The outcome of the Thirty Years' War finally established the pre-eminence of the kingly state, although in such a way as to seed the next development in statecraft, the territorial state. Partly this had to do with the way the war was fought.
In the Thirty Years War, warfare reached the nadir of brutality and pointlessness portrayed in the etchings of Callot and the black humour of Grimmelshausen's prose. In order to survive at all, mercenary forces had to batten on the civil population. In order to survive at all, civilians, in their turn, their homes burned and their families butchered, [swelled armies] governed not by strategic calculation but by the search for unplundered territory.37
Such horrors fed the need for a state constitutionally grounded in territorial identity. When brutalized inhabitants fled the countryside and populated the besieged cities, they looked to the state for protection. There has been an active debate over the magnitude of the actual population loss owing to the Thirty Years' War.38 Some historians say about one-third of Germany's population was lost and the war has been variously estimated as having depleted the population of the Empire by 20 – 40 percent. Ward notes that of 35,000 villages in Bohemia at the beginning of the war, scarcely more than 6,000 remained at the end. Some war zones lost over half their population; in a corridor running from Pomerania in the north to the Black Forest, the loss of civilian population reached 50 percent. Even these estimates are clouded by the enormous number of refugees. Some cities that were places of refuge then became targets, as happened to Magdeburg, which lost almost its entire population in the sack of 1631. All these events, including the collapse of an independent and prosperous peasantry that had local ties and did not identify with the larger states, as well as the consequent rise of large-scale estate farming, tended to enhance the viability of and desire for territorial states. Finally, the Peace of Westphalia encouraged mass migrations, as populations sought the protection of sympathetic kings of the same religious sect as themselves.
Craig and George begin their study of diplomatic history by observing that the “Thirty Years War [brought] to the fore the most modern, best organized, and, if you will, most rationally motivated states: the Netherlands, Sweden, and France.”39 The political practices of this wartime coalition were ratified “by the Westphalian settlement as the rules of the new commonwealth in Europe [which] rules then developed by ad hoc practice into the constituent legitimacy of the European society of states.”40 Each of the members of the coalition had had to be persuaded to cooperate, rather than being obliged to do so, which secured for each a de facto equality as a state.
Of these three allied states, one would take the kingly state to new heights (France), while another (the Netherlands) would develop the internal institutions and external attitudes of a territorial state. France remained a kingly state, struggling to assert its primacy in a society of states that would be increasingly inhospitable to such states, while its competitor kingly state, Sweden, fell successively to the flaws inherent in such states: the caprice of inheritance, the megalomania of rulers, the lack of domestic levers of mobilization, the unity such states evoke from their adversaries, and the suspicion they evoke in their allies. For a century and a half after Westphalia, the military and political struggles in Europe were divided between two theatres, east and west, in which these kingly states asserted themselves, and within which the supremely successful territorial states— the Dutch and their successors, the British in the west and Prussia in the east—rose to pre-eminence. The first half of this era culminates in the Treaty of Utrecht, which enshrines the political system of the territorial states, and the second half ends with the French Revolution, which utterly effaces the greatest kingly state, France.
The Peace of Westphalia recognized the legal status of a great many states; representatives of over a hundred attended the congress. The most important aspect of this recognition is that, extrapolating from the Peace of Augsburg, the Peace of Westphalia augmented the sources of constitutional legitimacy of the State, which hitherto had been conferred by the customary system of dynastic inheritance and conquest. By simply removing from over three hundred autonomous territories in Germany the umbrella of authority hitherto supplied by the Holy Roman Emperor, the two Westphalian treaties legitimated a vast number of states on two novel bases: one, that the “state” was organized on a recognizable constitutive basis that did not conflict with the status quo; and two, that the congress (and thus the new European society) found it acceptable. This recognition embraced such small principalities as Parma, Baden, and Hesse, but also ecclesiastical lordships such as Cologne, Mainz, and Salzburg, as well as city-republics such as Venice, Genoa, Lucca, Geneva, and Berne. It included states whose affairs were governed by dynastic princes, elected officials, collective bodies, and mixtures of these models. At the same time, this society of states refused to recognize national groups that inhabited provinces such as Catalonia, Scotland, Brittany, Sicily, and Bohemia, where larger states had absorbed them. From the perspective of the present work, the great English historian C. V. Wedgwood could hardly be more wrong in her conclusion that the Thirty Years' War was “the outstanding example in European history of a meaningless conflict.”41 From the point of view of constitutional law and strategic conflict, the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia ended the interstate dimension of the religious struggles of the previous era and set the strategic agenda for a century. Indeed one might even say that by generalizing the Augsburg principle of cuius regio eius religio to all the states of Europe,* the result of this conflict was the inevitable identification of a particular population with a particular state, a development that in time led to the nation-state and the struggle for self-determination. Thus the Westphalian settlement's calculated omission of a unified Germany led directly to the Long War of our century.
The territorial state had special concerns that contrasted with those of the kingly state. Whereas a kingly state was organized around a person, the territorial state was defined by its contiguity and therefore fretted constantly about its borders. For the territorial state, its borders were everything—its legitimacy, its defense perimeter, its tax base. The territorial state depended on vigorous trading systems because its domestic market might often be insignificant, and also because it derived a significant amount of its revenue from taxing imports. Such states, of which the United Provinces of the Dutch was the initial example, pursued similar diplomatic and strategic objectives, including rational borders; free seas and open markets; an international consensus that no state should be allowed to dominate the affairs of the others; secular state preferences in the international arena; and a continuous diplomatic dialogue. Above all, the territorial states depended upon an active and engaged society of states. Only an international society could confer legitimacy on the constant territorial adjustments required by the balance of power, once legitimacy was founded on formally ratified treaties and agreements and not simply inheritance or conquest. As with the other historic changes in the constitutional orders of the European powers, however, it required the strategic collapse of the dominant form for the new order to be widely adopted.
With Louis XIV the kingly state reached its final apotheosis. He inherited four mutually supporting elements of such a state: a widely supported theory of divine right; a rich, well-organized, and highly centralized state apparatus; an unquestioned dynastic legitimacy; and a regal temperament. Bossuet, his court chaplain and resident political philosopher, expressed the view of many of his contemporaries that a king is a minister of God, to Whom alone he is responsible. On a somewhat different basis, the English political philosopher Filmer wrote: “That which is natural to man exists by divine right. Kingship is natural to man, therefore kingship exists by divine right.”42 This theory fitted perfectly the attitude and temperament of the new king.
