THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES
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It had required an international society to accomplish these achievements, including the effective ratification of the constitutional triumph of the territorial state. So much else that we now take for granted in the international system flows from this watershed event. For example, the authority of multinational congresses (of which Utrecht itself was the most far-reaching in the eighteenth century) and our view of law as the legitimation of acknowledged customary practice (because this revolution in legitimation came about not through a hierarchical appeal but through consensus) both date from this time. In one respect, however, the Peace of Utrecht stood for a system that is very different from the system of international rule making and rule following we have today: Utrecht gave a significant role to war. At Utrecht and thereafter, the balance of power not only permitted but required occasional territorial adjustments, though resort to war was tempered by the further requirement that these adjustments be ratified by the society of states.
This society was motivated by a commitment to preserve its own peace and stability. As ever, strategic means were deployed to secure constitutional ends, but these ends were subtly shaped by the necessities imposed by the development of innovative strategic forms. After Utrecht, the eighteenth century saw many wars, but all of them were
minor wars of adjustment: the final means, after other pressures and inducements had not succeeded, of compelling… modifications of the balance between the states of the system… [T]he commitment to preserving a balance of power led to the transfer of territories from one sovereign to another regardless of tradition, the wishes of the inhabitants [or dynastic rules].54
This crucial and unusual role for war as an integral part of the diplomatic system would, of itself, have led to an increasing professionalization of war making, but that development was accelerated by other factors having to do with innovation in war-making itself. These factors led to the success of the two territorial states best able to professionalize their capacity to make a new kind of war and maintain their independence from the wars of others: England and Prussia.
Historians debate whether territorial states made the development of professional armies possible—armies that were trained by the State, paid year round from a state treasury, employed within a career structure that was designed and maintained by the State—or whether the changes in warfare brought about by the deployment of such armies made the development of territorial states a necessity. The kingly state was well suited to deploy forces that comprehended the revolution in tactics of the seventeenth century—Gustavus Adolphus showed that beyond doubt—but such states could not maintain these forces in the field for decade after decade, which the collapse of the French economy in 1708 – 1709 also showed. Only forces that were socially cohesive, drawn from a single territory, recruited to fight for “their country”—a phrase uniquely associated with the territorial state—rather than for highly paid mercenary captains, and above all used for the limited objectives of limited wars, as opposed to the ambitious dynastic enterprises of the megalomaniacal kingly states, could make up a standing army capable of being supported over the long term. The triumph of the territorial state coincided with developments in weapons technology—the replacement of the matchlock musket by the flintlock, whose simple and reliable design made possible a discharge of three rounds per minute and thus the establishment of three ranks capable of simultaneous fire, and the invention of the ring bayonet, which eliminated pikemen from the battlefield—and together led to the successes of Marlborough and Eugene and thus directly to Utrecht.
The Peace of Utrecht,* composed of the whole complex of treaties embracing Utrecht, Rastadt, and, a few years later, Passarowitz and Ny-stad, subordinated the traditional legal criteria of inheritance and hierarchical allegiance (religious or political). In their place was a unity of strategic approach—a judgment by the society of states as to what was an appropriate strategic goal and what constitutional forms were legitimate. This is how it looked to Voltaire, writing in about 1750:
For some time now it has been possible to consider Christian Europe, give or take Russia, as “une espèce de grande republique” —a sort of great commonwealth—partitioned into several states, some monarchic, the others mixed, some aristocratic, others popular, but all dealing with one another; all having the same basic religion, though divided into various sects; all having the same principles of public and political law unknown in the other parts of the world. Because of these principles the European [states] never enslave their prisoners, they respect the ambassadors of their enemies, they jointly acknowledge the preeminence and various rights of [legitimate rulers], and above all they agree on the wise policy of maintaining an equal balance of power between themselves so far as they can, conducting continuous negotiations even in times of war, and exchanging resident ambassadors or less honourable spies, who can warn all the courts of Europe of the designs of any one, give the alarm at the same time and protect the weaker…55
Such practices are usually taken to be the necessary preconditions of modern public international law; indeed the most influential commentator on international law of the period, Vattel, virtually repeats this characterization of European political society in the summary of his Law of Nations.† What is equally interesting, however, is the passage with which Vattel ends this summary:
England… has the honour to hold in her hands the political scales. She is careful to maintain them in equilibrium. It is a policy of great wisdom and justice, and one which will be always commendable, so long as she makes use only of alliance, confederations, and other equally lawful means.56
The Treaty of Utrecht was often called by contemporaries the “Paix d‘Anglais” and for good reason: it represented the success of a constitutional order that had passed from the Dutch to the English with William of Orange at about the same time that the trade wars against the Dutch ceased and British merchants secured the majority of maritime trade. William's policies required an unprecedented level of state expenditure: the rate of taxation was doubled to pay for a large and growing navy and an army the size of those of continental states. Once Britain effectively defeated the Jacobite movement in Scotland in 1746, she became a territorial state free of the vulnerabilities, as well as the temptations, of continental acquisitions. Even though the electorate of Hanover had been brought to London along with a new dynasty in 1714, Britain did not seek territorial expansion on the continent. And while it was a less than constant leader in preserving the balance of power—acting forcefully in 1717 by organizing the triple alliance of the Hague to check Spanish ambitions but refusing in 1731 to act on behalf of the balance—Britain was a principal beneficiary of the new international order. Within that order Britain meant to improve her position outside the continent. Rather than seek European conquests, Queen Anne declared, “It is this nation's interest to aggrandize itself by trade.”57 For the rest of the century, when Britain and France clashed, the principal impact was felt overseas.
