The state-nation mobilized and exploited whatever national resources it happened to find itself in charge of (including the colonial resources of otherwise stateless nations). It was not responsible to the nation; rather it was responsible for the nation. The nation, for its part, provided the raw material with which the state-nation powered the engines of state aggrandizement. Nowhere is this contrast more apparent than in the history of empire that began as colonization in the seventeenth century, was transformed into imperialism by the middle of the nineteenth century, and then was ultimately undone by the ethos of the nation-state and its demands for the constitutional recognition of national identities.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the empires of European states were in place: the great subcontinent of India was already the most important possession of the most important empire. Ironically, at about the time the nation-state emerged in Europe with the creation of Germany and Italy, imperialism abroad intensified. This is the period, as Michael Doyle has observed, that “is associated with the full transfer of rights of sovereignty (usually marked by either treaty or conquest)”67 to the governing imperial state and it is usually dated from the 1880s and the scramble for African possessions. In only a few decades the state-nation would be destroyed in Europe proper, and with it the Concert of European states that had maintained peace.
The turning point occurred in the late 1840s, when, for similar but unrelated domestic political purposes, European politicians seized on the idea of national self-determination as the key element underpinning a program of political reform.* This idea was antithetical to the Vienna system and cast doubt on the legitimacy of that system. Challenges to the system's program of strategic restraint further discredited the Vienna system. The Crimean War, the Italian wars, the unification of Italy, but most especially the unification of Germany were ever escalating challenges to the Vienna Concert that arose from the campaigns for popular sovereignty, so that by the last of these conflicts, in 1870, the state-nation in Europe was in rapid retreat.
It may seem to us today altogether natural that states should occupy fixed and contiguous places on maps, but that, as we have seen, was not always the common conception. And it may also seem obvious that the geographical division of the world into states should fit the division of mankind into nations. But this too was not always so. As H. G. Wells put it, that the political world should be divided into nation-states, and that this must be so in order to ensure stability,
would seem to be self-evident propositions were it not that the diplomatists at Vienna evidently neither believed nor understood anything of the sort, and thought themselves free to carve up the world as one is free to carve up such a boneless structure as a cheese.68
One could argue—as indeed Castlereagh did as a young man when he voted to disband the Irish parliament—that the coincidence of political boundaries with ethnic ones is actually a recipe for conflict. Nevertheless, it became a common belief among very different societies after the upheavals of 1848 that governments existed to better the lot of national peoples. Some have argued that this shift to welfare nationalism was a conscious strategy on the part of ruling elites to distract the masses from the exploitative practices of the industrial age. There is doubtless some truth in this, but nationalism was itself also a motivating factor among revolutionaries, and, in any case, that it was a card effectively played by politicians in several very different circumstances does not tell us why it proved so effective and transformative.
During 1848, Poles, Danes, Germans, Italians, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Romanians rose in arms, claiming the right of self-government. In February, a revolution occurred in France, and one of the great powers suddenly appeared to have taken up the cause of popular nationalism against the Vienna system. In March the French foreign minister declared that the new French Republic did not recognize the peace treaties of 1815 and would defend by force the rights of oppressed nationalities against any aggressor. This pledge was not immediately fulfilled, but a new leader emerged who was able to exploit sentiment in Europe for the nation-state and the self-determination of peoples. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, was elected president of the Republic by universal suffrage in December 1848. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he mounted a coup d'état in December 1851. A fresh plebiscite was held on a new constitution; 7.5 million persons voted yes, against 650,000 voting no, with 1.5 million abstentions. The seizure of constitutional power had been legitimated by an appeal to the people.
The use of the plebiscite to ratify changes in the constitution had been previously initiated by Napoleon I, but the differences in the two occasions are illuminating.
When Napoleon I used the plebiscite, he was attempting to legitimate his own role within a revolutionary state; when he sought to legitimate his role vis-á-vis other states, by contrast, he had himself crowned emperor by the pope. When Louis Napoleon resorted to the plebiscite, he first used it to legitimate a new constitution, and later in 1852 in order to confer the title of emperor and to make this title hereditary. In other words, Napoleon III (as Louis Napoleon then became) employed the plebiscite to legitimate not only his role, but the new role of the State itself. Moreover, the universal suffrage of Napoleon III, vastly larger than that called upon by Napoleon I, not only ratified constitutional changes, but was also the basis for legislative elections. The use of the national referendum to determine the constitutional status of a state is more than anything else the watermark of the nation-state. For on what basis other than popular sovereignty and nationalism can the mere vote of a people legitimate its relations with others? It is one thing to suppose that a vote of the people legitimates a particular policy or ruler; this implies that, within a state, the people of that state have a say in the political direction of the state. It is something else altogether to say that a vote of the people legitimates a state within the society of states. That conclusion depends on not simply a role for self-government, but a right of self-government. It is the right of which Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg.
Napoleon III desired to break out of the Vienna system, which he perceived, with some justice, as having been built to confine French ambitions, and he wished to invigorate the principle of national self-determination, which he believed, with somewhat less justification, to have been the guiding ideology of his late uncle. Accordingly, he carefully chose the place where he would confront the system: not Belgium nor the Rhineland nor the Italian states. Aggression against these states could be justified on grounds of frustrated nationalism, but such an attack would have united the Concert against him. Rather he chose to move against the Ottoman Empire. As Gildea has shrewdly concluded, the “Empire could be used safely as a laboratory for testing the principle of nationalities, and the precedent could then be applied to other parts of Europe.”69
The ten million Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire came under the protection of the tsar. But there were Roman Catholic Christians in the empire as well, mainly in Lebanon, where French missionary efforts had been steadily increasing their numbers throughout the 1840s. Napoleon III seized on this issue and demanded that the Ottoman governor remove the keys to the Holy Places from the Orthodox patriarch and give them to Catholic clergy, and further that a Latin patriarchate be established in Jerusalem. When the Ottoman authorities acceded to these ultimata, Russia responded by insisting on guarantees for Balkan Orthodox Christians, whose national movements the Russians had begun to aid. In July, the tsar moved forces into the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Finally war broke out between Turkey and Russia, and in November 1853, the Turkish fleet was destroyed off the southern coast of the Black Sea. Napoleon III seized this opportunity to propose an alliance with Britain to prevent Russia from driving the Ottoman Empire from the Dardenelles and thus opening the Mediterranean to Russian fleets. Great Britain pledged to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
In Britain, public opinion ran high against Russia. Although the Aberdeen cabinet was disposed to do nothing, its most formidable member, Lord Palmerston, resigned on the issue and took his case to the public. He was returned on a wave of popular feeling in favor of war. An alliance was concluded with France, and a combined fleet was sent to the Black Sea in January 1854.
