CHAPTER EIGHT
A swamp still skirts the mountain chain
And poisons all the land retrieved;
This marshland I hope yet to drain,
And thus surpass what we achieved.
For many millions I shall open regions
To dwell, not safe, in free and active legions.
Green are the meadows, fertile; and in mirth
Both men and herds live on this newest earth,
Settled along the edges of a hill
That has been raised by bold men's zealous will.
A veritable paradise inside,
Then let the dams be licked by raging tide;
And as it nibbles to rush in with force,
A common will fills gaps and checks its course.
This is the highest wisdom that I own,
The best that mankind ever knew:
Freedom and life are earned by those alone
Who conquer them each day anew.
Surrounded by such danger, each one thrives,
Childhood, manhood, and age lead active lives.
At such a throng I would fain stare,
With free men on free ground their freedom share.1
THE INCESSANT COMPETITION of the new European society of territorial states required enormous and ever increasing expenditures on professional armies. Although the territorial gains permitted by the balance of power to any single state could not possibly justify such expenses, without an extensive professional army any single state risked piecemeal losses to the other states that could be catastrophic (such as happened to Poland when it lost 29.5 percent of its population and 35.2 percent of its territory in 1772).
The diplomatic relations among eighteenth century states were conducted according to a precise diplomatic code of behavior; so were their wars. Neither left much room for innovation. The increasing burden on states thus could not be significantly relieved externally; that meant that there would be increasing pressure for constitutional change, internally, as each state struggled to wring greater and greater effort from its own society.
Those territorial states, like Britain, that were able to survive eventually transformed themselves into state-nations in the nineteenth century. Those states that had not made the transition to the territorial constitutional order—that remained kingly states in their constitutional life (like France or Sweden)—could not call on the leadership of elites to support the increasing demands of the State. At some point, the groups on which the kingly states depended simply refused to support the State any further. Each monarch was then faced with a difficult choice for the social order: either cut back on military expenditure and give in to what every state feared as external threats but which the kingly state saw as a threat to dynastic sovereignty itself, or ally with elements in the threatened society that were traditionally outside the leadership. Every kingly state eventually made the choice to do the latter, and everywhere this occurred, the old order was destroyed.2 Thus at the end of the eighteenth century, Europe entered a period of intense crisis from which it did not emerge until 1815.
Adherents of the revolution, who could be found all over the European world in 1790, liked to see themselves as part of a single movement… [b]ut the revolutions of the 1790s were not brought about by revolutionaries, nor were they the product of a revolutionary movement. They were situations resulting from the collapse of the previous order; the situations produced the revolutionaries… The collapse of the old order resulted, in general, not from attacks by those excluded from its rewards, but from conflicts between its main beneficiaries—rulers and their ruling orders.3
For this reason the first states in the new international order to be transformed into the next state constitutional form, the state-nation, were those that had made the least accommodation to change hitherto; by mid-century, however, virtually every great power had followed suit. Although it might have horrified some of the statesmen of these countries to be told so, they were all following in the path of the military genius and dictator Napoleon Bonaparte.
THE STATE-NATION
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.
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.
The turning point occurred in the late 1840s, when, for similar but unrelated domestic political purposes, European politicians seized on the idea of national self-determination as the key element underpinning a program of political reform.* This idea was antithetical to the Vienna system and cast doubt on the legitimacy of that system. Challenges to the system's program of strategic restraint further discredited the Vienna system. The Crimean War, the Italian wars, the unification of Italy, but most especially the unification of Germany were ever escalating challenges to the Vienna Concert that arose from the campaigns for popular sovereignty, so that by the last of these conflicts, in 1870, the state-nation in Europe was in rapid retreat.
It may seem to us today altogether natural that states should occupy fixed and contiguous places on maps, but that, as we have seen, was not always the common conception. And it may also seem obvious that the geographical division of the world into states should fit the division of mankind into nations. But this too was not always so. As H. G. Wells put it, that the political world should be divided into nation-states, and that this must be so in order to ensure stability,
would seem to be self-evident propositions were it not that the diplomatists at Vienna evidently neither believed nor understood anything of the sort, and thought themselves free to carve up the world as one is free to carve up such a boneless structure as a cheese.68
One could argue—as indeed Castlereagh did as a young man when he voted to disband the Irish parliament—that the coincidence of political boundaries with ethnic ones is actually a recipe for conflict. Nevertheless, it became a common belief among very different societies after the upheavals of 1848 that governments existed to better the lot of national peoples. Some have argued that this shift to welfare nationalism was a conscious strategy on the part of ruling elites to distract the masses from the exploitative practices of the industrial age. There is doubtless some truth in this, but nationalism was itself also a motivating factor among revolutionaries, and, in any case, that it was a card effectively played by politicians in several very different circumstances does not tell us why it proved so effective and transformative.
During 1848, Poles, Danes, Germans, Italians, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Romanians rose in arms, claiming the right of self-government. In February, a revolution occurred in France, and one of the great powers suddenly appeared to have taken up the cause of popular nationalism against the Vienna system. In March the French foreign minister declared that the new French Republic did not recognize the peace treaties of 1815 and would defend by force the rights of oppressed nationalities against any aggressor. This pledge was not immediately fulfilled, but a new leader emerged who was able to exploit sentiment in Europe for the nation-state and the self-determination of peoples. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, was elected president of the Republic by universal suffrage in December 1848. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he mounted a coup d'état in December 1851. A fresh plebiscite was held on a new constitution; 7.5 million persons voted yes, against 650,000 voting no, with 1.5 million abstentions. The seizure of constitutional power had been legitimated by an appeal to the people.
The use of the plebiscite to ratify changes in the constitution had been previously initiated by Napoleon I, but the differences in the two occasions are illuminating.
When Napoleon I used the plebiscite, he was attempting to legitimate his own role within a revolutionary state; when he sought to legitimate his role vis-á-vis other states, by contrast, he had himself crowned emperor by the pope. When Louis Napoleon resorted to the plebiscite, he first used it to legitimate a new constitution, and later in 1852 in order to confer the title of emperor and to make this title hereditary. In other words, Napoleon III (as Louis Napoleon then became) employed the plebiscite to legitimate not only his role, but the new role of the State itself. Moreover, the universal suffrage of Napoleon III, vastly larger than that called upon by Napoleon I, not only ratified constitutional changes, but was also the basis for legislative elections. The use of the national referendum to determine the constitutional status of a state is more than anything else the watermark of the nation-state. For on what basis other than popular sovereignty and nationalism can the mere vote of a people legitimate its relations with others? It is one thing to suppose that a vote of the people legitimates a particular policy or ruler; this implies that, within a state, the people of that state have a say in the political direction of the state. It is something else altogether to say that a vote of the people legitimates a state within the society of states. That conclusion depends on not simply a role for self-government, but a right of self-government. It is the right of which Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg.
