Question about Kaiser Wilhelm II's culpability in encouraging the outbreak of WWI

Factual Questions
1

Hi

How culpable was Kaiser Wilhelm in starting WWI? The reason I ask is because there are a whole spectrum of analyses of the Kaiser’s mental state and degree of responsibility. Who to date offers the most balanced view? From Barbara Tuchman’s account he seems to have been either weak-willed or not aware of the alternatives. Moltke’s plan could have been altered, as we know today.
I look forward to your feedback.

from Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August”
p. 80-82
"Finally, when Moltke convinced the Kaiser that the mobilization plan could not be changed, the group which included Bethmann and Jagow drafted a telegram to England regretting that Germany’s advance movements toward the French border “can no longer be altered”. (p. 80)…

Kaiser Wilhelm sent a telegram to King George V telling him that …

…for “technical reasons” mobilization could not be countermanded at this late hour, but “if France offers me neutrality which must be guaranteed by the British fleet and army, I shall of course refrain from attacking France and employ my troops elsewhere. I hope France will not become nervous.”…

The Kaiser without asking Moltke, ordered his aide-de-camp to telephone and telegraph 16th Division Headquarters at Trier to cancel the movement to Luxembourg.

“Moltke saw ruin. Luxembourg railways were essential for the offensive through Belgium against France. “At that moment”, his memoirs say, “I thought my heart would break”. (p. 81). Despite all his pleading the Kaiser refused to budge. Instead, he added a closing sentence to his telegram to King George, “The troops on my frontier are in the act of being stopped by telephone and telegraph from crossing into France”, a slight if vital twist of the truth, for the Kaiser could not acknowledge to England that what he had intended and what was being stopped was the violation of a neutral country. It would have implied his intention also to violate Belgium, which would have been casus belli in England, and England’s mind was not yet made up.”
Moltke: “Do what you want with this telegram”, he said to his aide; “I will not sign it”. (p. 81)…
No positive reply came from England

The Kaiser to Moltke: “Now you can do what you like”.

2

The historical record shows that the Kaiser’s chief culpability rests in his having promoted and overseen an aggressive foreign policy (aimed largely at humiliating France) and arms race that elevated tensions, plus his having encouraged Austria-Hungary to crush Serbia, without regard to the inevitability of a wider conflict involving Russia and other nations.

Being weak-willed and/or deceived by Moltke over the possibility of attacking just Russia in 1914 seems like small potatoes in the overall scheme of things.

Based on past threads, we may now anticipate a renewal of “it was just as much the Allies’ fault!” from our resident revisionists, not to mention dismissal of Tuchman’s work as being old stuff (never mind the fact that more modern historians including Max Hastings and Robert Massie have come to similar conclusions).

3

This honestly belongs in GD, because it’s simply not something which can be factually answered.

There was an entire thread on this a couple months back. Suffice it to say that the historical record is seriously mixed, and the Kaiser’s bad reputation may stem more from the hostility of contemporaries than anything he did. Kaiser Wilhelm made genuine mistakes and poorly managed Imperial Germany’s foreign relations, but it’s not clear if his bellicosity was actually bluster rather than any serious aggression.

4

Um, he ordered his army to invade France?

Sure, his generals told him he’d be at a disadvantage if he waited, but once you give the order for the troops to start shooting people, you can’t blame someone else for the failure of diplomacy to resolve the crisis.

5

Trying to decipher historical morality is a bit more complicated than dropping “Um, like, y’know!”

If you want to understand Kaiser Wilhelm, you need to delve into his personal psychology (and there’re whole books around that subject), guesses about what he actually wanted, what he intended, and what though would happen, and consider the context of Europe at that time.

6

Yeah, that. Basically from 1918 onwards the general historical theory was, first, “Germany did it !”, then the leading thesis *from *Germany, that they’d been hemmed in and choked from all sides thus somewhat forced to do something about it took some wings, although in most places not_Germany this took the form of “arms race and weird web of treaties eventually triggered by some silly thing, nobody’s fault really”. Then Fischer came in around the mid 60s (IIRC ?) and proved that no, no, it really WAS Germany. Moreover, that it had been essentially the same Germany (and Germans) as the ones that started WW2, too - in terms of a self-image of entitled superiority over the rest of Europe ; a feeling of injustice over their piddly colonial empire ; hostility towards parliamentarism & democracy ; glorification of militarism etc… ; the differences between either Reichs being a question of mere degree rather than kind. Fischer has been criticized since, obviously, but not as convincingly as his thesis was IMO.

