* * *
The most conspicuous theme in
international history is not the growth of internationalism. It is the series
of efforts, by one power after another, to gain mastery of the states-system—efforts
that have been defeated only by a coalition of the majority of other powers at
the cost of an exhausting general war. ' Life ', as the President of the United
Nations General Assembly [O. Aranha of Brazil] once said, ‘is a continuous
sequence of dominations ‘.
There are hints of the theme before
the end of the Middle Ages. France enjoyed a European hegemony after the
collapse of the Empire, and made the papacy during its Avignonese Captivity
(1305-77) to some extent her political
tool. England undertook a great war of aggrandizement in the Hundred Years War
(1337-1453), transforming a feudal dispute about Aquitaine into a struggle to
unite the English and French crowns, first under Edward III and then more
brilliantly and ephemerally under Henry V. But it was among the Italian powers
that feudal relationships first disappeared and the efficient, self-sufficient,
secular state was evolved, and the Italian powers invented the diplomatic
system. The French invasion of Italy in 1494 is the conventional beginning of
modern international history because it dramatically marks the point from which
the European powers at large begin to adopt the habits of Italian power
politics.
Spain, not France, is the earliest
power to dominate the states-system as a whole. When the Habsburg King of Spain
inherited the Austrian dominions and was elected Emperor as Charles V, he
became the greatest power in Europe, and quickly supplanted the French in
Italy. On his abdicating Spain was separated from Austria, but the two branches
of the Habsburg family continued to work together as a dynastic axis, and
occasioned two general wars. The first was fought by Philip II from 1572 to
1598 against a growing coalition of the Dutch (for whom it was their war of
independence), the French and the English. The second raged from 1618 to 1659,
beginning with the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which was an attempt by Austria
to unify Central Europe in the name of the principles of the
Counter-Reformation, and continuing in the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-59.
In the seventeenth century there
were two systems of international relations in Europe, partially independent of
one another. In Western Europe the chief powers were Spain, France, Holland and
England; in the north round the Baltic the chief powers were Sweden, Denmark,
Poland and Russia; and the two systems overlapped in Germany, where Austria was
predominant. Their wars were separate but interlocking, like the European and
Pacific wars which together made up the Second World War. Sweden became the
dominant power in northern Europe when Gustavus Adolphus launched her into the
Thirty Years War, and she lost her ascendancy in the Great Northern War of
1700-21, when Charles XII fought against a coalition led by Russia and
including at one time or another Poland, Saxony, Denmark and Prussia.
While Sweden was the dominant power
in the Baltic, the predominance in Western Europe was passing from Spain to
France, and French ascendancy in its turn caused two general wars. The first
was the war of 1688-1713, in which Louis XIV was defeated by a coalition of
Holland, England and Austria. The second was the war of 1792-1815, by which
time Western and northern Europe had merged into a single system, and
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France fought against Britain, Russia, Austria and
Prussia. Continental predominance passed to Germany with her defeat of France
in 1870-71, and in the twentieth century
Germany in her turn has waged two general wars against coalitions of the
majority of other powers. As a result of the second of these wars continental
predominance passed to Russia.
This sequence provides the
political skeleton of international relations. But to complete the picture we
must notice that on the oceans there has been a different succession of
dominant powers from that on the Continent. Spain alone has had the dominion both
of the land and of the sea, and the vast responsibilities destroyed her. France
inherited the continental ascendancy, but the maritime predominance fell to
Holland. . . .Holland was supplanted in the maritime predominance by England. .
. . Britain's history of predominance, like that of most other dominant powers,
went through two cycles. The first ran from the defeat of Louis XIV to the
American Revolution. It rose to its zenith in the Seven Years War (1756-63),
when Canada and India were conquered, and Britain reached a greater height of
relative power than she ever afterwards attained. But her naval and commercial
supremacy evoked foreign enmity as well as colonial rebellion; and in the War
of American Independence (1775-83) she had to fight a coalition of the United
States, France, Spain and Holland, with Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia and
Austria in a hostile Armed Neutrality to uphold the rights of neutral powers.
