What is a “state-nation,” this curious phrase that seems no more than a typographer's inversion of a familiar term in political science? A state-nation is a state that mobilizes a nation—a national, ethnocultural group—to act on behalf of the State. It can thus call on the revenues of all society, and on the human talent of all persons. But such a state does not exist to serve or take direction from the nation, as does the nation-state. This is quite clear in the case of Napoleonic France, which incorporated many nations within its territory, but suppressed nationalism wherever it encountered it outside France.* It is equally true of the British Empire. By contrast, the nation-state, a later phenomenon, creates a state in order to benefit the nation it governs. This, of course, raises the familiar late-nineteenth century (and twentieth century) question of self-determination: when does a nation get a state? This question is nonsense to the state-nation. One might say that the process of decolonization in the twentieth century was the confrontation of nascent nation-states like Ireland or India or Indochina with state-nation forms, like Britain and France.†
To understand the development of the state-nation, the French example is particularly illustrative, for there a single leader can be shown to have appreciated the strategic demands that put the old regime under such pressure (indeed these same demands threatened to destroy the revolutionary Directory) and to have instituted the constitutional innovations that transformed the State. Here, also, an epochal war provided the occasion for the adoption of these innovations throughout Europe.
The Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) pitted France against all the other major states of Europe, sometimes in coalition, sometimes standing alone. This epochal war—throughout the nineteenth century it was known as the Great War4—can be conveniently broken down into twelve successive interconnected conflicts:
(1) The war of the First Coalition (1792 – 1797) was a war begun by Austria against revolutionary France. In September 1791 the French National Assembly dissolved itself and announced that the Revolution was over; a new Assembly was elected and a constitution put in place. The Revolution, however, was only getting underway. The French king and queen secretly appealed to the queen's brother, the Habsburg ruler of Austria, Leopold II, for assistance. Leopold had already allowed French émigré forces to organize and arm; on July 6, 1791, he invited the other powers to join a coalition to stop the course of the Revolution. On August 21 Austria and Prussia announced that they regarded the situation in France as a matter of interest to all European sovereigns. For its part, the French Legislative Assembly was in a truculent mood. “It may be,” one member wrote to his constituents in December, “that as a matter of sound and wise policy the Revolution has need of a war to consolidate it.”5 On March 1, 1792, the Assembly voted for war. Prussia supported Austria, and their joint armies invaded France in the summer of 1792.
At Valmy, a hundred miles from Paris, the French won a decisive vic-tory. A new Assembly was chosen, to be called a “convention” after the American constitutional convention.* The Convention proclaimed France a republic, offered French aid to all nations that wished to overthrow their oppressive regimes, and condemned the French king to the guillotine. Following the withdrawal of allied forces after Valmy, the French invaded Austrian territories, occupying Brussels and annexing Savoy and Nice. The Convention declared war against Great Britain and the Dutch Republic in February 1793 and against Spain in March. British subsidies induced a number of states to join the expanding allied forces: Portugal, Piedmont-Sardinia, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples, as well as various German states allied with Prussia and Austria.
The force built up by this alliance shook the French armies. Their commander, Dumouriez, the victor at Valmy, was defeated in March and subsequently defected to the enemy, taking with him the minister of war. In October the Constitution of 1793 was suspended, and the Reign of Terror began. After putting down revolts in Lyons, Marseilles, and Toulon, French forces faced the coalition and won a resounding victory at Fleurus on June 25. As soon as it became apparent that France could not be easily crushed, the European coalition faltered. The Prussians made peace in March 1795; Spain, three months later. The Netherlands were defeated by France and occupied. Only Britain and Austria refused to concede.
In 1796 the young French general Napoleon Bonaparte opened his first Italian campaign, defeating the Austrians repeatedly until in April 1797 they agreed to a truce, followed by a peace treaty between the two states. “Napoleon's Italian campaigns of 1796 – 7 seemed almost miraculous; twelve victories in a year, announced in bulletins which struck the world like thunderclaps.”6 The First Coalition now dissolved completely, but the British still refused to make peace.
(2) A new campaign was begun against Britain through Egypt (1798 – 1801) by Bonaparte, who sought a route by which to conquer India and to menace the Ottoman possessions in the Near East. While this was going on, France began a series of campaigns on the Italian peninsula. These commenced (3) the War in Central Europe (1798 – 1799). France swept the Papal States (1798), Piedmont-Sardinia (1798), and Naples (1799) when she was welcomed as a liberator. The ambitions of Bonaparte toward the Levant succeeded in alarming the tsar, who responded to a proposal from London that he organize a second alliance. This proposal, drafted by Pitt, laid out the program that was the blueprint for the ultimate settlement in Vienna sixteen years later.
(4) The War of the Second Coalition (1798 – 1802) was prosecuted against France by Britain, Austria, and Russia. Prussia did not join, nor, as Pitt had hoped, did the three great powers pledge themselves not to make peace separately. By the summer of 1799, allied forces had driven France from German territory and inflicted severe defeats on the French in Italy and Switzerland; France itself appeared threatened with invasion and the ruling Directory was discredited. In October, however, French forces rallied and forced the Russians out of Switzerland while defeating and expelling an Anglo-Russian force that had attempted to invade the Batavian Republic (as the Netherlands had now become under French occupation). On October 22, the disillusioned tsar withdrew from the coalition.
That same week, Bonaparte suddenly reappeared in Paris from Egypt; in November a coup d‘état ended the Directory and established the Consulate; by the close of 1799 Bonaparte had made himself first consul and head of the French Republic.
He could not claim legitimacy for himself on dynastic grounds, but he had no intention of relying on assemblies either (and thus was not interested in the form of the territorial state). Nor did he wish to remain the condottiere of the Directory. Throughout his dictatorship he showed a canny appreciation for the symbols of the French state and of how the French nation could be put at the service of that state. “Clearly, the decisive factor throughout was Napoleon's hold on the imagination of the French people at a moment when they felt themselves threatened by a renewal of Jacobin terror [at home] and invasion [from abroad].”7
With Bonaparte's victory at Marengo in June of 1800 and Moreau's at Hohenlinden in December, the second allied coalition fell completely apart. France succeeded in signing a peace treaty with Austria at Luneville in February 1801 and with England at Amiens* in 1802.
Bonaparte's handling of the continental states arrayed against him reflected a shrewd appreciation of their constitutional basis. So long as he faced territorial states, he could outmaneuver their coalitions by offering one of their members substantial territorial cessions; that state realized that if these were refused, another state might accept offers made to it, thus bringing down the coalition and weakening the bargaining power of the resisting state. Russia, Prussia, and Austria each revealed a willingness to settle with France if offered a sufficient territorial inducement.8 This tactic had been well understood by Frederick the Great, but in him it was deployed for the limited territorial objectives of the territorial state. With Bonaparte, this technique was used in service of the unlimited, imperial objectives of the state-nation.
France was transformed into a new constitutional entity. After Amiens, Bonaparte declared, “Citizens, the Revolution is now settled in the principles which started it,” meaning that a new state had been created that embodied those principles. That state, however, was far different from what had been envisioned in the heady days of 1789.9 A referendum was now proposed to determine whether Bonaparte should be consul for life. This plebiscite resulted in an enthusiastic endorsement for a quasi-iimperial regime. Fresh hostilities that reopened against England in May 1803 moved France further along the constitutional path of the state-nation. The French Senate in 1804 sent an address to Bonaparte after an assassination attempt, urging that the Consulate for Life be changed to an hereditary empire subject to a new public referendum. “The government of the Republic,” the address stated, “is now entrusted to an emperor. Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul, is Emperor of the French.”
But only when each of Napoleon's victim states had become persuaded that it must change in order to save itself, did a society come into being that can properly be called a society of state-nations. In the meantime, there lay twelve more years of war. The same week in May that Bonaparte assumed the title of Napoleon I, Pitt returned to power in England and at once began to organize yet another alliance against France. British subsidies succeeded in bringing first the Russians, in November 1805, and later the Austrians, in August, into a league that fought (5) the War of the Third Coalition (1803 – 1807).
