ABSTRACT
It is misleading to describe international affairs after 1900 as if the only important thing which was going on was the diplomacy which led directly to the Great War. In the first place, there was nothing unavoidable about the war until a comparatively late hour; accidents might have averted disaster at several 'turning points' or 'crucial moments'. Secondly, there were many other developments, hard to relate to the origins of the war, yet important in affecting statesmen's conduct and in changing the historic setting of international affairs. What is more, much had been done to mitigate the disorder of international competition. For all the obvious dangers of militarism and colonial rivalry, the formal willingness of states to accept some restraints on their behaviour was probably greater than in the whole history of modern Europe. War between the great powers had successfully been averted for thirty years. The Concert of Europe was still believed to matter. Africa had been partitioned peacefully. There was more formal international cooperation and organization than ever before. Even before 1880, matters of common interest had begun to be regulated by international agencies and conventions on railways, telegraphs and postage. Technology's international implications were beginning to be recognized - for instance, by a radiotelegraphy convention in 1906. More important still was the growing acceptance of arbitration to settle disputes between nations. More questions were decided by arbitration in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century than in the previous eighty. Some nations submitted to it more readily than others, arbitration was usually employed only in a limited class of disputes and there was no effective sanction available if a nation refused to accept an award against it, yet even limited resort to this method represented an advance. Matters which had caused conflict in the past were now being settled peacefully. Treaties providing that certain classes of disagreement between two nations should regularly be submitted to arbitration were more and more common; between the Anglo-French Convention of 1904 and the Great War there were over a hundred. 1
