territorial and national sovereigns: sovereign identity and consequences for security policy

This article was downloaded by: [University Of Pittsburgh]On: 30 October 2014, At: 16:34Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK

Security StudiesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20

Territorial and nationalsovereigns: Sovereignidentity and consequencesfor security policyRodney Bruce Hall aa Postdoctoral fellow in international relationsat the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute forInternational Studies , Brown UniversityPublished online: 24 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Rodney Bruce Hall (1998) Territorial and national sovereigns:Sovereign identity and consequences for security policy, Security Studies, 8:2-3,145-197, DOI: 10.1080/09636419808429377

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636419808429377

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsst20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/09636419808429377

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636419808429377

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of accessand use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

TERRITORIAL AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNS:

SOVEREIGN IDENTITY AND CONSEQUENCES FOR SECURITY POLICY

RODNEY BRUCE HALL

I WILL ADDRESS two issues of current interest to students of interna-tional relations in this article. The first is the extent to which socie-tal collective identity, and especially national collective identity, has

causal significance for international interaction and for the strategicbehavior of states that are committed to different forms of sovereignidentity. The second is the issue of change in the international system.Both of these issues have been consequential to theoretical debatesamong scholars approaching the analysis of international politics andglobal order and have been featured in the disparate writings of real-ists, Marxists, liberals and institutionalists of various stripes for dec-ades. More recently, the notion that societal collective identity is a cru-cial component of the social construction of social and political orderhas become an essential claim upon which, in part, more recent reflec-tivist , constructivist , and poststructuralist research programs havebeen founded.

Rodney Bruce Hall is a postdoctoral fellow in international relations at the Thomas J.Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

An earlier draft of this article was presented at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Ameri-can Political Science Association, 29 August-1 September 1996, San Francisco, Cali-fornia. Portions of this article appear in a somewhat different form in Rodney BruceHall, National Collective Identity: Social Constructs and International Systems (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1999). Thanks to Michael Barnett, Glenn Chafetz,Daniel Deudney, Martin Heisler, Friedrich Kratochwil, Yosef Lapid, Hendrik Spruytfor useful comments on earlier versions of these arguments. Thanks to the anonymousreferees of Security Studies for useful suggestions for structural and stylistic enhance-ments of this article. Thanks also to the Watson Institute for International Studies forfinancial support.

1. An important recent example is Barry Buzan, Richard Little and Charles Jones,The Logic of Anarchy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

2. See the work of Friedrich Kratochwil, esp. Friedrich V. Kratochwil, Rules,Norms, and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical and Legal Reasoning in Interna-tional Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. In addition to the work of Kratochwil, see the agency-structure debate literature,esp. Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations The-ory," International Organization 41, no. 3 (summer 1987): 335-70; and David Dessler,"What is at Stake in the Agent-Structure Debate?" International Organization 43, no. 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4

146 THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL INTERESTS

For structural realists and, especially structural neorealists, actoridentities and interests are determined by the context of interaction;the "anarchical" structure of the international system. Actor self-identifications are irrelevant for the subsequent patterns of interaction.Epochal change in the international system is unknown, and change isoccasioned only by major positional shifts in the distribution of mili-tary and economic power resources among the actors. National actorsare simply nationalized state actors. Their self-identification as na-tional-states has no consequences for their subsequent interaction. Thesystem is static but for the name of the hegemon. There is no require-ment to identify the "generative moment" of the system, which hasalways been the same.

For reflectivists-constructivists, and especially for postmodernists-poststructuralists, the social institutions which constitute the structureof international relations are generated by the agency of malleable hu-man societies acting upon historically contingent notions of their ownidentities and interests. Thus social institutions such as the structural-realist notion of international anarchy are, according to Alex Wendt,"what states make of it."7 The context of international social interac-tion is provided by the prevailing, historically contingent, structure ofidentities and interests in the system. Epochal change in the interna-tional system is a function of major transformations in this "structureof identities and interests."

(summer 1989):441-74; Also see Nicholas Onuf and Frank Klink, "Anarchy, Author-ity, Rule," International Studies Quarterly 33, no. 2 (June 1989): 149-74; and Onuf,World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); HaywardR. Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for InternationalStudies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and the collection of essays inThomas T. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4. Notable works include R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations asPolitical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). See esp. chaps. 5 and 6in this context. See also Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical(Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994); andCynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press," 1995); and Jens Bartleson, A Genealogy ofSovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

5. See Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, "Revisiting the 'National': Toward anIdentity Agenda in Neorealism?" in The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory, ed.Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 105-26.

6. See Buzan, Jones, and Little, The Logic of Anarchy.7. Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It," International Organiza-

tion 46, no. 2 (spring 1992): 391-425.8. Wendt provides a highly useful development of the meaning of this phrase in

ibid. Kahl notes the importance of the historical contingency of social "structure"when he notes that in constructivist theory it "is produced, reproduced and potentially

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4

Sovereign Identity and Consequences for Security Policy \A7

SOCIAL IDENTITIES AND STATE INTERESTS

WE CAN SEE the dichotomous tension between these opposingviews. For structural realists and Marxists, the behavior of in-

ternational actors in the system is all but determined by structural fea-tures that so significantly constrain interaction within the system thatthis behavior is either immutably fixed, or objectively predetermined.Structure governs behavior. Conversely, for poststructuralists andpostmodernists, the power of human agency to transform politicalstructure is so potent that structure is an illusion, projected into eyes ofthe unwitting to ensure the perpetuation of oppressive and asymmetricsocial power structures which can be dismantled if only we exposetheir insidious nature.

For social constructivists, whom, I would argue, take a positionsomewhere between these epistemological poles, human agency hasthe capacity to transform social systems, but structure is real and indis-putably constrains behavior. The interests of international actors,however, are not objectively or structurally determined. Interests, inthis view, do not develop independently of social identities. Identitiesand interests are co-constituted. Actor motivations are embedded insocial identities. The structure that is in fact causally significant for be-haviors is the structure of co-constituted identities and interests. Aproblem that even the analyst who accepts these propositions immedi-ately encounters, however, is that of how to account for social identi-ties in order to apprehend this structure of identities and interests. Theanalyst must designate actors to construct any theory of the interna-tional system. Let me spend a moment considering the manner inwhich structural neorealist theory approaches this problem, and an-other moment considering the case of classical realism. The works ofKenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau will serve this purpose.

transformed by interaction within the social and structural context existing at a givenpoint in space and time" (Colin Kahl, "Constructing a Separate Peace: Constructivism,Collective Liberal Identity, and Democratic Peace," Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter1998/99-spring 1999]: 103).

9. For a particular view of constructivist method as a via media, see Emanuel Adler,"Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics," European Journal ofInternational Relations 3, no. 3 (September 1997): 319-63. Note that I would, however,argue in favor of including most postmodernist and poststructuralist scholarship undera very large "constructivist" umbrella.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


In constructing his system theory, Waltz underspecifies the relevantactors in the system by specifying only the unitary state-as-actor. Iargue that designation of actors requires some specification of theirattributes in a social context. These contexts are not, however, staticover time. Waltz is mired perpetually in a system of Westphalian terri-torial-sovereign states precisely because he has designated these notonly as the primary actors but as the only actors in his system, whosestructure, in his view, perpetually reproduces the system. He can notexplain, for example, nationalist phenomena as he can not perceivenations. They are exogenized from his system, as are all other histori-cally observed forms of political association that preceded the Peace ofWestphalia. In order convincingly to define political structure, theanalyst must take into account the self-designations of the actors of thesystem. Had Waltz designated a different sort of actor, he might havediscovered a different conception of structure, and might have formu-lated a very different systems theory.

A common assumption of both classical realist and neorealist theo-ries regards the fixity of the "interests" and motivations of state actorsin the conduct of interaction. Hans Morgenthau's formulation of thenotion of interest obscures the relationship between interests andpower by equating these two distinct concepts. He states boldly, earlyon in his work, that "[w]e assume that statesmen think and act interms of interest defined as power." Even in acknowledging in a par-ticular case that an ideational factor like nationalism has consequencesthat must be accounted for, Morgenthau merely asserts that the factorhas been appropriated by statesmen and applies the factor as if it hadno consequences for his description of state interests in terms ofpower. His analysis of the behavior of nation-state actors is an analysisof the behavior of nationalized state actors still ruled by the old powerlust. The goals of this will-to-power alone have changed. Morgenthaurecognizes that, in the nationalist era, actor identities have changed,but insists that their interests remain constant. He perceives a chang-ing structure of identities, but not a changing structure of interests.

10. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House,1979).

11. See Richard Little, "Rethinking System Continuity and Transformation," inBuzan, Jones, and Little, The Logic of Anarchy.

12. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), 5.

13. Martin Griffiths, Realism, Idealism and International Politics: A Reinterpretation(London: Routledge, 1992).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4

Sovereign Identity and Consequences for Security Policy 149

Theory that is formulated in such a way as to describe the interestsof social actors in terms of power, and in unitary terms, is not capableof making an analytic cut into the discovery of the notion of interestswhich impel nationalist phenomena. This suggests that interests mustsometimes be described in a different language, and that their formula-tion and expression are far from a unitary process. The analysis of theinteraction of sovereign states will remain forever static if it providesno means by which to analyze transformations in collective identityand especially transformations in sovereign identity.

It will not do simply to note that the territorial-sovereign states ofmodern Europe (and by extension non-European states) have becomenationalized, suddenly imagining themselves to have become nations,and then proceed to analyze their behavior as though the same normsof sovereignty are applicable to nation-states as had been the case fordynastic and territorial-sovereigns. Statesmen in the nationalist erahave not spoken in voice of the same set of prenational interests. Theydo not merely articulate a different set of ethics which now simply ex-tend the goals of the state, in relation to those articulated in the prena-tionalist era. They have spoken in an entirely new voice and have ar-ticulated a new set of interests—the interests of an entirely new socialentity. In the nationalist era, statesmen were no longer speaking withthe voice of a prince, a house, an empire or kingdom. Nor did theyany longer articulate these interests and goals. The statesmen of nation-states began speaking in the voice of a sovereign people, a collectiveactor possessed of a collective identity and collective interests andgoals. This is a very different social actor than was the dynastic-sovereign or the absolutist territorial-sovereign. I argue, and willshortly seek to illustrate, that actor self-identification is a critical com-ponent of this structure of identities and interests.

Societies with different conceptions of the nature of legitimateauthority choose to endow different elements of society with thisauthority. What or whom is regarded as sovereign is strongly condi-tioned by the self-understandings of members of domestic society with

14. For a more extended critique of structural neorealism and Morgenthau's formu-lation of interests in terms of the "will-to-power," see the first chapter of Hall, Na-tional Collective Identity.

15. Kahl similarly appears to recognize the importance of societal self-identification(at the level of the state in his case) in arguing that "For constructivists, a state's con-ception of 'self is in large part a meaning existing in the activity of viewing itself re-flexively." Later, on the same page, he argues that "identity can literally define a state'sinterest" (Kahl, "Constructing a Separate Peace," 107).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


respect to legitimate authority. That which we call sovereign says a lotabout whom we believe ourselves to be as a polity, whether we are apassive polity (regarding ourselves as subjects of authority) or an activepolity (regarding ourselves as sources of authority).16

The subject of the dynastic-sovereign state gives his or her allegianceto the Prince, who rules domestic society, and to his creed. The subjectof the territorial-sovereign state gives his or her allegiance to the sover-eign of that state. The citizen of the national-sovereign state give his orher allegiance to the nation, to the imagined community of shared an-cestry, culture or history to which he or she believes himself or herselfto be a part. Domestic law is given to domestic society by the prevail-ing sovereign. The sovereign is that person, institution or communityin which legitimate social authority is lodged in accordance with thelegitimating principles of the social order.

The emergence of national collective identity transformed sovereignidentity within the state. The notion that nations—national communi-ties based upon common language, ethnicity, culture or shared his-tory—are the legitimate wielders of the sword of state sovereignty, hasaltered the norms, rules and principles of international as well as do-mestic society. The notion that the nation, however defined or seg-mented, is inherently sovereign and self-determining, transformed thelegitimate purposes of state action.

We must delineate the structure of identities and interests of the ter-ritorial-sovereign from that of the national-sovereign. The emergenceof national collective identity in Europe resulted in the replacement ofthe territorial-sovereign legitimating principle of raison d'etat with thenational-sovereign legitimating principle of national self-determination.Eighteenth-century dynastic, mercantilist absolutism and easy recourse

16. A sweeping study of changing identities and polities is found in Yale H. Fergu-son and Richard W. Mansbach, Polities: Authority, Identities and Change (Columbia:University of South Carolina Press, 1996).

17. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on theOrigins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

18. It is in this context that I concur with Cheshier's and Dauber's assertion that"constructivists and globalists...insist culture and race and nationality can be over-come, as they all arise out of socially constructed realities" (David M. Cheshier andCori E. Dauber, "The Place and Power of Civic Space: Reading Globalization andSocial Geography Through the Lens of Civilizational Conflict," Security Studies 8, nos.2/3 [winter 1998/99-spring 1999]: 47). Note that, consistent with Doty's emphasis onindividuals and societies as well as states, I concur that "while survival for the state is aquestion of sovereignty, survival for society is a question of identity" (Roxanne LynnDoty, "Immigration and the Politics of Security, Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter1998/99-spring 1999]: 78).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


to war were practices which developed from the norms, rules andprinciples of a system legitimated by the territorial-sovereign principleof raison d'etat. Territorial-sovereign imperialism was a commercialand strategic venture whose social purpose conformed to the zero-sumnature of dynastic, territorial-sovereign status competition.

