Introduction
In January of 1907, a document entitled “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations With France and Germany” circulated around the British Foreign Office. Its main contention was that German behavior toward Britain “might be linked not inappropriately to that of a professional blackmailer.”[1] In light of Britain’s core interest in preserving the balance of power on the Continent, the author calls for an end to the “spirit of accommodation,” arguing that “there will be no surer or quicker way to win the respect of the German government and of the German nation” than a policy of “unbending determination to uphold British rights and interests in every part of the globe.”[2] The author was Eyre Crowe, who had played a pivotal role in a series of reforms attempting to break down the “Old Diplomacy”[3] of aristocratic networks and make way for a professionalized civil service. Crowe’s Memorandum was the quintessential byproduct of these reforms, utilizing a broad strategic perspective and blunt language to articulate a fundamental set of principles and policies. Through such clarity of expression and breadth of scope, the Memorandum aimed to break down the intradepartmental barriers of class, rank, party, and specialization to allow for comprehensive debate on the merits of the most critical issues in British foreign policy.
Crowe’s memorandum took a central role in prewar debates over foreign policy. Foreign Secretary Edward Grey called it “most valuable”[4] and called for its distribution at the highest levels of government; meanwhile, Thomas Sanderson, the former Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, sent Grey a rebuttal of Crowe in which he argued that “a country which looks to each change as a possible chance of self-aggrandizement is not much more open to criticism than one which sees in every such a change a menace to its own interests, existing or potential.”[5] Even today the Crowe Memorandum has endured as an archetype through which to analyze British foreign policy leading up to the First World War.
Two general schools of thought regarding Crowe and his famous Memorandum have emerged. Some scholars paint Crowe as a latter-day Cassandra who foresaw the structural trends that were hurling the two powers toward confrontation and articulated the necessary course of action, which his government failed to undertake until it was too late. Harvard’s Graham Allison compares the Crowe Memorandum to the writings of Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War identified the dilemma that a dominant power faces when it must either accede to the rise of a challenger or risk eventual war with it.[6] The other school of thought argues that Crowe delivered only self-fulfilling prophecies by helping to institutionalize an attitude of anti-German animus. One prominent German historian even dubbed Crowe the “evil spirit of the Foreign Office.”[7] With these two schools of thought forming in play, the bulk of the literature on Crowe has accordingly sought to determine the precise extent and manner of his influence on British-German relations both before and after the First World War. These efforts include attempts to reconstruct his psychological profile, to review his contemporaries’ commentary and marginalia regarding his work and character, and analyze Crowe’s influence on major events such as the Second Hague Conference, Paris Peace Conference, and Locarno Conference based on his role in those events, his relations to the other major players, and comparisons between actual outcomes and his stated preferences.[8]
The question of Crowe’s anticipation of or influence on subsequent twentieth-century events is worthwhile for students of diplomatic and strategic history to engage with, but it has obscured analysis of what he actually intended to achieve through the Memorandum, and to what degree he succeeded in that regard. After he begins the Memorandum with an exhaustive review of recent German actions toward Britain and assessing their likely motives, Crowe announces that he would proceed to recommend “a general line of conduct … in such a way as to command the assent of all persons competent to form a judgment in this matter.”[9] His Memorandum was principally an attempt to establish a consensus on Britain’s diplomatic strategy while accommodating the various interests and biases of the Foreign Office bureaucracy that he needed to reconcile to achieve such consensus. Crowe’s most compelling—and still most frequently quoted—passages describe an imminent German threat to which the Foreign Office has not given sufficient heed. Yet over the course of the 16,000 word Memorandum, Crowe also assures his readers that the general course of recent British foreign policy had been both wise and honorable, that its assumptions regarding the strategic environment remain sound, and that there is little cause to fear that tensions with Germany would escalate into armed conflict. Instead, he affirms that Britain may respond to each hostile or friendly gesture on their own merits, with the aggregation of each response establishing the proper balance between appeasement and confrontation.
This essay will explain the apparent contradiction within Crowe’s argument by treating the Memorandum as a byproduct of conflicting imperatives rather than a pure expression of its author’s oracular insights. In highlighting the tension that exists between a dynamic international system and a diplomatic apparatus whose raison d’etre is rooted in the preservation of the status quo, Crowe’s memorandum demonstrates its continued relevance for contemporary efforts to analyze emerging threats such as China or cyberwarfare. It is more useful for students and practitioners to understand strategic forecasting as an attempt to reconcile new and disruptive information with the bureaucratic norms and standard operating procedures that preserve the useful fiction of statecraft as the rational expression of a unified national interest. Toward that end, we will first provide a brief overview of Crowe’s life, explaining how his personal background and bureaucratic experience shaped his ideas on Anglo-German relations as well as the most effective means of disseminating those views. We will then address the Moroccan Crisis of 1905, which for Crowe was a seminal example of both Germany’s mounting global ambitions and of the increasing importance of public opinion in diplomatic calculations. We will then turn to a close reading of the memorandum itself, showing how the accuracy of his assessments of German intentions is less important than his ability to manage the dual task of developing a bureaucratic consensus that is also sufficiently flexible to accommodate the inevitable swings of public opinion.
