The Long Nineteenth Century
The Concert of Europe holds for a generation. Nationalism, the principle Napoleon scattered, slowly unifies Italy and Germany into Great Powers. The Westphalian state, now democratic in form, reaches its apex of legitimacy and reach. Imperialism extends the model to most of the planet.
Part of Farewell To Westphalia
15 moments in this segment.
- — The Congress of Vienna. Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 'Congress of Vienna' (1819), engraving of the negotiating chamber. Place: Vienna, Habsburg Empire Figures: Klemens von Metternich, host · Talleyrand, French · Castlereagh, British · Hardenberg, Prussian · Alexander I of Russia The Concert of Europe Twenty-two years of revolutionary and Napoleonic war end at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, nine days after the Final Act is signed at Vienna. The Great Powers (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and a re-admitted France) have spent the previous nine months in Habsburg ballrooms redrawing the European map. Metternich's project: a balance of power maintained by periodic congresses (Aix-la-Chapelle 1818, Troppau 1820, Verona 1822), sovereign legitimacy as monarchical right, the principle of intervention to suppress revolutionary movements that threaten the system itself. It works for a generation. The 1815 to 1853 stretch is the longest period without a Great Power war in Europe since 1648. What Vienna Built and Broke Vienna restores the Westphalian system in monarchical form but cannot suppress the nationalist principle Napoleon scattered. Belgium revolts from the Dutch (1830). Greece from the Ottomans (1830). 1848 sees revolutions in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Naples, Budapest. Metternich himself flees Vienna for England. The 1848 wave fails politically but transmits the nationalist program to a continental scale. The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 ends the Concert. Russia and Britain fight an actual war over Ottoman succession. The system survives, but its method (Great Powers cooperating through congresses to maintain equilibrium) is replaced by a more nakedly competitive balance of armed alliances. The road to 1914 begins here. Video: John Green on the 1814 to 1815 congress that redrew Europe and tried to put the Napoleonic genie back in the monarchical bottle.
- — The Monroe Doctrine. Samuel F. B. Morse, portrait of President James Monroe (1819). Place: Washington, D.C. Figures: James Monroe, US President · John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, principal drafter · George Canning, British Foreign Secretary, the silent enabler Adams Writes for Monroe The Spanish American republics, independent since the 1810s, are nominally unrecognized by the Holy Alliance, which has spent the Congress era (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) suppressing liberal revolts in Italy and Spain. Rumors circulate in 1823 that France, fresh from restoring Ferdinand VII in Madrid, may turn next to the Americas. Canning proposes a joint Anglo-American declaration against any such intervention. Adams talks Monroe out of it: a joint declaration would tie the United States to British policy. A unilateral declaration commits the United States to nothing it does not already wish to do. On 2 December 1823, Monroe's seventh annual message to Congress contains, scattered across several paragraphs, what later generations will read as a single doctrine. The Western Hemisphere is closed to further European colonization. Any attempt by a European power to extend its system to any portion of this hemisphere will be regarded as dangerous to our peace and safety. In exchange the United States will not interfere in existing European colonies or in the internal affairs of Europe itself. Words First, Navy Later The doctrine in 1823 is rhetorical. The US Navy has perhaps a dozen frigates; the Royal Navy, which actually keeps the European powers out of the Americas, has roughly six hundred warships. For the first half-century the doctrine works because British interests align with American ones: London wants Latin American markets open, not reabsorbed into closed Iberian empires. By the 1890s the calculation reverses. The Venezuela boundary crisis of 1895 sees Secretary of State Olney inform Britain that the United States is practically sovereign on this continent. Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary adds an interventionist right: the United States may itself intervene in Latin American states whose internal disorder might invite European involvement. The Westphalian principle (sovereign equality among states) is now modified for one hemisphere by a single regional hegemon. The Concert of Europe's right of intervention against revolution has been transplanted to the New World with the polarity reversed. Video: The doctrine's enforcement puzzle: a US Navy of a dozen frigates, a Royal Navy that quietly aligned with the policy for fifty years.
- — Greek Independence. Eugène Delacroix, 'Scenes from the Massacre at Chios' (1824), Salon icon of the Greek cause. Place: London; the protocol negotiated by Britain, France, and Russia Figures: Ioannis Kapodistrias, first head of state of independent Greece · Lord Aberdeen, British Foreign Secretary · Prince Lieven, Russian ambassador · Prince de Polignac, French Foreign Minister Nine Years of War, One Naval Afternoon The Greek War of Independence begins in March 1821 with risings in the Peloponnese. It runs for nine years and consumes perhaps 150,000 lives. Philhellene volunteers from across Europe (Byron at Missolonghi, 1824) lend it a romantic charge that the Holy Alliance powers find difficult to suppress at home. By 1825 the Ottoman position is shored up by Egyptian forces under Ibrahim Pasha, whose campaigns in the Morea reduce much of the Greek countryside to depopulation. On 20 October 1827, a combined British, French, and Russian fleet under Admiral Codrington enters Navarino Bay on a stated mission of mediation and, after a disputed first shot, destroys the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet in four hours. The Duke of Wellington, on hearing the news in London, calls it an untoward event. The Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29 follows. The Treaty of Adrianople in September 1829 forces the Sultan to accept Greek autonomy. The London Protocol of 3 February 1830 converts autonomy into full independence under joint Great Power guarantee. The Pattern That Follows Greek independence is the first nineteenth-century case of a Christian nation seceding from a Muslim empire with Great Power backing. It establishes a template the Concert (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) had not anticipated: collective European intervention not to suppress a revolutionary movement, but to legitimize one, on the ground that the population being claimed has a right to self-determination the existing sovereign cannot or will not honor. The template repeats. Belgium (see [[belgian-independence-1831]]) the next year. The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1856 and 1859. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Bulgaria across the same decades. By the time of the Balkan Wars (see [[balkan-wars-1912]]), the Ottoman position in Europe is reduced to a strip around Constantinople. The Westphalian principle that what happens inside a state is its own business has acquired an exception: not when the population is the wrong religion and the Great Powers can be persuaded to care. Video: Kings and Generals on the eleven-year war and the great-power intervention (Navarino, the London Protocol) that broke Ottoman sovereignty over a province for the first time on nationalist grounds.
