|
|
|
|
The National Interest
Winter 2001/02
Meaning Well
by Larry Wolff
. . . Because his reign was so brief, ending in his death before the age of fifty in 1576, it is hard to know how highly to rate the "success" of the measure of religious peace that he pursued within the Holy Roman Empire. Certainly it can not compare in duration with Elizabeth’s half century in England, the relative peace that permitted the English Renaissance to flourish insularly in the age of Shakespeare. Yet Maximilian’s policy of peace, compromise, and reconciliation in an age of religious violence, persecution, and massacre deserves consideration within the broader context of Habsburg history. In 1957, a decade after Taylor’s The Habsburg Monarchy, Henry Kissinger published his postwar contribution to Austrian history, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace. Kissinger, writing about the early 19th century, emphasized the common Austrian and English interest in preserving a conservative peace after the fall of Napoleon, but noted the crucial difference between England’s insular and Austria’s continental perspectives. Metternich, argued Kissinger, seemed to recognize that Austria’s geographical position in the middle of Europe, and its "anachronistic" political condition as a dynastically-linked polyglot agglomeration of lands and peoples, made the conservative preservation of the international status quo seem absolutely essential to imperial survival. Metternich therefore identified the particular political needs of the Habsburg dynasty with the principles of general European conservatism. In a striking passage, Kissinger wrote: "Metternich’s thus became a never-ending quest for a moment of tranquillity, for a suspension, if only for an instant, of the flux of life, so that what happened, perhaps inevitably, could be represented as a universal principle instead of an assertion of will and of indeterminacy. It was as if a physicist, unable to measure both position and velocity of the electron accurately, bent all his energies to making the electron hold still, if only for a fraction of a second, because this would enable him to chart its course for eternity."
This analysis of Metternich’s perspective on the modern Habsburg monarchy—a sort of striving to achieve "the end of history"—offers an interesting analogy to Maximilian’s perspective on the early modern Habsburg monarchy. Working from a similar geopolitical position, confronting explosive religious tensions rather than a modern nationalities conflict, looking to universal Christian principles rather than universal conservative ideology, Maximilian also aspired toward an ideal peace. He sought a formula for harmony and stability at a time when tensions could be temporarily balanced, neutralized, or assuaged, but could no longer be resolved in the fundamental fashion that he envisioned. Kissinger’s imagery from modern particle physics could have been analogously anticipated by the language of Hermetic magic that was current among the irenic humanists of Maximilian’s court. The fantasy of religious reconciliation in the 16th century was universal in its spiritual assumptions and presumptions, but also particularly adapted to the perceived concerns of the Habsburg dynasty in a century of cultural and political crisis. Metternich would have understood.
Of what relevance is Maximilian’s life and era to our own? Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, issued this insufficiently heeded warning: "To ignore the impact of the Islamic Resurgence on Eastern Hemisphere politics in the late twentieth century is equivalent to ignoring the impact of the Protestant Reformation on European politics in the late sixteenth century." In this regard, Maximilian certainly had his eye on the ball, reflecting deeply and creatively about the impact of the great religious upheaval of his own century. In Huntington’s vision, however, the religious fault line between Catholicism and Protestantism seems of limited contemporary relevance, since he regards them both in combination as the Christian religious foundation of the West: "Western Christianity, first Catholicism, and then Catholicism and Protestantism, is historically the single most important characteristic of Western civilization."6 Maximilian certainly believed in the fundamental unity of Western Christianity and his quest for reconciliation, his efforts to bridge religious difference, may be seen as a visionary determination to evade a definitive "clash" by refusing to recognize it as definitive. Though Maximilian mobilized for hostilities with the Ottoman Empire on the tense Hungarian border, an empire reaching from Buda to Baghdad, he was also capable of maintaining tactical neighboring relations when he knew he lacked the military means to go on the offensive. Facing an adjacent and extremely powerful Islamic enemy, while seeking to address the religious tensions within Europe, Maximilian stood at the early modern threshold of that religious nexus which eventually crystallized as "Western civilization" in the modern age. Even in his hesitations and half measures he seems to have had some significant sense of what was at stake.
As for us, the Habsburg dilemma of the 16th century is perhaps easier to grasp today than it was a few years ago. Maximilian faced a complicated mix of strategic and religious division—a militant Islamic force at the gate, and sharp differences of creed within the broad confines of empire. It made sense to Maximilian, for practical as well as moral reasons, to seek unity within so that he could stave off assault from without. In his own way, he knew very well the importance and frustrations of coalition maintenance.