Germany-United Kingdom relations are the bilateral relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Relations between the countries span hundreds of years.
During Classical antiquity and the Migration Period, the progenitors of the populations of the United Kingdom and Germany consisted of the same Ingvaeonic and Elbe Germanic peoples.
Relations were strong in the Late Middle Ages when the German cities of the Hanseatic League traded with England and Scotland.
Before the Unification of Germany in 1871, Britain was often allied in wartime with German states, including Prussia. The royal families often intermarried. The House of Hanover (1714–1837) ruled the small Electorate of Hanover, later the Kingdom of Hanover, as well as Britain. Queen Victoria, known as the grandmother of Europe, married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and further diplomatic marriages would result in their grandchildren occupying both the British and German thrones.
Historians have long focused on the diplomatic and naval rivalries between Germany and Britain after 1871 to search for the root causes of the growing antagonism that led to World War I. In recent years, historians have paid greater attention to the mutual cultural, ideological and technological influences.Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth, eds. Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity (2009).
Germany, as the German Empire, fought against the United Kingdom and its allies in World War I between 1914 and 1918; and, as Nazi Germany, against the United Kingdom and allied forces in World War II between 1939 and 1945. Germany was defeated by the United Kingdom and its allies in both wars. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, Germany was occupied by the allied forces, including the United Kingdom, from 1945 to 1955, after which it was divided into West Germany and East Germany.
The United Kingdom became close allies with West Germany during the Cold War, through West Germany's integration into the Western world. Contrastingly, relations between East Germany and the United Kingdom were poor owing to the former's alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
West Germany was a founding member of the European Communities, later to become the European Union, which the United Kingdom joined in 1973. West Germany and the United Kingdom were among the most powerful countries in the organisation, both having significant influence on its development. Germany broadly favoured European integration, whereas the United Kingdom generally opposed it.
East and West Germany reunified in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which symbolized the end of the Cold War, hence an improvement of the relationship between East Germany and the United Kingdom, with which she had developed along with West Germany.
Through membership of the European Union, trade and cooperation with the United Kingdom significantly increased in many areas, particularly in research and development which has created enduring links between the science and university communities of Germany and the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is the second largest consumer of German motor vehicles after Germany herself.
In a referendum on continued membership of the European Union in 2016, the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union and left the bloc on 31 January 2020 after 47 years of membership. Despite a slight reduction in trade afterwards, the amity between the countries remain strong in many areas, which has been reinforced by their joint response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
UK Government data reported 126,000 German nationals lived in the United Kingdom in 2013, while German Government data showed 107,000 British nationals living in Germany in 2016. Both countries are members of the Council of Europe and NATO. Germany is a European Union member and the United Kingdom is a former European Union member.
Historical connections
Shared heritage
English and German are both West Germanic languages. Modern English has diverged significantly after absorbing more French influence after 1066. English has its roots in the languages spoken by Germanic peoples from mainland Europe, more specifically various peoples that came from what is now the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, including a people called the Angles after whom the English are named. Many everyday words in English are of Germanic origin and are similar to their German counterparts, and more intellectual and formal words are of French, Latin or Greek origin, but German tends to form calques of many of these. English has become a dominant world language and is widely studied in Germany. German, in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, was an important language of science and technology, but it has now largely lost that role. In English schools, German was a niche language and much less important than French. German is no longer widely studied in Britain, except at the A-level in secondary schools.
Trade and Hanseatic League There is a long history of trade relations between the Germans and the British. The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds, which dominated trade across Northern Europe from the Baltic to the North Sea in the 13th to the 17th centuries. The Hanseatic League established trading post in many ports and cities. The steelyard of London was one of the largest one.
Royal family Until the late 17th century, marriages between the English and German royal families were uncommon. Empress Matilda, the daughter of Henry I of England, was married between 1114 and 1125 to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, but they had no issue. In 1256, Richard, 1st Earl of Cornwall, was elected King of Germany, and his sons were surnamed Almain. German mercenaries were hired in the Wars of the Roses.
Anne of Cleves was the consort of Henry VIII, but it was not until William III of England that a king of German origin came to reign, from the House of Nassau. Prince George of Denmark, from the House of Oldenburg, was the consort of his successor Queen Anne who had no surviving children.
