But surely, with the benefit of hindsight one can say that the British opposition to German hegomony in Europe was a failed and possibly mistaken policy; can it not be said that there exists now a European hegemon in the shape of the European Union and, furthermore, that that hegemon has as its economic powerhouse, its control centre as it were, the economic clout of the Federal Republic of Germany, which state also is the most populous in the EU?
Indeed, the defeated Germany of 1918 was in a far stronger position than any of its "victorious" wartime adversaries: Britain was near bankrupt and eventually had to default on its war debts to the USA; France had not only been "bled white" because of the carnage that had taken place on its territory, but the major battles fought in France, having also largely taken place in the industrial regions of the French Republic, had laid those regions waste; the Russian Empire no longer existed and was being torn apart by civil war; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that state, that should surely be judged the most guilty of all, should one wish to label any World War I belligerent as being responsible for the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, or at least its Foreign Minister should have been so judged, had fragmented into its ethnically differentiated regions, the result of national self-determination, that very thing that Austria-Hungary had most feared in its multi-ethnic empire and which had caused the spark at Sarajevo that had ignited Europe.
Defeated Germany was still, more or less, in one piece in 1918, apart from the Danzig corridor and bits of Silesia ceded to Poland and the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia. Germany throughout the war had - apart from the sudden incursion of the Russians into East Prussia in 1914, whence they had promptly been despatched after their defeats at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes - never had its territories invaded and occupied by foreign armies, had not had its industrial regions reduced to ruins and had a population that, despite the hunger caused by the Royal Navy blockade that continued from the armistice of November 1918 until the signing of the Versailles Treaty the following year, was still growing and rapidly outnumbering that of France, proud claims of French fecundity notwithstanding.
True, British policy for 300 years or more had been to prevent the existence of a European hegemon: the threat usually came from France. So the UK did an about face in 1914 and allied itself with France in a struggle against the potential "threat" of German domination of Europe. But is that not what has, in the end, eventually happened? Germany has at last found its "place in the sun" that it had yearned for in the first flush of its successes during the last quarter of the 19th century; Gemany's place in the sun has, however, not turned out to be an overseas empire that would challenge those of the British and French: Germany is now boss of the European Union, a union that that self-styled emperor of the French, Buonaparte, would have been proud of.
In the meantime, along that route towards that German hegemony that we now witness, there have been two world wars fought to prevent its occurence; there has been the destruction of most of old Europe, the loss of millions of lives, the collapse of empires and the rise of Bolshevism and its counterpoint, Fascism, Stalinism and subsequent wars both hot and cold.
When British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey supposedly said on the eve of the outbreak of World War I, apparently as he watched lamplighters lighting the gas lamps in the street below his Westminster Foreign Office window: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit gain in our lifetime" he could certainly have added that he had been one the parties that had helped put them out.
Sir Edward had by that time realised that he had failed to clearly communicate to Germany that a breach of the treaty not merely to respect but to protect the neutrality of Belgium - of which both Britain and Germany were signatories - would cause Britain to declare war against Germany. When he finally did make such communication, German forces were already massed at the Belgian border and the German High Command convinced the Kaiser that it was too late to change the plan of attack.
So the United Kingdom declared war on the German Empire because of "a scrap of paper" as the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg had labelled the broken treaty.
As regards Sir Edward Grey's speech to parliament concerning the necessity for a declaration of war against the German Empire, in 1915 Bethmann-Hollweg described to an American newspaper journalist his final meeting in Berlin on August 4th 1918 with the departing British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen: "
The day before my conversation with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Grey had delivered his well-known speech in Parliament, wherein, while he did not state expressly that England would take part in the war, he left the matter in little doubt. One needs only to read this speech through carefully to learn the reason of England's intervention in the war. Amid all his beautiful phrases about England's honour and England's obligations we find it over and over again expressed that England's interests - its own interests - called for participation in war, for it was not in England's interests that a victorious, and therefore stronger, Germany should emerge from the war...England drew the sword only because she believed her own interests demanded it. Just for Belgian neutrality she would never have entered the war. That is what I meant when I told Sir E. Goschen, in that last interview when we sat down to talk the matter over privately man to man, that among the reasons which had impelled England into war the Belgian neutrality treaty had for her only the value of a scrap of paper."
So "England" went to war over a point of principle? John Keegan, in his book The First World War (published on the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of WWI), concluded: "...principle...scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection." One could, for sure, retort to Keegan's opinion concerning principles: What do principles represent if they are not worth fighting for? However, the "fight" in question involved the deaths of millions.
And I still say that the real reason why the UK declared war on Germany was to protect British economic interests: a German Weltmacht supported by a powerful fleet and German domination of Europe were definitely not in the best economic interests of the United Kingdom and the British Empire.
As they say: It's the economy, stupid!
And as Groucho Marx once said: These are my principles: if you don't like them, I have others!
