Triple Entente
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.
Triple Entente
At the start of World War I in 1914, all three Triple Entente members entered it as Allied Powers against the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. 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. Historians continue to debate the importance of the alliance system as one of the causes of World War I.
Alliance system
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. The alliance also served to oppose such socialist movements as the First International, which the conservative rulers found unsettling. 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. 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. 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.
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