The emergence of national-sovereign identity and interests, in thenineteenth century, problematized territorial-sovereign legitimatingprinciples and subsequently transformed the structure of state interests,practice and institutions. The emergence of national collective identitycreated problems of secessionism and irredentism, and thus newsources of interstate conflict. It enhanced the resources mobilizable bystatesmen by enfranchising ever lower economic strata of domesticsociety, inducing their participation in the projects of the state asmembers of the nation. Conflicting class and national identity com-mitments created tools for statesmen to "divide and rule" domestic so-ciety, but radically reduced the insularity of their decision-makingprocesses as an enfranchised and nationalized "citizenry" took an inter-est in the affairs of state with which territorial-sovereign statesmen hadnot been required to contend. As I will illustrate later in the article,national collective identity engendered statesmen such as Bismarckwith the tools to forge a German superstate from the many pettykingdoms and mini-states of German Central Europe. It constrainedother statesmen, such as Napoleon III, from "balancing" the creation ofa threatening German superstate, and from enjoying the flexibility toform alliances with other powers sufficient to meet the threat of thishostile superstate when the Franco-Prussian War commenced in 1870.

TERRITORIAL-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY AND STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR

BEFORE I proceed to illustrate the behavioral consequences of thetransition from territorial-sovereign identity to the behavior in-

duced by national sovereign identity, it is important to pause here todelineate territorial sovereignty from the dynastic form which had pre-ceded it. Territorial sovereignty and mercantilist economic policy canbe seen to have operated synergistically in the eighteenth century, withsignificant and logical consequences for strategic behavior. The princi-ples underlying this form of sovereignty, and the practices associatedwith it need to be explained before we can understand the changes thatcame with the later notion of the development of national sovereignty.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


TERRITORIAL-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY AND MERCANTILIST

THEORY AND PRACTICE

One of the most significant consequences of the Westphalian settle-ment and the close of the era of the Wars of Religion had been a shiftin both the rationales and character of the system of continental alli-ances that had structured European international relations between thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With the delegitimation of relig-ious ideas and affiliations as sources of interstate conflict, and the riseof the principle of raison d'etat, the continent fell away from the famil-iar pattern of conflict between the Austro-Spanish Hapsburg axis andthe coalition of Protestant powers aided by a France encircled byHapsburg territories. Consequently the continental system becamemuch more multipolar, and increasingly characterized by a loose sys-tem of very short-term alliances.

The creation of standing armies and their regular employment in theacquisition of new territory, to buttress state or dynastic status, and tocompensate for increasing uncertainty in alliance politics due to thedelegitimation of religious-military affiliations, created a pressing needfor steady flows of revenues for their maintenance. Continental strug-gles became wars of shifting, short-term coalitions. Financing thesestruggles was a challenge for an era characterized by the scarcity ofcoin and the continued flow of funds to armies of professional soldiers,many of whom were mercenaries recruited from foreign lands and dis-tinctly unmotivated by more than the desire to earn money and tosurvive. Thus finance was of paramount importance for monarchswho wished to sustain a successful campaign.

An artifact of the segmentation of the political world according tothe principle of territoriality was an economic closure correspondingto the political closure segmented by territory. As state-building andterritorial consolidation crystallized the state as an institutional form,Europe witnessed the emergence of economies whose boundariesroughly coincided with those of the state. As European monarchs

19. Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Mili-tary Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 73. For an illumi-nating discussion of alliance politics during this era, see Evan Luard, The Balance ofPower: The System of International Relations, 1648-1815 (New York: St. Martin's,1992), 256-80.

20. John Gerard Ruggie. "Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity inInternational Relations," International Organization 47, no. 1 (winter 1993): 148-52.

21. James Mayall. Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 72.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


continued to discover the extent to which success in their martialstatus-contests relied upon their ability to mobilize the "industrial,commercial, financial, military and naval resources" of their territo-ries, they increasingly viewed these resources as interchangeably fungi-ble, globally scarce, and fundamentally limited. The absolutist regardedthe wealth of the state as his or her personal war-chest. The scarcity ofcoin and precious metals, and the rudimentary nature of early eight-eenth-century credit vehicles and banking systems had led to bullion-ism—the view that all wealth resides in the possession of precious met-als, that money had to be secured either by plunder or trade. Thecrown could tax trade and sell monopolies to individual merchants ortrading companies. These revenues made up a crucially significantshare of the revenues of the crown, which was anxious to see sucheconomic activity expanded.

The establishment of colonies in large measure resulted directlyfrom the desire to increase the flow of limited tradable commodities.Colonies were, unlike continental territory, coveted not from a desirefor conquest, honor, or glory but for the products they could supplyand the taxable wealth they could generate. This motivation is funda-mentally distinct from the imperial impulses that were to impel theterritorial 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 de-sire for conquest, but to secure access to particular commoditieswhich could be profitably traded in Europe....Except in theAmericas, permanent settlement was usually not intended, still lessthe detailed administrations of local populations.24

Trade with one's colonies was an enormously important contribu-tion to the balance of trade. Woloch provides data which indicates thatFrance's colonial trade grew from twenty-five million livres in 1716 to263 million livres in 1789, which constituted growth from 20 percentto 50 percent of France's total foreign trade. Similarly, Luard's data

22. Edward Mead Earle, "Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: TheEconomic Foundation of Military Power," in Makers of Modern Strategy: MilitaryThought From Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1973), 118.

23. Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, 72.24. Luard, The Balance of Power, 226.25. Isser Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe: Tradition and Progress 1715-1789 (New

York: Norton, 1982), 128.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


suggests that Britain's North American colonial trade alone constituted20 percent of her total foreign trade in 1750 and 34 percent by 1785.

The territorial-sovereign state had a powerful incentive to establishcolonies, particularly in regions were valuable commodities could beextracted or grown which were unavailable in Europe. Colonies wereseen not as strategic liabilities but as economic assets, particularlywhere they were established by trading companies that maintainedtheir own armed forces, which many did.

The major incentive to establish colonies for eighteenth-centurymercantilist regimes, however, lay in the extension of the sovereigntyof the state (and its monarch) to the remote colony, not for purposesof accruing status to either, but for the capability, unavailable on thecontinent, to leverage the terms of trade to the advantage of themother country and to shield it from competition. Colonial trade was"directed," or "managed" trade. It was reserved to the home countryalone and as such constituted "a pure monopoly." Moreover, suchmanaged arrangements could be designed to ensure not only a captivemarket for the manufactures of the mother country, and a supplier ofrare and valuable commodities for those manufactures, but a perpetu-ally captive market as well. Residing under the sovereignty of themother country, colonists could be obstructed from developing manu-facturing industries, and generally were, as manufacturing industries athome needed markets and abhorred competition.29

Mercantilist theory and practice routinely subordinated private eco-nomic interests to the perceived interests of the state, and raison d'etatjustified and legitimated this view and practice in as much as wealthand power were so closely coupled in the thought of the day. EdwardEarle captures the issues succinctly in a rather extreme formulation.

In modern terminology, we would say that the predominant pur-pose of mercantilist regulations was to develop the military poten-tial, or war potential. To this end exports and imports were rigidlycontrolled; stocks of precious metals were built up and conserved;military and naval stores were produced or imported under a sys-tem of premiums and bounties; shipping and the fisheries were fos-

26. Luard, The Balance of Power, 228.27. Ibid., 227. Also see Darrett B. Rutman. "The Virginia Company and Its Military

Regime," in The Old Dominion: Essays for Thomas Perkins Abemethy, ed. Darrett B.Rutman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 1-20.

28. Luard, The Balance of Power, 228-29.29. Ibid., 229.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


tered as a source of naval power; colonies were settled and pro-tected (as well as strictly regulated) as a complement to the wealthand self-sufficiency of the mother country; population growth wasencouraged for the purpose of increasing military man power.These and other measure were designed with the major, if not thesingle, purpose of adding to the unity and strength of the nation[sic].30

Of course mercantilist assumptions are highly suspect, and the cri-tiques of the classical economists of the Scottish Enlightenment, spe-cifically that of Smith, began to appear later in the decade. These cri-tiques became influential and began to guide even British economicpolicy in the nineteenth century, but certainly not in the eighteenth.What is important to the present study is not whether or not wealthand military power are fungible, or whether they are mutually inter-dependent. The last is a question that is still a point of much conten-tion in international relations theory.32 What is important is thateighteenth-century governments believed that they were valid, andpredicated their economic policies on their perceived economic, mili-tary and strategic needs, acting on assumptions very similar to those ofclassical realist and neorealist theories of international relations.

The critical link between extreme nationalist economic nationalismand mercantilism is the assumptions regarding the political order inwhich economic activity is conducted. Mercantilism "envisages 'aworld not of markets but of states'." Colonies were seen as exten-sions of the state, and as such sources of raw materials for home indus-tries, of strategic materials and naval goods such as hemp, flax, copper,pitch and tar. They were seen as provenders of precious metals, assources of a positive balance of trade, a means of import saving, sourcesof cheap slave labor, markets for manufactures of the mother country,distress goods markets for mitigating the effects of protectionist tariffselsewhere, as well as outlets for surplus production and surplus capital

30. Earle, "Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List," 118-19.31. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,

vols. 1 and 2, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1981).See esp. Book 4, "On Systems of Political Economy," 428-688.

32. See, for example, David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1985).

33. Martin Staniland, What is Political Economy? A Study of Social Theory and Un-derdevelopment. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 106.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


for the mother country. They were generally prized for helping to re-duce dependency on other states for commodities and markets.

Thus an important element motivating eighteenth-century colonial-ism was that it was integral to the state-building exercise, but unlikethe continental competition for territory, the competition for colonialterritory in the periphery was oriented toward building up the wealth,and consequently, it was thought, the power of the continental state. Areal distinction between dynastic interests of earlier centuries, and thestate interests that developed significantly in the eighteenth century,regarded the desire to render the sovereignty lodged in the monarchand in the state "impermeable" by shielding it in impermeable terri-tory. Dynasts of earlier centuries desired the loyalty or allegiance oftheir subjects in the lands they ruled. They cared little for direct con-trol, and expended little effort toward creating unified administrationsfor this purpose. Each territory acquired might continue on its ownpath with its customs and institutions undisturbed, and might evenextract a pledge from its new ruler to speak the language of the ac-quired territory. The acquisition of the territory had added honor tothe 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 waslodged, rather than in the institutional structure of a state.

The territorial-sovereign, however, "is sovereign because he has thepower to constrain his subjects, while not being so constrainable by asuperior power. The decisive criterion thus is actual control of one's'estates' by one's military power."37 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 byfeudal custom or residue, he now required an institutional structure to"house" that legitimacy, and to reproduce it for his scion. It is gener-ally accepted that the Westphalian settlement resolved the legitimationcrisis that the segmentation of European international politics alongconfessional lines had created. An unintended consequence of the set-tlement was the creation of a crisis of dynastic legitimacy by enshrin-ing territorial rule as the legitimating principle of European govern-ment. This dynastic legitimation crisis was simultaneously a dynastic

34. Luard, The Balance of Power, 232-36.35. John H. Herz, "Rise and Demise of the Territorial State," World Politics 9, no. 4

(fuly 1957): 478-79.36. Luard, The Balance of Power, 174.37. Herz, "The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State," 479.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


"identity crisis," thus in no small measure an impetus to the state-building projects of territorial-sovereigns. This was so precisely becauseit was the institution of the modern state which replaced the dynastichouse as sanctuary for the continued legitimacy of dynastic rule.

This territorial-sovereign was, however, now vulnerable to thestrong winds of the caprice of his peers in a way in which his dynastichouse never had been. Dynastic claims to territory based upon customor ancient privilege no longer held the sway they once had. Theseclaims could now be contended, thus territory was desired "to createreadily defensible and powerful states" with rounded frontiers "to cre-ate more self-sufficient units" of sovereignty. Territorial-sovereignshad thus developed a passion for contiguous, defensible territories andmany conflicts were fought in attempt to unite divided dynastic hold-ings. Thus the principle of territoriality was the only means of socialand political closure available to resolve the legitimation crisis createdby the Westphalian settlement.

On the continent, any and all means were employed in the acquisi-tion of state-buttressing territory. War, as we have seen, was consid-ered not only a legitimate means, but the most decisive means, andmost wars had clear territorial objectives when they were launched.Negotiation was generally only effective when one had territory inhand to bargain with. Purchase was not uncommon (and is, signifi-cantly, quite difficult to imagine in the nationalist era). Matrimony stillcould serve to acquire territory, but now in a manner limited by thebalancing concerns of others. The loss of territory was inevitably bit-terly resented and could result in prolonged "wars of recovery."39 Aswe shall see, Austria's preoccupation with recovering Silesia, lost toFriedrich the Great of Prussia, served to align the Hapsburg monarchywith its ancient nemesis France during the Seven Years' War, with dis-astrous consequences for both.

Most significantly, the land-grabbing proclivity that accompaniedthe state-building of the period, and that was even more pronounced inmilitary struggles for territory in the colonial periphery, was in largemeasure a direct consequence of this dynastic legitimation crisis. Theabsence of logical frontiers had not been such a significant impetus tointernational violence when dynastic-feudal claims had held sway.Now these claims were largely defunct, but neither had they yet been

38. Luard, The Balance of Power, 175-76.39. Ibid., 184-95.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


replaced by any clear linguistic, ethnic or cultural alignments withincontiguous territories ruled by the emerging, centralized administrativeapparatus of the absolutist state. As Luard suggests, "one state had asgood a reason to claim a particular territory as another."4 Certainlythis was doubly so in the periphery, where commercial quasimilitaryenterprises and the settlers that followed on their heels pushed aside,enslaved, and in most conceivable fashions exploited the indigenouspeoples they encountered there, as well as the resources of the landswhich these peoples had previously regarded as their homes.41

I will begin the analytic section of this article with an illustration ofthe behavioral consequences of territorial-sovereign identity drawnfrom the pages of diplomatic history. This article will conclude with acomparative illustration of the behavioral consequences of national-sovereign identity in the nineteenth century. I now proceed with ananalysis of the consequences of territorial sovereignty for strategic be-havior during an eighteenth-century dispute between Britain andFrance over which of them would be master on the North Americancontinent.

