Scope, approach and content
Émile Dupuis was apparently indignant. In the midst of the First World War, the French painter had begun to create several series of postcards as contributions to his home country’s war propaganda. While the first and the second series – released in 1915 – portrayed Entente soldiers at the front and the ‘heroic women’ of France and its allies respectively, he now turned his pen to the neutral states, this mass of countries that had abstained (and continued to abstain) from the war on widely differing grounds. Scandinavia in particular got into his focus. In one of the paintings, Norway and Denmark are depicted as raftsmen in traditional Nordic costume transporting driftwood towards the sea, the caption bitterly stating ‘Ils flottent dans tous les sens’ (They float in every direction). Driftwood is actually an obvious and established metaphor with regard to the north of Europe, partly derived from the widespread timber industry in Norway, Sweden, and Finland.1 Dupuis, however, turns the driftwood into something distinctly negative, with the raftsmen appearing as an almost allegoric concretion of small-state opportunism and spinelessness. In Dupuis’s variations on the neutrals of Europe, Sweden – the largest of the Nordic countries – is even hit harder. A bizarre-looking, smallish figure, clearly a shopkeeper dressed in the Swedish national colours blue and yellow, counts and registers barrels at a beach. The barrels are filled with, as it says, grasse neutre (neutral fat) and huile neutre (neutral oil), both elementary goods for the war effort of any belligerent. From some of the barrels, most of the content is leaking as a constant stream into the nearby sea. The metaphoric language here appears more complex, referring to the water – the Baltic Sea – as the regularly frequented waterway through which Sweden would allegedly supply the German Empire with essential goods, even war contraband, for its war effort against the Entente. Il y a bien quelques fuites (There are certainly some leakages), the caption reads with caustic sarcasm.2
Dupuis’s postcards, one example out of many more, lead directly to the very subject of this book. It revisits a classic problem in the history of international politics – the relationship between great powers and small states in times of war. Its primary interest rests with the small neutral countries of Scandinavia – or to be precise: of Northern Europe – in the context of the First World War, and their complex, ambivalent, often difficult relations with the war’s major belligerents. The title of the book is reminiscent of Patrick Salmon’s much more comprehensive and still unsurpassed study Scandinavia and the Great Powers, 1890-1940, published in 1997.3 Salmon’s pioneering work, the first full-scale and truly international history of the region in the first half of the twentieth century, has visibly had a bearing on my own approach. As Salmon’s broader scope, this book’s intention is to situate the Scandinavian war experience in a larger historical setting, somewhat de-nationalizing the history of Northern Europe by re-internationalizing it.4 That this is even today called for is due to the peculiar re-nationalization of the Nordic research landscape in the course of the twentieth century. Just as the broader colonial past of, for instance, Denmark or Sweden was successfully ‘de-globalized’ and hence virtually disappeared from the dominant historical narrative, the historical relationships of the region to the surrounding powers are often and almost pathologically read through the prism of national historiography.5 In the field of international history, the analysis of Scandinavia’s situation and position in European politics and the international system hence lacks both comparison and context.
Despite being indebted to Salmon’s approach, this book differs in more than just its chronological dimension. It is not – and does not strive to be – a broad historical synthesis, a comprehensive overview of Scandinavian history in the ‘Age of the World Wars’.6 Rather, the book collects explorative essays on a variety of problems related to or representing the Scandinavian experience of the First World War. This entails the obvious disadvantages every incomplete story has, above all the absence of an integrated narrative and hence of an overarching dramaturgical development. However, the format chosen here also allows for more flexibility and a more pointed approach in dealing with episodes that, taken together, characterize Northern Europe’s position in as well as on the war. The individual, though strongly linked, essays thereby probe into particular themes, problems, and developments in the region’s relationships to the great powers with greater depth than an overarching narrative would be able to do so. In various ways, these explorations as well deal with what might be termed as lost causes of Nordic history, aspects of Scandinavian and Finnish history as well as the history of the First World War that were publicly ‘unremembered’ or, in particular cases, swallowed by the predominant historiographical tides of the century in-between.7
From its onset, two levels of relations determined the Scandinavian experience of the First World War: firstly, there were the complex, often differing relations the Scandinavian countries had to the great powers of Europe, particularly to those who made their imperial presence felt in the region, Britain, Germany, and Russia. Secondly, the external dimension went along with the relations of the Scandinavian states to one another and to organizational and political questions within the region. If one had looked at Northern Europe a century ago, one would have not found the largely integrated, highly developed, and smoothly connected space of ‘Norden’, the progressive realm of the post-Second World War Nordic countries, but rather a region of relative political turmoil, drastic economic change, and social upheaval. The First World War changed this, or at least led to the gradual transformation of Northern Europe. One of its most prominent results was that the states of Scandinavia learned how to speak to one another again while learning to speak to the outside world with one voice – and if not with one voice, then at least as a comparatively harmonious choir.
