BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

The British entente with France in 1904, and Russia in 1907, ended more than a decade of
Anglo-German alliance attempts. These missed opportunities were thwarted by mutual distrust,
opposing geopolitical strategies, diplomatic maneuvering and, ultimately, naval rivalry. But
national stereotypes in public media also contributed a cultural aspect to Anglo-German
diplomatic antagonism. British journalists drew upon a rich heritage of German stereotypes, both
for polemical argument and for entertaining a national self-image at the expense of the German
other. Stereotypes also gained currency through pseudoscientific racial theories and ethnological
hierarchies that constituted the nineteenth-century paradigm of innate national character.
Because they encapsulate assumed national difference so effectively, stereotypes in print provide
a useful perspective on the interface between national identity, public opinion and policy.
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