His greatest asset was the structure of the French kingdom that Richelieu and Mazarin had shaped that enabled Louis, with his incomparable finance minister Colbert, to exploit its resources for war. The establishment of the French war ministry, whose intendants supervised and inspected the financing, supply, and organization of troops;* the creation of an entire military physical plant and infrastructure including barracks, hospitals, officer academies, ship repair yards, parade grounds, magazines, and arms depots: these formed the sinews not only of the military authority of the State, but of its political and constitutional status as well. Other states ardently copied the French model. As Kennedy puts it:
[A]ll this forced the other powers to follow suit, if they did not wish to be eclipsed. The monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state is clearly a central part of the story of “nation-building”; and the process was a reciprocal one since the enhanced authority and resources of the state in turn gave to their armed forces a degree of permanence which had not often existed a century earlier.43
Richelieu had died in 1642, having orchestrated the coalition that defeated the Habsburg drive for empire in Europe. The following year Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a five-year-old boy. For eight years Mazarin struggled to maintain the state in the face of a civil war known to history as the Fronde. When the young king attained his majority in 1651, Marshal Turenne was able to restore order in Paris and to declare the Fronde to be rebels against the king's person. By 1653 the movement was dead, and Mazarin, the object of its hatred, had been restored to power as prime minister. But although suppressed, just as the English Restoration suppressed the Protectorate, these movements against the absolutism of the kingly state, their patriotic appeals to “the country,” and their hatred of foreigners at court, can be seen in retrospect as harbingers of the ultimately triumphant form of the territorial state.
In 1654 Louis XIV was crowned at Reims. The next year when Parlement attempted to criticize the edicts of the king, he appeared suddenly before them and is said to have made his celebrated declaration, the motto of the kingly state: “L'état, c'est moi.” Whatever his actual remarks, he scolded the members and left without waiting for their reply, a maneuver that had been previously attempted with such disastrous effects by another champion of the kingly state, Charles I of England. In this case, Mazarin and Turenne were able to suppress any insurrectionary reaction. Louis returned to the field, where he led his troops in their campaigns.
Louis did not share power. He never summoned the States-General or the Parlement. The nobility, the Church, and the towns were all made subservient to the absolute authority of the king. An administrative apparatus operating through ministers who were no more than agents of the Crown, initiated by Richelieu, was put securely into place. Once Louis was secure from internal challenges, with the administrative despotism of a sophisticated kingly state thus in place, he began to make war on the settlements of Westphalia in order that he might become the arbiter of Europe.
“Everything was calm everywhere [when I ascended the throne],” Louis XIV later recalled ruefully; “peace was established with my neighbors, probably for as long as I myself might wish… my age and the pleasure of being at the head of my armies perhaps made me desire rather more external activity.”44
At some point Mazarin and his kingly protégé conceived the plan of uniting the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties through marriage and eventually bringing Spain within French control. Toward this end Mazarin began negotiations with Philip IV for the marriage of his daughter, Maria Theresa, to Louis. These negotiations were accelerated by French strength in the field and a show of French interest in the young princess of Savoy. When Louis was reconciled to the prince of Conde, his principal rival, who had attempted to seize power in 1650, the king made a tour through the south of the country to Bayonne, where his marriage with the Spanish infanta took place. He then made a triumphal entry to Paris with his bride. When Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, died in 1661, Louis did not replace him, choosing instead to be his own prime minister. Louis was twenty-three. All the elements of the kingly state—political unity, absolutism, centralized administration, dynastic legitimacy, secularism—were in place.
Louis abolished or ignored all rival authorities and councils. The local authorities, the nobility, the Church, and town government were all placed directly in relationship to the Crown, and all were made responsible to his will. The bureaucratic structure of the kingly state created by Richelieu had been perfected by Mazarin, who sought and promoted the talented managers necessary to run it—Fouquet, Colbert, le Tellier. There were more men of remarkable ability, promoted on merit, who were wholly dependent on the king for their status and authority. Speaking of the most celebrated of this cadre, Mazarin is said to have declared upon his deathbed, to Louis, “Sire, I owe everything to you, but I pay my debt in giving you Colbert.”
Colbert, who succeeded the masterful Fouquet, was from 1661 to 1672 supreme in virtually every domestic department. He increased methods of indirect taxation, thus capturing some of the hitherto exempt classes; gave incentives to trade and manufactures; invited foreign talent to settle in France; produced road and canal projects by the score; created a fleet that was, in size at least, the equal of any in Europe; financed the fortifications with which Vauban, the great siege architect, overcame the very tactics he had taught the rest of Europe and secured Calais, Dunkirk, Brest, and a whole line of interior fortresses; and most significantly, produced a revenue surplus each year with which Louis could pursue his foreign policy. This permitted France to enlarge the standing army first established in 1640. Louis's domination of Europe was largely based on the fact that by 1666 he was able to maintain a force of almost 100,000 men, which he would soon triple. This, however, would have been fruitless without the centralized civilian structure put into place during this period by Louis's ministers.
Bankruptcy, indiscipline, corruption: these were the characteristics of French armies, as of most others, before… 1661. Yet by 1680 the French forces were nearly 300,000 strong and the wonder of Europe… Basically [this] was the work of two outstanding and tireless bureaucrats, le Tellier… and his son… Louvois. [Their] most important innovation… was the creation of a civil bureaucracy to administer the army.45
All French soldiers, of whatever rank, were subject to civilian control in every aspect of defense preparation: procurement, weapons manufacture, the hiring and fitting out of privateers, no less than logistics.
When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, Louis laid claim to various lands in the southern Netherlands, relying on his wife's dynastic rights.* The War of Devolution (1667 – 1668) ensued when he invaded these territories. The Spanish could not mount a serious resistance, but the French invasion prompted the Dutch and the English, then in the midst of a trade war, to conclude a peace at once and to enter into an alliance in order to prevent Louis from seizing the entire southern Netherlands. At Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668 Louis agreed to a settlement, gaining a number of fortified cities in Flanders. This was merely a prelude.
For the next four years, Louis planned his campaign against the Dutch. In 1667 Colbert had imposed discriminatory tariffs against Dutch products; in 1671 these were sharply increased. French diplomacy deftly detached the British (in the secret Treaty of Dover) and the Swedes from Dutch alliances. Then, in 1672 Louis struck on land while the English fleet attacked the Dutch at sea. This invasion brought William III to power in Holland, a man who embodied the ideals of the territorial state to the same degree that Louis XIV represented the kingly state. It is an irony that is not uncommon in strategic affairs that the very success of Louis's forces so terrified the Dutch that they turned to their most intransigent and dynamic leader. He, by playing on the fears of other states that Louis would upset the balance of power in Europe—fears that were excited by Louis's successes in the field—was able to organize a general coalition against the French. In 1673 the Spanish joined the Dutch; the next year a number of German states joined the alliance. In 1674 the English parliament forced Charles II to withdraw from the war, and in 1677 William married Charles's niece, Mary, the daughter of his brother and heir.
Louis redoubled his efforts. At the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, he took back Franche-Comté and made further gains in the southern Netherlands and Alsace. Along these lines, Louis—with the guidance of Vauban—built the “iron barrier” of fortifications that presaged the Maginot Line of a later century. Louis was determined to press on to the Rhine. Of the cities that he then seized in 1681 the most important was Strasbourg, which was followed by the siege of Luxembourg. When the English threatened a general European war, Louis raised the siege in return for an agreement that for thirty years he would remain in possession of the territory he had claimed. This was the Truce of Ratisbon, which ratified all of Louis's gains since 1678.