Napoleon III desired to break out of the Vienna system, which he perceived, with some justice, as having been built to confine French ambitions, and he wished to invigorate the principle of national self-determination, which he believed, with somewhat less justification, to have been the guiding ideology of his late uncle. Accordingly, he carefully chose the place where he would confront the system: not Belgium nor the Rhineland nor the Italian states. Aggression against these states could be justified on grounds of frustrated nationalism, but such an attack would have united the Concert against him. Rather he chose to move against the Ottoman Empire. As Gildea has shrewdly concluded, the “Empire could be used safely as a laboratory for testing the principle of nationalities, and the precedent could then be applied to other parts of Europe.”69
The ten million Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire came under the protection of the tsar. But there were Roman Catholic Christians in the empire as well, mainly in Lebanon, where French missionary efforts had been steadily increasing their numbers throughout the 1840s. Napoleon III seized on this issue and demanded that the Ottoman governor remove the keys to the Holy Places from the Orthodox patriarch and give them to Catholic clergy, and further that a Latin patriarchate be established in Jerusalem. When the Ottoman authorities acceded to these ultimata, Russia responded by insisting on guarantees for Balkan Orthodox Christians, whose national movements the Russians had begun to aid. In July, the tsar moved forces into the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Finally war broke out between Turkey and Russia, and in November 1853, the Turkish fleet was destroyed off the southern coast of the Black Sea. Napoleon III seized this opportunity to propose an alliance with Britain to prevent Russia from driving the Ottoman Empire from the Dardenelles and thus opening the Mediterranean to Russian fleets. Great Britain pledged to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
In Britain, public opinion ran high against Russia. Although the Aberdeen cabinet was disposed to do nothing, its most formidable member, Lord Palmerston, resigned on the issue and took his case to the public. He was returned on a wave of popular feeling in favor of war. An alliance was concluded with France, and a combined fleet was sent to the Black Sea in January 1854.
Palmerston's strategic objectives were by no means confined to simply opposing Russia over the straits. In a secret memorandum he prepared for the cabinet in March 1854, he wrote of the Russian empire's
dismemberment. Finland would be restored to Sweden, the Baltic provinces would go to Prussia, and Poland would become a sizable kingdom. Austria would renounce her Italian possessions but gain the Danubian principalities and possibly even Bessarabia in return, and the Ottoman Empire would regain the Crimea and Georgia.70
Such a program appealed to Napoleon III's desire to inflame Polish, Romanian, and Italian nationalism, but it required a total military defeat of the Russians, which France could not afford: to lose Russia completely would sacrifice important protection France might need against Prussia. The hazards of destroying the Vienna system began to dawn on French policymakers.71
In September 1855 Sevastopol fell to the British and French. Palmerston, who had become prime minister the preceding February, was eager to press the attack, but he was also fearful of a separate peace between France and Russia. Finally he gave in to the rest of the cabinet and to the views of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and concluded a peace treaty. The terms were harsh: Russia lost her protectorate over the Danubian principalities, as well as about a third of Bessarabia. These areas became the state of Romania, the formation of which markedly increased the intensity of nationalist sentiment in other Balkan states. The provision that no warships could traverse the straits in peacetime was extended to the entire Black Sea.
Russia's defeat completed her constitutional transition to a state-nation. Because service in the army was rewarded by emancipation, serfs had to be recruited for long periods; otherwise, the number of those bound to the land would have plummeted. Thus recruitment provided only about 700,000 men. There was no reserve. Such measures did not fill the needs of contemporary warfare, which required universal, short-term conscription, followed by service in the reserve. An adequate system, however, would move all serfs through the army in a generation. Therefore modern conscription and reserve service meant the emancipation of the serfs. And this is precisely what happened, in yet another example of strategic imperatives flowing back into the constitutional structure that strategy is supposed to serve. In 1861 the serfs were freed; universal military service followed in 1874. Six years' active service and a nine-year reserve commitment created a total force of 1.35 million. Various other efforts were made to focus the energies of the entire nation on service to the state. Thus evolving, Russia entered a period from which most of the great powers were just emerging; it would take another military catastrophe, in 1916, to bring a nation-state into being.
With the successful conclusion of the Crimean War, Napoleon III moved from being a mere egoist to becoming the most prominent personage in Europe. Ever mindful of his public, he next turned to Italy, where the strategic objectives of France could again be married to the support of local nationalist sentiments. In 1859, France intervened in Italy after Napoleon III concluded a secret agreement with Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, providing that the kingdom of Piedmont would be extended into a Kingdom of Upper Italy to include Lombardy, Venetia, and the Romagna. France would receive Nice and Savoy. A Kingdom of Central Italy, composed of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, Umbria, and the Marches, would be given to Napoleon's cousin, Prince Napoleon. As with the French demands against the Ottoman Empire, French intrigue had singled out another vulnerable multinational state-nation: the Austrian empire.
Fighting broke out in April, most of the warfare taking place between French and Austrian forces. The battles of Magenta and Solferino were actually French victories, not those of the Piedmontese or Italian volunteers. The decision to cease fire was also French, and an agreement was signed between Napoleon III and the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph on July 11, 1859. This truce clearly sacrificed Italian nationalism to French ambitions. Lombardy was given to Piedmont but Venetia remained with the Austrians. Nothing was said of the French agreement with Cavour. The settlement ignited a firestorm of reaction among the Italians, who had not been consulted. Cavour resigned his premiership. Assemblies called by Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and the Papal Legations*met and requested annexation by the kingdom of Piedmont.
At first Napoleon III demurred and fell back on a call for a European congress to settle the question of central Italy. This approach might have strengthened the system of collective security in Europe, but then, in December, he changed course. Relying on Britain, where Palmerston and his foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, supported the principle of self-determination, Napoleon III renewed the agreement between France and Piedmont. Cavour returned to power in less than a month.
Piedmont annexed the Duchies and the Legations and promptly organized a plebiscite, based on universal suffrage, held in March 1860. The Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel, took over the new territories by decree. Elections to a single Italian parliament were held in Piedmont-Sardinia, Lombardy, the Duchies, and the Legations. The first task of this legislature was to ratify the annexations to Piedmont as well as those to France. The French annexations of Nice and Savoy had been similarly endorsed by local plebiscites.
The French annexations, however, had enraged the Italian partisan leader Garibaldi (a native of Nice) and other Italian revolutionaries, and he mounted an insurrection in Sicily in April. The success of this insurrection, which was quickly joined by discontented peasants recruited by promises of land reform, prompted Cavour to dispatch officials to prepare plebiscites for annexation in the newly liberated areas. These officials Garibaldi expelled or avoided. When Garibaldi marched on Naples, Cavour planned a pre-emptive coup, but this failed, and Garibaldi entered Naples in September.
Fearful of losing the leadership of the emerging unification movement to Garibaldi's partisans, Piedmont sent forces into the Papal States and defeated a Catholic army at Castelfidardo in mid-September. When Bourbon forces in the south began to gain ground against Garibaldi, the latter called on Piedmont for assistance. This permitted Cavour to announce to the parliament on October 2, 1860, that the revolution was at an end. Sicily and Naples were annexed after a plebiscite by universal suffrage on October 21.
