"...wrote that 'the Central European War may have been mostly contested in Europe, but in many ways it was not entirely about Europe.' This adage especially applies to the rivalry between France and Germany, which was as much about which of the two would financially, politically and militarily dominate west-central Europe but also who would extend that domination to challenge Britain, Russia and increasingly the United States on the world stage. In this view, French paranoia and German ambition - or French ambition and German paranoia - delivered a conflagration that consumed the continent for nearly three bloody, brutal years, but ironically many of the things that delivered the final detonation flowed an accumulation of events on the periphery of both powers.
This particular volume of this study of the Central European War has already covered in detail events such as the Monegasque Crisis of 1912, the Revolutions of 1912, the Budapest Congress of 1913, the deteriorating relationship between Vienna and Budapest and the parallel Italian ambitions in the Balkans vis a vis Greece, all in the shadow of Britain's declining influence and Russia's continued choice to remain focused on consolidating her Central and East Asian empire, both internally and externally. Most of these crises, however, with the partial exception of Monaco, did not directly involve a bilateral dispute between France and Germany that could directly threaten the fraying Grand Detente forged by Napoleon V and Friedrich III and tentatively maintained by their heirs in the years since both had died. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 changed all that, irreversibly, as Germany's imperial advantage became completely impossible to ignore.
The chaotic governments of Portugal are beyond the remit of this volume, but the small, poor Iberian state had for a quarter-century by early 1916 pirouetted from unstable government to unstable government, with Cabinets frequently appointed based on the Prime Minister's proximity to King Carlos I and heavily dependent upon a handful of core statesmen of the Progressist and Regenerator parties, which were both monarchist but agreed on little else. Republican and socialist movements had captured the imaginations of the urban intelligentsia in Lisbon and Porto, while in rural communities the Catholic Church maintained perhaps a tighter vice than anywhere else in Europe save Galicia and certain communities in western Ireland. By 1916, most of the experienced statesmen of the Kingdom of Portugal who had rotated the Premiership amongst themselves at the behest of Carlos I had died, leaving a younger, less tenured generation to take their place, and many of the more credible names in that cadre would pass during the decade as well. In late 1915, Carlos I tapped Admiral Francisco Ferreira as Prime Minister at the head of an independent technocratic Cabinet to solve the country's rapidly deteriorating financial situation without an eye towards partisanship or ideology; Ferreira sold off two of his beloved naval vessels to show his seriousness but it nonetheless could not solve the black hole that was corrupt Portugal's treasury. It was not merely a question of taxes and spending, which were both fairly low in early 20th century Portugal even by the less statist standards of the time, but simply the fact that the country was poor, the civil service was corrupt, and the massive African colonial empire produced too little income to justify its own existence. Ferreira, after three months on the job, quipped that he was unable to rub two coins together to make a hundred - Portugal, having already had two small partial defaults on its external debt in the 1890s, defaulted on its entire debt load on January 11, 1916, debt owed primarily to its longtime ally the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent Germany.
While this set of events was disastrous in Portugal and for a brief moment brought the survival of the monarchy into question - Ferreira resigned on January 13, followed by the abdication of Carlos I in favor of his considerably more popular son Luis Filipe I after the Anglo-German Convention in early February - its impact would reverberate throughout Europe. That Portugal had been avoiding bankruptcy and hanging onto its vast "Austral-Africa" holdings by the skin of its teeth for close to two decades had not been a secret in Europe and many powers had coveted the land, despite the increasingly expensive nature of colonialism at that time, but it was well known that Britain, as owner of the bulk of Portuguese debt, would have first choice of absorbing much of that land. The expectation in other European capitals, though, had been that a Congress would be called to resolve the matter eventually, even if it was resolved in Britain's favor.
Not so. Britain had long maintained secret agreements with Germany to consult them first in the event of a Portuguese default and the African territories becoming "available," and Foreign Secretary Ian Malcolm met with his German counterpart, Gottlieb von Jagow, in Hamburg to finalize the contours of the long-discussed, long-secret negotiations that both sides had tentatively agreed to in principle as far back as the Joseph Chamberlain years. The Anglo-German Convention of 1916 thus was not a secret treaty dropped upon Europe from on high, but rather the culmination of years of negotiations regarding spheres of influence in the Americas, Africa and Asia as well as Europe, and formalized and finalized longstanding principles and interests shared by both states. Critically, it was pointedly not a military alliance, to Germany's dismay, but it did very definitively close most of the disputes Britain had with Germany, and simultaneously emboldened Germany in Europe and overseas and terrified France and Austria alike..." [1]
- The Central European War
[1] The next update will cover the terms of the Anglo-German Convention and the howls of anger from Paris when it is disseminated