THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  This lack of centralization was further accentuated by the geographic dispersion of the Habsburg constitutional order. Such de facto decentralization tended to surrender initiative to Spain's adversaries owing to the Habsburg refusal to abandon any part of the realm no matter how lengthy and precarious the lines of communication. During the next decade, Dutch and French forces attacked the Spanish Netherlands at two points; the Portuguese revolted in 1640; Swedish and German troops pressed Habsburg forces in northern Germany; a Catalan rebellion began; and there appeared to be some possibility of a complete breakup of Spain itself.

  Mainly, though, the conflict settled in Germany, where more than five hundred separate garrisons carried out a savage war designed to deny their enemies any material support, and to seize for themselves whatever forage they could discover. The war that had hitherto been fought principally by German states with foreign assistance now entered its characteristically “epochal” phase as a struggle between the great kingly states of Sweden and France versus Habsburg Austria and Spain. France's defeat of Spain at Rocroi in 1643 and Sweden's victory over the imperial armies at Jankau forced the Habsburgs to the peace tables. Although a Franco-Spanish conflict lingered on for ten more years, the central war in Europe was ended in 1648.

  The final destruction of the princely state—of which states the vast Habsburg assemblage was a conglomerate—was the result of the settlement of the Thirty Years' War itself. The Westphalian Peace, as we shall see in Book II, replaced the vision of a dynastic continental empire with the reality of the kingly state. With some exceptions, the Peace gave Ferdinand III, the Habsburg emperor, a free hand in his hereditary territories, including of course the right to suppress Protestantism. At the same time, the treaties removed the pre-eminence of the Habsburg dynasty in Germany. It would now be possible to speak of the interests of the Empire as deriving from the electors, princes, and free cities represented in the Diet. All princes were confirmed in their “territorial superiority in matters ecclesiastical as well as political.”28 All princes gained the right to conclude treaties with foreign powers. Thus did the Reformation destroy the universal lay structure, just as the Renaissance had destroyed the universal Church. In Paradise Lost, Milton would re-create Machiavelli's prince in the guise of Satan.29 At Westphalia the sectarian princely state had similarly been cast out.

  The Peace of Westphalia “is null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time,” declared Pope Innocent X, 30 reflecting a shrewd and percipient assessment of the implications of the treaty for a universalist Catholic Europe. Rather than an imperial, hierarchical states system that might operate in tandem with a pan-European reconquista, the Peace* created a system based on absolutist sovereignty, which meant a system predicated on the legal equality of states.

  The peace legitimated the ideas of sovereignty and dynastic autonomy from hierarchical control… The reverse of the coin was that it de-legitimated all forms of hegemony and the vestiges of hierarchical controls… By sanctifying Europe's centrifugal forces by providing a legal basis… the documents licensed an anarchical dynastic states system and the internal consolidation of its members.31

  Princely states persisted in Italy and in Germany because of powerful competing cities in both places and owing to the presence of the papal states in the former and irreconcilable religious division in the latter. These thwarted the consolidation necessary for the creation of a kingly state in both places. The princely state by contrast was “in essence a personal union of territories. In institutional terms, the state was unified only in the person of the prince. Most rulers had enclaves of territory within their states which owed allegiance to another prince.”32 Generally, in Europe, however, this constitutional form gradually gave way, in the period of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to another idea, wherein the dynastic heir ruled an impersonal state in which the function of kingship was inseparable from that of an enduring, immortal state. After the ratification of the constitutional form of the kingly state at Westphalia, no war arising primarily from religious issues occurred in Europe among the signatories. The victory of the kingly state was accompanied by the broad introduction of rationalism into European thought. Thus Bossuet, 33 one of the proponents of the autocratic power of Louis XIV, is also notable for maintaining that government was a work of reason and intelligence.

  Bossuet claimed that there were four characteristics of monarchical power: it was sacred; it was paternal; it was absolute; and it was subject to reason. We might re-characterize these qualities of the monarch as legitimate by means of divinely guided dynastic succession (sacred); owing a duty to the State that superseded the personality of the monarch (paternal); owing no hierarchical duty to any other institution, domestic or external (absolute); secular and rational rather than dogmatic (subject to reason).

  Over the period of the rise, triumph, and fall of the kingly state—roughly from 1567 and the outbreak of the Dutch revolt against Spain, until 1688 and the expulsion of the Stuarts from England—the armies of France, England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic tripled or quadrupled, sending government expenditures soaring. These immense strategic demands provided a constitutional impetus toward absolutism. Vastly more money and planning also were required for the sieges of the Thirty Years' War than anything preceding it. To capture Hertogenbosch in 1629, for example, the Dutch had to construct over twenty-five miles of trench works.