On October 20 the Austrians were crushed at Ulm, and on November 13, the French army entered Vienna. Only ten days earlier the British and Russians had induced Prussia to join the coalition. On December 2, Napoleon defeated the combined Austrian-Russian armies at Austerlitz. On December 15 Napoleon offered the formerly British seat of Hanover to Prussia and wrecked the Third Coalition. That same month harsh terms were imposed on the recalcitrant Austrians: the Habsburgs were excluded from Italy; an indemnity of forty million gold francs was paid; and Germany was reorganized—Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden became states allied with France and, with a dozen German states, formed the Confederation of the Rhine with Napoleon as Protector. The Confederation pledged 80,000 troops to France in case of war. When Napoleon announced that he would no longer recognize the Holy Roman Empire, it was dissolved. The Habsburg ruler henceforth styled himself Francis I, Emperor of Austria.
Throughout the summer of 1806, Napoleon negotiated with Britain and Russia, the only members of the Coalition still in the field. When Prussia dispatched an ultimatum to France on learning that Napoleon had offered to return Hanover to Britain in these negotiations, Napoleon immediately struck back. At Jena on October 14 the Prussian forces were destroyed, and two weeks later Napoleon occupied Berlin.* Napoleon now turned against Russia. At the battle of Friedland the Russians were defeated, and the tsar, Alexander I, agreed to a truce that matured into the Peace of Tilsit. This agreement brought Russia not only out of hostilities but into alliance with France. In November 1807, Russia declared war on Britain.
(6) The Franco-Austrian War was a desperate attempt by Austria to exploit French preoccupation with a Spanish uprising, supported by Britain in (7) the Peninsular War (1807 – 1813), and to seize the initiative in Central Europe. Like the Prussians, who seethed under French oversight, the Austrians prepared for a nationalist struggle against French imperialism. Indeed, it has been remarked that “[h]itherto, Napoleon had fought governments; after 1807 he found himself fighting nations,”10 a crucial development in the evolution of the state-nation from territorial states. Napoleon's victory at Wagram, however, dashed Austrian hopes before Prussian forces could even be brought into play. Austria was forced to cede territory to the Confederation of the Rhine, to Saxony, and to the Italian kingdom. Russia, which had taken Finland from Sweden in (8) the Russo-Swedish War of 1808, was now given Austrian territory in Poland. In March, Napoleon signed a marriage treaty with the daughter of Emperor Francis, and a proxy marriage took place in Vienna two days later.
The Franco-Russian alliance had not kept Austria from making war against France, as Napoleon had planned; nor had it provided Russia with the promised partition of Turkey, where Russia had been at war since 1806 in (9) the Russo-Turkish War. Thus in 1812, Napoleon concluded treaties with Prussia and Austria requiring those states to provide 20,000 and 60,000 troops, respectively, to attack Russia. By spring he had accumulated forces totaling 600,000 men. Alexander responded quickly: he made peace with the Turks; received secret assurances from the Prussians and Austrians that they would not in fact make war against Russia; formed an alliance with Britain; and negotiated an accord with the Spanish insurgents. One may say that (10) the Russian Campaign of 1812 laid the foundation for (11) the War of the Fourth Coalition (1812 – 1814), which ultimately defeated Napoleon and deposed him. The final campaign in this epochal war was begun with the flight of Napoleon from Elba, an island to which he had been exiled by the Coalition. The One Hundred Days (12) ended shortly after the French defeat at Waterloo.
Napoleon inherited the strategic problems created by the French Revolution. It is true that a revolution in war had been underway for some time, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the strategic innovations of this era would have occurred quite as they did without Napoleon's leadership, or that the state-nation he brought into being was simply the result of revo-utionary ideology. As the Duke of Wellington put it,
[Napoleon] was the Sovereign of the country as well as the military chief of the army. That country was constituted upon a military basis. All its institutions were framed for the purpose of forming and maintaining its armies with a view to conquest. All the offices and rewards of the State were reserved in the first instance exclusively for the army.11
It is important to understand precisely what strategic innovations Napoleon relied upon, and then to briefly chronicle his experience with them. That will lead us to an understanding of the state-nation form he created.*
The most important of these military innovations was the adoption by the Convention of something approaching universal conscription—the levée en masse—which produced an enormous increase in the number of soldiers. This changed the type of soldier available to French commanders, but it also enabled them to fight a different sort of campaign, and to fight more campaigns.
Describing the posture of Austria and Prussia at the outset of the French Revolution, Clausewitz noted that the two countries resorted to the kind of limited war that the previous century had made familiar in Europe. People at first expected to deal only with a seriously weakened French army; but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people—a people of thirty millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens… and consequently the opponents of France faced the utmost peril.12
This political and social change led to far larger armies and thus to important developments in strategy and tactics. After 1800 Napoleon normally fought his campaigns with more than 250,000 troops, in contrast to the 75,000-man armies of the early and middle eighteenth century.
Second, the reform of the artillery arm by Gribeauval* and du Teil—whose brother was one of Napoleon's patrons and instructors—had created the most efficient and mobile artillery in Europe. Third, the separation of armies into autonomous and self-sufficient divisions that could proceed along several different roads simultaneously gave greater speed and flexibility to strategic movement. Fourth, the use of light skirmishers, who were detached from the line and could be shifted to harass, mask, or exploit, operated to confuse an enemy accustomed to fixed formations in which an encounter implied contact with an element of the main force. Fifth, the change from the line, which had emphasized defensive fire, to the attacking column, which emphasized shock—that is, the change from l'ordre mince to l'ordre profond—increased the sheer violence of battle as well as making use of less trained soldiers whose enthusiasm could compensate for their understandable reluctance to stand mutely while absorbing fire. The column could deploy large numbers of raw recruits, whereas the firing line required a steadiness and discipline that only highly trained troops could muster. Altogether, there was a “revolution in war” composed of the great increase in the number of soldiers, far larger and more sophisticated administrative services, innovative infantry tactics and technical improvements in artillery that “for the first time made possible the close co-ordination of infantry, cavalry and artillery in all phases of combat.”13
Such armies awaited a commander who could disperse them along many routes, bringing them together at a decisive moment to crush the enemy in one state-shattering battle. Paret has speculated about the effect of these innovations had there been no Napoleon, that is, how they might have been used to create a French territorial state:
All that we know… suggests that had Napoleon been killed before Toulon… France would have ceased or at least slowed its efforts to destroy the European balance of power. Without his insistence on the immense exertions demanded by Europe-wide wars, the government would probably have been content with securing France's “natural” frontiers… Had further wars been waged, [the] Revolution and the transformation of war would still have left France the most powerful country in Europe but a country integrated in the political community, rather than dominating and indeed almost abolishing it.14
This strikes me as exactly right: but for Napoleon, France would have joined the society of territorial states instead of attempting to supplant it. And this speculation is important for our wider study, because it suggests that a revolution in military affairs is not sufficient, without further human agency, to bring a new constitutional order into being.
The French entered warfare in 1792 to defend their Revolution against invading reactionary forces; they continued these wars to spread the gospel of revolution to other states; and finally France pursued war to aggrandize the French state, which was represented as the embodiment of the Revolu-tion. It is usually said that this progression represents a complete shift—from missionary crusade to imperial engorgement—but this fails to appreciate the constitutional outcome of the Revolution, the new state-nation. For such a state, the expansion of the State—the state that represents the nation—is not at all incompatible with popular sovereignty, nor is the state-nation's subjection of other states, either as satellites or as colonies. All energies are bent to the triumph of the state as apotheosis of the nation, and thus the champion of the people.
That the armies of France, which had once been welcomed by nationalists in Germany and elsewhere, were to become the target of local patriotic hostility tends to obscure this point, but that is only because we see this from the perspective of the nation-state and of national liberation movements. The nationalism of the state-nation, which created the imperial state, focused the will of the nation in serving the state, building in a kind of paradox at the inception: the great state-nations existed to promote liberty and equality, constitutionalism, and the rule of law; and yet in order to aggrandize the State, which was the deliverer of national identity and political liberty, other nations were subjugated and alien institutions superimposed upon them.