Italian unification was not quite complete. French troops remained in Rome, kept there by conservative pressure on Napoleon III, and it was not until the German victory at Sedan in 1870 that they were finally withdrawn. Nevertheless, without French determination to drive Austria from Italy, unification would not have happened at this time. Whether it was wise of Napoleon III to accomplish this is open to question; by weakening Austria, he removed the strongest check on Prussian ambitions to unify Germany, a development that could only threaten France in the long run. Moreover, France—with the enthusiastic if passive collaboration of the British—had dealt a severe blow to the Vienna system. By relying on a national insurrection to destroy the forces of a great power, these states had ignored the ominous predictions of Castlereagh about a general war. In so doing, these state-nations, and the society of such states, had begun to give way to the nation-state. There is some evidence that the leadership in these states perhaps believed they had found in the ideology of popular sovereignty and national aspirations a way of preserving their own states from revolt. After 1870 the greatest of the nation-state builders, Bismarck, made clear to all what had happened. As Michael Doyle has insightfully observed:
Leadership could win nationalism over to the state… and when revolution and nationalism were no longer synonymous, war could be fought on a wave of national feeling that, to everyone's surprise, did not ignite liberal revolution. The tiger of the nation-state did, however, require lavish feeding. Provinces and people could no longer be treated casually as the chips in dynastic politics, they were the children of the nation. Thus as war became more efficient, unleashing the power of the whole people, so peace became more difficult.72
But in 1860, at the conclusion of the Italian wars, this was not obvious to all observers. The most that could be said was that the rules of the Concert had been tested in the Crimea—an “out-of-area” problem, so to speak, as the Concert did not strictly apply beyond Europe or include the Ottoman Empire—and had been abandoned in the Italian peninsula apparently without the dire consequences of which Castlereagh had warned. The Crimean War alone, however, caused more deaths than any other European conflict between 1815 and 1914. Moreover, within eleven years of the conclusion of the Italian War, three major wars were fought in Europe: the war between Denmark and the German states in 1864; the Austro-Prussian war of 1866; and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. As a consequence a new nation-state was forged and a new society of states eventually came into being, with a new sort of question at the center of every member state: which political system best improved the welfare of the national people?
The construction of the new nation-state of Germany occurred when Prussia was able to conquer and annex the other members of the German federation, excluding Austria. Although it is commonly said, by Kissinger73 among others, that the peace of Vienna lasted until 1914 because no general war broke out until then, the wars by which Germany was unified virtually destroyed the Vienna System and with it the system of consensus as to the legitimacy of the state-nations that were its constituents. German unification was made possible, first, by the reform of the Prussian military that moved Prussia from a territorial state to a state-nation. This was primarily accomplished under the leadership of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Second, this state-nation was made the political and diplomatic leader of a national movement to unite the German people, ultimately transforming its constitutional basis and its strategic objectives into those of a nation-state. This effort was led by Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke.
The transformation of warfare by Napoleon I and the state-nation had been fully appreciated by Prussian analysts, who were well aware that new methods of war and the preparation for war would have a profound social and political impact on Prussian society. The army of Frederick the Great had been a force of professionals isolated from the rest of society, ruled by iron discipline, and led by officers drawn solely from the nobility. To transform this army into that of a state-nation, Prussia undertook universal conscription of a more radical type than had previously been attempted anywhere.
Conscription had been adopted in most of the other countries in Europe as each transformed itself into a state-nation, and put its nation in arms. In every country outside Prussia, however, this amounted to the drafting of the poor because substitutes for service could be hired. In Prussia, however, all groups in the population were required actually to serve. This provided enormous manpower; it made the army into a true citizens' armed force; it made possible the strategic and tactical innovations urged by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and their successor, Moltke. Most importantly, it set up a constitutional conflict between liberal, decentralizing parliamentary elements that wished to maintain the voluntary militia and Prussian royalist military groups that intended to use the new standing army to create a pan-Germany in the image of Prussia.
Helmuth von Moltke, like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, was not a Prussian by birth. His father had been an officer of the king of Denmark.* Moltke was educated as a Danish cadet, but his experiences at school had been unhappy and his relations with his father were distant, so in 1822 he applied for a commission in the Prussian army. In 1823 he passed the entrance examination to the War College, which was at that time directed by Clausewitz. In 1826 he returned to his regiment but was soon assigned to the Prussian general staff, where he remained for more than sixty years. In order to buy and maintain horses, without which he could not serve on the general staff, Moltke earned money by translating six volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Financial need had earlier compelled him to write short novels, and his letters from Turkey, where he had served as a military advisor, are still read as classics of German literature.
With the exception of those few years in Turkey, Moltke never saw action, indeed never commanded a company or any larger unit, until, at the age of sixty-five, he took command of the Prussian armies in the war against Austria in 1866. If it was said of Bismarck that he was a “kind of Minister-President with a uniform hidden under his suit,”* the very opposite might have been said of the highly reserved and rather sensitive Moltke.
Prussian mobilization for the Italian wars had been a fiasco. In the ensuing years until 1866, Moltke devoted himself entirely to preparations for future military operations and remained aloof from the political scene. In 1860 the Prussian king William I, and the minister of war, von Roon, had proposed a thoroughgoing reorganization of the Prussian military. This plan envisioned increasing the standing army by raising the length of military service from two years to three, while converting the militia to a reserve force, which in turn meant the abolition of those militia-like sections of the armed forces, the territorial army, in which liberal politics had generally prevailed. In May the Prussian parliament agreed to vote additional military credits on the understanding that the government was withdrawing the reorganization plan and would use the money only to strengthen existing units. New units had already been formed, however. Further military credits were then denied; a parliamentary dissolution followed and a new election was held in December 1861. This and another election in May 1862 only reinforced the parliamentary opposition to military reform. In September 1862 Otto von Bismarck was called in by the crown to break the deadlock, a “konfliktminister” who, it was assumed, was willing to violate constitutional rules in order to quell the opposition. It was at this time that he made his famous statement directly attacking the prevailing constitutional order in Europe:
Prussia's frontiers as laid down by the Vienna treaties are not conducive to a healthy national life; it is not by means of speeches and majority resolutions that the great issues of the day will be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.†
He followed this in January by saying menacingly that if the Parliament refused to agree, conflict would follow, and “conflicts become questions of power. He who has the power in his hands goes forward, because the life of the State cannot stand still even for one moment.”74
When new elections in October 1863 strengthened the Opposition in Parliament, Bismarck simply ruled without an approved budget. This period of nonparliamentary rule allowed the army to institute its reforms and, ultimately, to implement its innovative strategy. Holborn concludes:
The constitutional conflict was still raging when the battle of Koniggratz was fought. The parliamentary opposition, however, broke down when the Bismarckian policy and Moltke's victories fulfilled the longing for German national unity. Moltke's successful strategy, therefore, decided two issues: first, the rise of a unified Germany among the nations of Europe; second, the victory of the Prussian crown over the liberal and democratic opposition in Germany through the maintenance of the authoritarian structure of the Prussian army.75
Prussian innovations in strategy were well designed to serve both these purposes, and indeed could not have succeeded without the new constitutional structure because they depended upon a highly motivated, highly disciplined force of immense size under a central command with spaciously delegated constitutional authority.