This principally historical approach as well explains the basic terminology employed here, beginning with conceptions of the area as a historical region (or space), a ‘Geschichtsregion’. The history of areas/regions and especially that of Scandinavia precedes the celebrated spatial turn in the humanities and the social and cultural sciences. The need fo r paying greater analytical attention to the spatial dimension of history, however, has not only highlighted, but also altered our approach to historical regions, not least to Scandinavia or rather the European North among a host of alternative concepts for the area.8 The actual function of a topologically broader concept of the region is heuristic and less fixed than allegedly objective geographical parameters might indicate.9 Instead, approaching Northern Europe both as a whole and with a view of its particular entities and their relations to the major belligerents of the First World War allows for a broader analytical scope than individual studies of the particular bilateralisms, foreign policies, and strategies would. The latter, in any case, have a rather natural function in a study conceived from an international historian’s vantage point. They, however, only make for half of the substance dealt with here. Approaching Northern Europe, as well as a historical region, expands the range and perspective of the subsequent studies, all the more as the conception of what it meant to be ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Nordic’ drastically changed in the subsequent decades.
Despite the fact that Scandinavia and Northern Europe are often used interchangeably, the difference between the two spatial concepts is marked and has, as with most regional conceptions, traditionally been fluid. Scandinavia as a term, at least after Norway’s separation from Sweden in 1905, has conventionally been limited to the three Scandinavian kingdoms Sweden (before 1809 as well including Finland), Norway, and Denmark (and – occasionally – Denmark’s imperial overseas territories Iceland and the Faroe Islands, less Greenland).10 In contrast, Northern Europe has always had a less defined use as a spatial and political term. In almost all cases, it forms the broader, non-territorialized, and meso-regional conceptual alternative to Scandinavia, additionally including at least Finland, partly as well the Baltic region as a whole.11 Considering its variability, the adequate term for the region covered in this book would apparently be rather Northern Europe, or the actual Scandinavian term ‘Norden’.12 Against this backdrop, I have opted for a pragmatic approach, largely in line with the priorities and emphases of this book. Its overall scope, in any case, does not encompass the whole region and not each of its components in the way in which it would have most certainly been appropriate, if the book would have aimed at an integrated narrative of the Scandinavian war experience. There are, for instance, no systematic studies discussing the war experiences of Norway and Iceland, although Norway at least is prominently reflected in both the introductory essay and the comparative historical studies. Rather pragmatically therefore, I use the term ‘Scandinavia’ – with the apparent exception of the book’s title – for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. If including Finland and the imperial borderlands of the Russian Empire, the broader concept Northern Europe is employed. Nordic – as in Nordic countries – is a later term, which only gradually emerged after the First World War against the backdrop of the closer integration of the region. It is hence only used where analytically relevant.
Dealing with an entire historical region such as Northern Europe unavoidably and often fruitfully forces one into comparison. A considerable number of the studies brought together in this book are therefore based on historical comparison as a method, sometimes explicitly, more frequently implicitly. The aim here is a comparative history of international relations, which – for all intents and purposes – forms a rather established methodological approach in this sub-discipline. In general, my approach to comparative history is based neither in generalizing comparisons nor in the comparison of European societies called for by Marc Bloch.13 Instead, the studies employ a combination of what Charles Tilly describes as ‘individualizing’ and ‘encompassing’ comparisons.14 Bloch attempts to identify the special characteristics of two or fewer cases, while Tilly is interested in parts of a larger whole such as the colonies of an empire or, as with the case studies developed here, in hegemonial zones of influence and behaviour within more comprehensive inter-state constellations. Taken together, the studies collected in this book revolve around the subsequent topics and perspectives:
• The foreign policy strategies and concrete diplomatic practice of the great power belligerents of the First World War – especially Britain, Germany, and Russia – with regard to Northern Europe.