Napoleon transformed strategy on the basis of two strategic insights that he ultimately also used to create a new constitutional vision of the State. The first of these insights had been prefigured by du Teil, who, in his work De l'usage de l'artillerie nouvelle dans la guerre de campagne (1778), had argued that concepts familiar in siege warfare could be employed on the battlefield, especially the way in which artillery fire could be concentrated to exploit a breach in the enemy's line of battle. Napoleon expanded this idea to an entire battle, and then, in his greatest innovation, to the enemy state itself. “Strategic plans are like sieges,” he wrote; “concentrate your fire against a single point. Once the breach is made, the balance is shattered and all the rest becomes useless.” Napoleon argued for the greatest concentration of force possible at a single point because this compelled the other side to give battle with armies sufficiently strong that their destruction would mean political collapse, threatening the very State itself. His strategy called for deep salients into enemy territory with large numbers of French troops. These penetrating maneuvers were managed by bringing autonomous divisions along many differ-ent routes to converge at a single point. As Sir Michael Howard has vividly described it,
[t]his decisive concentration arose from an initial dispersal of forces, a deployment so wide that it was impossible to discern in advance where Napoleon intended to strike. In 1805 these corps were quartered all over western Europe—northern France, the Netherlands, Hanover—and were brought together with perfect timing to surround the Austrian army at Ulm. Then they dispersed, to converge on the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. The following year they advanced northward, spread out like beaters, to destroy the Prussians at Jena.15
Because they were autonomous and relatively smaller, these corps could be expected to live off the land, and travel on roads that could not otherwise accommodate armies of the size that would achieve Napoleon's goal.
The result was a new mobility, which made possible the concentration of superior force at the decisive point. Against a greater enemy force, Napoleon sought the point at which their forces were divided. Typically, in the coalitions of territorial states, it was a point between different national forces—and defeated each in detail, as happened in Italy in 1796 and almost again at Waterloo. Against an inferior force, Napoleon sought the point at which the enemy's communications were most vulnerable, so that either the opposing commander was forced to fight at a disadvantage or capitulate, as happened at Ulm in 1805.16
Napoleon himself, like all great innovators perhaps, doesn't seem to have appreciated the strategic and political reasons why the armies of the territorial states had ever bothered to use the old tactics before he arrived to teach them new ones. In exile, Napoleon criticized the dispersal of forces by a French general in the 1799 campaign as a vicious habit that made it impossible to achieve important results. “But that was the fashion in those days,” he said sarcastically, “always to fight in little packets.”17 Fighting with much smaller armies within a system that permitted only minor gains and penalized risk, the territorial state performed according to a completely different strategic agenda. Napoleon freed French strategy from these restraints by adopting a different constitutional role for the French state that shattered the system that had imposed these restraints in the first place. This set the stage for Napoleon's second insight.
The strategic aim of preserving a balance of power, which is associated with the society of territorial states, reflected a quite different underlying political culture from one that sought collective security. Although we often think of maintaining the balance of power in a negative sense— states coalescing to defeat any attempt at hegemony—it also has an aspect of adjustment, in that whenever a member state is enlarged by gain, the others are given compensation to maintain the balance. This was the case, for example, in the partitions of Poland in 1772 and 1793. Thus the system is relatively tolerant of violence, so long as it is limited both as to means and ends. A collective security system, by contrast, is wholly intolerant of interstate violence and calls on all members to check an attack from any source. It is perfectly conceivable that the latter should have developed after the continental struggles to contain Charles V, and later Louis XIV, but this did not happen, partly no doubt because the leader of the coalition against the hegemony of the Habsburgs then became the state that drove for hegemony itself, and partly because the new society of states in Europe was still too fragile to evoke so strong a collective commitment from its members. Yet only such a system could have contained a state-nation of such dynamism as France under Napoleon's leadership.
In Napoleon history found an extremely aggressive and warlike personality mixed with an extraordinary talent for improvisation. He did not “regard war as an emergency measure, a measure of the last resort with which to repair the failures of diplomacy; instead it was the central element of his foreign policy.”18 He was thus able to turn the system he found in Europe against itself by playing on the competition among states inherent in the territorial system. Paret describes this well:
Nowhere was Napoleon's integration of diplomacy and violence more effective than in the manner in which he pursued the traditional goal of politically isolating a prospective opponent…. In December of [1805,] having seduced Prussia into neutrality, he defeated the Austrians and Russians. In 1806, England and Russia watched as the Prussian army was destroyed. The following spring he defeated the Prussian remnants and their Russian allies while Austria was still arming; and in 1809 Austria was once more defeated while potential supporters were still debating whether to come to its aid.19
Of course such a strategy depended on Napoleon first establishing his credibility—that he could, and would, actually put at risk stakes of his own such that battle would be on a scale and of such a ferocity as would jeopardize the survival of the state—and second, on molding a state that would permit such vast investments as to make these threats credible (as no territorial state could do).
There is a story told of the young Napoleon Bonaparte that is instructive in this respect. While a lieutenant in the artillery, he was present at the siege of Toulon, which he visited during a furlough. This city, then the center of resistance to the Revolution, sits at the midpoint of a bay forming a natural harbor and partly enclosed by heights at the harbor entrance. Napoleon is alleged to have advised the besieging revolutionary commander to move his artillery batteries from their position overlooking the city to the distant point that commanded the entrance to the bay. When this apparently counterintuitive advice—moving the besieging artillery beyond a range where it could shell the city—was taken, it had the effect of creating anxiety in the commander of the British fleet that lay in the harbor. He feared that French guns might cut off his means of exit. Accordingly he withdrew the fleet to a point beyond the mouth of the bay. When the British ships withdrew, however, morale among the citizens of Toulon collapsed, for they too had counted on an escape by sea should that prove necessary, and the city quickly surrendered. The remark attributed to Napoleon, as he pointed on the map to the remote edge of the harbor precipice, is “There lies Toulon.”20
Just as Napoleon generalized to battle and then to the campaign itself the lessons of an artillery siege, so he generalized to the prevailing European political system the mentality of the siege commander who plays upon the morale of the defenders to give him victory at a reasonable cost. This strategy nicely suited Napoleon's tactical sense: he was uninterested in the capture of fortresses or the occupation of terrain, because these could not force the collapse of will that the destruction of the enemy's army accomplished. A dramatic defeat not only led to further reversals and withdrawals, but eventually had the effect of forcing the opposing government to withdraw its support from the multistate coalition. To achieve such a defeat, Napoleon had to entice the enemy into committing his main force in battle. This could only be accomplished through deep penetrations of enemy territory with the greatest force possible, often leaving his own communications and rear completely exposed. One example of this can be found in the Austerlitz campaign of 1805. Napoleon induced the main Austro-Russian army to launch a premature offensive, not waiting for Russian and Austrian reinforcements, by playing on the Austrian desire to reoccupy Vienna. Another example can be found in the 1806 campaign against Prussia, in which Napoleon advanced toward Berlin, creating a threat to which the Prussians had to respond, in a tactical context in which they were diverted by their anxiety about their capital. In both these cases, he did not aim at mere territory, but instead struck at the state: the state was forced to fight, for essentially political reasons, and inevitably found Napoleon well-prepared militarily for the confrontation that he alone truly sought.
Indeed Napoleon's defeat in Russia came about when he was unable to force the Russians to commit their main army to a climactic battle to save Moscow. To the contrary, the Russians burned their own capital and left Napoleon's army to starve in it. Although Russia was very much a member of the European society of powers, she was not a territorial state and thus the legitimacy of her dynasty did not depend, conditionally, on the support of the nobility. Russia was perfectly capable of a defense in depth because she was not defined, constitutionally, by her territorial extent. Because she faced a French army that was hopelessly overextended while she herself had all of Russia to withdraw into, she did so, laying waste to her own territory as Russian forces retreated.* When on September 14, 1812, Napoleon entered an undefended Moscow, and it was set ablaze that night by the Russians, the tsar astonishingly refused to negotiate a peace. As French communications and supply links collapsed, Napoleon abandoned Moscow on October 19, but heavy snowfalls transformed the retreat into a catastrophe: the French suffered more than 300,000 casualties from exposure, starvation, and the harrying fire of Russian forces.21
Napoleon thus was defeated in Russia not because the territorial state had found a successful strategy to parry his innovative techniques. Nor were territorial states eager to adopt Napoleonic methods. Indeed the states who opposed France well realized that a fundamental shift in the nature of the state was a prerequisite to fielding a nation in arms by mass conscription, whose officers had been given open access to commissions, and which often was fed by requisition—although it gradually did appear that this could be done without the revolutionary upheavals that took place in France. When these changes did come, they spread to other states the state-nation model of government of which the Napoleonic state was an early example.
