PART II
THESIS: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN STRATEGIC AND CONSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION CHANGES THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER OF THE STATE.
Epochal wars produce fundamental challenges to the State. A warring state that is unable to prevail within the then-dominant strategic and constitutional practices will innovate. In such wars, successful innovations—either strategic or constitutional—by a single state are copied by other, competing states. This state mimicry sweeps through the society of states and results in the sudden shift in constitutional orders and strategic paradigms in the aftermath of an epochal war. By this means, a new dominant constitutional order emerges with new bases of legitimacy, and older forms decay and disappear.
A History Lesson
Kings
like golden gleams
made with a mirror on the wall.
A non-alcoholic pope,
knights without arms,
arms without knights.
The dead like so many strained noodles,
a pound of those fallen in battle,
two ounces of those who were executed,
several heads
like so many potatoes
shaken into a cap—
Geniuses conceived
by the mating of dates
are soaked up by the ceiling into infinity
to the sound of tinny thunder,
the rumble of bellies,
shouts of hurrah,
empires rise and fall
at the wave of a pointer,
the blood is blotted out—
And only one small boy,
who was not paying the least attention,
will ask
between two victorious wars:
And did it hurt in those days too?
— Miroslav Holub
(translated by George Theiner)
CHAPTER FIVE
THE IDEA OF a “military revolution” in Europe was first introduced by Michael Roberts in his now-famous inaugural lecture at the Queen's University of Belfast in January 1955.1 Roberts identified four profound changes in warfare in the period 1560 – 1660. First was a revolution in tactics, as archers and then infantry armed with muskets ended the dominance of feudal knights and massed squares of pikemen. To put this in other words, fire replaced shock as the decisive element on the battlefield. Second, a dramatic increase in the size of armies occurred, with the forces of several states increasing ten times between 1500 and 1700. Third, strategies changed as the possibility of decisive action in the field replaced the static and inconclusive siege tactics of the previous century. Fourth, war became more of a depredation on the civilian society: the vastly greater costs required to field such larger armies, the damage wrought by foraging troops, and the destructiveness of battles made civil life grimly more like that of Brecht's Mother Courage, written of the Thirty Years' War, than of Lepanto, Chesterton's brightly lit account of the famous naval battle of a century before.
Roberts's thesis quickly achieved the status of orthodoxy—Sir George Clark enthusiastically adopted it unqualifiedly in his War and Society in the Seventeenth Century published three years later2—and thus became a target for various qualifying theses* in the ensuing years. But by far the most important development was the claim that the need for cash and an administrative infrastructure to fund and manage the larger armies and new technologies caused a revolution in government from which, in the seventeenth century, the modern state emerged. Roberts himself had drawn attention to issues of state formation, national identity, centralization, and the development of state bureaucracies, and this aspect of his argument was picked up by others.3 Geoffrey Parker, Roberts's greatest student, observed a strikingly similar pattern that culminated in the establishment of the Ch'in imperial dynasty.4 And he concluded that there occurred in European armies such a massive growth in manpower, accompanied by a profound change in tactics and strategy, and on European societies such a greatly intensified impact of war, that equally profound changes in the structure and philosophy of government came about.5
To manage the sheer size of seventeenth century armies—Gustavus Adolphus had 175,000 men under arms—states could no longer rely on the traditional ways in which troops were raised. Roberts suggested that governments met this challenge through constitutional centralization, first taking control of the recruiting, equipping, and supplying of troops (which in turn required a more extensive and accountable administrative structure); then establishing permanent standing armies; and finally funding this vast military and administrative expansion through the sophisticated credit and financial systems that are a key characteristic of the modern State. By 1660, it was claimed, the military revolution had had its effect: the modern style of warfare had come into being and with it the modern State, exemplified by the progressive regime of Protestant Sweden.
