Cabinet versus Economic Warfare in Germany: Policy and Strategy during the Early Months of the First World War

Abstract

Just after the second Morocco crisis had been settled by the Morocco-Congo treaty, the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, on 16 November 1911 wrote a confidential letter to Carl Weizsäcker, Premier of Württemberg, in which he defended his foreign policy against Pan-German and conservative charges of unpardonable softness. He acknowledged that some aspects of the Morocco agreement fell short of perfection, but expressly denied having pursued a military conflict for the attainment of limited colonial interests. His argument ran:

Had I … allowed the war stage to be reached, we should not be somewhere in France, while the major part of our fleet would lie at the bottom of the North Sea and Hamburg and Bremen would be blockaded or under bombardment. The German people might then well have asked me why? Why all this — for the fictitious sovereignty of the Sultan of Morocco, for a piece of the Sudan or the Congo, for the Mannesmann brothers? And they would have had every right to string me up from the next tree.