Palmerston's strategic objectives were by no means confined to simply opposing Russia over the straits. In a secret memorandum he prepared for the cabinet in March 1854, he wrote of the Russian empire's
dismemberment. Finland would be restored to Sweden, the Baltic provinces would go to Prussia, and Poland would become a sizable kingdom. Austria would renounce her Italian possessions but gain the Danubian principalities and possibly even Bessarabia in return, and the Ottoman Empire would regain the Crimea and Georgia.70
Such a program appealed to Napoleon III's desire to inflame Polish, Romanian, and Italian nationalism, but it required a total military defeat of the Russians, which France could not afford: to lose Russia completely would sacrifice important protection France might need against Prussia. The hazards of destroying the Vienna system began to dawn on French policymakers.71
In September 1855 Sevastopol fell to the British and French. Palmerston, who had become prime minister the preceding February, was eager to press the attack, but he was also fearful of a separate peace between France and Russia. Finally he gave in to the rest of the cabinet and to the views of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and concluded a peace treaty. The terms were harsh: Russia lost her protectorate over the Danubian principalities, as well as about a third of Bessarabia. These areas became the state of Romania, the formation of which markedly increased the intensity of nationalist sentiment in other Balkan states. The provision that no warships could traverse the straits in peacetime was extended to the entire Black Sea.
Russia's defeat completed her constitutional transition to a state-nation. Because service in the army was rewarded by emancipation, serfs had to be recruited for long periods; otherwise, the number of those bound to the land would have plummeted. Thus recruitment provided only about 700,000 men. There was no reserve. Such measures did not fill the needs of contemporary warfare, which required universal, short-term conscription, followed by service in the reserve. An adequate system, however, would move all serfs through the army in a generation. Therefore modern conscription and reserve service meant the emancipation of the serfs. And this is precisely what happened, in yet another example of strategic imperatives flowing back into the constitutional structure that strategy is supposed to serve. In 1861 the serfs were freed; universal military service followed in 1874. Six years' active service and a nine-year reserve commitment created a total force of 1.35 million. Various other efforts were made to focus the energies of the entire nation on service to the state. Thus evolving, Russia entered a period from which most of the great powers were just emerging; it would take another military catastrophe, in 1916, to bring a nation-state into being.
With the successful conclusion of the Crimean War, Napoleon III moved from being a mere egoist to becoming the most prominent personage in Europe. Ever mindful of his public, he next turned to Italy, where the strategic objectives of France could again be married to the support of local nationalist sentiments. In 1859, France intervened in Italy after Napoleon III concluded a secret agreement with Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, providing that the kingdom of Piedmont would be extended into a Kingdom of Upper Italy to include Lombardy, Venetia, and the Romagna. France would receive Nice and Savoy. A Kingdom of Central Italy, composed of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, Umbria, and the Marches, would be given to Napoleon's cousin, Prince Napoleon. As with the French demands against the Ottoman Empire, French intrigue had singled out another vulnerable multinational state-nation: the Austrian empire.
Fighting broke out in April, most of the warfare taking place between French and Austrian forces. The battles of Magenta and Solferino were actually French victories, not those of the Piedmontese or Italian volunteers. The decision to cease fire was also French, and an agreement was signed between Napoleon III and the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph on July 11, 1859. This truce clearly sacrificed Italian nationalism to French ambitions. Lombardy was given to Piedmont but Venetia remained with the Austrians. Nothing was said of the French agreement with Cavour. The settlement ignited a firestorm of reaction among the Italians, who had not been consulted. Cavour resigned his premiership. Assemblies called by Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and the Papal Legations* met and requested annexation by the kingdom of Piedmont.
At first Napoleon III demurred and fell back on a call for a European congress to settle the question of central Italy. This approach might have strengthened the system of collective security in Europe, but then, in December, he changed course. Relying on Britain, where Palmerston and his foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, supported the principle of self-determination, Napoleon III renewed the agreement between France and Piedmont. Cavour returned to power in less than a month.
Piedmont annexed the Duchies and the Legations and promptly organized a plebiscite, based on universal suffrage, held in March 1860. The Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel, took over the new territories by decree. Elections to a single Italian parliament were held in Piedmont-Sardinia, Lombardy, the Duchies, and the Legations. The first task of this legislature was to ratify the annexations to Piedmont as well as those to France. The French annexations of Nice and Savoy had been similarly endorsed by local plebiscites.
The French annexations, however, had enraged the Italian partisan leader Garibaldi (a native of Nice) and other Italian revolutionaries, and he mounted an insurrection in Sicily in April. The success of this insurrection, which was quickly joined by discontented peasants recruited by promises of land reform, prompted Cavour to dispatch officials to prepare plebiscites for annexation in the newly liberated areas. These officials Garibaldi expelled or avoided. When Garibaldi marched on Naples, Cavour planned a pre-emptive coup, but this failed, and Garibaldi entered Naples in September.
Fearful of losing the leadership of the emerging unification movement to Garibaldi's partisans, Piedmont sent forces into the Papal States and defeated a Catholic army at Castelfidardo in mid-September. When Bourbon forces in the south began to gain ground against Garibaldi, the latter called on Piedmont for assistance. This permitted Cavour to announce to the parliament on October 2, 1860, that the revolution was at an end. Sicily and Naples were annexed after a plebiscite by universal suffrage on October 21.
Italian unification was not quite complete. French troops remained in Rome, kept there by conservative pressure on Napoleon III, and it was not until the German victory at Sedan in 1870 that they were finally withdrawn. Nevertheless, without French determination to drive Austria from Italy, unification would not have happened at this time. Whether it was wise of Napoleon III to accomplish this is open to question; by weakening Austria, he removed the strongest check on Prussian ambitions to unify Germany, a development that could only threaten France in the long run. Moreover, France—with the enthusiastic if passive collaboration of the British—had dealt a severe blow to the Vienna system. By relying on a national insurrection to destroy the forces of a great power, these states had ignored the ominous predictions of Castlereagh about a general war. In so doing, these state-nations, and the society of such states, had begun to give way to the nation-state. There is some evidence that the leadership in these states perhaps believed they had found in the ideology of popular sovereignty and national aspirations a way of preserving their own states from revolt. After 1870 the greatest of the nation-state builders, Bismarck, made clear to all what had happened. As Michael Doyle has insightfully observed:
Leadership could win nationalism over to the state… and when revolution and nationalism were no longer synonymous, war could be fought on a wave of national feeling that, to everyone's surprise, did not ignite liberal revolution. The tiger of the nation-state did, however, require lavish feeding. Provinces and people could no longer be treated casually as the chips in dynastic politics, they were the children of the nation. Thus as war became more efficient, unleashing the power of the whole people, so peace became more difficult.72
But in 1860, at the conclusion of the Italian wars, this was not obvious to all observers. The most that could be said was that the rules of the Concert had been tested in the Crimea—an “out-of-area” problem, so to speak, as the Concert did not strictly apply beyond Europe or include the Ottoman Empire—and had been abandoned in the Italian peninsula apparently without the dire consequences of which Castlereagh had warned. The Crimean War alone, however, caused more deaths than any other European conflict between 1815 and 1914. Moreover, within eleven years of the conclusion of the Italian War, three major wars were fought in Europe: the war between Denmark and the German states in 1864; the Austro-Prussian war of 1866; and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. As a consequence a new nation-state was forged and a new society of states eventually came into being, with a new sort of question at the center of every member state: which political system best improved the welfare of the national people?