The new monarchies who came to power, after the Revolution of 1830, Louis Philippe and Leopold I, sought the sanction of “the people” as king “of the French” and “of the Belgians,” rather than of France or Belgium. Even the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, three years after crushing the Polish uprising of 1830 – 1831, proclaimed that his own authority was based on nationality (as well as autocracy and Orthodoxy)—and his word narodnost, also meaning “spirit of the people,” was copied from the Polish narodowosc.22
This model was very different from that of the nation-state, and Napoleon himself, as well as the architects of the Vienna state system that institutionalized his defeat, were careful not to nurture such states. For a time Napoleon enjoyed a reputation as a liberator, arising from his 1796 campaign in Italy, 23 in which, as a general of the Revolution, he prised Lombardy from the Austrians and established the Cisalpine Republic, whose capital was in Milan. But in the beginning of 1799, having annexed Tuscany and Piedmont, and having established republics in Rome and Naples, the Directory studiedly refused to assemble an Italian nation-state. Once Napoleon seized power he annexed Piedmont directly to France in 1802, and the Ligurian Republic, whose capital was Genoa, in 1805; in 1801 he had decreed a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic and was named president of what he agreed to call the Italian Republic. Belgium— the Austrian Netherlands—had been occupied in 1795 and formally annexed to France in 1797. The left bank of the Rhine had been annexed by France in 1797 and by 1803 all but three of the ecclesiastical princes had lost their sovereignty, as had all but six of the fifty-one imperial towns and cities. Several south German states were carved out or enlarged, but there was never any question of creating a new German state.
The kingdoms of Westphalia and Bavaria and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw were all French satellites. For a time Holland was made a kingdom under Napoleon's brother Louis, but when this monarch showed too much independence, the Dutch state was annexed directly to the French Empire. Joseph Bonaparte was first King of Naples, and was then replaced by the French marshal Murat when Joseph became king of Spain. In all of these states, important reforms were accomplished: serfdom was abolished (in varying practical degrees), French-style prefectures were set up in some of the German states, a civil code was introduced, and new written constitutions were promulgated. But at no time was there any contemplation of creating actual states whose legitimacy derived either from the fact that their institutions were expressions of national will or that they sought responsibility for the welfare of the nation. Napoleon's remark regarding the Polish Sejm (parliament) is instructive: “As for their deliberating assemblies, their liberum veto, their diets on horseback with drawn swords, I want nothing of that…. I want Poland only as a disciplined force, to furnish a battlefield.”24
Nor did the Peace Settlement of 1814 – 1815, following Napoleon's defeat, seek to create national states: quite the opposite. The claims of Hol-and were extended to include Belgium; Piedmont was enlarged to include Genoa and Nice, then handed over to the House of Savoy; Austria annexed Lombardy as well as Venice; Pius VII recovered the Papal States; and Poland was reorganized into little more than a province of Russia, three-quarters of the size of the Duchy of Warsaw, while most Poles lived elsewhere under Prussian, Austrian or Russian rule. The Federal Diet in Frankfurt was not to be a popularly elected parliament; on the contrary, it was to be a body of state representatives of thirty-nine different German governments, including Austria and Prussia, both of which lay partly outside the German Confederation. Sweden and Norway were joined in a forced marriage. And, interestingly for our study, England secured to herself the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and the Ionian Islands. Insofar as the wishes of the national peoples involved were contemplated at all, they were calculatedly frustrated.
Despite Napoleon's loss, however, the state-nation had triumphed and its imperatives were to govern not only the Peace Settlement but the peace itself. The myth that united strategy and law in every period became now a national myth, epitomized by the merging of the State into the personal and quasi-religious roles once occupied by princes.
National history was depicted by writers both of school textbooks and of popular works as the history of the Nation's military triumphs. Other Nations were defined by these authors in terms of military relations. Foreigners were people with whom one went to war and usually defeated, and if one had not done so the last time, one certainly would the next. [O]ne found personal fulfillment in making “the supreme sacrifice” so that the national cause might triumph…25
It is important to appreciate the characteristics of such a state in order to understand the nature of the international society composed of such states. Napoleon had forced every territorial state eventually to conform itself to the state-nation model if it was to compete militarily. Armies of conscripts, meritocratic and bourgeois ministries, broad-based taxation without exemptions for the nobility, all spread across Europe, just as mercenary and nonstate elements vanished from the forces of the great powers.26 Most importantly for our purposes, the triumph of the state-nation meant that the legitimacy of this constitutional form was recognized by the congress of states that wrote the peace. The creation of this congress we owe to one remarkable figure more than to any other, and it is perhaps only from the present perspective that we can truly appreciate his achievement.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822, was born in 1769, the same year as Napoleon, his great adversary, and Wellington, his principal political and personal ally. This proud, uncharismatic* man understood the requirements of the new society of state-nations and labored selflessly to bring about its harmony. At the time, he was little understood and greatly vilified; both Byron27 and Shelley† wrote remarkably cruel lines to immortalize their hatred of him, and even today he has yet to find a diplomatic biographer sufficiently attentive to his conceptions for Europe. For the most part such biographers are either apt to be defensive in tone28 or they are mesmerized by the voluptuous characters of his cynical contemporaries, Talleyrand and Metternich.29 From our current perspective, however, one can see in Castlereagh's work an achievement of such magnitude that it becomes clear how, despite the incomprehension of his successors and the hostility to his designs of his continental collaborators, it survived to give Europe peace for forty years. To appreciate this, let us revisit the endgame of the epochal French War, and its resolution at Vienna.
Having abandoned Russia, Napoleon was on the defensive in 1813. As he retreated from the Rhine late in that year, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees and successfully attacked Bayonne. Holland rose in revolt and expelled the French imperial civil and military officers. Early in November the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, made a peace overture that would have acknowledged French conquests through 1796, leaving Belgium, the German left bank, and Nice-Savoy under French rule. Napoleon rejected these terms. On December 21, the armies of the coalition crossed the Rhine, beginning the invasion of northern France. But in February, encouraged by recent victories in the field, the French emperor again rejected peace offers, this time confining France to the boundaries of 1792. Only at this juncture was Castlereagh able to secure an allied agreement, signed March 9 at Chaumont in Champagne, that the war should be fought out until a definitive victory had been won and, more importantly, that the alliance would continue after its victory. The language of the treaty is significant:
The present Treaty of Alliance having for its object the maintenance of a balance of Europe, to secure the repose and independence of the Powers, and to prevent the invasions which for so many years have devastated the world, the High Contracting Parties have agreed among themselves to extend its duration for twenty years from the date of signature.30
This treaty held the coalition together until the Peace of 1814 – 1815 was completed, providing the basis for the First and Second Treaties of Paris and for the Congress of Vienna. Chaumont is the source of “the first notable experiment in institutionalizing the principles of concert and balance in behalf of European peace,”31 where the key word is “institutionalize.” The Congress system took the wartime coalition of collective security and applied it to peacetime, in much the same way that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has operated in our own time, persisting beyond the Cold War to provide a framework for subsequent collective action in Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
It was Castlereagh's strategic innovation to use the wartime coalition to maintain the peace. To accomplish this, he undertook the following, highly difficult objectives: (i) he had to dismantle the Napoleonic superstate, while preserving the state-nation of France to such a degree that it would legitimate its new regime (rather than stigmatizing it as the collaborationist party that had sold out France to her enemies); (2) he had to persuade the allies that their cooperation in the face of tantalizing French offers and menacing French threats had ultimately been worthwhile, which meant that while British allies would receive substantial territorial gains, the British would not; (3) he had to institutionalize the directorate of the Congress so that it met regularly to continue multistate collaboration, and yet somehow keep it from turning into an instrument of internal repression when member-states felt threatened by revolutions in various European countries; (4) he had to win credible commitments of armed force of such overwhelming magnitude that no single power or coalition of two of the five great powers could be reasonably hopeful of success through war; (5) he had to do all these things while facing stiff opposition in his own party from George Canning, whose rhetorical gifts and skill at playing on public opinion he could not hope to match, and from Whigs who portrayed him as a mere henchman of the reactionary Metternich, and (6) he had to act in concert with Prussians who wanted a Carthaginian peace, Russians who were entertaining the idea of a continental hegemony at German expense, Austrians who felt threatened by the new development of the state-nation and its ability to exploit national sentiments, and the French, who saw England as their primary persecutor and the frustrator of their continental dreams.