• The handling of various practices of neutrality in relations between the belligerent great powers and the neutral small states of the region. This also involves comparatively dealing with existing perceptions and interpretations of international law, in particular the laws regulating neutrality.
• The perception of and the responses to the war in Northern Europe, both in terms of political behaviour and potential alliance formation. Here, it will become obvious that the question of whether primacy rests with foreign or domestic policy is only adequately resolved by means of an integrated approach that sees foreign policy-making as closely linked to the domestic conditions of politics.15 This approach is not limited to the elites in government and politics, but also encompasses intellectuals and the twin questions of intellectual mobilization and (war) propaganda in Scandinavia and beyond.
The book is built around five analytical chapters, intellectually framed by an introductory, contextualizing, and largely comparative essay, which attempts to map the place of the Scandinavian states and the region as a whole in the great power politics and war strategy of the First World War. The book’s individual chapters mostly form separate entities, each exploring a different subject and often as well advancing a different thesis. Despite their intellectual autonomy, the chapters have a number of overarching issues in common, lending the book as a whole a consistent conceptual framework, it is to be hoped. As indicated above, the book’s main structuring element is derived from dealing with the intricate web of relationships between the European major powers – in particular Germany, Britain, and Russia – and the countries of Northern Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, mostly concentrated on the years of and around the First World War. Consequently, the bulk of the studies deals with aspects of foreign policy and strategy, with decision-making processes and diplomacy against the backdrop of a volatile, effectively collapsed international system. In line with that, a second focus touches on systemic aspects and specific forms of expansionist, hegemonic, and imperial policy during the First World War and is closely linked to issues of international law and, not least, small-state neutrality and security policy.16 Beyond the system-specific aspects of international history, the present studies also focus on analysing diplomacy and diplomats (in the broadest sense), not only in their core function as representatives of foreign policy but also with regard to social backgrounds and ‘personality networks’, self-images, and professional identities, related to the emergent research field of a new diplomatic history.17 Through the analysis of activities, behaviour, and patterns of perception in diplomacy and international relations, politics, and culture, some of the chapters can also be read as explorations in cultural and transnational history, indebted to a culturally sensitized history of international relations and to what has been labelled as ‘new political history’.18 This emphasis brings with it a number of patent deficiencies, most prominently the at best sporadic engagement with the economic dimension of neutrality, with economic diplomacy as a whole, only too well reflected in both the archives and the existing literature.19 I will return to this at the end of the Introduction.
Concretely, the book’s chapters follow differing paths and approaches to one or more of the problems developed above:
The second chapter – Comparing neutralities – provides both an overview and a discussion of the different neutral policies and practices of the Scandinavian states during the First World War. In broad strokes, this introduction attempts to outline the situation Norway, Denmark, and Sweden found themselves in at the onset of the war. It examines their responses to the great power politics and pressure in the course of the conflict, their traditions, and changing conceptions of neutrality and security politics in an increasingly insecure international environment. In turn, the Scandinavian responses are related to the politics of the great powers in the region, especially those of Britain and Germany. What emerges, it is to be hoped, is a comparative historical panorama of Northern Europe’s complex situation within the international arena.
The third chapter – Royal diplomacy – builds on its predecessor insofar as the scope is shifted from the position of the region in international politics to the region itself. The role of monarchical relations and the mechanisms of royal diplomacy among the Scandinavian states are used in order to illustrate the profound changes the pressures of war brought about, both in terms of the formulation and practice(s) of Scandinavia’s neutrality and with regard to self-conceptions and policy initiatives of the region’s political elites. Here, the royal diplomats and the rather minute reconstruction of their diplomatic engagements function as an exploratory probe into shifting senses of belonging, into the foundational layer out of which a broader collective narrative was formed in the course of the subsequent century. While economic diplomacy undoubtedly structured the everyday practice of neutrality, it is the cultural and symbol-political umbrella that attempts to instil a mundane practice with meaning.
