From the Three Emperors' Treaty to the Triple Entente | A Brief History of Things

The irony of history is this: it was not other powers' hostility that isolated Germany. The way events unfolded gave them the chance to isolate it, and that chance kept growing stronger.

Preventing France from building an anti-German coalition was the first task of the new German Empire's diplomacy, and the work of the second half of Bismarck's life. For a long stretch the job was done almost perfectly, and its chief symbol was the Three Emperors' League of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Germany also kept close ties with every country in Europe through a web of treaties, all of it in the service of isolating its enemy, France.

By 1887 the continental alliance system Bismarck had built stood at its peak. The Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, together with the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, kept France permanently isolated and unable to assemble an anti-German coalition. The Mediterranean Agreement among Britain, Italy and Austria, which Bismarck helped broker, even made Germany and Britain indirect allies by way of the Triple Alliance.

Twenty years later, the German version of that system fell apart. In 1907 Britain and Russia signed a convention; together with the Anglo-French agreement of 1904 and the Franco-Russian alliance signed as early as 1894, Britain, France and Russia appeared to have joined hands in a strategic alliance with a strong anti-German edge. What happened in between?

The British historian Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers, his account of the origins of the First World War, does not lay the blame entirely on the belligerence of the new German leadership under the young and hot-headed Kaiser Wilhelm II. He traces the outbreak of the war instead to the combined weight of Europe's great powers, to the shifting international situation from Africa to the Far East, and to the growth of mass politics inside each of those powers. Put another way, even if a statesman as canny as Bismarck had lived on, he probably could not have stopped the First World War — a point the road from the breakup of the German-Austrian-Russian Three Emperors' alliance to the making of the new Franco-Russian-British one shows in full.

Quarrels in the Balkans, and the clash of Russian and Austrian interests there, were always the weakest point of the Three Emperors' Treaty. The Bulgarian crisis of the mid-1880s once brought Bismarck's alliance to the edge of collapse. In 1885 Eastern Rumelia, then part of the Ottoman Empire, rose in revolt and declared its union with Bulgaria. Russia's government fought this hard, because a larger Bulgaria would sit closer to the Bosphorus and Constantinople, both of them strategic ground for Russia. Britain, long at odds with Russia over Central Asia, recognized Eastern Rumelia as new Bulgarian territory. Serbia then invaded Bulgaria in November 1885 and raised the temperature further. The Serbs did not win; Bulgarian troops drove them back across their own border, and only Austria-Hungary's intervention kept Belgrade, the Serbian capital, out of Bulgarian hands. Through a series of compromises Russia managed to block any further Bulgarian expansion, but had to accept the union of northern Bulgaria with the formerly Ottoman land to its south.

For Germany, the Bulgarian crisis laid bare something of the deep contradiction hidden in the region: a small change in the fortunes of a country of no great importance could push two great powers toward war. How should such a challenge be met? Bismarck's answer was to seek Russia's friendship once again, and to that end he signed the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887 with Nikolay Girs, Russia's pro-German foreign minister.

But Bismarck's policy was not fully accepted at home. Many began to question the Reinsurance Treaty, and even Herbert von Bismarck — his son, and then Germany's state secretary for foreign affairs — had misgivings about it. Why, many asked, should Germany take on the duty of helping Austria-Hungary hold off Russia and helping Russia hold off Austria-Hungary at the same time? Why must Germany forever play the balancer? Why could it not set policy purely by its own interests? To his opponents, the treaty system Bismarck had built so carefully to balance one power against another was held together with "scrap iron," and it was dragging Germany onto ever more dangerous ground. For those reasons Leo von Caprivi, who succeeded Bismarck as German chancellor, announced in the spring of 1890 that the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia would be allowed to lapse.

The end of the German-Russian Reinsurance Treaty pulled away the ground on which Russia had stayed aligned with Germany. On top of that, a German military bill of June 1890 called for adding 18,574 men to the reserves, which Russia felt as a threat coming closer. With Bismarck gone, the impulsive and reckless Kaiser Wilhelm II held full power — an emperor Tsar Alexander described as a "rogue playboy" — and his rise added a new uncertainty to where German diplomacy would go. At the same time, the large bond issues France was offering had caught the tsar's eye.

