However internally complex states may be, they face each other as unities armed and ready for both attack and defence. The history of Europe has largely been a story of war.
The reason is that so far no peaceful and prosperous social condition has long survived without the means of defending itself. A Europe of large and small political units has been an arena of wars, and they have generally been inconclusive. No state has long managed to dominate the rest. European history has been plausibly summed up as preparing for war, waging war, or recovering from war. One might have expected Christianity, as a religion of peace, to have modified this history, but its actual influence is perhaps best exemplified in the story told of Clovis, the leader of the West Franks, who conquered Gaul in AD 491 and was converted to Christianity. Listening one day to a sermon about the crucifixion, he could not help rising up in anger and bursting out: ‘That would not have happened if I had been there with my Franks!’ Morality can lead to war, no less than its opposite.
War kills people and destroys property, and rationalists blame it on the passions. Why in that case is the history of a rational species so dismal a tale? Part of the explanation is necessity. Since defeat in war could mean extinction as a people, and since there were always some states that were, or might become, expansionist, warriors were everywhere needed for protection. These warriors had an ethic of honour. Valour in battle was glorious and sacrifice would win, as it seemed, undying glory. In the millennium between the end of Rome in the west and the beginning of the modern world, these aristocratic protectors were to become the problem rather than the solution to the desire for peace. The death and destruction resulting from their feuding was brought to an end by the ascendancy of absolute monarchs, who then themselves became the source of the problem. War was now the pastime of kings; cannons, ran the motto, are the arguments of princes. By marriage and diplomacy, but above all by war, a state could grow to be a power. Over several centuries, the mosaic of small dominions inherited from the Middle Ages was consolidated by these means into the relatively simple political map of the Europe we know today.
War, as Clausewitz put it, is the continuation of policy – that is, politics – by other means. Rulers attack for advantage, and defend to protect the national interest. As in chess, one side or other must win, and even stalemate is merely a precarious equilibrium. To lose this international game may be a desperate thing, as the Poles discovered when the feebleness of their government left them to the partitioning mercies of the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians, and as many states discovered when overrun by Nazi Germany after 1939.
The best explanation of political conflict was given by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651). Hobbes called any situation in which men do not acknowledge a common superior a ‘state of nature’ and his thesis was that a state of nature is always a state of war, in which the life of man would be ‘nasty, poor, solitary, brutish and short’. As he put it in the famous thirteenth chapter: ‘men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where this is no power able to over-awe them all.’ Hobbes suggested three basic reasons for this. We have already mentioned two of them: the scarcity of the things men value (such as well-watered land), and the human passion for glory. The third was something Hobbes called ‘diffidence’ or mistrust of others. The very fear of the future aggression of others might well lead to a policy of pre-emptive strikes, which have a terrifying logic: Alpha fears that Beta will attack, and decides to strike first, but Beta already fears this, and wants to get in even earlier, fearing which Alpha … and so on.
Human beings living in a state of nature, and fearing death, must form a civil association by authorizing some superior power to rule them by law – an outcome Hobbes thought would most commonly come about through conquest. Human beings were impelled to take this course of action by their vulnerability. The situation of states is not essentially different; all that is different is the fact that states can protect themselves, whereas solitary individuals cannot. As Hobbes put it: ‘in all times, kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbours; which is a posture of war.’
We can never quite escape the insecurities of the Hobbesian state of nature, which can be illustrated by the Wild West, or the condition of inner cities, the fear of footsteps when alone in a dark street at night, or (in an image used by Hobbes) by the fact that we lock our doors. And it is a powerful explanatory model because Hobbes had turned the whole question of war and peace upside-down. It had long been common to deplore war and seek its causes, as if it were a pathology to be explained. Hobbes argued that war was the natural relation between humans, and the real question was thus how they could ever achieve a condition of peace.
Broadly speaking, this model explains how European states have generally related to each other. Special circumstances may induce modifications: for example, the dominance of the USA and the USSR during much of the second half of the twentieth century made war between west European states seem unthinkable. In human affairs, however, nothing remains stable for long, and the interesting question is how Europe (by contrast with most other parts of the world) has for centuries been divided into separate and rather hostile states, none of which has long succeeded in subduing the rest.
What one would rather expect is that some conqueror would extend his power until problems of communications and logistics made further conquest unprofitable. This is what Rome did, and, notably, China and it illustrates a powerful logic in human affairs.