Louis chose this time to revoke the Edict of Nantes and renew the persecution of Protestants. Although this might seem reckless, perhaps explained only by the deepest religious convictions, in fact neither conclusion is warranted. It was Louis, after all, who, when the emperor and pope appealed to him for help in driving the Turks from Vienna in 1683, replied laconically that “crusades [are] no longer in fashion.”46 Moreover, Pope Innocent XI condemned the revocation of the Edict and correctly saw that Louis intended to use this step as a means of ultimately asserting his supremacy over the French Church. This was precisely Louis's objective, and it is doubtless also true that he correctly read the mood of his people, who had collaborated in many ways since the death of Mazarin in petty and malicious attacks on Protestants.* Thus Louis managed to succeed in further centralizing in his person the aspirations, and the prejudices, of his subjects.
This step had the unintended effect, however, of destroying his closest ally, James II, who had been trying to maintain a kingly state in Britain. James had attempted to intercede with the pope, soliciting his support for the Revocation, a move that scarcely endeared James to his own subjects, some 300,000 of whom were non-Anglican Protestants.47
In 1686 the League of Augsburg was formed to maintain the agreements of Westphalia, which, it was felt, were jeopardized by Louis's ambitions. The emperor, the kings of Spain and Sweden, the Dutch, Bavaria, and the Rhine provinces all joined, as did the pope the following year. Louis replied by demanding that the League adopt the Truce of Ratisbon as the permanent peace settlement, and James was unwise enough to support this claim. Along with other factors (including James's scarcely concealed Catholicism), this provoked leading English figures to invite William III to replace James, and thus Louis's chief opponent, and the chief protagonist of the territorial state, came to power in London.
The resulting War of the League of Augsburg, begun when Louis responded to the developments against him by invading the Rhineland and burning Heidelberg, was the greatest international conflict since the Thirty Years' War. For the first time Louis faced armies that were a match for his own. By 1697 both sides were exhausted and agreed to the Peace of Ryswick. Louis was obliged to surrender some of the towns he had seized before the war, including Luxembourg, and to recognize William III as king of England, but he retained Strasbourg and Franche-Comté. Ryswick was a victory for the territorial states, and for the constitutional geography of a multipolar Europe in which small states held the balance of power. For that reason, every diplomat of the period must have realized that when the issue arose of the succession to the Spanish throne—for which Louis had so long prepared himself—Ryswick would be challenged.
The War of the Spanish Succession arose owing to an essential shortcoming in the system of kingly states, its dependence on dynastic legitimacy and on the will of a single person. As it happened, “[o]n no other occasion in the history of modern Europe have so many questions of vital concern to its peoples depended on the death or survival of one man.”48
That man was the Spanish king, Carlos II, the last descendant of the male line of the great emperor Charles V. He had long been an invalid, and had not produced an heir. The prospect of his death, which appeared imminent over an unexpectedly long reign, excited and alarmed the dynasties of Europe because of the possibility that either Bourbon France or the Habsburg empire would attempt to amalgamate with what was still the richest and by far the most populous collection of human beings owing allegiance to a single European sovereign, the kingly state of Spain—encompassing the Iberian peninsula (minus Portugal), Belgium, a huge overseas colonial empire, and various parts of Italy, including Milan. The pieces that Louis had carefully assembled—his Spanish wife, a dowry controversy, a secret partition agreement with the Austrian Habsburg king Leopold I that provided for a division of the Spanish empire between them if Charles should die without an heir—now all seemed to fall into place.
There remained two formidable obstacles. Spain's partners in the Peace of Ryswick would not tolerate the blow to the balance of power that would occur from uniting Spanish overseas possessions with either France or the Empire. It is a matter of some dispute whether the occupation of the Americas had continued to be nearly as enriching to Spain as it proved at first; compared to the ever-escalating expense of garrisoning a continent and the costly maintenance of long lines of threatened communications across the Atlantic, this may not actually have been so. But in light of the greatly increased costs of maintaining competitive military forces on the continent of Europe, no territorial state could risk diverting this treasure, however costly it had become to extract, to a hegemonical kingly state so plainly on the march.
Shortly after Ryswick, England, Holland, and France had attempted to settle the question of Spanish succession. It is interesting to observe the two sets of negotiating states in these treaties: the territorial states, personified by William III, carefully trying to maintain a balance of power; the kingly states, represented by Louis, keeping intact those dynastic inheritances that might, in the fullness of time, augment the kingly state. William's vision of the European community would eventually triumph at Utrecht when the epochal war waged by Louis finally ended.
Lossky portrays the two men with great insight, and accomplishes also a vivid portrayal of a Europe constituted by Westphalia, compared with that which would emerge at Utrecht.
Louis' aim was quite simple: to increase the grandeur of his State and of his House, so that his own preeminence as “the greatest king in Christendom” would be beyond dispute. He believed that each country had its own “true maxims of state,” rooted in the natural order, whose ultimate author was God. Good statesmanship consisted in following these maxims… Only an absolute monarch stood a chance of following the true maxims consistently. Wherever kingly power was limited, it was virtually certain that private interest would becloud the real interest of the State…. There was more room for change in [William's] world than in Louis'… [William came to see] the struggle on [a] plane that helped him attain to that comprehensive view of the war, and eventually of all Europe, which made him natural leader of the coalition. He ceased to belong to any one country. He sacrificed Dutch interests to English, English to Dutch; when necessary, he was ready to sacrifice the interests of both to those of the coalition; and towards the end he preferred the welfare of all Europe to the smooth running of the coalition.
The correspondence of William and his narrow circle of friends frequently contains expressions like “the general interest of Europe” and “the public good.” These are no mere phrases: often the writer is aware of a conflict between “public good” and State interests, and he invariably sides with the former. Louis, probably, would have resolved such a conflict the other way around, had he been aware of its existence anywhere except in the imagination of misguided men.49
The Spanish and King Carlos II objected to the arrangement negotiated by William and Louis in the Partition Treaty, however, as did the Emperor Leopold. When Carlos died in November 1700, it was discovered that he had left the entire of his dominions to Louis's grandson. Carlos evidently believed that France, as Europe's strongest military force, was most able to prevent a future dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy. And there was this codicil: if Louis chose to honor the Partition Treaty instead and to reject the bequest, all the Spanish holdings were to go to Leopold's younger son, whose family, conveniently, was not a party to the Partition Treaty.