It is sometimes difficult to see this through the fog of engagements on the continent. Despite important battles abroad—the French besieged Madras, while the British had notable successes in America and French overseas trade was virtually halted by blockade—it was French success in the southern Netherlands that brought the British to the negotiating table and forced them to return Louisbourg, the key to Canada. It was clear to all parties, however, that the great stakes lay outside Europe, even if the key to winning them might lie within. Some French strategists argued that America could be conquered by attacking Hanover; others, that this was only a diversion from maritime engagements that depended upon a pre-eminent navy. Meanwhile, in London, opposition members denounced continental involvement to defend “the despicable electorate” of Hanover, while others argued that America could be won on the banks of the Elbe by tying down French resources. Everyone was agreed, however, that America was the stake.
The Seven Years' War sustained this argument. All-out war began in North America in 1755 (a
s a young lieutenant colonel, George Washington, and his men fired the first shots of the war) and quickly spread to the European continent. Pitt's strategy of using Prussia to bleed French land forces on the continent while the British Navy destroyed the French at sea proved to be a spectacular success. One by one the French overseas posts were taken once their communications had been cut by British seapower. The Peace of Paris in 1763 brought Canada and Florida to Great Britain. Then the American colonies revolted, and France concluded a formal alliance with the United States, “not,” as Louis XVI put it, “with any idea of territorial aggrandizement for us, but solely as an attempt to ruin [British] commerce.”58 By 1780, the Spanish, Dutch, and French were all arrayed against Britain. The American victory at Yorktown in 1781 was the accomplishment of an army that was half-French and of a French fleet that blocked relief for the surrounded British forces (though this is not the standard account in American schoolbooks). For the first time since 1692 the British lost control of the seas.
To American eyes, British policy appeared as a lapse by the British into the ways of the kingly state: George III and his ministers were just so described in the Declaration of Independence. If this was the case, the British had steadied by 1786 and concluded a new commercial treaty with France, restoring by this and many other efforts the British position as arbiter of the balance of power. Despite the younger Pitt's famous remark in 1792 anticipating a long period of peace, this step came just in time.*
One other state especially benefited from the new society in Europe organized around the balance of power by the territorial states. Prussia was best able to exploit the revolution in technology and tactics in warfare, as Britain was best able to benefit from the commercial advantages of relative tranquility on the continent and of maritime expansion beyond. Prussia, by happenstance as much as planning, had been shaped by its ruling family into an instrumental, highly effective territorial state seeking its aggrandizement in carefully selected limited wars, always adding territories that would increase rather than divert the power of the center, avoiding dynastic overextension, and above all, separating the person of the ruler from the state that he and the state's system of bureaucracy served. This last, of course, is the constitutional watermark of the territorial state, and contrasts sharply with its constitutional predecessor.
The kingdom of Prussia began its modern course in 1618, when the electorate of Brandenburg and the duchy of Prussia were united under a Hohenzollern prince.59 Prussia was hitherto a small state on the Baltic in Poland, to the east of the Vistula, once inhabited by Lithuanian tribes who were conquered and converted by the Knights of the Teutonic Order. During the Thirty Years' War, the Brandenburg electorate had played an insignificant role until the succession of Frederick William, known as the Great Elector. It was he who transformed the electorate into a kingly state, observing the example of Louis XIV. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Great Elector was able to gain valuable accessions of contiguous territory, and in 1653 he secured a small grant to raise an army of a few thousand men from the estates in which the landed aristocracy was the main voice;* in return, the nobility were confirmed in their privileges and were given full jurisdiction within their lands and a guarantee of preferment as to official posts; in addition, the towns were confirmed in their judicial immunities and guild rules.60 To finance the army the estates agreed to the assessment by royal officials of land values on which a modest tax was levied—the Gener-alkriegskommissariat. In so doing the estates compromised their traditional right to tax themselves. Frederick William promptly used this reform to leverage higher taxes; when some estates objected, he levied taxes by force. By these measures he was able to create a highly centralized absolutist monarchy and its necessary accompaniment, a standing army, which by 1672 was 45,000 strong.61 Virtually all state resources were subordinated to the building up of the army. The royal bureaucracy responsible for levying taxes to support the army extended its control over many aspects of Prussian commercial life: in the towns where the tax was raised by an excise on goods, and in the country where levies against harvests and rents supplied revenue, these Prussian officials constituted a supervisory arm of the king and intensified the increasing centralism of Prussian economic life. The Prussian victory against the Swedes at Fehrbellin in 1675 had shaken Europe, 62 and the Great Elector's successor, Frederick III, was recognized as King Frederick I of Prussia by the emperor. Superficial as this recognition may appear to us, it fulfilled a prerequisite for the formation of a territorial state by giving to the subjects of the Prussian crown a common name. Frederick's son resumed the policy of strengthening the army.