The Hybrid Life and Times of Eyre Crowe (1864-1925)
Crowe’s own personal background placed him at the intersection of English and German culture, making him a far more complex figure than the “archetype of British chauvinism and anti-German hostility”[10] that some historians characterized him to be. Eyre Crowe was born in 1864 in Leipzig, Germany to a German mother and an English father. Crowe’s eventual wife, Clema Gerhardt, was the scion of minor German nobility. Her uncle, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff, served as a high -ranking German officer who during the First World War became the chief of the German naval staff.[11] Educated in Germany, Crowe arrived in England at the age of eighteen, perfecting his English before joining the Foreign Office in 1885. As a junior clerk, Crowe championed the reorganization of the Foreign Office with the aim of “relieving the Diplomatic Establishment of the Office” to ensure that it would “be free to devote itself to more important work.” Crowe’s most significant contribution to this effort came in April of 1906 when he established a new system of annual reports and subsequently transformed communication among Foreign Office officials. The system mandated that all official subjects must be reported through official means, rather than solely through private letters to the secretary of state.[12] After ten years of service, Crowe assumed the role of Senior Clerk in the Western Department, placing him at the center of Britain’s emerging strategy for dealing with an ascendant Germany.
It was his education in France and Germany that set Crowe apart from the established members of his department and the wider Foreign Office, the majority of whom studied at prestigious English public schools before attending Oxford or Cambridge.[13] Crowe’s background undoubtedly affected his reputation among other diplomats within the Foreign Office, his credibility suffering when his peers called attention to his German roots and his unusual route to the Foreign Office. Sir Charles Hardinge, the former Permanent Under-Secretary and Viceroy of India at the time, wrote that he “admired Crowe’s ability” but that Crowe’s promotion to head of the Foreign Office would “lower the prestige of the office” as he was “so palpably German and his wife quite unpresentable.”[14]
Crowe only narrowly escaped expulsion from the Foreign Office due to the anti-German animus that prevailed during the First World War, and it was his personal reputation that saved him. Contemporaries allude to his incredible “work ethic” along with his commitment to foreign policy and diplomacy. Harold Nicholson described Crowe as “the perfect type of British Civil Servant,” recalling his “loyalty, accuracy, expertise, and courage,” while Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin dubbed Crowe the “ablest servant of the Crown.”[15] Crowe secured a promotion to Permanent Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs (the title once held by his best-known critic, Thomas Sanderson), holding that position until his death in 1925. In this role, he participated in key aspects of postwar British foreign policy, most significantly the Locarno Pact that settled Germany’s western borders and that, for a time, promised a durable peace on the Continent.
For all that Crowe accomplished during his life, the 1907 Memorandum is the most significant part of his historical legacy. Before examining that essay in detail, we will first review an event that was foremost on Crowe’s mind as he wrote the Memorandum: the Moroccan Crisis (also known as the Tangier Crisis) of 1905 and the Algeciras Conference that resulted from it in 1906. As Crowe was writing the Memorandum, these provided the most recent and most salient examples of how Germany was seeking a global status commensurate with its capabilities. It also revealed that public opinion was gaining an increasingly influential role in the traditionally insular and elitist world of European diplomacy. Having been a reformer for his entire career, Crowe was aware that these two developments prompted a major reconsideration of Foreign Office conventional wisdom. At the same time, too severe a readjustment could interfere with the very effort to prepare for and confront a potential crisis. Crowe would accordingly take on the paradoxical task of highlighting the significances of revolutionary changes while minimizing their institutional ramifications.
The Moroccan Crisis and Public Opinion: 1905-1906
Despite his frequent clashes with the more elitist elements of the Foreign Office, Crowe’s writing often betrays a contempt for the masses. The Memorandum is full of disparaging references to the “venal press”[16] that he believes are provoking emotions rather than reporting facts. Then there are Crowe’s descriptions of various nationalities that tend to conform to rough stereotypes—the sober-minded English; the prickly if timid French; and the crude, belligerent Germans. And there is the fact that he offers no advice on how British statesmen could or should manage public opinion, which he describes as an independent variable that operates according to its own peculiar logic. And yet for all of this, even if Crowe tended to regard the public as a somewhat alien entity, he explicitly recognized that not even the most soundly conceived diplomatic strategy could survive without public support. Crowe understood that the Foreign Office could no longer reasonably expect to wield a monopoly over political communication with other nations—shifts in the public mood could set off ripple effects in London, Paris, and Berlin well ahead of their respective ambassadors’ ability to manage them.
