War-in-sight crisis
The war-in-sight crisis was a diplomatic crisis following the Franco-German War 1870 / 1871 .
France quickly regained strength after the occupation troops withdrew in 1873 and began rearmament. This aroused Otto von Bismarck's fears of revenge for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine .
On April 9, 1875, the government-affiliated newspaper Post published an article entitled Is War In Sight? . The author was the journalist Constantin Rößler , but Otto von Bismarck is believed to be behind this and numerous other articles in the next few weeks. In these articles he threatened France with a preventive war in the event of further rearmament. The article made a heated reference to the French chamber law, which increased France's military clout. The newspaper in which it appeared was a government-related paper and was often used for semi-official purposes. Therefore, the article provoked and alarmed the major European powers.
The background was the precarious situation of the German Empire after the founding of the empire . The German Reich was a great power, but not strong enough to be able to defend its unification, which it had achieved between 1864 and 1871 in wars of unification with isolated enemies, against a coalition led by France. In Berlin, the military under Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke actually pushed for the French threat to be eliminated with the help of a preventive war. In such a war, the empire, which was only founded in 1871, could not count on Russia's neutrality. The aim of the press campaign was to find out how the other European powers would behave in the event of a renewed Franco-German conflict.
The result was a clear signal from Great Britain and Russia to support France. They were unwilling to accept a further increase in power by the German Reich that would have endangered their own position.
From this course of the “war-in-sight” crisis, Bismarck concluded that Germany had to pursue the diplomacy of equilibrium and put alternative options such as the policy of territorial compensation or the diplomatically supported preventive war on hold. Every attempt to expand the empire territorially and to develop the empire's position of power entailed incalculable risks for the newly founded empire. The aim was to portray Germany as a saturated power and to use diplomacy to keep France as isolated as possible in order not to be forced into a two-front war . He describes this conception in the Kissinger Diktat .
As a result, however, it became apparent that the successors of Bismarck did not succeed and that France, the Russian Empire and England ultimately united to form the Entente against the Central Powers.
State of research
Many historians, such as Klaus Hildebrand and Volker Ullrich , suspect Otto von Bismarck to be the driving force behind the publication of the article Is the war in sight? and see the crisis as a political calculation by Bismarck as a result of the failed Radowitz mission .
In contrast, Johannes Janorschke advocates the more recent thesis that the article can be traced back to the unauthorized press officer of the Foreign Office, Ludwig Aegidi . This acted against the strategy of the Chancellor at the time. Consequently, Janorschke refuses to interpret the war-in-sight crisis as a consequence of the Radowitz mission drawn by Bismarck.
literature
- Andreas Hillgruber : The "War-in-Sight-Crisis" 1875 - The political divide of the European great powers in the late Bismarck period , in: Schulin, Ernst (Ed.): Studies on European history. Commemorative letter for Martin Göhring. Wiesbaden 1968 pp. 239-253.
- Johannes Janorschke: The "war-in-sight" crisis of 1875. A reconsideration , in: Historische Mitteilungen, 20 (2007), pp. 116-139.
- Johannes Janorschke: Bismarck, Europe and the "war in sight" crisis of 1875 , Paderborn [among others] 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76708-0 .
- James Stone: The War Scare of 1875: Bismarck and Europe in the Mid-1870s , Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2010, 385 pages, ISBN 978-3-515-09634-8
Individual evidence
- ↑ Klaus Hildebrand: German Foreign Policy 1871-1918 . 3. Edition. De Gruyter, Munich 2008.
- ↑ Volker Ullrich: The nervous great power 1871-1918. The rise and fall of the German Empire. 1st edition. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2013.
- ^ Johannes Janorschke: Bismarck, Europe and the "war-in-sight" crisis of 1875 . Ed .: Otto von Bismarck Foundation. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010.
- ↑ Stephen Schröder: Johannes Janorschke: Bismarck, Europe and the "war-in-sight" crisis of 1875. In: Recensio. 2011, accessed March 4, 2020 .