THE EUROPEAN "DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION" AND UNSETTLED SCORES

France had by 1750 constructed a series of settlements and fortresses,from New Orleans in the south to Quebec in the North which bi-sected the continent and threatened to foreclose further British west-ward expansion. By the middle of the decade it became clear to eachside that the issue of supremacy in America would be settled by a testof arms. Britain was anxious to constrain the conflict to the NorthAmerican periphery where its preponderance of sea power wouldquickly and economically overwhelm France and deliver mastery ofAmerica. France's best hope of victory lay in grinding down Britishresolve and resources in a continental war, diverting British resourcesfrom America. Newcastle, and William Pitt (the Elder) had greatlyfeared a continental theater of the approaching war as most inimical toBritish interests, and began to cast about for continental allies strongenough to frustrate this ambition and contain the coming conflict tothe seas, and to North America.

40. Ibid., 198.41. A particularly thorough account of the impact of colonial wars on indigenous

peoples may be found in Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies andTribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


As Europe prepared for the Seven Years' War it was still fully in thehands of European territorial-sovereigns. The Bourbon-Hapsburg ri-valry which had dominated European international relations from theWestphalian settlement through the close of the War of Spanish Suc-cession had begun to give way to a more multipolar arrangement. Theissues surrounding the realignment about to occur in Europe were ledby the Franco-British competition in the periphery, and the Austrianvendetta against Prussia over the loss of Silesia in 1740. This action byFriedrich the Great had roughly doubled the territory of Prussia, cre-ated a Great Power to upset Austrian hegemony over the Germanstates, and enraged the Hapsburg dynasty. The Prussian acquisitionhad also upset Russia's ambitions in central Europe. We should alsoconsider the importance of the personal caprice of territorial-sovereignmonarchs in the equation. The Russian Czarina, Elizabeth, clearly de-spised Friedrich II of Prussia as an individual, which had added venomto the already bitter potion of dynastic ambition and more than souredthe relationship between Berlin and St. Petersburg.4

As Britain and France squared off over control of territory in thecolonial periphery, Britain had begun to caste about the continent insearch of allies there, feeling disinclined to stand alone against France.Dutch fear of a powerful French neighbor, which had clearly recov-ered its strength so many years after the Treaty of Utrecht had formal-ized the demise of the last French bid for continental hegemony, hadplaced the previous British arrangements with the Dutch in question.Prussia had been hostile to Britain since 1753 owing to an unresolvedmaritime dispute. Moreover, the existing British defensive alliance withRussia was due to expire in 1757. Apprehending the isolation to whichthese problems threatened to consign them as they contemplated warwith France, the British monarch and government instituted a freneti-cally active diplomacy in 1755 in order to correct this isolation.

The Hanoverian succession of 1714 had dealt Britain another misfor-tune. As war with France for empire in America loomed, the reigningBritish monarch, George II, was simultaneously Elector of Hanover onthe continent. In the event of continental hostilities, little Hanover wasvulnerable to being overrun either by France from the west, or byPrussia from the east. So long as George was attached to his electorate,royal pressure for the provision of the defense of Hanover was to be afactor in every decision taken by Newcastle, and later by Pitt, in the

42. See, for example, Woloch, Eighteenth Century Europe, 41.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


conduct of British foreign policy. Unfortunately for Newcastle and forPitt, George was very much attached to Hanover, as his sovereigntyover it provided him with a great deal of personal income and en-hanced his status as a player in the politics of Central Europe and theflagging Holy Roman Empire. Of course, this dual-sovereignty of amonarch over, in this case, both English and German-speaking territo-ries separated by geography, language, culture and history is no longerpossible in the national-sovereign era. Yet such an arrangement wasquite unremarkable in the eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign sys-tem, and, I will argue, had causal significance not only for the conductof British diplomacy, but for the British conduct of the war. Thecausal significance of such an institutional fact is beyond the notice ofstructural realist and neorealist systems' theoretical explanations whichwould generally emphasize arguments like this one:

The Seven Years' War—whatever its immediate causes—represents adeeper structural crisis within the global political system, generatedby the need to readjust relations among the core states in the sys-tem in line with intervening changes in power distributions and, ina more general sense, to resolve prewar ambiguities in the order andstatus hierarchy of the system itself.

It is never made clear, when structural realists are generating suchsweeping assertions, why these immediate causes are of no interest orsignificance. Neither is it ever really made clear what these systemneeds are, or at what point they become dire. Schweizer cites, as hisinspiration for this analysis, the power-transition theories of Organskiand Kugler, and the cycles-of-hegemonic-war thesis of Robert Gilpin,and other theorists of structural social causation, such as George Mod-elski and Immanuel Wallerstein. It is puzzling to see a historian ac-quire the structural realist passion for the reification of functional-structural teleology in this context, and to generate an assertion inwhich the designation of actors is abandoned in place of the agency ofa disembodied "system" that is in "crisis." Social systems are trans-

43. For a development of the notion of institutional facts and their role in structur-ing action, see Friedrich Kratochwil, "Regimes, Interpretation and the 'Science' ofPolitics: A Reappraisal," Millennium 17, no. 2 (summer 1988): 263-84. For a new andmore general development of the significance of institutional facts in social life, seeJohn R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), 79-126.

44. Karl Schweizer, "The Seven Years' War: A System Perspective," in The Originsof War in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jeremy Black (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 242.

45. Ibid., 255 n. 4.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


formed and replaced when they cease to be reproduced by social ac-tors, but they are sometimes intentionally transformed by the agencyof these actors. Similarly, alliance systems do break down, but in re-sponse to specific decisions taken by specific social actors.

The passage quoted above is a very strange argument when the proseis disaggregated in order to clarify what is being said. We must, by con-trast, be careful to point out that France and especially Britain, not"the system," needed to adjust relations among core states. Britainneeded to do so because France was challenging her in the peripheryand threatening to isolate her on the continent. Britain and France"needed" to fight the Seven Years' War because they were, respec-tively, eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign mercantilist oligarchiesand autocracies, and they were playing the game that eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign mercantilist oligarchies and autocracieshad created to play. Elizabeth of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austrianeeded "to resolve prewar ambiguities in the order and status hierar-chy" because Friedrich the Great had played the game well at their ex-pense and they consequently despised and resented his grandson. Thesystem "needed" the legitimate functioning of mercantilist, oligarchicand autocratic territorial-sovereigns in order to continue to exist in itseighteenth-century form. It ceased to exist when these did. Failure torecognize that the functioning of a system is dependent on the variable"needs," motivations, interests and agency of social actors, which mustbe designated in the ontological construction of a system theory, is thegreatest error of structural realist teleologies of this form. Let us returnto the European theater of the war for further illustration. The discus-sion will deepen my critique of structural realist system theory bydemonstrating that, without correction, it cannot adequately explainthe notion of interest that informs the practice even of territorial-sovereign alliance formation. I will demonstrate that commitments toparticular territories cannot be explained by structural realist theorywithout incorporating a more rigorous analysis of the prevailing, his-torically contingent, structure of sovereign identities and interests.

THE DEFENSE OF HANOVER AND ISSUES OF TERRITORIAL SOVEREIGNTY

The devastating seventeenth-century English civil war that had toppledthe Stuarts, and created the monarchical vacancy that the Hanoveriansuccession was designed to fill, had also resulted in a distrust of a largestanding army that had remained with Britain to the eve of the Seven

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


Years' War. It was a measure of the value which Britain placed in fur-ther westward expansion in North America at the expense of Francewhen Parliament voted £1,000,000 on 22 March 1755 to enhance thearmy and navy.4 It was generally felt in Britain that its forces wereadequate to deal with the French on the North American continent,and on the seas approaching and surrounding it, as the British had es-tablished "a clear working superiority"47 over the French in navalforces. The relatively diminutive size of Britain's standing army, andthe lack of enthusiasm for strongly enhancing it, however, suggested tothe British that they would need to fight the French on the continentwith the forces of others. This could be accomplished only by alliancediplomacy, or by the payment of subsidies, or with a combination ofthese strategies.4

The territorial-sovereign practice of payment of subsidies impliedeither subsidizing the armed forces of allies engaged in hostilities fortheir own casus belli, or payment of cash to the sovereign of troopswho would serve under British colors and orders for a period of timespecified by treaty. Such an arrangement was essentially a contract formercenary troops, whatever the arrangement might be called. In sig-nificant contrast with the national-sovereign era, there were, duringthe period of the Seven Years' War, a large number of states thatseemed to specialize in these services, and whose sovereigns relied uponthe revenues from such contracts to make ends meet.

Eldon's 1938 study of the British policy of subsidies to the continentduring the Seven Years' War provides an appendix which details theannual British subsidies to no less than ten such states. According tothis data, Britain provided subsidies to, or contracted troops fromMentz, Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Cassel,Hanover, Prussia, Brunswick, and Portugal. Britain also subsidizedRussia for a time early in the war. Among these states, Russia and

46. Carl William Eldon, "England's Subsidy Policy Towards the Continent Duringthe Seven Years' War" (Ph. D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1938), 11.

47. Julian S. Corbett, England in the Seven Years' War: A Study in Combined Strat-egy, vol. 1, (London: Longmans, Green, 1918; reprint, New York: AMS, 1973), 23.

48. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 111-13.49. For all of these reasons Hampton correctly observes that, during this period, the

"norms shared by the great powers did not erase the option of implementing forcebetween them" (Mary N. Hampton, "NATO, Germany, and the United States: Creat-ing Positive Identity in Trans-Atlantia," Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter 1998/99-spring 1999]: 229).

50. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy. See the appendix, "Table II—Subsidy Payments,"160.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


Prussia, at least, were belligerents in their own right, and should not beseen merely as provenders of mercenaries in order to glean state reve-nues. Russia, of course, fought on the side of France. Eldon demon-strates that the diplomatic record provides evidence that Saxony andBavaria, however, were highly dependent upon subsidy money tomaintain themselves as states. Both of these states approached Britainfor such arrangements. Saxony was initially engaged for the defense ofHanover (to quell the fears of George), with the understanding thatBritain would defend Saxony if attacked, presumably by Prussia.Clearly Saxony's armed forces did not exist solely for the purpose ofdefending Saxon territory, a finding somewhat at odds with the as-sumptions of the structural realist position. Bavaria was not to be thusengaged by Britain during the war as the Bavarian Elector demurred onrenewal of an existing subsidy arrangement with Britain until he couldascertain the sentiments of Austria, whose immanent presence andpreponderance of force no doubt weighed heavily on his mind.

Parliamentary debate on the issue of the defense of Hanover hadcome about indirectly through debate on a measure to provide a sub-sidy to Hanover to pay and provision 8,000 Hanoverian troops for itsdefense. That this measure would be advanced by the government-men who were appointed by and beholden to the king—could not havebeen a surprise for the Whig oligarchy assembled in parliament. Such ameasure allowed George II to ensure the defense of his Electorate withtroops, paid with British money, and to ensure his own revenues intothe bargain. Pitt, then still in opposition, included in his argumentsagainst the measure the fascinating dilemma that the government'semphasis of the defense of Hanover demonstrated that treaties madewith other powers for the defense of Hanover had been made in theinterests of the Electorate of Hanover, namely George II, not in theinterest of Britain. Many felt that the interests of Britain would be bestserved by surrendering Hanover until the end of the war, and demand-ing it back as a condition of peace.

Eldon has captured the gist of the debate on the pros and cons of aBritish subsidy policy on the continent in his study of the pamphletscirculating in Britain in the summer and fall of 1755 that debated theissue. They are worth pausing to discuss, not only as they recount an

51. Ibid., 18.52. Ibid., 20.53. Ibid., 14.54. Ibid., 47.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


important debate whose outcome would strongly influence furtherBritish conduct of the war, but because they provide a fascinatingglimpse of the interests of the eighteenth-century mercantilist oligar-chy of Britain.

Those opposed to the subsidies argued that Britain could never gainenough on the continent to compensate for the cost of the subsidies.They argued that the European costs would starve British militaryforces in America. They asked why Britain should hire Germanprinces to defend their own lands. They argued that France would not,in any case, overrun those countries on the continent with whom Brit-ain was engaged in active trade, and thus saw no benefit to Britain'strade from a continental war. They argued that continental wars hadalways impoverished Britain in the past, that this was merely to playinto French hands and that mercenary troops were, in any case, un-trustworthy.

Also gleaned from the pamphlets are the arguments of those favor-ing the subsidy arrangements. The pro-subsidy forces argue that subsi-dies were the best and cheapest way of diverting France, and con-versely the most expensive for France. They argued that the Russiansubsidy would prevent Prussian aggression, by cowing Prussia and thusneutralizing Friedrich. They argued that German subsidies wouldpermit their continental fight to take the offensive, and would allowBritain to focus on the destruction of the French navy and commercialshipping, and thus to defend the colonies. They argued that it was bet-ter to pay in British money than in British lives, and that the destruc-tion of French shipping alone could not destroy French trade owing tothe inevitable persistence of land routes and neutral carriers. They ar-gued that there could be no markets for re-exports from British colo-nies if France overran Europe, and that the maintenance of an Englisharmy on the continent would be much more expensive than the provi-sion of mercenary troops. They also argued that an English militiawould draw men from economic pursuits, that Britain's real wealth layin the pursuits of industry, trade and commerce, and thus that it wouldbe wasteful to turn productive workers into soldiers.