The potential impact of public opinion on the actual conduct of foreign policy had been evident for decades. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out when Chancellor Otto von Bismarck leaked to the press a dispute over the Spanish throne between Kaiser Wilhelm and the French ambassador, spurring Napoleon III to declare an ill-fated mobilization. After that war, the newly declared German Empire maintaining a state monopoly over the military, but also established a multiparty democracy and an educational system widely understood to be the best and most widely accessible in the world.[17] Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, politics had become much more democratic under William Gladstone, who left the Prime Minister’s office for the final time in 1894. Gladstone had famously taken to the stump to champion the freedom of Bulgarians chafing under Ottoman rule, in contrast to the conservative policy of using the Ottomans as a convenient bulwark against Russian expansion.[18]
Diplomatic strategy and public opinion proved especially combustible in the years immediately preceding the circulation of Crowe’s Memorandum. Kaiser Wilhelm II, eager to pass a controversial plan of naval expansion through the Bundestag, encouraged anti-British sentiment in the popular press as a means of justifying the expense.[19] In France, nationalist elements settled at the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 and the failure to eject Britain from Sudan in 1895.[20] Britain itself was trapped between its traditional self-perception of “splendid isolation” and its profound alarm toward German naval ambitions. Containing Germany would require a firmer partnership with France, which was problematic not only because of their historic rivalry but also due to the prospect of indirect engagement with France’s ally Russia, whose repressive autocracy was anathema to the more liberal sectors of the British public.[21] Actual decision-making of course remained the provenance of an exclusive elite, but in an industrializing society it was increasingly difficult to evaluate national power and prestige without taking into account the interests and passions of those who would ultimately be expected to populate the factories and the trenches.
All of these competing pressures came to a head during the 1905 Tangier Crisis, which in the Memorandum established the primary point of departure for Crowe’s analysis of German intentions. In 1904, Britain and France had negotiated an entente, less an alliance than a commitment to settle their outstanding colonial disputes. Germany later objected to the portion of the agreement that effectively ceded Morocco to the French sphere of influence, even though there was no obvious reason for their objection given the absence of any substantive German claims or interests on that territory. In March 1905, the Kaiser arrived in Tangiers to endorse in person the independence of the Sultan and demanded an international conference to settle all outstanding claims. The possibility of war as a penalty for noncompliance with German demands severely shook the French government, ultimately prompting the resignation of Foreign Minister Delcassé. As the conference date approached, the onus fell upon Britain either to support its newfound French partner and risk a continental war, or blatantly violate its traditional policy of upholding the continental balance of power by acceding to Germany.[22]
Germany’s internationalization of the crisis backfired, when the Algeciras Conference of 1906 provided a collective forum for the majority of European states to voice their disapproval. The Kaiser’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Bülow, hastily withdrew his delegation after calculating that his own public would hardly countenance war against the whole of Europe for the sake of Morocco.[23] Diplomats puzzled over how Germany could be so quick to start a crisis only to balk at the first sign of resistance. Crowe came to regard it as an attempt to disrupt Anglo-French cooperation before it could harden into an anti-German alliance, and that it had the ironic effect of deepening Anglo-French ties.
As the crisis unfolded, the motives in play proved less significant than the immediate consequences for the politics of each of the three major participants. France realized it could not subject itself to a pattern of folding under pressure without essentially conceding its status as a Great Power. Already demoralized by the false accusations of espionage against Captain Alfred Dreyfus and the years-long public scandal that ensued, the French army began to adopt the “cult of the offensive”[24] as a cure for its defeatist malaise. As Britain redoubled its commitment to France, “an awareness of German diplomatic isolation on the Continent began to emerge, exacerbating its social insecurity and commitment to dangerous practices of Weltpolitik (‘World Policy’).”[25] The same public that had rejected the need for war now clamored for revenge against humiliation. Whereas France needed no prodding to regard Germany as a threat to its national honor, German behavior was convincing the British to entertain similarly hostile attitudes. In the years following the First Moroccan Crisis, Britain gradually redesigned its homeland defense strategy from its traditional reliance on the Royal Navy to one of landing ground forces on the Continent to halt the progress of any German attempt to seize the European side of the Channel.[26]
Reflecting upon these events as he wrote the Memorandum in 1906, Crowe recognized that whatever agreement was reached among his colleagues would not remain quietly within the halls of the Foreign Office. The implications of British foreign policy would reverberate off of the British public and public opinion on the Continent, any of which would denounce whatever they considered too rash or pusillanimous. At the same time, such commitments to national honor could make it impossible to resolve the next crisis with the kinds of compromises that had defused tension in the past. In light of this context, it is reasonable to interpret Crowe’s Memorandum as an attempt to formulate a general principle that was at once suitable for public consumption and yet sufficiently malleable to the logic of circumstances.
