The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was an important part of coalition building when France took the lead in creating alliances with Japan, Russia and (informally) Britain. Japan wanted to borrow from Paris, so France subordinated the loan to a Russian-Japanese agreement and a Japanese guarantee for France`s strategically vulnerable assets in Indochina. Britain has encouraged Russian-Japanese rapprochement. Thus was born the Triple Entente Coalition that led the First World War. [1] Unlike the Triple Alliance and the Franco-Russian Alliance, the Entente was not a mutual defence alliance and Britain was therefore free to make its own foreign policy decisions in 1914. As British Foreign Office official Eyre Crowe said: “The fundamental fact is, of course, that the Entente is not an alliance. For the purposes of the ultimate emergencies, it can be found that it has no substance at all. Because the Agreement is nothing more than a state of mind, a vision of general policy shared by the governments of two countries, but which can be or become so vague that it loses all content. [18] Russia had 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 in the European theater was valuable in countering the threat of the Triple Alliance. Tomaszewski describes the evolution of the triple Entente relationship from the Russian perspective between 1908 and 1914 as an evolution of a flawed set of understandings that withss withsed different crises and emerged as a full-fledged alliance after the outbreak of World War I. The alliance was part of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck`s plan to diplomatically isolate France; He feared that France`s revanchist tendencies would lead it to recover its 1871 losses from the Franco-German War.
[4] The alliance was also used to confront socialist movements such as the First International, which conservative leaders considered worrisome. [5] However, the League experienced great difficulties with the growing tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary, particularly over the Balkans, where the rise of nationalism and the continued decline of the Ottoman Empire led to the struggle for independence of many former Ottoman provinces. [6] In order to thwart 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. . .
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