Triple Entente
The Triple Entente (from French entente [ɑ̃tɑ̃t] meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was built upon the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between France and Britain, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. It formed a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Italy. The Triple Entente, unlike the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was not an alliance of mutual defence.
Not to be confused with Triple Alliance.
Triple Entente
The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was a key part of building a coalition as France took the lead in creating alliances with Japan, Russia, and (informally) with Britain. Japan wanted to raise a loan in Paris, so France made the loan contingent on a Russo-Japanese agreement and a Japanese guarantee for France's strategically vulnerable possessions in Indochina. Britain encouraged the Russo-Japanese rapprochement. Thus was built the Triple Entente coalition that fought World War I.[1]
At the start of World War I in 1914, all three Triple Entente members entered it as Allied Powers against the Central Powers: Ottoman Turkey, Germany and Austria-Hungary.[2] On September 4, 1914, the Triple Entente issued a declaration undertaking not to conclude a separate peace and only to demand terms of peace agreed among the three parties.[3] Historians continue to debate the importance of the alliance system as one of the causes of World War I.
Alliance system[edit]
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Prussia and its allies defeated the Second French Empire, resulting in the establishment of the Third Republic. In the Treaty of Frankfurt, Prussia forced France to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, souring subsequent relations. France, worried about the escalating military development of Germany, began building up its own war industries and army to deter German aggression.
Russia had previously been a member of the League of the Three Emperors, an alliance in 1873 with Austria-Hungary and Germany. The alliance was part of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's plan to isolate France diplomatically; he feared that France's revanchist aspirations might lead it to attempt to regain its 1871 losses stemming from the Franco-Prussian War.[4] The alliance also served to oppose such socialist movements as the First International, which the conservative rulers found unsettling.[5]
However, the League faced great difficulty with the growing tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary, mainly over the Balkans, where the rise of nationalism and the continued decline of the Ottoman Empire made many former Ottoman provinces struggle for independence.[6]
To counter Russian and French interests in Europe, the Dual alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary was concluded in October 1879 and with Italy in May 1882.
The situation in the Balkans, especially in the wake of the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War and the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, which made Russia feel cheated of its gains made in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/78, prevented the League from being renewed in 1887. In an attempt to stop Russia from allying with France, Bismarck signed the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887. This treaty assured that both parties would remain neutral if war broke out. The growing rapprochement between Russia and France and Bismarck's exclusion of Russia from the German financial market in 1887 prevented the treaty from being renewed in 1890, ending the alliance between Germany and Russia.[7]
After the forced resignation of Bismarck in 1890, the young Kaiser Wilhelm set out on his imperialist course of Weltpolitik ("world politics") to increase the empire's influence in and control over the world.[8][9]
Anglo-Russian Convention[edit]
Russia had also recently lost the humiliating Russo-Japanese War, a cause of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the apparent transformation into a constitutional monarchy. Although it was perceived as useless during the war with Japan, the alliance was valuable in the European theatre to counteract the threat of the Triple Alliance. Tomaszewski describes the evolution of the triple entente relationship from the Russian standpoint during the period 1908 to 1914 as a progression from a shaky set of understandings that withstood various crises and emerged as a fully-fledged alliance after the outbreak of World War I.[19]
In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Entente was agreed, which attempted to resolve a series of long-running disputes over Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet and end their rivalry in Central Asia, nicknamed The Great Game.[20] and helped to address British fears about the Baghdad Railway, which would help German expansion in the Near East.
The entente in operation[edit]
The coming into being of the entente did not necessarily fix a permanent division into two opposing power blocs. The situation remained flexible.[21] The alignment of the Russian Empire with Europe's two largest power centres was controversial on both sides. Many Russian conservatives distrusted the secular French and recalled British past diplomatic manoeuvres to block Russian influence in the Near East. In turn, prominent French and British journalists, academics, and parliamentarians found the reactionary tsarist regime distasteful. Mistrust persisted even during wartime, with British and French politicians expressing relief when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was replaced by the Russian Provisional Government after the February Revolution in 1917. An offer of political asylum for the Romanovs was even withdrawn by the British king for fear of popular reaction.[22] Also, France never brought up the subject of asylum with the deposed tsar.