An excerpt from, "Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890-1914" by Roderick R. McLean, Cambridge University Press, 2001, Pg. 12 - 14:
The present study examines the significance of dynastic factors in European diplomacy in the last decade of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth. This is done by analysing the importance of the political and personal relationships between monarchs, and by looking at various events where monarchical involvement can be seen to be at work in the diplomatic sphere. Thus, the first chapter addresses Wilhelm II's attempts to encourage Nicholas II to abandon the Franco-Russian alliance in favour of co-operation with Berlin, and stresses the key importance of both monarchs in German-Russian relations before the First World War. They were able to determine the foreign policies of their empires to a considerable extent, notably as a result of the control that they exercised over ministerial and ambassadorial appointments. However, due attention is also given to structures and to the pressures that rendered dynastic links less efficacious as the conflagration of 1914 approached. The conflicting ambitions of Germany and Russia in the Balkans reduced the value of diplomatic exchanges between the two emperors, notably after the Bosnian crisis of 1908/9. Similarly, the mutual antagonism that developed between German and Russian public opinion in the early years of the twentieth century also reduced the scope for co-operation between the two powers. By 1914, appeals to the monarchical principle were no longer sufficient to prevent Germany and Russia from going to war on opposing sides.
The second chapter looks at the turbulent relationship between Edward VII and his nephew, Wilhelm II. This is a subject which has not been fully scrutinised since the 1930s. Yet the antagonism which existed between them was of more than personal significance, for it came to have a profoundly negative political impact on Anglo-German relations, particularly after the accession of Edward VII in 1901. Wilhelm II's love-hate relationship with the British royal family influenced his entire attitude towards Britain politically, most notably by stimulating his desire to create a large battlefleet to rival the Royal Navy. His paranoid conviction that his uncle Edward VII was orchestrating Germany's diplomatic encirclement caused Wilhelm to refuse political compromise with Britain, most notably on the issue of naval armaments. Edward VII, in contrast to the Kaiser, was able to influence his country's foreign policy but not to determine it. However the King's suspicion that Wilhelm II harboured malevolent intentions towards Britain eventually led him to give his support to the policy of entente with France and Russia that was pursued by both Conservative and Liberal governments during his reign, to further the careers of diplomats who were convinced that Germany wished to obtain the mastery of Europe, and to support a robust British naval and military policy. The antagonism between the Kaiser and the King thus provides a good example of the way in which palace politics could actually contribute towards a deterioration in bilateral relations between states.
The third chapter examines Edward VII's involvement in British diplomacy, and seeks to find a middle path between the professional historians, who dismiss him as a decorative non-entity, and the royal biographers, who occasionally exaggerate his significance. The evidence indicates that the King played a significant role in the establishment and maintenance of Britain's ententes with France and Russia. He manifested his influence most notably by cultivating French and Rus- sians diplomats and foreign ministers, together with a number of French presidents and Tsar Nicholas II. The King's influence has traditionally been played down by historians, yet the judgement of contemporaries was that his role in Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian relations was a significant and sometimes vital one. The chapter also gives due regard to the limits on the King's diplomatic influence that emanated from the gradual diminution in the power of the British monarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Edward VII's own fraught relationships with a succession of prime ministers, and his inclination towards a life of pleasure rather than desk work. However, the evidence still suggests that Edward VII's diplomatic influence was much greater than many historians have been prepared to concede.
Finally, attention is focused on royal visits before 1914 and their impact on Anglo-German relations. Royal visits represented the public face of royal diplomacy before the Great War, yet they are rarely examined for their own sake. In the context of Anglo-German relations, royal visits reveal the limits of dynastic diplomacy. Even in the era after the accession of King George V in May 1910, when relations between the British and Prussian courts again became cordial after the period of antagonism of Edward VII's reign, there was no more than a superficial political rapprochement between the British and German governments. Cordial dynastic relations had a beneficial influence on Anglo-German relations, but this influence was circumscribed by factors such as the attitude of public opinion, the views of politicians and military leaders, and most crucially by the conflicting vital interests of the two states. The German leadership was determined to achieve supremacy in Europe, whereas the British government believed that the survival of Britain and her empire depended on preventing this. Exchanges of royal visits could do nothing to alter these entrenched positions.
The topic is a vast one, and thus the approach taken is selective. Certain issues, such as the diplomatic role of minor royalty, are mentioned only in passing. Equally it has not been possible to give detailed consideration to the diplomatic role of the Habsburg monarchy. However, all the chapters illustrate the general theme: that monarchs remained important figures in European diplomacy in the first decade of the twentieth century and that dynastic factors must be taken into account when historians examine international relations during the period. In some cases, such as the role of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Germany's relations with Britain, royal influence could have decisive consequences. The Kaiser's decision to build a navy to challenge that of Britain, and his refusal to contemplate an arms limitation agreement with London, ensured that the British would enter the war in 1914 on the side of Germany's enemies. More often, royal influence served to modify existing trends, for example in the way in which the ties of monarchical and conservative solidarity between the Kaiser and the Tsar slowed the pace of German-Russian estrangement, or to accelerate their pace, as in the case of Edward VII's role in the formation and consolidation of Britain's ententes with France and Russia. However, despite the impres- sion given by traditional diplomatic history, monarchs were rarely sidelined completely, as will become evident as we now turn to a detailed examination of royal diplomacy before the Great War.
An excerpt from, "Reviewed Work: Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890-1914 by Roderick R. McLean" by Norman Rich, Central European History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003):
McLean's central argument is that "traditional diplomatic history" has almost completely ignored the political role of the European monarchs with "the dominant role in decision making and the conduct of foreign policy." His primary purpose in the present study has been to "redress this imbalance in academic research" (p. 1).
McLean takes issue with two historiographical schools that he believes have dominated the study of international relations since 1945: the "bureaucratic" school that analyzed foreign policy from the point of view of governments and diplomats; and the socioeconomic school that assigned a decisive role to "modernization," i.e., to social and economic forces. He cites in particular Hans-Ulrich Wehler, a leading practitioner of one school of social history, who has argued that the entire structure ofthe German imperial government was rotten and that there was "a permanent crisis of the state behind its facade of high-handed leadership." That leadership was not exercised by William II, however, but by "the traditional oligarchies in conjunction with the anonymous forces of an authoritarian polycracy" (p. 7).
McLean welcomes the fact that the Wehler thesis has come under increasing criticism in recent years and that historians are now beginning to fill "a shaming gap in the historiography of the period." He credits John C. G. Rohl with having made the pioneering contribution to this turnabout and for setting "a new standard of archival scholarship for work on Wilhelmian political history" (p. 8). He believes that Dominic Lieven has initiated a similar turnabout for the study of Nicholas II, so long derided by traditional historians for his weakness and vacillation (p. 10). And he sees signs of a similar turnabout in Britain, where scholarly interest in the monarchy had been "even bleaker" and where professional historians traditionalfy dismissed Edward VII as a "decorative non-entity" (p. 11).
I agree with much of McLean's criticism of modern trends in historiography that emphasize social and economic forces and downgrade or ignore altogether the role of political leaders.
