The Europe Illusion

Britain, France, Germany and the Long History of European Integration

Stuart Sweeney

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789140934
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the pre-eminent figures of the Italian Renaissance – he was also one of the most paradoxical. He spent an incredible amount of time writing notebooks, perhaps even more time than he ever held a brush, yet at the same time Leonardo was Renaissance culture's most fanatical critic of the word. When Leonardo criticized writing he criticized it as an expert on words; when he was painting, writing remained in the back of his mind.
In this book, Joost Keizer argues that the comparison between word and image fuelled Leonardo's thought. The paradoxes at the heart of Leonardo's ideas and practice also defined some of Renaissance culture's central assumptions about culture and nature: that there is a look to script, that painting offered a path out of culture and back to nature, that the meaning of images emerged in comparison with words, and that the difference between image-making and writing also amounted to a difference in the experience of time.

1

FROM HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE TO
GERMAN EMPIRE:
Wars, Politics and Diplomacy,
1648–1864

In these two thematic chapters we will look at wars, politics and diplomacy. This brings together politicians, generals and philosophers and the events they shaped, as Europe moved together and apart at different times. We will show the extent to which the stakes have risen for our three powers, to make cooperation indispensable, meaning diplomacy is now institutionalized across France, Britain and Germany.

At the start of our period, the mid-1600s, Thomas Hobbes, the fatalistic Oxford philosopher, argued that unity through a Europe-wide Leviathan might stabilize Europe. He wrote during the English Civil War and observed the Thirty Years War in Germany. These dramatic events informed his opinions. But at the end of the catastrophic European war, with the Peace of Westphalia, participating states avoided an authoritarian pan-Europe monarch. Instead the powers compromised around limited religious toleration, pursuing for a while European peace.

This was a messy compromise between centralized government out of Vienna and devolved power to Catholic and Protestant princes, across the myriad of German-speaking states. By 1678 the German political philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf described the Empire, after Westphalia, as a political compromise or even ‘monstrosity’. It pretended to be a state but compromised German states within it.¹ One of these was Prussia, plundered by the Empire and Sweden during the war while allied to Catholic France. Yet the war provided the platform for Prussia to grow over time, gradually usurping Vienna as the centre of German-speaking power. Much later this would allow Europe to evolve into the ‘three-state’ balance of power, which forms the narrative of this book.

While the Holy Roman Emperor gained lands, and embraced confessional trappings, the French monarchy was now the most powerful force in seventeenth-century Europe. As we will see, our three-power narrative was born of France-Empire rivalry in Europe, and French-British rivalry without. This arrangement showed remarkable longevity in the years that followed, although Prussia gradually usurped Austria as the centre of German-speaking power. True, three is an important configuration in Western culture, from the rhetorical devices of Seneca to Christianity’s Holy Trinity. But, as we will discover, stability through triumvirate proved elusive.

Russia: The Fourth Power

While this dynamic between France, Britain and Prussia-Germany is the basis for telling the story of wars and European integration, other great powers have impinged regularly and sometimes decisively. In particular, Russia had been omnipresent in Europe’s tale of war and peace since Peter the Great. In fact, Russia’s ascendancy to European power status began with St Petersburg’s victory over Sweden by 1721 after the Great Northern War. Since that time Russia, as a Eurasian power, has complicated the military and strategic balance between our big three, making European integration a more vulnerable project. Moreover, European powers have at different times underestimated and overestimated Russian military potency, with equally destabilizing effects. The physical distance and size of the Russian Empire blurred perceptions of her military, diplomatic and economic strengths.

Europe from 1648: Legacy of the Thirty Years War and the Sun King

The role of Russia as ‘fourth power’ will be important, but at the heart of this story of Europe is France. Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century Calvinist King Henry IV befriended Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England in dialogue on a federal Europe. This prompted the Duke of Sully, Henry’s leading minister (a Huguenot), to gush that Henry and Elizabeth were ‘the two princes who were authors of the scheme’ and had ‘indissolubly united the interests of the two crowns of France and England’.² Yet by 1593 Henry had renounced Calvinism to secure the French throne, ostracizing his Protestant ally Elizabeth, and declaring that ‘Paris is well worth a mass.’ The French king had chosen to unite his state under Catholicism, ahead of more ambitious European distractions or confessional loyalties.

