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National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems
Rodney Bruce Hall (ed.)
1999
4. Raison d’Etat and Territorial Sovereignty: Mercantilist Absolutism and Eighteenth-Century Imperialism
We are king and master and we do as we please.
—Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia
No one reasons, everyone executes!
—Friedrich the Great
Power or weakness does not in this respect produce any difference. A dwarf is as much a man as a giant.
—Vattel
In the eighteenth century state-building projects and international rivalries in many ways developed in tandem. They were both aspects of the development of the fundamental legitimating principle of the territorial-sovereign international system. This is the doctrine of raison d’état; the notion of the primacy of the interests of the state, which could only with great difficulty be delineated from the interests of the dynasts who ruled most eighteenth-century states. State sovereignty and the personal sovereignty of a dynast went hand-in-glove in the Hapsburg and Russian Empires, in France, Prussia, and elsewhere. The sovereignty of the state was an extension of the sovereignty of its lord. Throughout the early modern period, as political theory slowly emancipated itself from political theology, political theorists from Machiavelli to Bodin to Hobbes had developed the notion of sovereignty as a justification of, and prop to, the development of state power. Thus eighteenth-century sovereignty had both internal and external dimensions, and domestic and international consequences. I will explore these dimensions in turn.
Internal Dimensions of Territorial Sovereignty: The Eighteenth-Century Domestic Social Order
The religious conflict had abated, but its memory gave credence to the notions of these theorists of sovereignty. The sovereign emerged as judge and legislator, granted the authority to settle religious differences and to resolve the problem of religious minorities within his territories. According to this doctrine the sovereign had been granted absolute power, which vastly exceeded the kingly power of medieval monarchs who had relied so heavily on the advice and consent of lesser nobles in their realm. The monarchy was now winning the domestic struggle for power with the lesser nobility. The sovereign had the power of life and death over all who were “subject” to his sovereignty, which was now purported to derive directly from God, so Friedrich Wilhelm could claim “[w]e are king and master and we do as we please.” 1
While the eighteenth-century monarchs had to contend with limits on their power and freedom of action as a result of continued, though diminished, privileges and pressures of the domestic aristocracy, it is certain that their sovereignty entitled them to so substantial a measure of authority over the state that it necessarily blurred the distinction between the state and the dynasty. The state-building projects of monarchs had left them with “supreme legitimate power over the people residing within their borders” as well a monopoly of coercion (the legal disposition of armed force), taxation (collection and expenditure), administration (control of public life through a rational bureaucracy that served at the pleasure of the Crown), and lawmaking (setting of public policy and enactment of laws governing civil society). 2
The process of transition from feudal norms of heteronomy and diffusion of political power among the nobility had proceeded speedily in the west of Europe, and more slowly in the east. In central and eastern Europe and particularly Russia, the nobility, accompanied by the church and the Crown, had retained a legal monopoly on land ownership throughout the most of the eighteenth century. There existed “no land without a lord.” Ancient norms of personal servitude ensured the rural nobility of a ready availability of peasant labor. The rural nobility retained vast discretion in the administration of their lands and the governance and discipline of the peasantry within them. The rural peasantry was strapped with significant obligations to provide labor services to work the land attached to the demesne. Peasants were bound to the land by the tie of serfdom, lacking freedom to leave or change their occupation or even to travel without the permission of the noble. Peasants were required to lease out their own plots and land from the lord for payments in money or in kind. While ostensibly entitled to tenure of their land by longstanding norms, this tenure could in practice be forfeited for serious offenses, with the lord determining what a serious offense was.
All of these arrangements of serfdom, with their feudal residues, were more or less odious regarding the status of the peasantry. They were perhaps less odious in the German states (with the significant exception of Prussia) and Hapsburg Empire and more odious in Poland and Russia where the peasantry was subject to routine and vigorous corporal punishment, as a disciplinary measure, at the discretion of the lord. The peasantry was effectively reduced by legal measures to the status of chattel. 3 Significantly, the stronger feudal residues of the central and eastern European states limited the penetration of the Crown and its state into vast tracts of rural society in the countries where its strength held. The administrative power of the nobility in these realms served as a buffer between the state and the peasantry which constituted the bulk of the population of eighteenth-century Europe. Rural peasants in such circumstances were much more likely to identify themselves as stewards and servants of their local noble and lord than as subjects of the Crown. The particulars of such a peasant’s personal circumstances, the quantity of labor he performed, the dues and taxes he paid, which woman he was permitted to marry, the rents he paid on his lands, the materials from which he was permitted to construct his meager shelter, and the number of stripes he bore upon his back, were determined entirely as a consequence of his relationship with his local lord, not his sovereign.
Peasants were tied to the land and to the commune, even in western Europe where a mixed system of land-ownership that ran the gamut from noble landlords to urban landowners to free peasant proprietors to peasant tenants and, at the bottom, landless laborers, prevailed. Even here the feudal residues survived in the eighteenth century, though generally the labor services still owed to the rural nobility in the east were replaced by a system of seigniorial dues and fees. 4 In addition to these, in France, for example, the weight of the taxes levied by the Crown in the forms of the taille (the royal land tax), the capitation (the head tax), and the gabelle (salt tax) were all ultimately payable by the peasantry. 5 Thus even where eighteenth-century European peasants were legally of free status they remained for practical purposes bound to land and condition by heavy taxes and seigniorial dues and debt. In France the taxes and obligations alone typically skimmed off about half of the proceeds of the gross harvest, and the peasant family was required to set aside seeds for the next planting, meet rents and debt obligations, and maintain themselves on what remained, ensuring an insecure and marginal existence on a deficient diet and under often quite squalid conditions. 6
The heavy labor and grinding poverty of such conditions year-to-year and generation-to-generation had infested the peasantry with the attitude of traditionalism. The aspirations of the bulk of the peasantry were of necessity quite modest, generally limited to the assurance of subsistence of the family. Submissiveness to authority and acceptance of lowly station became peasant communal norms. With eyes fixed so firmly on the ground, the primary sources of peasant self-identification tended to derive rather firmly from the manor (or chateaux), the parish, the local village or commune, and the family. The “interests” of the peasant lay in the maintenance of subsistence for the family, avoiding the wrath of the seigneur, and the maintenance of a ragged respectability in social intercourse with peers.
