Ideology and International Relations in the Modern World

Alan Cassels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134813292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Cassels offers a novel perspective on the part played by ideology in international relations over the past two centuries. His treatment is not restricted to the familiar totalitarian ideologies of communism and nazism, but also includes conservatism, liberalism and nationalism. The focus and emphasis given to ideology in an historical survey of such broad scope make this book unusual, and even controversial.

1
RAISON D’ÉTAT MEETS THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Modern international relations began with the collapse of the medieval world. Out of the decline of feudalism and the breakdown of a united Christendom emerged the centralized sovereign nation state. Without any supranational authority competition among these units of international politics necessarily unfolded in a state of anarchy, mitigated only by the individual nations’ sense of proportion and conscience.¹ The consequence was the appearance during the first centuries of the European state system of two categories of international conduct, conveniently termed the Italian and French methods of diplomacy.

The former derived from the ‘wolf-like habits developed by the Italians of the Renaissance…a combination of cunning, recklessness and ruthlessness which they lauded as Virtù’.² The lack of scruple with which the Italian city states pursued their rivalry appeared to receive its imprimatur in Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, first published in 1532. Whatever the author’s intent—and it has been endlessly debated—his name has resounded through the centuries as a term of political abuse. From its inception The Prince has exercised enormous influence in public life as an endorsement of force and fraud at the expense of morality and principle. Raison d’état justified all. By and large, international relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries operated along Machiavellian lines. This was true not least during the series of religious wars that convulsed Europe. The Reformation had undermined the medieval Christian theory of a just war which had sanctioned war for the true faith; it was impossible to apply the just war theory to sectarian conflict.³ The door was thus opened wider to Machiavellian amorality. While protesting loyalty to the Catholic or Protestant religion, states more often than not followed their own self-interest; Philip II of Spain was an almost lone exception and paid a steep price for his religious-political consistency. The Thirty Years War (1618–48), which opened as a climactic ‘confessional’ battle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ended as an unmistakable struggle for secular power.⁴ And it was not at all inconsistent for his most Christian majesty of France to side with the infidel Turk in order to curb Habsburg imperial power.

The sheer opportunism of this Italian system of diplomacy provoked in due course a predictable revulsion. Its most notable literary manifestation was Of War and Peace (1625) by Hugo Grotius, the first attempt to suggest on the basis of precedent and natural law, a code of international behaviour. It was reprinted or translated some fifty times between 1625 and 1758. The book played a part in the drive for a more honest diplomacy—the French system, so called not because the French were particularly virtuous but simply because it achieved prominence when the France of Louis XIV (1643–1715) was the dominant European power. In addition, its most able spokesman was a Frenchman, François de Callières, whose De la manière de négocier avec les souverains appeared in 1716. Essentially a manual of advice for diplomats, it stressed prudence, good faith and the will to compromise in negotiation. Diplomacy, to de Callières, was ‘a civilized activity…equipped to cushion the forcefulness of power politics’.⁵ An urbane approach to international affairs was furthered too by the dawning professionalization of diplomacy. The first training academy for diplomats was established in Paris in 1712; admittedly short-lived, it was nevertheless followed by similar schemes in other countries.⁶ All of which reflected a desire to replace the lawless pursuit of self-interest with a degree of order and assurance in diplomatic practice.

International relations in the eighteenth century were conducted in a mix of the Italian and French styles. A perfect illustration was provided by Frederick the Great, king of Prussia (1740–86). Before reaching the throne he composed a tract critical of political expediency that, altered slightly by Voltaire, appeared under the title of Antimachiavel (1740). Yet, in the same year, his first action as Prussian monarch was the swift and violent seizure of the Austrian territory of Silesia—a coup straight out of the textbook of Italian diplomacy. ‘Raison d’état, with its appeal to the elemental impulses of power and grandeur in Man, triumphed in him…Frederick decided to follow in the reprehensible steps of Machiavelli.’⁷

The larger truth, however, is that, whether the Italian or French style of international relations prevailed, neither allowed any scope for ideology. The egotistical calculation of the Italian school precluded sacrifice for a larger cause. This was reinforced by the prevailing mercantilist theory of economics that lay behind the colonial wars of the age. In the context of sauve qui peut, old allegiances and enmities might be shelved at a stroke, as they were in the notorious diplomatic revolution of 1756. A few years later, an English diplomat complained that ‘every court stands upon its own bottom, and lives from hand to mouth without any great principle of policy’.⁸ On the other hand, the reasonableness of the French system ruled out strong emotional conviction. ‘A man who is naturally violent and passionate’, wrote Callières, ‘is in no ways proper to manage rightly a negotiation of great importance’.⁹ The entire political culture of the eighteenth century, in fact, was inimical to ideological thinking.