When the Spanish king died and Louis was informed of the will, he called his councillors together and solicited their views. The memoirs of the foreign minister, Torcy, who was present, recount the debate:
It was easier to foresee than to prevent the consequences of the decision in question. [In signing the Partition Treaty with the British and Dutch, the king] had engaged himself to reject every disposition whatever made by the King of Spain in favor of a prince of the line of France…. [T]he consequence of such a violation was inevitable war. [But if Louis rejected the will, the whole of Spain's dominion would go to the Habsburgs, a union that, when last held by Charles V, was deemed] heretofore so fatal to France [that war here too was inevitable].50
It was absurd that France should make war on Spain because its late king had tried to give his dominions to a French prince. Furthermore, Louis was well aware that he would fight such a war to enforce the Partition Treaty without allies. Only weeks before Carlos's death, William III had written to the Dutch Grand Pensionary that it “would be quite against my intention to be at present involved in a war for a treaty which I concluded only with a view to prevent [a war].”51 Finally the prospect of the union of the two kingdoms was too tempting for a man of Louis's nature to reject. On Tuesday, November 16, 1700, Louis exuberantly introduced his grandson to the court as Philip V of Spain. The Spanish ambassador exclaimed, “There are no more Pyrenees. They have vanished and we are but one nation.”
The wrath of the disappointed emperor was not in itself a reason to rouse the territorial states to defy Carlos's will. They declined to insist, with Leopold, that the Partition Treaty be enforced. Then Louis went too far: he declared that his grandson could not renounce his rights to the French throne. Anticipating the reaction, Louis quickly invested the Spanish fortresses of Luxembourg, Namur, and Mons on the Dutch border; and he transferred to France commercial advantages formerly granted by Spain to England. The French ambassador to Madrid became a kind of proconsul through whom Louis effectively administered Spain. A council of four was set up to reform Spanish finances and administration along French lines.
Thus began the War of the Spanish Succession. Initially, Louis decided to carry the front to Vienna, an audacious plan that miscarried with the vic-tory at Blenheim of the virtuoso partnership of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. In 1706, an Anglo-Portuguese army seized Madrid. This was followed by further defeats for the French at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene: Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and finally Malplaquet (1709), all enormous battles with tens of thousands of casualties. France was invaded, and the hard winter of 1709 starved countless peasants to death. Louis sued for terms. The allies, however, now insisted that Louis send French troops to drive Philip, Louis's own grandson, from the peninsula. This the French king refused to do. Philip was able, in part owing to the success of French reforms, to garner widespread popular support in Spain and in 1710 twice won victories. When the unexpected death of Leopold's successor brought his son to the imperial throne, the entire picture changed. Now the territorial states faced the prospect of a new Habsburg ruler reassembling the dynastic properties of Charles V. When Louis agreed to promise that the Spanish and French crowns would never be united, the territorial powers were willing to accept the obvious preference of the Spanish for Philip V. Only the Austrians wished to continue the struggle, and, after long negotiations, the war was ended by the treaties of Utrecht in 1713 and Rastadt in the following year.
For our present study, the importance of the Treaty of Utrecht cannot be overstated. By its terms it is the first European treaty that explicitly establishes a balance of power as the objective of the treaty regime. The letters patent that accompanied Article VI of the treaty between England, France, and the king of Spain whose dynastic rights were being set aside acknowledged the “Maxim of securing for ever the universal Good and Quiet of Europe, by an equal weight of Power, so that many being united in one, the Ballance of the Equality desired, might not turn to the Advantage of one, and the Danger and Hazard of the Rest.”
This treaty permitted adjustments at the margin, but not the wholesale annexation of a national state; inhabitants now cared whether they were French, German, or Austrian.52 More importantly, securing the territorial state system had now become an important diplomatic objective; after Utrecht, the recognition of any state required its assurance to an international society that the system generally was not thereby jeopardized. That meant that “hereditary right and the endorsement of the constituent local authorities were no longer sufficient by themselves to secure sovereignty over a territory.”53
It had required an international society to accomplish these achievements, including the effective ratification of the constitutional triumph of the territorial state. So much else that we now take for granted in the international system flows from this watershed event. For example, the authority of multinational congresses (of which Utrecht itself was the most far-reaching in the eighteenth century) and our view of law as the legitimation of acknowledged customary practice (because this revolution in legitimation came about not through a hierarchical appeal but through consensus) both date from this time. In one respect, however, the Peace of Utrecht stood for a system that is very different from the system of international rule making and rule following we have today: Utrecht gave a significant role to war. At Utrecht and thereafter, the balance of power not only permitted but required occasional territorial adjustments, though resort to war was tempered by the further requirement that these adjustments be ratified by the society of states.
This society was motivated by a commitment to preserve its own peace and stability. As ever, strategic means were deployed to secure constitutional ends, but these ends were subtly shaped by the necessities imposed by the development of innovative strategic forms. After Utrecht, the eighteenth century saw many wars, but all of them were
minor wars of adjustment: the final means, after other pressures and inducements had not succeeded, of compelling… modifications of the balance between the states of the system… [T]he commitment to preserving a balance of power led to the transfer of territories from one sovereign to another regardless of tradition, the wishes of the inhabitants [or dynastic rules].54
This crucial and unusual role for war as an integral part of the diplomatic system would, of itself, have led to an increasing professionalization of war making, but that development was accelerated by other factors having to do with innovation in war-making itself. These factors led to the success of the two territorial states best able to professionalize their capacity to make a new kind of war and maintain their independence from the wars of others: England and Prussia.
Historians debate whether territorial states made the development of professional armies possible—armies that were trained by the State, paid year round from a state treasury, employed within a career structure that was designed and maintained by the State—or whether the changes in warfare brought about by the deployment of such armies made the development of territorial states a necessity. The kingly state was well suited to deploy forces that comprehended the revolution in tactics of the seventeenth century—Gustavus Adolphus showed that beyond doubt—but such states could not maintain these forces in the field for decade after decade, which the collapse of the French economy in 1708 – 1709 also showed. Only forces that were socially cohesive, drawn from a single territory, recruited to fight for “their country”—a phrase uniquely associated with the territorial state—rather than for highly paid mercenary captains, and above all used for the limited objectives of limited wars, as opposed to the ambitious dynastic enterprises of the megalomaniacal kingly states, could make up a standing army capable of being supported over the long term. The triumph of the territorial state coincided with developments in weapons technology—the replacement of the matchlock musket by the flintlock, whose simple and reliable design made possible a discharge of three rounds per minute and thus the establishment of three ranks capable of simultaneous fire, and the invention of the ring bayonet, which eliminated pikemen from the battlefield—and together led to the successes of Marlborough and Eugene and thus directly to Utrecht.
