Chapter 21 French Mistakes and Russian Ambitions

Indeed, by the late 1890s, fear among the British elite about the economic challenges of an emerging Germany was at its height.In order to make the development of events in Europe favorable to its own interests, Britain made a radical adjustment to the continental alliance strategy that had not changed for ten years. What directly led to the adjustment of the alliance's strategy was a major military confrontation in Egypt.In Egypt, both Britain and France have historically had huge economic interests through the Suez Canal Company. In 1898, a French army led by Colonel Marchand crossed the Sahara Desert to the east.There they encountered a British force at Fashoda on the Nile under General Kitchener.The two armies confronted each other and refused to give in to each other, and the situation was tense.Finally, after Marchand asked Paris for instructions, he led the French army to evacuate first.This is the famous Fashoda crisis, which ended when Britain and France reached a balance of power alliance for the joint resistance against Germany.In this event, France mistakenly passed up a good opportunity to industrialize Africa.

The French colonial minister at the time was Théophile Delcase, and it was he who gave the retreat order to the French expeditionary force led by Captain Marchand, who was confronting the British army in Fashoda, Africa.Although France has had territorial claims to the area since the days of Napoleon, Britain has pushed ahead, de facto occupying Egypt and the Suez Canal.Since the "temporary" occupation of Egypt by British troops in 1882, British civil servants have de facto managed the Egyptian government in order to "protect" British and French interests in the Suez Canal Company.In the end, the British quietly stole Egypt under the noses of the French.

Delcasse's order to retreat was against French interests and against the clear policy vision of French Foreign Minister Gabriel Arnault.Arnotto originally had a complete vision for the development and industrialization of French African colonies, but he did not participate in the critical six months of dealing with the Fashoda conflict.Anotto is a well-known anti-British republican. His idea is to use the French African Lake Chad as the center, and then use the railway to connect the inland French Senegal Dakar and the French Djibouti on the Red Sea. to form an economic community.This idea refers to the Trans-Saharan Railway Project in France, which will change the face of the entire African Sahara region from west to east.This concept would also block Britain's main strategic objective of controlling the entire region from Africa across Egypt into India.

Arnault carefully maintained the normalization of the relationship between France and Germany, which was the biggest threat to Britain's "balance of power" strategy. In early 1896, the German foreign minister asked the French ambassador in Berlin whether France would consider joining a joint operation in Africa, "to limit Britain's insatiable greed...the British must know that they can no longer profit from the Franco-German confrontation and wantonly grab any resource". However, not long after, the notorious Dreyfus incident was publicly exposed in the French media. Its direct goal was to undermine the stable Franco-German relationship that Arnault worked hard to build.At that time, a French army captain named Dreyfus was accused of betraying military secrets to the Germans.Arnault intervened at the start of the trial in 1894, warning that the Dreyfus affair would lead to "a diplomatic rupture with Germany, and even war".Dreyfus was acquitted a few years later when it was shown that Count Ferdinand Wilsing-Esterhazy had falsified against Dreyfus in a payment voucher from the Rothschild Bank. evidence of.By 1898, Arnotto was ousted and replaced by the Anglophile Théophile Delcase.

After the Fashoda incident in 1898, during the tenure of the new French Foreign Minister Delcase, Britain used various tricks to trick France into giving up its important colonies and economic interests in Egypt, and provoke France to concentrate on fighting Germany.Britain also secretly agreed to support France's claim to the Alsace-Lorraine region, over which Franco-German sovereignty has historically been contested.At the same time, it supported French ambitions in other areas that were not important to Britain.Years later (1909), Arnault described all the British diplomatic intrigue surrounding Fashoda, commenting: History shows that any colonial expansion of France was accompanied by British fear and concern.For a long time, Britain believed that in terms of maritime hegemony, France was her biggest competitor with the three coastlines of the English Channel, Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea bestowed by nature.After 1880, under the influence of the environment at that time and Jules Ferry's outstanding ideas, France began to reconstruct the divided colonies.Each time, France met the same resistance, whether in Egypt, Tunisia, Madagascar, or Indochina, or even in the Congo and Oceania, and she always met Britain.