Nor was the environment of the Congress suited to his virtues. Castlereagh was honorable and undevious; 32 Metternich and Talleyrand were notably, even ostentatiously, neither. Castlereagh was tolerant in religious matters (though an Anglo-Irish peer, he had long supported Catholic emancipation, and resigned from the government in 180133 when the king refused to sign the emancipation act) and modest in his deportment; by contrast, Tsar Alexander I, the most flamboyant and politically indispensable personage at the Congress, persuaded every single party attending to sign a declaration in behalf of a “decent Christian order” (except the Ottoman sultan, the Pope—who refused to sign along with Orthodox and Protestant monarchs—and Great Britain), kept spectacular mistresses, and was acknowledged even in this society as a narcissistic megalomaniac. Yet, despite all these obstacles, Castlereagh did to a very large degree succeed.
Castlereagh played, first, on the awareness of all parties that a few states, collectively, possessed preponderant armed force and second, on the fact that while any one of these states could mobilize an entire nation to inflict horrific damage on the others, any further international conflict was sure to arouse the will of nations to seize their states because the mobilization of entire national peoples produced a larger and more critical audience for public decisions. Between these two apprehensions, fear of military defeat and fear of domestic upheaval, Castlereagh strung his diplomatic strategy. As we will see, it really had very little to do with the “balance of power” as that term had been used in Europe since Utrecht, although labeling it as such gave it the status of precedent.
As we have observed, the eighteenth century armies fielded by territorial states were (compared to their successors) relatively small and highly professional. Prior to the 1790s a military treaty might call for the provision of a force of 18,000 or 24,000—reckoned in the Roman units of 6,000 soldiers associated with the legion. In a previous chapter, the increase in size brought about by Frederick the Great was noted; yet on only two or three occasions did he ever commit more than 50,000 men to a battle. The French levée en masse, a nationwide mobilization, transformed this scale. In 1808, on the eve of the campaign that ended at Wagram, Napoleon commanded some 300,000 troops in Spain, another 100,000 in France, some 200,000 in the Rhineland, and another 60,000 in Italy. One expert has calculated that between 1800 and 1815, the number of Frenchmen called up reached two million, of whom an estimated 400,000 died either in service or as a result of service in war.34 By the time of the Hundred Days, the Coalition was able to field quickly 750,000 men, of whom 225,000 converged on Waterloo. Such magnitudes transfixed the attention of every political leader in Europe. Armies of this size meant that a campaign prosecuted on a continental scale would risk destroying the state that waged it, as indeed the French state had been destroyed, but only if opposing forces of comparable size could be mustered.
This was the true balance in Castlereagh's calculations: a collective security force of such immense magnitude that it would deter any great power from aggression. As Ford has observed, Castlereagh's “position rested on the belief that genuine national interests, clearly recognized, could create in Europe an equilibrium of forces capable of rendering war unfeasible for any one power, or even for a coalition unless directed against a single aggressor.”35
To maintain such a coalition credibly required a commitment from all the major states. Even if the benefits to the common good justified a common effort, what was to prevent any single state from opting out of such an effort and still enjoying the fruits of general security? If the cost of a European conflict was so horrific, why wouldn't a state simply let the others fight—or not fight, for that matter? For if one state kept out, why would its rivals bleed themselves white in a conflict for the common good? If one state did keep out, why wouldn't the others do likewise, leaving the field to the most aggressive state? This problem required Castlereagh to exploit the second overwhelming impression of the wars that had just ended: wherever the war had been taken, large and hostile popular insurrections had been touched off. These occurred in Belgium in 1798, Naples in 1799 and 1806, Spain in 1808, and the Netherlands in 1811–1812. There is some dispute whether these were national uprisings or simply revolts of a familiar kind against the requisitioning by troops of foodstuffs, horses, and equipment. It is of no matter: in either case, war on an international scale meant unleashing popular national forces that the state could not control.
This was the problem of the state-nation, which, unlike the nation-state, had no broad-based elective assemblies to mediate strategic decisions and, speaking comparatively, little free press to articulate and educate public opinion. The state-nation, however, did have positive characteristics that Castlereagh understood perfectly. Its leadership was cosmopolitan, it could take decisions quickly and make commitments over the long term, and it possessed a mercantile and industrial tax base that could benefit from defense preparations and direct military expenditures. It was, in short, ideal for the innovation of the Congress, which Castlereagh introduced at Vienna, having insisted on provisions for this mechanism in the preceding treaties among the allies.
There had of course been other conferences and congresses before Vienna; two or three, the Westphalian conferences at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, and that at Utrecht in 1713, have been discussed, and form the subject of Part II in Book II. Those congresses, however, met for the sole purpose of arranging peace settlements—where settlement was the objective, including parceling out the territorial spoils of war. The Congress of Vienna was something new.* Of this Congress Metternich wrote,
No great political insight is needed to see that this Congress could not be modeled on any which had taken place. Former assemblies which were called congresses met for the express purpose of settling a quarrel between two or more belligerent powers—the issue being a peace treaty. On this occasion peace had already been made and the parties meet as friends who, though differing in their interests, wish to work together toward the conclusion and affirmation of the existing treaty.36
Relying on the Treaty of Chaumont, a secret article inserted in the first Treaty of Paris had reserved the determination of Europe's ordering to the great powers of the Coalition. Castlereagh now concluded the Quadruple Alliance of November 1815, which reiterated the key features of Chaumont but stipulated that the great powers would hold periodic conferences,
for the purpose of consulting upon their interests, or for the consideration of measures which… shall be considered the most salutary for the purpose and prosperity of Nations and the maintenance for the Peace of Europe.37
“Thus,” as Craig and George put it, “the new order was in a sense given both a constitution and a constitutional watchdog (as defined by the final act), and a concert of powers to watch over it.”38
At Vienna, diplomats of the great powers met repeatedly with each other and with parties as various as the Vatican emissary, the sultan of Turkey, rival Italian factions, thirty German princes, and representatives of the Jews of Frankfurt am Main. Meanwhile, ten special commissions dealt with specific questions ranging from the organization of Germany and Switzerland to topics such as population statistics, diplomatic rules, and the vexing matter of the slave trade. There was no plenary session of all the delegates until the signing of the final comprehensive treaty, called—as with the Helsinki Accords in our own day, which the Congress prefigured—the Final Act. The historian Jacques Droz has concluded,
[t]rue, it was scarcely possible to talk of limiting State sovereignty in favour of an international organization. Nonetheless, the results achieved at Vienna were inspired by a certain concept of international relations which excluded the use of force and which consequently represented a considerable advance on the highway robbery of the eighteenth century.39
The course of the Congress did not run entirely smooth. The tsar and the Prussians were not quite willing to abandon their goals of using the Congress to win historic territorial concessions. Tsar Alexander's ambition was to gain a Polish kingdom that would recover for Poland all of Prussia's share in the partitions of 1793 and 1795, with the tsar as king. Prussia, for its part, wished to annex the whole of Saxony.
On January 3, 1815, Castlereagh concluded a secret agreement with Austria and France to resist, by force of arms if necessary, these extreme claims. It has been questioned by historians whether this was in fact merely a bluff; Castlereagh would have been hard put to secure the approval of Parliament for such a war. However that may be, the agreement, which was quickly leaked, had the desired effects both of bringing France into the Alliance, and of persuading Prussia and Russia promptly to moderate their demands. Within six weeks the Polish and Saxon questions had been resolved by compromise, and the Final Act was signed on June 9, 1815.
Of all the powers of the coalition, Britain took away the least in territorial gains. It annexed nothing on the continent. It returned scores of overseas areas seized and occupied during the years of warfare. At Ghent, moreover, Castlereagh had concluded a treaty with the United States that ended the War of 1812 on terms so generous in light of the British capture of Washington that American students are routinely taught that the United States actually won the war. This far-sighted statesman had, more than any other person at the Congress, created a permanent system of consultation, a genuine “concert of Europe.”