This thesis was criticized, however, by Parker.6 He attacked the idea that the military advantage had shifted to constitutionally progressive regimes, and wrote admiringly of the Spanish, who, he claimed, were at the forefront of new weapons technology and the introduction of smaller, more tactically flexible units. Indeed, it was the Spanish army, as early as the 1570s, that had taken on the characteristics of a permanent standing army, with its extensive structures for financing, training, logistics, and command. In subsequent work, Parker focused on a differing explanation for the increase in army size than that proposed by Roberts: rather than reflecting a response to the more ambitious and decisive strategies of the seventeenth century, Parker traced the growth of armies to developments in fortification in the sixteenth century. It was not so much the development of artillery capable of blasting down fortresses as it was the change in the fortresses themselves, enabling them to employ this technology defensively, that set the terms of the sixteenth century battlefield. This change produced the trace italienne, characterized by low formidable walls, broken by complex bastions to enable fire against sapping trenches, and surrounded by obstacle-strewn but visually clear fields that permitted fortress artillery to rake a besieging force with fire. Parker argued that commanders, contemplating these new fortifications, were compelled to increase greatly the numbers of troops in order to man the ever more complex and lengthy siege lines and, if on the defensive, to garrison fortresses for an aggressive defense. For Parker then, the revolution began a century earlier.
In contrast to this claim, Jeremy Black argued that the military revolu-tion actually occurred a century later than that proposed by Roberts.7 The development of the ring bayonet, which effectively replaced the use of pikemen by giving the musketeer a pike of his own; a surge in the number of troops engaged in battle; the standardization of equipment, including uniforms; and vastly more comprehensive logistical infrastructures all impressed Black as having a decisiveness that was absent in the transient reforms of earlier periods. Moreover, rather than seeing the creation of the modern state as the outcome of an earlier military revolution, Black concluded that the modern administrative and bureaucratic state that emerged in the early eighteenth century was the driving factor behind strategic change.
Challenging the thesis of a military-governmental revolution altogether, David Parrott attacked the claim that the expansion in the size of armies was indeed accompanied by a comparable expansion and centralization of the State. In fact, he argued, the great majority of forces that fought in Europe before the end of the seventeenth century were not raised by states at all, but rather were recruited and managed by an extensive system of private entrepreneurs. He concluded that there was no direct correlation between the growth of the forces being maintained and the development of the State. The principal reason for the large numbers of troops in Europe was to allow the military contractors who maintained them to recover their expenses by means of enforced contributions from local populations. The great seventeenth century commander Wallenstein, Parrott noted, told the Holy Roman Emperor in 1626 that he could maintain a self-financing army of 50,000 but not one of 20,000 because the larger force could man garrisons and extract contributions. Parrott proposed that we see the increase in military forces and expenditure as leading not to state-building, but to an unprecedented willingness of the State to offload its responsibilities onto private contractors. When the seventeenth century did witness an increase in the centralization of state authority, Parrott disparaged this as a reaction to the military developments of the preceding period.
In the chapters that follow, I will trace developments in strategy from roughly the end of the fifteenth century onward and relate these developments to changes in the constitutional structures of the states of Europe. For these purposes, we need not attempt to resolve many of the questions about the “military revolution.” Whether in fact the numbers of troops employed in the sieges of Strasbourg, Breisach, or Turin were greater than those deployed in the preceding century, and whether the forces available for any particular battle in the Thirty Years' War really were as large as those nominally under Swedish command, are matters not directly germane to the present task. It is undeniable that developments in strategy changed the ferocity of and resources required for war from the beginning of the sixteenth century onward, even if we do not know precisely how these demands were met. What we must attempt to answer is Parrott's question: what is the relationship between strategic development and constitutional innovation? And if there is a causal relation, then we must answer Black's question: which way does it run? Does the state change, and with it the strategies it employs? Or do changes in the strategic environment force states to change their organization in order to cope with these developments? And if we can answer those questions, then we can perhaps decide at what point this profound change occurred—the question that divided Roberts and Parker and Black.
This agenda, however, is not as tractable as it may at first appear. Take Parrott's question. It seems undeniable that there is a relationship between strategic and constitutional change, and the reason for this is not hard to gather. Strategic developments in a geography of proximate societies like Europe can present a similar, acute problem to states that otherwise may greatly differ. The endowments of states such as Spain and France may have little in common—that is, their material resources, cultural traditions, and political leadership may be absurdly unalike—but the cannon that confronts one will confront both. A new development in military tactics or technology will quickly spread through the available colleges and arsenals of all states. Every state must either mimic or innovate in response to such a development. And yet isn't Parrott right in implying that there is no single relationship between state formation and strategy because history provides far too many counterexamples of retrenchments that follow growth, of successful military innovations that lead nowhere constitutionally, and profound constitutional changes that seem to have no impact on military matters? To take but two examples: Consider the Polish army's practices during the seventeenth century that considerably diverged from those of the European states discussed by Roberts, Parker, and Black, yet were highly successful against the Swedes. Nevertheless, these innovations forced neither military nor constitutional changes on the rest of Europe. One might add also the Hungarian tactics against the Turks in 1686, which were similar in style to those of the Poles. Or consider the downsizing of European forces after Waterloo. Of the great powers, only Prussia elected to follow Napoleon's example and retain a large standing army; the others were far too wary of having so many soldiers garrisoned at home with large numbers of weapons that could be turned against the state.
