The Anglo-German Tension and a Solution

In: American journal of international law: AJIL, Band 6, Heft 3, S. 601-613

Abstract

An English writer in the Nineteenth Century and
After, for April last, after naming twelve wars since
1850, great in political effect and, with two exceptions, great also in
bloodshed, says:
If all these wars, and others which I have not stopped to name,
were insufficient to convince our Radicals that their whole theory
of international affairs was false, then the events that next
followed might at last have brought the proof. In the South African
war Britain had over two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the
field, while the British Navy alone stood between our otherwise
unguarded shores and a Europe burning to intervene — a feat which,
in like circumstances, it is now no longer adequate to perform.
Meantime, .in a silence inspired with a terrible energy, had
proceeded the renaissance of the Japanese — a renaissance not of
Jetters, but of arms, until, in 1904–5, by sea and by land she
showed to mankind a new portent, the victory of an Asiatic race over
one of the mightiest empires of the West. Later still than all this,
even within the last few months, a vast upheaval, fraught with
infinite meaning for the whole world, has occurred in China; while
even at the present time a war is proceeding between Italy and
Turkey, and rumours of possible co-operation with the former Power
on the part of Russia are rife in the world.
As if all this were not enough evidence of the impermanence of
all political conditions, Western mankind is also threatened with an
earthquake from beneath in comparison with which the fury of the
French Revolution itself might pale its ineffectual fires. The "Red
Peril" already throws its lurid glare across the page of coming
history, and intestine struggles on a scale unprecedented in human
annals are already looming on the horizon of nearly all civilized
peoples.