THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  The territorial state was characterized by a shift from the monarch-as-embodiment of sovereignty to the monarch as minister of sovereignty. A striking example of this occurred in the well-known “Diplomatic Revolu-tion” of 1748, in which reasons that related entirely to perceptions of the national interests concerned were allowed to predominate over the dynastic traditions of the Bourbon and Habsburg houses, and as a consequence, France and Austria found themselves allies for the first time.

  In the period after Utrecht a number of decisive changes occurred, in terms of army size, weapons, and most especially the administration of the armed forces, their training and control by the State. Thus it can be argued that the constitutional imperatives of the territorial state were partly the cause, and not merely the consequences of these changes.81 The period from 1660 to 1760 saw a significant increase in the number of men permanently under arms in Europe, an increase that is more dramatic once we recall that for most of this period European population figures were static. Greater administrative capability was felt in the field: for example, the Austrian conquest of Hungary from 1683 relied on the creation of a series of magazines. Large-scale mapping took place as surveys grew in importance, an obvious consequence of the territorial state's preoccupations.

  But not every state was able to reconstruct itself along such constitutional lines; in Poland, for example, the nobility was unable to reconcile itself to fidelity to the State as an entity of which the monarch was the first steward, and it simply destroyed the state structure that might otherwise have successfully resisted partition. Everywhere that control of the troops—everywhere the state monopoly on legitimate violence—fell from the hands of the State, the advantages of this military revolution eluded the country, as happened in Sweden and Hungary. Yet even the rigid stability of the successful territorial states would soon be shaken by a new, more dynamic constitutional form and its accompanying strategic whirlwind.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From State-Nations to Nation-States:

  1776 – 1914

  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 I
taly; 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.