The millionaire who, when asked ‘How much money is enough?’ replied ‘Just a bit more’ recognized a central feature of human life. There are positive reasons why power tends to snowball, or why to those that hath it shall be given. Movements grow because everyone seeks to join up with power and success – known as the bandwagon effect. In the internal politics of some states, bandwagons work because after a certain point it becomes dangerous not to have joined. This makes democratic government in such states impossible, for the natural terminus is a single dominant party. But it is the negative reasons for the growth of power which are most striking. They are illustrated by the familiar board game called Monopoly in which the most successful capitalist ends up buying out his bankrupted competitors. This was how Karl Marx imagined capitalism. Similarly, no state is really secure until all of its competitors have been reduced to impotence or clienthood. The logic seems irresistible, but it turns out to be wrong. Why?
In the case of economics, it doesn’t work because the economy is not a zero-sum game. Technology changes, large firms lose their flexibility, new ideas sweep all before them, and any theory of human life as a system with a logic of its own (such as Marxism) must fail. In a modern economy, which is a positive-sum game, everyone gets richer. Some, no doubt, get very much richer than others, but all enjoy cleaner water, more food, better health care, and other benefits. Let us now consider why the logic of Monopoly has so far failed to generate a single imperial power ruling all Western Europe.
The reason lies in the balance of power. Our logic of human endeavour does indeed work in explaining the fact that a succession of potential unifiers of Europe have arisen, but in each case they have been frustrated by the propensity of other European states to unite in frustrating the ambitious hegemon. In the sixteenth century, Habsburg Spain, buoyed up by gold from the New World, bestrode the Continent, but found itself blocked by Valois France. By the late seventeenth century, it was Louis XIV of France who threatened the independence of his neighbours, especially Holland, which was led by the indomitable William III (as he became when in 1689 he was crowned king of England). When in 1700 it seemed as if the Bourbons might control both France and Spain, all Europe united against Louis, and his armies suffered numerous defeats at the hands of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. During the eighteenth century, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were major players in this game. Even tiny Sweden had nearly a century of world-historical significance before the adventures of Charles XII exhausted her resources. After the French Revolution, it was Napoleon whose bid for world power united everyone against him. The history of the twentieth century has been dominated by the policy of blocking the hegemony which Germany’s power and population demanded. Power has thus always found its balance, but the costs have been great. That is why so many Europeans have favoured transposing this whole endeavour into a new key, and creating a unified Europe by agreement rather than conquest.
European unity might at least change a situation in which the ally of one epoch may become the enemy of the next, a fact which illustrates the essential coldness and brutality of much politics. We often construe inter-state relations in terms of the metaphor of friends and foes, but misleadingly. A great power, as many statesmen have said, has no friends, merely interests, and interests change. ‘Blood dries quickly’ remarked Charles de Gaulle, and countries do indeed rapidly forget the enmities of yesteryear. The idea of friendship in international politics is merely sentimental overlay concealing calculations of national interest. But what is national interest?
It is whatever a state judges necessary to its security. Control of the Suez Canal was a British national interest so long as Britain ruled India; not afterwards. A national interest is limited by reality. The Poles would certainly prefer not to have such powerful and difficult neighbours as Germany and Russia, but it is not open to choice. The United States could promulgate a Monroe Doctrine largely declaring the hemisphere out of bounds to European interventions, but its power to do so has not always pleased its neighbours to the south. Thomas Jefferson was deeply suspicious of France just before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, remarking: ‘The day that France takes possession of New Orleans … we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.’ Neighbours are commonly enemies, while neighbours-but-one are allies.
The national interest is a matter of interpretation, but changes of regime seldom greatly change a state’s idea of its national interest. Revolutionary France after 1789 and Bolshevik Russia after 1917 largely continued the foreign policies of their predecessors, but were additionally aggressive. Sometimes the national interest acquires the dignity of a theory to sustain it, as in Cardinal Richelieu’s doctrine that the Alps, Pyrenees, and the Rhine formed the natural frontiers of France. Judgements of national interest require prudence, and some concern for the likely trend of future events. Consider as typical of such reasoning, Winston Churchill reflecting on Britain’s national interest in the early 1920s:
It is argued that we could never endure the possession of the Channel ports by a victorious Germany … We dwelt, however, for centuries when those same Channel ports were in the possession of the greatest European military power, when that power – France – was almost unceasingly hostile to us. It is said that new weapons aggravate the danger. But that depends on who has the best and most powerful weapons. If, in addition to sea supremacy, we had air supremacy, we might maintain ourselves as we did in the days of Napoleon for indefinite periods, even when all the Channel ports and all the Low Countries were in the hands of a vast hostile military power. It should never be admitted in this argument that England cannot, if worse comes to worst, stand alone. I decline to accept as an axiom that our fate is involved in that of France.
