Divided Attention: Britain's Perception of a German Threat to Her Eastern Position in 1918

Abstract

While British statesmen had committed their country to war in 1914 largely to preserve the balance of power in Europe, throughout the first world war Britain's concern for continental affairs was seen largely through the prism of her imperial interests. The most compelling argument for the participation of Britain and the Dominions in a European war, made by Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1911, was that the Royal Navy could not maintain command of the seas against a hostile power dominant in Europe. Hence the preponderance of one continental state, Grey argued, would mean the irrevocable shattering of the British imperial system.2 Until the end of 1917, London regarded this loss of naval supremacy as the most serious ramification of a German hegemony on the continent for Britain's imperial interests. Following Russia's collapse, however, the British came to regard a change in the European balance of power as having a far more direct impact on their imperial security. For several of the bleakest months of the war, the German overland threat to India dominated Britain's fears and came to be seen by many in official circles and not just 'imperialists' as the greatest danger to British security. These concerns illuminated the dichotomy never resolved during the war as well as the interdependence of Britain's continental and extra-European strategic interests. Up until just before the Great War, the defence of India, not of the European balance, was by far Britain's most important overseas defence priority. The Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) assumed