This tendency towards confessional pragmatism (or opportunism) was evident in France’s role in the monumental European struggle known as the Thirty Years War. The conflict began with an attack by Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II on Protestants within the Empire. But over time it pulled in all the great powers of continental Europe, including Paris, in a religious and territorial conflict. In particular, Ferdinand so antagonized Catholic France that he encouraged Paris to ally with the entire Protestant forces of northern Europe, notably Sweden, Prussia and the United Provinces. Initially France was peripheral to the fighting, simply funding Sweden’s Protestant forces. But in 1635 Paris declared war on Catholic Spain and undertook full-scale conflict with arch-rival Vienna. Crucially the confrontation represented the last credible attempt by the Habsburgs to impose their Catholic hegemony over Europe. Of course, France also sought European hegemony. But Paris was seen as nakedly opportunistic in fighting with Protestants against fellow Catholics and the Papacy.³

The Thirty Years War was a genuinely Europe-wide conflict. All major states were involved in the fighting, apart from England. Impressively, King James I of England displayed sound judgement in refusing to join fellow Protestant forces fighting the Catholic Habsburg empires of Austria and Spain. Finally, by 1648, out of the destruction wrought by war, the Westphalian peace treaties were signed, promising mutual tolerance between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, and a balance of power, however imperfect, between two giant ‘confederations’ centred on Paris and Vienna. Yet even after Westphalia, the two Catholic powers, France and Spain, fought for a further eleven years to consolidate their European positions. Eventually Spanish leadership of Europe’s Counter-Reformation prompted puritan Oliver Cromwell to join France. This left no part of Europe untouched by the Thirty Years War and its legacy.

Then, out of the carnage of universal war, Westphalia promised more peace and integration in Europe, not least for our three powers. In particular, the intensity and longevity of the Thirty Years War ground down the two opposing alliances. Vienna accepted that rolling back the Reformation across Europe was no longer tenable. Religious toleration was now indispensable. Although the Counter-Reformation in Habsburg Spain continued, for Vienna and central Europe a period of relative calm took hold. As we will see, this allowed state-building across German princely states, supported by economic growth. Conditions for a German population would finally improve after the demoralization of war. Vienna’s anaemic central power no longer stymied matters.⁴

Elsewhere, as the Westphalian peace was signed, Louis XIV, the Bourbon king of France, was just ten years old. He had been on the throne since early boyhood. Crucially Louis and his Bourbon family were steeped in the idea of the divine right of kings. These beliefs, coupled with his resolute leadership, positioned him to embrace a more Hobbesian profile as European Leviathan. He challenged the balance of power diplomacy, pursuing French dominance in Europe. In support of such ambitions, he exploited the French economy and demographics. In short, the Sun King’s famous assertion ‘L’état, c’est moi’ corresponded with unparalleled French dominance in Europe. Louis could pursue his European wars against Spain, the United Provinces and the German states. Then at the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678 his representatives negotiated favourable terms with the Dutch, absorbing new territories. But after the opportunism of the Thirty Years War and the wars of Louis XIV, France was stigmatized as the aggressor European power. Indeed, many German-speakers identified France as their permanent enemy. After all, at the geographical centre of Europe, they were hugely impacted by French policies of the seventeenth century, as they would be in succeeding centuries.

European Absolutism and Religious Intolerance: Disintegration Writ Large

In pursuing his European Leviathan, Louis spent French taxes fighting continental wars. Here he was both the symbol and sole authority of France. Indeed, earlier in 1666 Louis defined his absolutism succinctly. He asserted that ‘kings are absolute lords and by nature have complete and free disposition of all wealth owned either by churchmen or by laymen’. Hence, the monarch was a centralizing power, seated above France’s First and Second Estates. This was in contrast to his nearest rival, the Habsburg Emperor, who presided over a loosely federated German-speaking world. In the politics of European integration this tension between diffused and federated power, contrasted with centralized (sometimes autocratic) power, would frequently divide Europe, as we will discover.⁵

But in the Europe of Louis XIV arcane arguments about centralized power and federalism were irrelevant. The balance of power between the English, German and French-speaking powers was out of kilter. French absolutism held sway, supported by Europe’s largest population and most productive farming sector. Louis’ ambitious expansion was backed with economic clout. At the same time, the old enemy that France fought to a standstill between 1618 and 1648, Vienna’s Habsburg Empire, was preoccupied with threats from the Ottomans in the east. This culminated in the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, which Louis hoped would finally crush the Habsburgs.