As for the Kaiser personally, his inaction over the Serbo-Austrian foofaraw has traditionally been taken as a sign that he was OK with Austrio-Hungary attacking Serbia (or at least wouldn’t budge if they did), which has long been taken as incomprehension or lack of forethought on his part, but Fischer rooted out some correspondence that proved that 1) he was well aware of what he was doing, and in fact had covertly given Austria positive encouragement for an action in Serbia rather than “simply appearing indecisive or unconcerned” as had been believed and 2) there had been a meeting of his high command, with him present, two years prior the July incident, where they discussed essentially how best to kick up a war to their advantage. The question of Austria vs. Serbia was raised during the conference.

Relevant wiki quote :

Wilhelm wasn’t just an pompous saber-rattling idiot, he was a *dangerous *pompous saber-rattling idiot. He wasn’t deceived by Moltke at all - Moltke agreed with him rather than the other way around.

7

Your claim was not the deciphering of historical morality, it was a claim that the Kaiser didn’t really do anything all that bad. I pointed out that he did indeed do something.

Understanding Kaiser Wilhelm must stem from not revising his role in the crisis out of existence.

8

The Kaiser has more than his share of culpability, but few nations are truly innocent in the start of WW1. The question comes down to what right a nation has to do something. Does Germany have a right to get in a Naval Arms race with England? Does it have a right to enter the colonies game so late? Does England have a right to box Germany in with alliances on all fronts? Do they have the right to villify Germany as horrid invaders before the 1st World War even starts?

All of these actions, wether the nations had the right to do them are not, had very dire consequences. The Naval race was futile, colonies were not the shiny gem they seemed to be (and of course killed much of the native populations), the Allied alliance meant to make Germany think twice just meant they acted more like a cornered animal, and the villification had consequences that lasted well into the 2nd world war.

9

His big mistake was in supporting his friend, the Emperor Franz Josef. It was then inevitable that Austria-Hungary would try to impose impossible conditions on Serbia which then dragged the Russians in, followed by their allies, France.

10

davidmich: why are you asking? That’s important, in order to know which direction to go in attempting to explain this.

You used the word “culpable,” suggesting that your question might stem from doubts about the post war claims made by the victors, that Germany was the only country who made it all happen.

When it comes to any such large portion of history, anyone who claims that ONLY one participant should accept "culpability" for events, is likely trying to pull a fast one in the present.

The people above who are already saying some variation of “it’s complicated” are the most accurate.

A long list of elements and people have been said to be to “blame” for WW1 over the years since. They include the times (as in the state of military technology, as well as the ONGOING efforts of each nation to accomplish goals, or defend interests), the upbringing of the monarchs and elected rulers, the many secret alliances, and so on.

The decline of the Turkish Empire in Europe played a huge part. Had Turkey remained in control of the Balkans, Serbia would not have existed, or had designs on southern portions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so would not have plotted to murder the Austrian leader, who’s death was the primary trigger event. Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese Empire in 1909 was heavily influential in Russia’s sense of intense involvement with the fate of the Slavic people in the Balkans, and hence contributed to their insistence on defending Serbia after the Austrians moved towards war.

The very deep and very long standing hostility between France and Germany was key as well. They had been at war only a single generation before (1870), and two generations before that, France had rolled across the entire continent of Europe, never really getting over the idea that they should be the foremost power there.

If you imagine every nation and every internationally popular concept (including the birth and growth of Marxism) as long threads of sequential events, you would be able to see that a LOT of those threads were taking the world directly down a road which led to a very large conflict.

That’s why it’s neither true to declare that any one player was MOSTLY to blame, nor is it worthwhile to pretend that therefor, NO ONE was to blame.

11

Come again? I don’t see that I stated any such thing.