The fact that these points were debated, and hotly debated, is highlysuggestive in itself, in spite of the fact that many of these arguments arehighly problematic upon further examination. Lacking the mercantilist

55. Ibid., 51-52.56. Ibid., 53-54.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


blinders of these eighteenth-century oligarchs, we might find, from ournational-sovereign perspective, serious flaws with the premises of mostof these arguments. What is particularly noteworthy is that nearly allof these arguments, both pro and con, are predicated on the assump-tions and notions of state interest that were consistent with the legiti-mating principles of mercantilist, oligarchic or absolutist, eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign identity. In this Weltanschauung, as wehave seen, international economic competition is a zero-sum game.What helps you must hurt your opponent. Men, money, commodities,trade, armed force are all fungibly interchangeable. Colonies arevaluable as they promote trade and gain wealth. More is better, thusmore colonies are war objectives. Continental allies with whom onetrades minimally are expendable. British subjects are too valuable forthe commodity value of their labor to risk losing to French cannonade.

These people thought like capitalists, not like patriots, let alone na-tionalists. This is not to suggest that there was no "love of country" ineighteenth-century Britain or France, but that this sentiment did notappear to influence significantly either decisions to go to war, or warobjectives, or the conduct of war, or even who would do the fighting.These decisions, at least in the British case, appear to have been morestrongly influenced by love of profit than of country. Here is, in manydimensions, the model of the state-as-firm in the competitive marketplace that inspires nearly all theories of rational choice in the literatureon international relations. Debates such as these certainly lend thesetheories some credence. These theories, however, fail to mention theextent to which the character and issues of such debates change whenthe notion of state (or now, national) interest changes. Such a trans-formation in the British notion of state interest was to begin before theend of the eighteenth century, with the humiliating loss of the NorthAmerican colonies, and the delegitimation of mercantilist thought bythe development of liberal economic theory of the later Scottish En-lightenment. The debate was settled when Parliament voted 301 to 105in December of 1755 to retain the pledge of assistance to Hanover withthe lame assertion the British "honor" was at stake in Hanover. Georgehad his way. Russian and Hessian subsidy treaties were also approvedthat month.58

57. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 113.58. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 55-57.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


An active British diplomacy had also turned toward Berlin and Vi-enna in the hope that if defensive alliances could be arranged with bothof these, France would wisely eschew continental hostilities and beforced to confine these to the sea and North America, where Britainhad a strong advantage in forces deployed and deployable. Prussia hadnot been a natural British ally, but Friedrich's seizure of Silesia fromAustria in 1740 had transformed Prussia into a considerable continen-tal power, and Friedrich was still anxious merely to maintain and con-solidate Prussian control over it by 1755. Neither is it inconceivablethat dynastic loyalties played some role in this British-Prussian diplo-macy when we realize that George II was Friedrich's uncle. By theend of November 1755 Britain had promised to renew its guarantee ofPrussian control of Silesia and to settle Prussia's grievance regardingthe ships Britain had seized from Prussia if only Prussia guaranteedHanover's neutrality in any future conflict. The result of this diplo-macy was the Convention of Westminster, signed on 16 January 1756,in which each party pledged peace and friendship. This alliance poi-soned British diplomacy with Austria, however, and the Austrian Em-press, intent on recovering Silesia from Friedrich, "refused point-blankto subscribe to a treaty in which Prussia was a party."

The Convention of Westminster, concluded in large measure to se-cure Prussian defense of George's Hanover, triggered the rest of theEuropean realignment that has become known as the "diplomatic revo-lution." The hasty arrangement of the Convention, and the fact that itwas concluded without consultation with other interested parties,namely France, Russia and Austria, strongly irritated these courts andset in motion the diplomacy that led to their own alliance. It was notlost on the court in St. Petersburg that the British subsidy arrangementwith Russia that had just been signed in December was starkly contra-dicted by the Convention as it "provided for Russians coming intoGermany [sic], the former for keeping them out." The Austrian ven-detta regarding Prussian control of Silesia assured that the Hapsburgshad at last found a common cause with the Bourbons, in their capaci-ties as territorial sovereigns, that their common Catholicism had neverbeen able to foster when, in their capacities as purely dynastic sover-

59. Ibid., 58.60. Ibid., 61.61. Ibid., 62.62. Ibid., 71.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


eigns, Catholic Hapsburgs had squared off against the Catholic Valoisand Bourbon kings of France in centuries past.

This rapprochement was cemented in a Franco-Austrian alliancewith the signing of the First Treaty of Versailles on 1 May 1756. Brit-ain declared war against France two weeks later, Russia promised assis-tance to Austria in the event the latter was attacked by Prussia, andFranco-Russian rapprochement strengthened with an exchange of min-isters in May. By June, Friedrich's strategic-political position was quiteprecarious. Certain of the imminence of hostilities, he decided on apreemptive move to strengthen his strategic-military position and in-vaded Saxony, against British wishes and advice to the contrary. Russiamobilized in response and promised assistance to France and Austria.Newcastle then suspended British subsidy payments to Russia lest theybe used to fight Friedrich.

This series of events suggests that it is less illuminating than it wouldat first appear to intone that "whatever it's immediate causes...[thewar]... represents a deeper structural crisis in the global political sys-tem." The British requirement to provide for the defense of Hanoverresulted directly from the dual-sovereignty of George II over Britainand Hanover, and from this consideration alone. The Prussian alliancewas clearly designed primarily to enssure Prussian defense of Hanover.France was to be belligerent in any case, and neither Russia nor Aus-tria were situated geographically to provide a credible guarantee ofHanover's security, thus they were not approached in this regard.Only Prussia possessed the geographical proximity and military capa-bility either to defend Hanover as a British ally from a powerful andbelligerent France, or to seize it as an enemy of Britain. In the absenceof the requirement to defend Hanover, and the Prussian alliance thatpredominantly secured this defense, British diplomacy would havebeen free to pursue, and much more likely to secure, Austrian andRussian alliances that might well have prevented any French action onthe continent.

It is therefore quite reasonable to argue that one of the major imme-diate causes of the continental theater of the war was the unique char-acter of George Il's dual-territorial-sovereignty over Britain and Hano-

63. For a discussion of the pattern of French pragmatism on the matter of alignmentin accordance with confessional factors, see Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); and Emannuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State1460-1610, trans. Juliet Vale (London: Blackwell, 1994).

64. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 73-78.65. Schweizer, 'The Seven Years' War: A System Perspective," 242.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


ver. It is not at all clear from the diplomatic record that (1) either Brit-ain or France perceived any "structural crisis they needed to resolve"on the European continent, or (2) hostilities initiated in the NorthAmerican periphery would have migrated to a European theater at allwithout British anxiety over the status of Hanover.

The European alliance realignment that we now call the diplomaticrevolution occurred entirely subsequent to the signing of the Conven-tion of Westminster, and in reaction to it. The realignment was notdue to any parsimonious, disembodied, structural determinism latentwithin the system, but occurred because Austria had an axe to grindwith Prussia, and Russia had ambitions in central Europe that could bemuch more easily achieved subsequent to the demise of Prussia. TheEuropean theater of the Seven Years' War was thus engaged largelybecause the whims and caprice of eighteenth-century territorial-sovereigns led to decisions (George's insistence on the defense ofHanover at all costs, Maria Theresa's insistence on the recovery of Sile-sia at all costs, Friedrich's anxiety to leave a Prussia augmented by Sile-sia to his heir, Czarina Elizabeth's loathing of Friedrich) that had unin-tended consequences. Opposition to the will of the king in HanoverianEngland could have cost the average ambitious Whig oligarch dearly inpatronage and position, and the whims and words of Maria Theresa,Friedrich and Elizabeth were law in their lands.

In the conduct of the war the defense of Hanover appeared to takeprecedence over many other objectives as well, including sound mili-tary and political strategy. With William Pitt the Elder, the earlier op-ponent of continental subsidies, in charge of the government in 1758,George n again displayed the division of his loyalties between Britainand Hanover. Friedrich was now receiving British subsidies to the tuneof £670,000 sterling per year. Subsequent to the Prussian defeat at theBattle of Kolin in June 1758, and the subsequent Prussian evacuationof Bohemia (in which much of Friedrich's mercenary army had disap-peared in mass desertions), Friedrich had gathered his strength andprepared to resume the offensive. Pitt wanted to send Friedrich astrong letter of British support of this intention, but George wantedthe forces under Friedrich's command in Hanover excluded from thecampaign under the lame pretense that this would be impossible "dueto his [George's] obligation to accept an Austrian agreement regarding

66. H. T. Dickinson, "Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century," in The Whig Ascen-dancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England, ed. John Cannon (New York: St. Martin's,1981), 43.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


Hanover's neutrality." After leaving George's presence, Pitt ex-pressed the opinion that a separate peace for Hanover would be an in-tolerable breach of faith with Friedrich and ordered Newcastle "to givePrussia the strongest assurance of support" counter to George'swishes.

George had evidently moved privately to obtain a separate peace forHanover in any case, perhaps leery of a direct clash on the matter withthe formidable Pitt, whom he needed as Britain grappled with war ontwo continents. In any event, later in the year, George's son, the Dukeof Cumberland, concluded the Convention of Closterseven and a sepa-rate peace for Hanover, acting on the full powers of his father. Thetemerity of George when confronted with this breach of faith was re-markable. As Eldon recounts it: "The king [George] insisted falselythat the convention had been signed contrary to his orders." Noteven the equally audacious Pitt had a stomach for questioning theking's veracity, but Pitt, in his capacity as head of the government,insisted upon the abrogation of the treaty in vehement terms, and re-fused to allow the exchequer to send any more funds to Hanover untilthe troops there were again in motion against France. Later, in thesummer of 1759, George declared that his Hanoverian revenues wereonly sufficient to pay his 42,000 Hanoverian troops, and that conse-quently Britain would have to pay all other expenses associated withthe defense of Hanover. An angry Pitt refused and instead spoke ofterminating all continental operations.7

CONQUERING AMERICA IN GERMANY?

In reading such accounts, it is both fascinating and terrible for those ofus reared in the era of national-sovereignty to watch an eighteenth-century statesman be required to negotiate with, and to outmaneuverhis monarch in order to ensure that the latter conducted foreign policyin a manner consistent with the "interests" and security of the statewhose throne he had mounted. A conflict in the "interests" of the sov-ereign qua king of Britain and the empire, and the interests of the sov-ereign qua Elector of Hanover, could be acknowledged and debated, as

67. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 100.68. Jeremy Black, "Chatham Revisited," History Today 41, no. 8 (August 1991): 38.69. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 101.70. Ibid., 103.71. Ibid., 118.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


Pitt had done while still in opposition. Ultimately, however, preciselybecause the interests of the king qua dynast and the interests of theking qua territorial sovereign could not be decoupled, the "interests" ofGeorge in both capacities had to be accommodated, and reconciledwith those of the British empire, as Pitt had done when he left the op-position and agreed to lead George's government. The same WilliamPitt the Elder who had so vehemently opposed the defense of Hanoverand the expense of the system of continental subsidies designed to en-sure it, was now called upon to defend the subsidy policy as expensesmounted with the progress of the war. As Schweizer himself suggests,though he does not grasp the extent to which the assertion damages hisstructural realist explanation of the origins of the war:

Although Englishmen often resented the union of Hanover andBritain, abandoning Hanover was strategically [sic] and politically[much more to the point] unfeasible...the impossibility of severingthe connection insured that Hanover's interests would be consid-ered by British administrations, and, on occasion, would predomi-nate. It also meant that Britain was obliged to make provisions forHanover's defense and thus for continental war, by subsidies to al-lies, through a British expeditionary force or both.2

It is difficult to argue, in the face of this realization, that British"sovereignty" was so firmly lodged with the people or with the Par-liament as Britons then and now might wish to believe. George mayhave had a Parliament and the wishes and interests of British oligarchsto contend with, but his arrangement of the defense of Hanoverthroughout the war, in the teeth of voices and evidence that suggestedthat this policy could not be easily reconciled with the seemingly ob-jective political and strategic interests of the British empire, demon-strates that George n was an eighteenth-century territorial-sovereign inhis own right. Even though it would appear he acted to protect per-sonal and dynastic interests, the principle of raison d'etat still legiti-mated his actions to the extent that he successfully extended his sover-eignty over, and to, German Hanover on the continent. When it wasclear that he insisted upon this extension, the British notion of "stateinterest" adjusted to incorporate the necessity of the defense of Hano-ver. As this is the case, and as this example serves to help illustrate, itbecomes quite problematic to speak of the "objective interests" of the

72. Schweizer, "The Seven Years' War, A System Perspective," 248.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


state in a trans-historical or an ahistorical fashion. It is difficult to seehow any structural model of rational choice, let alone structural neore-alism, can account for this. One suggestion which emerges from thisdiscussion is that the interests of whatever institutional form of collec-tive action which forms the units that populate a given historical sys-tem are not static, not "an object of rational determination," or ob-jectively given even within the time span of a single military conflict,let alone across the time frame in which that "system" is dominant, oracross "systems" that I argue are constituted and reconstituted by trans-formations in the prevailing forms of collective identity.

British conduct, and especially Pitt's conduct to the end of the war,illustrate that certainly British war objectives had expanded from colo-nial territorial aggrandizement in the periphery at least to encompassextracting Britain from the European theater of the conflict withoutsurrendering or endangering Hanover, and without undue cost in livesor money. Money may have won out over lives near the end, as Britishfinances became strained, and Pitt acceded to the introduction of Brit-ish troops to the "German war" by May 1760, upon learning howmuch money Friedrich demanded in exchange for allowing Britain toconclude a separate peace with France. Further, by the close of 1759,in the North American periphery, the strategic points of Niagara, Ti-conderoga, Crown Point and Quebec had all fallen to British forcesand Pitt had begun to realize, contrary to his earlier opinion, the realbenefits that the British free hand in the North American theater, oc-casioned by the continental subsidy policy, had gained for Britain atthe expense of France.

