Imperialism in a Nutshell: Conflict and the “Concert of Powers” in the Tripartite Intervention, 1895

Shortly after the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Russia, France, and Germany forced Japan to return the Liaodong peninsula to China (the so-called Tripartite intervention). The event had an immense impact on Japanese public opinion and considerable consequences for Japan's future course in international politics. However, the question still remains why Japanese decision-makers of the time did not foresee such an intervention, or if they did, why they thought they could resist. The present study tries to answer the question by reconstructing the knowledge upon which the Japanese leaders acted, and so understand their decisions as the rational application of rules that prevailed in those times of late high imperialism. The study argues that the Tripartite intervention was a constellation of conflict and consensual action typical to international power politics. Judging by what the Japanese leaders knew or could know of the constellation, their calculations might have been correct. However, a series of events that would have been hard to predict even for Western observers—especially the accession of Germany to the Russian plans for intervention—proved fatal to Japan's hopes of overcoming a possible intervention.