The construction of the new nation-state of Germany occurred when Prussia was able to conquer and annex the other members of the German federation, excluding Austria. Although it is commonly said, by Kissinger73 among others, that the peace of Vienna lasted until 1914 because no general war broke out until then, the wars by which Germany was unified virtually destroyed the Vienna System and with it the system of consensus as to the legitimacy of the state-nations that were its constituents. German unification was made possible, first, by the reform of the Prussian military that moved Prussia from a territorial state to a state-nation. This was primarily accomplished under the leadership of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Second, this state-nation was made the political and diplomatic leader of a national movement to unite the German people, ultimately transforming its constitutional basis and its strategic objectives into those of a nation-state. This effort was led by Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke.
The transformation of warfare by Napoleon I and the state-nation had been fully appreciated by Prussian analysts, who were well aware that new methods of war and the preparation for war would have a profound social and political impact on Prussian society. The army of Frederick the Great had been a force of professionals isolated from the rest of society, ruled by iron discipline, and led by officers drawn solely from the nobility. To transform this army into that of a state-nation, Prussia undertook universal conscription of a more radical type than had previously been attempted anywhere.
Conscription had been adopted in most of the other countries in Europe as each transformed itself into a state-nation, and put its nation in arms. In every country outside Prussia, however, this amounted to the drafting of the poor because substitutes for service could be hired. In Prussia, however, all groups in the population were required actually to serve. This provided enormous manpower; it made the army into a true citizens' armed force; it made possible the strategic and tactical innovations urged by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and their successor, Moltke. Most importantly, it set up a constitutional conflict between liberal, decentralizing parliamentary elements that wished to maintain the voluntary militia and Prussian royalist military groups that intended to use the new standing army to create a pan-Germany in the image of Prussia.
Helmuth von Moltke, like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was not a Prussian by birth. His father had been an officer of the king of Denmark.* Moltke was educated as a Danish cadet, but his experiences at school had been unhappy and his relations with his father were distant, so in 1822 he applied for a commission in the Prussian army. In 1823 he passed the entrance examination to the War College, which was at that time directed by Clausewitz. In 1826 he returned to his regiment but was soon assigned to the Prussian general staff, where he remained for more than sixty years. In order to buy and maintain horses, without which he could not serve on the general staff, Moltke earned money by translating six volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Financial need had earlier compelled him to write short novels, and his letters from Turkey, where he had served as a military advisor, are still read as classics of German literature.
With the exception of those few years in Turkey, Moltke never saw action, indeed never commanded a company or any larger unit, until, at the age of sixty-five, he took command of the Prussian armies in the war against Austria in 1866. If it was said of Bismarck that he was a “kind of Minister-President with a uniform hidden under his suit,”* the very opposite might have been said of the highly reserved and rather sensitive Moltke.
Prussian mobilization for the Italian wars had been a fiasco. In the ensuing years until 1866, Moltke devoted himself entirely to preparations for future military operations and remained aloof from the political scene. In 1860 the Prussian king William I, and the minister of war, von Roon, had proposed a thoroughgoing reorganization of the Prussian military. This plan envisioned increasing the standing army by raising the length of military service from two years to three, while converting the militia to a reserve force, which in turn meant the abolition of those militia-like sections of the armed forces, the territorial army, in which liberal politics had generally prevailed. In May the Prussian parliament agreed to vote additional military credits on the understanding that the government was withdrawing the reorganization plan and would use the money only to strengthen existing units. New units had already been formed, however. Further military credits were then denied; a parliamentary dissolution followed and a new election was held in December 1861. This and another election in May 1862 only reinforced the parliamentary opposition to military reform. In September 1862 Otto von Bismarck was called in by the crown to break the deadlock, a “konfliktminister” who, it was assumed, was willing to violate constitutional rules in order to quell the opposition. It was at this time that he made his famous statement directly attacking the prevailing constitutional order in Europe:
Prussia's frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.†
He followed this in January by saying menacingly that if the Parliament refused to agree, conflict would follow, and “conflicts become questions of power. He who has the power in his hands goes forward, because the life of the State cannot stand still even for one moment.”74
When new elections in October 1863 strengthened the Opposition in Parliament, Bismarck simply ruled without an approved budget. This period of nonparliamentary rule allowed the army to institute its reforms and, ultimately, to implement its innovative strategy. Holborn concludes:
The constitutional conflict was still raging when the battle of Koniggratz was fought. The parliamentary opposition, however, broke down when the Bismarckian policy and Moltke's victories fulfilled the longing for German national unity. Moltke's successful strategy, therefore, decided two issues: first, the rise of a unified Germany among the nations of Europe; second, the victory of the Prussian crown over the liberal and democratic opposition in Germany through the maintenance of the authoritarian structure of the Prussian army.75
Prussian innovations in strategy were well designed to serve both these purposes, and indeed could not have succeeded without the new constitutional structure because they depended upon a highly motivated, highly disciplined force of immense size under a central command with spaciously delegated constitutional authority.
The Napoleonic strategic revolution had been carefully studied by all the armies of Europe. As early as 1815 it had become the new dogma, and its imperatives were in part responsible for the development of the state-nation that it called into being. Napoleon Bonaparte had stood the strategic ideas of the eighteenth century on their head. These ideas held that, as territorial gain was the object of warfare and war was prosecuted by expensive, professional armies, battles were to be avoided. Wars became intricate ballets of position, each army maneuvering to force the other from one less favorable territorial position to another, occupying the ceded ground. This was the strategic paradigm of the territorial state. The Napoleonic campaign denied all these principles. Instead of avoiding actual clashes, such campaigns sought battle, and the larger and more destructive the better, because it was by battle that the forces of the enemy could be destroyed. Only this would cause the collapse of morale that would force the enemy government to sue for peace and put that government at the mercy of French terms. It was not territory that Napoleon I sought, but the political and economic resources of the conquered nation, so these could be exploited by the French state. This was the strategic paradigm of the state-nation.
A liturgy of Napoleonic principles soon replaced the study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. In the widely read writings of the Swiss theoretician Jomini, Napoleon's ideas were reduced to a set of rational rules and geometric axioms. The Prussian school of strategy, however, drew a different conclusion from Napoleon's campaigns. The most important lesson for the Prussians was the link drawn between the political objectives of war and its strategic prosecution, a connection summed up in the concept of the “moral” element in warfare. Napoleon's Prussian students stressed the role of spontaneity in his decisions and the ineluctable nature of the unpredictable. To these theoretical insights, they added the tactical possibilities opened up by the technology of the Industrial Revolution. This technology included techniques for manufacturing armaments that greatly increased the lethality of fire; the telegraph, which expanded the immediacy and range of communications; and, perhaps most significantly, the railroad, which promised to transform logistics.