Other British war objectives and interests had remained constant. AsMontreal fell in September of 1760, the British conquest of NorthAmerica was moving to mopping-up operations and Pitt and Newcas-tle had determined to continue the war only to obtain the most favor-able (and lucrative) settlement from France. Pitt was now kept quitebusy defending the "German war" before the restless Parliament thatwas the first to convene with a new king, George in, on the throne.Prussia's price in money for a separate British peace with France re-mained too high, however, and Russian diplomacy under Elizabeth

73. It is equally problematic, contra Marx, to speak of the "objective interests" of asocio-economic class, and for similar reasons, but this is a topic for another article.

74. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York:Praeger, 1966), 285.

75. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 131-32.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


insisted on Russian acquisition of Prussian territory in return for aRussian cessation of hostilities. At this point, Pitt provided the finaldemonstration of his extreme mercantilist proclivities as head of theBritish government when Spain, hoping to bolster its own colonialempire, concluded an alliance with France in mid-August of 1761.Spain's miscalculation was grave and its timing bad. Pitt was anxious touse the alliance as a pretext to declare war on Spain in order to allowthe British navy to capture Spanish treasure fleets.77 Spanish gold fromAmerica would alleviate severely strained British finances and defraythe long-term expenses of the unexpectedly expensive war for Britain.Outvoted on this measure, he resigned on 5 October 1761, and con-signed himself to defending, as a private member of Parliament, thecontinental war "for having diverted the energies of France. 'America',he said, has been conquered in Germany'."78

Irrespective of the merits of this claim, Parliament was not consoledby the fact that America had been conquered so long as the war ragedon in Europe at a ruinous cost, principally in British money. Fortu-nately for British coffers, for Prussian territorial integrity, and forPitt's reputation, the irascible Russian Czarina Elizabeth died in Janu-ary of the following year, "when Friedrich Il's military fortunes wereat their lowest point,"79 to be succeeded by the Pro-Prussian Peter m,who offered Prussia peace on terms so favorable that Austria andFrance, in recognition that they could now hope for a return to thestatus quo ante bellum at best, were forced to sue for peace.80 The 1763Peace of Paris left Great Britain in control of the North American con-tinent east of the Mississippi River, the Indian subcontinent, and anumber of strategic islands.

Thus this eighteenth-century, transcontinental war ended with Brit-ain overwhelmingly the big winner.82 Had America been conquered inGermany? Pitt has today long been lionized by historians as the strate-gic visionary who saw that the strategic division of French energiesbetween two continents and an ocean, made possible by the system of

76. Ibid., 137-9.77. Ibid., 140.78. Ibid., 143.79. Karl W. Schweizer and Carol S. Leonard, "Britain, Prussia, Russia and the

Galitzin Letter: A Reassessment," Historical Journal 26, no. 3 (March 1983): 531.80. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 114.81. Corbett, England and the Seven Years' War, vol. 2, 377-90. Corbett provides the

English language text of the treaty in the appendix to his second volume.82. See, for example, Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 114.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


subsidies to the continent, had left British forces free to ride herd overthe Atlantic and Caribbean and the North American continent, inspite of the evidence that he clearly held the opposite opinion while inopposition and vacillated while in office. Pitt may well have been,and probably was, convinced of the efficacy of this policy at somepoint, most likely in the annus mirabilis of 1759, when French colo-nies fell to British forces around the globe. More important than theanswer to this question, in my view, is the notion of state interest thatanimated the subsidy policy. To illuminate this, I will conclude thissection, appropriately, with a citation from the last paragraph of El-don's study of the subsidy policy.

Whether we take the word of the [British] pamphleteer who wrote:"if you take your people from their work, and make soldiers of mi-litia man...you will certainly be the cause of its (money) goingabroad, never to return again," or whether we quote the ministerialdoctrine that "we must be merchants while we are soldiers,"... wecan see operating even in war time the belief that it is better towork for one's country than to die for it. 4

These sentiments, particularly the notion that it is better to workand produce for your country than to die for it, are quintessential ten-ants of the notion of interest that animated the eighteenth-century,mercantilist, territorial-sovereign state system. This last sentiment, aswe shall see, was to become quintessentially alien to the national-sovereign collective identity that was soon to break upon America andWestern Europe, and from there to Central and Eastern Europe andthe globe.

In light of the analysis above, what is the reason that, in 1756,George II could rearrange a hitherto stable system of European alli-ances, to the effective disadvantage of a notion of British interests ascalculated within a rational instrumental logic predicated on the as-sumption of the state as a unitary actor? How could he have inducedhis ministers and nation to accept a painfully expensive continentalwar which might have been averted by abandoning Hanover? The ex-planation lies in the nature of eighteenth-century territorial sover-eignty and the self-understandings of the relevant actors. Even in Brit-ain, which had earlier ended a Stuart dynasty with an act of regicide,George was sovereign of both Britain and Hanover, and so long as this

83. Ibid., 98.84. Eldon, England's Subsidy Policy, 160.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


was the case he was able to extend his sovereignty over each. Britishnational interests could not be neatly decoupled from George's per-sonal interests qua sovereign of Britain and Hanover. Even the enfran-chised Whig oligarchy was unable, at the level of policy, to decoupletheir interests qua British national interests from the personal, dynasticinterests of George n. Let me move to analysis of the strategic behaviorand the fate of a nineteenth-century emperor who reigned a centuryafter the close of the Seven Years' War, in the national-sovereign era,where matters were quite different.

NATIONAL-SOVEREIGN IDENTITY AND STRATEGIC BEHAVIOR

LOUIS BONAPARTE, a nephew of Napoleon, was elected president ofthe Second French republic in 1848. He seized power in a military

coup four years later and had himself crowned Napoleon III, emperorof the Second French Empire, subsequent to a plebiscite in which theFrench people had declared themselves weary of republicanism. LouisNapoleon had, as Marx caustically observed, replaced "liberte, egalite,fraternite, with cavalry, infantry, artillery."

Napoleon Ill's reign was not to be conducted with the carefree, un-selfconscious, pseudo-autocratic authority that Friedrich-Wilhelmmanaged to carry off in Prussia, in spite of the parliamentary window-dressing that the latter had been required to give to his governmentfrom 1848. Napoleon III wished to reign as had his grand-uncle, but hefound it unexpectedly difficult to carry off the trappings of absolutism.The violent manner in which he had established his empire rankledGreat Britain and all republicans. The plebescitory manner in whichhe had formally acquired his title left serious questions regarding hislegitimacy as a monarch in the eyes of his continental peers. In anyevent his dynasty was distressingly young and quixotically nouveauroyale from the perspective of the courts of Vienna, St. Petersburg,Berlin and Madrid. Consequently they had been very hesitant to granthim the full, official recognition that was due to a brother-monarch,and they addressed him in their official correspondence, throughouthis reign, and to his considerable irritation as "notre tres cher ami [ourvery dear friend] rather than Sire monfrkre [Majesty my brother]."8

85. Ibid., 15.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


It was not possible to legitimate the Second Empire with recourse tothe dynastic, divine right that the other monarchies of mid-nineteenth-century Europe still so resolutely relied upon. Whether by design orby default, Napoleon in inherited the nationalist credentials of his un-cle. France had chosen the Second Empire in lieu of the Second Repub-lic in her craving for a return to the national glory of the first Em-pire. A Bonaparte served this purpose. He professed a belief in thepower of the development of "completed nation-states" as a progres-sive, organizing, and modernizing force of history and was soon toplay the champion of the principle of nationality in the conduct of hisforeign policy. Kissinger argues that Napoleon "was driven to depend-ence on public opinion [to maintain his legitimacy], and his policyfluctuated with his assessment of what was needed to sustain his[domestic] popularity." He was only consistently popular when thatpolicy consistently defended the principle of nationality.

NATIONALITY AND LEGITIMACY IN THE SECOND EMPIRE:

CONSEQUENCES FOR ALLIANCE FORMATION

By 1854 Napoleon had entered the Crimean War on the side of Eng-land, in part to check Russian expansion into the collapsing Ottomanempire. This move was quite popular at home precisely because itavenged France against Russia's role in the defeat of the first empire ofa Napoleon. Later in the decade he was to bring French troops into thefray of a War of Italian liberation against Austria. This conflict posed aconflict of state and "national" interests that became a classical patternfor the hybrid international system of the nineteenth century—a mixedsystem of the competing territorial-sovereign and national-sovereignentities. The Austrian interest in engaging in the Italian campaign wasthe maintenance of "social order, political legitimacy and religiousfaith...[against]....Bonapar- tism, nationalist passions and seculariza-tion." Having already made an enemy of Russia, Napoleon's Italiancampaigns now earned him the permanent enmity of Hapsburg Aus-tria, at whose expense the Italian unification had come.89 Significantly,

86. Theo Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon (Indianapolis and New York:Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 15.

87. Ibid.88. James J. Sheehan, German History 1770-1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 865.89. Cronin provides an excellent constructivist account of Italian unification in this

issue. See Bruce Cronin, "From Balance to Community: Transnational Identity andPolitical Integration," Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter 1998/99-spring 1999]: 270-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


it also earned him the mistrust of Francophobe Great Britain, whichwas by no means pleased to witness new Napoleonic military activitysuch a short time after the Battle of Waterloo was supposed to haveended it once and for all. Neither had his Italian campaigns earned Na-poleon the good will of the Pope. The advancing unification of Italypresented an obvious threat to the Papal States, and Napoleon hadbeen forced in 1848, when still president of the Second Republic, tosend a substantial French garrison to Rome in order to protect Pius DCfrom Garibaldi and the Roman Republic. Pius had issued his continueddefense of his temporal authority in the forms of the encyclical Quantacura and the December 1864 Syllabus errorum. Thus, as Prussian ag-gression and German unification loomed on Napoleon's eastern hori-zon, he could not yet remove the garrison without inflaming devoutFrench Catholic opinion. Unfortunately for Napoleon, French do-mestic opinion might have adored the principle of nationality, but notat the expense of the papacy. French identity might have been na-tional, but it was also overwhelmingly Catholic. The papacy might bedefied, as it had been during the first Empire, for the sake of the ex-pression of French national identity, but not for the sake of Italiannational identity.

Worst of all, his actions in Italy had not even earned him the une-quivocal gratitude of Italian patriots, who were upset that Napoleonhad not freed all of northern Italy, as he had promised, and were nomore pleased that the French garrison in Rome prevented the eternalcity from becoming the capital city of the united Italy that the Risor-gimento insisted it must become.92 This was later to cost Napoleon thepotential for an alliance with Italy, when he was to cast about in vainfor help against the threat of a war with Prussia. In spite of the factthat Napoleon had wed his cousin, Prince Jerome Napoleon (who wasknown in France, irreverently, as Plon-Plon) to Clotilde, daughter tothe Italian King Victor Emanuel n, Italy would not ally with Francewhile French troops still protected the temporal power of the pa-

301). While I treat the German case, I share Cronin's use of the puzzle of unification asa "voluntary cession of sovereignty by a group of independent states to create an en-tirely new political authority" and also emphasize the irrationality of such an act in thestructural realist and neoliberal institutionalist frameworks (ibid., 270, 273-74).

90. Eric Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (New York: Norton, 1968), 102-3.91. See, for example, Woloch's treatment of the anticlerical nature of French domes-

tic educational policy during the First Republic and much of the First Empire. SeeIsser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820(New York: Norton, 1994), 173-236.

92. Aronson, TheFall of the Third Napoleon, 20-21.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


pacy. This was so because the papacy had for long been so effectivein sustaining political fragmentation on the Italian peninsula.

It is worthwhile to pause here and observe the extent to which theinsularity of decision making for statesmen, which had been completea century before the reign of Napoleon III, had become so badly erodedby this time that Napoleon could not make the move required to lockup an alliance with an emerging nation that he had helped to create. Bythe 1860s, Napoleon III, ruling France without the constraints of a con-stitution (until months before the end of his reign), found himself un-able to take a decision to abandon a militarily helpless papacy to Italiannationalists in order to maximize his opportunity to gain a militaryally which otherwise had been given every reason to support him. Hecould not do so precisely because such a decision would so badly in-flame domestic opinion that his regime likely would not have survivedthe domestic aftershocks of such a decision. Napoleon could take nodecision on foreign or domestic policy which could not be soundlyexcoriated in the corps legeslatif or in the press. Each major decisionthat Napoleon in had taken resulted in an unofficial plebiscite inFrance regarding the question of whether his rule and his dynastywould continue to be tolerated.

Napoleon was soon to further aggravate his strained relations withRussia by playing the champion of the cause of the long-suffering na-tionalists of partitioned Poland when they revolted against Alexander IIin 1863. This policy played well to the appreciative Parisians, butgained the lasting enmity of Alexander. According to Aronson:

Nor had a recent state visit [by Alexander] to Paris done anythingto endear the Russian Emperor to Napoleon Ill's regime. His[Alexander's] arrival had been greeted by shouts of "Long live Po-land!" and, on driving back one day with Napoleon from Long-champs, he had been shot at by a young Polish patriot. Napoleon'stactful observation that as the two of them had been under fire to-gether they were now "brothers-in-arms" was frigidly received bythe outraged Tsar. He returned to Russia in a very bad humor.94

Neither had Napoleon's ill-advised policy in Mexico endeared himto the court in Madrid. Napoleon had acceded to the encouragementof his Empress of Spanish birth, Eugenie, to install Maximilian, thebrother of the Hapsburg Austrian Emperor, as a Catholic puppet em-

93. Ibid., 55.94. Aronson, The Fall of the Third Napoleon, 56.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


peror in republican Mexico.95 This feat, and the subordinate relation-ship of Maximilian's "Empire" to the French Empire made France ap-pear glorious in the eyes of domestic French nationalists of all politicalopinions. The glory this move bestowed on France allowed mostFrenchmen to ignore the fact that Maximilian had essentially imposeda Catholic Hapsburg imperial government on a national republicanMexico. Similar to his policy of supporting the papacy against Italiannationalists, the installation of a puppet emperor in Mexico was an-other clear move away from support for the principle of nationality,though it won him rabid approval by domestic French nationalists.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A TOOL OF STATESMEN: BISMARCK

ENGINEERS THE DANISH AND AUSTRO-PRUSSIAN WARS

Napoleon's Prussian nemesis Bismarck, conversely, had been able toutilize an emerging sense of national identity among the German-speaking peoples of Central Europe to pursue quite traditional territo-rial-sovereign objectives for the Prussian crown. From the inceptionof his administration, Bismarck consistently steered Prussian policy ona unilateral course oriented toward Prussian aggrandizement. Bismarckindeed sought the unification of the German states, but he sought thisunification only as he envisioned it; under Prussian rule. He was mas-terfully to employ popular pan-German nationalist sentiment as a tooltoward the attainment of this goal. To that end Prussian policy underBismarck, from 1863, set out to destroy the "legitimate structure ofEurope" that had been codified in the 1815 Vienna treaties.98 Like Na-poleon m, Bismarck's policy was entirely subversive of the legitimatingprinciples, and the agenda of Metternich's Vienna system. The Viennasystem had been predicated on the assumption of common Austrianand Prussian interest in the maintenance of conservative institutions as

95. Ibid., 17.96. Here, as Spirtas argues in a different context, "group identification contributes

to intimate international cooperation" (Michael Spirtas, "Trench Twist: French andBritish NATO Policies from 1949 to 1966," Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter1998/99-spring 1999]: 302).

