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Updated: June 21, 2025
Our Friends at Home do not believe that war is imminent. They tell me that the feeling between Germany and Britain is steadily improving." "And yet two years ago, Mother, in connection with the Agadir incident war might have happened any minute." "That is true," replied his mother, "but every year of peace makes war less likely.
Then came the Agadir incident in 1911 when once more the Kaiser bluffed. But Great Britain called his bluff that time and the great War Lord had to back down with great loss of prestige not only with his own people but with the whole of Europe. It hurt the Kaiser to think that any nation in Europe should move in any direction without his consent.
The impression thus gathered from M. Bourdon's observations is confirmed at every point by those of Baron Beyens, who went to Berlin as Belgian minister after the crisis of Agadir. Of the world of business he says:
It seems banal to have to point out that Bosnia was unlawfully annexed by Germany's vassal Austria; that Germany, herself, brought Europe to the verge of war by sending the Panther to Agadir; and that the final catastrophic Machtprobe was likewise provoked by Germany's eastern vassal.
What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British and American journalists defended then, that she should be accorded "a place in the sun." Berlin is a city of reason, not a city of faith. You cannot get people to try and do the impossible there. It loves to grade itself upon the possible and do that.
The Agadir incident in 1911 betrayed the purely commercial nature of the designs of the four Powers concerned France, Spain, England, and Germany and a war over the corpse of Morocco was only narrowly avoided. Germany felt quite naturally that she was the victim of a plot, and thenceforth was alternately convulsed by mad Ambition and haunted by a lurking Terror.
The natural alliance with England twice averted war: in the Moroccan crises of Algeciras and Agadir, when Sir Edward Grey said boldly that we should defend France, and took the first steps towards a joint military and naval control of the French and English forces.
The German rebuff over Agadir in 1911 was followed by a general election in 1912 at which the Social Democrats polled nearly a third of the votes and secured by far the largest representation of any party in the Reichstag.
In the case of England the demand for greater democratic control in the sphere of foreign policy arose in large measure from the sudden realisation, in the late summer of 1911, at the time of the so-called Agadir crisis, that war between this country and Germany was a possibility with which English statesmen and the English people had to reckon.
Might not the Kaiser still be pleased with his dramatic role of "the war-lord who kept the peace"? Might he not do again as he did successfully in 1909, when Austria violated the provisions of the Congress of Berlin by annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Germany protected the theft; and with partial success at Algeciras in 1906, and after the Agadir incident in 1911, when Germany gained something she wanted though less than she claimed?
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