Even though some princes began to see themselves as servants of the state, politics remained overwhelmingly dynastic. International competition did not so much concern the Prussians against the Russians, or the French against the British, as the king of Prussia against the Russian emperor, and the king of France against the king of England (especially as the latter was also elector of Hanover). Foreign policy was primarily a matter for European courts and courtiers. Ambassadors had to pay many costs of a mission abroad out of their own pocket, which is why they came to expect a substantial parting gift from the court to which they were accredited. Notwithstanding the few halting steps to the professionalization of diplomacy, an ambassador was almost invariably a rich aristocrat. International relations rested in the hands of an elite who had much more in common with each other than with the populace of their own country. They all underwent the same classical education, perhaps topped off by the Grand Tour of European cultural centres; they spoke and wrote a lingua franca, increasingly French during the eighteenth century; monarchs and aristocrats intermarried freely across national frontiers.¹⁰

Such cosmopolitanism fostered a sense of community among states, what some theorists of international relations call ‘solidarism’.¹¹ The sense of a ‘family’ of European nations also arose from the growing habit of calling international congresses, particularly at the end of a period of warfare. The agreements to emerge from such meetings—the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) and Utrecht (1713), for instance—attempted to bind together all participants in joint commitments. Writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries regularly referred to Europe’s nations as constituting a single commonwealth or republic.¹² The Hanoverian A.H.L. Heeren, writing in 1809, waxed nostalgic about the old regime’s ‘union of several contiguous states resembling each other in their manners, [Christian] religion and degree of social improvement, and cemented together by a reciprocity of interests’.¹³ International rivalries were thus worked out in the ambience of a common European civilization based on shared values; the possibility of an ideological rupture was virtually nil.

‘Diplomacy without armaments is like music without instruments’, Frederick the Great is reported to have said.¹⁴ But here again, international conflict was kept within bounds by certain features of eighteenth-century warfare. Although the brutalization of lower ranks everywhere sowed the seeds for acts of savagery in the clash of arms, berserk violence was episodic rather than characteristic of fighting in the century before 1789. In the main, this was because armies were composed of mercenaries, conscripts and volunteers whose enlistment was often less than an act of free will. Mercenary troops were expensive to raise and deserted in droves if a commander exposed them too recklessly to slaughter. National recruits, many lured by penury to take the ‘king’s shilling’ or coerced by pressgang, hardly constituted an effective fighting force. The day when millions would willingly lay down their lives for their country at little or no cost to the nation’s treasury lay far in the future; Voltaire claimed that the inhabitants of France in his day did not know the meaning of the word patriotism.¹⁵

Furthermore, few advances in military technology and tactics were made in the century and more after 1648—‘when time stood still’, as one expert in warfare puts it.¹⁶ Dependent on costly and unreliable troops and antiquated weaponry, military leaders in the eighteenth century preferred to concentrate on manoeuvring and set pieces like sieges, piling up ‘minor successes until their aggregated weight and financial exhaustion compelled the adversary to make peace’.¹⁷ Europe in the eighteenth century was much more often at war than at peace, but there was neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to indulge in crusading ventures to annihilate the enemy. Limited war was the other face of cosmopolitan diplomacy. Together, they ensured that ‘Europe held itself at bay’.¹⁸