Meanwhile in England the Stuart restoration of Charles II left London a vassal state for Louis. England was a shadow of the Tudor power that defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and planned a federated Europe with Henry IV. Indeed, the opening of the ostentatious palace at Versailles in 1682, three years before Charles’s death, was symbolic of the unequal power of Paris and London, prior to the Glorious Revolution. Louis XIV was free to pursue distinct European integration, through conquest and control.

Louis failed to promote unity across European religion or ethnicity. Instead he practised religious intolerance, exiling from France some 500,000 Huguenots, many powerful and wealthy. This cemented Calvinist communities in England, Scotland, the United Provinces and Germany, all resentful towards the absolutist French king. Divisively, Louis had pursued aggressive policies towards Protestants after acceding to the French throne in 1643. In such a period of political and religious disunity, with Louis dominating Europe’s landscape, there was little room for European cooperation. True, Louis controlled less territory than the Empire at the high watermark of Charles v. But by the later seventeenth century Paris was solidly positioned as a unitary absolutist state, free of the internal dissension and federalism afflicting Vienna.⁶

Notably, Louis’ absolutism and pursuit of French hegemony was far removed from the earlier European vision of his grandfather, Henry IV. As the first Bourbon king, Henry instituted a ‘Grand Design’ for a ‘union between all these princes’ of Europe. He would govern ‘not only France, but all Europe’, through constitutional arrangements rather than conquest. His proposal for a European constitution offered checks on absolutism through a general council. This council represented all the states of Europe including France’s traditional enemy, the Emperor, and the Pope. The model for these arrangements was ‘the ancient Amphyctions of Greece’. Indeed, such ‘grand designs’ prompted Sully to anticipate an early diplomatic revolution. This was to be a federation spanning Vienna and Madrid, under French sponsorship. Notably the Muslim Ottoman Empire was excluded from Henry’s big tent, remaining a shared ‘other’ for Europe.⁷

Later, by 1688, Henry’s grandson pursued less enlightened practices, more naked opportunism, in fact. Louis fought a ‘Grand Alliance’ of leading European states in the Nine Years War (1688–97). This time France completely abandoned all of Christian Europe, not just Catholic fellow travellers. Instead Louis allied with the Turkish Sultan. This in turn coalesced a European unity of sorts around opposition to France’s absolutist king. Hence the Protestant Stadholder of the United Provinces (now also King William III of England) and Catholic Emperor Leopold I led anti-French forces, supported by Spain and Savoy. In the fighting that followed, French aggression and violence left a legacy of more bitterness across Europe. As so often this was most marked in Germany. Notably, France’s wanton destruction of Heidelberg in 1689 led to more demonization of the French among Germans.

After the Nine Years War, under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick (1697), Louis held Alsace but handed back Lorraine. This divided Charlemagne’s ‘middle kingdom’ between France and Germany. Thereafter of course these sensitive Franco-German borderlands would change hands several times. Elsewhere Louis was forced to abandon the Catholic Stuart king, James II of England. Instead he grudgingly recognized Protestant William of Orange as King of England, Scotland and Ireland. Finally, Britain, the United Provinces and Germany resolved to exclude French troops from Flanders and the Rhineland, at all costs. These arrangements became of totemic significance for the British. This British-enforced neutrality of the Low Countries, keeping French (and later German) troops away from Channel ports, was a recurring theme in European peace and war. It reflected British maritime detachment, a psychology impacting on Britain as the reluctant European.⁸

William Penn and Early British ‘Federalism’

The Peace of Westphalia was an attempt to construct a balance of power in Europe around the confederations of France and Austria and their allies. Almost immediately Louis challenged this equilibrium. Later challenges to European peace by Napoleon, after the French Revolution, and Wilhelm II and Hitler after German unification prompted new opposing European alliances. But military coalitions were not the only response to instability in Europe. Elsewhere, thinkers on European peace and integration engaged intellectually with the dangers they perceived to such a peace.