  During the Thirty Years War, capital levies were imposed by both sides on cities and towns… The discovery that taxes collected regularly by any permanently existing governmental unit… could be multiplied many times by assigning them to the service and repayment of a specific war debt laid the basis for far-reaching innovations in public finance throughout Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century.34

  Six institutional structures typified the kingly state: a standing army35 (or navy, in the case of England); a centralized bureaucracy; a regularized statewide system of taxation; permanent diplomatic representation abroad; systematic state policies to promote economic wealth and commerce; the placement of the king as the head of the church. But note these differences between the kingly state and the territorial state that eventually replaced it: the former had standing armies, but these were armies in which foreign mercenaries still predominated, at least numerically. The kingly state had a centralized bureaucracy but positions in it were sold to raise revenue. Diplomacy was made more formal and representation more stable, but a principal duty of the legation remained to negotiate marriage contracts for the royal family. Finally, although the kingly state regulated and protected its local industries, it did so not in order to enlarge private wealth, and thereby increase tax revenues, but to boost its own power, and it often reneged on its debts.36

  TERRITORIAL STATES

  The outcome of the Thirty Years' War finally established the pre-eminence of the kingly state, although in such a way as to seed the next development in statecraft, the territorial state. Partly this had to do with the way the war was fought.

  In the Thirty Years War, warfare reached the nadir of brutality and pointlessness portrayed in the etchings of Callot and the black humour of Grimmelshausen's prose. In order to survive at all, mercenary forces had to batten on the civil population. In order to survive at all, civilians, in their turn, their homes burned and their families butchered, [swelled armies] governed not by strategic calculation but by the search for unplundered territory.37

  Such horrors fed the need for a state constitutionally grounded in territorial identity. When brutalized inhabitants fled the countryside and populated the besieged cities, they looked to the state for protection. There has been an active debate over the magnitude of the actual population loss owing to the Thirty Years' War.38 Some historians say about one-third of Germany's population was lost and the war has been variously estimated as having depleted the population of the Empire by 20 – 40 percent. Ward notes that of 35,000 villages in Bohemia at the
beginning of the war, scarcely more than 6,000 remained at the end. Some war zones lost over half their population; in a corridor running from Pomerania in the north to the Black Forest, the loss of civilian population reached 50 percent. Even these estimates are clouded by the enormous number of refugees. Some cities that were places of refuge then became targets, as happened to Magdeburg, which lost almost its entire population in the sack of 1631. All these events, including the collapse of an independent and prosperous peasantry that had local ties and did not identify with the larger states, as well as the consequent rise of large-scale estate farming, tended to enhance the viability of and desire for territorial states. Finally, the Peace of Westphalia encouraged mass migrations, as populations sought the protection of sympathetic kings of the same religious sect as themselves.

  Craig and George begin their study of diplomatic history by observing that the “Thirty Years War [brought] to the fore the most modern, best organized, and, if you will, most rationally motivated states: the Netherlands, Sweden, and France.”39 The political practices of this wartime coalition were ratified “by the Westphalian settlement as the rules of the new commonwealth in Europe [which] rules then developed by ad hoc practice into the constituent legitimacy of the European society of states.”40 Each of the members of the coalition had had to be persuaded to cooperate, rather than being obliged to do so, which secured for each a de facto equality as a state.

  Of these three allied states, one would take the kingly state to new heights (France), while another (the Netherlands) would develop the internal institutions and external attitudes of a territorial state. France remained a kingly state, struggling to assert its primacy in a society of states that would be increasingly inhospitable to such states, while its competitor kingly state, Sweden, fell successively to the flaws inherent in such states: the caprice of inheritance, the megalomania of rulers, the lack of domestic levers of mobilization, the unity such states evoke from their adversaries, and the suspicion they evoke in their allies. For a century and a half after Westphalia, the military and political struggles in Europe were divided between two theatres, east and west, in which these kingly states asserted themselves, and within which the supremely successful territorial states— the Dutch and their successors, the British in the west and Prussia in the east—rose to pre-eminence. The first half of this era culminates in the Treaty of Utrecht, which enshrines the political system of the territorial states, and the second half ends with the French Revolution, which utterly effaces the greatest kingly state, France.

  The Peace of Westphalia recognized the legal status of a great many states; representatives of over a hundred attended the congress. The most important aspect of this recognition is that, extrapolating from the Peace of Augsburg, the Peace of Westphalia augmented the sources of constitutional legitimacy of the State, which hitherto had been conferred by the customary system of dynastic inheritance and conquest. By simply removing from over three hundred autonomous territories in Germany the umbrella of authority hitherto supplied by the Holy Roman Emperor, the two Westphalian treaties legitimated a vast number of states on two novel bases: one, that the “state” was organized on a recognizable constitutive basis that did not conflict with the status quo; and two, that the congress (and thus the new European society) found it acceptable. This recognition embraced such small principalities as Parma, Baden, and Hesse, but also ecclesiastical lordships such as Cologne, Mainz, and Salzburg, as well as city-republics such as Venice, Genoa, Lucca, Geneva, and Berne. It included states whose affairs were governed by dynastic princes, elected officials, collective bodies, and mixtures of these models. At the same time, this society of states refused to recognize national groups that inhabited provinces such as Catalonia, Scotland, Brittany, Sicily, and Bohemia, where larger states had absorbed them. From the perspective of the present work, the great English historian C. V. Wedgwood could hardly be more wrong in her conclusion that the Thirty Years' War was “the outstanding example in European history of a meaningless conflict.”41 From the point of view of constitutional law and strategic conflict, the Thirty Years' War and the Peace of Westphalia ended the interstate dimension of the religious struggles of the previous era and set the strategic agenda for a century. Indeed one might even say that by generalizing the Augsburg principle of cuius regio eius religio to all the states of Europe,* the result of this conflict was the inevitable identification of a particular population with a particular state, a development that in time led to the nation-state and the struggle for self-determination. Thus the Westphalian settlement's calculated omission of a unified Germany led directly to the Long War of our century.