The cold logic of politics requires that men and wealth should be sacrificed to protect the national interest. This necessity has always been known. In modern times it generated the idea of reason of state which may require violence, deception, and the breaking of promises. As Hobbes remarked, in war, force and fraud are the cardinal virtues, and he regarded international relations as always potentially a condition of war. Cavour, one of the creators of a united Italy in the nineteenth century, is reported as remarking: ‘What scoundrels we would be if we had done for ourselves what we have done for our country.’
Yet in more recent times reason of state has been remembered largely for its failures, because these failures reinforce the case for the international morality which has grown up as a countervailing movement to the untrammelled power of national sovereignty. When Napoleon sent troops across the border into Baden to capture and shoot the duc d’Enghien, an act which shocked the whole of Europe, Talleyrand remarked. ‘It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.’ And the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg is denigrated for his remark at the start of the First World War that the 1839 treaty guaranteeing the integrity of Belgium (which Germany had just violated) was only ‘a scrap of paper’.
The movement to turn the society of European states into an international moral order derives from the medieval idea of Christendom, which in turn owed much to the Romans and the philosophy of natural law. The Romans had a law covering relations between peoples (the ius gentium), while philosophers had followed the Stoics in exploring the rational precepts of a law of nature which applied to all human beings. War within the common culture of Christendom acquired usages and conventions which in some small degree mitigated its ferocity: heralds, ambassadors, signs of truce, and conventions for the treatment of prisoners of war and the immunity of civilians, including, more recently, the immunities of the Red Cross. Some rationalists of the eighteenth century were self-conscious cosmopolitans who detached themselves from loyalty to their state, and some dreamed of a universal republic that would bring peace to the world. Not all philosophers shared the dream. Hegel, for example, while not defending war, observed that it was the nursery of the heroic virtues.
The study of international relations is riven by a conflict between realists, who take the national interest as their guide, and idealists, who focus on the emergence of an international order. The idealist case has a broad popular appeal. It takes the view that if war ever was a rational way to settle conflicts, it ceased to be so with the emergence of weapons of mass destruction. Another powerful argument is that irresistible developments, especially in trade, have made countries so interdependent that the sovereignty of national states is an illusion. An application of this argument is that environmental policies for the planet require international action. The process of globalization has certainly incorporated all of mankind within an international system of states, including the world-wide currency of human rights, particularly the rights of women, which are especially disruptive in traditional societies. Some non-Western societies reject the attempt to impose such rights as a form of Western cultural imperialism. A global economy is certainly emerging, but equally certainly there is no emergence of a dominant global morality.
The moral thrust of internationalism is to identify the national interest with selfishness. Conformity to international treaties and the implementation of rights is, by contrast, seen as virtuous. The reader will already have realized, however, that nothing in politics is purely moral, or indeed purely economic, spiritual, or anything else. What is economically efficient may be spiritually destructive, and what is universally moral may be fatal to a specific culture. It is not even as if the movement for international virtue can claim to be entirely independent of particular interests. International morality certainly suits some nations more than others, and a prosperous bureaucracy of civil servants with clients among the pressure-groups of Western countries benefits from its extension.
Realists claim that national interest remains, and indeed ought to remain, the lodestar of international relations. They have seen a whole succession of monocausal theories of the causes of war (baronial arrogance, dynastic ambition, nationalism, or fanaticism) refuted by the facts. Their concern is that utopian aspirations towards a new peaceful world order will simply absolutize conflicts and make them more intractable. National interests are in some degree negotiable; rights, in principle, are not. International organizations such as the United Nations have not been conspicuously successful in bringing peace, and it is likely that the states of the world would become extremely nervous of any move to give the UN the overwhelming power needed to do this. International relations is thus one area which conspicuously demonstrates that all political solutions tend to create new political problems.