For example in 1693, as Louis XIV challenged a pan-European coalition of states, William Penn advocated constitutional progress in Europe, publishing An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe, by the Establishment of an European Dyet, Parliament or Estates. By background Penn was an early English Quaker, essayist and businessman, now best remembered for setting up the American state of Pennsylvania. As a Nonconformist in Anglican England he was familiar with European divisions around politics and religion. Indeed, Penn was optimistic that from the bloodshed of the Nine Years War, and anxieties in Ireland around England’s new Protestant state of 1688, a peace movement might be incubated. To encourage toleration Penn designed a federal ‘imperial state’, aping the model of Vienna. The European assembly would draw votes and representation in proportion to ‘the value of the territory’.

Hence ‘the empire of Germany’ (the Holy Roman Empire) would send twelve representatives, France would have slightly fewer (ten), Spain also ten, and England only six. Other smaller states would make up the balance, including notably ‘Turks and Muscovites’, who would controversially be inside this definition of Europe. Indeed, having Muslims in Penn’s ‘imperial parliament’ was expected to secure peace and rescue the reputation of Christianity, blighted by religious wars since the Reformation. Inclusiveness could avoid damaging intolerance and suspicions. Equally, the diverse legislature that voted on European policy would require a three-quarters majority. This was intended to protect minorities while removing obstructionists. In short, these supranational arrangements would be more universal than those of Henry IV, who had seen fit to exclude Ottomans from a united Christian Europe. Of course much later that Christian identity for Europe would be prominent within the EEC. Indeed since the 1950s Turkish membership has been frequently debated but blocked by Christian Europe. In that sense, Penn’s ideas were genuinely radical.

Interestingly, Penn’s pragmatism on member states and insights into European diplomacy were informed by his own business experience. He understood that the strongest state (Louis XIV’s France) would object to such a confederacy, since they would expect to lose from the arrangement. But no single state could expect to override the will of the rest of Europe, if the coalition of opposing states were universal. Hence France should be compelled to join. Unfortunately this confidence was misplaced. French unilateralism continued until Paris succumbed to military defeat and unsustainable financial burdens. Indeed, cajoling the strongest ‘European’ state into comparable arrangements after wars has proven an intractable problem at various times since.⁹

Frustratingly, in 1693 Penn underestimated the absolutism of the Sun King. In fact, there is little evidence that the thoughts of an English Quaker colonialist, albeit one who had spent several years in Germany and observed the court at Versailles, had significant impact on French thinking. Instead Penn would influence American revolutionaries, like Benjamin Franklin. Yet by the early eighteenth century Louis met resistance from rising European powers. This cast doubt on the sustainability of French hegemony in Europe, and added support to Penn’s assertion that a single powerful leader could not dictate European arrangements forever. In particular, the resurgent William III and allied ‘Maritime Powers’ made French isolation dangerous for the Bourbon king. They exerted this power on the battlefield rather than through some early European Parliament. In fact, Europeans would have a long time to wait for such an assembly.

Britain and Germany as Empire Electors, in a Federal System

If the Westphalian system struggled to keep peace in Europe, it was partly because French power was unchecked. Fortunately, the progression of our other two states would remedy this problem. This progression was linked, with Britain and German states becoming joined through dynastic links. This served to temper French dominance, but the power of Britain and the German states presented new problems for the maintenance of European peace. For Britain the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a turning point. This has been viewed as an aristocratic takeover of the English state, usurping Francophile Stuart kings. It heralded a comprehensive strengthening of the English state and a merger with t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Brexit, Populist Aberration or Slow Burn Revolt?
• 1 From Holy Roman Empire to German Empire: Wars, Politics and Diplomacy, 1648–1864
• 2 From Bismarck to Brexit: Wars, Politics and Diplomacy, 1864–2018
• 3 Cameralism to Cobden-Chevalier: Economics of European Integration, 1648–1871
• 4 Bismarck’s Gold Standard to EMU: Economics of European Integration, 1871–2018
• 5 From Empire Plantations to Boers and Boxers: Empires, Migrations and Europe, 1648–1904
• 6 From Entente to Enlargement: Empires, Migrations and Europe, 1902–2018
• 7 Religion and the ‘Other’ in Europe, 1648–2018
• Conclusion
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index