97. As Cronin observes in the similar case of pan-Italian nationalism, "a morebroadly conceived nationalism can extend the definition of one's community to in-clude populations from other established states" (Cronin, "From Balance to Commu-nity," 280). The significance and "rational utility" of this fart was clearly not lost uponBismarck.

98. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 71.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


a bulwark against the forces of liberalism and democracy in the domes-tic opposition of each. 9

Unfortunately for Austria, Bismarck did not feel that he requiredthis bulwark to maintain order and conservative monarchical rulewithin Prussia. Austria was at this time, as it had always been, muchmore dynastic than territorial in outlook. Due to its polyglot ethnicand linguistic composition, cemented by a coextensive division of eth-nicity with geography, the Austrian state had never been and couldnever become a national state. In deference to their imperial subjectstraditions, the Hapsburgs had of old taken separate coronation oathsfor the regions that they ruled. "Hapsburgs swore to defend each prov-ince and to respect its traditional customs, laws, privileges, and relig-ion." In doing so, the Austrian Hapsburgs attempted to govern afairly conventional Empire along the lines of the Roman model of an-tiquity, subsequent to what Michael Doyle has described as the Augus-tan revolution of imperial administration.10 The Austrian HapsburgEmpire was at this time, at the most, what Michael Mann calls a"confederal state" subjected to a dynastic, monarchical, absolutist rulesoftened only by the mitigating parameters of Hapsburg respect forcultural and linguistic particularism. It became increasingly difficultfor confederal Austria simply to maintain what it held in an age whencentrifugal nationalism was making its rounds in Europe, and whileRussia was frustrating Austria's hopes of expansion into the soft areasof south-eastern Europe created by the quickening Ottoman collapse.The very last thing that Austria wanted to do at this time was to strug-gle with Prussia for regional hegemony of the German lands of centralEurope. Equally unfortunate for Austria, Prussia felt it had to strug-gle with Austria to gather up these lands. Austrian Hapsburg princeshad been continuously elected Holy Roman Emperors by the GermanElectors from 1438 until the last Holy Roman Emperor had resignedand done away with the office in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-tury. While this office was gone, the allegiance to Hapsburg Austriaamong the many remaining German princes had not receded. This wasso particularly in the Catholic south of German central Europe. Bis-

99. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 122.100. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Na-

tion-States, 1760-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 330-31.101. Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 92-97.102. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, 331.103. Sheehan, German History, 856.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


marck was eventually to determine that he must remove the sparklefrom the imperial Hapsburg diadem in order to bring the Germanstates under the rule of Prussia. He was soon to provide such a drub-bing of Austrian prestige.

Austria, however, was not to be the first victim of Prussian aggres-sion in the developing Bismarckian scheme to employ pan-Germannational identity to unite the German lands under Prussian rule. Thatmisfortune was to befall a non-German state, specifically Denmark.Significantly, Denmark attracted Bismarck's attention in this regardprecisely because it was a non-German power. Even before, and espe-cially after an 1848 insurrection by the German-speaking inhabitants ofthe Danish-ruled Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, tangled disputeshad emerged regarding to whom the titles to the Duchies would revertupon the death of the Danish King Friedrich VH.104 Schleswig-Holsteinwas a region of mixed Danish-German ethnicity. Friedrich had heldtitle to both while he lived. The dispute had been an essentially legal,titular dispute of the sort common in the eighteenth century. It hadbeen an issue of contended dynastic succession, of the sort that was tobecome very uncommon in the more recent era of national-sovereignidentity—which prince would own and rule the territory upon thedeath of their present sovereign.

Upon the death of the Danish sovereign in 1863, Bismarck quicklyreduced the issue to a German national irredentist claim to recoverseparate ethnic Germans. Of course, Bismarck had never viewed theSchleswig-Holstein affair from the perspective of a German nationalistand was unlikely to have given a fig for whether or not the ethnicGermans had been mistreated by their Danish rulers. Yet claims thatsuch mistreatment had occurred had been advanced and German na-tionalists throughout the German-speaking states of central Europeexpressed enthusiasm for the separation of the Duchies from Danishrule. The Danish king had died without issue, and Bismarck becameanxious to take advantage of the controversy regarding the right ofsuccession over these Duchies in the name of the German nationalistcause, not because he had any sympathy for this cause but because"Prussia did not have, either in law or in history, the smallest title to

104. In the German case, as in the Italian case, the "permissive cause of integrationwas the revolutions of 1848" (Cronin, "From Balance to Community: TransnationalIdentity and Political Integration," (ms. p. 24.). This was a "permissive cause" of theSecond French Empire as well.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


the Duchies."105 He has earlier written, to Manteuffel, "I have not thesmallest doubt that the whole Danish business can be settled in a waydesirable for us only by war. The occasion for such a war can be foundat any moment we consider favorable for waging it." 6 The death ofthe Danish king provided that moment.

Bismarck was able to take advantage of German nationalist senti-ment in this context in large measure because Friedrich vn had, some-what foolishly and autocratically, attempted to "impose a new consti-tutional order on Schleswig without the promised consultation" backin March 1863. Upon Friedrich's death, rival claims by PrinceChristian of Gliicksburg (to both Schleswig-Holstein and the Danishcrown) and Prince Augustenburg (a progressive candidate supported bymost German liberals) were evaluated by the Diet of the German Con-federation in late November. The Diet was effectively powerless ex-cept as a negotiating forum for delegations of the German princes ofthe loose Confederation formed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars,but among its delegates were many German liberal nationalists. A con-sensus in support of Augustenberg's candidacy emerged. This wasthe combined result of inflamed and nascent German nationalist pas-sion over the alleged mistreatment of the German minority in theDuchies, the attempt by a Danish prince to impose a constitutionalorder on them without consultation with the estates, and the prospectof the continuation of this alleged state of affairs under a new Danishsovereign.

What is essential to my analysis of the period is the difference inAustrian and Prussian motivation in cooperating in the joint conquestof Schleswig-Holstein, and the insights that analysis of this differenceprovides in understanding the growing cleavage in the Austrian andPrussian notions of their state interests. This rift was critical in bring-ing the curtain down on the Vienna system, and ending the prolongedperiod of peace among conservative dynasts that had characterized thefunctioning of the Concert of Europe. As Sheehan describes the situa-tion, Bismarck and the Austrian foreign minister, Count Johann Bern-hard von Rechberg, were laboring over a very different set of assump-tions regarding the significance of their cooperation in operationsagainst Denmark for the future of Austro-Prussian relations. The dif-

105. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 81.106. Ibid.107. Sheehan, German History, 890.108. Ibid.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


ference is hardly surprising, given Austria's reliance upon the con-tinuation of Metternich's Vienna system to avoid conflict with Prussiawhile nationalist and secessionist trouble was appearing in its multi-ethnic empire. It is less surprising still when we consider the characterof Rechberg, who "called himself a Conservative statesman and a pupilofMetternich."109

Rechberg saw the Schleswig-Holstein problem as the occasion forcreating the constellation of forces that he had always wanted: aConfederation dominated by an Austro-Prussian condominium di-rected against liberal nationalism and in favor of the status quo. Hisinterest in Schleswig-Holstein per se was minimal; his principal aimwas to lay the basis for a broad and lasting set of agreements withBerlin. This was not Bismarck's intention. Although he did not re-veal his goals to anyone for another year, he was attracted to theidea of annexing the Duchies to Prussia. Moreover, his agreementto work with Vienna in support of the treaties of 1852 [with theConfederation, which Denmark had violated] was purely tactical, away to keep the game going while he waited to see what would de-velop.

In his dedication to conservative principles of government, the placeof the ancient aristocracy in the leadership of domestic society, and tomonarchical rule, Bismarck was every bit Rechberg's match. UnlikeRechberg, however, and unlike many of his Prussian peers such asGerlach, Bismarck did not regard adherence to the Vienna system as inany way essential to the maintenance of dynastic rule in Prussia. Thisled him to reject the premises, advice and wishes of Prussian conserva-tives. As Kissinger has recently argued, Bismarck "challenged the con-ventional wisdom which identified nationalism with liberalism."111

Thus Bismarck did not see any inherent liberal threat to the Prussianmonarchy or social order in a pan-German policy which excludedHapsburg Austria. Instead, he believed "the illusion of the need for anAustrian alliance served above all to inhibit Prussia from pursuing itsultimate goal of unifying Germany" under the Prussian crown. Inrejecting the necessary identification of nationalism with liberalism,however, a linkage that was almost axiomatic to the adherents to Met-ternich's doctrine when he constructed the Vienna system in 1815,

109. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 64.110. Sheehan, German History, 891.111. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 128.112. Ibid.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


Bismarck also rejected the proposition that liberal institutions wererequired to achieve the unification of Germany. This was a proposi-tion that had been equally axiomatic among the German liberals whohad gathered in Frankfurt after the 1848 revolution to construct an all-German constitution. Bismarck felt that the legitimacy of the Prussianmonarchy and the strength of the Prussian state was of an order thatrendered it impervious to the threat of this logic. Thus he could flirtwith the Prussian left, the liberals, and the Prussian, German national-ists when it suited him, and he could employ what he regarded as theirdelusional, pan-German, national enthusiasms for his own purposes.As Bismarck had himself written in this context:

The sense of security that the King remains master in his countryeven if the whole army is abroad is not shared with Prussia by anyother continental state and above all by no other German power. Itprovides the opportunity to accept a development of public affairsmuch more in conformity with present requirements....The royalauthority in Prussia is so firmly based that the government canwithout risk encourage a much more lively parliamentary activityand thereby exert pressure on conditions in Germany.

On the basis of Rechberg's delusions regarding his intentions, Bis-marck had, in January 1864, engineered the joint invasion of Schleswigby Austrian and Prussian forces. They crossed the frontier on 1 Febru-ary. With annexation of the Duchies as his aim, Bismarck carefullyavoided all overtures for a peaceful settlement throughout the ensuingconflict and Denmark was forced to sue for peace by August, and tocede the Duchies to the joint control of Austria and Prussia. Schleswig-Holstein was to be administered by an Austro-Prussian condominiumof the sort Rechberg had favored, in spite of the fact that this arrange-ment favored Prussia, which was geographically situated to exercise anauthority over the area that Austria could not.

Bismarck wished, of course, to annex both Duchies directly to Prus-sia, but could not employ such a demand as a legitimate basis for warwith Austria, a war which he desired in order to humble Austria in theeyes of the Confederation as well as to complete the Prussian conquestof Schleswig-Holstein. Neither his sovereign, the Crown Prince ofPrussia, nor the opinion of the smaller German states that he wished to

113. Ibid., 129. Kissinger is citing Bismarck's Werke here. The cited passage waswritten in March 1858.

114. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 90.115. Ibid., 92-94.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


woo under the sovereignty of the Prussian crown, would tolerate sucha selfish act of aggression. The Prussian sovereign and his son wouldnot tolerate it, as it would constitute a blatant breach of faith with abrother-monarch, violating his primary aristocratic identity commit-ment to his social class. The smaller German states would not tolerateit, as it would constitute a blatant breach of faith with a brother-German, violating their emerging pan-German identity commitments.The best that Bismarck could therefore manage to advance his design,for a time, was to engineer the Convention of Gastein which ended thecondominium arrangement by dividing the Duchies between them,awarding Schleswig, in the north, to Prussia and Holstein, in thesouth, to Austria. The convention was completed on 14 August1865. This division was extremely unpopular throughout the Con-federation.

Unfortunately for Austria, however, the Convention of Gastein wassigned in the nature of a provisional, not a permanent settlement. Thisprovided Bismarck with the opportunity to manufacture grievancesagainst conduct of the Austrian administration of Holstein, and con-tinuously to badger the Austrian ambassador and court with a series ofhostile notes until Austria was provoked into sending a very sharpnote to Bismarck in response. This note upset the Prussian king andwas now allowed to serve as a pretext for the creation of a rift in Prus-sian relations with Austria, particularly in light of the growing realiza-tion in Berlin that a military conflict with Austria might provide ameans of suspending the escalating constitutional crisis between thePrussian parliament and the Prussian crown.

