THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  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 wa
s 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 commone
rs 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.

  THE NATION-STATE

  The state-nation mobilized and exploited whatever national resources it happened to find itself in charge of (including the colonial resources of otherwise stateless nations). It was not responsible to the nation; rather it was responsible for the nation. The nation, for its part, provided the raw material with which the state-nation powered the engines of state aggrandizement. Nowhere is this contrast more apparent than in the history of empire that began as colonization in the seventeenth century, was transformed into imperialism by the middle of the nineteenth century, and then was ultimately undone by the ethos of the nation-state and its demands for the constitutional recognition of national identities.

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the empires of European states were in place: the great subcontinent of India was already the most important possession of the most important empire. Ironically, at about the time the nation-state emerged in Europe with the creation of Germany and Italy, imperialism abroad intensified. This is the period, as Michael Doyle has observed, that “is associated with the full transfer of rights of sovereignty (usually marked by either treaty or conquest)”67 to the governing imperial state and it is usually dated from the 1880s and the scramble for African possessions. In only a few decades the state-nation would be destroyed in Europe proper, and with it the Concert of European states that had maintained peace.