The Memorandum
- The Balance of Power and the Rise of Germany
The Crowe Memorandum is best known for its analysis of Germany, but as the title indicates, his topic is British relations with both Germany and France. Crowe begins by declaring that:
The Anglo-French Agreement of the 8th April, 1904, was the outcome of the honest and ardent desire, freely expressed among all classes and parties of the two countries, that an earnest effort should be made to compose, as far as possible, the many differences which had been a source of perpetual friction between them. In England, the wish for improved relations with France was primarily but a fresh manifestation of the general tendency of British Governments to take advantage of every opportunity to approach more closely to the ideal condition of living in honourable peace with all other States.[27]
This is the first of many times in the Memorandum that Crowe reaffirmed Britain’s traditional role as a “holde”’ of the European balance of power. Crowe later declares that “it has almost become a historical truism to identify England’s secular policy with the maintenance of the balance by throwing her weight now in this scale and now in that, but ever on one side, opposed to the political dictatorship of the strongest single state or group at a given time.”[28] This claim enjoyed enough historical support, particularly in British efforts to block the hegemonic aspirations of Charles V, Louis XIV, and Napoleon, to furnish British diplomats and statesmen with a disarmingly benign account of their country’s intentions. As far back as 1655, Edmund Weller offered the following lines to Oliver Cromwell:
Heaven, (that has placed this isle to give law
to balance Europe and her states to awe!
In this conjunction does on Britain smile;
After the First World War obliterated the European balance of power, Winston Churchill looked back nostalgically on “four hundred years of consistent purpose” during which he argued that “we preserved the liberties of Europe, protected the growth of its vivacious and varied society … It is a law of public policy which we are following, and not a mere expedient dictated by accidental circumstances.”[30]
As Crowe acknowledges, the British commitment to the balance of power reflected a consistent strategic calculus rather than altruistic concern for the national independence of the Continental states:
The general character of England’s foreign policy is determined by the immutable conditions of her geographical situation on the ocean flank of Europe as an island State with vast oversea colonies and dependencies, whose existence and survival as an independent community are inseparably bound up with the possession of preponderant sea power.[31]
Just as Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had famously declared that Britain had neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests, Crowe interprets the Entente as an innovative method for advancing a traditional objective. Settling the two states’ dispute over colonial spheres of influence ensured “greater freedom in regulating their general foreign relations,” particularly the ability to concentrate their resources in the event of a more serious “quarrel with this or that power.”[32] By reducing tensions between the historic rivals, the Entente “was received by all foreign governments without apparent misgiving, and even with signs of relief and satisfaction.”[33]
Having established the Entente as an act of benign adjustment to the balance of power, Crowe then frames Germany’s subsequent critique of the Entente as an anti-German alliance as patently insincere, a tacit admission that a stable balance of power was an obstacle to German ambitions. Since Germany refrained from pressing its objections at the Algeciras Conference, the question remained of whether the resulting flare-up with Britain was “but an ephemeral incident, or a symptomatic revelation of some deep-seated natural opposition between the policies and interests of the two countries.”[34] Fixing the precise motives of German behavior would not be nearly as important as it is to Crowe’s Memorandum if Britain had been strong enough to ignore a mere irritant or deploy the capabilities necessary to contain an emerging threat. Such had been the case when the Industrial Revolution had vaulted Britain to the apex of global power, but the turn of the 20th-century witnessed the emergence of larger, more populous, and resource-rich nations with the potential to dwarf Britain’s economic output and military capabilities. Further complicating matters was Britain’s transition from manufacturing to financial services which, as historian Paul Kennedy described it:
meant that it was much more dependent upon international prosperity, much more a hostage to a continuing boom in global trade, and therefore much more vulnerable economically to the shock of war and the collapse of international credit than those more tightly controlled, protectionist-one might say mercantilist-economies of Germany, Russia, and the United States.[35]
This did not mean that Britain had been reduced to a paper tiger. Direct threats to its colonial interests could provoke a direct military response (such as its bruising series of campaigns against the Boers), or a credible threat of force (such as its 1898 confrontation with France over control of the Upper Nile). The year prior to Crowe’s Memorandum, the admiralty launched the HMS Dreadnaught, signaling its intent of maintaining undisputed naval superiority as the Germans announced the expansion of their own High Seas Fleet. While Britain could still defend its home waters and imperial lifelines, it could no longer promise to intervene and blunt the aspirations of a Continental hegemon in the time, place, manner, and duration of its choosing. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had quipped decades earlier that if the British were to attempt an amphibious landing, he would “call out the local police and have them arrested.”[36] The relative stability of the Pax Britannica, therefore, owed less to the deterrent effect of British might than its reliance on negotiation and even outright appeasement to avoid conflict on the peripheries of its far-flung imperial possessions and commercial interests.