Bismarck had met with Wilhelm on 21 February to consider how todeal with the crisis and had convinced Wilhelm "that only three alter-natives were now open to him: a liberal ministry [an idea which re-pelled Wilhelm], a coup d'etat against the constitution [which also re-pelled him as the document had been drafted by his father], or war."119

Thus when Wilhelm called a Crown Council on 28 February 1866 toformulate future Prussian policy he was persuaded without difficultyto grant Bismarck permission to begin negotiations with Italy for amilitary alliance against Austria. This was concluded by 8 April. Thefollowing day, Bismarck instructed the Prussian minister in Frankfurt

116. Ibid., 100.117. Ibid., 106.118. Ibid., 107-10.119. Sheehan, German History, 900.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


to introduce to the Diet of the German Confederation a proposal toconvene a German parliament elected on the basis of universal suf-frage!120 This was precisely the franchise that the Frankfurt Parliamentwhich had convened in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 hadsought, and had been denied when the Prussian king had refused toaccept the imperial German crown and to vitalize that franchise. Themove was carefully and cynically calculated to gain sympathy for thePrussian government as an administration of progressive design whichsupported liberal, pan-German national unity in comparison with thecreaking, dynastic, particularistic Hapsburg court in Vienna. The moveserved its purpose admirably. It was a singular success for Bismarckwhen one realizes that the move helped to convince the peoples of theGerman Confederation that Prussia was demonstrating itself to be notonly liberal, but German nationalist in outlook, while at the same timein essence it demolished the German Confederation by concluding analliance with Italy against another German member of the Confedera-tion. Bismarck admitted as much when he confided to Benedetti, theFrench foreign minister:

I have induced a King of Prussia to break off the intimate relationsof his House with the House of Hapsburg, to conclude an alliancewith revolutionary Italy, possibly to accept arrangements with Im-perial France, and to propose in Frankfurt the reform of the Con-federation and a popular parliament. That is a success of which I amproud.121

Bismarck's reference to "arrangements with Imperial France" referto the ultimately unsuccessful negotiations that he had been conduct-ing with Napoleon III. Bismarck had hoped to bring Napoleon into thewar against Austria, or at the least to ensure Napoleon's benevolentneutrality, by suggesting to Napoleon that if France wished to incor-porate all French-speaking regions of Europe (clearly alluding to Bel-gium) into the Empire, in accordance with the Emperor's devotion tothe principal of nationality, that Prussia would take no notice. Theseovertures to Napoleon in had scandalized Gerlach, Bismarck's mentorand Wilhelm's military adjutant. Gerlach regarded Napoleon as an ille-gitimate upstart, as had been his great uncle before him, and counseledrapprochement between Vienna and Berlin in order to isolate illegiti-mate and chronically revolutionary France. In the margin of a letter

120. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 115.121. Ibid.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


from Gerlach, protesting to Bismarck that "Napoleon is our naturalenemy," Bismarck had scrawled, "What of it?"1 2 For most conserva-tives, even so late in the nineteenth century, the legitimacy of the prin-ciples of the Vienna system was ironclad. Men like Gerlach listened tothe mechanized hum of Bismarck's radical, realpolitik move awayfrom Metternich's creation with incomprehension and incredulity. YetBismarck appears to have realized that in order for Prussia unambigu-ously to wrest leadership of German central Europe from HapsburgAustria, Prussia would have to exploit pan-German national sentimentand was qualified to do so in a fashion that Austria was not. As Kiss-inger has recently argued:

Had Prussia sought [earlier] to exploit German nationalism, itcould have challenged Austrian pre-eminence in Germany a genera-tion before Bismarck...[but]...refrained from pursuing their advan-tage because it ran counter to the dominant principle of maintain-ing the status quo. Austria, seemingly on its death bed after Napo-leon's [I] onslaught was given a new lease on life by the Metternichsystem, which enabled it to survive for another hundred years.

In a similar sense, Bismarck's move to bring a motion for universalsuffrage before the Diet of the German Confederation was astonishing.Universal suffrage certainly existed nowhere in the German states atthat time. In a masterstroke, Bismarck made the severe, autocratic andparochial Prussian government appear to be both democratic and pan-German nationalist, when it was neither. Bismarck had calculated thathis motion to grant universal suffrage for confederal elections wouldtake the wind out of the sails of his domestic parliamentary adversaries,especially the liberal, bourgeois Progressive party, in the upcomingelections. The move made him appear to support German unificationas well—in as much as nationalism and liberalism were such cognitivelylinked concepts in the minds of Prussian and other German liberals, aswell as in the minds of their conservative adversaries. Bismarck had nodoubts that he would succeed in his aim by these moves; he had seen itaccomplished before, in France. As Eyck argues persuasively:

His [Bismarck's] practical model was Napoleon in, whose govern-ment was sustained by the masses and opposed by a portion of theeducated upper middle class; Napoleon had introduced universal

122. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 124-25. Kissinger's quotations of the exchange betweenGerlach and Bismarck are taken from p. 125.

123. Ibid., 85.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


suffrage to get rid of the Second Republic [in 1852] and had beensuccessful in that. Bismarck was confident that he would be able toachieve the same success.124

Bismarck did achieve the same success, and more. War between Aus-tria and Prussia finally came and Prussia prevailed quickly and spec-tacularly, in spite of the fact that the Prussian army had been univer-sally thought to be no match for the Austrian forces. The Austrianforces, however, were defeated at Sadowa a mere three weeks afterPrussian troops had crossed the Saxon frontier. The armistice wasconcluded on 26 July 1866 in Nikolsburg.

The terms of the armistice were extraordinarily moderate for Aus-tria. Bismarck had wished to humble the Hapsburgs in order to turnthe eyes of the Confederation squarely to Prussia for future leadershipof a united German Empire. He had not wished to make of Austria apermanent and implacable enemy. He had been required to argue atgreat length, and at significant personal cost, with an obsessively tri-umphant and momentarily vindictive Wilhelm, that no Austrian landsshould be annexed to Prussia as part of the settlement. Prussia was notto be so moderate in its terms for the northern German states who hadsupported Austria in the war. Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, Nassau and theFree City of Frankfurt were annexed to the Prussian crown, theirmonarchs were deposed, and they ceased to exist as independent actorsin the international arena. Saxony, which had also favored Austria, wasspared this fate only by vociferous Austrian opposition, yet Saxonywas required under the terms of the peace to enter the new confedera-tion that would be formed under the leadership of Prussia.

NATIONAL IDENTITY AS A CONSTRAINT FOR STATESMEN:

THE SECOND EMPIRE'S FAILURE TO BALANCE

Quite contrary to Bismarck's expectations, his subordinate, Goltz, hadinduced Napoleon in to accept this annexation of vast tracts of north-ern Germany, along with its three to four million inhabitants, into thePrussian state. The fact that Napoleon did not oppose this annexation,despite the fact that it created a more powerful, and therefore moredangerous German state on his western border, is also quite contrary

124. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 116.125. Ibid., 128.126. Ibid., 132-33.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


to the expectations of realist balance-of-power theories of internationalrelations, quite irrespective of whether they are of the classical realist,or of the neorealist variant.

The structural neorealist variant argues that a state can balance in-ternally, by arms racing, as easily as externally, by alliance formation.Waltz has argued that "[b]alance-of-power politics prevail wherevertwo, and only two, requirements are met: that the order be anarchicand that it be populated by units wishing to survive." Waltz con-structs this argument in order to argue that bipolar superpower compe-tition in the twentieth century was not inconsistent with the classicalrealist notion of the balance of power as an explanation of state behav-ior. Certainly the notion should have therefore been just as applicablein the late nineteenth century, in a clearly multipolar European systemwhich featured, at a minimum, Austria, Britain, France, Prussia andRussia as Great Powers. Any variant of balance-of-power theory wouldargue that it was explicitly inimical to French state interests to sit idlyby and watch large tracts of central Europe and up to four millionpeople, and their goods and wealth, become annexed to an alreadypowerful Prussian neighbor to the east. Yet this is precisely what Na-poleon in did, however much hand-wringing might have accompaniedhis inactivity. How might this behavior be explained?

The major component of the explanation appears to lie in the man-ner in which Napoleon Ill's regime had been legitimated. This legiti-mating principle derived directly from the collective identity of theFrench nation. Throughout his reign Napoleon had consistently posedas the defender of national self-determination and had attacked the Vi-enna system coterie of traditionally legitimated, conservative monarchson this basis. His nationalist rhetoric and campaigns had been in-spired in no small measure by a store of personal conviction that thefuture belonged to national-states and not dynastic states. Kissinger has

127. For the balancing expectations of classical realist scholarship, see Hans J. Mor-genthau, Politics Among Nations, 161-215; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in WorldPolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 156-210; Edward HallettCarr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of InternationalRelations, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 102-46; A. F. K. Organski andJacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 13-62.Neorealist expectations of balancing activity among states are best described in Waltz,Theory of International Politics, 102-28; and the "expected utility" model presented inBruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress, 1981).

128. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 121.129. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 107.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


argued that Napoleon m in fact "dreaded German unification but wassympathetic to German nationalism and dithered about solving thatinsoluble dilemma."130 Moreover, a great deal of his popularity andlegitimacy within France derived from his role as a symbol of the pro-gressive future of national-states. Irrespective of its acceptance of a Sec-ond Empire, France still regarded itself to be one of these. France mayhave chosen an imperial form of government with the 1852 plebiscitethat resulted in Napoleon's installation as Emperor, but it was a na-tional-imperial state which had enthusiastically supported Napoleon'snationalist campaigns throughout the continental periphery in the in-tervening years between the proclamation of the Second Empire in1852 and the Austrian debacle at Sadowa in 1866. A major difficultyfor Emperor Napoleon m, was that over the years he had been "drivento dependence on public opinion, and his policy fluctuated with hisassessment of what was needed to sustain his [domestic] popularity."131

Napoleon's seeming inability to play the balance-of-power gamewhen it would bring his policy into conflict with the principle of na-tionality—which had served so admirably to legitimate his regime—indicates that his decision-making procedures could not be conductedwith the insularity of more traditionally legitimated statesmen. Just ashe had been unable to abandon the papacy for fear of inflaming do-mestic Catholic opinion, neither could he oppose the operation of theprinciple of nationality in central Europe without inflaming radicaldomestic nationalist opinion. To oppose the principle of nationality,which had long served to legitimate his foreign policy and his domesticrule, would simultaneously risk exposing himself as a traditional auto-crat. A Second Empire which represented and glorified the French na-tion was popular when successful and at least tolerated when not. ASecond Empire which represented the Bonaparte family and dynasty,and nothing else, would be unpopular and domestically illegitimateeven when successful and deposed when unsuccessful. The legitimatingprinciples of the Second Empire were the principles of nationality andthe belief that the imperial institutional form of collective action wasbest suited to glorify the French nation and thus manifest the agencyof the French nation abroad.

Bismarck was, of course, not immune to the pressure of domesticopinion in the formulation and conduct of his policy, but he had sev-

130. Ibid., 114.131. Ibid., 107.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


eral crucial advantages over Napoleon. First, Bismarck served an auto-cratic Prussian monarch whose legitimacy to rule in that capacity wasunquestioned by the broad mass of Prussian society. The only ele-ments of Prussian society which conceivably questioned the legitimacyof Wilhelm's reign were the radical liberals and socialists. Both of theseelements were marginalized fringe groups in the context of the prevail-ing Prussian political discourse of the 1860s. Second, Wilhelm's legiti-macy was enhanced by his emergence as a rallying point for pan-German nationalist sentiment. Bismarck's skillful maneuvers in theDiet of the German Confederation had created the illusion of a liberal-izing, German-nationalist Prussian monarchy. The illusion was en-hanced by a number of institutional facts.132 One of these had emergedwith the failure of the decisions of the Frankfurt Parliament to be im-plemented by the Prussian crown. Pan-German nationalist sentimentcould only realize its ambition to become institutionalized in a Ger-man nation by attaching itself to, or becoming adopted by, an existingGerman prince or state in order to acquire an institutional form. TheHapsburg Austrian state was both unsuitable for this purpose by virtueof its polyglot demography, and disinclined to serve this role by virtueof the dynastic, Hapsburg conception of Austrian state interests. ThusBismarck could play the nationality card to his domestic audience, andto a broader central European audience, as a German nationalist leader.He could annex the defeated German powers which had sided withAustria in the Austro-Prussian War into a Norddeutscher Bund, as partand parcel of a legitimate irredentist claim to gather up the German-speaking lands of central Europe into a greater German Reich.

In order to oppose this move, Napoleon would have been requiredto repudiate the legitimating principle of his own regime and its for-eign policy in its entirety. As Kissinger has recently argued, Napoleoneffectively had two options. First, he could adhere to the tried and truestrategy of Richelieu and strive to keep central Europe fragmented.Adopting this policy would, however, have cost him his credentials asa nationalist, with all the attendant potential consequences that I havejust outlined above. Otherwise, he could strive for the leadership ofEurope by placing himself and his Empire at the head of a nationalist

132. Kratochwil, "Regimes, Interpretation and the 'Science' of Politics," 270-72.133. For a discussion of the problem of irredentism to the stability of international

order see Mayall, Nationalism and International Society, 57-61.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


crusade, as had his uncle before him. Instead, "[u]nfortunately forFrance, Napoleon pursued both strategies simultaneously."

As the Austro-Prussian War progressed, "Bismarck threw Napoleonthe sop of letting him mediate the peace," though this attempt atintervention also failed and was ultimately exercised only after Austriahad been defeated. Napoleon believed that he could not ask for any-thing for France so long as he was in the process of mediating the Aus-tro-Prussian peace, but when this task was completed he sent Benedettito Bismarck on 23 July to ascertain Bismarck's attitude to a Frenchproposal for a secret convention between France and Prussia thatwould award France with its 1814 frontiers, and Luxembourg aswell.137 It would appear, then, that Napoleon was suffering from theillusion—which Bismarck had taken no small pains to encourage—thathe had achieved an understanding with Prussia, based on the principleof nationality—a principle that Bismarck was proclaiming falsely. Prus-sia would be allowed to gather up German states in central Europe,and would in return wink at French annexation of Belgium and Lux-embourg. It is a tribute to the growing strength of pan-German na-tional sentiment, in what was soon to become Germany, that Bis-marck found it impossible to yield Germanophile Luxembourg toFrance. Yet we should not delude ourselves that such an annexationwas Napoleon's intent before the Austro-Prussian war began. Thisdoes not salvage either classical or neorealist understandings of the bal-ance of power. Napoleon did not intend to balance Prussian gains incentral Europe with acquisitions of the significant French-speakingterritories that lay between France's northeastern frontier and theRhine. At least, he did not intend to do so before the Austrian defeat atSadowa.