In 1714, George I, a German-speaking Hanoverian prince of mixed British and German descent, ascended to the British throne, founding the House of Hanover.Philip Konigs, The Hanoverian kings and their homeland: a study of the Personal Union, 1714–1837 (1993). For over a century, Britain's monarchs were also rulers of Hanover (first as Prince Electors of the Holy Roman Empire and then as Kings of Hanover). There was only a personal union, and both countries remained quite separate, but the king lived in London. British leaders often complained that Kings George I, who barely spoke any English, and George II were heavily involved in Hanover and distorted British foreign policy for the benefit of Hanover, a small, poor, rural and unimportant country in Western Europe.Jeremy Black, The Continental Commitment: Britain, Hanover and Interventionism 1714–1793 (2005). In contrast, King George III never visited Hanover in the 60 years (1760–1820) that he ruled it. Hanover was occupied by France during the Napoleonic Wars, but some Hanoverian troops fled to England to form the King's German Legion, an ethnic German unit in the British army. The personal link with Hanover finally ended in 1837, with the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne, while obtaining Heligoland from Denmark. The semi-Salic law prevented her from being on the throne of Hanover since a male relative was available.
Every British monarch from George I to George V in the 20th century took a German consort. Queen Victoria was raised under close supervision by her German-born mother, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld and married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1840. Their daughter, Princess Victoria, married Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia in 1858, who became Crown Prince three years later. Both were liberals, admired Britain and detested German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, but Bismarck had the ear of the elderly German Emperor Wilhelm I, who died in 1888. Friedrich Wilhelm now became Emperor Fredrich III until he died only 99 days later, and Princess Victoria became Empress of Germany. Her son became Emperor Wilhelm II and forced Bismarck to retire two years later.
Wilhelm II (1888–1918)
Wilhelm, the grandson of Queen Victoria, had a love-hate relationship with Britain. He visited it often and was well known in its higher circles, but he recklessly promoted the great expansion of the Imperial German Navy, which was a potential threat that the British government could not overlook. A humiliating crisis came with the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908. While on an extended visit to Britain, the Kaiser had a series of conversations with his host, Edward Stuart-Wortley. In the hope that it would help improve British–German relations, he gave his notes, with Wilhelm's permission, to The Daily Telegraph, which wrote them up in the form of an interview. The result, which Wilhelm approved, was full of his bombast and exaggerations. He was quoted as calling the British populace "mad, mad as March hares" for questioning his peaceful intentions and sincere desire for peace with England, although he admitted that the German populace was in general "not friendly" toward England. The "interview" caused a sensation around Europe, demonstrating that the Kaiser was utterly without tact in diplomatic affairs. The British had already decided that Wilhelm was at least somewhat mentally disturbed and saw the interview as further evidence of his unstable personality rather than an indication of official German hostility.Thomas G. Otte, "'The Winston of Germany': The British Foreign Policy Élite and the Last German Emperor." Canadian Journal of History 36.3 (2001): 471–504. The affair was much more serious in Germany, where he was nearly unanimously ridiculed. He thereafter played mostly a ceremonial role in major state affairs.Christopher M. Clark, Kaiser Wilhelm II (2000) pp. 172–80, 130–38.
The British Royal family retained the German surname von Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha until 1917, when, in response to anti-German feelings during World War I, it was legally changed to the more British name House of Windsor. In the same year, all members of the British Royal Family gave up their German titles, and all German relatives who were fighting against the British in the war were stripped of their British titles by the Titles Deprivation Act 1917.
Intellectual influences Ideas flowed back and forth between the two nations. Refugees from Germany's repressive regimes often settled in Britain, most notably Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Advances in technology were shared, as in chemistry.Johann Peter Murmann, "Knowledge and competitive advantage in the synthetic dye industry, 1850–1914: the coevolution of firms, technology, and national institutions in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States," Enterprise and Society (2000) 1#4, pp. 699–704. Over 100,000 German immigrants also came to Britain. Germany was one of the world's main centres for innovative social ideas in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. The British Liberal welfare reforms, around 1910, led by the Liberals H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, adopted Bismarck's system of social welfare.Ernest Peter Hennock, British social reform and German precedents: the case of social insurance, 1880–1914 (1987). Ideas on town planning were also exchanged.Helen Meller, "Philanthropy and public enterprise: International exhibitions and the modern town planning movement, 1889–1913." Planning perspectives (1995) 10#3, pp. 295–310.
Diplomacy