Nor can one easily answer Black: if, as Parrott asserts, there is no linear, causal relationship between changes in the State and changes in strategy, how can we determine in which direction the causal relation holds? And if we don't know that, how can we say at which precise point the decisive revolution occurred—for if the constitutional changes in the State are dominant, the point at which those changes occur dates the revolution, but if the strategic change is determinant, then its hour of change is decisive. And so we cannot answer Roberts and Parker either.
Nor can they answer each other, for on the facts as we know them—that the nation-state has been the outcome of modern history, and that modern warfare has proceeded from loosely organized bands of mercenaries to the vast, professionalized standing armies of the present—there is no decisive fact that cannot be accommodated by each of the various proposed theses. If we focus on the Battle of Nödlingen in 1634, for example, the Swedish innovations so praised by Roberts look ineffectual against an apparently traditional Habsburg force—but it was just such innovations that won battles at Breitenfeld (1631), Lützen (1632), and Wittstock (1636). A partisan of either position can parry such evidence with the ease of a sociobiol-ogist asked for evidence of adaptive traits. Biogenetic evolution is punctuated; why can't the evolution of states also be? And therefore what counts as a significant event is one that fits a general account whose terminus is the world we know now. Other events, other battles, are pruned away as evolutionary dead ends.
Can it be a sheer coincidence that Roberts, one of the most distinguished contemporary historians of the Swedish empire, locates the military revolution in the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, while Black, a prominent historian of the regimes of the eighteenth century, finds his revolution there, and Parker, whose evidence goes beyond his special distinction in the history of the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century, nevertheless discovers in that century, in the Spanish campaigns in Flanders, the true beginning of the military revolution? It seems the more one learns about a period, the more pivotal and unique it appears. This appearance might simply be owed to that situating perspective that can accompany scholarly immersion. But in the case of historians as able and judicious as these, that seems an insufficient conclusion. Mightn't it also be that each of these historians is right because they are all right? More than one revolution has occurred because more than one constitutional order of the state has arisen. In the following narrative, I will discuss the transformations of the State that have accompanied military revolutions. I count six of these, not one—and thus do not answer Roberts's, Black's, and Parker's question by choosing one single date for a military revolu-tion, but by choosing all three, as well as some others—because the states that were brought into being are constitutionally distinct with respect to six different periods.
I propose, in the brief historical narrative that follows, to treat the relationship between state formation and strategic change as that of a field, as contrasted with those causal relations that are usually characterized along a line. A field relationship is mutually effecting between two or more subjects. Significant events in the development of strategy will be shown to have important constitutional manifestations, and significant constitutional changes will enable and sometimes demand strategic shifts, including shifts in the deployment of technology and tactics. Whether the one causes the other, or vice versa, depends entirely on where you stand and when you decide to begin. If we begin at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, it seems clear that the constitutional changes of the French Revolution made possible, even required, the levée en masse and wouldn't tolerate a heavy reliance on foreign mercenaries; bound by these requirements, Napoleon fashioned a new strategic approach to warfare. If we begin in the middle of the nineteenth century, it seems equally clear that the technological impact on military affairs of the industrial revolution—the ability of railways to move troops, the awesome results of rifled firearms and mass-produced naval hulls—made possible, perhaps even required, the mobilizing nation-state capable of harnessing industry to wage war. If we stand in Poland, we see the evolutionary process differently than if we view events from the perspective of Spain. But this is not because they are disconnected, but rather because the connection is not linear, with one a dependent variable of the other. Individual choice and sheer contingency have a role to play that is a necessary part of, not an annoying intrusion on, such field relations. It is choice, after all, that determines where we begin our story, and where it is set.