Brendan Simms - Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present

BRENDAN SIMMS

BASIC BOOKS
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Copyright 2013 by Brendan Simms

Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

Published in 2013 in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books

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LCCN: 2013936230

E-book ISBN: 978-0-465-06595-0

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For Constance

A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight

Proverbs 11:1

You must in commanding and winning

Or serving and losing

Suffering or triumphing

Be either hammer or anvil

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it has attained. It is obliged, therefore, to organize all its internal resources for the purpose of self-preservation. This is the supreme law of the state.

Leopold von Ranke, A dialogue on politics (1836)

History is European... it is quite unintelligible if treated as merely local.

William Ewart Gladstone, British prime minister

Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for purposes of defence.

Sir Halford Mackinder

We are often told that the past is another country, and they certainly did many things differently in the 550-odd years covered by this book. To western readers, religious wars, slavery, Nazism and even communism all seem quite alien today. By contrast, our ancestors would have been puzzled by the current western consensus on universal adult suffrage, racial equality and the emancipation of women. More than likely, much of what we take for granted today will seem odd to later generations. Some things, however, never change, or change only very little or very slowly. This book shows that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries. The concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states and pre-emption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balance; the balance between liberty and authority; the tension between consultation and efficiency; the connection between foreign and domestic policy; the tension between ideology and reason of state; the phenomena of popular hubris and national performance anxiety; the clash of civilizations and the growth of toleration all these themes have preoccupied European statesmen and world leaders (insofar as these were not one and the same) from the mid fifteenth century to the present day. This book, in short, is about the immediacy of the past.

That said, it must be stressed that the past was once open. Our European story always contained the seeds of many futures. We will therefore have to pay as much attention as possible to the roads not taken, or those which led nowhere, as well as to the great highway which leads to the international state system of today, and the domestic order underlying it. We will have to treat the losers with a due degree of respect, however trying that might sometimes be. There was, after all, nothing inevitable about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler. The coming of religious toleration, the abolition of slavery and the international slave trade, and the spread of western-style democracy in Europe were not preordained. Yet these outcomes were not random, either. As we shall see, the rise and fall of the great powers, the growth of freedom and the triumph of the west were closely linked. Whether they will remain so depends largely on what Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic do next. We shall have to make our own story, using history not as a manual, but as a guide to how these questions were approached in the past. It is for this reason that the final chapter ends not with a prediction, but with a series of questions. To have done otherwise would have made this a work not of history but of prophecy.

Western and central Europe had enjoyed a sense of common identity since the high Middle Ages. The vast majority of princes, in short, did not wield absolute power.

Unlike the nearby Ottoman Empire or remoter Asian polities, therefore, European political culture was characterized by intense public or semi-public debate: about how much tax should be paid, by whom, to whom and for what purpose (almost always military). Although they were subjects rather than citizens in the modern sense, most Europeans believed in government by consent. Defending their rights or privileges in contemporary parlance against princely encroachment was a This freedom was defended at home in the first instance, but sometimes a domestic tyrant could only be defeated with the help of neighbouring princes. For this reason, Europeans did not have a pronounced sense of sovereignty: many considered external intervention against tyrannical rule not only legitimate, but desirable and even incumbent on all right-thinking princes.