At higher levels of domestic society a spectrum of noble elites vied for distinction and patronage. The eighteenth century saw little if any of the social mobility that was to characterize the nineteenth. Noble birth continued to confer a distinction upon the beneficiary that was quite independent of the merits of the individual. Generally the landed aristocracy sat at the summit of the social pyramid in largely agricultural eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the wealthy urban nobility and clerics. An increasingly vulnerable group of nobles with titles and no wealth clung to the trappings of aristocracy throughout the century as well. 7
The aristocratic class cultivated its own system of values that was quite distinct from either the merchant and emerging bourgeois classes, and even further from the dogged and resigned traditionalism of the peasantry. The continental nobility, and especially the French nobility, cultivated a regal disdain for what they considered to be the “money-grubbing activities” of the “vulgar rich” who came in for such poor treatment in the appraisals of St. Simon. Assured of income and credit as a result of their landed estates and attendant seigniorial rights to rents and dues accruing from this proprietorship, they were a profligate class of conspicuous consumers. They despised the bourgeois virtue of frugality that had aided the accumulation of the fortunes of the “commercial nobility,” who in their eyes offered them insult in the ludicrous pretense of seeking social acceptability among them. In counterpoint to the pretensions of this “commercial nobility” of the “vulgar rich” they prided themselves as a “military nobility” of ancient lineage in the service of the Crown and “state,” belonging to a race apart. 8
The urban nobility prospered in the twenty odd cities on the continent with populations exceeding 100,000. While the landed aristocracy held their titles from their ancient lineage and their lands from ancient feudal norms, the urban nobility, who generally lacked landed estates, relied more directly on the patronage of the Crown for the maintenance of their wealth and position. The Crown’s sovereignty had a very real and immanent meaning in both their political and economic systems of accounting. Their extravagant and opulent lifestyles, their large expenditures and prodigal, wasteful, and lavish social engagements were often financed by short-term debts and regarded as “short-term investments” in their futures. The system of royal patronage that they relied upon demanded that they obtain the highest level of visibility. The more visible one was, the more “sinecures, pensions, and favorable marriage alliances for one’s children” would likely be forthcoming. 9
In France in particular, the aristocracy had squandered their resistance to the absolutist state for the trappings of power and preeminence, and for lifestyles of idle and rather purposeless opulence. The Bourbons had stripped the French nobility of real, political power, except for a residual role as judges and magistrates, and had fed the nobility on patronage and pageantry in its stead. 10 This is particularly in evidence when one examines the fate of the court nobles, who served a purely ornamental function for the Bourbon monarchy, enhancing the status of the Bourbon kings by their presence, by their attendance to the king’s whims, and by the exchange of their ancient power and authority for this “unproductive, even dissipated existence.” 11 A trenchant passage by Liah Greenfeld describes the dilemma of the court noble.
The great and proud nobles were indeed reduced to the position of children. Denied all independence and treated without respect, they were expending their pent-up energies in intriguing against each other and for the attentions of the ruler whose supreme power over them they no longer dared to contest, and in fear of displeasing him. Their exaggerated concern over formal dignities coexisted with pathetically, pitifully undignified behavior vis-a-vis the king....Court life was not conducive to proud bearing. A manual for courtiers...advised utter self-effacement and submission to the will of the sovereign. Among the qualities most necessary for a courtier, it recommended “patience, politeness, and no will at all; listen to everything, and tell nothing. Always appear to be content. Have a lot of friends and very few confidants.” 12
A significant result of the humiliation of the French aristocracy was their alienation from the regime. The government of France emanated from the Crown to the intendants who administered the thirty-six generalités and the Crown’s advisers at court. These latter were not the pathetic court nobles consigned to preening in the presence of the sovereign. The intendants and real advisers were the king’s men. The primary self-identification of the bulk of the French nobility, however, under such humiliating circumstances was with their class, rather than with the roi or the patrie, and Greenfeld has argued that this was to have dire circumstances for the French regime later in the century. These issues will be treated in chapter 7.
The personal sovereignty of the Prussian kings over domestic matters was similarly unconstrained. Friedrich the Great (who ruled 1740–86) was the consummate Prussian autocrat, and exercised an intensely personal rule over the Prussian state, a style of rule that he had inherited from his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I.
He directed the state in person, all threads came together in his hand, and the only center of unity was his own mind. Order, in Prussia, had not come from free discussion and collaboration. As Friedrich the Great once observed, if Newton had to consult with Descartes and Leibnitz, he would never have created his philosophical system. 13
The Prussian kings invariably held a highly pessimistic view of the potentialities of the common classes, whose limited capabilities required their firm supervision by the Prussian nobility in the eyes of the Hohenzollerns. A significant consequence of this outlook was the strictest preservation of the privilege of military command in the hands of the Prussian nobility. No social mobility whatever was available for the Prussian of low birth throughout the century. Autocracy limited the posts available to them in the civil service as well, and over time even this limited platform of authority became a preserve of the nobility. 14
Significantly, however, the Prussian kings resolved the problem faced by every eighteenth-century dynast—namely “how to subdue the nobility without earning their enmity and without creating severe social instability” 15 —with the singular solution of setting them apart as a military class de facto as well as de jure. There would be no Prussian sales of military titles to wealthy bourgeoisie as in France. As a consequence the Prussian army was intensely professional, competent, and efficient, and consequently extremely effective, whereas the French army under the old regime was topheavy, and bloated with amateurs and dilettantes, and consequently significantly less effective. In this manner Friedrich consistently managed to instill an identification of the Prussian aristocracy with the Prussian state, by making them the guardians of the state in fact as well as in name, and in bolstering and providing opportunities for attainment of the fundamental motivating factors of their class, especially their “honor, class-consciousness, glory, or ambition.” 16
Though he valued patriotism, Friedrich certainly did not expect it from the common classes. From these obedience alone was both prized and expected, whether they were soldiers or civilians. The self-identifications and self-understandings of the masses of common people were of no consequence to the absolutist dynasts who ruled them, so long as they produced and obeyed.
Between populations and their governments little feeling existed. The tie between the sovereign and subject was bureaucratic, administrative and fiscal, an external mechanical connection of ruler and ruled, strongly in contrast to the principle brought in by the Revolution, which...effected an almost religious fusion of the government and the governed. A good government of the Old Regime was one that demanded little of its subjects, which regarded them as useful, worthy, and productive assets to the state, and which in wartime interfered as little as possible with civilian life. A ‘good people’ was one which obeyed the laws, and paid its taxes, and was loyal to the reigning house; it need have no sense of its own identity as a people, or unity as a nation, or responsibility for public affairs, or obligation to put forth a supreme effort in war. 17
For the subject of an eighteenth-century state who lacked the badge of nobility, the pursuit of preferment within the humble boundaries allotted them by a highly stratified society dominated their daily life. Wealthy merchants might pursue social recognition and material comfort, or even promotion into the nobility. They were not entirely without influence with monarchs who understood the benefits to the domestic economy, and thus to the state’s revenues, promoted by their trade. This was particularly the case, as we shall see, for merchants engaged with colonial pursuits and trading companies engaged in international trade.
The peasantry, as we have seen, was overwhelmingly preoccupied with the pursuit of subsistence. The lower bourgeoisie found solace in the pursuit of mastership as artisans and master craftsmen. The best journeymen might set themselves up as a master. This was a cherished badge of citizenship, denoting honorable social status and considerable economic privileges to guilded masters. The attainment of mastership entitled its possessor to a modicum of moral respectability, and as the century progressed, as masters increasingly became capitalists and proprietors, hope of much more. 18 This hope of enfranchisement with expanded political rights, however, was to be realized only in France, and then quite late in the century.
