{"id":26893,"date":"2014-07-20T00:01:16","date_gmt":"2014-07-20T04:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26893"},"modified":"2018-01-15T18:31:43","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:31:43","slug":"qotd-the-kaiser-and-the-genesis-of-the-high-seas-fleet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/07\/20\/qotd-the-kaiser-and-the-genesis-of-the-high-seas-fleet\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Kaiser and the genesis of the High Seas Fleet"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The 1890s were [&#8230;] a period of deepening German isolation. A commitment from Britain remained elusive and the Franco-Russian Alliance seemed to narrow considerably the room for movement on the continent. Yet Germany&#8217;s statesmen were extraordinarily slow to see the scale of the problem, mainly because they believed that the continuing tension between the world empires was in itself a guarantee that these would never combine against Germany. Far from countering their isolation through a policy of rapprochement, German policy-makers raised the quest for self-reliance to the status of a guiding principle. The most consequential manifestation of this development was the decision to build a large navy.<\/p>\n<p>In the mid-1890s, after a long period of stagnation and relative decline, naval construction and strategy came to occupy a central place in German security and foreign policy. Public opinion played a role here &mdash; in Germany, as in Britain, big ships were the fetish of the quality press and its educated middle-class readers. The immensely fashionable &#8220;navalism&#8221; of the American writer Alfred Thayer Mahan also played a part. Mahan foretold in <em>The Influence of Sea Power upon History<\/em> (1890) a struggle for global power that would be decided by vast fleets of heavy battleships and cruisers. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who supported the naval programme, was a keen nautical hobbyist and an avid reader of Mahan; in the sketchbooks of the young Wilhelm we find many battleships &mdash; lovingly pencilled floating fortresses bristling with enormous guns. But the international dimension was also crucial: it was above all the sequence of peripheral clashes with Britain that triggered the decision to acquire a more formidable naval weapon. After the Transvaal episode, the Kaiser became obsessed with the need for ships, to the point where he began to see virtually every international crisis as a lesson in the primacy of naval power.<\/p>\n<p>Christopher Clark, <em>The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914<\/em>, 2012.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 1890s were [&#8230;] a period of deepening German isolation. A commitment from Britain remained elusive and the Franco-Russian Alliance seemed to narrow considerably the room for movement on the continent. Yet Germany&#8217;s statesmen were extraordinarily slow to see the scale of the problem, mainly because they believed that the continuing tension between the world [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7,5,41],"tags":[30,61],"class_list":["post-26893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-navy","tag-ships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6ZL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26893"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26912,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26893\/revisions\/26912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}