12

Thanks igor frankensteen. I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that Germany was solely to blame for the war. My focus was solely on whether or not Kaiser Wilhelm II was a real contributing factor to tensions that led to the outbreak of hostilities. If Christopher Clark’s “Sleepwalkers” is anything to go by "(p. 185 "if the monarchs didn’t determine the course of foreign policy, who did? …p. 198 "it was (Friedrich von) Holstein, not the chancellor or the imperial foreign secretary, who determined the shape of foreign policy in the early and mid-1890s. Holstein could do this in part because he had excellent ties both with responsible politicians and with the coterie of advisors around Kaiser Wilhelm II. …

(goes on to say Wilhelm “failed to become ‘his own Bismarck’…)
“He failed in this objective, but his antics did paradoxically produce a concentration of executive power, by virtue of the fact that the most senior politicians and officials clubbed together to ward off sovereign threats to the integrity of the decision-making process”. …Hohenlohe became adept at ‘managing the Kaiser’. They did so mainly by not taking him too seriously”. …
p.222
In Germany, as one senior commander later observed, the Kaiser made one policy, the Chancellor another (and) the General Staff came up with its own answers".

13

I suppose it’s possible that when you said Kaiser Wilhelm II was denigrated more because his contemporaries hated him than for anything he did, you meant ‘than for anything he did [over and beyond what Emperor Franz Josef, Tsar Nicholas II, and Dragutin Dimitrijević, and Helmuth von Moltke did]’

…that would still be debatable, but it wouldn’t really send red flags up the way the original statement here did:

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
Suffice it to say that the historical record is seriously mixed, and the Kaiser’s bad reputation may stem more from the hostility of contemporaries than anything he did.
[/quote]

Is the bracketed portion above closer to what you really meant?

14

I don’t agree that the two statements are in conflict.

15

Again, this was not a “mistake” on his part. He knew the Austro-Serbian conflict would likely drag Russia and France in. That’s exactly what he wanted.

16

Personally, I blame the moronic Tsar Nicholas II more than anyone else, including Willie Hohenzollern.

Austria vs Serbia could have been a regional skirmish. Russia turned it into something much bigger.

17

Not from the POV of Serbia ;).

18

Neither Russia nor Nicky turned anything into anything. They had a defensive treaty in place, they couldn’t not defend Serbia unless they wanted to lose the faith and trust of every last other ally or partner they had.

19

Well, the unbracketed version leaves room, for example, to try to blame Poincaré as much as Wilhelm, which I think would be unreasonable, but there are others out there who think the French deserve it.

Did they? Looking around briefly, wikipedia says they didn’t.

Of course, wikipedia can be wrong.

20

Which loops back to the general epistemological question:

If you get the first order outcome you want / expect, yet it leads to second and third order outcomes that are far from what you wanted / expected, was your first decision “right” or “wrong”? Every move in chess is intended to improve your position. Yet someone always loses despite making almost all of their moves with intent to improve.

IANA WWI expert; far from it. But ISTM that each country wanted safety and security. So over time they created a web of mutual defense treaties and under-the-table agreements which the participants believed would improve their situation as each agreement was being made.

Unwittingly they collectively created a very unstable, well nigh explosive, meta-situation.

Into that unstable mixture a couple outfits wanted to bump the apple cart in their favor. Not understanding, or ignoring, the larger reality that small sparks won’t die out; instead they’ll initiate detonation.

So they stirred the nitroglycerine. With the effect we all remember. And yes, IMO Wilhelm II was one of the more active stirrers of the day.
Amateurs like to assign neat “causes” to large scale events. e.g. but for Gavrilo Princip’s hot-headed moment the war would never have happened. That’s nonsense.

The war was prepped, started, and evolved as a result of a decades-long process involving many major and minor actors. There are certainly inflection points in the process where certain individuals, such as Wilhelm II, could, in principle, have turned 90 degrees and hugely altered subsequent history.

That thinking ignores the probability distribution of such a leader, backed by such a bureaucracy, making a large course change when under the major time and political pressure of being at one of those obvious inflection points.
The parallel to the current US / NATO / EU / Russia situation should give pause to all thoughtful students of international affairs.