The Napoleonic strategic revolution had been carefully studied by all the armies of Europe. As early as 1815 it had become the new dogma, and its imperatives were in part responsible for the development of the state-nation that it called into being. Napoleon Bonaparte had stood the strategic ideas of the eighteenth century on their head. These ideas held that, as territorial gain was the object of warfare and war was prosecuted by expensive, professional armies, battles were to be avoided. Wars became intricate ballets of position, each army maneuvering to force the other from one less favorable territorial position to another, occupying the ceded ground. This was the strategic paradigm of the territorial state. The Napoleonic campaign denied all these principles. Instead of avoiding actual clashes, such campaigns sought battle, and the larger and more destructive the better, because it was by battle that the forces of the enemy could be destroyed. Only this would cause the collapse of morale that would force the enemy government to sue for peace and put that government at the mercy of French terms. It was not territory that Napoleon I sought, but the political and economic resources of the conquered nation, so these could be exploited by the French state. This was the strategic paradigm of the state-nation.
A liturgy of Napoleonic principles soon replaced the study of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. In the widely read writings of the Swiss theoretician Jomini, Napoleon's ideas were reduced to a set of rational rules and geometric axioms. The Prussian school of strategy, however, drew a different conclusion from Napoleon's campaigns. The most important lesson for the Prussians was the link drawn between the political objectives of war and its strategic prosecution, a connection summed up in the concept of the “moral” element in warfare. Napoleon's Prussian students stressed the role of spontaneity in his decisions and the ineluctable nature of the unpredictable. To these theoretical insights, they added the tactical possibilities opened up by the technology of the Industrial Revolution. This technology included techniques for manufacturing armaments that greatly increased the lethality of fire; the telegraph, which expanded the immediacy and range of communications; and, perhaps most significantly, the railroad, which promised to transform logistics.
In the Italian wars of 1859, a French force of 120,000 reached the theater of operations in eleven days by rail; had they marched, it would have taken two months. Generally it was calculated that troops could be transported by railway six times as fast as the armies of Napoleon I had marched. In addition to the railroad, there was now in place a dense road system that had come into being in the course of the explosive development of European industrial trade. Not only the movement of men, but also their resupply with matériel was affected by the railroad and road network. Forces arrived in good shape; they could be maintained for months on end by their home economies; the injured could be evacuated; home leaves and furloughs became possible, with all the consequences for morale in the field and politics in civil society.*
The limits to the size of armies that Napoleon I had shattered had reim-posed themselves in his Russian campaign. There was a limit to what foraging and pillage could accomplish to effectuate resupply. But with provisioning by rail there was in principle no limit imposed by logistics on the size of armies that could be fielded. Only the national economy and the demography of the society remained constraints. In 1870 the North German Federation deployed against France exactly twice the number of men Napoleon had led into Russia: 1,200,000. By the time Germany fielded an army in the next war, that number would double again.
Technological developments either enhanced the importance of sheer numbers—like new technologies of lethal firepower—or made those numbers more effective, like the development of the telegraph that gave commanders greater control of their forces. By the 1860s firearms had undergone considerable improvement since their introduction as slow-firing muskets. The smooth-bore, muzzle-loading musket, whose awkwardness had inspired the elaborate quadrilles of Maurice of Nassau, was replaced by the breech-loading, rapid-firing, rifled firearm. Rifling, the grooving inside barrels that increased the range and accuracy of a weapon fivefold, was in use by the 1840s, by which time the percussion cap had replaced the flintlock. In 1866 the Prussians fought with the Dreyse “needle gun,” the first rifled breechloader. This fired three shots to a muzzle-loaded rifle's one, and could be fired lying down. “For the first time in the history of war the infantryman could kill his adversary at a range of several hundred yards without presenting a target himself.”76 According to Strachan, between 1840 and 1900 the range and rate of small-arms fire had increased tenfold.77 In artillery, analogous developments took place. By 1870 Krupp was producing new steel breech-loading rifled cannon with ranges in excess of three thousand yards.
These technological developments challenged the prudence of the Napoleonic confrontation. How could an attacking force close with the enemy if they were battered to pieces miles before even sighting them? Just as importantly, how could the commander deploy forces in these huge numbers as anything more than a giant, confused mass? In 1865 Moltke wrote:
The difficulties in mobility grow with the size of military units; one cannot transport more than one army corps on one road on the same day. They also grow, however, the closer one gets to the goal since this limits the number of available roads. It follows that the normal state of any army is its separation into corps and that the massing together of these corps without a very definite aim is a mistake…. A massed army can no longer march, it can only be moved over the fields. In order to march, the army has first to be broken up, which is dangerous in the face of the enemy. Since, however, the concentration of all troops is absolutely necessary for battle, the essence of strategy consists in the organization of separate marches, but so as to provide for concentration at the right moment.78
Napoleon I had demonstrated at Ulm the power of dividing the army into columns that advanced to a critical point for juncture. Napoleon, however, had held that an army must be massed days before battle. Partly this was dictated by the time it took for columns to re-form in battle formation. But partly also it was the result of Napoleon's preference for interior lines, an undivided force, frontal assault at the crucial moment, and central tactical command. Such tactics seemed suicidal now in the face of the advances in firepower that a defensive position could deploy with such lethal effectiveness. Scharnhorst was among the first to adapt the Napoleonic principle of concentrated forces to new conditions through the use of concentric movements. In Moltke, strategy found a commander who would use concentric operations and detached corps on a scale undreamt of before. As Rothenberg has observed:
Confronted with the deadlock imposed by new weapons and extended frontages, Moltke… developed the concept of outflanking the enemy in one continuous strategic-operational sequence… By seizing the initiative from the outset, he intended to drive his opponent into a partial or complete envelopment, destroying his army in a great and decisive battle of annihilation or encirclement.79
Outflanking maneuvers of this kind—because they had to encompass the enormous lines made possible by armies in unprecedented numbers— would call for enormous numbers as well. The army with the greatest resources in manpower and supply would enjoy a decisive advantage. This required not only a sense of national purpose (which the state-nation was well-suited to provide) but also a sense of participation in the politics that led to war (which only the nation-state could fulfill). “[T]he greater the sense of participation in the affairs of the State, the more was the State seen as the embodiment of these unique and higher value systems which called it into being, and the greater became the commitment to protect and serve it.”80
Thus popular participation became the instrument that both created the nation-state and was itself reinforced by the institutions of the State it created. This phenomenon is evident in the history of the creation of the nation-state Germany by the Prussian state-nation.
Bismarck had begun by identifying Prussia as the apotheosis of the German; accordingly there was nothing “more German than the development of Prussia's particular interests.”81 But this was by no means clear to the other members of the German federal diet, including especially the Austrians. It was Bismarck's task to somehow separate the Austrians from the mission of unification and then carry out that mission so successfully as to silence opposition to Prussian leadership among the other apprehensive German states.
Bismarck became minister-president in 1862. The following November, King Frederick VII of Denmark died, and the main line of the Danish royal house became extinct. The provinces of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg had been attached to the Danish kingdom in much the same way that Hanover had been attached, for dynastic reasons, to the British kingdom: Frederick had been duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and as duke of Holstein and Lauenburg as well had been represented in the German Confederation. As with Hanover, Holstein and Lauenburg were by language and geography German. Two national movements, the German and the Danish, competed for support in the duchies, whose independence had been guaranteed by the 1852 Treaty of London, to which the great powers were signatories.