All this opened a new opportunity for Franco-Russian relations, but in Christopher Clark's view none of it was the decisive factor. What really shook Russia's willingness to work with Germany was its fear that Britain — its arch-rival in the "Great Game" — might join the German-Austrian-Russian alliance.

In the early 1890s, Anglo-German relations reached their best point before the war. Under the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of July 1, 1890, Britain and Germany traded or ceded sovereignty over parts of Africa, and Germany gained Heligoland, an island in the North Sea. Russia took notice. In the summer of 1891 the Triple Alliance was renewed; pro-German newspapers also made much of the Kaiser's visit to Britain, and Russia's sense of crisis rose sharply. Britain's Morning Post went so far as to speak of "joining the Triple Alliance, or in other words becoming a member of a Quadruple Alliance."

Britain and Germany growing closer, together with the "Great Game" that Russia and Britain were playing across Afghanistan, Persia, China and the Turkish straits, forced Russia to weigh its interests in the Balkans far more carefully. Faced with the threat that Britain's closeness to the Triple Alliance carried, Russia set its posture aside and signed an agreement with France in the open. On August 18, 1892, France and Russia signed a military convention, and two years later the two turned it into a full alliance.

As Britain and Germany drew closer, how to handle its own rivalry with Britain became a problem for France as well. To the French foreign minister, Gabriel Hanotaux, one way to keep Britain and Germany from colluding might be to seek an understanding among France, Germany and Russia across a wider range of matters. If Germany were willing to return permanently the French territory it had taken in 1870, Hanotaux once wrote, a lasting Franco-German friendship might still be possible.

Théophile Delcassé, who took over as foreign minister in 1898, tried to put Hanotaux's idea into practice by pulling Germany into the Franco-Russian alliance, in order to press Britain harder. From the autumn of 1899 to the spring of 1900 the political weather for such an alliance turned unusually good: in a conversation with the French ambassador to Germany, the new German chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, hinted that he was willing to share interests with France outside continental Europe.

France's plan came to nothing in the end, because Germany refused to build the anti-British alliance Delcassé had in mind. The Germans even said that any demand made of Britain should first be put to the British government. What killed the recovering Franco-German relationship was the condition Germany attached: a report from the French ambassador to Germany dated March 15, 1900, said Germany would consider going further with an anti-British alliance only if France, Russia and Germany together "guaranteed that Europe's political map would not be altered again." In practice, that was a roundabout demand that France recognize German sovereignty over Alsace-Lorraine.

Germany's demand changed Delcassé's thinking for good. From that moment the French foreign minister gave up entirely on the idea of a Franco-German alliance. He came to believe instead that an alliance with Britain, and closer cooperation on trade and other matters, would help France reach its own goals: if Britain's colony in Egypt could be secured with French help, Britain would hand Morocco to France in exchange. By 1903 the French foreign minister had made that swap of sovereignty — Morocco for Egypt — the basis of a Franco-British alliance. This turn in French diplomacy had a deep effect on relations with Germany: as the pro-British policy grew, anti-German feeling grew with it.

For the British, though, the Entente Cordiale signed with France in 1904 was meant mainly to ease colonial disputes with France, and to work against Russia at the same time, rather than to counter Germany. By the same logic, the Anglo-Russian convention of 1907 was not aimed at Germany or born of fear of it. The reverse was true: because Russia posed a huge threat in a series of places where Britain was weak, the British had to give up Germany in order to keep Russia. Russia's own policymakers backed the agreement too, and for much the same reason as the British. To them the policy was not aimed at Germany but was a good bargain: it bought breathing room from unrest at home and more freedom of action abroad.

The question is what these pacts and agreements actually did. The Entente Cordiale wiped out the anti-British feeling the French had carried before the 1904 agreement, and, in fits and starts, thinned French politicians' fear of Germany as well. For Russia, the temporary quieting of its disputes with Britain over Central Asia inevitably turned its foreign policy back toward the older obstacle to its imperial ambitions — the Balkan question. Russia's foreign-policy circles were split into an "Asia faction" and a "Europe faction," and that argument now ended in a win for the second. The Europe faction wanted good relations with Britain and France, and took a stance of distrust toward Germany to get them.