Napoleon attempted to retrieve the situation by calling for a Euro-pean congress. While his call was ignored, Bismarck allowed him tomediate the peace in bilateral negotiations between the belligerent par-ties. Napoleon faintly hoped to intervene sufficiently with his media-tion efforts to avoid the "complete reversal of the European balance ofpower"139 that was developing as a result of the war. Bismarck, how-

134. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 108.135. Ibid., 109.136. Ibid., 117.137. Ibid., 136.138. Ibid., 156.139. Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire, 129.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


ever, had procrastinated in these diplomatic efforts to terminate hostili-ties, while simultaneously hinting broadly that Napoleon should makean ultimatum to the Belgian King that Belgian integration into theSecond Empire would be essential to offset Prussian political and terri-torial gains as a result of the Austrian war.

The rapid Austrian military collapse, coupled with Bismarck's hintsthat France could be compensated for its neutrality in a manner consis-tent with French devotion to the principle of nationality, especially inBelgium, appears to have secured that neutrality. Upon the attainmentof a peace, however, Bismarck lost interest in the question of Frenchirredentist interests in Belgium and Luxembourg. Napoleon pursuedthis issue in order to obtain compensation subsequent to the Prussianterritorial gains and the humiliation of Austria. French balancing was,however, somewhat tardy. It was a forlorn hope, ex post facto of thePrussian fait accompli. The French failure to balance Prussian aggran-dizement prior to the Prussian victory had effectively and permanentlyended the French hegemony in central and western Europe that Francehad enjoyed since the reign of Louis XIV.

Certainly, as I have indicated, Louis Napoleon appears to have beenbadly outmaneuvered by Bismarck. Bismarck's duplicity and superiorstatecraft, however, cannot in themselves explain Napoleon's failure tobalance Prussian aggrandizement. Napoleon had surely not failed tounderstand where the consequences of the Danish and Austro-Prussianwars were tending, or their implications for French security. It was, inmy own view, precisely the hybrid character of the French regime, thefact that it was simultaneously an imperial, or pseudo-monarchical in-stitutional form of collective action, and legitimated by the principle ofnationality, and a country rife with popular nationalism, that renderedit so difficult for Napoleon in successfully to balance Prussian aggran-dizement in central Europe. Napoleon was an emperor so long as heand his empire served to embody French national aspirations. TheSecond Empire provided an institutional form of collective action thatprovided a serviceable vehicle for the expression and agency of Frenchnational collective identity so long as Napoleon's goals were at unitywith the will of French national aspirations. French national aspira-tions willed the demise of the Vienna system, which had been con-structed to shackle the French people, and all the peoples of Europe, toa legitimate scion of the ancien regime. This system constituted, by

140. Ibid., 130.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


design, the uncompromising nullification of the idea of the nation.Napoleon's Second Empire served, for a time, as an institutional formfor the collective action of the French nation because its goals wereindeed at unity with the will of the nation. His regime provided aninstitutional form of collective action capable of serving as an instru-ment for the effective execution of the agency of pre-existing Frenchnational collective identity. French national identity sought demolitionof the Vienna system that had been created to constrain it.

Napoleon's ultimate goal was to abrogate the territorial clauses ofthe Vienna settlement and to alter the state system on which it hadbeen based. He never understood, however, that achieving his goalwould also result in a unified Germany, which would forever endFrench aspirations to dominate Central Europe.141

That Napoleon's attainment of his goal of demolishing the Viennasystem did entail these consequences meant that the French failure tobalance the Prussian creation of the Norddeutscher Bund spelled thebeginning of the end for the Second Empire. The Prussian aggran-dizement resulting from the defeat of Austria not only created an ob-stacle to the advancement of specifically French national aspirations,but created an aggressive and expansive Prussian power which couldmuster an army four times the size of that of France.142 By failing tobalance this power, the Second Empire had acceded to the forging ofthe tool of its own destruction.

141. Kissinger, Diplomacy, 107.142. According to Eyck, having cowed the southern German states by his annexa-

tion of most of those in the north, Bismarck had been careful to obtain alliances, stipu-lated in secret treaties, with nearly all of these states to the effect that they would puttheir forces at the disposal, and under the command of the King of Prussia in the eventof a future Prussian war with, particularly, France. See Eyck, Bismarck and the GermanEmpire, 136. As a consequence, according to Howard, the Prussian army had at itsdisposal as many as 1,200,000 men compared to 288,0000 Frenchmen under arms at theend of 1866. See Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion ofFrance, 1870-1871 (New York: Collier, 1969), 29. Note here also that, as with Cronin'semphasis of the importance of "fighting together as Italians," the experience of havingfought together against the common French foe was an important element in solidify-ing pan-German national identity and the integration of the German states under thePrussian crown. See Cronin, "From Balance to Community: Transnational Identityand Political Integration," (ms. pp. 291ff.).

143. It might be interesting, in a larger study where more space is available, to con-sider in this context the reasons why Russia and Britain also failed or declined to bal-ance Prussian expansion. Paul Schroeder suggests answers to this question in separatebut relevant arguments. First, Schroeder argues that the system of the Concert periodwas not a "balance of power" system but a hegemonic system dominated by superpow-ers in Russia and Britain. See Paul W. Schroeder, "Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on aBalance of Power?" American Historical Review 97, no. 6 (June 1992): 683-735. One

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


REPRISE: IDENTITIES, INTERESTS, AND INSTITUTIONS

f-r-fHE SEVEN YEARS' WAR provides a highly effective illustration of theJ. causal significance of the territorial-sovereign structure of identities

and interests for the security conduct of territorial-sovereign states. Ihave argued that the scope, conduct, terms of engagement, and termsof disengagement of belligerents during the Seven Years' War are inex-plicable without recourse to analysis of the manner in which the inter-ests of the belligerents were structured by their territorial-sovereignsocial identities. Analysis of George's dual territorial-sovereignty overBritain and Hanover is required to explain the scope of the war and thediplomatic revolution which demolished a classical European system ofalliances which had stood for centuries as more consistent with thebalancing requirements of European actors. The choice of alliancepartners and the theaters of conflict are otherwise inexplicable. Theyare equally inexplicable without analysis of the consequences for alli-ance formation of the whims and caprices of the territorial-sovereignmonarchs who were to become belligerents. No argument predicatedon assumptions of rational instrumental decision making on the part ofbelligerents can explain why a continental European theater of the warshould have been opened, unless the interests of actors are properlyunderstood to be structured by historically contingent territorial-sovereign social identities.

Similar analysis is required to apprehend the terms of engagement ofthe war. On the part of the British, the peripheral war was foughtprimarily by the British navy and provincial troops over whom theBritish crown had extended sovereignty, but to whom the crown hadnot awarded full citizenship. The British oligarchy reasoned like capi-talists, not like patriots, evincing evidence of their love of profit ratherthan love of country in decision making regarding whether or not toconduct the war, for what objectives, and with whom. The state-as-firm model is nearly reified in this portrait of mercantilist, oligarchic,territorial-sovereign decision making. The notion of state interestswhich emerges from this portrait, however, is a construction of a very

might then surmise that Russia and Britain could afford to take an indulgent view ofPrussian expansion at the expense of France. In another argument, Schroeder pointsout the Britain had both instrumental and cultural affinities for Prussia, which "wouldbe a peaceful, satiated, progressive, Protestant power, a useful commercial partner, anda good guarantor of Peace in Europe against a restless France" (Paul Schroeder,"Historical Reality vs. Neo-realist Theory," International Security 19, no. 1 [summer1994]: 108-48). The passage quoted is found on p. 146.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


specific structure of social identities, and theories which exogenize thisnotion of interests by assumption to all actors in quite different sys-tems consequently severely limit their potential explanatory utility.

I have argued that similar analysis is required to apprehend the con-duct of the war. On the British side, the primacy of the defense ofHanover was continuously elevated over other, more likely genuinelystrategic priorities, in decision making regarding the application ofstrategic resources: namely, troops and subsidy funds for more troops.In the person of one territorial-sovereign individual and his system-legitimated proprietary sovereign interests, we are witnesses to thespectacle of a conflict of interests between the sovereign and the ra-tional, objective, strategic and pecuniary interests of the nation. Thisdichotomy was to become an impossible contradiction in terms in thenational-sovereign system that followed. In the system structured byterritorial-sovereign identities and interests, however, the division hadto be accommodated and reconciled. The British notion of state inter-ests had to adjust to accommodate the proprietary and territorial inter-ests of the sovereign's second territorial sovereignty. Thus we observethat it is ineffectual to theorize about the objective interests of state ornation in a transhistorical or ahistorical fashion; a fashion in whichsocially constructed and empirically verifiable notions of state or na-tional interests are disregarded in some accounts in favor of a prioriassumptions.

Lastly, I have argued that similar analysis is required to apprehendthe terms of disengagement from the war. It is certainly true thatFrance had suffered serious military defeats in the periphery and mightwell have been financially exhausted in the last year of the war. It isalso certainly true that the death of Catherine and the accession of acapriciously pro-Prussian Peter to the Russian throne had left Francebereft of continental allies with the resources to assist France effec-tively in a successful conclusion to the continental theater of the war.

The discussion of the demise of the Second Empire and birth of theSecond Reich has analyzed the consequences of the development ofnational collective identity for the conduct of national-state securitypolicy in the nineteenth century in the context of critical areas of state

144. It is in this context that I heartily endorse Schimmelfennig's suggestion that"rationalist and constructivist explanations do not have to exclude one another but canbe combined in different ways.' See Frank Schimmelfennig, "NATO Enlargement: AConstructivist Explanation," Security Studies 8, nos. 2/3 [winter 1998/99-spring 1999]:230).

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


conduct, in which realist and neorealist theory predict state securitybehavior that is at variance with the observed behavior of nation-states.

Both classical realism and structural neorealism predict that stateswill balance the attempts of powerful neighbors and adversaries to ex-pand their territory. Yet, as has emerged in my analysis, Napoleon niwas unable to take action to frustrate Bismarck's projects to unify theGerman states, in spite of the fact that French ascendancy over conti-nental affairs was seriously endangered by the creation of the Nord-deutscher Bund at the close of the Austro-Prussian War. Napoleon al-lowed himself to be goaded by Bismarck, and the French nationalistpress, into initiating a war against Prussia for which he clearly believedFrance to be unprepared. France fought Prussia, in 1870, for no pur-pose whatever consistent with an instrumentally rational definition ofthe interests of the French state. I have explored the impact of Frenchdomestic nationalist agitation in the origins of the Franco-PrussianWar. I have developed the manner in which the legitimacy of Napo-leon in's reign was predicated on his policy of upholding the principleof nationality in French policy toward the Italian Peninsula, the Ger-man states of central Europe, and the Polish reaction against its parti-tion by Russia and Prussia. I have argued that, by the time Bismarck'spolicy of unification came to fruition, the policy of the liberal Empireof France was at the service of the popular French conception of theprinciple of nationality.

The interests of societies, whatever institutional form of collectiveaction they employ to express these interests, is demonstrated to beinfluenced by the self-perceptions of the society they represent. I arguethat interests are not static or exogenously given, but are a function ofhistorically contingent societal collective identity. The structure ofstate interests of the Second Empire of Napoleon m, and that of Bis-marck's Prussia emerge as distinctly different conceptions, derivedfrom distinctly different notions of the nature of sovereign identity.The regime of Napoleon m, legitimated as it was by Napoleon's anti-dynastic support for the principle of nationality, led him to take deci-sions that were not formally rational or consistent with the rational-instrumental logic that Bismarck was able to apply as chancellor of atraditionally legitimated Prussia. Significantly Bismarck, though a con-firmed monarchist, was able to employ French and pan-German na-tional sentiment as a tool to obtain his rational-instrumental objectives.Thus a major consequence of the development of national collectiveidentity is that it could be employed as a tool or alternately suffered as

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4


a constraint for statesmen. Variations in the structure of state identitiesand interests, predicated on the legitimating principles of a given re-gime, determined whether or not the principle of nationality (later fol-lowed by national self-determination) was a constraint or a tool forstatesmen who might like to pursue rational instrumental policies.Domestic nationalist ferment sometimes transforms the structure ofstate interests, impelling statesmen to pursue formally irrational poli-cies. I argue that this is precisely what occurred to induce Louis Napo-leon to launch the Franco-Prussian War, which resulted in the demiseof his Second Empire and in the birth of the Second German Reich.

It was precisely the hybrid nature of the liberal Empire—that it nei-ther served as an appropriate institutional form of collective action tomanifest monarchical territorial sovereignty nor French popular andnational sovereignty—which doomed it to extinction at the first serioustransnational difficulty. The symbolism of earlier French nationalglory, latent within the imperial office and the name of Bonaparte, wascast aside like a tarnished ornament when delegitimated by defeat.Louis Napoleon's legitimation crisis came into being and passed awayin a day, at Sedan. The imperial institutional form of collective actioncould no longer manifest French national collective identity. It suited,however, as a wholly appropriate institutional form to manifest thenational collective identity of the newly forged pan-German nation.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Uni

vers

ity O

f Pi

ttsbu

rgh]

at 1

6:34

30

Oct

ober

201

4

territorial and national sovereigns: sovereign identity and consequences for security policy

Documents