  The territorial state had special concerns that contrasted with those of the kingly state. Whereas a kingly state was organized around a person, the territorial state was defined by its contiguity and therefore fretted constantly about its borders. For the territorial state, its borders were everything—its legitimacy, its defense perimeter, its tax base. The territorial state depended on vigorous trading systems because its domestic market might often be insignificant, and also because it derived a significant amount of its revenue from taxing imports. Such states, of which the United Provinces of the Dutch was the initial example, pursued similar diplomatic and strategic objectives, including rational borders; free seas and open markets; an international consensus that no state should be allowed to dominate the affairs of the others; secular state preferences in the international arena; and a continuous diplomatic dialogue. Above all, the territorial states depended upon an active and engaged society of states. Only an international society could confer legitimacy on the constant territorial adjustments required by the balance of power, once legitimacy was founded on formally ratified treaties and agreements and not simply inheritance or conquest. As with the other historic changes in the constitutional orders of the European powers, however, it required the strategic collapse of the dominant form for the new order to be widely adopted.

  With Louis XIV the kingly state reached its final apotheosis. He inherited four mutually supporting elements of such a state: a widely supported theory of divine right; a rich, well-organized, and highly centralized state apparatus; an unquestioned dynastic legitimacy; and a regal temperament. Bossuet, his court chaplain and resident political philosopher, expressed the view of many of his contemporaries that a king is a minister of God, to Whom alone he is responsible. On a somewhat different basis, the English political philosopher Filmer wrote: “That which is natural to man exists by divine right. Kingship is natural to man, therefore kingship exists by divine right.”42 This theory fitted perfectly the attitude and temperament of the new king.

  His greatest asset was the structure of the French kingdom that Richelieu and Mazarin had shaped that enabled Louis, with his incomparable finance minister Colbert, to exploit its resources for war. The establishment of the French war ministry, whose intendants supervised and inspected the financing, supply, and organization of troops;* the creation of an entire military physical plant and infrastructure including barracks, hospitals, officer academies, ship repair yards, parade grounds, magazines, and arms depots: these formed the sinews not only of the military authority of the State, but of its political and constitutional status as well. Other states ardently copied the French model. As Kennedy puts it:

  [A]ll this forced the other powers to follow suit, if they did not wish to be eclipsed. The monopolization and bureaucratization of military power by the state is clearly a central part of the story of “nation-building”; and the process was a reciprocal one since the enhanced authority and resources of the state in turn gave to their armed forces a degree of permanence which had not often existed a century earlier.43

  Richelieu had died in 1642, having orchestrated the coalition that defeated the Habsburg drive for empire in Europe. The following year Louis XIII died, leaving as his heir a five-year-old boy. For eight years Mazarin struggled to maintain the state in the face of a civil war known to history as the Fronde. Wh
en the young king attained his majority in 1651, Marshal Turenne was able to restore order in Paris and to declare the Fronde to be rebels against the king's person. By 1653 the movement was dead, and Mazarin, the object of its hatred, had been restored to power as prime minister. But although suppressed, just as the English Restoration suppressed the Protectorate, these movements against the absolutism of the kingly state, their patriotic appeals to “the country,” and their hatred of foreigners at court, can be seen in retrospect as harbingers of the ultimately triumphant form of the territorial state.

  In 1654 Louis XIV was crowned at Reims. The next year when Parlement attempted to criticize the edicts of the king, he appeared suddenly before them and is said to have made his celebrated declaration, the motto of the kingly state: “L'état, c'est moi.” Whatever his actual remarks, he scolded the members and left without waiting for their reply, a maneuver that had been previously attempted with such disastrous effects by another champion of the kingly state, Charles I of England. In this case, Mazarin and Turenne were able to suppress any insurrectionary reaction. Louis returned to the field, where he led his troops in their campaigns.

  Louis did not share power. He never summoned the States-General or the Parlement. The nobility, the Church, and the towns were all made subservient to the absolute authority of the king. An administrative apparatus operating through ministers who were no more than agents of the Crown, initiated by Richelieu, was put securely into place. Once Louis was secure from internal challenges, with the administrative despotism of a sophisticated kingly state thus in place, he began to make war on the settlements of Westphalia in order that he might become the arbiter of Europe.