Journeyman artisans lacking proprietorship over their means of production increasingly acquired the status of proletarians as their masters simply salaried them. A significant indicator of the extent to which the eighteenth-century state discounted the sentiment of vast majority of its working subjects is how it dealt with labor unrest. These regimes prized social control above all other domestic concerns. Labor unrest was regarded simply as a threat to public order, and was brutally dealt with as such. The social conservatism and stratification inherent in the domestic social order demanded the unquestioned subordination of workers to employers and government actively abetted this process by forbidding strikes or labor demonstration, and even requiring that a journeyman’s master provide a certificate indicating that all their affairs had been settled before the journeyman or worker could lawfully leave his employment. 19 The nonpropertied classes had even less incentive to identify with the Crown than did their employers in such circumstances, and it is not difficult to see how legitimation crises continued to erupt for absolutist regimes as capitalism developed and increasingly privatized the function of the extraction of resources from domestic society. 20
A significant exception to this absolutist form of sovereignty had developed in England, however, where “Whiggism” had triumphed in the “Glorious Revolution” to ensure the demise there of Stuart theories of the divine right of kings. 21 A constitutional monarchy had been restored with the Protestant Hanoverian succession. While the power of the English monarch was circumscribed by a power-sharing arrangement with parliament, this was no figurehead Crown. The Crown employed patronage and sinecures, dispensed by its government ministers to ensure working majorities for its policies in parliament. The Duke of Newcastle became the quintessential master of patronage dispensation for George II, and such arrangements enabled the recruitment of highly talented non-nobles, such as William Pitt the Elder (1708&-;78)—later Lord Chatham—into the service of the government. 22
But while absolutism in England had been held at bay, English suffrage still strongly resembled a corporate, or group privilege rather than a universal franchise, “almost a form of property, whose exercise was expected to bring some direct benefit.” 23 Most Commons seats available early in the century represented corporate boroughs. It was the privilege of the leading family in the area to nominate a candidate for parliament, with the result that many seats “seemed almost hereditary with sons replacing their fathers as the generations passed” such that on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, three quarters of the 1761 Parliament consisted of men whose ancestors had served in the House. 24 The government of England during the reigns of George I and George II therefore bore a strong likeness to a form of one-party government dominated by Protestant Whig Peers in the House of Lords and their non-noble counterparts in the House of Commons. The rest of parliament was populated by a hundred or so Tories who were systematically excluded from participation in ministries and regarded as covert subversives or Jacobites waiting for an opportunity to restore the ousted Stuarts by force. 25 Party labels had limited meaning, however, and the parliament more nearly represented a “loose network of interests and ‘connections’ based on individual ties and individual ambitions.” 26
The Whig ascendancy, which dominated English politics in the eighteenth century, opposed the Tory demands for a more democratic political order. Whiggism held that a democratic form of government, in which political equality was granted to all, independent of birth and particularly property, was inherently unstable. The Whigs feared that such a system would undermine both the notion of limited monarchy and the responsibilities of the aristocracy. They explicitly rejected natural law arguments regarding the inalienable rights of all men to a voice in their government. They therefore rejected Tory theories of popular sovereignty as rigorously as they rejected absolute monarchy and favored a program that ensured a constitutional monarchy, Protestant succession, the rule of law, and most particularly the defense of property against encroachments by the Crown or the Commons. 27
Thus England’s government appears, more than any other eighteenth-century arrangement, to bear a strong resemblance to Marx’s “executive committee of the bourgeoisie” with the exception that it was most prominently led by a small landed aristocracy. Unless one was a noble or a wealthy merchant or other form of bourgeois one’s franchise was extremely limited. Yet the self-definition of England as a Protestant nation, since at least the end of the sixteenth century, 28 had created a vehicle for social mobility for commoners that had been unknown on the continent (with the exception of the United Provinces). A sense of national feeling extended at least to those well enough educated to benefit from this “nobility.” Thus it may fairly be argued that identification with the regime of some form extended further down into the common reaches of English society than it did elsewhere. The notion of the people as sovereign, however narrowly the “people” might be in practice defined, had deep roots and enjoyed significant credence among the common people in the England of the eighteenth century. 29 As will be seen later, this was to have significant consequences for the early emergence of national collective identity in England in relation to the continental absolutist states, and for England’s behavior as an eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign power.
External Dimensions of Territorial Sovereignty: The Eighteenth Century International System
The employment of the notion of personal sovereignty to buttress traditional divine right doctrine as a legitimating principle for domestic rule entailed also accepting the legitimacy of the rule of other sovereigns, including one’s enemy. One might challenge the right of one’s adversary to rule over a particular bit of territory, but not his right to rule qua sovereign. Significantly, after his downfall, Napoleon was granted “sovereignty” over the island of Elba and was fashioned “emperor” of Elba by his conquerors. 30 This illustrates the extent to which even the deposed and despised were recognized as sovereign entities in their persons by other sovereigns, and also served the purpose of emphasizing the sovereign legitimacy of the dynastic victors. As Ruggie has argued:
The issue here was not who had how much power, but who could be designated as a power. Such a designation inherently is a collective act. It involved the mutual recognition of the new constitutive principle of sovereignty....Reciprocal sovereignty thus became the basis of the new international order. 31
Externally sovereignty defined power and rights in relation to other states. A sovereign power’s rights with respect to other states included, at a minimum, the right to sovereign independence from all external power, the right to enter into diplomatic relations with other states under the principle of pacta sunt servanda, 32 and the right to make war if required to defend the interests of the state. The doctrine of raison d’état alone was to govern the conduct of the statesman of a sovereign power in the eighteenth century. Most if not all eighteenth-century monarch’s likely subscribed to the following words of Friedrich Meinecke:
Raison d’état is the fundamental principle of national conduct, the State’s first Law of Motion. It tells the statesman what he must do to preserve the health and strength of the State...an organic structure whose full power can only be maintained by allowing it in some way to continue growing; and raison d’état indicates both the path and the goal for such a growth. 33
Louis XIV had referred to this doctrine as “the first of all laws by common consent,” and Friedrich the Great, alluding to the inapplicability of private morality to interstate relations implied by the doctrine, had written that the “fundamental rule of government for all states...is the principle of extending their territories.” 34 Neither does it appear that the amoral doctrine failed to take hold of many seventeenth and eighteenth-century European monarchs regarding their personal affairs. Peter the Great allowed his son to be tortured to death for an offense against the state. Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia sentenced the young friend of his son to death for a minor offense and forced his son and heir to witness the execution. Elizabeth of Russia usurped the throne and imprisoned her son, Ivan, and Catherine II colluded in the overthrow and eventual murder of her husband Peter III in usurping his throne. 35 Dissimulation, deliberate breaches of treaty obligations, betrayal of allies, “cheerful justification of aggressive war,” acquiescence in brutality in the conduct of war, general unconcern about the human costs of war—all of these dismal characteristics and practices were justified by the doctrine of raison d’état. 36
Significantly, a problem for both the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century international systems was the absence of agreement regarding what the principle of sovereignty implied in a system where the principle of raison d’état could be employed to legitimate almost any action that a territorial-sovereign state might take while invoking it. Luard has documented numerous violations of the sovereignty of the smaller states in the system which did not necessarily entail the smaller state becoming a simple victim of territorial aggrandizement of a larger one, though the latter was hardly an uncommon occurrence. It is worth examining these issues briefly in order to avoid overstating the extent to which the post-Westphalian principle of sovereignty had actually exiled feudal heteronomy. The system remained transitional, even on through the eighteenth century, in that “the more powerful states were able to treat some territories in ways wholly inconsistent with the normal rules of sovereignty.” 37
Examples of this transitional phenomenology abound. The stubborn refusal of the papacy and Holy Roman Emperor to accede to the banishment of their influence from the system, as “non-sovereign entities,” was not least among these. The smaller German states would often be excluded from the perquisites due to sovereign states—even the exchange of ambassadors and routinized diplomatic relations—for fear of angering the Holy Roman Emperor who still claimed feudal rights over many of them. As John Herz has observed:
But there remained the chief problem: how to define the status of those rulers who, because of their membership in the Empire, were subjects of the emperor. Could one be “sovereign” and “subject” at the same time?...If so, what did their subjection to the emperor amount to? 38
In other cases, the sovereign right of a ruler to a monopoly of force in his own territory was denied by other powers, either as an artifact of an atavistic feudal relationship or occasionally merely imposed on a nominally sovereign state. Unauthorized transit by foreign armed forces in a military exigency was not uncommon. The right of protection of religious minorities in another territory was sometimes sought and sometimes even granted. The right of a state to determine its own constitution was sometimes limited by external powers, and veto over a constitutional change was sometimes demanded by a neighbor. The right to determine succession to the throne of a deceased monarch was often contended by other states, to which the wars of Spanish, Polish, Bavarian, and Austrian succession attest. Intervention in the affairs of a foreign power to assist a revolutionary movement was the most frequent violation of sovereignty, and thus the most frequently prohibited in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treaties. 39
Yet it is not abnormal today for states to seek influence in the affairs of others. Violations of the principle of sovereignty do not obviate the viability of the principle. The normativity of system legitimating principles ensures their counterfactual validity. The issue here is definitional, and regards an absence of the development of consensual knowledge 40 regarding the contemporary definition of sovereignty, which “provided no exact measure of the degree or type of independence that a state could expect to enjoy.” 41
Problems of consensual knowledge regarding these definitional issues tended to see progress in the conference diplomacy following major wars involving most or all of the major powers in the system. Osiander has suggested, for example, that the principles of autonomy of states, equality among them, balance of power among states, and guarantees of the security of states emerged from the Peace of Utrecht as the “consensus principles” upon which the European system of international relations was founded at the end of the War of Spanish Succession. 42 Postcontinental war conference diplomacy was, however, a rather costly means of establishing consensus for system principles and the norms of international behavior, and elementary rules began to develop in the absence of the impetus of major conflagrations.
