conflict, the German people, including the Social
Democrats, felt a strong sense of national pride
in the progress of the ‘fatherland’. Furthermore,
the last peacetime chancellor of imperial Ger-
many, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, recog-
nised that constitutional reform was a matter of
time. But there was not sufficient time.
The Social Democrats, the Progressives and
Centre, who had won a majority in the 1912 elec-
tions, demanded a constitutional monarchy
responsible to the Reichstag. The Conservatives
chose to regard this challenge as provoking a con-
stitutional crisis, threatening the Wilhelmine
state. But did they unleash a war deliberately to
preserve their position and to avoid reform? To
be sure, there were Conservatives and militarists
who saw a successful war as a means of defeating
democratic socialism. The chancellor, Bethmann
Hollweg, was not one of them. Nevertheless, it
was an element of the situation that the kaiser and
his supporters saw themselves in a hostile world
surrounded by enemies at home and abroad.
There developed in the increasingly militarised
court a wild and overheated atmosphere, a fear
and pessimism about the future. While German
society as a whole had good reasons for confi-
dence and satisfaction on the eve of the
war, the increasingly isolated coterie around the
kaiser suffered more and more from hysterical
nightmares inimical to cool judgement.
They were carried forward in 1914 by a tide
of events they had themselves done much to
create. In the summer of 1914 war was seen as a
last desperate throw to stave off Germany’s oth-
erwise inevitable decline. Bethmann Hollweg laid
the blame for the outbreak of war on cosmic
forces, on the clash of imperialism and national-
ism, and, specifically, on British, French and
Russian envy of Germany’s progress. Germany, so
he claimed, could have done little to change this.
But did its growth of power make the struggle
in Europe inevitable or did its own policies
contribute to war and its ‘encirclement’?
Twenty-six years earlier, in 1888, at the time of
the accession of Wilhelm II, Germany appeared
not only secure but on the threshold of a new
expansion of power, world power. The contrast of
mood and expectations between then and 1914
could not have been greater. Bismarck had
adopted the same manipulative approach as at
home to safeguard the new empire. In a famous
passage in his memoirs he spoke of his recurr-
ing ‘nightmare of coalitions’. By this he meant
that Germany’s neighbours would combine and
surround and threaten Germany. The danger
stemmed from a fatal error he had made in his
primitive treatment of defeated France. France
was forced to pay a war indemnity and, worse, lost
a large slice of territory, the provinces of Alsace
and Lorraine.
Why had Bismarck, who had treated the
defeated Danes and Austrians generously, unchar-
acteristically ensured that France would harbour
hatred for its German neighbour for the next fifty
years? The reason is that Bismarck believed that a
genuine reconciliation with France, the hereditary
enemy, was impossible. At the heart of his diplo-
macy lay the need to keep France weak and to
isolate it. His alliance system succeeded but with
increasing difficulty and contradictions. What
made it plausible was his genuine declaration that
Germany was satiated, hankered after no more
territory. He could thus act on the continent for
two decades as the ‘honest broker’ in mediating
the disputes of others. The most serious arose
from the decline of power of the Ottoman Turks.
The Habsburg Empire and tsarist Russia and
Great Britain eyed each other with suspicion
when it came to the inheritance and influence
among the weak, unstable nations emerging from
the decay of Turkey in the Balkans. Brief wars
flared up and were smothered by great-power
diplomacy with Bismarck’s assistance.
The efforts to prevent a hostile coalition from
coming together began to break down even
before Kaiser Wilhelm II ‘dropped the pilot’, dis-
missing the aged chancellor in 1890. Bismarck’s
genius was to bind nations in rivalry together in a
web of alliances at the pivot of which lay Germany,
while isolating France. But this construction was
beginning to come apart at the seams. In 1890
Germany ‘cut the wire to St Petersburg’, the
reinsurance alliance that had bound Germany and
Russia. Now Russia was isolated, which created
the conditions for France and Russia, republic and
tsarist imperial regime, to come together in a