In the Italian wars of 1859, a French force of 120,000 reached the theater of operations in eleven days by rail; had they marched, it would have taken two months. Generally it was calculated that troops could be transported by railway six times as fast as the armies of Napoleon I had marched. In addition to the railroad, there was now in place a dense road system that had come into being in the course of the explosive development of European industrial trade. Not only the movement of men, but also their resupply with matériel was affected by the railroad and road network. Forces arrived in good shape; they could be maintained for months on end by their home economies; the injured could be evacuated; home leaves and furloughs became possible, with all the consequences for morale in the field and politics in civil society.*
The limits to the size of armies that Napoleon I had shattered had reim-posed themselves in his Russian campaign. There was a limit to what foraging and pillage could accomplish to effectuate resupply. But with provisioning by rail there was in principle no limit imposed by logistics on the size of armies that could be fielded. Only the national economy and the demography of the society remained constraints. In 1870 the North German Federation deployed against France exactly twice the number of men Napoleon had led into Russia: 1,200,000. By the time Germany fielded an army in the next war, that number would double again.
Technological developments either enhanced the importance of sheer numbers—like new technologies of lethal firepower—or made those numbers more effective, like the development of the telegraph that gave commanders greater control of their forces. By the 1860s firearms had undergone considerable improvement since their introduction as slow-firing muskets. The smooth-bore, muzzle-loading musket, whose awkwardness had inspired the elaborate quadrilles of Maurice of Nassau, was replaced by the breech-loading, rapid-firing, rifled firearm. Rifling, the grooving inside barrels that increased the range and accuracy of a weapon fivefold, was in use by the 1840s, by which time the percussion cap had replaced the flintlock. In 1866 the Prussians fought with the Dreyse “needle gun,” the first rifled breechloader. This fired three shots to a muzzle-loaded rifle's one, and could be fired lying down. “For the first time in the history of war the infantryman could kill his adversary at a range of several hundred yards without presenting a target himself.”76 According to Strachan, between 1840 and 1900 the range and rate of small-arms fire had increased tenfold.77 In artillery, analogous developments took place. By 1870 Krupp was producing new steel breech-loading rifled cannon with ranges in excess of three thousand yards.
These technological developments challenged the prudence of the Napoleonic confrontation. How could an attacking force close with the enemy if they were battered to pieces miles before even sighting them? Just as importantly, how could the commander deploy forces in these huge numbers as anything more than a giant, confused mass? In 1865 Moltke wrote:
The difficulties in mobility grow with the size of military units; one cannot transport more than one army corps on one road on the same day. They also grow, however, the closer one gets to the goal since this limits the number of available roads. It follows that the normal state of any army is its separation into corps and that the massing together of these corps without a very definite aim is a mistake…. A massed army can no longer march, it can only be moved over the fields. In order to march, the army has first to be broken up, which is dangerous in the face of the enemy. Since, however, the concentration of all troops is absolutely necessary for battle, the essence of strategy consists in the organization of separate marches, but so as to provide for concentration at the right moment.78
Napoleon I had demonstrated at Ulm the power of dividing the army into columns that advanced to a critical point for juncture. Napoleon, however, had held that an army must be massed days before battle. Partly this was dictated by the time it took for columns to re-form in battle formation. But partly also it was the result of Napoleon's preference for interior lines, an undivided force, frontal assault at the crucial moment, and central tactical command. Such tactics seemed suicidal now in the face of the advances in firepower that a defensive position could deploy with such lethal effectiveness. Scharnhorst was among the first to adapt the Napoleonic principle of concentrated forces to new conditions through the use of concentric movements. In Moltke, strategy found a commander who would use concentric operations and detached corps on a scale undreamt of before. As Rothenberg has observed:
Confronted with the deadlock imposed by new weapons and extended frontages, Moltke… developed the concept of outflanking the enemy in one continuous strategic-operational sequence… By seizing the initiative from the outset, he intended to drive his opponent into a partial or complete envelopment, destroying his army in a great and decisive battle of annihilation or encirclement.79
Outflanking maneuvers of this kind—because they had to encompass the enormous lines made possible by armies in unprecedented numbers— would call for enormous numbers as well. The army with the greatest resources in manpower and supply would enjoy a decisive advantage. This required not only a sense of national purpose (which the state-nation was well-suited to provide) but also a sense of participation in the politics that led to war (which only the nation-state could fulfill). “[T]he greater the sense of participation in the affairs of the State, the more was the State seen as the embodiment of these unique and higher value systems which called it into being, and the greater became the commitment to protect and serve it.”80
Thus popular participation became the instrument that both created the nation-state and was itself reinforced by the institutions of the State it created. This phenomenon is evident in the history of the creation of the nation-state Germany by the Prussian state-nation.
Bismarck had begun by identifying Prussia as the apotheosis of the German; accordingly there was nothing “more German than the development of Prussia's particular interests.”81 But this was by no means clear to the other members of the German federal diet, including especially the Austrians. It was Bismarck's task to somehow separate the Austrians from the mission of unification and then carry out that mission so successfully as to silence opposition to Prussian leadership among the other apprehensive German states.
Bismarck became minister-president in 1862. The following November, King Frederick VII of Denmark died, and the main line of the Danish royal house became extinct. The provinces of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg had been attached to the Danish kingdom in much the same way that Hanover had been attached, for dynastic reasons, to the British kingdom: Frederick had been duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and as duke of Holstein and Lauenburg as well had been represented in the German Confederation. As with Hanover, Holstein and Lauenburg were by language and geography German. Two national movements, the German and the Danish, competed for support in the duchies, whose independence had been guaranteed by the 1852 Treaty of London, to which the great powers were signatories.
In March 1863, the Danish parliament rashly incorporated Schleswig* on the nationalistic grounds that most of the population of Schleswig was Danish, conceding that Holstein and Lauenburg held special rights. In reply, acting in the name of the Confederation on behalf of the German minority in the duchy, Prussian and Austrian forces invaded Schleswig in January and Jutland in March. Anglo-French opposition to the invasion was frustrated by English fears of encouraging a French move against the Rhine. In August the new king of Denmark, whose forces had been overwhelmed despite some initial misfires by the Prussian general, surrendered his rights in Schleswig.
Having contrived a successful military alliance with Austria over Schleswig, Bismarck proceeded to use this success as a hammer to break first the Confederation and then Austria herself. The apparent Austrian-Prussian rapprochement put Prussia in a good position to renew the Franco-Prussian free-trade treaty that Prussia had negotiated in 1862, playing on French fears of a Habsburg/Confederation-wide competing market. Bismarck now proposed expanding this treaty to include the entire Confederation, excluding Austria. Eventually even the southern, pro-Austrian states came along because they were unable to survive without the markets and outlets controlled by North Germany.
