Fashoda, Witte, great projects and great mistakes

Russian and anti-German’ alliance strategy. This shift was evident as early as the late 1890s, when the emerging alliance between France’s Gabriel Hanotaux and Russia’s Sergei Witte, together with an emerging industrial Germany, seemed imminent.

FASHODA, WITTE, GREAT PROJECTS AND GREAT MISTAKES

Indeed, fear of the emerging German economic challenge towards the end of the 1890s was so extreme among the leading circles of the British establishment that Britain made a drastic change in her decades-long Continental alliance strategy, in a bold effort to tilt European events back to her own advantage.

A seminal event which crystallized this alliance shift was, oddly enough, an eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation over Egypt, where historically both Britain and France had major interests through the Suez Canal Company. In 1898, French troops marching across the Sahara to the east, under Colonel Jean Marchand, encountered British forces under the command of General Kitchener at Fashoda on the Nile. A tense military showdown ensued, with each side ordering the other to withdraw, until fi nally, after consultation with Paris, Marchand withdrew. The Fashoda Crisis as it became known, ended in a de facto Anglo-French balance-of-power alliance against Germany, in which France foolishly ceded major opportunities to industrialize Africa.

The decision to send the French Expeditionary Force under Marchand to Fashoda for a head-on military confrontation with Britain in Africa came from Colonial Minister Théophile Delcassé. Britain had steadily moved to what became a de facto military occupation of Egypt and the Suez Canal, despite French claims to the area going back to Napoleon. Since 1882, British troops had ‘temporarily’ occupied Egypt, and British civil servants ran the government in order to ‘protect’ French and British interests in the Suez Canal Company. Britain was stealing Egypt from under the eyes of France.

Delcassé acted against the better interests of France and against the explicit policy design of French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux. Hanotaux, who was absent from government for a critical six months when the Fashoda folly was decided, had a conception of development and industrialization of France’s African colonies. A republican who was known as an Anglophobe, Hanotaux had a conception of an economically unifi ed French Africa centered around development of

Lake Chad, with a railroad linking the interior from Dakar in French Senegal to French Djibouti on the Red Sea. The idea was referred to in France as the Trans-Sahara railway project. It would have transformed the entirety of Saharan Africa from west to east. It would also have blocked major British strategic objectives to control the entire region from Africa, across Egypt and into India.

Hanotaux had carefully pursued a policy of normalizing relations between France and Germany, a most threatening development to British balance-of-power machinations. In early 1896, the German foreign secretary asked the French ambassador in Berlin if France would consider joint action in Africa for ‘limiting the insatiable appetite of England … [It] is necessary to show England that she can no longer take advantage of the Franco-German antagonism to seize whatever she wants.’

But then the infamous Dreyfus affair erupted in the French press. Its direct aim was to rupture the delicate efforts of Hanotaux to stabilize relations with Germany. A French army captain named Dreyfus was prosecuted on charges of spying for the Germans. Hanotaux intervened in the initial process in 1894, correctly warning that the Dreyfus affair would lead to ‘a diplomatic rupture with Germany, even war.’ Dreyfus was exonerated years later, and it was revealed that Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, in the pay of the Rothschild banking family, had manufactured the evidence against Dreyfus. By 1898, Hanotaux was out of offi ce and had been succeeded by the malleable Anglophile, Théophile Delcassé.

After Fashoda in 1898, Britain had skillfully enticed France, under Foreign Minister Delcassé, to give up fundamental colonial and economic interests in Egypt and concentrate on a French policy against Germany, in which Britain secretly agreed to back French claims on Alsace-Lorraine, as well as British support for French ambitions in other areas not vital to British designs. Describing these British diplomatic machinations around Fashoda some years later (in 1909), Hanotaux remarked:

It is an historical, proven fact that any colonial expansion of France has been seen with fear and concern in England. For a long time, England has thought that, in the domination of the Seas, she has no other rival to consider than that power endowed by nature with a triple coastline of the Channel, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. And when, after 1880, France, induced by the circumstances and stimulated by the genius of Jules Ferry,

began to reconstitute her dismembered colonial domain, she came up against the same resistance. In Egypt, in Tunisia, Madagascar, Indo-china, even the Congo and Oceania, it is always England she confronts.

After Fashoda, the Entente Cordiale was fashioned, and ultimately formalized in a secret agreement between France and Britain, signed by Delcassé, Hanotaux’s successor, in 1904. Germany’s economic threat was the glue binding the two unlikely allies. Commenting on this sad turn of events afterwards, Hanotaux noted the success with which Britain had imposed a new foreign policy on France, ‘a marvelous invention of English diplomatic genius to divide its adversaries.’