As Ruggie has argued, the “paradox of absolute individuation” implied by territorial sovereignty required the inviolability of embassies and foreign diplomatic personnel. 43 Thus the ambassador became immune to prosecution even for serious crimes, was exempted from liability to civil suits for injuries, could not be taxed or held accountable for payment of debts, nor could his goods be seized for payment of debts or his religious practice in his private chapel be interfered with. Neither could his mail be opened. Safe conduct was guaranteed for diplomatic personnel even of governments with whom hostilities had commenced. 44 Significantly, these solutions were fostered by the implications of the principle of territorial sovereignty. It is difficult to suggest here that purely rational instrumental reasons for action can account for the eighteenth-century rules governing the diplomatic relations. The Ottoman Turks were also possessed of instrumental rationality, also experienced the need to exchange ambassadors and conduct diplomatic relations, yet felt no compulsion to adhere to these rules. Occasionally they violated them rather dramatically.
The century saw the development of a system of rules that was incorporated into a developing corpus of limited international law in the areas that most seriously challenged the consensual knowledge of territorial sovereigns. Rules governing the effectivity of treaties, the limits to sovereign jurisdiction on the high seas, trade, the rights of neutrals during war, maritime rules governing use of the sea all saw progress in the eighteenth century. 45 This did not mean that as the century waned, all problems of consensual knowledge in these areas were resolved, particularly in the area of maritime neutral rights. 46 British insistence on the right of blockade during war, their broad definition of contraband, which could be seized under the prize law they had adopted, was a major point of contention for neutral maritime trading powers like the Dutch, and later the Americans, who relied upon maritime commerce and argued for a “free ships, free goods” principle to be applied to them by belligerents. 47
While Luard points out that these controversies reflect “deep differences of interest” among eighteenth-century, territorial-sovereign states, he also demonstrates how territorial sovereignty as a system-legitimating principle lent itself to demands for the mitigation of many of its effects through the development of interstate rules that slowly became codified into a system of international law. The controversies:
also clearly demonstrated the determination of the majority to establish principles of international behavior which would protect them from arbitrary and high-handed action at the hands of one or two dominant naval powers...[significantly]...the rules which the majority demanded eventually came to be accepted as representing the “public law” of the continent. 48
Nonetheless, there was certainly no prohibition of war or any serious question of the legitimacy of war attending the principle of territorial-sovereignty. War was deemed legitimate in order to obtain reparation for losses, for breach of a legal pact, for self-defense, for maintenance of a state or dynastic right, to prevent intended or threatened injury, to punish offense (however broadly defined), to anticipate the designs of another state, to prevent reoccurrence of attacks, to assist an ally under treaty obligation, to assist the uprising of the “unjustly oppressed” in another state, to maintain the balance of power, or merely to uphold the “honor” of the state. 49
Dynastic Status, Mercantilism and the Notion of Interest in the Absolutist State
Having established the absolutist character of rule in the majority of eighteenth-century European states we certainly might be led to characterize the “interests” of the state in this period in Morgenthau’s terms of the will-to-power. It would appear that the will-to-power in the hands of an absolutist dynast, however, was an implement by which he or she expressed his or her will-to-manifest-identity. The whims and wills of absolute monarchs in the eighteenth century tended to be sized to the scale of the power that they wielded. They wished to be grand, admired, feared, immortalized, and deferred to in higher proportions than were their peers. They willed-to-manifest-identity as conquerors, emperors, and hegemons. They strove to become the composers and fiddlers of the tune to which the rest of Europe, even the rest of the world, would dance. Aggression was a natural impulse for such a powerful enfant terrible. As Schumpeter has argued:
War was a part of their settled order of life, so to speak—an element of sovereign splendor, almost a fashion. Hence they waged war whenever the occasion was offered, not so much from considerations of advantage as from personal whim. To look for deep-laid plans, broad perspectives, consistent trends is to miss the whole point. 50
The principle of raison d’état provided eighteenth-century absolutists with an ideal justification to exercise their caprice in international competition. Absolutism itself, however, blurred the distinction between the dynast and the state and it is clear that the assertion of Louis XIV at the beginning of the century, that L’Etat c’est moi was roughly equally applicable in Hohenzollern Prussia, in Russia, and in the Hapsburg Empires of Austria and Spain. That the absolutists themselves regarded the interests, reasons, and status of the state to be quite nearly conterminous with their personal and dynastic interests and fortunes is exemplified by the energy they expended in jealously ensuring their status relative to other monarchs and states. Yet this absolutist “status anxiety” lacked the provincial character of the pettier status conflicts of earlier centuries when the only concern was to win status for the ruler’s person and house. Now the “central concern was with the positions occupied by the states with which the rulers increasingly identified themselves.” 51 The principle of raison d’état legitimated the practice of seeking personal and dynastic glory under the rubric of seeking glory for the state.