Crowe is acutely aware of this reliance, hammering repeatedly throughout the Memorandum on Britain’s “old willingness to oblige” especially Germany, even in the face of outright provocation. But no doubt Crowe was also aware that Britain’s domestic politics of 1907 provided another set of reasons for adopting a general policy of conciliating rivals on matters of marginal interest. The second half of the 19th century featured parallel growths in both the urban population and the size of the electorate, prompting the emergence of a labor movement that demanded a much greater emphasis on the immediate needs of workers over the interests of the empire. Just as Britain was coming to recognize the limits of its power abroad, it suddenly also had to navigate a partisan divide over the allocation of the budget. A conciliatory approach toward foreign rivals therefore doubled as a way to mollify anxieties at home over an expensive and risky arms race while forestalling a more radical restructuring of Britain’s imperial responsibilities.[37]
In sum, successive British governments were struggling to adapt to revolutionary changes while ensuring an overall perception of systemic stability that offered the best hope for those changes within manageable bounds. The balance of power, according to historian Keith Wilson, became the centerpiece of an elaborate fiction through which Britain could convince others—and even itself—that what might appear to be a highly unstable situation was a mere extension of the natural order:
So anxious were [the British] that Europe should at least appear to be in balance that they piled dissimulation upon dissimulation. They did their utmost to make it appear that there was a ‘fair equilibrium’ in Europe…Merely by dint of saying so, simply by force of repetition, they went a long way toward convincing themselves that the image was a reality. Theirs was a triumph of mind over matériel, a game that their treble-bluff would not be called.[38]
The rise of German power on the Continent unequivocally belied this pretense of equilibrium, thrusting the whole of British foreign policy onto the horns of a dilemma that occupies the remainder of Crowe’s Memorandum, although without arriving at a firm conclusion. Crowe’s task would be to figure out how best to deal with emerging German power without bargaining away British hegemony or precipitating a conflict that would at best culminate in a Pyrrhic victory.
If Germany was in fact seeking to overturn the balance of power and establish continental dominion, a condition of hostility with Britain “assumed almost the form of a law of nature.”[39] Yet as Crowe surveyed recent Anglo-German relations, he admits that “there has never been any real clashing of material interests, “whereas the same period of recent history “reveals ancient and real sources of conflict”[40] with France, Russia, and the United States. But whereas those conflicts took place according to the rules of the balance of power, and were therefore subject to negotiation, Crowe finds a set of ideas in German history and national character that pose a much more fundamental threat to the European order. Crowe describes the German Empire, which Bismarck had declared after the defeat of France in 1871, as the “descendant of Prussia,” which through centuries of “Blood and Iron” had transformed itself from a “small and weak vassal state” to becoming “one of the leading, if not, in fact, the foremost Power on the European continent.” Its ascent had also given it sufficient perspective to see how more established powers such as “England, the United States, France, and even the Netherlands” had been relying on naval power and commerce to compete on a global stage that “dwarf[ed] altogether the proportions of European countries.”[41]
Having been imbued with the “spirit of Prussia” at the moment of unification, Crowe argues that the new German empire exhibited a “conviction so deeply rooted in the very body and soul of all classes of the population that the preservation of national rights and the realization of national ideals rest absolutely on the readiness of every citizen in the last resort to stake himself and his State on their assertion and vindication.” This resulted in an entirely different perspective of international politics than that which informed the Pax Britannica. At this point in the argument, Crowe’s tone shifts into the voice of a German expansionist, loosely if not entirely unfairly summarizing the arguments of groups such as the Pan-German League:
‘A healthy and powerful State like Germany, with its 60,000,000 inhabitants, must expand, it cannot stand still, it must have territories to which its overflowing population can emigrate without giving up its nationality.’ When it is objected that the world is now actually parceled out among independent States, and that territory for colonization cannot be had except by taking it from the rightful possessor, the reply again is: ‘We cannot enter into such considerations. Necessity has no law. The world belongs to the strong. A vigorous nation cannot allow its growth to be hampered by blind adherence to the status quo. We have no designs on other people’s possessions, but where States are too feeble to put their territory to the best possible use, it is the manifest destiny of those who can and will do so to take their places.’[42]
If Germany were to achieve its desired status of “World Power” (Weltmacht) Crowe feared that the balance of power would no longer exist either in fact or, much more consequentially, as a principle governing relations among the European powers. In forecasting what would take its place, Crowe’s profound concerns over German foreign policy dovetail with his equally profound admiration for the German culture with which he had such intimate familiarity. He praises the consolidation and expansion of German power in places such as Schleswig-Holstein (seized from Denmark in 1864) for having “brought to these and all her other territories a more enlightened government, a wider conception of national life, and a greater share in a glorious national tradition than could have been their lot in other conditions.” It would therefore “only be logical” if the Germans proved to be utterly ruthless in their imperial ambitions, “ready to leave to posterity the burden of vindicating the employment of force for the purpose of spreading the benefits of German rule over now unwilling peoples.” For Crowe, the most dangerous facet of this conviction is that it has a sufficient basis in fact to vindicate the belief that the “good German sword” should eliminate any obstacle to “establishing the reign of those ideals in a Germanized world.”[43]