Over the next eight years, Britain reversed its geopolitical alliance policy in another profound matter as well, and shifted developments in Russia to British advantage. Beginning in 1891, Russia had embarked on an ambitious industrialization program, with the passage of a stringent protective tariff and a railroad infrastructure program. In 1892, the man responsible for the railroad plan, Count Sergei Witte, became minister of fi nance. Witte had enjoyed close relations with France’s Hanotaux and a positive basis for Franco-Russian relations developed around the construction of the railway system in Russia.

The most ambitious project initiated in Russia at that time had been the construction of a railroad linking Russia in the west to Vladivostock in the Far East—the Trans-Siberian railway project, a 5,400 mile-long undertaking, which would transform the entire economy of Russia. This was the most ambitious rail project in the world. Witte himself was a profound student of the German economic model of Friedrich List, having translated into Russian List’s ‘National System of Political Economy’, which Witte termed ‘the solution for Russia.’

Witte spoke of the rail project’s effect on uplifting the culturally backward regions of the interior. In 1890, he wrote:

The railroad is like a leaven which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it is passed through an absolutely wild people along the way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.

A central part of Witte’s plan was to develop peaceful and productive relations with China, independent of British control of China’s ports

and sea-lanes, through the overland openings which the Siberian rail line would facilitate.

As fi nance minister from 1892 until he was deposed during the suspiciously timed 1905 Russian ‘revolution,’ Witte transformed Russia’s prospects dramatically from its former role as ‘breadbasket’ to British grain-trading houses, into a potentially modern industrial nation. Railroads became the largest industry in the country and were inducing a transformation of the entire range of related steel and other sectors. Furthermore, Witte’s friend and close collaborator, the scientist Dimitri Mendeleyev, who had founded Russian agrochemistry based on the ideas of the German Justus von Liebig, was appointed by Witte to head a new Offi ce of Standard Weights and Measures, in which he introduced the metric system to further facilitate trade with the Continent of Europe.

Britain energetically opposed the economic policies of Witte and the Trans-Siberian railway project with every means at its disposal, including attempts to infl uence reactionary Russian landed nobility linked to the British grain trade. Shortly after the inception of the Trans-Siberian rail project, a British commentator, A. Colqhum, expressed the dominant views of the British Foreign Offi ce and the City of London. Referring to the new Russian rail project, undertaken with French fi nancing and which would ultimately link Paris to Moscow to Vladivostok by rail, Colqhum declared:

This line will not only be one of the greatest trade routes that the world has ever known, but it will also become a political weapon in the hands of the Russians whose power and signifi cance it is diffi cult to estimate. It will make a single nation out of Russia, for whom it will no longer be necessary to pass through the Dardanelles or through the Suez Canal. It will give her an economic independence, through which she will become stronger than she has ever been or ever dreamed of becoming.

For decades, the British balance-of-power alliance strategy in Europe had been built around support for Ottoman Turkey’s empire, as part of what British strategists called the Great Game—blocking the emergence of a strong and industrialized Russia. Support for Turkey, which controlled the vital Dardanelles access to warm waters for Russia, had been a vital part of British geopolitics until that time. But as German economic links with the Ottoman Empire grew stronger

at the end of the century and into the early 1900s, so too did British overtures to Russia, and against Turkey and Germany.

It took a series of wars and crises, but following unsuccessful British attempts to block Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok, which the Russians largely completed in 1903, Russia was badly humiliated in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, in which Britain had allied with Japan against Russia. After 1905, Witte was forced to resign his position as chairman of the Council of Ministers under Czar Nicholas II. His successor argued that Russia must come to terms with British power, and proceeded to sign over to the British the rights to Afghanistan and large parts of Persia, and agreed to curtail Russian ambitions in Asia signifi cantly. Thus, a British–French–Russian Triple Entente in effect had been fully established by 1907. Britain had created a web of secret alliances encircling Germany, and had laid the foundations for the coming military showdown with the Kaiser’s Reich. The next seven years were ones of preparation for the fi nal elimination of the German threat.10

Following British consolidation of its new Triple Entente strategy of encirclement of Germany and her allies, a series of continuous crises and regional wars were unleashed in the Balkans, the ‘soft underbelly’ of Central Europe. In the so-called First Balkan War of 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, secretly backed by England, declared war against the weak Ottoman Turkey, resulting in stripping Turkey of most of her European possessions. This was followed in 1913 by a second Balkan War over the spoils of the fi rst, in which Romania joined to help crush Bulgaria. The stage was being set for Britain’s great European war.

Three months after Edward Grey’s Paris talks, on July 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb, setting off a predictably tragic chain of events which detonated the Great War.