In March 1863, the Danish parliament rashly incorporated Schleswig* on the nationalistic grounds that most of the population of Schleswig was Danish, conceding that Holstein and Lauenburg held special rights. In reply, acting in the name of the Confederation on behalf of the German minority in the duchy, Prussian and Austrian forces invaded Schleswig in January and Jutland in March. Anglo-French opposition to the invasion was frustrated by English fears of encouraging a French move against the Rhine. In August the new king of Denmark, whose forces had been overwhelmed despite some initial misfires by the Prussian general, surrendered his rights in Schleswig.
Having contrived a successful military alliance with Austria over Schleswig, Bismarck proceeded to use this success as a hammer to break first the Confederation and then Austria herself. The apparent Austrian-Prussian rapprochement put Prussia in a good position to renew the Franco-Prussian free-trade treaty that Prussia had negotiated in 1862, playing on French fears of a Habsburg/Confederation-wide competing market. Bismarck now proposed expanding this treaty to include the entire Confederation, excluding Austria. Eventually even the southern, pro-Austrian states came along because they were unable to survive without the markets and outlets controlled by North Germany.
Bismarck then used the Austro-Prussian military success to drive a wedge between Austria and the rest of the German states. Austria and most of the southern German states in the Confederation had expected to bring Schleswig into the Confederation along with Holstein. Bismarck rejected this and instead negotiated an agreement with Austria partitioning the duchies, Austria to administer Holstein and Prussia, Schleswig, on an ad interim basis. In so doing, he was playing on the unreformed constitutional structure of the multinational Habsburg state that was perforce insensitive to the contradiction of accumulating isolated, ethnically distinct provinces.
This agreement, the Treaty of Bad Gastein, discredited Austria within the Confederation, as well as put her in the impossible position of attempting to administer a remote and recalcitrant state that lay between Prussia and Denmark. Bismarck took covert steps to exacerbate this difficulty, as well as stimulating Prussian public opinion to call for the annexation of both duchies into Prussia. Attempting a retreat from its position, Austria then reasserted its support for an independent duke and proposed that the decision be left to the Confederation. This Bismarck knew would result in a rejection of Prussian claims to the duchies, because the Confederation would vote for a separate state constructed from a union between the duchies. Prussia therefore denounced this move as a breach of the treaty and a cause for war. Bismarck promptly concluded a treaty with Italy to attack Austria and add Venetia to the Italian national state; he also began talks with Hungarian nationalists. Next he attempted to isolate Austria within the Confederation by bidding for the support of the German liberals, to whom he proposed a national parliament elected by universal suffrage. When Austria asked the Confederation to reject Prussia's proposals, Prussia responded by announcing that the German Confederation had ceased to exist, and called upon the German states to join a new Confederation, the North German Confederation, that excluded Austria.
The Prussian king, William I, had wished to avoid war with the Austrians and as a consequence the Prussians began their mobilization late, such that there was doubt whether an effective offensive could be mounted. But whereas the Austrians could employ only one railroad line for their mobi-lilization in Moravia, Moltke used five to transport Prussian troops from all over Prussia to the battlefront. Thus on June 5, 1866, the Prussian armies spread over a half circle of 275 miles. Moltke began at once to draw them closer toward the center, but steadfastly refused to order a full concentration in a small area. It was not until June 22 that officers of the Prussian vanguard handed their Austrian counterparts notice of the Prussian declaration of war.
The Austrian army moved from Moravia in three parallel columns, reaching their destination on June 26. Their commander, Benedek, was a product of the old school: fearless, stolid, he relied on formation in depth and the advantage of an interior line of operations. He failed, however, to derive the chief advantage of such a concentration when he delayed attacking either of the two equally strong Prussian armies facing him. Moreover, Benedek's early concentration inhibited his mobility. Once the opportunity had passed it was too late for the Austrians even to retreat behind the Elbe at Koniggratz and Benedek was forced to accept battle with the river at his rear. Like a Wagnerian overture, Moltke continued to hold off the final climax, keeping his armies one day's distance from each other until the night of July 2. At that time, he ordered the two Prussian armies to operate not merely against the flanks, but against the rear of the enemy: a strategy of encirclement. This did not completely come off, but at Koniggratz the Austrian army did lose the war as well as a fourth of its strength. Because Benedek did not retain enough space to advance against one portion of the Prussian army and then turn against the other, but instead was so hemmed in that he could not attack one force without being immediately attacked in his rear, the advantage of the interior line was forfeited. Had the local commanders actually carried out Moltke's orders for encirclement, it is possible the Austrian army would have been entirely destroyed, as occurred when Moltke's battle plan was executed against the French at Sedan.
Peace preliminaries were signed on July 27. Bismarck's principal war aims—the dissolution of the German Confederation and the removal of Austria from German affairs—had been accomplished by a course so circuitous, so Machiavellian, that historians continue to debate whether or not Bismarck actually intended the diplomatic campaign as it unfolded.82
Putting aside as unprofitable for our study an analysis of the psychological intentions of the Prussian president-minister, three questions remain: (1) How was Prussia able to convert a somewhat reckless act of Danish nationalism into a decisive weapon of destruction against the Confederation, on whose behalf Bismarck was allegedly acting? (2) How was Prussia able to use an alliance with Austria, and a successful war prosecuted by the two allies, to destroy Austria's role in German nationalism? (3) Is there anything about the nature of Moltke's strategy that helps us answer (1) and (2); that is, did the military imperative in this instance shape the sort of state that Bismarck was pursuing, such that it enabled, indeed brought to life a ruthlessly decisive diplomatic and political opponent of both the Confederation and the Austrian empire? The answers to all three questions revolve around legitimacy, popular nationalism, and self-determination, and their interplay with the new constitutional structure coming into being, the nation-state.
First, Denmark and all the states of the German Confederation were inflamed by nationalism. There were both German- and Danish-speaking residents in Schleswig-Holstein, in significant numbers. It had long been a goal of Danish nationalists to recognize constitutionally what was already a fact dynastically; namely, that the Danish king was the ruler of the duchies. Danish dynastic succession had been strengthened by the Treaty of London in 1852, which recognized Christian IX as the successor to Frederick VII. The role of the duchies, however, remained a point of contention between the two national movements. As early as 1855 a constitution had been adopted for a Greater Denmark that gave a central parliament in Copenhagen legislative rights over the duchies.
Protests had been immediately lodged against this move by the Confederation on behalf of Holstein, which was a member of the Confederation, and also by Austria and Prussia, which were signatories to the Treaty of London. When the Federal Diet threatened the Danish king with an enforcement order (a Bundesexekution) with respect to Holstein and Lauenburg, Frederick compliantly abolished the new constitution, but this had the unfortunate effect of separating Schleswig from the other two territories, because it was not a member of the Confederation. At the end of March 1863 the Danes formally objected to the section of the Treaty of London that dealt with Schleswig, and announced they would henceforth recognize special status for Holstein and Lauenburg only. When the Conf-federation now threatened to reinstitute the Bundesexekution order with respect to Schleswig, it exceeded its lawful authority. The Confederation was not a signatory to the Treaty of London, and Schleswig was not a member of the German Confederation. The Confederation was thus discredited in the eyes of German nationalists and forced to rely on the two German great powers to enforce matters against the Danes.
