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Contact the team. About the College. Events calendar. Give Me Inspiration! The Paradigm Shift. Master and Fellowship. The Germans could not hope to match the British response. To raise new revenue to cover ever-escalating expenses for naval construction proved increasingly difficult, due to structural domestic political impediments.
Furthermore, an ever-growing chorus of critics within and outside the government rapidly emerged. They emphasized British financial superiority and the deleterious diplomatic consequences of the Anglo-German antagonism, while also arguing for Germany to once again prioritize land power over the navy. The arms race was decided almost as soon as it started, as clear-headed observers in Germany and Britain recognized right away.
But until , German navy leaders struggled to face the facts and to declare a lost arms race lost. The Anglo-German arms race saw repeated attempts to explore the possibility of an arms control agreement.
These talks, which included a visit by the British Secretary of War Richard Burdon Haldane to Berlin in February , never stood a chance of succeeding, as both sides were unwilling to enter into an agreement to their disadvantage.
In Germany, Tirpitz enjoyed a veto position that allowed him to torpedo any efforts at a mutually acceptable agreement with Britain, which were undertaken by successive chancellors and supported by most of the civilian foreign policy elite in an effort to improve Anglo-German relations.
In Britain, interest in an arms agreement was driven by a desire to stabilize naval competition at as low a level as possible in order to limit the financial costs of maintaining a clear British superiority. The Anglo-German talks that took place while the German Navy Bill of was being considered shattered any hopes in that regard for good. In each country, the essentials of the naval build-up ultimately remained non-negotiable.
This reflected the thinking of the decision-making elites, but it was also underwritten by the pressures of fast-developing naval-industrial complexes and their protagonists in politics and the press. Any substantive reduction of armaments appeared problematic in light of the direct consequences for the particular industries involved and the repercussions for national economies.
More importantly, the naval competition galvanized political parties and the broader public and attracted the attention of the fast-developing mass media. In each country, the pursuit of maritime force became a focal point of political mobilization, public debate, and nationalist identity politics. Political parties rallied around the case for national power, global empire, and maritime force, making the possession of a first-rate navy an attribute of a strong nation, well beyond the particulars of force ratios and maritime strategy.
Another key component of the naval race was the rise of broader cults and folkloric appropriations of the navy, promoted by but not limited to the British and German navy leagues. Popular enthusiasm and media coverage developed in particular around the public staging of the navy in the form of fleet reviews and ship launches, which became performative displays of power and deterrence. The Anglo-German naval race heightened the tensions between the German and British Empires and cast a long shadow over their pre-war diplomacy.
To be sure, the race was decided early on; political leaders and diplomats learned to bracket it as an issue, and it did not cause the decision for war in But the naval competition nonetheless created an atmosphere of mutual hostility and distrust, which circumscribed the space for peaceful diplomacy and public recognition of shared interests, and helped to pave the twisted road to war in Europe.
This, in turn, provided a necessary condition for the German policy of brinkmanship in July , which ultimately made war inevitable. The pre-war culture of conflict then easily turned into intense wartime hostility, a mutually reinforcing regime of British Germanophobia and German Anglophobia combined with the totalizing conditions of a war cast as a clash of civilizations.
But on the other, Dreadnought reset every navy almost to zero. All previous battleships - including all of those in the Royal Navy - were now obsolescent, and would soon be known dismissively as "pre-Dreadnoughts". Now anyone who could build enough Dreadnoughts could challenge the Royal Navy's pre-eminence. Couldn't they? They certainly tried. The unveiling "set ablaze the big naval armament race with Germany, who was determined to keep up with us", says Roberts. In Britain there was Dreadnought fever as the public clamoured for more shipbuilding and the Liberal government, caught trying to reduce naval spending, was forced on the defensive.
One election meeting was disrupted by cries of "Dreadnought! The result was hardly a surprise. As the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, wryly noted: "The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight. The reason for the fever was that the stakes for the UK were so high. Only the Royal Navy could ensure British security, and only the Royal Navy, by protecting trade routes, could ensure her prosperity. No other major nation was so reliant on its navy for its wealth and security.
Lord West describes the disparity: "For us, supremacy at sea was fundamental for our survival. For them it was just nice to have. Ultimately Britain won the naval arms race with Germany several years before World War One, and in time Dreadnoughts were replaced by super-dreadnoughts - with even larger guns, faster engines and more armour.
Dreadnought and her successors went on to form the backbone of the Grand Fleet, described by Churchill, by then First Lord of the Admiralty as "the Crown Jewels" and at their assembly, prior to the outbreak of war as "the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world".
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