On November 20, 1815, the coalition partners committed themselves for twenty years each to contribute 60,000 men should there be any attempt to overturn the settlement. In the meantime, however, Alexander had drawn up the Treaty of the Holy Alliance, a union of the tsar's religious convictions (Castlereagh called it “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense”40) and Metternich's reactionary intrigue. This treaty, though innocuous enough on its face, in fact sought to organize the powers of Europe for intervention against internal revolution. Such a step was viewed by Castlereagh as a subversion of the true purpose of the Congress and in a diplomatic note of October 19, 1818, Castlereagh protested that
nothing would be more immoral or more prejudicial to the character of governments generally than the idea that their force was collectively to be prostituted to the support of established power without any consideration of the extent to which it was abused.41
Confronting this nineteenth century version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, Castlereagh continued to cling to the hope that peace could be maintained among nations whose internal systems remained their own affair. Two months after the Holy Alliance was concluded, Castlereagh renewed the Treaty of Chaumont and arranged for the periodical calling of international congresses. The first of these meetings, the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in the autumn of 1818, seemed to reinforce his hopes. He and Wellington attended for Britain; for Austria, the emperor Francis I and Metternich; for Russia, the tsar and Nesselrode; for Prussia, Frederick William III; for France, Talleyrand's successor (Talleyrand having resigned to become Louis XVIII's royal chamberlain). Although the Quadruple Alliance was reaffirmed, a new agreement, the Quintuple Alliance, was formed to admit France into the society of great powers “to protect the arts of peace.” All occupation forces agreed to leave French soil; progress was made on a more generous definition of Jewish rights, the abolition of the slave trade, and mediation between Sweden and Denmark. Yet beneath this harmony, there lay a fundamental division of purpose as to the proper scope of the emerging directorate of the five powers.
The three eastern monarchies held the view that political revolutions were the responsibility of governments, like other public order problems—crime, for example, or epidemics and panics. When, therefore, a revolution broke out within the European world, it was the responsibility first of the state government, but second, if necessary, of the international directorate—the Concert of Powers, as the phrase was first used at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen)—to stabilize the situation. All this they had learned from Napoleon, who had used the rhetoric of revolution to bridge state boundaries, and had effectively exploited civil discontent as a strategic weapon.
Castlereagh did not share this view. For one thing, he knew that the British Parliament would not support a policy of constant intervention in other states, particularly to prop up repressive regimes. This meant that the directorate would proceed without British consent—that was part of the rules—and that this would gradually isolate Great Britain. Second, he saw that enlarging the agenda of the Concert moved the powers away from the two contexts of concern on which he had relied for their cooperation, for while revolutionary activity might arise from national feeling and might by contagion threaten neighboring regimes, it did not necessarily arouse a national people to arms against their neighbors. Once the focus was off this threat to international security, the states of the coalition would not need to hang together and would soon split into rival camps, in part on the basis of their differing attitudes about political reform. It was at Aix-la-Chapelle that Castlereagh condemned all efforts “to provide the transparent soul of the Holy Alliance with a body.”42 Even a new revolt in France, he added, would openly justify intervention only if it were judged that the result would be the arming of the nation for conquest elsewhere. By adroit diplomacy he was also able to prevent discussion of the question of intervention against the Latin American colonies that were in revolt against Spain.
When the following year, however, military revolts occurred in Spain itself and in Naples—a rising of the Cadiz regiments against Ferdinand VII, a revolt of the Carbonari against Ferdinand I—there was no deflecting the debate over intervention. By means of the diplomatic note of May 5, 1820, Castlereagh was able temporarily to prevent intervention in Spain. With regard to the Neapolitan uprising, which alarmed the Austrians, who held significant and restive territories in Italy, Metternich was able to win consent of the other powers to a military expedition, and a new conference was promptly proposed by the tsar. Castlereagh did not oppose Austrian intervention, but strongly opposed intervention by the alliance, and he tried to avoid the convening of a new conference.
The tsar insisted, however, and Castlereagh was forced to be content with sending low-level representation. The Congress of Troppau, in October 1820, met in Silesia to consider the revolutions then in progress against the Bourbon monarchs of the Two Sicilies and Spain. On November 19, Metternich laid before the congress a document, already signed by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, which dealt with the question of revolutions in general and the right of the alliance to deal with them by force. This Protocole had been drawn up by the Russians, and announced the intention
to prevent the progress of the evil with which the body social is menaced, and to devise remedies where its ravages have begun or are anticipated… When States [which have undergone a change due to revolution] cause by their proximity other countries to fear immediate danger… the Allied Powers… will employ… measures of coercion if the employment of such coercion is indispensable.
From London, Castlereagh acted quickly. He called in the Russian ambassador and stated:
On viewing… the spectacle now presented by the Troppau reunion, it is impossible not to consider the right which the Monarchs claim to judge and to condemn the actions of other States as a precedent dangerous to the liberties of the world…. [N]o man can see without a certain feeling of fear the lot of every nation submitted to the decisions and to the will of such a tribunal.43
Then he rewrote the State Paper of May 5, 1820, which had come straight from his own pen. Phrased in sometimes lengthy and complex sentences, it nevertheless goes directly to the heart of the matter with two lucid arguments. First, are the great powers prepared to apply such principles for intervention to themselves? Second, while it was true that the revolution that brought Napoleon to power had unleashed a conflict with an entire nation in arms, this was due to the particular state involved, France, and not simply to the fact it was triggered by a revolution: of “that spirit of military energy which was the distinctive and most formidable character of the French Revolution… the late revolutions have as yet exhibited no symptom.” Indeed the massed opposition of the great powers to a national revolt was precisely what could evoke such a force: “The apprehension of an armed interference in their internal affairs may excite them to arm, may induce them to look with greater jealousy and distrust than ever to the conduct of their rulers…” Finally, he concluded:
What hope in such a case of a better order of things to result from the prudence and calm deliberations among a people agitated by the apprehensions of foreign force, and how hopeless on the other hand the attempt to settle by foreign arms or foreign influence alone any stable or national system of government!44
It was possible, Castlereagh believed, for a nation to create “a better order of things” —a state-nation—without terrorizing one's neighbors. Britain had done so. But this was only possible if the nation was not menaced by foreign threats.
The reader will recognize from this paper the two wellsprings of Castlereagh's policy described earlier—the consequences of provoking a nation in arms, and the danger of nationalism—as well as his conclusion that, in such an historical context, peaceful change in one state need not jeopardize the interests of others. Tying these ideas together implied that intervening to arrest change was actually the surest route to a general conflagration. Moreover, Castlereagh's first point suggests that the great powers are in some sense obliged to obey the same rules they would prescribe for others, a dimension of collective security regimes that is often overlooked. If it was strategically shrewd to avoid a massive intervention in order not to unite a nation in arms, it was also a strategic consequence of the constitutional objectives of the Coalition: to preserve a society of states that were secure from territorial trespass.
The Protocole was withdrawn. Metternich was able to deflect Russian offers of assistance in dealing with the Neapolitan revolt, and a new venue, Laibach, was chosen for the concluding stages of the conference. The Congress of Laibach, which in January 1821 authorized Austrian intervention, is often taken as marking the ruin of Castlereagh's project. As Sir Harold Nicolson wrote, “The Great Coalition was thus finally dissolved; the Concert of Europe had disintegrated; the Holy Alliance had succeeded in destroying the Quadruple Alliance; the Congress system had failed.”45 This was not Castlereagh's view at the time, however, and in any case, it tends to overemphasize the purely formal aspects of his program.
At Troppau, Britain had opposed any project for sending troops into either Spain or Naples, and the allies had deferred to British objections regarding a proposed intervention in Madrid. But the other powers at the congress had also voted to authorize military action by Austrian forces in Italy and to ask that a Russian army of 90,000 men stand by to march there from Poland if necessary. At Laibach, Ferdinand himself appeared before the conference and Metternich sought and obtained permission for Austria to act alone in Italy. Austrian troops—not, it must be emphasized, troops from the coalition—restored the regime in Naples. When the Circular of December 8, 1820, out of Laibach reiterated the claims of the alliance to intervene against revolutionary activity, Castlereagh responded with his own paper, the British Circular of January 19, 1821. In it the allies read that
the British government would… regard the principles on which these measures rest to be such as could not be safely admitted as a system of international law…. [The government does] not regard the Alliance as entitled, under existing treaties, to assume, in their character as allies, any such general powers.
The distinction is crucial:* Castlereagh was prepared to accept Austrian intervention as the act of a state that had, after all, substantial security interests that were jeopardized by events in the Italian peninsula. A great power was permitted to intervene in its sphere of influence, acting on its own behalf. He was not prepared to agree to the alliance acting in concert on Austria's behalf in order to pacify an Austrian possession. Metternich professed horror that the December circular had been leaked; he presaged Nicolson in his exclamation, “Les bienfaits de l'Alliance Européenne etaient suspendus.” He could not resist including in the final declarations from Laibach a ban by the allied sovereigns on all revolutions. Yet it was also announced that another conference would be summoned the next year at Florence (it was actually held at Verona) to reconsider the occupation of Naples and Piedmont. Castlereagh responded to this declaration on the floor of the House of Commons on June 21, 1821. He reiterated his objections but stated that he did not think a new protest was required. He subsequently made clear, and Metternich confirmed, that each regarded the alliance as the best means of preventing aggressive action by a great power. Both men planned to convene a new Congress of Vienna to discuss the Spanish question, following the ministerial meeting in Verona that was devoted to Italian affairs.
