British foreign policy and the Ruhr Occupation crisis 1922-1924.
This thesis provides a comprehensive examination of British policy during the Ruhr occupation crisis of 1922-1924. It addresses central questions raised in the historiography of the 1920s, shedding light both on Britain's policy and that of other powers, particularly France. Based on a thorough examination of the British archives, analysis also focuses on the process of policy-formation, revealing the significance for this of administrative and personal relationships and of domestic political constraints. The thesis begins with an analysis of Britain's role at the onset of the crisis. It evaluates the influence on Britain's policy both of the international situation and of internal factors after the collapse of the Lloyd George coalition. Britain's ambiguous position of benevolent neutrality from January to April 1923 is then analysed and its inadequacy demonstrated by revealing the contradictions involved when implementing it on the spot in the Rhineland and Ruhr. The thesis explores the search for alternatives during the summer of 1923, when policy-makers tentatively tried to encourage negotiations, but in fact simply compounded Britain's difficulties. Discussion then moves to events in the autumn of 1923. Once German passive resistance ceased the European situation became more fluid. Britain was at last able to pursue an effective policy. She distanced herself from events on the spot and played an important role both in establishing international enquiries to investigate reparations, and in ensuring that the experts' reports (particularly those of the Dawes Committee) were adopted at the London Conference in 1924. This thesis explores Britain's attitude to reparations and to broader questions of post-war European reconstruction and stability, revealing the dilemmas caused by Britain's underlying strategic and economic weakness after the war. It highlights the difficulties Britain encountered when dealing with her European neighbours and provides a valuable insight into the complexity of British foreign policy during this brief but crucial period.
Walther Rathenau and German Foreign Policy: Thoughts and Actions
O N JULY 30, I898 there appeared in Maxmilian Harden's magazine, Die Zukunft, a short essay by a certain Walter Michael, under the title "Transatlantische Warnungssignale" [Transatlantic warning signals]., It commented on the sinking of the American ship "Merrimac," by the American Lieutenant Hobson, at the entrance of Santiago harbor to bottle up the Spanish fleet. Hobson's name may outlive Shafter, Sampson, and Dewey, the author suggested. For what he did symbolizes the predominance of technology and capital over the older forces of courage and chivalry. Behind the fighting battalions there are the silent columns of engineers, construction men, chemists, and financiers-those ignoble and selfish powers without ancestors and without nobility. The writer then scoffs at the German liberals who sympathize with Spain. He holds that the fight between the Germanic and the Romanic people is something "prehistoric," a thing of the past; the battle of the future will be between England and Russia for the hegemony of the world. For Germany all signposts point eastward; but, since the fateful morning of Kronstadt, this way is blocked. The Triple Alliance has lost most of its attractiveness since then. As a consolation Germany could play hide and seek with the English cousin. But now a new dual alliance is in preparation, a dual alliance of the Anglo-Saxon sea
The Progressive Movement in England
On the centenary of the birth of C. P. Scott, the political outlook of the Manchester Guardian under his editorship was explained thus: ‘He, and those who wrote under him, thought always in terms of what he called “the progressive movement”. What was important was that those who were agreed on reforming measures should work together to secure them’. In its use of the rather imprecise label ‘progressive’, in its conception of a reform movement wider than strict party boundaries, in its distinctive flowering in the press—in all these respects the progressive movement of early twentieth-century America gives us some notion of what Scott had in mind. And indeed American historiography can, I believe, suggest valuable lines of analysis which have not been fully applied in England. Perhaps the most obvious would entail giving closer attention to the intellectuals and publicists and asking more searching questions about their role in politics. A few years ago the late Charles Mowat pointed to the broadly similar problems in social policy which Britain and the United States faced at this time; and he commented on how, despite these similarities, the history of social reform in the United States had been written with due attention to the history of ideas: in Britain, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of political and administrative history. It would not, perhaps, be fair to extend Mowat's observation by saying that in England we purposely write history with the ideas left out.