Ideally, in Crowe’s estimation, a powerful Germany could still fit within a balance-of-power system, that justified itself on the grounds that relative equality among states allowed each of them to cultivate the potential of their own territory and people so that all may “contribute, in freedom, to the evolution of a higher civilization.” If Germany could limit itself to competition “for an intellectual and moral leadership of the world in reliance on her own national advantages and energies, England can but admire, applaud, and join in the race.”[44] Despite there being few direct conflicts of interest between Britain and Germany, Crowe turns to the preceding twenty years of Anglo-German relations and finds that competition has thus far been anything but benign, and all because of a deliberate German policy that “cannot be called otherwise than actively hostile.”[45] He then goes into painstaking detail on a series of outrages ranging from territorial demands to insults against British military and diplomatic personnel, as well as secret collaborations with journalists to spread defamatory stories about the British, especially their civil servants, in major newspapers. Rather than reflect a structural condition that thrusts Germany and Britain into mutual hostility regardless of anyone’s preferences, Crowe finds “that it has been caused by an entirely one-sided aggressiveness, and that on the part of England the most conciliatory disposition has been coupled with never-failing readiness to purchase the resumption of friendly relations by concession after concession.”[46]
2. Whither the March of the German Empire? Juxtaposing Actions and Intentions
The failure of British appeasement to mollify German behavior prompts Crowe to raise the most pressing and difficult question of the Memorandum: the nature of German intentions and the implications for the British Empire. Crowe raises two possible explanations of recent German diplomatic behavior; the first of which he summarizes as follows:
Germany is deliberately following a policy which is essentially opposed to vital British interests, and that an armed conflict cannot in the long run be averted, except by England either sacrificing those interests, with the result that she would lose her position as an independent Great Power, or making herself too strong to give Germany the chance of succeeding in a war.[47]
Crowe acknowledges that his own analysis of German malfeasance could be read as giving considerable weight to this explanation, whereupon he introduces the alternative explanation that “the great German design is in reality no more than the expression of a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift.” This second hypothesis does not invalidate Crowe’s earlier statements regarding Germany’s global ambitions, truculent diplomacy, and the near-certainty of friction with Britain. It simply raises doubts as to whether Germany’s dreams of Weltmacht have cohered into a grand design that informs every aspect of its foreign policy. The blatant crudeness of its “erratic, domineering, and often frankly aggressive spirit” suggests the outbursts of a temperamental Kaiser and his mediocre advisors whose “underhand intrigues do not contribute to the steady working out of a well-conceived and relentlessly followed system of policy.”[48]
Although “most of the facts of the present situation could be explained”[49] with this latter formulation, Crowe is reluctant to endorse either interpretation. If German hostility is the purposeless expression of an incompetent leadership, then Britain can comfortably sustain a policy of appeasement in the manner of an indulgent parent waiting out a child’s tantrum. If Germany is in fact harboring more comprehensive ambitions, or if its belligerent mood lasts long enough to undermine confidence in the balance of power, then Britain would have to undertake an explicitly confrontational policy toward Germany. Germany would then have to respond with an equally comprehensive effort of its own to challenge British power, whether or not they had such ambitions in the first place. With Britain and Germany scrambling for arms and allies, the era of the balance of power would give way to the Darwinian struggle envisioned by German nationalist academics, in which nations devote their whole energies to “greater relative preponderance of material power, wider extent of territory, inviolable frontiers, and supremacy at sea.”[50] Regardless of the outcome, Britain could not even commence such a struggle without undermining the material and normative foundations of its own global power.
3. The “Pivot of History”— Seas or Heartland?
Having presented two distinct lenses through which British diplomats may choose to interpret German behavior, Crowe’s Memorandum refuses to make an explicit recommendation on behalf of one or the other, or even to demand that his Foreign Office colleagues make it for him. Harshly critical of appeasement but also acutely conscious of the political headwinds against a militarization of British foreign policy, Crowe instead opts to split the difference and locate a more robust approach to Germany squarely within the boundaries of the status quo. Earlier in the memorandum, Crowe cites the American naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose hugely influential writings on the inherent superiority of sea power over land power had cited the British Empire as its primary example.[51] Crowe confidently announces that “no one now disputes”[52] Mahan’s doctrine, even though only three years prior, the geographer Halford Mackinder delivered his famous address on the “Geographical Pivot of History” to the Royal Geographical Society, arguing that the struggle for global power would occur on the “heartland,” the great steppes stretching from eastern Europe to northern China.[53] Anticipating German efforts in both world wars to focus its empire-building not in faraway maritime colonies but rather in the fertile and oil-rich regions of Ukraine and southern Russia, Mackinder warned that any power capable of industrializing this region and linking it together through railway would achieve enough power to regard an insular naval power such as Britain as a mere nuisance.