There Metternich hoped to collaborate with Castlereagh to prevent Russia from supporting French intervention in Spain. The tsar, whose close relations with Castlereagh were unique in the diplomatic world, had asked to meet with him in Vienna. It is clear that the latter dreaded the upcoming meetings in Verona, where he would be required to repeat the British position on what was no longer a live question, and at one time he entertained a proposal by Metternich that he simply skip Verona and come to Vienna in late August, before the sovereigns met, in order to have preliminary conversations with Metternich.
Castlereagh was, at this time, perhaps the most unpopular man in English public life. He had for a long time been forced to carry pistols to protect himself, and his life had often been threatened. To Liberals he was the embodiment of repression abroad; in his own party, of which he was effectively the prime minister during this period, he was isolated by his long-standing hostility to Canning, and indeed to the whole world of public relations that Canning represented, and his closest connections in public life were confined to the king and the Duke of Wellington.
On August 9, he seems to have had something like a breakdown. That day he saw both the king and the duke—the latter said, in his characteristic way, “I am bound to warn you that you cannot be in your right mind,” to which Castlereagh replied, rather pathetically, “Since you say so I fear it must be so.” The duke offered to stay with him, but Castlereagh would not consent to this. Wellington then tried without success to contact Castlereagh's doctor. Castlereagh paid a visit to the king, who was preparing to leave for Scotland. The king, also alarmed, alerted Liverpool, the titular prime minister, who refused to credit the report that Castlereagh, always so notably self-possessed, had become deranged. An interview with the doctor ensued; he was not greatly concerned. Castlereagh went to his country house and was kept in bed during the 10th and 11th. He was bled and given “lowering” drugs, which might be called tranquilizers nowadays; however, they had the effect of inducing a violent delirium. The next morning, the 12th, he cut his throat with a small knife and died immediately. At his burial in Westminster Abbey, large hostile crowds filled the streets, and malicious cheers were given as the coffin was carried into the Abbey.
This event utterly changed all that followed. At Verona, Metternich was isolated—Castlereagh's replacement at the conference, the Duke of Wellington, having arrived only when the issues had already been decided. At Vienna, there was no powerful influence to divert Russian support from France, which wished to take the initiative of intervening in Spain where a fresh revolt at Cadiz had broken out. Chateaubriand, the architect of French intervention in Spain, understood this.
I believe that Europe (and in particular France) will gain by the death of the first minister of Great Britain. Castlereagh would have done much harm at Vienna. His connections with Metternich were obscure and disquieting; Austria deprived of a dangerous support will be forced to come near to us.46
Moreover, Castlereagh was replaced at the Foreign Ministry by Canning, who despised the Congress system, had no relationship with the tsar, whom he loathed, and who was determined to reduce the Alliance to its component parts. In support of his policy, he had decided to enlist public opinion, which he did in a series of declarations that inspired liberal reformers throughout Europe.
Whether or not Castlereagh could have achieved the legal and strategic point at Vienna on which he insisted—that the Alliance could not intervene as an Alliance in domestic affairs—can we agree that his system basically failed? Ford's conclusion that “[a]fter Verona, now one and then another major state took the initiative, employing means and encountering responses most of which would have been familiar to 18th century statesmen”47 suggests a reversion to the diplomacy of territorial states.
This remark, like Nicolson's, implicitly dismisses much of the point of Castlereagh's efforts, and in any case bears only glancingly on the subject of our inquiry. Whatever the form of the congresses—and these have lingered on to our own day and were a prominent feature of the nineteenth century—Castlereagh's great innovations were not procedural only. This fact is made clearer if we appreciate the difference between Castlereagh's objectives and those suggested by the phrase balance of power, so often associated with the Vienna settlement.
For Castlereagh, the term equilibrium had a different meaning from that of the phrase balance of power as that phrase was understood at Utrecht and by the territorial states. He sought to introduce a benign, shared hegemony based on a mutual recognition of rights underpinned by law. His goal was a constitutional transformation of the society of states, and this objective contrasted sharply with the system of territorial states and its competitive rather than collaborative design. Indeed one can see retrograde “balance of power” thinking as responsible for Napoleon's initial success: while Austria attempted to check French aggression, Prussia and Russia carved up Poland; at the same time, Britain helped herself to France's overseas possessions. The first three coalitions were flawed, as Paul Schroeder has argued in The Transformation of European Politics: 1763 – 1848,48 not, as is usually maintained, owing to the failure of the allies to coalesce militarily but rather in their inability to concert their basic interests. The “balance of power” of the ancien régime, “a balance among hostile forces,” does not promote such harmony, and perhaps does not hold it even to be possible.49
It was only when European statesmen adopted the goals of political cooperation and compromise that victory over France was achieved. “The final coalition against Napoleon preserved its unity, paradoxically, by putting agreed political aims before purely military concerns.” After 1815, Castlereagh's vision of equilibrium—a system of collective security—was enhanced by the readmission of France to the concert.
It is customary to think of the Vienna settlement in Metternichian terms: as a restoration of reactionary constitutional ideas. But this view arises as much from the political perspective today associated with contemporary realism as it once did from the politics of radicalism. Indeed one sees it most formidably in Henry Kissinger's descriptions of the Vienna settlement.50 Schroeder, on the other hand, argues that the Vienna system was in fact “progressive, [and] oriented in practical, non-Utopian ways toward the future.” This system proved itself able to handle the Spanish and Greek crises, and emerged intact from the revolutionary crises of 1848. It faced its most damaging threats from the shortsightedness of Canning and Palmerston, who wished for roles in the already outmoded theatre of the competitive balance of power. Castlereagh's equilibrium amounted to an imaginative transformation of the power politics of the territorial states. The difference can be appreciated when one notes that, during the turbulence of 1848, the members of the concert did not use the various revolutions as an opportunity to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their rivals, in contrast to the behavior of the great powers during the revolutionary wars of a half century before. As John Lynn has perceptively summarized:
Many have responded by arguing that the Congress respected and established a balance of power to Europe. However, balance of power thinking was hardly original; it had underlain treaty settlements for the preceding century and a half and they had not brought lasting peace. Something else was involved. Rather than create a balance among hostile forces, the statesmen of Europe created an international system based on compromise and consent… regulated through a series of periodic international conferences. In short, the Congress of Vienna did not bring a return to the old international politics of the eighteenth century, but accepted and furthered new approaches to the international system…51
In 1793, when he was twenty-four, Castlereagh had written his uncle: “The tranquillity of Europe is at stake, and we contend with an opponent whose strength we have no means of measuring. It is the first time that all the population and all the wealth of a great kingdom has been concentrated in the field.”52
On this insight—his appreciation of the emergence of the new state-nation on the international scene—he built a constitutional system that long outlasted the conflicts he was called upon to resolve. Until the advent of the nation-state made it unfeasible, the Concert of Europe was able to cope with every crisis between 1815 and 1854 by finding a solution that prevented the outbreak of war. This was true in the Belgian crisis of 1830, the Near Eastern crisis of 1838, and the first Schleswig-Holstein crisis of 1850, to take only the most dramatic disputes.
In his last interview with the king, Castlereagh is recorded as having said, in despair, “Sir! it is necessary to say goodbye to Europe; you and I alone know it and have saved it; no one after me understands the affairs of the continent.”53
This remark is sometimes attributed to his mania; and there is no doubt that he may have exaggerated matters when he politely included his sovereign in the role of statesman, a claim that must have pleased, if mystified, the insular king; but is there not something to it? And doesn't it, with the youthful remark of thirty years earlier, fittingly bracket the remarkable insight of this lonely, much vilified, and rarest of personalities? When his system ultimately failed, after 1870, it was in part because the object of his insight, the society of state-nations, was to be replaced.
The period of the ancien régime had been forcibly ended by the French Revolution. This constitutional transformation demanded a commensurate revolution in strategy. The new French state could not avail itself of the hierarchical and aristocratic military structure of the territorial state. Once a new strategy was found, its triumph was made possible by the political mobilization of the mass of the French people on behalf of their national identity and on behalf of the state that did so much to define that identity. Thus in this instance constitutional innovation drove strategic innovation, which relied ultimately on the popular effects of the constitutional change that had set the new strategy in motion in the first instance.