The Danes promptly adopted a new constitution incorporating Schleswig, and it was at precisely this point that Frederick VII died. The Treaty of London, which had been guaranteed by the great powers for just this eventuality, was now called into question because the legal requirements for succession had not been fulfilled by the Holstein parliament. German opinion was virtually unanimous that the treaty did not apply. Into this breach the duke of Augustenburg, who had relinquished his rights under the treaty, now stepped forward and offered his son, who was presented to the Confederation as Duke Frederick VIII. This was rapturously hailed by the citizens of Schleswig-Holstein as vindicating their rights to self-determination. A constituent assembly gathered spontaneously and swore allegiance to Frederick VIII. The majority of members of the German Confederation declared for Augustenburg and for the recognition of an independent principality for Schleswig-Holstein. This was the situation in November 1863. Prussia thus was offered the opportunity of championing the national movement, a role for which Bismarck had previously clamored.
Now, to the astonishment of all observers, Bismarck objected. As his principal biographer puts it,
instead of leading Prussia to the head of the national movement, instead of mobilizing Prussia's military might for the German cause, the might that after all was supposed to have been strengthened and was to be strengthened further to this end, the Prussian head of government appealed to the sanctity of international treaties. And instead of supporting the actions of the Confederation and upholding Prussia's claim to a leading role with that organization, he was obviously concerned only to put relations between Prussia and Austria back on their old, pre-1848 footing…83
For Austria had never been keen on the idea of self-determination. The vindication of national passions would hardly be welcome to a multinational empire, with the obvious implications for Venetia, Bohemia, and Hungary. Moreover, Schleswig-Holstein was far from Austria, lying between Prussia and Denmark and obviously well within Prussian control. In view of this, Vienna was extraordinarily pleased, if surprised, when the Prussian minister-president suggested a close collaboration between the two states and rejected the proposal for an independent principality.
It was a virtuoso performance. By demonstrating the impotence of the Confederation to the German national movement, Bismarck wholly discredited it as the vehicle for unification. The German Confederation could not deliver a German state against the Danes. But by luring Austria into a repudiation of the Augustenburg plan, Bismarck demonstrated that Austria too could not be relied on to vindicate German nationalism. By securing an alliance with Austria, he divided it from France, the one party that might have saved the Habsburg Empire once Prussia turned on it. And by selecting a field of confrontation so remote from Austria as Schleswig-Holstein, Bismarck guaranteed that, when the time was right, he could force a conflict with a now isolated Austria and annex the duchies to Prussia.
In creating an alliance with Austria, he excluded the German Confederation. This was accomplished by persuading the Austrians that the principle on which they must stand was the sanctity of international law; the Confederation, after all, was not a signatory to the Treaty of London. Moreover, Bismarck claimed to be upholding the rights of the state-nation against the national movements that threatened it, in this case the Danish. When, Prussia having proposed to annex the duchies, Austria was forced to fall back on the pro-Augustenburg position, she fatally embarrassed herself with the German national movement and gave Prussia the casus belli that permitted Moltke's armies to take the field.
All this falls into place if we appreciate Bismarck as the architect of the nation-state, as opposed to a champion of nationalism. Perhaps the most important insight into his aims is contained in his own words: “If revolu-tion there is to be, let us rather undertake it than undergo it.”84
Despite his frequent and passionate claims to the contrary, Bismarck was not inclined to protect the state-nations of Europe, including its empires. Rather he aimed to destroy the Concert built out of them with a new creation, the nation-state.* In so doing he was internationalizing the constitutional struggle in which he was engaged in Prussia, and he was deploying a strategic style of confrontation that was uniquely suited to the popular resources and moral passions of the nation-state.
The mortal risk to the Vienna system of state-nations lay in the kind of warfare conducted by the nation-state. As Lothar Gall has observed of the 1866 campaign:
The danger, as Bismarck knew, was considerably increased by the type of war that the Prussian military leadership, under the influence of… Moltke, envisaged waging. From the start it was no limited engagement in the style of eighteenth century warfare that they planned, one answering to possibly wide-ranging but at the same time precisely defined and hence limited political objectives; what they had in mind was an unlimited, “total” war that aimed to destroy the opponent's military might as completely as possible.85
It is no coincidence that the appearance of the nation-state—in the United States owing to the Civil War, in Europe owing to the unification of Germany—was accompanied by the strategic style of total war.* If the nation governed the state, and the nation's welfare provided the state's reason for being, then the enemy's nation must be destroyed—indeed, that was the way to destroy the state. Whereas Napoleon and the state-nation had reversed this, as for them it was necessary to destroy the state by threatening the state apparatus with annihilation, for the nation-state it was necessary to annihilate the vast resources in men and matériel that a nation could throw into the field, quickly through encirclement (Moltke's method), or less quickly if necessary through the attrition of economic resources (Sherman's method). It was only when nuclear weapons made the divided superpowers mutually and mortally vulnerable that the nation-state and the style of total war it dictated were undermined (at least as to these powers and their allies).
Moltke's strategy led to the overwhelming defeat of the Austrians at Koniggratz and Sadowa on July 3, 1866, and the peace of July 27 of that year. This time there was no congress to sort out the results. The Prussian peace terms were moderate, nonnegotiable, and perfectly understandable in light of the objective of creating a nation-state, though puzzling from the perspective of a state-nation (as indeed they completely bewildered William I). Austria made no surrenders of territory. Even the customary war indemnity demanded of the loser was quite reasonable, much of it being composed of a cancellation of Prussian debts. The principal changes were political: Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and what had been the free city of Frankfurt all were to lose their independent status and become provinces of Prussia, as were the disputed duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
Bismarck next turned to the question of the southern states of Germany. The peace treaty of Prague in 1866 confined Prussia to an area north of the river Main. His strategy for annexing the states beyond the Main appeared at the time extraordinarily indirect and improbable, but it was made successful nonetheless by virtue of a remarkable stroke of political luck. For Bismarck did not threaten these states directly—which would have united Austria and France against him—but rather brought them under his control by virtue of a conflict over Spanish succession, of all things. If we keep in mind his goal of building a new constitutional order, however, and put to one side the more usual goals of simple territorial aggrandizement and accretion, his success does not seem all that roundabout. It was only necessary for him to build, by every means at his disposal, a sense of the German nation in the southern states, and then wait for the international opportunity that would allow him to unite that sense with Moltke's army corps.
Bismarck first concluded a set of secret military alliances with the south German states. Then he announced a proposal for a common customs union, to be governed by a parliament elected on the basis of universal suffrage for the entire area of the union, which included Southern and Northern Germany. He then covertly disclosed to the press a secret deal wherein Napoleon III had agreed to purchase Luxembourg from the king of the Netherlands. When news of this broke, a wave of patriotic emotion carried the southern states into the new parliament in June 1867.
Of course, in such a parliament, as he was well aware, he immediately began to confront the same political opposition he had encountered in the Prussian parliament. Popular opinion was far more influential in the nascent nation-state than it had been in the state-nation, but Bismarck had to risk its antagonism and even opposition if he was to harness its energy. In the election to the new parliament Bismarck's allies were crushed, just as his forces had been routed repeatedly in Prussian elections. Bismarck bided his time.
