BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

a free hand toward Europe and failure to adopt policies that might have averted war, namely the
maintenance of Austrian integrity and a power balance in the Balkans, have been also been
deemed symptomatic of a universal, imperialistic short-sightedness. 49 To the latter point, R. J.
Crampton has shown that attempts to improve Anglo-German relations through cooperation on
the periphery, specifically via efforts to quell nationalist and territorial squabbles in the Balkans,
signally failed to address more substantive issues concerning military and diplomatic
commitments. The collapse of a short-lived Anglo-German “hollow detente” during the Balkan
wars of 1912-13, Crampton concluded, reflected the inability of the great powers to stray from
alliances that constituted a larger European crisis. 50 As to the policy of the free hand, Gordon
Martel has concluded that Britain’s default policy of non-alliance actually offered the best
strategy for balancing the Central Powers’ Triple Alliance against the Franco-Russian Dual
Entente. Lord Rosebery’s invasion and control of Egypt through the Khedive in 1892, besides
securing the Suez Canal and a route to India, established a British presence in the Eastern
Mediterranean that could check French and Russian imperial ambitions while Britain could enjoy
an automatic security in the military standoff between the two European alliances on the
Continent. According to Martel, Britain’s built-in relationship with Germany as a tacit member
of the Triple Alliance depended upon assurances that Italy and Austria-Hungary could rely on a
49 Paul Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,”
Journal of Modern History 44 (September 1972): 344-45.
50 British diplomats found that Germany would neither part with Austria and Italy on the
protection of Albania’s coastline from Greek incursions nor jeopardize commercial and military
ties with the Ottomans for a coerced compensatory surrender of Turkish-owned Aegean islands
to Greece. This impasse left Britain without support on the one issue that mattered: control of
the Eastern Mediterranean and a possible launching point for involvement in any European
scramble for Asiatic Ottoman territories. The Hollow Detente: Anglo-German Relations in the
Balkans, 1911-1914 (London: Prior; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979), 123-25, 174-75.
237