This figure is well known to historians from Macaulay's description: Frederick William I did indeed, it seems, walk into private houses and inspect the family dinner, and cane idlers when he happened to meet them on the street, and did fly into inexplicable rages as well as fits of depression. But he also first introduced universal conscription into military service, while exempting the bourgeois taxpayers, taking care to send peasant soldiers back to their farms at harvest time, and nurturing a textile industry with state purchases. By the time of his death in 1740, Prussia had a highly efficient bureaucracy, large financial reserves, and the fourth largest army in Europe (although the state ranked only tenth in territory and thirteenth in population).
In the same year, 1740, the Austrian emperor Charles VI died. With Charles, the male line died out and the throne passed to his daughter Maria Theresa. The last years of Charles's reign had been clouded by his fears for her succession, and so he had persuaded the other European powers to subscribe to the Pragmatic Sanction, an agreement according to which they promised to observe and defend the integrity of Austrian possessions under Maria Theresa. Among the signers was Frederick II, the new king of Prussia.
Nevertheless, without warning, Frederick invaded Silesia, an Austrian possession that lay between the Brandenburg and Prussian lands of his state. In the ensuing three wars, he managed to retain Silesia, despite overwhelmingly adverse odds, and thereby almost doubled the size of his small kingdom. The following excerpt is from Frederick's memorandum on the matter to his ministers:
Silesia is the portion of the [Austrian] heritage to which we have the strongest claim and which is most suitable to the House of Brandenburg. The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word, the clear advantage we have over our neighbors, gives us in this unexpected emergency an infinite superiority over all other powers of Europe…. England could not be jealous of my getting Silesia, which would do her no harm, and she needs allies. Holland will not care, all the more since the loans of the Amsterdam business world secured on Silesia will be guaranteed. If we cannot arrange with England and Holland, we can certainly make a deal with France, who cannot frustrate our designs and will welcome the abasement of the [Austrian] house. Russia alone might give us trouble. If the empress lives,… we can bribe the leading counsellors. If she dies, the Russians will be so occupied that they will have no time for foreign affairs… All this leads to the conclusion that we must occupy Silesia before the winter and then negotiate. When we are in possession we can negotiate with success.63
To this remarkable document, Craig and George say only, “This memorandum really requires no comment. Here is a mind completely dominated by Staats raison, a mind that admits no legal or ethical bonds to state ambition.” Although this term translates to “reasons of state,” it has a connotation unique to the territorial state, in contrast to raison d‘état and to ragione di stato, which, as we have seen, reflect their respective constitutional origins. Staats raison is a rationale given on behalf of the State, an imperative that compels its strategic designs (such as the seizure of a proximate province for geostrategic reasons). It identifies the state with the country, the land. The raison d‘état is a reason invoked on behalf of a king, justifying his acts as being those imposed on him by the State (such as aid to Protestant princes by a Catholic king); it identifies the kin
g with the State when he takes on the role of the state. Ragione di stato are reasons that distinguish the state code of behavior from the moral code of the prince (such as deceit or treachery) when the state takes on the role of the prince and the prince is relieved of his moral obligations as an individual. Each phrase, though it translates into the same English words, belongs to that constitutional order within which it acquired use—the territorial state, the kingly state, and the princely state, respectively.
Frederick's seizure of Silesia had profound effects on the future of Germany, for when Austria lost Silesia, with its large population and impor-tant commercial resources, the western half of the Austrian empire ceased to be predominantly German, and Prussia became the primary force in Germany. Two further wars confirmed Frederick's gains: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740 – 1748), in which various states abandoned the Pragmatic Sanction and joined Prussia in a bid for Austrian territories in the Netherlands, Italy, and Bohemia, and the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which Prussia was supported only by Hanover and Great Britain (which took the war to North America and India, where British success was finally achieved). The Prussia of the Great Elector who inherited parcels of territory along the vulnerable north German plain, repeatedly crossed and recrossed by brutal mercenaries of every contending power in the Thirty Years' War, had become one of the great powers of Europe in little more than twenty years. Moreover, the Great Elector's Prussia, which had been so carefully modeled on the French kingly state, was transformed by his great-grandson, now called Frederick the Great, into a territorial state of singular intensity. It was Frederick, who entertained no self-doubts about his role at the apex of Prussian political society, who nevertheless described himself not as the incarnation of the State but as its “first servant.”64