Algeciras Conference

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In 1904 France made agreements with England and Spain that allowed France to increase its trading rights in Morocco. Germany, angered because it was not consulted, demanded a conference of the signatories to the Morocco Agreement negotiated in Madrid in 1880. Among the signatories was the United States, to whom the German government now appealed for an extension of the Open Door policy to Morocco. In private correspondence Kaiser William II warned President Theodore Roosevelt that the crisis might lead to war between France and Germany if left unresolved. Roosevelt, in an attempt to obtain a peaceful solution, persuaded England and France to attend a conference at Algeciras, Spain, in 1906. At the conference, however, the Germans appeared so uncompromising that Roosevelt supported France, which in the end won a privileged position in Morocco. Although resolved peacefully, the Moroccan crisis intensified German-French hostility, which boiled over eight years later with the coming of World War I. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty that resulted from Algeciras but declared that this action was taken solely to protect American interests and should not be interpreted as an abandonment of its nonintervention policy toward Europe.

Bibliography

Gould, Lewis L. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Harbaugh, William H. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

—Lynn M. Case/A. G.

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