For Crowe, the world that Mackinder envisions is apparently too terrifying to contemplate, as he ignores it and takes for granted that command of the ocean is and will remain an indispensable ingredient of true world power. Instead he offers a syllogism by which permanent structural conditions define strict parameters for historical development. Assuming, as Mahan does, that naval power is the key to the kind of unprecedented global preponderance that Britain then enjoyed, Crowe finds that it to be “natural that the power of a State supreme at sea should inspire universal jealousy and fear, and be ever exposed to the danger of being overthrown by a general combination of the world.” The only way to avoid this is for “the national policy of the insular and naval State [to be] so directed as to harmonize with the general desires and ideals common to all mankind,”[54] and since this has not occurred, it apparently follows that Britain is strong enough to uphold the balance of power and weak enough not to threaten it. By contrast, German land power since the days of Bismarck provoked countervailing coalitions, who correctly recognize that any program of Pan-Germanism “could never be built up on any other foundation than the wreckage of the liberties of Europe.” Were Germany to seek strategic depth against its hostile neighbors by building a maritime empire, it “would compel the world to combine for the riddance of such an incubus.”[55]
Simply by following this logical sequence, Crowe concludes that “there is no actual necessity for a British Government to determine definitely which of the two theories of German policy it will accept.”[56] If Germany is in fact “threatening the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England,” (a possibility which Crowe never explicitly rejects), then that proves that they are not diabolical, master strategists, but utter fools who are “wilfully concentrating in [their] own path all the obstacles and oppositions of a world set at defiance.”[57] If the Germans are wise enough to avoid such a ruinous path, then their reckless behavior could be likened to a gambler who has grown emboldened after hitting upon an unexpected lucky streak. In that case, Britain can continue to act with “unvarying courtesy and consideration in all matters of common concern, but also with a prompt and firm refusal to enter into any one-sided bargains or arrangements, and the most unbending determination to uphold British rights and interests in every part of the globe.”[58]
Crowe’s closing recommendations are noticeably short on specifics, aside from calling for a slight revision to the “Two Power Standard” in which Crowe argues that Britain should build two battleships for every one of Germany’s, instead of its traditional meaning of twice the battleships of the next two largest fleets. Otherwise, the choice of how to respond to German actions depends entirely on the immediate circumstances, offering no resistance “so long as Germany’s action does not overstep the line of legitimate protection of existing rights,” and then switching to “determined opposition at the first sign of British or allied interests being adversely affected.”[59] Crowe offers no advice on what criteria might distinguish one course of action from the other, which seems like a serious omission given the consequences of either condoning a harmful move or unduly punishing an innocent one. Calibrating the right response to the right situation is ultimately less important to Crowe than maintaining a two-track diplomacy toward Germany, one that assumes their healthy contribution to the balance of power and civilization more broadly, and another that assures Germany that it is not free to define the limits of its own ambitions without due consideration of the interests and concerns of other nations.
The Crowe Memorandum and the Challenges of Policy Making
In the years between the circulation of the Memorandum and the outbreak of the First World War, Crowe was thoroughgoing in his hostile assessment of Germany, opposing any plans for naval disarmament and pushing for an unequivocal guarantee of Belgian neutrality.[60] This adds further evidence to the contention that Crowe himself helped to bring about the very possibility that he analyzed in the Memorandum. Yet the Memorandum is equally liable to the opposite criticism of showing too much complacency and trust in the natural workings of the balance of power. If readers can find evidence in the Memorandum of both an overly hawkish and an overly sanguine view of German power, then perhaps Crowe’s primary fault was his ambivalence, grasping the general character of an emerging crisis without being willing to reckon fully with its consequences.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to evaluate the Memorandum in light of the policy outcomes that followed, especially for those who argue that Britain embodied that same spirit of ambivalence, raising tensions on the Continent and then vacillating at the moment of crisis, thereby convincing Germany to pursue a quick victory against France and Russia.[61] However, Crowe’s difficulty in articulating a clear and unambiguous message reflects the distinction between conceptualizing a diplomatic strategy and actually implementing it. Crowe’s task was not to put together a comprehensive strategic blueprint that was so obviously correct in its assessments and recommendations as to win support across the organs of British foreign policy. Even if it were possible to overcome differences of opinion and secure complete institutional commitment to a single course of action, its success would require foreign actors to behave according to a fixed set of assumptions and predictions. Instead, the diplomat’s task is to discover the most effective means of reconciling national interests with external developments. At best, diplomats can establish a set of principles that allow for flexible application, define the outer boundaries of compromise, and justify the recourse to alternative methods should negotiations fail.
