Berlin

Bismarck did not let the many diversions during the conference impede progress on the principal business at hand. Alternatively cajoling and threatening—at one point he confronted the Turkish delegation in full uniform with spiked helmet—he managed to push the affair to a conclusion on July 13, 1878, exactly one month from its opening. The terms of the agreement showed that the chancellor had remained faithful to his promise to be an “honest broker.” The major victor was not Germany, but Britain, which gained Cyprus, a reduction in the size of Bulgaria, and the continued closure of the Straits to Russian warships. Turkey retained sovereignty over Macedonia and the coast of the Aegean. In exchange for supporting Turkey, Austria obtained a protectorate over the Porte’s Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mainly because of pressure from Disraeli, Russia emerged the big loser, having to give up much of what it had gained through the Treaty of San Stefano. Thus, though Bismarck had certainly not set out to humiliate them, the Russians accused him of bias and betrayal. St. Petersburg broke away from its alliance with Berlin and Vienna. The Three Emperors’ League, it seemed, had been sacrificed on the altar of honest brokerage.

Berlin hosted one more important, albeit far less grand, diplomatic meeting during the Bismarckian period—the West Africa Conference, which ran, on and off, from November 15, 1884 to February 26, 1885. The purpose of this meeting was to resolve disputes stemming from the “Scramble for Africa,” that mad rush for colonial acquisitions in the so-called Dark Continent. Of course, Great Britain, France, and Portugal had already established major holdings in Africa, but at the beginning of the 1870s large sections of central and western Africa were still up for grabs. In the brief period between 1870 and 1900 this hitherto unclaimed part of the continent, along with sizable parts of Asia and the Pacific, were added to the Europeans’ imperial domains.

Bismarck’s Germany emerged in the mid-1880s as an unexpected player in the frenetic imperial contest. The Reich’s participation was unexpected because Bismarck had initially shown little interest in colonial ventures, save for supporting a beleaguered German trading outpost in Samoa. In general the chancellor took the position, as he put it during the Franco-Prussia war, that “for us Germans, colonies would be exactly like the silks and sables of the Polish nobleman, who has no shirt to wear under them.” Shortly after unification he told his aide, Baron Holstein, that “so long as I’m chancellor, we shan’t pursue a colonial policy.” When German explorers began to take an interest in Africa, and urged Bismarck to join in the rush for colonies there, the chancellor pointed to a map of Europe and said: “Here is Russia and here is France, with Germany in the middle. That’s my map of Africa.” In the three-year period between 1884 and 1886, however, Bismarck acquired a colonial domain five times the size of the Reich itself. The man who supposedly had no interest in expanding German territory put far more land under the German flag than did Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, as we shall see, spoke grandly of Weltpolitik and a German “day in the sun.”