The fourth chapter – Activism – examines a different type of activism that one would expect in the twentieth century’s retrospect of the region. It engages not with the origins of humanitarian and internationalist activism typical for the Nordic states in the subsequent decades, but with residue of the nineteenth century and its potent consequences thereafter. Effectively, the chapter forms a case study of a rather unfashionable subject, the Swedish nationalist conservative forces and their agitation for war and imperial expansion in an increasingly post-imperial political landscape. Similar mobilizations are to be found in the Danish case, primarily over the Schleswig problem post-1864 and then – reawakened – in the period from 1918 to 1920. For Sweden, the more complex case, however, is the one of Finnish nationalist activism, which at one point – and especially with regard to Åland – directly collided with the expansionist agenda of the Swedish right around the royal court and in the country’s political life. While the Danish mobilization around the Schleswig issue is touched upon in the chapter on Georg Brandes’s war, I have opted to link the case of Swedish Activism with the Stockholm- and Berlin-based Finnish nationalist agitation – a subject later on revisited in the chapter on Finnish nation- and state-building efforts in and around the First World War.
The subsequent fifth chapter – Intellectuals and war in Scandinavia and beyond – bears as well the character of a seemingly specific case study, a biographical exploration of one of Scandinavia’s most prominent public intellectual since the late nineteenth century, the cosmopolitan and internationally renowned Dane Georg Brandes. Despite highlighting Brandes’s singularity and unique position within the continent’s modernist intelligentsia, an examination of his war experience and behaviour as well bears more general, indeed representative features.20 In equal measure, his predicament mirrors the predicament of the intellectual in war generally and, even more, of the neutral in a conflict driven by moral recrimination and nationalist mobilization. Just as the book’s central approach re-situates the small states of Northern Europe in the broader arena of the international system, Brandes is contextually connected to his milieu, the pre-war international entente of critical modernist intellectuals that for long fatally assumed that art – and especially their art – transcended national divisions and war.
The sixth chapter – State and revolution in Finland, empire and revolution in Russia – broadens the book’s scope significantly by engaging with the emergence of the fourth member of the evolving Nordic context, Finland. Contrary to the protracted and – most importantly – negotiated Norwegian independence process, the emerging Finnish nation-state capitalized on the gradual implosion and eventual demise of the Russian Empire. While this outcome is usually regarded as an almost natural consequence of a long evolutionary drive towards Finnish independence, this chapter’s intellectual premise inverts the core argument. Counter-intuitively, I ask what actually bound the Finns and even those in moderate nationalist circles for such a long time to the tsar’s empire. The chapter therefore deliberately avoids reading a nation-building process from its end, but rather attempts to historicize and contextualize the process against the backdrop of Russian imperial developments in the First World War. Finland is thereby seen as what it actually was until 1917, a component of a much larger imperial framework.
The final seventh chapter – Arguing Åland – refers back to the overarching theme of the book, the dynamic of relations between hegemonial great powers and small states within a given international system. What then, I inquire, happens if (and indeed when) a system of hegemonial rule implodes and is replaced by a new international order resting on decidedly anti-imperialist principles? My primary interest in this context relates to the question of the practice and transformation of international politics and law in the final stages of the First World War and its immediate aftermath. This process is illustrated by tracking the basic developments of the Åland problem from about 1917 to its lasting resolution by the League of Nations in 1921. Through the example of the Åland Islands dispute, one can vividly reconstruct the shifting dynamic in the international system: from, firstly, a great power dominated international system with rather fixed legalist conceptions and practices through, secondly, the existential negation of law against the backdrop of the First World War and its immediate aftermath to, finally, the progressivist attempt to establish an internationalist world order, whose model case the settlement of the Åland problem became. Historicizing the Åland dispute furthermore allows for a few necessary relativizations, most pointedly the observation that small states, even those of today’s pacified Nordic region, have historically been just as capable of belligerence and conflict as great powers. They have usually only lacked the capacities to ventilate that disposition in a comparably explicit fashion.21 Secondly, the chapter corroborates the argument of a continuity of great power influence, even within a programmatically internationalist framework such as the League of Nations. In keeping with the book’s structuring theme, the analysis of the Åland problem in a radically changing international environment links a seemingly bilateral issue to a far broader historical dynamic, thereby situating the conflictious origins of the common Nordic space in their equally conflictious international context.
