Triple Entente

The Triple Entente from French 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 Paris and London, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. It formed a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Entente, unlike the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was non an alliance of mutual defence.

The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was a key element of building a coalition as France took the lead in making alliances with Japan, Russia, and informally with Britain. Japan wanted to raise a loan in Paris, so France reported the loan contingent on a Russo-Japanese agreement and a Japanesefor 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.

At the start of World War I in 1914, all three Triple Entente members entered it as Allied Powers against the Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary. On September 4, 1914, the Triple Entente issued a declaration undertaking non to conclude a separate peace and only to demand terms of peace agreed between the three parties. Historians come on to debate the importance of the alliance system as one of the causes of World War I.

Alliance system

During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Prussia and its allies defeated the Second French Empire, resulting in the instituting 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 approximately the escalating military developing of Germany, began building up its own war industries and army to deter German aggression.

Russia had ago been a module of the League of the Three Emperors, an alliance in 1873 with Austria-Hungary and Germany. The alliance was factor 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 submission 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, particularly 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 1877/8, prevented the League from being renewed in 1887. In an effort 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 brand out on his imperialist course of Weltpolitik "world politics" to increase the empire's influence in and authority over the world.