After the Fashoda incident, a mechanism of amity negotiations between Britain and France took shape, and finally, in 1904, a formal agreement was secretly signed between Delcasse and Britain.Germany's economic threat is the glue between the two dubious allies.Commenting on this sad turn of events afterwards, Arnotto also said that Britain's success in imposing this new foreign policy on France was "a wonderful invention of a British diplomatic genius to drive a wedge between rivals". In the eight years since, Britain has again changed her geopolitical alliance policy on another far-reaching issue: using Russian developments to her advantage. In early 1891, Russia embarked on an ambitious industrial program, passing a strict tariff protection program and a railway infrastructure project. In 1892, Count Sazi Witte, who undertook the railway project, became the Minister of Finance of Russia.Witte had a close relationship with Arnault of France, and laid a good foundation for Franco-Russian relations around the construction of the Russian railway system.

At that time, Russia launched a railway construction project, which was 5,400 miles long and stretched across Siberia, connecting western Russia with Vladivostok (Vladivostok) in the Far East. Its completion would change the entire Russian economy.It was the most ambitious project in the world at the time.Witte was a faithful believer in the German economic model proposed by Friedrich List. He translated List's "National System of Political Economy" into Russian and regarded it as a good solution to Russia's problems. Witte said that this railway will have an impact on the development of Russia's culturally backward interior.In 1890, he wrote: This railway is like a piece of leaven which will produce a cultural ferment in the crowd.Even if it passes through a completely barren area, the operation of the railway will increase the quality of the local population for a short time.

A central part of Witte's plan was to promote a complete openness of the land through the Trans-Siberian Railway, to establish a peaceful and productive relationship with China, and to free itself from British control of Chinese ports and sea routes. From his tenure as finance minister in 1892 until his ouster in the Russian Revolution in 1905, Witte transformed Russia from what had been the "granary" of British grain traders into a potential modern industrial nation.Railroads became the country's largest industry and led to the development of steel and other related industries.In addition, the scientist Dmitry Mendeleev, friend and close collaborator of Witte, who founded Russian agricultural chemistry on the basis of the theories of the German scientist Justus von Liebig, was appointed by Witte to formulate the newly established standards of weights and measures The head of the office, the metric system introduced by him greatly promoted the trade between Russia and the European continent.

The British did everything possible to obstruct Witte's economic policy and the Trans-Siberian Railway project, including trying to influence the reactionary Russian noble landowners who were closely related to the British grain trade.Not long after the start of the Trans-Siberian Railway project, the British commentator Coquim expressed the mainstream views of the British Foreign Office and the City of London, referring to the new Russian railway plan funded by France, which will eventually connect Paris, Moscow and Vladivostok. Coquim claimed that the railway would not only be one of the greatest trade routes in the world, but would also be a political weapon in the hands of the Russians, whose power and significance were incalculable.The railway would also make a country other than Russia economically independent without having to go through the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal, and she would become stronger than ever.

For decades, Britain's strategy for the balance of power in Europe was structured around supporting the Ottoman Empire as part of the so-called "Great Game" strategy (to prevent the rise of a powerful industrialized Russia).Supporting Turkey, which controls the vital Dardanelles, which gives Russia access to warmer waters, has always been an important part of British geopolitics.However, as Germany's economic ties with the Turkish Empire became stronger towards the end of the century and the beginning of the 19th century, Britain also courted Russia against Turkey and Germany.

Despite Britain's series of wars and crises, her plot to thwart Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok failed.The Russians completed most of the railway in 1903.However, in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Britain and Japan allied against Russia, causing Russia to suffer the humiliation of defeat. After 1905, Witte was forced to resign from the position of Chairman of the Council of Ministers during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. His successor strongly advocated the reconciliation between Russia and Britain, and began to transfer the rights in Afghanistan and most of Persia to the Britain, too, agreed to significantly curb Russian ambitions in Asia.Thus, the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente was successfully established by 1907.Britain laid a network of alliances to surround Germany, laying the foundation for the subsequent showdown with the German Empire.For the next seven years, she undertook a series of preparations to finally eradicate the German threat. As Britain's new Triple Entente strategy of encircling Germany and its allies consolidated, a series of successive crises and regional wars took place in Europe's "soft underbelly"—the Balkans.In the First Balkan War in 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, with secret support from Britain, declared war on the Ottoman Empire, causing Turkey to lose most of its European lands.Immediately afterwards, in 1913, the Second Balkan War broke out due to the first unfair distribution of spoils.In this war, Romania joined, helped and defeated Bulgaria.These all paved the way for Britain to launch a major war in Europe. Three months after Edward Gray's Paris talks, on July 2, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Crown Prince of Austria, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian youth, setting off a predictable chain of tragic events that led to the first The outbreak of World War I.