Bismarck then used the Austro-Prussian military success to drive a wedge between Austria and the rest of the German states. Austria and most of the southern German states in the Confederation had expected to bring Schleswig into the Confederation along with Holstein. Bismarck rejected this and instead negotiated an agreement with Austria partitioning the duchies, Austria to administer Holstein and Prussia, Schleswig, on an ad interim basis. In so doing, he was playing on the unreformed constitutional structure of the multinational Habsburg state that was perforce insensitive to the contradiction of accumulating isolated, ethnically distinct provinces.
This agreement, the Treaty of Bad Gastein, discredited Austria within the Confederation, as well as put her in the impossible position of attempting to administer a remote and recalcitrant state that lay between Prussia and Denmark. Bismarck took covert steps to exacerbate this difficulty, as well as stimulating Prussian public opinion to call for the annexation of both duchies into Prussia. Attempting a retreat from its position, Austria then reasserted its support for an independent duke and proposed that the decision be left to the Confederation. This Bismarck knew would result in a rejection of Prussian claims to the duchies, because the Confederation would vote for a separate state constructed from a union between the duchies. Prussia therefore denounced this move as a breach of the treaty and a cause for war. Bismarck promptly concluded a treaty with Italy to attack Austria and add Venetia to the Italian national state; he also began talks with Hungarian nationalists. Next he attempted to isolate Austria within the Confederation by bidding for the support of the German liberals, to whom he proposed a national parliament elected by universal suffrage. When Austria asked the Confederation to reject Prussia's proposals, Prussia responded by announcing that the German Confederation had ceased to exist, and called upon the German states to join a new Confederation, the North German Confederation, that excluded Austria.
The Prussian king, William I, had wished to avoid war with the Austrians and as a consequence the Prussians began their mobilization late, such that there was doubt whether an effective offensive could be mounted. But whereas the Austrians could employ only one railroad line for their mobi-lilization in Moravia, Moltke used five to transport Prussian troops from all over Prussia to the battlefront. Thus on June 5, 1866, the Prussian armies spread over a half circle of 275 miles. Moltke began at once to draw them closer toward the center, but steadfastly refused to order a full concentration in a small area. It was not until June 22 that officers of the Prussian vanguard handed their Austrian counterparts notice of the Prussian declaration of war.
The Austrian army moved from Moravia in three parallel columns, reaching their destination on June 26. Their commander, Benedek, was a product of the old school: fearless, stolid, he relied on formation in depth and the advantage of an interior line of operations. He failed, however, to derive the chief advantage of such a concentration when he delayed attacking either of the two equally strong Prussian armies facing him. Moreover, Benedek's early concentration inhibited his mobility. Once the opportunity had passed it was too late for the Austrians even to retreat behind the Elbe at Koniggratz and Benedek was forced to accept battle with the river at his rear. Like a Wagnerian overture, Moltke continued to hold off the final climax, keeping his armies one day's distance from each other until the night of July 2. At that time, he ordered the two Prussian armies to operate not merely against the flanks, but against the rear of the enemy: a strategy of encirclement. This did not completely come off, but at Koniggratz the Austrian army did lose the war as well as a fourth of its strength. Because Benedek did not retain enough space to advance against one portion of the Prussian army and then turn against the other, but instead was so hemmed in that he could not attack one force without being immediately attacked in his rear, the advantage of the interior line was forfeited. Had the local commanders actually carried out Moltke's orders for encirclement, it is possible the Austrian army would have been entirely destroyed, as occurred when Moltke's battle plan was executed against the French at Sedan.
Peace preliminaries were signed on July 27. Bismarck's principal war aims—the dissolution of the German Confederation and the removal of Austria from German affairs—had been accomplished by a course so circuitous, so Machiavellian, that historians continue to debate whether or not Bismarck actually intended the diplomatic campaign as it unfolded.82
Putting aside as unprofitable for our study an analysis of the psychological intentions of the Prussian president-minister, three questions remain: (1) How was Prussia able to convert a somewhat reckless act of Danish nationalism into a decisive weapon of destruction against the Confederation, on whose behalf Bismarck was allegedly acting? (2) How was Prussia able to use an alliance with Austria, and a successful war prosecuted by the two allies, to destroy Austria's role in German nationalism? (3) Is there anything about the nature of Moltke's strategy that helps us answer (1) and (2); that is, did the military imperative in this instance shape the sort of state that Bismarck was pursuing, such that it enabled, indeed brought to life a ruthlessly decisive diplomatic and political opponent of both the Confederation and the Austrian empire? The answers to all three questions revolve around legitimacy, popular nationalism, and self-determination, and their interplay with the new constitutional structure coming into being, the nation-state.
First, Denmark and all the states of the German Confederation were inflamed by nationalism. There were both German- and Danish-speaking residents in Schleswig-Holstein, in significant numbers. It had long been a goal of Danish nationalists to recognize constitutionally what was already a fact dynastically; namely, that the Danish king was the ruler of the duchies. Danish dynastic succession had been strengthened by the Treaty of London in 1852, which recognized Christian IX as the successor to Frederick VII. The role of the duchies, however, remained a point of contention between the two national movements. As early as 1855 a constitution had been adopted for a Greater Denmark that gave a central parliament in Copenhagen legislative rights over the duchies.
Protests had been immediately lodged against this move by the Confederation on behalf of Holstein, which was a member of the Confederation, and also by Austria and Prussia, which were signatories to the Treaty of London. When the Federal Diet threatened the Danish king with an enforcement order (a Bundesexekution) with respect to Holstein and Lauenburg, Frederick compliantly abolished the new constitution, but this had the unfortunate effect of separating Schleswig from the other two territories, because it was not a member of the Confederation. At the end of March 1863 the Danes formally objected to the section of the Treaty of London that dealt with Schleswig, and announced they would henceforth recognize special status for Holstein and Lauenburg only. When the Conf-federation now threatened to reinstitute the Bundesexekution order with respect to Schleswig, it exceeded its lawful authority. The Confederation was not a signatory to the Treaty of London, and Schleswig was not a member of the German Confederation. The Confederation was thus discredited in the eyes of German nationalists and forced to rely on the two German great powers to enforce matters against the Danes.
The Danes promptly adopted a new constitution incorporating Schleswig, and it was at precisely this point that Frederick VII died. The Treaty of London, which had been guaranteed by the great powers for just this eventuality, was now called into question because the legal requirements for succession had not been fulfilled by the Holstein parliament. German opinion was virtually unanimous that the treaty did not apply. Into this breach the duke of Augustenburg, who had relinquished his rights under the treaty, now stepped forward and offered his son, who was presented to the Confederation as Duke Frederick VIII. This was rapturously hailed by the citizens of Schleswig-Holstein as vindicating their rights to self-determination. A constituent assembly gathered spontaneously and swore allegiance to Frederick VIII. The majority of members of the German Confederation declared for Augustenburg and for the recognition of an independent principality for Schleswig-Holstein. This was the situation in November 1863. Prussia thus was offered the opportunity of championing the national movement, a role for which Bismarck had previously clamored.