In 1868 Queen Isabella of Spain was overthrown; the successful insurgents now looked for a new monarch. They offered the crown to Prince Leopold of the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, Prussia's dynastic family. This in itself did not fire Bismarck's ambitions for the Prussian ruling house, contrary to the conclusions of historians analyzing this offer from the state-nation's point of view. Napoleon I may have wanted his relatives on all the thrones proximate to his; Bismarck was after something else. Rather, he feared that if the Hohenzollern candidate rejected the offer, the Spanish would turn to the Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavaria, the principal south German state that opposed his long-range plans. If this happened, Bismarck told a nonplussed William I on March 9, 1870, the Spanish ruling house would maintain “contacts with anti-national elements in Germany and afford them a secure if remote rallying point.”86
This did not persuade William, who was often baffled by his minister-president. In the middle of March the king cast the only vote in the Prussian Crown Council against the Hohenzollern candidacy of Prince Leopold. The king's opposition was sufficient; on April 20 Leopold and his father sent the Spanish government a formal notification of their refusal. By June, however, Bismarck had been able to turn this around, all the time keeping to the pretense that this was purely a dynastic affair. The acceptance by Leopold on June 19 was followed by the consent of the Prussian king two days later. Now the trap was baited.
What Bismarck counted on was an intemperate reaction by Napoleon III. If this could be provoked, then
German national feeling would all of a sudden come into play: the nation would feel humiliated through its protecting power, Prussia, and would demand appropriate counter-measures. [That] would result in all misgivings and reservations with regard to Prussia and Prussian control being thrust into the background, at least temporarily. One could then expect to see a kind of national united front comprising the vast majority of existing parties and political forces with corresponding repercussions on the future shape of Central Europe.87
On July 4, two days after the announcement by the Spanish of the Hohenzollern acceptance, the Prussian ambassador was summoned to hear a sharply worded threat from the French foreign minister as well as the prime minister. The ambassador agreed to report these directly to the Prussian king at Bad Ems, where William had gone for a holiday. Two days later the French foreign minister announced in the Chamber of Deputies that
[w]e do not believe that respect for the rights of a neighbor people obliges us to suffer a foreign power to disturb the present balance of power in Europe to our disadvantage… [The French government relies on] the wisdom of the German… people….[But] should things turn out otherwise we shall know… how to do our duty without hesitation and without weakness.88
At this point the French ambassador, Benedetti, hurried to Bad Ems. On July 9 he delivered a formal complaint to the Prussian king. As arranged by Bismarck, the king replied simply that he had given his consent as the head of the Hohenzollern family and not as king of Prussia; the decision had been one for Leopold's branch of the family to decide. The conciliatory king nevertheless then promptly wrote to Leopold's father on July 10 suggesting that his son withdraw. On July 12 Prince Leopold announced that he was no longer a candidate.
However they may have appeared, so far things were going Bismarck's way. He knew he could count on the king's genuine aversion to war and his willingness to compromise. Now Bismarck's judgment of Napoleon III and the French leader's invincible vanity, as well as recent developments on the French political scene, came to bear. Through the Prussian ambassador in Paris the French government demanded not only formal approval of the withdrawal but also a declaration on the part of the king that in consenting to the candidature he had had no desire to offend the interests and honor of the French nation, and, further, that he would enter into a binding commitment never to give his consent to such a candidacy in the future. It was now possible for Bismarck to spring the trap by disclosing these demands to the German public and demonstrating that France was attempting to use the king's obvious love of peace and willingness to compromise to humiliate him and with him Prussia and the German nation that relied on Prussia as its military arm. Thus when the king sent his reply to the French through Bismarck, the latter cut the “Ems Dispatch” to only two sentences and distributed it to all Prussian diplomatic missions late in the evening of July 13 for immediate publication. A legend has grown up around Bismarck's behavior at this point—Winston Churchill renders it unforgettably89—that Bismarck doctored the dispatch. The “revised” message went:
His Majesty the King has refused to receive the French ambassador again and has informed the latter through the duty adjutant that His Majesty has nothing further to say to the ambassador…90
The original had spoken only of “an adjutant” and the part about having nothing to say had referred explicitly to the present state of information. This was the final snap of the trap. French reaction, which would have been imprudent enough in the hands of Napoleon III, was now a matter of French public opinion. Bismarck could count on France responding so vehemently that Prussia could take its newly won national solidarity into the field. The French mobilized on July 14, 1870, and declared war on July 19, 1870. With this declaration, the formal legal requirements of the alliance treaties with the south German states were triggered, probably unnecessarily for ever since the publication of the Ems Dispatch, German national opinion had been passionately behind the Prussian king.
There was some further maneuvering. Bismarck leaked to The Times a handwritten draft of a treaty by Benedetti that spoke of France acquiring Belgium (without disclosing the date, which was 1866), and this doubtless reinforced the decision of the British not to get involved. But the main brake on intervention by third parties was the general understanding of the situation by the great powers: as in 1866 they completely misread what was actually happening. The leaderships in these states were convinced that this was a war to adjust international tensions, that it involved a local territorial conflict that would be resolved by a limited war. They had lived so long within the rules of the Vienna system that they appear to have thought them self-executing. All states knew it was in the self-interest of the state-nation system to avoid the destruction of any other state; the constitutional form of the state-nation and its precarious relation to the public demanded this restraint, as Castlereagh had taught. They were unprepared for a strategic challenge shaped by a new kind of state, whose constitutional legitimacy required the destruction of the system that had prevented German national unification. If Prussia was to establish itself as the legitimate state of the German nation, the system of collective security that had kept the German people fragmented must be smashed and a new method of validation for the State put in its place.
The German mobilization order came on the night of July 15, 1870. When complete the Prussian army had over a million men under arms. Against this the French—who fielded a professional, veteran force, experienced in combat, with modern weapons—could at best call on 350,000. In eighteen days, six Prussian rail lines and three additional lines for South Germans transported ten corps, 426,000 troops, to the front. By August 18, one of the two main French armies had fallen back on the fortress of Metz, which capitulated after a long siege. The other French force, attempting to relieve the fortress, was intercepted, driven against the Belgian frontier at Sedan, and surrounded. It surrendered on September 1 with Napoleon III and 104,000 men, who became prisoners of war.
The Germans invested Paris on September 18 but held only a narrow corridor to the capital. The French still had significant resources. Four new armies were raised in the French provinces. Bismarck, concerned that time was inevitably on the side of the French, who commanded the sea and could thereby bring fresh supplies from abroad, demanded an immediate bombardment of Paris. Moltke demurred, on grounds that he lacked sufficient guns for an effective attack, and argued that an unsuccessful bombardment would merely strengthen resistance. The king, however, sided with Bismarck, and as more heavy artillery arrived, Moltke commenced a furious shelling of the city on January 5, 1871. Armistice negotiations began on January 23 and Paris surrendered on January 28.
William I was proclaimed emperor of Germany in January at Versailles, the southern states having signed treaties the preceding month creating a united German state. Sovereignty lay in the Bundesrat, but the leading role of Prussia was obvious: of the sixty-one votes in this assembly, Prussia had seventeen, Bavaria six, Saxony and Wurttemberg four each, Baden and Hesse-Darmstadt three each, and all the others one apiece. Bismarck became the imperial chancellor, the only responsible federal minister, replicating on the national scale his precarious but decisive role in the Prussian parliament. In September he had electrified Europe by demanding the cession of Alsace-Lorraine. It is still debated whether this was the result of an attempt to capitalize on German nationalist sentiment or was rather the natural aggrandizement of a supremely successful military campaign. In all likelihood it was neither: restoring these ancient lands, which had been taken from Germany by France, was a way of creating a certain kind of state, a state that the nation felt belonged to it.