The Peace of Utrecht,* composed of the whole complex of treaties embracing Utrecht, Rastadt, and, a few years later, Passarowitz and Ny-stad, subordinated the traditional legal criteria of inheritance and hierarchical allegiance (religious or political). In their place was a unity of strategic approach—a judgment by the society of states as to what was an appropriate strategic goal and what constitutional forms were legitimate. This is how it looked to Voltaire, writing in about 1750:
For some time now it has been possible to consider Christian Europe, give or take Russia, as “une espèce de grande republique” —a sort of great commonwealth—partitioned into several states, some monarchic, the others mixed, some aristocratic, others popular, but all dealing with one another; all having the same basic religion, though divided into various sects; all having the same principles of public and political law unknown in the other parts of the world. Because of these principles the European [states] never enslave their prisoners, they respect the ambassadors of their enemies, they jointly acknowledge the preeminence and various rights of [legitimate rulers], and above all they agree on the wise policy of maintaining an equal balance of power between themselves so far as they can, conducting continuous negotiations even in times of war, and exchanging resident ambassadors or less honourable spies, who can warn all the courts of Europe of the designs of any one, give the alarm at the same time and protect the weaker…55
Such practices are usually taken to be the necessary preconditions of modern public international law; indeed the most influential commentator on international law of the period, Vattel, virtually repeats this characterization of European political society in the summary of his Law of Nations.† What is equally interesting, however, is the passage with which Vattel ends this summary:
England… has the honour to hold in her hands the political scales. She is careful to maintain them in equilibrium. It is a policy of great wisdom and justice, and one which will be always commendable, so long as she makes use only of alliance, confederations, and other equally lawful means.56
The Treaty of Utrecht was often called by contemporaries the “Paix d‘Anglais” and for good reason: it represented the success of a constitutional order that had passed from the Dutch to the English with William of Orange at about the same time that the trade wars against the Dutch ceased and British merchants secured the majority of maritime trade. William's policies required an unprecedented level of state expenditure: the rate of taxation was doubled to pay for a large and growing navy and an army the size of those of continental states. Once Britain effectively defeated the Jacobite movement in Scotland in 1746, she became a territorial state free of the vulnerabilities, as well as the temptations, of continental acquisitions. Even though the electorate of Hanover had been brought to London along with a new dynasty in 1714, Britain did not seek territorial expansion on the continent. And while it was a less than constant leader in preserving the balance of power—acting forcefully in 1717 by organizing the triple alliance of the Hague to check Spanish ambitions but refusing in 1731 to act on behalf of the balance—Britain was a principal beneficiary of the new international order. Within that order Britain meant to improve her position outside the continent. Rather than seek European conquests, Queen Anne declared, “It is this nation's interest to aggrandize itself by trade.”57 For the rest of the century, when Britain and France clashed, the principal impact was felt overseas.
It is sometimes difficult to see this through the fog of engagements on the continent. Despite important battles abroad—the French besieged Madras, while the British had notable successes in America and French overseas trade was virtually halted by blockade—it was French success in the southern Netherlands that brought the British to the negotiating table and forced them to return Louisbourg, the key to Canada. It was clear to all parties, however, that the great stakes lay outside Europe, even if the key to winning them might lie within. Some French strategists argued that America could be conquered by attacking Hanover; others, that this was only a diversion from maritime engagements that depended upon a pre-eminent navy. Meanwhile, in London, opposition members denounced continental involvement to defend “the despicable electorate” of Hanover, while others argued that America could be won on the banks of the Elbe by tying down French resources. Everyone was agreed, however, that America was the stake.
The Seven Years' War sustained this argument. All-out war began in North America in 1755 (as a young lieutenant colonel, George Washington, and his men fired the first shots of the war) and quickly spread to the European continent. Pitt's strategy of using Prussia to bleed French land forces on the continent while the British Navy destroyed the French at sea proved to be a spectacular success. One by one the French overseas posts were taken once their communications had been cut by British seapower. The Peace of Paris in 1763 brought Canada and Florida to Great Britain. Then the American colonies revolted, and France concluded a formal alliance with the United States, “not,” as Louis XVI put it, “with any idea of territorial aggrandizement for us, but solely as an attempt to ruin [British] commerce.”58 By 1780, the Spanish, Dutch, and French were all arrayed against Britain. The American victory at Yorktown in 1781 was the accomplishment of an army that was half-French and of a French fleet that blocked relief for the surrounded British forces (though this is not the standard account in American schoolbooks). For the first time since 1692 the British lost control of the seas.
To American eyes, British policy appeared as a lapse by the British into the ways of the kingly state: George III and his ministers were just so described in the Declaration of Independence. If this was the case, the British had steadied by 1786 and concluded a new commercial treaty with France, restoring by this and many other efforts the British position as arbiter of the balance of power. Despite the younger Pitt's famous remark in 1792 anticipating a long period of peace, this step came just in time.*
One other state especially benefited from the new society in Europe organized around the balance of power by the territorial states. Prussia was best able to exploit the revolution in technology and tactics in warfare, as Britain was best able to benefit from the commercial advantages of relative tranquility on the continent and of maritime expansion beyond. Prussia, by happenstance as much as planning, had been shaped by its ruling family into an instrumental, highly effective territorial state seeking its aggrandizement in carefully selected limited wars, always adding territories that would increase rather than divert the power of the center, avoiding dynastic overextension, and above all, separating the person of the ruler from the state that he and the state's system of bureaucracy served. This last, of course, is the constitutional watermark of the territorial state, and contrasts sharply with its constitutional predecessor.
The kingdom of Prussia began its modern course in 1618, when the electorate of Brandenburg and the duchy of Prussia were united under a Hohenzollern prince.59 Prussia was hitherto a small state on the Baltic in Poland, to the east of the Vistula, once inhabited by Lithuanian tribes who were conquered and converted by the Knights of the Teutonic Order. During the Thirty Years' War, the Brandenburg electorate had played an insignificant role until the succession of Frederick William, known as the Great Elector. It was he who transformed the electorate into a kingly state, observing the example of Louis XIV. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Great Elector was able to gain valuable accessions of contiguous territory, and in 1653 he secured a small grant to raise an army of a few thousand men from the estates in which the landed aristocracy was the main voice;* in return, the nobility were confirmed in their privileges and were given full jurisdiction within their lands and a guarantee of preferment as to official posts; in addition, the towns were confirmed in their judicial immunities and guild rules.60 To finance the army the estates agreed to the assessment by royal officials of land values on which a modest tax was levied—the Gener-alkriegskommissariat. In so doing the estates compromised their traditional right to tax themselves. Frederick William promptly used this reform to leverage higher taxes; when some estates objected, he levied taxes by force. By these measures he was able to create a highly centralized absolutist monarchy and its necessary accompaniment, a standing army, which by 1672 was 45,000 strong.61 Virtually all state resources were subordinated to the building up of the army. The royal bureaucracy responsible for levying taxes to support the army extended its control over many aspects of Prussian commercial life: in the towns where the tax was raised by an excise on goods, and in the country where levies against harvests and rents supplied revenue, these Prussian officials constituted a supervisory arm of the king and intensified the increasing centralism of Prussian economic life. The Prussian victory against the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675 had shaken Europe, 62 and the Great Elector's successor, Frederick III, was recognized as King Frederick I of Prussia by the emperor. Superficial as this recognition may appear to us, it fulfilled a prerequisite for the formation of a territorial state by giving to the subjects of the Prussian crown a common name. Frederick's son resumed the policy of strengthening the army.