The status competition among dynastic states was manifested in many edifices and institutions that survive to the present day. Not the least of these were the splendid and ostentatious palaces and public buildings built by nearly all European monarchs—even those who controlled territories of minuscule dimensions. Similarly, while they were institutions necessitated by the conflictual nature of eighteenth-century international relations, and made possible by the consolidation of state-building projects and nascent capitalist activity, the standing armies that were everywhere created in this period were status symbols of the first magnitude. They were ornamental as well as functional, and in the case of very small states served more of the former than the latter purpose. The pretension of this activity had impelled Friedrich the Great of Prussia to quip caustically that “there is no prince...who does not imagine himself to be Louis XIV: he builds his Versailles, has his mistress, and maintains an army.” 52 Consider in this context the rather amusing pretense of the “Elector of Palatine, [who], though by no means wealthy, at one time possessed 30 regiments, of which a quarter of the manpower consisted of officers; and, though without a seaboard, boasted a Grand Admiral commanding a few small craft which he sailed up and down the Rhine.” 53
Eighteenth-century European monarchs demonstrated what today appears to be a singularly neurotic fetish regarding issues of precedence in what might otherwise be regarded as trivial circumstances. We might refer to this as protocol fetishism. The relative honors shown to their ambassadors at formal diplomatic functions, courtesies shown to each, order of their placement at the dinner table, were intensely scrutinized and bitterly contended. Rather minor breaches of diplomatic protocol involving issues of precedence could have the most bizarre and serious consequences, not infrequently resulting in violent incidents, so that ambassadors found excuses not to attend functions where these issues were likely to arise. 54
Similarly contended were “first salutes” on the high seas as monarchs would insist that foreign ships dip their flags in salute before allowing their flags to be dipped. Enormous importance was attached to hierarchy of titles: The Marquises wished titular promotion to Dukes, who in turn craved the superior title of Elector, who fashioned themselves Kings, who styled themselves Emperors. Significantly, one could not unilaterally assume a higher title in order to achieve this desired importance. The recognition of one’s higher status by others was essential. In withholding this recognition, individual status-anxious aristocrats and rulers could stoop to absurdity, as might have been the case with the Holy Roman Emperor who emphasized his superior titular precedence over mere kings by refusing to refer to them as “majesty,” and offering instead the title “serenitas.” 55
It is worthwhile to ponder this anecdotal evidence of what appears to contemporary eyes as neurotic status-anxiety of a magnitude that might, if isolated in an individual or small group, be attributed to some form of clinically interesting mental pathology. As it was rather a concern shared by each of the rulers of the various states that comprised Europe, we should rather take it as a concern with relative position in a status-conscious age. What is unclear is whether the concern with relative position which characterized the international politics of the entire century was a concern for the relative position of monarchs or of states. Breaches of diplomatic protocol are still negatively sanctioned. This occurred as recently as 1995 when Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II chose to schedule a vacation, forcing a delay of President Clinton’s planned state visit to the U.K. to confer with Prime Minister Major. This snub was reportedly offered as Elizabeth had been annoyed that Clinton had chosen to accept the Russian invitation to attend ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the capitulation of Germany in World War II, without attending London’s celebration. The consequences of this pique were, however, confined to a rescheduling of the American-British summit meeting. Louis XIV had, by contrast, sent a French squadron to Genoese waters to demand a first salute from the port, and had ordered the city bombarded when this was refused. 56 It was the inseparability of the territorial sovereign and absolutist state, the impossibility of slighting one without slighting the other, that renders these piquant displays of status-anxious protocol fetishism explicable.
Territorial-Sovereign Identity and Mercatilist Theory and Practice
One of the most significant consequences of the Westphalian settlement and the close of the era of the Wars of Religion had been a shift in both the rationales and character of the system of continental alliances that had structured European international relations between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the delegitimation of religious ideas and affiliations, and the rise of the principle of raison d’état, the continent fell away from the familiar pattern of conflict between the Austro-Spanish Hapsburg axis and the coalition of Protestant powers aided by a France encircled by Hapsburg territories. Consequently the continental system became much more multipolar, and increasingly characterized by a loose system of very short term alliances. 57
The creation of standing armies and their regular employment in the acquisition of new territory, whether to buttress state or dynastic status, and to compensate for increasing uncertainty in alliance politics due to the delegitimation of religious-military affiliations, created a pressing need for steady flows of revenues for their maintenance. Continental struggles became wars of shifting, short term coalitions. Financing them was a challenge for an era characterized by the scarcity of coin and the continued flow of funds to armies of professional soldiers, many of whom were mercenaries recruited from foreign lands and distinctly unmotivated by more than the desire to earn money and to survive. Thus finance was of paramount importance for monarchs who wished to sustain a successful campaign.
An artifact of the segmentation of the political world according to the principle of territoriality 58 was an economic closure corresponding to the political closure segmented by territory. As state-building and territorial consolidation crystallized the state as an institutional form, Europe witnessed the emergence of economies whose boundaries roughly coincided with those of the state. 59 As European monarchs continued to discover the extent to which success in their martial status-contests relied upon their ability to mobilize the “industrial, commercial, financial, military and naval resources” 60 of their territories, they increasingly viewed these resources as interchangeably fungible, globally scarce, and fundamentally limited. The absolutist regarded the wealth of the state as his or her personal war chest. The scarcity of coin and precious metals, and the rudimentary nature of early-eighteenth-century credit vehicles and banking systems had led to bullionism—the view that all wealth resides in the possession of precious metals, that money had to be secured either by plunder or trade. 61 The Crown could tax trade and sell monopolies to individual merchants or trading companies. These revenues made up a crucially significant share of the revenues of the Crown, which was almost universally anxious to see such economic activity expanded.
The overseas traders and merchants were increasingly seen as the real growth engines of the global economy that began to develop during the eighteenth-century colonization process, and they were responsible for generating much of the wealth of Europe during the century. The state actively supported the establishment and operations of maritime trading companies that were engaged in competition with the trading firms of other states for commercial domination in the periphery. Trade in the West Indies was particularly lucrative for the British and French Empires. This chain of small tropical islands provided imports of tobacco, coffee, cotton, dye indigo, and sugar for manufacture into finished products in the mother country, which could then be re-exported to other European states for specie. 62
The establishment of colonies in large measure resulted directly from the desire to increase the flow of limited tradable commodities. Colonies were, unlike continental territory, coveted not from a desire for conquest, honor, or glory but for the products they could supply and the taxable wealth they could generate. This motivation is fundamentally distinct, as we shall see in chapter 8, from the imperial impulses that were to impel the territorial segmentation of the globe in the late nineteenth century, during the nationalist era. In the eighteenth century:
Europeans did not settle in the remote foreign regions out of a desire for conquest, but to secure access to particular commodities which could be profitably traded in Europe....Except in the Americas, permanent settlement was usually not intended, still less the detailed administrations of local populations. 63
Trade with one’s colonies was an enormously important contribution to the balance of trade. France’s colonial trade grew from 25 million livres in 1716 to 263 million livres in 1789, which constituted growth from 20 percent to 50 percent of France’s total foreign trade. 64 Similarly, North American colonial trade alone constituted 20 percent of her total foreign trade in 1750 and 34 percent by 1785. 65 Figures for trade with British India are not available, but recognition that France’s colonies on the subcontinent were forfeit in the 1763 settlement of the Seven Years’ War leads us to suspect that these figures would be much higher with the inclusion of the Indian contribution.
The territorial-sovereign state had a powerful incentive to establish colonies, particularly in regions where valuable commodities, unavailable in Europe, could be extracted or grown. Colonies were seen not as strategic liabilities but as economic assets, particularly where they were established by trading companies that maintained their own armed forces, which many did. At one time the army of the British East India Company numbered 150,000 and the state-sponsored firm employed its own navy as well. 66 Similarly, the Virginia Company of London had governed in accordance with martial law in the establishment of the Virginia colony, and had maintained a strict military form of governance there for many years. 67
But the major incentive to establish colonies for eighteenth-century mercantilist regimes lay in the extension of the sovereignty of the state (and its monarch) to the remote colony, not for purposes of accruing status to either, but for the capability, unavailable on the continent, to leverage the terms of trade to the advantage of the mother country and to shield it from competition. Colonial trade was “directed,” or “managed” trade. It was reserved to the home country alone and as such constituted “a pure monopoly.” 68 Moreover, such managed arrangements could be designed to ensure not only a captive market for the manufactures of the mother country, and a supplier of rare and valuable commodities for those manufactures, but a perpetually captive market as well. Residing under the sovereignty of the mother country, colonists could be obstructed from developing manufacturing industries, and generally were, as manufacturing industries at home needed markets and abhorred competition. 69 Consider the case of the British Navigation Acts, which specified the terms of trade for Britain’s American colonies. These acts ensured that a precious stream of coin continued to flow into British coffers. According to one economic historian “The basic elements of the system...tended to drain specie from America to Britain. There is no need to quote colonial witnesses concerning the distress which results from lack of ready cash [in America].” 70
Yet mercantilist theory and practice routinely subordinated private economic interests to the perceived interests of the state, and raison d’état justified and legitimated this view and practice inasmuch as wealth and power were so closely coupled in the thought of the day. Edward Earle captures the issues succinctly in a rather extreme formulation.