Problem and key terms: What makes a certain power great and a particular state small? And what actually is neutrality?
The core problem, of course, is the question of how great and potentially hegemonic powers relate to small states and their conceptions and practices of neutrality. For that, one would have to trace both the problem and the debate on the key analytical terms of this book, great power and small state. Though strongly influenced by the relevant discussions in politics and particularly in the field of international relations, my own approach is primarily both pragmatic and historical. What then makes, in a historicizing perspective, a great power great and a small state small?
Often quoted and one of the earlier succinct contributions on the question, the problem was taken up by Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue of his History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides’s dramatization discusses the siege and ruthless conquest of Melos by Athens, which at that time emerged as a great power in the Aegean Sea. The dialogue itself revolves around the negotiations in 416 BC between Athenian emissaries and the Melians, who refuse to voluntarily surrender their island and their sovereignty as a neutral small state in the great hegemonic war between Athens and Sparta. In the form of a dialogue, Thucydides presents the core arguments of each position: justice as well as rights, including the right of a neutral state to integrity and the right of the strong to enforce their interests; concepts of ethical action, epitomized by the opposing notions of honour and shame; the feasibility and consequences of certain decisions and – in conjunction with this – their advantages or disadvantages for the parties concerned. The position of steadfast refusal adopted by the Melians, which results in the end of negotiations and the siege of Melos, causes consternation among the Athenian emissaries. Above all, the Athenians cannot understand such lack of pragmatism, such unrealistic and thus unreasonable behaviour that carelessly disregards the circumstances at hand. The refusal of the Melians to bow to Athens results in the siege and eventual defeat of the island by the much superior Athenian forces, the fall of Melos, and, on orders from Athens, its total destruction: the Athenians ‘put to death all they found within the place able to bear arms, and made the women and children slaves. The town they afterwards re-peopled by sending thither a colony of five hundred.’22
The key question about the interpretation and historical reception of this passage, that is whether Thucydides really was, as Jacob Burckhardt wrote, concerned with ‘the philosophy that might makes right’ or – as opponents of the realistic school have argued – with an implicit disassociation from imperial hegemonic ambitions, can be disregarded here.23 It is only important to note that important research parameters for the reception of Thucydides have shifted drastically in recent decades in analyses of international politics. With regard to the neutral powers in the First World War, Johan den Hertog and Samuël Kruizinga have rightly concluded that the originally dominant classical realism – and with it the distorted image of small states in the international system – has become outdated.24 In recent interpretations, the behaviour of mostly neutral small states appears far less passive and, on the whole, much more complex in comparison with the way it has been reflected in realistic presentations of the international system.25 The analysis of levels above and below the state in the international and transnational network of influences and conditions has contributed to this development, as has the successive decline in the state as a category of analysis in the history of international relations.26 The state and the relations it maintains nevertheless remain a key point of reference in the present studies. As regards Thucydides, his key function in the history of international relations is relevant only to a certain extent here. Of much greater relevance is the fact that his description of the conflict between Melos and Athens, which was written as early as around 400 BC, encompasses the entire set of relations between great, frequently hegemonic, or potentially hegemonic powers and smaller states, the alleged ‘weak states’ in the international system.27 In light of this, Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue forms the obvious basis for a further examination of the relations between great powers and small states as reflected in the general approach of this book.