Now, to the astonishment of all observers, Bismarck objected. As his principal biographer puts it,
instead of leading Prussia to the head of the national movement, instead of mobilizing Prussia's military might for the German cause, the might that after all was supposed to have been strengthened and was to be strengthened further to this end, the Prussian head of government appealed to the sanctity of international treaties. And instead of supporting the actions of the Confederation and upholding Prussia's claim to a leading role with that organization, he was obviously concerned only to put relations between Prussia and Austria back on their old, pre-1848 footing…83
For Austria had never been keen on the idea of self-determination. The vindication of national passions would hardly be welcome to a multinational empire, with the obvious implications for Venetia, Bohemia, and Hungary. Moreover, Schleswig-Holstein was far from Austria, lying between Prussia and Denmark and obviously well within Prussian control. In view of this, Vienna was extraordinarily pleased, if surprised, when the Prussian minister-president suggested a close collaboration between the two states and rejected the proposal for an independent principality.
It was a virtuoso performance. By demonstrating the impotence of the Confederation to the German national movement, Bismarck wholly discredited it as the vehicle for unification. The German Confederation could not deliver a German state against the Danes. But by luring Austria into a repudiation of the Augustenburg plan, Bismarck demonstrated that Austria too could not be relied on to vindicate German nationalism. By securing an alliance with Austria, he divided it from France, the one party that might have saved the Habsburg Empire once Prussia turned on it. And by selecting a field of confrontation so remote from Austria as Schleswig-Holstein, Bismarck guaranteed that, when the time was right, he could force a conflict with a now isolated Austria and annex the duchies to Prussia.
In creating an alliance with Austria, he excluded the German Confederation. This was accomplished by persuading the Austrians that the principle on which they must stand was the sanctity of international law; the Confederation, after all, was not a signatory to the Treaty of London. Moreover, Bismarck claimed to be upholding the rights of the state-nation against the national movements that threatened it, in this case the Danish. When, Prussia having proposed to annex the duchies, Austria was forced to fall back on the pro-Augustenburg position, she fatally embarrassed herself with the German national movement and gave Prussia the casus belli that permitted Moltke's armies to take the field.
All this falls into place if we appreciate Bismarck as the architect of the nation-state, as opposed to a champion of nationalism. Perhaps the most important insight into his aims is contained in his own words: “If revolu-tion there is to be, let us rather undertake it than undergo it.”84
Despite his frequent and passionate claims to the contrary, Bismarck was not inclined to protect the state-nations of Europe, including its empires. Rather he aimed to destroy the Concert built out of them with a new creation, the nation-state.* In so doing he was internationalizing the constitutional struggle in which he was engaged in Prussia, and he was deploying a strategic style of confrontation that was uniquely suited to the popular resources and moral passions of the nation-state.
The mortal risk to the Vienna system of state-nations lay in the kind of warfare conducted by the nation-state. As Lothar Gall has observed of the 1866 campaign:
The danger, as Bismarck knew, was considerably increased by the type of war that the Prussian military leadership, under the influence of… Moltke, envisaged waging. From the start it was no limited engagement in the style of eighteenth century warfare that they planned, one answering to possibly wide-ranging but at the same time precisely defined and hence limited political objectives; what they had in mind was an unlimited, “total” war that aimed to destroy the opponent's military might as completely as possible.85
It is no coincidence that the appearance of the nation-state—in the United States owing to the Civil War, in Europe owing to the unification of Germany—was accompanied by the strategic style of total war.* If the nation governed the state, and the nation's welfare provided the state's reason for being, then the enemy's nation must be destroyed—indeed, that was the way to destroy the state. Whereas Napoleon and the state-nation had reversed this, as for them it was necessary to destroy the state by threatening the state apparatus with annihilation, for the nation-state it was necessary to annihilate the vast resources in men and matériel that a nation could throw into the field, quickly through encirclement (Moltke's method), or less quickly if necessary through the attrition of economic resources (Sherman's method). It was only when nuclear weapons made the divided superpowers mutually and mortally vulnerable that the nation-state and the style of total war it dictated were undermined (at least as to these powers and their allies).
Moltke's strategy led to the overwhelming defeat of the Austrians at Koniggratz and Sadowa on July 3, 1866, and the peace of July 27 of that year. This time there was no congress to sort out the results. The Prussian peace terms were moderate, nonnegotiable, and perfectly understandable in light of the objective of creating a nation-state, though puzzling from the perspective of a state-nation (as indeed they completely bewildered William I). Austria made no surrenders of territory. Even the customary war indemnity demanded of the loser was quite reasonable, much of it being composed of a cancellation of Prussian debts. The principal changes were political: Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and what had been the free city of Frankfurt all were to lose their independent status and become provinces of Prussia, as were the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
Bismarck next turned to the question of the southern states of Germany. The peace treaty of Prague in 1866 confined Prussia to an area north of the river Main. His strategy for annexing the states beyond the Main appeared at the time extraordinarily indirect and improbable, but it was made successful nonetheless by virtue of a remarkable stroke of political luck. For Bismarck did not threaten these states directly—which would have united Austria and France against him—but rather brought them under his control by virtue of a conflict over Spanish succession, of all things. If we keep in mind his goal of building a new constitutional order, however, and put to one side the more usual goals of simple territorial aggrandizement and accretion, his success does not seem all that roundabout. It was only necessary for him to build, by every means at his disposal, a sense of the German nation in the southern states, and then wait for the international opportunity that would allow him to unite that sense with Moltke's army corps.
Bismarck first concluded a set of secret military alliances with the south German states. Then he announced a proposal for a common customs union, to be governed by a parliament elected on the basis of universal suffrage for the entire area of the union, which included Southern and Northern Germany. He then covertly disclosed to the press a secret deal wherein Napoleon III had agreed to purchase Luxembourg from the king of the Netherlands. When news of this broke, a wave of patriotic emotion carried the southern states into the new parliament in June 1867.
Of course, in such a parliament, as he was well aware, he immediately began to confront the same political opposition he had encountered in the Prussian parliament. Popular opinion was far more influential in the nascent nation-state than it had been in the state-nation, but Bismarck had to risk its antagonism and even opposition if he was to harness its energy. In the election to the new parliament Bismarck's allies were crushed, just as his forces had been routed repeatedly in Prussian elections. Bismarck bided his time.