In modern terminology, we would say that the predominant purpose of mercantilist regulations was to develop the military potential, or war potential. To this end exports and imports were rigidly controlled; stocks of precious metals were built up and conserved; military and naval stores were produced or imported under a system of premiums and bounties; shipping and the fisheries were fostered as a source of naval power; colonies were settled and protected (as well as strictly regulated) as a complement to the wealth and self-sufficiency of the mother country; population growth was encouraged for the purpose of increasing military man power. These and other measures were designed with the major, if not the single, purpose of adding to the unity and strength of the nation [sic]. 71
Of course mercantilist assumptions are highly suspect, and the critiques of the classical economists of the Scottish Enlightenment, specifically that of Smith, began to appear later in the decade. 72 These critiques became influential and began to guide even British economic policy in the nineteenth century, but certainly not in the eighteenth. What is important to the present study is not whether or not wealth and military power are fungible, or whether they are mutually interdependent. The last is a question that is still a point of much contention in international relations theory. 73 What is important is that eighteenth-century governments believed that they were valid, and predicated their economic policies on their perceived economic, military, and strategic needs, acting on assumptions very similar to those of classical realist and neorealist theories of international relations. As I will demonstrate later in the work, national sovereigns were by no means invariably strident economic nationalists unless they were simultaneously imperialists, as was the case with Nazi Germany’s employment of the Hjalmar Schacht’s “influence effect” trading strategy. 74
Critical links between extreme nationalist economic nationalism and mercantilism are the assumptions regarding the political order in which economic activity is conducted. Mercantilism “envisages ‘a world not of markets but of states.’ ” 75 Colonies were seen as extensions of the state, and as such sources of raw materials for home industries, of strategic materials and naval goods such as hemp, flax, copper, pitch, and tar. There were seen as provenders of precious metals, as sources of a positive balance of trade, a means of import saving, sources of cheap slave labor, 76 markets for manufactures of the mother country, distress goods markets for mitigating the effects of protectionist tariffs elsewhere, as well as outlets for surplus production and surplus capital for the mother country. They were generally prized for helping to reduce dependency on other states for commodities and markets. 77
ComparativeInstitutionalizationof Dynastic-Sovereign Territorial-Sovereign Authority
Thus an important element motivating eighteenth-century colonialism was that it was integral to the state-building exercise, but unlike the situation on the continent, competition for colonial territory in the periphery was oriented toward building up the wealth, and consequently, it was thought, the power of the continental state. A real distinction between dynastic interests of earlier centuries, and the state interests that developed significantly in the eighteenth century, regarded the desire to render the sovereignty lodged in the monarch and in the state “impermeable” by shielding it in impermeable territory. 78 Dynasts of earlier centuries desired the loyalty or allegiance of their subjects in the lands they ruled. They cared little for direct control, and expended little effort toward creating unified administrations for this purpose. Each territory “acquired” might continue on its own path with its customs and institutions undisturbed, and might even extract a pledge from its new ruler to speak the language of the acquired territory. 79 The acquisition of the territory had added honor to the name and revenues to the coffers of the dynastic sovereign’s house. It was yet in this house that the dynast’s primary self-identification and legitimation was lodged, rather than in the institutional structure of a state.
The territorial sovereign, however, “is sovereign because he has the power to constrain his subjects, while not being so constrainable by a superior power. The decisive criterion thus is actual control of one’s ‘estates’ by one’s military power.” 80 As the legitimacy of the territorial sovereign’s rule was now predicated on his administrative sovereignty, recognized by his peers, over his lands, and not his dynastic rights by feudal custom or residue, he now required an institutional structure to “house” that legitimacy, and to reproduce it for his scion. While it is generally accepted that the Westphalian settlement resolved the legitimation crisis created by the segmentation of European international politics along confessional lines, an unintended consequence of the settlement was the creation a crisis of dynastic legitimacy by enshrining territorial rule as the legitimating principle of European government. This dynastic legitimation crisis was simultaneously a dynastic “identity crisis,” thus in no small measure an impetus to the state-building projects of territorial sovereigns. This was so precisely because it was the institution of the modern state that replaced the dynastic house as sanctuary for the continued legitimacy of dynastic rule.
This territorial sovereign was, however, now vulnerable to the caprice of his peers in a way in which his dynastic house never had been. Dynastic claims to territory based upon custom or ancient privilege no longer held the sway they once had. As these claims could now be contended, territory was desired “to create readily defensible and powerful states” with rounded frontiers “to create more self sufficient units” of sovereignty. 81 Territorial sovereigns had thus developed a passion for contiguous, defensible territories, and many conflicts were fought in order to unite divided dynastic holdings. Thus the principle of territoriality was the only means of social and political closure available to resolve the legitimation crisis created by the Westphalian settlement.
On the continent, any and all means were employed in the acquisition of state-buttressing territory. War, as we have seen, was considered not only a legitimate means, but the most decisive means, and most wars had clear territorial objectives when they were launched. Negotiation was generally effective only when one had territory in hand to bargain with. Purchase was not uncommon (and is, significantly, quite difficult to imagine in the nationalist era). Matrimony still could serve to acquire territory, but now in a manner limited by the “balancing” concerns of others. The loss of territory was inevitably bitterly resented and could result in prolonged “wars of recovery.” 82 As we shall see, Austria’s preoccupation with recovering Silesia, lost to Friedrich the Great of Prussia, served to align the Hapsburg monarchy with its ancient nemesis France during the Seven Years’ War, with disastrous consequences for both.
Most significantly, the land-grabbing proclivity that accompanied the state-building of the period, and that was even more pronounced in military struggles for territory in the colonial periphery, was in large measure a direct consequence of this dynastic legitimation crisis. The absence of logical frontiers had not been such a significant impetus to international violence when dynastic-feudal claims had held sway. Now these claims although largely defunct, had not been replaced by any clear linguistic, ethnic, or cultural alignments within contiguous territories ruled by the emerging, centralized administrative apparatus of the absolutist state. As Luard suggests, “one state had as good a reason to claim a particular territory as another.” 83 With the diminution of the legitimacy of dynastic claims to territory, armed conflict often proved the only means by which competing claims to territory could be adjudicated. Certainly this was doubly so in the periphery, where commercial quasi-military enterprises and the settlers that followed on their heels pushed aside, enslaved, and in most conceivable fashions exploited the indigenous peoples they encountered there, as well as the resources of the lands these peoples had previously regarded as their homes. 84
Neither had the conquest of Central and South America by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires been concerned with the participation or allegiance of the people who settled in these areas; their allegiance to the mother country was taken for granted. The participation and allegiance of the peoples subjected to this imperialism had not even been a topic of debate after the middle of the sixteenth century. Their participation as slave labor was adequate for their Spanish masters. Rosenberg argues that “the Spanish theory of empire’ was indeed the IR theory of its day, the language with which privileged groups within an imperial formation figured to themselves the superior rights of their ascendancy, and fought out the fate of subject peoples.” 85 He cites data to demonstrate that this theory of empire resulted in the decline of the native population of Mexico from 25 million to 1.5 million, and of Peru from 5 million to less than 300,000 between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 86
More significantly for my argument, however, Rosenberg helps to illuminate the importance of the extension of the sovereignty of the mother country to the territory of the periphery in his description of the legitimation of territorial-sovereign colonialism and imperialism as part and parcel of the legitimation of the larger social order.
