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Germany’s moves, but as the result of deep anti-German animus inspired by
a determination to return Germany to the status of weak victimhood that
had been its fate before 1871. This “encirclement” had to be smashed by bold
policy moves, Germany’s leaders and nationalist public opinion concluded.
The stage was set for Germany’s effort to break out of Franco-Russian-British
“encirclement” and World War I.
Several historians who have studied Germany’s fatal embrace of
Weltmacht have concluded that it was driven largely by domestic factors.
By the mid-1890s, the deep divisions of German society could no longer
be papered over by the compromise arrangements of the 1870s. Germany’s
Junker elite and Hohenzollern dynasty faced mounting demands for reform
requiring them to give up control of the state. Rather than accede to these
demands, Germany’s rulers decided to divert public attention outward, to-
ward Germany’s growing global majesty, generating popular appreciation for
the strong state that was delivering that glory. In the words of Imanuel Geiss,
“Weltpolitik came into existence as a red herring of the ruling class to distract
the middle and working classes from social and political problems at home at
the risk of war, of losing war, monarchy and all. ... A breathtaking foreign pol-
icy was intended to unite the nation and, through mobilization of the masses,
would increase her power.”^9 As one of the architects of Weltmacht, German
Chancellor Johannes von Miquel, put it in 1901 (shortly before Germany’s
move to break out of encirclement by the Triple Entente), the way to win pop-
ular support for the monarchy was to “revive the national ideal” by “a victo-
rious war.” Just as the victorious wars of German unification in 1866–1870
had revived the dynasty from a steady decline, “A victorious war would solve
many problems” within Germany, Miquel said.^10
Bismarck’s moderate course did not prove popular with nationalist
German opinion in the decades before 1914. A question haunting govern-
ments around the world today is whether a diplomacy of moderation, res-
traint, and reassurance will prove more acceptable to Chinese ardent and
mobilized nationalist opinion in the 2020s than it did to Germany’s nation-
alists in the 1900s. Will China someday embrace a Weltmacht diplomacy
to replace the cautious Bismarck-like diplomacy of Deng Xiaoping? Perhaps
such a shift has already begun with the strategic adjustment of 2009 followed
by the rise of Xi Jinping. China’s blunt and frequently intimidating diplo-
macy toward Japan and India is not reassuring (here used in its Bismarckian
sense). Assertive policies toward Japan and India are undoubtedly popular
with China’s nationalists. But they also seem to be precipitating the same
sort of countervailing coalition that Germany faced by the 1910s. And like
those of Germany, China’s nationalists blame the formation of that coun-
tervailing coalition not on China’s own actions but on malevolent foreign
powers; behind the growing Japanese-Indian coalition is the nefarious insti-
gation of the United States.