1. Guicciardini wrote in his Ricordi, “Before the year 1494, wars were protracted, battles bloodless, the methods followed in besieging towns slow and uncertain; and although artillery was already in use, it was managed with such want of skill that it caused little hurt. Hence it came about that the ruler of a state could hardly be dispossessed. But the French, on their invasion of Italy, infused so much liveliness into our wars, that [until compensating fortifications could be introduced] whenever open country was lost, the state was lost with it.” Cf. Francesco Guicciardini, Ricordi (Mursia, 1994).
2. A sympathetic thesis was propounded by Robert Randle in 1987 that I gratefully stumbled upon only as this book was going to press. Randle writes that “major peace settlements, such as Westphalia and Vienna, have the characteristics of constitutions; the same can be said of many lesser settlements, even those ending bi-lateral wars. Peace settlements not only bring wars to an end; they can also revise the constitution of the state system.” Robert Randle, Issues in the History of International Relations: The Role of Issues in the Evolution of the State System (Praeger, 1987), 34. See also Christian Reus-Smit, “The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions,” International Organization 51 (Autumn 1997): 555. In this chapter, I shall argue that the peace settlements that conclude epochal wars are the constitutions of the society of states.
3. Randle, Issues in the History of International Relations, 183.
4. Randle believes that the “key patterning of interstate relations results from states' interests in issues,” whereas I argue that the key pattern results from states' security needs in interaction with their domestic constitutional development—which may or may not be coextensive with the issues of the day. And Randle argues that the peace agreements are revisions of the constitutions of state systems, whereas I suggest that it is the society of states (by no means limited to its formal, juridical components) that is being reformed.
5. Cf. the opening paragraph of Hedley Bull, “The Emergence of a Universal International Society” in The Expansion of International Society, 117.
6. Cf. Paul Rice Doolin, The Fronde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935).
7. Randle, The Origins of Peace (New York: Free Press, 1973) 46 – 47; A transformation occurs when one ordering principle replaces another. A constitution embodies ordering principles so a transformation of the society of states occurs when a new constitution of that society replaces the old.