The framework within which this self-restraint was exercised was the balance of power, a phrase that came to enjoy wide currency after it was specifically mentioned in the Treaty of Utrecht. The functioning of the balance could not be described with any precision, however. Unquestionably, the very principle of a balance of power called for the formation of alliances to counteract the threat of a hegemonic state—hence the coalitions designed to thwart French continental ambitions between 1689 and 1713, and British naval and commercial pretensions during the American War of Independence. But apart from these ad hoc arrangements, the balance was volatile. It might, as at the opening of the eighteenth century, comprise a rough counterpoise between the traditional royal houses of Habsburg and Bourbon, or with the mid-century rise of Prussia and Russia a multiple equilibrium involving several great and secondary powers. The balance could be invoked to protect the rights of small states; conversely, it could be used to justify the dismemberment of Poland (1772–95) as a means of preserving the peace among Russia, Prussia and Austria. To some, the balance of power was a self-regulating mechanism, a kind of Newtonian law of international affairs. Others saw it more as an ideal to be aspired to, a moral imperative. However interpreted, the idea of a balance of power entered fully into eighteenth-century assumptions about international relations; it was ‘an orthodoxy whose acceptance was…formal and explicit’.¹⁹ Above all, the eighteenth-century balance demanded of national foreign policies a flexibility that, in turn, ruled out ideological alliances and enemies.²⁰

The international system made up of cosmopolitan diplomacy, limited war and balance of power was a peculiarly eighteenth-century phenomenon. Bitter memories were held of the religious wars of the previous century, whose horrors were often embellished in the telling. Especially appalling in retrospect was the religious fanaticism of the Thirty Years War—or more accurately, the religious guise given to dynastic rapacity. The Catholic-Protestant contest having been settled according to the formula of cuius regio, eius religio (a nation’s religion would be decided by its ruler), religion in the eighteenth century ceased to be a basic cause of conflict between states. If this did nothing to reduce international competition and war, it did lower the temperature of international politics; for example, it permitted the moderate diplomacy of the French style to emerge.

Moreover, the fact that humankind had introduced a degree of order into the anarchic state system was consonant with the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In its optimistic fashion, this set great hopes by humanity’s ability to understand and control the world it lived in. In human reason lay the expectation, perhaps the certitude, of progress. The advance from the ferocious wars of religion to the comparatively restrained international relations of the eighteenth century seemed a step in the right direction. Even the Machiavellian pursuit of self-interest in the age of Frederick the Great implied the exercise of rationality in calculating the probable profit and loss of any move on the world stage. In this sense, the secular diplomacy and restricted warfare of the eighteenth century was a function of the Age of Reason.

But eighteenth-century international relations appealed to the contemporary spirit of rationalism only up to a point. Inasmuch as the essence of the system remained power politics with war the final arbiter, it failed the absolute test of reason. It was not difficult to argue that interstate hostility was wasteful of a nation’s treasure and its citizens’ lives, and detrimental to human happiness at large. This utilitarian argument, sometimes married to a moral condemnation of war, gave rise to blanket critiques of an international order based on sovereign nation states. Schemes for a perpetual peace resting on a federation of nations flowed from the diverse pens of William Penn (1693), the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1712), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1761) and Immanuel Kant (1795). Their plans were frankly Utopian and made no impact on world politics in their own day. But it is worth noting that they were the forerunners of the twentieth-century creed of universalism. Advocates of the League of Nations and the United Nations frequently harked back to the writings of the eighteenth-century peace enthusiasts.²¹

A more pragmatic criticism of the existing international system came from the ranks of the philosophes.²² The school of thought known as the physiocrats was concerned to promote economic efficiency on the home 13 front, and it also subscribed to the notion of a natural harmony of economic interests among the nations. The physiocrats deplored the pursuit of dynastic and political objectives in the international arena partly because of the burdens imposed on the domestic economy, partly because of the obstacles raised to the free flow of goods throughout the world. France’s parlous financial situation on the eve of the revolution of 1789—after a century of intermittent hostilities with Britain culminating in expensive involvement in the American War of Independence—was adduced in support of physiocrat arguments. But at least the physiocrats more or less accepted governmental structures as they were; their aim was to see their own economic prescriptions taken up by the more enlightened rulers of the day. The physiocrats did, in truth, attract not a few admirers among European royalty.

Other philosophes adopted a more radical tack. Rousseau, the most influential if not the archetypal philosophe, planned but never completed a study of international politics to complement his famous Social Contract. Nevertheless, from this and other writings his scorn for the diplomacy of the ancien régime was evident. For Rousseau, man’s situation in the state of nature was benign; his fall was brought about by society—a notion summarized in the celebrated aphorism that ‘man is born free, but is everywhere in chains’. A wholesale reconstitution of society into small national units, in which the general will might be readily determined, would resolve ...