In 1868 Queen Isabella of Spain was overthrown; the successful insurgents now looked for a new monarch. They offered the crown to Prince Leopold of the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, Prussia's dynastic family. This in itself did not fire Bismarck's ambitions for the Prussian ruling house, contrary to the conclusions of historians analyzing this offer from the state-nation's point of view. Napoleon I may have wanted his relatives on all the thrones proximate to his; Bismarck was after something else. Rather, he feared that if the Hohenzollern candidate rejected the offer, the Spanish would turn to the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria, the principal south German state that opposed his long-range plans. If this happened, Bismarck told a nonplussed William I on March 9, 1870, the Spanish ruling house would maintain “contacts with anti-national elements in Germany and afford them a secure if remote rallying point.”86
This did not persuade William, who was often baffled by his minister-president. In the middle of March the king cast the only vote in the Prussian Crown Council against the Hohenzollern candidacy of Prince Leopold. The king's opposition was sufficient; on April 20 Leopold and his father sent the Spanish government a formal notification of their refusal. By June, however, Bismarck had been able to turn this around, all the time keeping to the pretense that this was purely a dynastic affair. The acceptance by Leopold on June 19 was followed by the consent of the Prussian king two days later. Now the trap was baited.
What Bismarck counted on was an intemperate reaction by Napoleon III. If this could be provoked, then
German national feeling would all of a sudden come into play: the nation would feel humiliated through its protecting power, Prussia, and would demand appropriate counter-measures. [That] would result in all misgivings and reservations with regard to Prussia and Prussian control being thrust into the background, at least temporarily. One could then expect to see a kind of national united front comprising the vast majority of existing parties and political forces with corresponding repercussions on the future shape of Central Europe.87
On July 4, two days after the announcement by the Spanish of the Hohenzollern acceptance, the Prussian ambassador was summoned to hear a sharply worded threat from the French foreign minister as well as the prime minister. The ambassador agreed to report these directly to the Prussian king at Bad Ems, where William had gone for a holiday. Two days later the French foreign minister announced in the Chamber of Deputies that
[w]e do not believe that respect for the rights of a neighbor people obliges us to suffer a foreign power to disturb the present balance of power in Europe to our disadvantage… [The French government relies on] the wisdom of the German… people….[But] should things turn out otherwise we shall know… how to do our duty without hesitation and without weakness.88
At this point the French ambassador, Benedetti, hurried to Bad Ems. On July 9 he delivered a formal complaint to the Prussian king. As arranged by Bismarck, the king replied simply that he had given his consent as the head of the Hohenzollern family and not as king of Prussia; the decision had been one for Leopold's branch of the family to decide. The conciliatory king nevertheless then promptly wrote to Leopold's father on July 10 suggesting that his son withdraw. On July 12 Prince Leopold announced that he was no longer a candidate.
However they may have appeared, so far things were going Bismarck's way. He knew he could count on the king's genuine aversion to war and his willingness to compromise. Now Bismarck's judgment of Napoleon III and the French leader's invincible vanity, as well as recent developments on the French political scene, came to bear. Through the Prussian ambassador in Paris the French government demanded not only formal approval of the withdrawal but also a declaration on the part of the king that in consenting to the candidature he had had no desire to offend the interests and honor of the French nation, and, further, that he would enter into a binding commitment never to give his consent to such a candidacy in the future. It was now possible for Bismarck to spring the trap by disclosing these demands to the German public and demonstrating that France was attempting to use the king's obvious love of peace and willingness to compromise to humiliate him and with him Prussia and the German nation that relied on Prussia as its military arm. Thus when the king sent his reply to the French through Bismarck, the latter cut the “Ems Dispatch” to only two sentences and distributed it to all Prussian diplomatic missions late in the evening of July 13 for immediate publication. A legend has grown up around Bismarck's behavior at this point—Winston Churchill renders it unforgettably89—that Bismarck doctored the dispatch. The “revised” message went:
His Majesty the King has refused to receive the French ambassador again and has informed the latter through the duty adjutant that His Majesty has nothing further to say to the ambassador…90
The original had spoken only of “an adjutant” and the part about having nothing to say had referred explicitly to the present state of information. This was the final snap of the trap. French reaction, which would have been imprudent enough in the hands of Napoleon III, was now a matter of French public opinion. Bismarck could count on France responding so vehemently that Prussia could take its newly won national solidarity into the field. The French mobilized on July 14, 1870, and declared war on July 19, 1870. With this declaration, the formal legal requirements of the alliance treaties with the south German states were triggered, probably unnecessarily for ever since the publication of the Ems Dispatch, German national opinion had been passionately behind the Prussian king.
There was some further maneuvering. Bismarck leaked to The Times a handwritten draft of a treaty by Benedetti that spoke of France acquiring Belgium (without disclosing the date, which was 1866), and this doubtless reinforced the decision of the British not to get involved. But the main brake on intervention by third parties was the general understanding of the situation by the great powers: as in 1866 they completely misread what was actually happening. The leaderships in these states were convinced that this was a war to adjust international tensions, that it involved a local territorial conflict that would be resolved by a limited war. They had lived so long within the rules of the Vienna system that they appear to have thought them self-executing. All states knew it was in the self-interest of the state-nation system to avoid the destruction of any other state; the constitutional form of the state-nation and its precarious relation to the public demanded this restraint, as Castlereagh had taught. They were unprepared for a strategic challenge shaped by a new kind of state, whose constitutional legitimacy required the destruction of the system that had prevented German national unification. If Prussia was to establish itself as the legitimate state of the German nation, the system of collective security that had kept the German people fragmented must be smashed and a new method of validation for the State put in its place.
The German mobilization order came on the night of July 15, 1870. When complete the Prussian army had over a million men under arms. Against this the French—who fielded a professional, veteran force, experienced in combat, with modern weapons—could at best call on 350,000. In eighteen days, six Prussian rail lines and three additional lines for South Germans transported ten corps, 426,000 troops, to the front. By August 18, one of the two main French armies had fallen back on the fortress of Metz, which capitulated after a long siege. The other French force, attempting to relieve the fortress, was intercepted, driven against the Belgian frontier at Sedan, and surrounded. It surrendered on September 1 with Napoleon III and 104,000 men, who became prisoners of war.
The Germans invested Paris on September 18 but held only a narrow corridor to the capital. The French still had significant resources. Four new armies were raised in the French provinces. Bismarck, concerned that time was inevitably on the side of the French, who commanded the sea and could thereby bring fresh supplies from abroad, demanded an immediate bombardment of Paris. Moltke demurred, on grounds that he lacked sufficient guns for an effective attack, and argued that an unsuccessful bombardment would merely strengthen resistance. The king, however, sided with Bismarck, and as more heavy artillery arrived, Moltke commenced a furious shelling of the city on January 5, 1871. Armistice negotiations began on January 23 and Paris surrendered on January 28.
William I was proclaimed emperor of Germany in January at Versailles, the southern states having signed treaties the preceding month creating a united German state. Sovereignty lay in the Bundesrat, but the leading role of Prussia was obvious: of the sixty-one votes in this assembly, Prussia had seventeen, Bavaria six, Saxony and Wurttemberg four each, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt three each, and all the others one apiece. Bismarck became the imperial chancellor, the only responsible federal minister, replicating on the national scale his precarious but decisive role in the Prussian parliament. In September he had electrified Europe by demanding the cession of Alsace-Lorraine. It is still debated whether this was the result of an attempt to capitalize on German nationalist sentiment or was rather the natural aggrandizement of a supremely successful military campaign. In all likelihood it was neither: restoring these ancient lands, which had been taken from Germany by France, was a way of creating a certain kind of state, a state that the nation felt belonged to it.