This was not lost on all other national leaders. In England, Benjamin Disraeli—who did as much to create the nation-state in Britain as any other nineteenth century leader—remarked with much prescience to Parliament in February 1871:
This war represents the German Revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century… Not a single principle on the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists. You have a new world…91
Unification was both the outcome of, and in some cases the cure for, nationalism. German nationalism, which sought to embody the political and cultural aspirations of the German people, was employed as a means of stifling Danish and Polish nationalism. Italian nationalism crushed the incipient national revolts in Naples and the national ambitions of Venetia. In both Italy and Germany, it would be as correct to say that a single state-nation conquered the others and transformed itself and them, as to say that a new state arose from the coming together of independent, ethnically connected states.
After 1871, a new society of nation-states gradually emerged. Its mood was one of easily inflamed nationalism and ethnic truculence. This reflected the public mood, excited by the press on a scale impossible before the spread of free compulsory public education and vastly increased literacy. Three new ideas vied in the public mind for attention and allegiance: Darwinism, which had been easily adulterated into a social credo of competitiveness and national survivalism; Marxism, with its hostility to the capitalist relationships of the industrial age; and bourgeois parliamentarianism, which promoted the rule of law in a national and an international society that was becoming increasing credulous about the role that law
could play. It was thus an age of faith in law even if the bases for legal consensus were at the time being quickly eroded, an age of anxiety in class relationships, an age of ethnomania within states. The contrast with the world it replaced could not have been greater.* One can scarcely imagine a leader of a state-nation speaking as Bismarck did in explaining the new spirit of the age:
Who rules in France or Sardinia is a matter of indifference to me once the government is recognized and only a question of fact, not of right…. [F]or me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or St. Louis…. I know that you will reply that fact and right cannot be separated, that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you posit antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, “I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”92
This is the authentic voice of the nation-state. Regimes may come and go, but the nation endures. International law conformed itself to this new society: how a government came to power was of no relevance so long as the fact of its control over a nation could be established.† Self-determination—the right of nations to have states of their own—became the only principle recognized in international law that detracted from the axiomatic legitimacy of the government that was in control.
It was obvious at the time that the nation-state bore certain strategic risks that were inherent in the kind of political society on which such a state depends.‡ In his last public statement, in 1890, Moltke issued an ominous and melancholy warning. With such states, the old warrior said, which depended upon and at the same time inflamed popular passions, future wars could last “seven and perhaps thirty years.”93 This Tiresian forecast takes us back to Part I and the Long War.
There are, of course, other examples of the transition from state-nation to nation-state. Lincoln brought about the first of these constitutional transformations. As James McPherson aptly puts it, “The United States went to war in 1861 to preserve the Union; it emerged from war in 1865 having created a nation.”94 This constitutional transformation, like the others we have studied, was accompanied by a revolution in strategy. Indeed, it may be said that it was Lee's adoption of the state-nation tactics of Napoleon I—tactics at which Lee excelled—that ultimately proved fatal to the Southern cause in the American Civil War. In the Wars of the French Revolution, Napoleon had been able to blast a hole in the enemy's line with canister fired by massed batteries of artillery, using fire against a line in much the same way a breach in a fortress wall might be opened. But by the time of the Civil War, infantry were armed with the Minié ball rifle, which had a greater effective range than canister. Moreover, with a range four times that of the smooth-bore musket carried by Napoleon's troops, the rifled barrels of the Union soldiers at Gettysburg doomed the frontal assaults that had been favored by the Grande Armée. Neither cannon nor charges could dislodge an entrenched defensive position, 95 and indeed the campaigns of 1864 – 1865 were marked by extensive entrenchments and field fortifications.96 By the end of the Civil War, major battles had more in common with operations on the Western Front in World War I—the initial campaigns of the nation-state's epochal war—than with early Civil War battles like First Manassas or Shiloh. But it was not the constitutional and strategic developments in America that gave Europe its model for the nation-state, in any case.*
One state more than any other in Europe had used the new developments in warfare to change itself. The Prussian solution to the danger of arming the public and the requirement of vast numbers of soldiers to exploit the opportunities of decisive battle was to militarize the entire society. After the 1873 depression, the German state nationalized the railroads, introduced compulsory social insurance, and increased its intervention in the economy—in order to maximize the welfare of the nation.97 Through-out the nineteenth century Britain refused to adopt a mass conscript army; it was Prussia that militarized as it industrialized. The railways, telegraph, and standardization of machined tools that industrialization made possible allowed for dizzying increases in the speed and mobility of military dispositions. The use of the telegraph, in concert with the railroad, allowed generals to mass widely dispersed forces quickly and to coordinate their operations over a vast theatre. During the Civil War, the Union Army shifted 25,000 troops, with artillery and baggage, over 1,100 miles of rail lines from Virginia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in less than ten days. An entire society could be mobilized for war, replenishing the front when necessary as the conflict progressed. But this was only possible if that entire society could be made a party to the war. This was the contribution of the nation-state. Far from being the paradoxical fact it is sometimes presented as, Bismarck's championing of the first state welfare systems in modern Europe, including the first social security program, was crucial to the perception of the State as deliverer of the people's welfare.* If the wars of the state-nations were wars of the State that were made into wars of the peoples, then the wars of the nation-states were national wars, championing causes that had deep popular support, and that were fought on behalf of popular ideals. The legitimation of the nation-state thus depends upon its success at maintaining modern life; a severe economic depression will undermine its legitimacy in a way that far more severe financial crises scarcely shook earlier regimes.98
Bismarck essentially bargained with the peoples of the various states of the North German Confederation to deliver German nationalism by means of Prussian aggression. There was no a priori reason why Prussia, feared and in many German quarters hated, was the natural leader of German nationalism nor any reason why Austria could not have been Germany's champion. The difficulty for Austria lay in the fact that it was necessarily a state-nation: its empire was composed of so many nationalities that it could not, constitutionally, adapt. The difficulty for the liberal states of the Confederation was that they could not marshal the material resources to exploit the military revolution wrought by industrialization. Only Prussia was without both these handicaps. Thus Prussia was the first European state to successfully unite the strategic and constitutional innovations of its time. Koniggratz, Gravelotte, and Sedan redeemed the Prussian pledge, and, in the doing, created a modern nation-state defined by the ethnicity of its people.
This new form of the state undertook to guide and manage the entire society, because without the total effort of all sectors of society, modern warfare could not be successfully waged. Not only the power of the State but its responsibility as well were extended into virtually all areas of civil life. All aspects of life were accordingly promised to improve. We hear its voice in Wilhelm II's famous assertion, “Herrlichen Zeiten führe ich euch noch entgegen” (“they are marvelous times towards which I will yet lead you”), 99a public relations remark one can scarcely imagine in the mouth of his dignified and reticent grandfather.