This figure is well known to historians from Macaulay's description: Frederick William I did indeed, it seems, walk into private houses and inspect the family dinner, and cane idlers when he happened to meet them on the street, and did fly into inexplicable rages as well as fits of depression. But he also first introduced universal conscription into military service, while exempting the bourgeois taxpayers, taking care to send peasant soldiers back to their farms at harvest time, and nurturing a textile industry with state purchases. By the time of his death in 1740, Prussia had a highly efficient bureaucracy, large financial reserves, and the fourth largest army in Europe (although the state ranked only tenth in territory and thirteenth in population).
In the same year, 1740, the Austrian emperor Charles VI died. With Charles, the male line died out and the throne passed to his daughter Maria Theresa. The last years of Charles's reign had been clouded by his fears for her succession, and so he had persuaded the other European powers to subscribe to the Pragmatic Sanction, an agreement according to which they promised to observe and defend the integrity of Austrian possessions under Maria Theresa. Among the signers was Frederick II, the new king of Prussia.
Nevertheless, without warning, Frederick invaded Silesia, an Austrian possession that lay between the Brandenburg and Prussian lands of his state. In the ensuing three wars, he managed to retain Silesia, despite overwhelmingly adverse odds, and thereby almost doubled the size of his small kingdom. The following excerpt is from Frederick's memorandum on the matter to his ministers:
Silesia is the portion of the [Austrian] heritage to which we have the strongest claim and which is most suitable to the House of Brandenburg. The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word, the clear advantage we have over our neighbors, gives us in this unexpected emergency an infinite superiority over all other powers of Europe…. England could not be jealous of my getting Silesia, which would do her no harm, and she needs allies. Holland will not care, all the more since the loans of the Amsterdam business world secured on Silesia will be guaranteed. If we cannot arrange with England and Holland, we can certainly make a deal with France, who cannot frustrate our designs and will welcome the abasement of the [Austrian] house. Russia alone might give us trouble. If the empress lives,… we can bribe the leading counsellors. If she dies, the Russians will be so occupied that they will have no time for foreign affairs… All this leads to the conclusion that we must occupy Silesia before the winter and then negotiate. When we are in possession we can negotiate with success.63
To this remarkable document, Craig and George say only, “This memorandum really requires no comment. Here is a mind completely dominated by Staats raison, a mind that admits no legal or ethical bonds to state ambition.” Although this term translates to “reasons of state,” it has a connotation unique to the territorial state, in contrast to raison d‘état and to ragione di stato, which, as we have seen, reflect their respective constitutional origins. Staats raison is a rationale given on behalf of the State, an imperative that compels its strategic designs (such as the seizure of a proximate province for geostrategic reasons). It identifies the state with the country, the land. The raison d‘état is a reason invoked on behalf of a king, justifying his acts as being those imposed on him by the State (such as aid to Protestant princes by a Catholic king); it identifies the king with the State when he takes on the role of the state. Ragione di stato are reasons that distinguish the state code of behavior from the moral code of the prince (such as deceit or treachery) when the state takes on the role of the prince and the prince is relieved of his moral obligations as an individual. Each phrase, though it translates into the same English words, belongs to that constitutional order within which it acquired use—the territorial state, the kingly state, and the princely state, respectively.
Frederick's seizure of Silesia had profound effects on the future of Germany, for when Austria lost Silesia, with its large population and impor-tant commercial resources, the western half of the Austrian empire ceased to be predominantly German, and Prussia became the primary force in Germany. Two further wars confirmed Frederick's gains: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740 – 1748), in which various states abandoned the Pragmatic Sanction and joined Prussia in a bid for Austrian territories in the Netherlands, Italy, and Bohemia, and the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which Prussia was supported only by Hanover and Great Britain (which took the war to North America and India, where British success was finally achieved). The Prussia of the Great Elector who inherited parcels of territory along the vulnerable north German plain, repeatedly crossed and recrossed by brutal mercenaries of every contending power in the Thirty Years' War, had become one of the great powers of Europe in little more than twenty years. Moreover, the Great Elector's Prussia, which had been so carefully modeled on the French kingly state, was transformed by his great-grandson, now called Frederick the Great, into a territorial state of singular intensity. It was Frederick, who entertained no self-doubts about his role at the apex of Prussian political society, who nevertheless described himself not as the incarnation of the State but as its “first servant.”64
What sort of power was the Prussian state? It was highly stratified; it carefully husbanded its resources; it emphasized loyalty to the State rather than to the dynasty; it encouraged economic growth in manufactures, trade, and agriculture rather than stripping these enterprises of their wealth for the Crown; and it derived all of these imperatives from a desire to create and maintain an army well beyond what most observers would have regarded as its means. In Frederick's view, the State must assure a careful balance between classes within the State, and between economic power and the diversion of economic resources to the military. To accomplish this he insisted that only members of the nobility could serve as officers, and that noble lands could not be sold to peasants or townsmen; that peasant lands must not be absorbed by bourgeois or noble acquisition, and that only those peasants who could be spared from agricultural duties should be recruited to the army; and that townspeople were most useful to the state as producers of wealth and thus “should be guarded as the apple of one's eye.” Frederick's soldiers felt no great loyalty to him as a person. Indeed, in his political memoir, he confides that, during the first Silesian wars, “he had made a special effort to impress upon his officers the idea of fighting for the country of Prussia.”
