Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals Read Free Page B

transformed the Central European map in mid-century.
    The most important of these was the agreement of Austria and Prussia to settle their historic differences and to reform the Holy Roman Empire, making it into something more closely resembling a Western state - that is to say, a relatively decentralised federation under a single imperial head. After prolonged debate, agreement was finally reached in 1862-3 when the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph secured the support of the Prussian King Wilhelm I for his scheme. Against the advice of his Austrophobe minister president Bismarck, Wilhelm accepted Franz Joseph’s supremacy as emperor of a reformed empire on condition that its Foreign Ministry should be given permanently to Prussia - a concession which quickly changed Bismarck’s attitude. As a consequence, the Habsburgs effectively extended their empire from Lombardy to Lübeck, from Mainz to Memel - though their power within the larger states was, like British power in America, in some ways more notional than real.
    This ‘reform era’ was made easier by the wars waged by Britain and France to prevent a Russian takeover of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans in 1854-5 (the Crimean War) and 1878-9 (the Bulgarian War). So long as the Tsar was kept from controlling the Black Sea Straits, the German Emperor was content to see the ancient kingdoms of Piedmont and Serbia extend their power in Italy and the Balkans. ‘Patriotism’ - the sense of loyalty to one’s own historic kingdom - came to be one of the vital sources of Habsburg strength. Those few intellectuals who argued for alternative ‘national’ allegiances based on language and culture went largely unheeded, though some modern scholars of ‘nationalism’ believe their importance has been underestimated.
    The ultimate loser in this process was France. In the wake of the defeat of Russia in Bulgaria, there were those at Versailles who dreamt of cementing a permanent alliance with Britain. True, the British Foreign Office was deeply suspicious of the new German Empire, particularly when it embarked on programmes of naval construction and colonial acquisition which some saw as a direct challenge to British maritime supremacy. This probably explains why the idea of an Anglo-German alliance came to nothing. But traditional hostility to France - the loss of Canada had never been wholly forgotten - and a growing belief on the part of English imperialists like Chamberlain in the natural cultural and economic affinity between an American Britain and a German Europe dashed the hopes of French Anglophiles like the Cambon brothers. Instead, the Bourbons turned to the Romanovs (a natural diplomatic convergence, perhaps, of the two most centralised monarchies). Unfortunately for Versailles, as far as most British politicians could see, the resulting Franco-Russian alliance simply made Habsburg-Hohenzollern fears of ‘encirclement’ more legitimate. The obvious ease with which the Royal Navy was able to maintain its superiority over the German fleet - and the lack of any real colonial friction between the two empires - soon dispelled City fears of an Anglo-German antagonism. By contrast, British interests seemed much more directly threatened by Russia’s continuing expansion in Asia.
    Russian and French military preparations undoubtedly did pose a direct threat to the security of the Habsburg-Hohenzollern Reich, which, because of its highly decentralised structure, lacked the financial resources to match its neighbours in terms of manpower. It was this threat to German security which made some sort of war more or less certain on the continent in the second decade of the twentieth century. Of course, there continued to be influential voices in British diplomatic and military circles who argued that Britain should align itself with France and Russia to avert what they claimed, rather implausibly, was a growing German threat to British security. Germanophobes like Eyre Crowe