Therefore we are unable to say precisely that causality flows in one direction only between military and constitutional innovation. As Black observes:
War is often seen as a forcer of… governmental… innovation in the shape of the demands created by the burdens of major conflicts… [I]t can be argued [however] that many military changes reflected political-governmental counterparts rather than causing them.54
Nevertheless, it is true that, as David Parrott notes, “the direct link between military change and state development remains: developments in the art of war are still attached to the idea of progress in achieving a modern administrative/bureaucratic state.”
Yet what is missing in such an account is the role of history itself with respect to law and strategy. Law and strategy are mutually affecting. All of these historians realize that, though none identify the reason this is so. The causal model these scholars have in mind, by which strategic innovation forces constitutional change, or sometimes vice versa, tends to obscure the fact that the link between the two is not merely causal but relational. Every change in the constitutional arrangements of the State will have strategic consequences, and also the other way around, so that innovation in either sphere will be reflected in the degree of legitimacy achieved by the State, because legitimation is the reason for which a constitution exists, for which the State makes war.*
One can say, with Charles Tilly, that the European “state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers' efforts to acquire the means of war.”55 And one can agree with Downing56 that the fiscal military state is the consequence of the pressures of sustained war and military expenditure that required an immense degree of administrative professionalism and vast global resources to maintain specialized battle fleets in remote seas. But one can also say with Davdeker57 that the democratic revolution brought about the bureaucratization of the force structure, thus changing command, control, and communications systems to a revolutionary degree.
Because history provides the way in which legitimation is conferred on the State, history is the manifestation of the interactions of law and strategy as history affords the means by which the State's objectives are rationalized. History determines the basis for legitimacy. Nowhere is this relation between history, strategy, and law clearer than in the example of the form of the state-nation that dominated the European scene from the period of the Napoleonic wars until that form was shattered by the collapse of the Vienna system and the rise of the nation-state. As will be seen in Book II, the search for legitimation was the common factor between the epochal wars of the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna that arranged the peace.
If the warfare of the territorial states was characterized by concerted efforts to minimize risk, the warfare of the state-nation can be said to seek the high returns that only come from accepting great risks. Rather than depend on proximity to magazines, Napoleon moved with lightning speed across distances too great to allow such reassurance; rather than dividing his troops, so as not to chance their annihilation, he concentrated his forces and defeated his enemies piecemeal. Napoleon exploited the use of light troops and skirmishers, the introduction of self-sufficient divisions that could travel separately until the moment of concentration and then suddenly mass in a decisive convergence, and the creation of light yet powerful field artillery, all to achieve the mobile strategy required for a cataclysmic confrontation with adversaries who would have preferred wars of position. Finally, Napoleon simply fought with forces vastly larger than any the eighteenth century had seen. Frederick the Great lacked the resources either to destroy his enemies or to completely impose his will on them.58 By September 1794, the army of the French republic had, at least on paper, 1,169,000 men, about six times the size of Frederick's armies at their largest.
The territorial state of Frederick the Great would never have risked the potential internal upheaval of assembling such forces; arming the people was the last thing Frederick wished. Nor could such forces have been trained in the exacting drill of his tactics. It was the revolutionary state that made the levée en masse possible—which Napoleon later exploited—because mass conscription made the State the focus of the nation. Untrained and to a large degree untrainable in the tactics of the territorial state, these lightly armed soldiers, many even without proper uniforms, were unsuitable to the strategy as well as the constitutions of such states; their service began as an unavoidable necessity when the Revolution, literally and figuratively, decapitated the officer class, yet this service continued and became the heroic pride of the state-nation.
The constitutional transition to the state-nation should not be confused with that which resulted in the nation-state. To repeat: the nation-state takes its legitimacy from putting the State in the service of its people; the state-nation asks rather that the people be put in the service of the State. The state-nation is not in the business of maintaining the welfare of the people; rather it is legitimated by forging a national consciousness, by fusing the nation with the State. Consider Napoleon's speech to the troops before entering Italy: “… All of you are consumed with a desire to extend the glory of the French people, all of you long to humiliate those arrogant kings who dare to contemplate placing us in fetters; all of you desire to dictate a glorious peace, one which will indemnify the Patrie for the immense sacrifices it has made; all of you wish to be able to say with pride as you return to your villages, ‘I was with the victorious army of Italy!’” Such states are imperial by their very nature and mercantile, whether or not they actually have colonies. The Congress of Vienna, which met to undo the constitutional damage done by Napoleon, in the end ratified his most profound transformation, making Europe safe for three-quarters of a century for a form of the State that would scarcely have been recognized by the ancien régimes it is sometimes purported to have restored.
The state-nation provides a novel constitutional basis for colonization, an idea utterly antithetical to the nation-state, which holds that a national group is entitled to its own state. Schroeder perfectly captures the nature of the Napoleonic state-nation when he describes the decade of Napoleonic hegemony in Europe—the Rheinbund, the collection of satellite states, the continental system—as an exercise in European colonization.59 Later the real action would take place elsewhere, in areas where European technology and especially European customs of command and control overwhelmed national peoples and made them imperial subjects.
It is in [the] global context that European military history is of most consequence. The technological changes that were to bring clear military superiority for the Europeans, such as steam power on sea and land, breech-loaders, rifled guns and iron hulls, did not occur until after 1815… Military strength was central to this rise in Western power, both within and outside Europe, and was to give shape to the 19th century world order.60
In the year 1800, Europeans controlled 35 percent of the land area of the world; by 1878 this figure had risen to 67 percent. What made this possible—what gave imperialism legitimacy and energized the colonial officials who officered native regiments and administered remote and disease-infected regions, and what above all drove the states that paid for that infrastructure—was a certain constitutional order of the State. It was not only superior technology61 but superior strategic habits (including discipline in battle, map making, supplying credit and financing quartermaster provisioning over long lines of communication, and above all, political cohesion) that ensured the European triumph because strategic habits were “more difficult to transfer or replicate than technology, resting as [they] did on the foundation of centuries of European social and institutional change.”62 This change forged a form of the State that apotheosized its glory within a system of great powers, bending the energies of often diverse national peoples to its service. Napoleon unsentimentally realized this source of his legitimacy: “My power depends upon my glory and my glories on the victories I have won. My power will fail if I do not feed it on new glories and new victories. Conquest has made me what I am and only conquest can enable me to hold my position.”63 Deriving legitimacy from delivering benefits to the state-nation was recognized also by institutions as diverse as the East India Company—which was nationalized in 1858—and the Suez consortium.64
Every era asks, “What is the State supposed to be doing?” The answer to this question provides us with an indication of the grounds of the State's legitimacy, for only when we know the purpose of the State can we say whether it is succeeding. The nation-state is supposed to be doing something unique in the history of the modern state: maintaining, nurturing, and improving the conditions of its citizens. That is a different assignment from enhancing the national interest. Burke, speaking in 1774 for the state-nation in his most famous address, put it this way: Parliament was not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests… but… a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.”65 That nation is a corporate body with a national interest that is distinct from the accumulated interests of groups or individuals within that body. By contrast, the nation-state exists to determine the desires of its different constituencies and translate them into legislative action. The flow of legitimacy is from the people's judgment—the nation's—to the state; hence the importance to the nation-state of the broadening of the suffrage and the vexing problem of the nation-state, the question of self-determination, that is, the people's judgment on statehood itself.
The transition from state-nation to the nation-state brought a change in constitutional procedures. The plebiscite, the referendum, and indeed the whole array of participatory procedures do not derive from the American or French revolutions. In Federalist Paper #63 Madison could write that the distinction of the American government “lies in the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share” in the government. By the end of the American Civil War, however, the requirements of legitimation had changed. Similarly, in Europe, it was, again, the relation between constitutional change and strategic innovation that made this transformation both necessary and possible. This relation was manifested in, and accounted for by, history.
It is fascinating to recall that, as early as 1809, General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the director of the Prussian War Academy and the creator of the Prussian general staff system, advocated such Napoleonic measures as a national army, general conscription, the appointment of commoners as officers, the abandonment of linear tactics in favor of light infantry and columns, and, astonishingly, the fomenting of popular insurrection in areas controlled by the French. Frederick William III was unwilling to endorse such a radical state-national program; 66 it was left to Scharnhorst's successors in Prussia to effect the next “revolution” in strategic and constitutional affairs, which brought the nation-state into being in Europe.