In the wake of Thucydides, more systematic attempts at defining the two categories have been made for in the field of international relations, often based on allegedly objective categories. These usually fail, however, because ‘historical reality’ turns out to be too complex to lend itself to easy abstract categorizat ion.28 Stalin’s mocking question to the French foreign minister Pierre Laval in May 1935, ‘Oho! … The Pope? How many divisions does he have?’, shows not only the political instincts of a totalitarian dictator.29 In its polemic oversimplification, the question in fact disqualifies itself, as the influence of the Vatican in the international system has always been impossible to effectively measure and has only declined in the twentieth century. The definition of a small state is thus for historians based only to a limited extent on quantifiable parameters and criteria such as population, geography, and gross domestic product. It is also based on categories that Churchill, in the same context, described as those legions that were not always visible on parade.30 The same undoubtedly applies to the great powers in international politics. These are characterized not only in terms of allegedly hard factors such as demography, geography, resources, armaments, and industry but also with regard to questions of system structures, traditions, ideology, and mentality. This is not meant to suggest that international history, in particular with regard to the position of small states in the international network of relations, is conceivable without the ‘material foundations of foreign policy’. In light of these requirements, Magnus Brechtken has developed a convincing analytical grid, by means of which the above-mentioned factors and parameters can be interpreted as indications of the ‘power projection ability’ of great powers around 1900.31 In ‘Scandinavia and the Great Powers’, Salmon examined for the same period the constraints and opportunities in Nordic politics primarily on the basis of economic developments that illustrate not least the actual and potential dependency of Scandinavian markets on European great powers. Like Brechtken, he connects this part of his analysis with sociological aspects and aspects of the history of mentalities, above all in relation to the special character and the behaviour of elites in small northern European societies since the late nineteenth century.32
A working definition of small states and great powers from a historical perspective can be based on the extensive body of literature that is available on the subject. For the most part, the definitions of small state and great power refer to one another. In some cases, the term ‘middle power’ is also used. In the tradition of Ranke, it was for a long time assumed that great powers are able to assert themselves in the international system, primarily by military terms, without relying on coalitions or alliances. If, as Ranke himself postulated in ‘The Great Powers’ with regard to the establishment of Prussia as a great power, ‘one could establish as a definition of a great power that it must be able to maintain itself against all others, even when they are united, then Frederick has raised Prussia to that position. For the first time since the days of the Saxon emperors and Henry the Lion, a self-sufficient power was found in northern Germany, needing no alliance, dependent only on itself.’33 That ‘degree of independence’ which, as Ranke puts it elsewhere, ‘gives a state its position in the world’ was for a long time the true criterion for defining a great power.34 While Ranke’s conceptual amalgamation of power and state, in fact an ‘idealization of the state on the basis of a spiritualization of power’, appears to have been broken apart since the later period of historicism in the 1950s – in particular since Ludwig Dehio and Gerhard Ritter – his definition of the term ‘great power’, which is based exclusively on the military resources of a state, continues to influence historical research on international relationships even today.35 A. J. P. Taylor’s typically trenchant view may illustrate this point: ‘The test of a great power … is the test of strength for war.’36 Ranke’s prominent albeit not very specific criterion of self-assertion is still present – quite justifiably – in the second half of the last century, for example in the work of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle.37
Military capacity, however, represents only one – albeit undoubtedly the key – criterion that determines the location and often the existence of power in the international system. In his ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’, Paul Kennedy convincingly linked this idea with an analysis of the economic and political development of great powers.38 In addition, even older literature has pointed out that, besides security, an ability to project power at least at the continental if not at the global level must be guaranteed if a state is to qualify as a great power. The extent of this ability to project power obviously also depends on the different historical constellations of international politics. Once again, this phenomenon is aptly described by Taylor in his ‘The Struggle for Mastery in Europe’ when he writes about Austria-Hungary: ‘Only the Austrian Empire had no concerns outside Europe: this was a sign of weakness, not a source of strength.’39 For a long time, the military potential of a state was also considered a vehicle of this outward projection of power. In more recent research on international relations, however, the emphasis has shifted to more abstract ideas, at the core of which – as suggested by Robert O. Keohane and Michael Handel – lies the influence of a state on the international system. In this connection, Keohane has spoken of ‘system-determining’ states, a term that is by no means limited to military implications.40 Instead, he uses an approach established in international congress diplomacy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is a comparatively rigid subdivision into great powers on the one hand and medium and small states on the other. This differentiation in the international system is reflected in the order established by the Congress of Vienna and can also be seen in the context of the Treaty of Versailles. With the term ‘Principal Allied and Associated Powers’, the victorious powers of the First World War, more commonly referred to as the ‘Big Four’ (or ‘Big Three’), transferred one of the core mechanisms of the old Concert of Europe to the new world order created at Versailles.41 The Council of Four, made up of the Entente Powers, essentially anticipated the permanent membership of the great powers in the Security Council of the United Nations.42 Although it cannot be reduced to the veto power of the permanent members, we can discern a component of the term ‘great power’ which goes beyond the criterion of military power and has persisted since the Congress of Vienna.43 Iver B. Neumann and Sieglinde Gstöhl have pointed out that this process involved the institutionalization – also in terms of international law – of the previously de facto category of ‘great power’:
From this activity, documents with legal force evolved, and since they were underwritten by these five powers and not by others, the category of ‘great power’ became a legal category. It has ever since cohabited uneasily with the principle of the sovereign equality of states. From a legal point of view, all sovereign states, great or small, are equal before the law. From a political stance, however, they are far from being equal.44
E. H. Carr expressed this more bluntly decades earlier when, in his classic work ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis’, he spoke of the ‘alleged dictatorship of the Great Powers’ as a ‘law of nature in international politics’.45
All in all, the term ‘great power’ thus entails more than the hard factors of power, population, and space, which are purported to be objectively identifiable. Without these ‘material foundations of the ability to project power’, however, a great power is obviously inconceivable.46 The contemporary observer understood this in a similar fashion – and at the same time with greater intensity, almost with an obsession. After all, discourse on great powers before 1914 (and ever since) was conducted by an increasingly global public and revolved around questions concerning the economic, industrial, technical, and, not least, demographic potency of aspiring powers.47 It is the geopolitically based, almost excessive discourse on world empire of the late imperialist period, though, that forces us to appreciate factors such as tradition and ideology, self-attribution and attribution by others, culture and practice, perceptual patterns, and mentality, if we would like to arrive at a balanced understanding of the international system and politics of the period.48 This applies to great powers and small states alike. As regards the latter concept, however, a fundamental question arises which the term ‘great power’ does not really pose: the question of the heuristic value of this term.
Both terms involve the problem of differentiating what is described from what comes above and below it, that is the issue of distinguishing a great power from a medium power or a regional power on the one hand and a super power – a term from the Cold War – on the other.49 Despite its chequered conceptual history, the term ‘great power’ has, in any case, essentially held its ground in political reality and in research – and this justifiably so because it appears, particularly in the ‘Concert’ diplomacy of the nineteenth century, both constitutive and programmatic to the international system. After 1918, its definition and conceptual application becomes somewhat frayed at the edges but it does not seem to have lost its analytical strength. Without a doubt, small states can easily be (and in fact long have been) defined by what they are not: states which in certain historical constellations of the international system were not great powers would thus have to be subsumed under the term ‘small state’, or something similar.50 In this context, a central criterion in this classification – at least for realist thinkers of the Morgenthau school – would be the apparent lack of resources, most notably in military terms but also with reference to demographic and economic/industrial resources.51 This, however, appears to be a rather conventional attempt at defining something by what it is not, which is somewhat unsatisfactory particularly for historians of small states. There is also the fact that in a number of historical cases and constellations, the nature of small states – in contrast to the frequently more comprehensive nature of great powers – is not an absolute quality but instead can have many different aspects.52 As suggested above, this can be illustrated most emphatically by the example of the Vatican. Measured on the basis of hard factors, its status in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries must have been that of an obviously weak and small state, or rather a mini- or micro-state. In the field of international politics and diplomacy, however, the Vatican’s status remained, even in the era of the two world wars and beyond, that of a relative great power.53 The same could be said in the Northern European context about Sweden, above all, and subsequently about Norway as well. After the 1905 dissolution of the union, Sweden lost all its residual claims to great power status and, after the First World War, successfully reinvented itself as a kind of ‘humanitarian super power’, particularly in terms of its own identity.54
Against this background, the realist notion of quantifying the power of a small state exclusively by structural determinants seems questionable, all the more for historians of the international system. ‘Small states’, this is evident, ‘are not just “mini versions” of great powers but may pursue different goals and policies worth studying’.55 Instead of insisting, in a traditionally realistic manner, on their admittedly minimal abilities to project power, Neumann and Gstöhl propose – in contrast to most historians before them – that small states should be analysed far more and in greater depth from the perspective of institutions and relationships. The resulting shift in emphasis suggests a departure from the discourse on small states in the international system, a tendency away from an older emphasis on the alleged deficits and insufficiency of the small state. Instead, the small state would have to be seen in its own right and through its own criteria and characteristics, not through the established great power lens.56 At its heart, this book attempts to translate such an historicizing approach into the concrete realm of small state relations to great powers.
