Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 20:27:37 -0700
From: Mark Jones <majones-AT-netcomuk.co.uk>
Subject: M-I: Plus ça change?


As 1911 progressed ministers in European countries were 
beginning- incredulously at first-to realise that they were in the 
grip of something new, unprecedented and unpredictable. In 
Britain  falling wages and inflation produced the beginnings of a 
social explosion. Liberal social policy was felt to be inadequate, 
for example Liberal social insurance schemes, based on German 
precedents instituted since Bismarck's day, merely raised new 
demands, they excluded so many worthy but needy categories.

In 1906 50 Labour MPs were elected- the workers were still 
prepared to try political means; but this was no longer so by 1906-
08. There was a huge strike wave in all the main European 
imperial states: England, France, Germany. In 1911 they grew and 
continued in 1912. There were strikes elsewhere; a big wave in 
Brazil, general strikes in Uruguay and Argentina. Bloody battles 
between Ruhr miners and employers 1912 which paralleled strikes 
in the great colliery districts of South Wales in 1910 (my 
grandfather participated, as a matter of family legend).

Labour leader Keir Hardie rose in the House of Commons to 
denounce Churchill -- then Home Secretary -- for sending in troops 
who shot at striking miners at Llanelly, South Wales. 

Peasants rose up in districts of Portugal & Spain, which by end-
1911 were virtually in a state of civil war. Terrific agrarian unrest 
in wine-growing regions of France - Marne & Aube. Rapid 
increase in trades union membership (rose by 600,000 in Britain in 
1911) & in socialist parties (still then thought by many to be 
revolutionary). In Austria the elections of 1911 left the Socialist 
Party strongest in Vienna.


Class struggle was increasing in all the civilised countries. And 
nowhere more than in Britain  - except perhaps Russia, where 
Prime Minister Stolypin was assassinated on 14 September. There 
was an upswing of struggle there following the Lena gold field 
strike in 1912 

The women's movement developed its civic programs and 
political demands.

There was feminist agitation during George V's coronation in 
June 1910, 

40,000 women suffragists demonstrated. 

1911 saw the end of the great boom which had begun in 1896.

There was a minor recession in 1907-08 in the industrialised 
world from which all countries more or less recovered, but 
thereafter slow growth in productivity and familiar problems of 
capital write-downs and general congestion, typical of over 
production at end of a long boom, materialised.

It was the speculative blow-off in the last years before 1914.

Arms production was seen as an alternative to recession by the 
heavy industrial maganates: Vickers, Armstrong, Whitworth in 
UK, Krupps and Thyssen in Germany.

The inflationary crisis was reflected in the discontent of both 
workers and the Mittelstand -- the German middle class -- as well 
as the English bourgeois rentier stratum which was by now eking 
out declining dividends from UK stocks and shares, supplemented 
with growing overseas investments.

For workers, real wages were no higher, and on average perhaps 
10% lower, than in 1896 .

But the general mood in European and US governing circles 
was one of unparalleled complacency tinged by strange 
premonitions of disaster.

Thus Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg played Beethoven 
sonatas before bed every night to soothe his nerves. 

Sir Edward Grey was the Foreign Minister in Asquith's Liberal 
Government (the ruling Liberals were pro-German, but Grey & 
senior Government member by now succumbed to suspicion of 
German intentions, although this was an incalculable blow to their 
white male Anglo-Saxon amour-propre. 

The atmosphere, socially, politically & in international relations 
became explosive. The Italian invasion of Tripoli in September  
1911 lit the fuse to 1914. Combustible  material: collapsing ancient 
empires- the Ottoman, Manchu, Habsburg, Russian.

There were revolutions in Persia and Turkey in 1906 & 1908.

British rivalry in Persia with Russia over oil almost led to war. 
Revolutions broke out in Mexico & China in 1911. In China the 
activities of western railway interests  & the scramble for 
concessions touched off Sun Yat-Sen's revolution.

Emiliano Zapata in Mexico.

Moslem discontent in N Africa (Morocco- Panther incident) 

Hindus in India. 
ANC set up in India, 1911.

General anti-Western resentment.

The international dimension was reflected in domestic politics. 
In Britain. Home Rule and Ireland was on the agenda and came to 
a head in 1914. 

There was massive labour unrest, accompanied by the rise of 
the British Labour Party. There was a constitutional crisis over the 
powers of the House of Lords in 1911.

When Count Metternich, new Ambassador to the Court of St 
James, visited Balmoral in September 1911, King George V 
lectured him about 'democracy'.


The rise of the German SPD meant  a centre-left Reichstag 
majority in the 1912 elections - Bethmann-Hollweg did not think 
the Bismarckian settlement could survive. He embarked on the 
Agadir adventure as a distraction. In fact the total policy paralysis 
in Germany only deepened and after 1912 the apparently-
successful Socialists were in reality a spent force, dished by their 
own chauvinist opportunism in Agadir.

In Britain the Liberal government was also a spent force by 
1911. As depression deepened the middle classes and even the 
Surrey coupon-clippers became increasingly desperate. What was 
to be Done?

Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey said the world was in `a fit 
of political alcoholism. )What was happening in the US, Japan? I'll 
get to that)

There was a recrudescence of imperialist ideology, with 
schemes for concessions and pillaging, after 1903, following a 10-
year relative lull. A new factor was the growing importance of big 
business. A hunt for raw materials in boom conditions after 1896.

Krupp, Schneider, Creuset linked up for joint Franco-German 
development in Morocco and N Africa, and in Turkey; Sir Wm 
Lever, the soap king, began planning large-scale palm-oil 
production in Africa in 1907: these were straws in wind. 

Competition between states was fuelled by competition between 
individual capitals; each wanted `open doors'. It was assumed that 
the superior white civilisations had, in Lord Curzon 's words: `a 
general right of entry to the darker places of the earth'.



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