The irony of history is this: it was not other powers' hostility that isolated Germany. The way events unfolded gave them the chance to isolate it, and that chance kept growing stronger. And every countermeasure Germany took to break out of the isolation it found itself in deepened that isolation and sharpened its confrontation with the British-French-Russian alliance. The wheel of history had begun to roll, rumbling, in a dangerous direction.

Cover image: German soldiers in a railroad car on the way to the front in 1914, source Wikipedia

Recommended reading: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

How does an object become a globalized commodity? How does an object drive globalization? And how is an object manufactured on a global scale? The column "A Brief History of Things" starts from "objects," looking at how these "objects" have permeated our lives and changed our world.

Topics it has covered include: shipping containers, spices, tea, Disney, climate, discounts, T-shirts, nautical charts, warriors, tea, spices, opium, coffee, timber, used clothing, trade, soybeans, IKEA, Arabia, corn, hotels, gold, disease, silver, fur, oil, natural gas, Western civilization, the railroad stock wars, automobiles, luxury goods, poverty, antibiotics, the Swiss tourism industry, General Electric, cable TV, advertising, the Discovery Channel, merchants, car models, the yuan, missionaries, guano, Amway, adventurers, the steam engine, addiction, shipping routes, cotton, eggplant, the Huguang-fills-Sichuan migration, the Nicaragua Canal, FAW-Volkswagen, bathing, New York, agriculture, alliances, HSBC, mountaineering, ports, cotton cloth, the euro, Amazon Prime delivery, weeding, tea theft, scrap, "Zara syndrome", wilderness culture, Matteo Ricci's map, the convert Shen Fuzong, the Black Death, cod, the human genome, migrating to Southeast Asia, red-barbarian cannons, barbarians in the economy, the welfare state, herbal medicine in Western medicine, machine guns, tin tanks, smallpox, ISIS, the Cold War, sports, overseas Chinese, the Battle of Waterloo, Zhukov, Republican-era political parties, the East India Company, artillery, Stilwell, innovation, the Pacific War, the Opium War, "Western shock", Chinese food, Europe, Prussia, Arab nationalism, Middle East wars, Lehman's collapse, the financial crisis, Chinese youth tour groups to Japan, air pollution, the Internationale, Volkswagen, the Jiang Qing dress, the Manchus, teamwork, Japan's industrial policy, appeasement, the Nazis, coal, WWI, the collapse of the Soviet Union, lawsuit marketing, "Collecting China", ballots, Indian independence, tea sterilization, Captain Sully, populism, Portuguese expeditions, Brzezinski, the Turkish empire, the Afghan war, 9/11, China-Japan relations, the fabi currency reform, red currency, Connectography, the fightback of domestic goods, the August 19 coup, street protests, the Qing government's market rescue, Japan's underclass, the fates of the Nationalists and Communists, the "punish Vietnam" diplomatic war, the Taiping Rebellion, the Qin-Han empire, the Tibet question, the British Empire, Stalin, Kublai Khan's "capital region", the Wokou pirates, democracy in wartime, MacArthur's legacy, brandy, rum, and modern America, Soviet cinema, the Ottoman Empire, the young Stalin, the foreign-run Customs Service, the Soong family, 1916, vegetarianism in Asia, the transatlantic divide, late-Qing newspapermen, Afghanistan, Qing-dynasty Xinjiang finances, the Genghis Khan exchange, German nationalism, the Great Qing Empire, royal hunts, America 1927, the war of the currents, rust, sleep, the Vietnam War, Reagan, ruins, the May Thirtieth Movement, the partition of Palestine, Israel, Bridgewater, the postindustrial city, The Wealth of Nations, WWI, 1950s America, US naval warfare, Microsoft, cloud computing, nationalism, automation, the English Revolution, Istanbul, WWI, ethnic cleansing, Yuan Shikai, Black slaves, Christians, Chamberlain, gun culture, Kissinger, the fur trade, the Canton trade, trade expectations, postwar Japan, the 1940 system, the office, football, civil war, railroad culture, Geithner, the Reformation, Hitler, European democracy, Bismarck, Normandy, Japan's malaise, Saudi oil, Syria...