Crowe’s Memorandum succeeds in each of these three tasks. He identifies the British interest in the balance of power and the fact of emerging German power as dual components of an ideal outcome whereby the two would be able to avoid war without having to sacrifice vital interests. A stable balance of power requires a healthy Germany, and a German assault on the liberties of Europe could only be self-defeating. Defining the rules of healthy competition within a stable balance of power is for Crowe less a matter of selecting the right tactics than as adopting the correct disposition, namely confidence in the balance of power as both a mechanism for peaceful adjustment and a principle worth defending against an outright assault. “So long as England remains faithful to the general principle of the preservation of the balance of power,”[62] the other powers of Europe can trust it not to precipitate a crisis while also expecting decisive action once a threat manifests itself. We can only speculate on whether a different approach to Germany could have avoided the conflagration of 1914, but Crowe’s efforts to safeguard a balance of power system over a Darwinian struggle would survive both World Wars and the decline of British power. Crowe’s Memorandum illustrates that diplomacy is not merely the art of avoiding a crisis, but reifying the institutional norms that will need to survive the crisis so as to reconstitute a stable status quo.
Eric Fleury is an Assistant Professor of Government and International Relations at Connecticut College in New London, CT, where he teaches courses on US Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Terrorism, and Ethics in International Relations. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Holly James is currently a senior at Connecticut College in New London, CT. A native of Liverpool, UK (and fan of Everton F.C.), she is a double major in International Relations and French, as well as a scholar in the Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA). Holly plans to pursue a Master’s in International Affairs after graduation.
Photo: Kaiser Wilhelm II points out an event of interest to the British Junior Minister at the Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, during the summer maneuvers of the Imperial German Army in 1906.
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NOTES
[1] Eyre Crowe, “Memorandum on the Present State of Relations With France and Germany,” in British Documents on the Origins of the War, eds. G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1928), 417.
[3] Jeffrey Stephen Dunn, The Crowe Memorandum: Sir Eyre Crowe and Foreign Office Perceptions of Germany, 1918-1925 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publisher, 2013), 9.
[4] Quoted in Muriel E. Chamberlain, Pax Britannica? British Foreign Policy 1789, 1914 (New York: Routledge, 2014),168.
[5] Thomas Sanderson, “Observations on Printed Memorandum on Relations With France and Germany, January 1907.” In Conflict After the Cold War, ed. Richard Betts, 5th edn. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 562-3.
[6] Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (New York:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 58-60.
[7] Quoted in Andreas Rose, Between Empire and Continent: British Foreign Policy Before the First World War. (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 289.
[8] Glenda Sluga. Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870-1919 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 125; Richard A. Cosgrove, “The Career of Sir Eyre Crowe: A Reassessment,” Albion 4, no. 4 (1972): 193-205; Sibyl Crowe, “Sir Eyre Crowe and the Locarno Pact,” The English Historical Review, 58, no. 342 (1972): 49-74.
[10] Cosgrove, “Sir Eyre Crowe,” 200.
[11] Dunn, “The Crowe Memorandum,” 54.
[12] Edward T. Corp, “Sir Eyre Crowe and the Administration of the Foreign Office, 1906-1914.” The Historical Journal 22, no. 2 (1979): pp. 443-54.
[15] Cosgrove, “Sir Eyre Crowe,” 202.
[16] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 401.
[17] James Retallack, Germany’s Second Empire: Portraits and Pathways (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 19.
[18] Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 161-162.
[19] Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977), 27.
[20] A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 413.
[21] Kissinger, Diplomacy, 163.
[22] Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 438.
[23] Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 439.
[24] Stephen van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9(1): 60.
[25] Michelle Murray, “Constructing the July Crisis: The Practice of Recognition and the Making of the First World War,” in Recognition in International Relations, eds. Christopher Daase, et al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 73-4.
[26] Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, 34-35.
[27] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 398.
[28] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 404.
[29] Quoted in Herbert Butterfield, “The Balance of Power,” in Diplomatic Investigations, eds. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 186.
[30] Quoted in Hans Morgenthau, eds. Kenneth W. Thompson and W. David Clinton Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace(Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006), 207-208.
[31] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 403.
[32] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 399.
[33] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 400.
[34] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 403.
[35] Paul Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870-1945 (London: Fontana Press, 1984), 96.
[36] Quoted in John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 119.
[37] Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, 56.
[38] Keith Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 82.
[39] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 404.
[40] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 409.
[41] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 405.
[42] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 406.
[43] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 407.
[44] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 408.
[45] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 411.
[46] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 415.
[47] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 415.
[48] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 416.
[49] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 416.
[50] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 408.
[51] David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015), 38-45.
[52] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 403.
[53] H.J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” The Geographical Journal 4 (1904): 298-321.
[54] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 403.
[55] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 417.
[56] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 418.
[57] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 417.
[58] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 420.
[59] Crowe, “Memorandum,” 419.
[60] Robert Warren Morse, Eyre Crowe and His Influence on Anglo-German Relations, 1907-1914 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 142-3.
[61] Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies From 1911 to 1914 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975,), 142.