The Policy Of The Entente

This book presents a realistic assessment of British priorities in the years before 1914.

Attempts to understand the real causes of the First World War.

The emergence of the Anglo-French entente after 1904 reshaped the international system before the First World War. After Russi's addition in 1907, the Triple Entente confronted the Triple Alliance in crisis after crisis. This study, first published in 1969, chronicles the impact of the entente upon the British decision to pursue a policy of Continental intervention and looks at the ramifications of that decision upon both British and French strategic policies. Britain's search for support against an assertive Germany represented its first acknowledgement of relative decline in the international system. The British sought to conceal the extent of their policy shift, denying the entente relationship had any military or naval dimension. In fact, from late 1905 to the war, there were secret military and naval conversations between the two governments. Mr. Williamson, focusing upon the content and conduct of the covert planning, examines the assumptions of entente strategy and its operational consequences. In the years after 1905 the military and naval talks would become a British substitute for a formal alliance commitment to the French; this use of the secret talks, which misled the British cabinet for years and the British parliament down to August 1914, possibly also explains Germany's failure to assess correctly Britain's support for France. Williamson thus helps put Fritz Fischer's arguments about German policy into a comparative framework. The Politics of Grand Strategy also examines the domestic ramifications of the secret staff planning and the ineptness of radical leadership in the British Cabinet in trying to block the Continental strategy. The author analyzes the problems of civil-military relations, the difficulty of controlling zealous staff officers, and the inherent risks of all forms of strategic planning. This second edition has a new preface that analyzes the abundant new literature appearing since 1969 on British military and intelligence operations, on the evolution of French strategic planning, and on the clashes of the entente and alliance systems.

The Triple Entente of Great Britain, Russia, and France was the foreign policy prong of the Russian imperial government's reaction to the disastrous events of 1905, including the revolution and the near defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. This alignment with the two western, liberal powers was almost universally perceived within official Russian governing circles as a necessary, if ideologically distasteful, diplomatic relationship to offset the growing German threat on the continent. Maintaining the entente would help Russia retain its great power status. For the first time, Tomaszewski tells the official Russian side of the story, long inaccessible due to restrictions imposed by the relevant Russian archives during the Soviet era. In doing so, she sheds new light on the international scene as the crisis of World War One approached. The Triple Entente went hand in hand with two policies of Stolypin, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers: draconian repression of the revolutionaries and sweeping domestic reforms. Acutely aware that serious failures in foreign policy would threaten the regime's existence, the imperial government designed both its foreign and its domestic policies to consolidate the autocracy for the twentieth century. Nicholas II gambled on the Triple Entente and its diplomatic alignment with the other two status-quo powers as the best means of preserving the peace in Europe and thereby preserving the imperial system as well.

This collection gathers many of the best-known names in the field of Anglo-French relations and provides an authoritative survey of the field. Starting with the crucial period of the First World War and ending with the equally complex question of the second Iraq War, the study has an emphasis on British perceptions of the Entente.