ABSTRACT
An English radical commented in 1887 that ‘the present position of the European world is one in which sheer force holds a larger place than it has held in modern times since the fall of Napoleon’. 1 Yet after the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871), none of the great powers fought one another for more than forty years, although these years were full, if not of wars, at least of rumours of wars. The fundamental reason for this was that between 1880 and 1900 there was coming to an end that Concert of Europe which, in spite of the wars of the mid-century, had avoided a general war since 1815. How this happened is the subject of this chapter. It was known that a change was taking place and perhaps it was felt the more because of the very success of the Concert; humanitarian impulses and liberal assumptions had disguised the fact, axiomatic to professional diplomats, that the interests of states often conflicted. New occasions of conflict were now appearing and would eventually break up the long peace, and as this became clearer so did the essentially competitive nature of the European system. The objects of competition varied: the traditional ones were territory, wealth, prestige and the power which these gave. The competition for them was not bound to result in the use of force, but it kept force in view. Great power status was in the last resort the ability to wage war. As that ability was still, in 1880, much more purely a matter of armies and navies than it was later to become, it is worth while to consider them briefly before turning to the diplomatic story. An approximation of relative strengths can be seen in Table 4.1.