The Spanish Empire, for its part, was literally an extension of Castilian society. Because...political relations traveled with the commodities, the lines of social power effecting the relaying of surpluses are clearly visible: they take the form of an extension of the political jurisdiction of the metropole. Thus the Iberian empires, like nearly all precapitalist structures of geopolitical power, can be visualized as geographical entities....This unseparateness of politics and economies (the perception of “economies” as social orders) is harder to visualize today. Indeed the contemporary international system could hardly look more different. Lines of political jurisdiction halt at fixed national borders, while those of economic activity speed on through a myriad of international exchanges without undermining the ramparts of formal sovereignty above....But once the wealth-creating properties of a free market were understood, the state conceived an interest in allowing the latter to regulate itself, and increasingly restricted its own activity to the more properly political functions of government. 87
Without criticizing Rosenberg’s strongly Marxist perspective, I would argue that more than “economies” were perceived as social orders in the precapitalist era. I do not dispute the validity of Rosenberg’s observations regarding the companionship of political relations with commodities, or their importance in the constitution of social power. I argue only that these economic relations did not, in themselves, legitimate this exercise of social power, or the ideology of empire.
The extension of the sovereignty of the mother country was also the extension of a well-developed system of hierarchical social relations that followed from the extension of the residual, personal, dynastic sovereignty of the crowned European heads to the territories subject to it, both on the continent and in the periphery. The identity commitments of the purveyors and ideologists of the territorial-sovereign empire were derived from their self-identification within what they perceived as a legitimate system of social relations. The extension to the periphery was deemed a natural, legitimate, even essential consequence of the broader social order. This social order constituted even a far more “hegemonic construct” than is illuminated in Gramsci’s account of the co-optation of Italian society during the Risorgimento. 88 Jesuit, Franciscan and Dominican priests, conquistadores, ecomenderos, and corregidores in turn converted, conquered, occupied, and exploited these colonial holdings as agents of a social order whose legitimacy they did not question, and whose extension to the periphery they viewed as a natural extension of the sovereign who personified that order. Their motivations varied from the other-worldly religious fervor of the Catholic orders, to the extremely worldly fortune seekers who supervised the exploitation of the continent. Their self-identification as agents of the extension of the sovereignty of the contemporary social order not only justified, but for many even sanctified, their endeavor in their own eyes. Atavistic ideologies and social forms had not entirely fallen with the Westphalian settlement on the Catholic Iberian peninsula. As Michael Doyle argues, perhaps too strongly:
Christendom is also the proper perspective from which to view the religious drive behind the Spanish justification for empire. Colonization, in effect, was an entrepreneurial venture of Christendom, organized on a private basis by soldiers and merchants and priests, sanctioned by the pope, and coordinated by the competitive monarchs of Spain and Portugal. 89
Rosenberg’s assertion that the state “conceived an interest” in relinquishing its jurisdiction over the domestic economy as it gained awareness of the benefits of skimming the profits of the privatization of production relations is fortuitous in demonstrating the co-constitution of identities and interests in the context of the maturation of the territorial-sovereign state. This realization was still blunted by mercantilist theory and practice on the eve of the Seven Years’ War, or “The Great War for Empire,” as it was contemporarily known. Yet even through the mercantilist blinders, the territorial-sovereign state began to perceive the outlines of benefits of the privatization of societal resource extraction in the field of finance, where the emerging capital was most mobile and liquid. It is to the strategic significance of this realization in Europe to which I turn in the next chapter.
Conclusions and Theoretical Reprise
The chapter was dedicated to illustrating the territorial-sovereign structure of identities and interests and explaining its causal significance for structuring territorial-sovereign institutional forms (internal dimensions of territorial-sovereignty) and patterns of politics among similarly legitimated institutional forms (external dimensions). State interests emerged as an extension of dynastic interests. Bereft of purely dynastic means of legitimating rule over specific territory after Westphalia, territoriality came to dominate the notion of state interests and state-building projects and rivalries emerged as a consequence of a new, territorial-sovereign legitimating principle of raison d’état.
Internally, territorial-sovereign absolutism institutionalized this principle in the domestic social order by granting monopolies of coercion, taxation, administration through a dependent nobility, and legislation to the sovereign, in whom all legitimate authority was lodged. Social privilege conferred by birth articulated domestic social identities. Co-constituted peasant self-identity and collective identities were attached to the manor, parish, commune, and family and were subject to such rigorous social control under conditions of social immobility that their allegiances were taken for granted by the Crown. Co-constituted aristocratic self identity and collective identity varied among territorial-sovereign states in accordance with variations in the requirements of territorial-sovereign absolutists to subdue the nobility. As the French Crown allotted them no substantial role within the state, their primary identity commitments became attached to their class as they experienced increasing alienation from the state. As the Prussian Crown employed the nobility as a true military aristocracy, their identity commitments became attached to the state as well as their class. As the English Crown ruled at the behest of a Protestant Whig oligarchy, the English nobility identified themselves more completely with the state and the period saw no English absolutism whatever, which contributed to a socially broader and earlier development of national collective identity in England.
Externally, territorial-sovereign absolutism institutionalized the system-legitimating principle of raison d’état in numerous ways with significant consequences for the subsequent patterns of politics among territorial-sovereign states. Adherence to the principle entailed the reciprocal recognition of various territorial-sovereign rights including the right to autonomy, or independence from external control, the right to enter into autonomous diplomatic relations with other states, and the right to make war for raisons d’état which proliferated. In practice, these principles legitimated territorial expansion at the expense of other states. An explicitly territorial sovereignty resulted in legitimate balancing behavior unique to that form of sovereignty, which was characterized by a rapidly changing system of short-term alliances, frequent conflict, fought largely with mercenaries with limited self-identification with the state and characterized by short-term wars of shifting coalitions, and financed in a fashion that tended to employ the collective wealth of the state as the personal war chest of the sovereign, and augmented by colonial fetishism in the periphery.
A uniquely territorial-sovereign mercantilist, absolutist structure of state identities and interests emerged that was largely coterminous with the interests of a dynastic sovereign. This structure of identities and interests legitimated and engendered a quasi-dynastic status competition on the continent and in the periphery, as well as status-anxious protocol fetishism with occasionally deadly consequences. It also engendered a colonial fetishism in the periphery to assure captive markets and a supply of strategic goods as a benefit of extension of territorial-sovereignty to the periphery. The conflictual nature of the resulting territorial-sovereign system impelled the development of a limited international legal structure to fill a developing need for consensual knowledge regarding maritime and neutral rights, the effectivities of treaties and the treatment of diplomatic personnel.
In the pre-Westphalian, dynastic-sovereign system, the collective allegiances and legitimating principles of rulership were lodged in a dynastic house rather than with the state. This had obviated a pressing requirement for contiguous territory to securely house sovereign authority. Dynastic territory could not be legitimately challenged and war could not be legitimately employed merely as a means of territorial expansion, in the absence of a different cause or pretext. In the Westphalian, territorial-sovereign system, the collective allegiances and legitimating principles of rulership were lodged with the state, though that state was often incarnate in the person of a sovereign. Ancient dynastic claim to territory could no longer ensure against its legitimate appropriation by a competing territorial-sovereign. Wars of territorial conquest were legitimated by the invocation of raisons d’état in prolific manifestations as wholly legitimate casus belli.