Such an approach clearly does not deny the structural conditions of small-state existence. It rather helps us understand small states as players in the international system whose scope of action is limited but not exclusively determined by the generally greater and often existential threats they face. In this context, the security – or insecurity – felt by a small state depends on the immediate set of conditions in which it finds itself and varies from case to case, as is, for instance, distinctly illustrated by the differing security political orientations of the Northern European states in both world wars.57 The studies included here also illustrate that the freedom of action of small states could be extended by means of skilful diplomacy and coalition building policies among each other and even vis-à-vis great and hegemonial powers. In this context, the capacity to mobilize support in the system in order to secure one’s own existence continues to be one of the cardinal virtues of the small state.58 Usually, however, this virtue does not make the small state more reactive or defensive, in general not even more peaceful than the allegedly expansionist great power. As Robert Purnell argues, ‘small states, in short, are great powers writ small. They behave as much like great powers as they can. … Any distinctiveness in small state behaviour arises not from any qualitative difference between small states and others but from the limitations their smallness places upon their capacity to implement significant decisions in foreign policy.’59 Earlier and in a much more pointed manner, this thought is also found in William E. Rappard, who wrote the following as early as 1934: ‘If Small States are on the whole internationally less sinful than Great Powers, it is not because they are more saintly but because they are less apt to be successful sinners.’60 Paraphrasing Rappard, this book’s actual interest and its overarching intellectual framework is to explore, contextualize, and compare those real and potential ‘sinners’ in international politics and diplomacy in the First World War.
Besides the problem of defining power in international relations and deriving from that what smallness actually means, there is another underlying theme around which some of the subsequent chapters are built: neutrality and the neutral small state in international politics. In the last decade or two, neutrality as a subject of historiography has become rather topical again, not least due to the efforts of international legal historians like Stephen C. Neff or Martti Koskenniemi and of historians of international relations such as Maartje Abbenhuis, Johan den Hertog, or Samuël Kruizinga.61 The historiography on neutrality and neutrals has been significantly furthered by the rehabilitation of the neutral as an actor. Instead of the older assumption of neutrality declining – in the words of Nils Ørvik – in the Age of the World Wars, more recent research has reinstated the non-belligerent absentee in international politics, all the more with regard to the belligerent twentieth century.62 Abbenhuis, the chief proponent of the ‘neutral as agent’ thesis, even goes as far as to suppose that the First World War would have to be redefined with respect to the function neutrality had in influencing, indeed even in argumentatively structuring the conflict. The traditional narrative, centred on the idea of the First World War as a great power struggle for hegemony, would fail to acknowledge that. Her interpretation of the twentieth century as the heyday of neutrality – an ‘Age of Neutrals’ – thereby expands beyond the Hague Peace Conferences to the First World War.63 One does not necessarily have to follow Abbenhuis to the more pointed ends of her otherwise convincing interpretation. Kruizinga, for a start and with a stronger foreign policy emphasis, has recently accentuated the enormous dependence of the small neutral on great power decisions in the First World War.
Essentially therefore, the studies included here are explorations in foreign policy research in a historical perspective that do not deny their connection to a tentatively modernizing history of diplomacy and international politics. What holds true for Paul Schroeder’s remarks about the expected benefit of a genuine history of international relations can, without a doubt, precede the various studies of this book: at heart, it is imperative to understand and practise international history as international history and not as a side or a by-product of something else. The targeted study of the history of the international system and its constituents should not have an exclusively auxiliary function; it should instead be practised for its own sake. There is no doubt that such a perspective has its limitations, but it also has a function and an epistemological value, which other methodological approaches do not have in this form or to this degree. Schroeder uses metaphor to make light of a common – and often justified – criticism of the diplomatic historian and supplements it by pointing ironically to the limitations of other schools and traditions:
I do not doubt that traditional diplomatic history often misses the forest for the trees. I am also convinced, however, that Marxists usually miss the forest for the roots; that Annalistes, if they pay any attention to international politics at all, miss the forest for the total global landscape; and that the Gesellschaftsgeschichtler miss the forest for the lumber industry.64
As Schroeder’s statement dates to the mid-1990s and thereby predates the all-encompassing presence of cultural history even in the field of international history, one could also add the cultural historian missing the forest for the bark beetle.