In all of these respects, Frederick the Great typified the ruler of a territorial state.65 His objectives were territorial and statist, rather than dynastic and personal or religious. It is intriguing that even the training of troops reflected the attributes of the state Frederick created, but not so surprising because the state itself had been crafted to provide resources and a structure for warfare. This is evident in the iron discipline that Frederick instilled in the Prussian forces. The goal of this discipline was to make the army into an instrument that could respond to a single strategic will. Frederick once remarked that his soldiers must be more afraid of their officers than of their enemies.66 Officers and men must understand that every act “is the work of a single man.” “No one reasons, everyone executes.” Men who are trained to march smartly can also turn quickly and in unison in battle. At Lentzen, Frederick's men suddenly began a flank attack with an about-face.67 An army thus trained can achieve tactical mobility, becoming skilled in quickly shifting from marching order to battle order, remain steady under withering fire, and, most important, respond to a unified strategic vision. An army trained in this way, Frederick repeatedly said, could provide full scope to the art of generalship.68
What kind of generalship was that to be? The answer is consistent with the answer to the question “what kind of statesmanship does the territorial state exact from its leaders?” Strategy, which is the art of the general, is the answer to the question posed by constitutional imperatives, the objects of the statesman. But constitutional imperatives, like the constitutional order itself, change in response to the demands of innovations acquired by strategy. A state that presents a new model, constitutionally, like the territorial state—which identifies the State with the land of its people—will succeed or fail depending on how it is able to adapt new forms of strategy to serve that model. And these new strategic forms will inevitably impose themselves on the constitutional order. The strategic innovations of Frederick and the Prussian state were so dramatically successful that they changed the shape of warfare—and of the State itself—for all Europe. Palmer observes of this new form:
Battle, with troops so spiritually mechanized, was a methodical affair. Opposing armies were arrayed according to pattern, almost as regularly as chessmen… on each wing cavalry, artillery fairly evenly distributed along the rear, infantry battalions drawn up in two parallel solid lines… each… composed of three ranks each rank firing as at a single command while the other two reloaded…69
According to Frederick, marching order was determined by battle order: troops should march in columns so arrayed that by a quick turn the column presented itself as a rank, firing in lines with cavalry on its flanks. Because a battle order of long unbroken lines was as vulnerable as it was murderous, Frederick designed the “oblique order,” which involved the advance of one wing by successive echelons while the other wing remained steady, minimizing exposure to the weaker end. This either gained a quick victory by a flanking attack, rolling up the enemy's line or, if failing, tended to minimize losses as the hitherto static wing maneuvered to cover the withdrawal of the extended wing. Such a general tends to avoid cataclysmic engagements; he looks for set battles, preferably sieges, and tries to acquire fortresses. Forts, Frederick wrote, were “mighty nails which hold a ruler's provinces together.” Generalship of this kind is after all territorial, both tactically and strategically: “To win a battle means to compel your opponent to yield you his [territorial] position.”
These military ideas were a dimension of Frederick's overall views as a statesman, and it was Frederick who succeeded William III as the model of the territorial state leader.70 He carefully maneuvered to augment his state with territory that would actually contribute to the wealth71 or territorial integrity of the state—rather than vindicate dynastic claims—and that could be gained at reasonable costs in concert with the other powers of Europe. The most striking example of this was the result of the First Partition of Poland, whereby, only nine years after the end of the Seven Years' War, Prussia, Austria, and Russia made substantial territorial acquisitions while avoiding conflict. Frederick gives us his view of this incident in his History of My Own Times:
This was one of the most important acquisitions which we could make, because it joined Pomerania and Eastern Prussia; as it rendered us masters of the Vistula we gained the double advantage of a defensible frontier to the kingdom and the power to levy considerable tolls on the Vistula, by which river the whole trade of Poland was carried on.72
Once this vital property was gained—it closed Prussia's territorial gap along the Baltic coast—Frederick immediately moved to improve it. Craftsmen, artisans, manufacturers, educators were all sent to colonize the area; marshes were drained; the Vistula was connected to the Oder and to the Elbe by a great canal.
Frederick was both a beneficiary and a strong supporter of the Utrecht system, even if he had made his debut on the European stage by a successful coup de main within that system.
The ambitious should consider above all that armaments and military discipline being much the same through Europe, and alliances as a rule producing an equality of force between belligerent parties, all that princes can expect from the greatest advantages at present is to acquire, by accumulation of successes, either some small city on the frontier or some territory which will not pay interest on the expense of the war [required to take it].73
He saw clearly enough that war should be undertaken in proximity to one's own frontiers, because of the “difficulty of providing food supplies at points distant from the frontier, and in furnishing the new recruits, new horses, clothing and munitions of war.”74 Above all, he relied on forces that, however well-drilled, had no moral enthusiasm or political conviction. For this reason he could not rely on his armies to live off occupied countries because they would desert if dispersed to forage, and their morale would collapse if their supplies were not regularly refreshed. For the same reason, his alliances were solely matters of strategic calculation, and thus he could never depend on support from ideologically sympathetic local parties in the countries he invaded. In order to preserve the authoritarian constitutional structure of the Prussian state, Frederick dared not excite the energy that lay dormant in nationalism. Indeed, this was the challenge of the territorial state: to make the State, rather than the person of the king, the object of constitutional and strategic concern without permitting the people to claim the State as their own. “My land,” “my country,” but not “my nation.” All of this stands in stark contrast to the style of warfare epitomized by Frederick the Great's successor as the leading commander in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte.75
In contrast to the absolutism of the kingly state, the territorial state was a state of definite limits. We have seen this to be the case in the composition and maintenance of its armies. The governments of territorial states were limited in the revenue base they could derive from their subjects because the territorial state depended for its legitimacy on a compact with the estates of the realm, and not on the axiomatic dynastic rights of an absolute ruler. Nor could these governments draw on the entire human resources of the state: typically the aristocracy was privileged to officer the army and the state. (The kingly state was more meritocratic in this respect.) The people, insofar as they were a material factor in the strategic calculations of the territorial state, were simply taxable assets to be encouraged, and not too much disturbed, by the occasional warfare of the state. Frederick the Great wrote that he “wanted to fight [his] wars without the peasant behind his plow and the townsman in his shop even being aware of them.”76 The role of the citizen did not require that he take part in war. Sound political economy counseled that armies should be composed of men who were the least necessary, economically, to the well-being of the state. The aristocratic officer corps scarcely demanded from the marginal persons they commanded any of the characteristics of esprit that the officers expected of themselves. Rather they relied on good physical care, medical attention, adequate housing, and regular pay to motivate their troops. The rise of large standing armies under the kingly state had resulted in the systematic use of billeting. Troops were assigned to private houses, taverns, and stables. After the Seven Years' War, however, the new territorial states of Europe increasingly housed their forces in barracks, isolated from the surrounding populations. It was expected that enlisted men would freely desert if allowed to reconnoiter in small parties and that both officers and men would change sides if presented with the promise of more attractive employment.
Professional armies were expensive and the extensive drill required by eighteenth century tactics meant that the territorial state had a great investment in each soldier. Large-scale pitched battles were seldom risked. Marshal Saxe in his Reveries de Guerre (1732) made the much-quoted statement: “I do not favor pitched battles, especially at the beginning of a war, and I am convinced that a skillful general could make war all his life without being forced into one.” Armies in Europe at this time became, in Clausewitz's words, like “a State within a State, in which the element of violence gradually faded away.”
The delimited territorial state thus produced a delimited warfare, fought with limited means for limited objectives. Wars of position prevailed over wars of attrition, and precisely because battles were so deadly they were largely avoided and were not decisive when they occurred. Thus even though there were technological breakthroughs, particularly in the ability to deliver firepower, and therefore casualty rates rose appreciably during this period, the abundant possibilities for decisive military action ironically prevented the hegemony of any one state. Small sovereignties that had been active participants in earlier eras however—Cologne, Wurtemberg, Münster, Bremen, Genoa, Hesse—virtually disappeared. War became an activity of the Great Powers because only they could control territory significant enough to finance its defense in an era in which terri-ory itself was the medium of exchange of power.