Endnotes
Note 1: Evan Luard, The Balance of Power: The System of International Relations, 1648–1815 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) pp. 101–3. Quotation of Frederick William of Prussia taken from p. 103. Back.
Note 2: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, p. 4. Back.
Note 3: Ibid. pp. 61–63. Back.
Note 4: A worthwhile description of, for example, the relationship of the French peasantry to seigneur and state may be found in Barrington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 70–101. Back.
Note 5: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, p .9. Back.
Note 6: Ibid. pp. 71–72. Back.
Note 7: Ibid. pp. 79–81. Back.
Note 10: A significant debate has emerged in the historical literature on absolutism in recent years regarding the extent to which the rule of even the French monarchy was unchallenged in all its aspects. Significantly, however, the bulk of this skepticism regarding “how absolute was it?” is directed toward the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the eighteenth century by which time centralization of the state and power in the hands of the monarchy had been well consolidated. For examples of the revisionist literature on absolutism see, for example, David Parker, “Sovereignty, Absolutism and the Function of the Law in Seventeenth-Century France,” Past and Present, No. 122 (February 1989): 36–74; Phyllis K. Leffler, “French Historians and the Challenge to Louis XIV’s Absolutism,” French Historical Studies 14 (1) (1985): 1–22. For the English case see John Miller, “The Potential for ‘Absolutism’ in Later Stuart England,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 69 (226) (1984): 187–207. For a debate, see J. Russell Major, “The Revolt of 1620: A Study of the Rise of Fidelity,” French Historical Studies 14 (3) (1986): 391–407; Sharon Kettering, “Patronage and Politics During the Fronde,” French Historical Studies 14 (3) (1986): 409–41; and Ellery Schalk, “Clientage, Elites, and Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 14 (3) (1986): 442–46. Back.
Note 11: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, p .92. Back.
Note 12: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, p. 138. Back.
Note 13: R. R. Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: From Dynastic to National War,” in Edward Mead Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought From Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 54. Back.
Note 14: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 89–90. Back.
Note 15: Ibid. pp. 86–87. Back.
Note 16: Palmer, “Frederick the Great,” p. 50. Back.
Note 17: Ibid. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 18: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 95–98. Back.
Note 19: Ibid. pp. 101–2. Back.
Note 20: Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 125. Back.
Note 21: See G.M Trevelyan, The English Revolution 1688–1689 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). pp. 70–92. Back.
Note 22: Jeremy Black. “Chatham Revisited,” History Today 41 (August 1991): 34–39. Back.
Note 23: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 30–31. Back.
Note 25: England had become adept at systematically marginalizing Catholics in particular. The government of James I had even created a national holiday to be celebrated on November 5, long used to reproach Catholics, in commemoration of a “gunpowder plot” by Guy Fawkes and a band of Catholic radicals to destroy parliament and James’s government on that date in 1605. See David Cressy, “National Memory in Early Modern England,” in John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 61–73. For a discussion of the popular equation of English Catholicism with Jacobinism in this era, see Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-industrial Britain 1722–1783 (London: Longmans, 1993). See Chapter 6, pp. 89–100. Back.
Note 26: Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe, pp. 33–34. Back.
Note 27: H.T. Dickinson, “Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century,” in John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1981), pp. 28–50. See especially pp. 29–36. Back.
Note 28: Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, See Chapter 1, “God’s First Born: England.” Back.
Note 30: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 104–5. Back.
Note 31: Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” p. 162. Back.
Note 32: From the Latin, “treaties are to be observed.” Back.
Note 33: Friedrich Meinecke, Machieavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History (Boudler: Westview Press, 1984), p. 1. Back.
Note 34: Quoted in Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 111–12. Back.
Note 36: Ibid. pp. 113–15. Back.
Note 38: John H. Herz. “Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” World Politics 9 (4) (1957): 478–79. Back.
Note 39: Ibid. pp. 116–26. Back.
Note 40: For the importance of consensual knowledge in fostering shared understandings in international interaction see Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions, p. 60 ff. Back.
Note 41: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 127. Back.
Note 42: Osiander, The States System of Europe, pp. 120–47. Back.
Note 43: Ruggie. “Territoriality and Beyond,” pp. 164–65. Back.
Note 44: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 305–7. Back.
Note 45: Ibid. pp. 308–16. Back.
Note 46: See Mlada Bukovansky, “American Identity and Neutral Rights From Independence to the War of 1812,” International Organization 51 (2) (1997): 209–43. Back.
Note 47: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 316–21. Back.
Note 49: Ibid. pp. 323–34. Back.
Note 50: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, Henz Norden (trans.) Paul M. Sweezy (ed.) (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1951), p. 82. Back.
Note 51: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 129. Back.
Note 52: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 129. Back.
Note 54: Ibid. pp. 134–36. Back.
Note 55: Ibid. pp. 136–42. Back.
Note 57: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 73. For a very fine discussion of alliance politics during this era see Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 256–80. Back.
Note 58: Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” pp. 148–52. Back.
Note 59: James Mayall. Nationalism and International Society, p. 72. Back.
Note 60: Edward Mead Earle, “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundation of Military Power,” in Edward Mead Earle (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought From Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 118. Back.
Note 61: Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, p. 72. Back.
Note 62: Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, pp. 124–25. Back.
Note 63: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 226. Back.
Note 64: Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, p. 128. Back.
Note 65: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 228. Back.
Note 67: Darrett B. Rutman. “The Virginia Company and Its Military Regime,” in Darrett B. Rutman (ed.), The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abernethy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp. 1–20. Back.
Note 68: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 228–29. Back.
Note 70: Lawrence A. Harper. “The Effect of the Navigation Acts on the Thirteen Colonies,” in Richard B. Morris (ed.), The Era of the American Revolution: Studies Inscribed to Evarts Boutell Greene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 38–39. Back.
Note 71: Earle, “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List,” pp. 118–19. Back.
Note 72: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: Vols. I and II, R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (eds.), (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981). See especially Book IV, “On Systems of Political Oeconomy,” pp. 428–688. Back.
Note 73: See, for example, David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Back.
Note 74: See Albert O. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945), pp. 29–40. Back.
Note 75: Martin Staniland, What is Political Economy? A Study of Social Theory and Underdevelopment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 106. Back.
Note 76: We should not pass by the issue of chattel slavery in the eighteenth century with a blithe phrase. There would have scarcely been a French colonial empire at all without millions of slaves to work the sugar plantations. Of course the British colonial cotton production relied on slaves, as did Spanish mining and other concerns. Of a total of 9.3 million Africans enslaved, 6 million were enslaved in the eighteenth century. Mortality was high on tropical plantations, and in transit from Africa. Mortality in passage from Africa averaged 11% during the height of the slave trade, due to shipboard “packing” schemes. See Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, pp. 131–34. Back.
Note 77: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 232–36. Back.
Note 78: Herz, “The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” pp. 478–79. Back.
Note 79: Luard, The Balance of Power, p. 174. Back.
Note 80: Herz, “The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” p. 479. The emphasis is Herz’s. Back.
Note 81: Luard, The Balance of Power, pp. 175–76. Back.
Note 82: Ibid. pp. 184–95. Back.
Note 84: A particularly thorough account of the impact of colonial wars on indigenous peoples may be found in Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988). Back.
Note 85: Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society, p. 120. Back.
Note 87: Ibid. p. 121. The emphasis is mine. Back.
Note 88: See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (eds. & trans.) (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 52–120. Back.
Note 89: Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 110. Back.
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