1 juill. 1911 - Second Moroccan Crisis

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2) After the French occupied Fez, it made its goal to create a protectorate in Morocco clear. It realized that this would affect countries' merchandising outputs from Morocco, and so was willing to offer compensations in compromising land it already owned. Berlin interfered, for no other reason than that it was interested in land compensations. On July 1st Germany sent the gunboat PMS Panther to the port of Agadir under the pretext of protecting “Germany’s commercial interest”. Again, Germany was overreacting, sending a powerful military ship to the occupied port of an opposing country and perhaps oblivious to the agitation of France and geopolitical tension the past few years. Britain sent a battleship to Agadir in case of war in order to protect their naval base in Gibraltar. Germany was hit by an economic crisis which caused the Kaiser to back down, and leave Morocco with a small (ephemeral) land compensation in French Congo, no higher political influence, nor respect. In fact, it created a very tense atmosphere in one of the biggest commercial ports of West Africa, with powerful countries with which it was already politically agitated with in the midst of one of the most socially anxious time periods of modern history. Not a good call.


3) The only way for a war to start was if Germany, France, or Britain initiated war. Germany was economically weak and could not afford a war so far from the core country with a military alike the one that they were in dispose of. France did not want to start conflict on the port of the country they were trying to impose a protectorate over as they would lose the public opinion’s trust and would abolish the main idea of protectorate: to protect. Britain, was not making any military engagement at the time, and was bent on not creating international conflict so close to their Gibraltarian commercial port. Even though war did not break out, tension was accumulating.

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