Prior to the arrival of the territorial state, rights of succession had been the principal source of interstate dispute. These were legal rights, based on ancient titles, marriages, cessions, that didn't merely provide the monarch with a patrimony, but established his right to rule. As Holsti has put it, “The territories that reverted to a prince, king or queen were less significant than the rights that inhered in them.”77 But in the eighteenth century, concerns for succession began to relate less to the right to rule—who had the better claim to succeed—than to the power to control territory. To paraphrase Luard slightly, control over territory no longer resulted from a credible claim; the claim resulted from a credible control over territory.78 We have only to compare the careful preparations of Louis XIV to place a Bourbon prince on the throne of Spain—the thwarted dowry, the Spanish wife, the secret agreement with the other principal contending family—with Frederick's casual pretexts regarding his Silesian claims. Once he decided to move against Austria, Frederick directed a subordinate to work up a case that Silesia really belonged to Prussia; on being presented with the results, Frederick replied with amusement that the official had proved to be a good charlatan.
Indeed even in the selection of monarchs, sorting out the dynastic priority among competing legal claims became subordinated to aligning the decision with overriding strategic purposes. Dynasts themselves in this era ceased to think of territory in terms of family patrimony but rather as a commodity—the currency of great power relations that it had become. Dynastic rights were now fig leaves for territorial claims.
This was the era of the great territorial partitions: in 1772 of Poland by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; in 1773, of Swedish possessions by Russia, Denmark, and Prussia. Territory could be traded to avoid or terminate a war, disregarding entirely its legal associations with family compacts, marriages, and titles.79 In place of the princely pursuit of titles and their appurtenant rights, once the coin of European patrimonial conflict, states struggled to gain or hold territory per se. Territorial conflicts became the chief source of war in this period, not simply because land was essential to national power—providing a population from which to conscript, a base of revenue and trade—for this had always been the case, but rather because legitimacy too now came from the sheer control of territory. A state that could consolidate its holdings, shedding noncontiguous family properties that were vulnerable to predation, could build itself a strategic position of relative invulnerability, and this alone was enough to assure its position among the other powers of Europe. Otherwise, it faced steady losses of its territory, even the threat of partition by a coalition. The balance of military technology and tactics was such that no state could hope for the wholesale patrilineal annexation of another—the vindication of a dynastic claim—yet every state was vulnerable to having a province picked off at its borders. The stereotypical view of eighteenth century conflict as indecisive reflects, as Jeremy Black effectively showed, an oversimplification of the political context.
18th century conflicts do appear inconclusive because they were frequently coalition conflicts and… coalition warfare could inhibit a determination to achieve decisive results. [Moreover] governments did not necessarily wish to make their allies too powerful by weakening their rivals excessively.80
This reticence lay in the nature of the constitutional basis for the territorial state and not in a lack of decisive military technology or ambition.
Pikemen had been hitherto used to protect musketeers from attack by cavalry and by other pikemen; now bayonets fulfilled this role and more because they added a firepower the pike could not provide. It had always been difficult to maintain the necessary ratio between pikemen and musketeers once a battle began; the bayonet effectively solved this problem. The deployment of the flintlock musket, in which powder was ignited by a spark caused by the striking of flint on steel, produced a lighter, more reliable weapon that, with the aid of cartridges, doubled the rate of fire. Both of these changes swept through the armies of Europe: Prussia adopted the bayonet in 1689, one year after Louvois had instructed Vauban to produce a prototype; Denmark followed suit in 1690. At the battle of Fleurus that year some Imperial units attracted universal attention when they repulsed repeated French cavalry charges though unsupported by pikemen and armed only with muskets. The French abandoned the pike in 1703, the British the next year. The Austrians adopted the flintlock in 1689, the Swedes in 1696, the Danes and the British by 1700.
From the late seventeenth century onward, especially in Prussia, Holland, and Britain, a new kind of regime was supplanting the king-centered states of which Louis XIV's was exemplar. The primacy of infantry fire made a well-trained and well-disciplined force more valuable than ever but, constitutionally, the state that fielded that force had to justify doing so on some basis more substantial than the vanity of the monarch. During this period, successful military powers were changing the compact that legitimated the state, and this, in the field relationship I have been describing, led to strategic innovation. The crises of legitimacy that brought William of Orange to the British throne and crushed the reign of James II epitomized this change, but it was going on in many states.
The new order was distinguished by a view of the State as a solar system rather than the reflection of the personality of a sun king. Hume expresses this point of view in his 1753 essay “Commerce,” in which he takes up Machiavelli's subject, the State, and transforms it into a marveling disquisition on the state as an invisible mechanism, enabling growth and the creation of wealth. No less a champion of this idea, though it may be shocking to say so, was Frederick the Great, who ceaselessly portrayed himself as the servant of the State, frugally husbanding its material assets and prudently attending to the increase of its efficiencies. This era, the Age of the ancien regime—before the dawning of an acute national self-consciousness but after the mannered rejection of the hubristic pyrotechnics of the kingly state—was characterized by the adroit use of strategic and tactical positioning.
Its military aspect was in perfect harmony with the constitutional modesty of its regimes. If, at other turns of the wheel, a strategic innovation or constitutional cataclysm signaled the new era, the introduction of the territorial state came with the exhaustion that followed the end of the vast European civil conflict, the Thirty Years' War. We can almost date its inception to the beheading of the monarch of the English kingly state, Charles I, in 1649.
The territorial state was characterized by a shift from the monarch-as-embodiment of sovereignty to the monarch as minister of sovereignty. A striking example of this occurred in the well-known “Diplomatic Revolu-tion” of 1748, in which reasons that related entirely to perceptions of the national interests concerned were allowed to predominate over the dynastic traditions of the Bourbon and Habsburg houses, and as a consequence, France and Austria found themselves allies for the first time.
In the period after Utrecht a number of decisive changes occurred, in terms of army size, weapons, and most especially the administration of the armed forces, their training and control by the State. Thus it can be argued that the constitutional imperatives of the territorial state were partly the cause, and not merely the consequences of these changes.81 The period from 1660 to 1760 saw a significant increase in the number of men permanently under arms in Europe, an increase that is more dramatic once we recall that for most of this period European population figures were static. Greater administrative capability was felt in the field: for example, the Austrian conquest of Hungary from 1683 relied on the creation of a series of magazines. Large-scale mapping took place as surveys grew in importance, an obvious consequence of the territorial state's preoccupations.
But not every state was able to reconstruct itself along such constitutional lines; in Poland, for example, the nobility was unable to reconcile itself to fidelity to the State as an entity of which the monarch was the first steward, and it simply destroyed the state structure that might otherwise have successfully resisted partition. Everywhere that control of the troops—everywhere the state monopoly on legitimate violence—fell from the hands of the State, the advantages of this military revolution eluded the country, as happened in Sweden and Hungary. Yet even the rigid stability of the successful territorial states would soon be shaken by a new, more dynamic constitutional form and its accompanying strategic whirlwind.