Britain was isolated and defeated, and her first empire was shattered. She
recovered her oceanic predominance in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. To
English eyes this was a generous struggle to free Europe from the tyranny of
Napoleon. From the detached standpoint of the American President it
looked different. 'Two nations of overgrown power', wrote Jefferson in 1807, 'are endeavouring to establish, the one an universal dominion by sea, the other
by land'; and it was against the former not the latter that the United States
eventually joined the war. . . .
If we remember that a political
definition describes a pattern to which every historical example only
approximates, we might define a dominant power as a power that can measure
strength against all its rivals combined. Pericles said that the strength of
imperial Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War lay in her possessing
naval forces more numerous and efficient than those of all the rest of Hellas.
Thus Louis XIV took over from Philip II the proud device, Nec Pluribus Impar: a match for many. At the end of the seventeenth
century, just before the War of the Spanish Succession broke out, [quoting
Bolingbroke] ‘France had been constantly in arms, and her arms had been
successful. She had sustained a war, without any confederates, against the
principal powers of Europe confederated against her, and had finished it with
advantage on every side' . . . . Perhaps the most perfect specimens of dominant
power are Britain in the mid eighteenth century, who won her oceanic triumphs
single-handed against the combined navies of France and Spain; and
Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which with no allies of importance
overthrew three military coalitions within fifteen years, before the fourth
brought her to her knees. But ‘however great France may be’, said Pitt in 1802,
‘we had a revenue equal to all Europe, . . . a navy superior to all Europe, and
a commerce as great as that of all Europe, - and he added, laughingly, to make
us quite gentlemen, a debt as large as that of all Europe.' .
. .
But a dominant power must be
described by purpose as well as by power. Each dominant power is engaged in
straightforward aggrandizement, but it generally also appeals to some design of
international unity and solidarity. Henry V dreamed, like most later medieval
conquerors, of leading a reunited Christendom in a last crusade against the
Turks. The House of Habsburg was itself a kind of international organization, a
dynastic confederation of many states (Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Naples,
Milan, Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal), asserting the principles of international
Catholicism. Gustavus Adolphus sought to make himself protector of all
Protestant states. Napoleon carried the benefits of the French Revolution
throughout Europe, and gave a new life to the ancient title of Emperor. So
effective was the Pax Britannica in the nineteenth century that it was easy to
mistake its fragile and temporary nature, and even to compare it with the Roman
Empire, as if it denoted a monopoly of power. Of all the dominant powers, Louis
XIV and Hitler had least to offer mankind, yet Louis was the exemplar of
Catholic monarchism, and Hitler (beside whom the arrogance of Louis XIV shines
as a kingly sense of duty) persuaded many people even outside Germany that his
savage designs would lead, not only to a new order in Europe, but to a
reconstitution of the world on biological principles. Every dominant power
aspires, by giving political unification to the whole of international society,
to become a universal empire.
The coalitions that overthrow the
dominant powers, however, describe their struggle in terms of freedom and
independence. Their policy is the balance of power; their classic appeals are
`the liberties of Europe' and `the freedom of the seas'. They have usually
sought to re-establish these liberties, at the end of a general war, by holding
an international congress and drawing up a general peace treaty, which remains
the legal basis of international politics until the next general war. . . .
Martin Wight, Power
Politics. Edited by Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester University
Press, 1978, pp. 30-37. Photograph courtesy of Wikipedia.
For a long time, it
was extremely difficult to find a copy of Power Politics in the United States, but
Continuum brought out a paperback in 2002, and there are cheap copies available
at Amazon and Abebooks. Wight’s sketch
of the political skeleton of international relations is very Eurocentric, and
as such subject to the reservations
noted by Barry Buzan and Richard Little, but another of Wight’s principal
works, Systems of States, shows a
much broader compass and is an important forerunner to Buzan and Little’s own study
of international systems in world history.