This was not lost on all other national leaders. In England, Benjamin Disraeli—who did as much to create the nation-state in Britain as any other nineteenth century leader—remarked with much prescience to Parliament in February 1871:
This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century… Not a single principle on the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. You have a new world…91
Unification was both the outcome of, and in some cases the cure for, nationalism. German nationalism, which sought to embody the political and cultural aspirations of the German people, was employed as a means of stifling Danish and Polish nationalism. Italian nationalism crushed the incipient national revolts in Naples and the national ambitions of Venetia. In both Italy and Germany, it would be as correct to say that a single state-nation conquered the others and transformed itself and them, as to say that a new state arose from the coming together of independent, ethnically connected states.
After 1871, a new society of nation-states gradually emerged. Its mood was one of easily inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence. This reflected the public mood, excited by the press on a scale impossible before the spread of free compulsory public education and vastly increased literacy. Three new ideas vied in the public mind for attention and allegiance: Darwinism, which had been easily adulterated into a social credo of competitiveness and national survivalism; Marxism, with its hostility to the capitalist relationships of the industrial age; and bourgeois parliamentarianism, which promoted the rule of law in a national and an international society that was becoming increasing credulous about the role that law
could play. It was thus an age of faith in law even if the bases for legal consensus were at the time being quickly eroded, an age of anxiety in class relationships, an age of ethnomania within states. The contrast with the world it replaced could not have been greater.* One can scarcely imagine a leader of a state-nation speaking as Bismarck did in explaining the new spirit of the age:
Who rules in France or Sardinia is a matter of indifference to me once the government is recognized and only a question of fact, not of right…. [F]or me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or St. Louis…. I know that you will reply that fact and right cannot be separated, that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you posit antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, “I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”92
This is the authentic voice of the nation-state. Regimes may come and go, but the nation endures. International law conformed itself to this new society: how a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established.† Self-determination—the right of nations to have states of their own—became the only principle recognized in international law that detracted from the axiomatic legitimacy of the government that was in control.
It was obvious at the time that the nation-state bore certain strategic risks that were inherent in the kind of political society on which such a state depends.‡ In his last public statement, in 1890, Moltke issued an ominous and melancholy warning. With such states, the old warrior said, which depended upon and at the same time inflamed popular passions, future wars could last “seven and perhaps thirty years.”93 This Tiresian forecast takes us back to Part I and the Long War.
There are, of course, other examples of the transition from state-nation to nation-state. Lincoln brought about the first of these constitutional transformations. As James McPherson aptly puts it, “The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation.”94 This constitutional transformation, like the others we have studied, was accompanied by a revolution in strategy. Indeed, it may be said that it was Lee's adoption of the state-nation tactics of Napoleon I—tactics at which Lee excelled—that ultimately proved fatal to the Southern cause in the American Civil War. In the Wars of the French Revolution, Napoleon had been able to blast a hole in the enemy's line with canister fired by massed batteries of artillery, using fire against a line in much the same way a breach in a fortress wall might be opened. But by the time of the Civil War, infantry were armed with the Minié ball rifle, which had a greater effective range than canister. Moreover, with a range four times that of the smooth-bore musket carried by Napoleon's troops, the rifled barrels of the Union soldiers at Gettysburg doomed the frontal assaults that had been favored by the Grande Armée. Neither cannon nor charges could dislodge an entrenched defensive position, 95 and indeed the campaigns of 1864 – 1865 were marked by extensive entrenchments and field fortifications.96 By the end of the Civil War, major battles had more in common with operations on the Western Front in World War I—the initial campaigns of the nation-state's epochal war—than with early Civil War battles like First Manassas or Shiloh. But it was not the constitutional and strategic developments in America that gave Europe its model for the nation-state, in any case.*
One state more than any other in Europe had used the new developments in warfare to change itself. The Prussian solution to the danger of arming the public and the requirement of vast numbers of soldiers to exploit the opportunities of decisive battle was to militarize the entire society. After the 1873 depression, the German state nationalized the railroads, introduced compulsory social insurance, and increased its intervention in the economy—in order to maximize the welfare of the nation.97 Through-out the nineteenth century Britain refused to adopt a mass conscript army; it was Prussia that militarized as it industrialized. The railways, telegraph, and standardization of machined tools that industrialization made possible allowed for dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. The use of the telegraph, in concert with the railroad, allowed generals to mass widely dispersed forces quickly and to coordinate their operations over a vast theatre. During the Civil War, the Union Army shifted 25,000 troops, with artillery and baggage, over 1,100 miles of rail lines from Virginia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in less than ten days. An entire society could be mobilized for war, replenishing the front when necessary as the conflict progressed. But this was only possible if that entire society could be made a party to the war. This was the contribution of the nation-state. Far from being the paradoxical fact it is sometimes presented as, Bismarck's championing of the first state welfare systems in modern Europe, including the first social security program, was crucial to the perception of the State as deliverer of the people's welfare.* If the wars of the state-nations were wars of the State that were made into wars of the peoples, then the wars of the nation-states were national wars, championing causes that had deep popular support, and that were fought on behalf of popular ideals. The legitimation of the nation-state thus depends upon its success at maintaining modern life; a severe economic depression will undermine its legitimacy in a way that far more severe financial crises scarcely shook earlier regimes.98
Bismarck essentially bargained with the peoples of the various states of the North German Confederation to deliver German nationalism by means of Prussian aggression. There was no a priori reason why Prussia, feared and in many German quarters hated, was the natural leader of German nationalism nor any reason why Austria could not have been Germany's champion. The difficulty for Austria lay in the fact that it was necessarily a state-nation: its empire was composed of so many nationalities that it could not, constitutionally, adapt. The difficulty for the liberal states of the Confederation was that they could not marshal the material resources to exploit the military revolution wrought by industrialization. Only Prussia was without both these handicaps. Thus Prussia was the first European state to successfully unite the strategic and constitutional innovations of its time. Koniggratz, Gravelotte, and Sedan redeemed the Prussian pledge, and, in the doing, created a modern nation-state defined by the ethnicity of its people.
This new form of the state undertook to guide and manage the entire society, because without the total effort of all sectors of society, modern warfare could not be successfully waged. Not only the power of the State but its responsibility as well were extended into virtually all areas of civil life. All aspects of life were accordingly promised to improve. We hear its voice in Wilhelm II's famous assertion, “Herrlichen Zeiten führe ich euch noch entgegen” (“they are marvelous times towards which I will yet lead you”), 99 a public relations remark one can scarcely imagine in the mouth of his dignified and reticent grandfather.