- — Belgian Independence. Gustaf Wappers, 'Episode of the September Days 1830 on the Grand Place of Brussels' (1835). Place: Brussels; the London Conference, 1830-1839 Figures: Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg, first King of the Belgians · Lord Palmerston, British Foreign Secretary, chairing London · Talleyrand, French ambassador to London · King William I of the Netherlands, refusing to sign until 1839 Risings in August, a Kingdom by July The Congress of Vienna had grafted the Catholic southern Netherlands onto the Protestant Dutch crown to form a buffer state against France. The arrangement lasted fifteen years. On 25 August 1830, a performance of Auber's opera La Muette de Portici in Brussels turns into a riot, which turns into a revolt, which turns by October into a provisional government declaring independence. The French July Revolution two months earlier has shown the season's pattern. The Great Powers convene at London in November 1830. The choice is to suppress the revolt (the conservative option, which Russia favors) or to negotiate a new kingdom (the British and French preference). The Polish November Uprising, which breaks out the same month, distracts Russia. The London Conference issues protocols recognizing Belgian independence in January 1831. Leopold I, a Saxe-Coburg widower of Princess Charlotte of Britain, accepts the throne and is crowned 21 July 1831. The Dutch invade ten days later in the Ten Days' Campaign; a French army drives them back. The Scrap of Paper The Treaty of London, finalized in 1839 once William of the Netherlands stops refusing to sign, contains the article whose afterlife is the moment's chief significance. Belgium is to be an independent and perpetually neutral state, with that neutrality jointly guaranteed by Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The Westphalian principle of sovereign immunity is here reinforced by an explicit Great Power covenant: this small state shall not be invaded by anyone, and any invader will face the others. Seventy-five years later, on 4 August 1914, German troops cross the Belgian frontier under the Schlieffen Plan. Britain invokes the 1839 treaty as its casus belli. German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg reportedly asks the British ambassador whether Britain will make war for a scrap of paper. The First World War is fought, on the British side, on the proposition that yes, the scrap of paper means what it says. The Belgian guarantee of 1839 is the legal thread that draws the British Empire into the war the alliance system (see [[franco-russian-alliance-1894]]) makes structurally inevitable.
- — The Communist Manifesto. Title page of the first edition of 'Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei', London, February 1848. Place: London (printed); commissioned by the Communist League at its Second Congress in November 1847 Figures: Karl Marx, principal author · Friedrich Engels, co-author and editor · J. E. Burghard, the Bishopsgate printer · the Communist League, the small émigré society that commissioned it Twenty-Three Pages from Bishopsgate The Communist League, an organization of perhaps a few hundred German artisans and émigré intellectuals, commissions a programmatic statement at its Second Congress in London in late November–early December 1847. Marx, who has just been expelled from one country and is about to be expelled from another, writes most of it in January and early February 1848. Engels supplies the structure of a prior draft and edits. The text reaches the printer J. E. Burghard at 46 Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate, in the third week of February. It is printed as a twenty-three-page pamphlet in German and reaches the booksellers around 21 February. Three days later, Paris rises (see [[revolutions-of-1848]]). The pamphlet has, in its first season, almost no readers. The first English translation does not appear until 1850; the first widely-circulated edition is the 1872 German reissue. Its century is the next one, not the one it appears in. Capital Has No Fatherland The text's first sentence (Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa) names a spectre and an audience. Its analytic core, however, is the second chapter's claim that the modern bourgeois state is not a neutral arbiter but the executive committee of a transnational class. Capital, in this reading, is global by structure; the working class is national by happenstance; this asymmetry is the source of the worker's powerlessness and the bourgeoisie's freedom of movement. The political program follows. Workers must organize on the same scale on which capital operates: across borders. Die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland. The Westphalian principle that politics ends at the border is here named as the specific institutional form that allows capital to escape any single state's regulation. The argument will animate the First and Second Internationals, dissolve into nationalism in August 1914, regroup as the Third International after 1919, and remain the most durable theoretical challenge to the nation-state as the natural container of political life. Whether the 2008 financial crisis (see [[bitcoin-whitepaper-2008]]) is a vindication of the analysis or a reminder of its limits is the live question its tr
- — The Revolutions of 1848. Eugène Delacroix, 'La Liberté guidant le peuple' (1830), iconographic anchor of the 1848 revolutionary wave. Place: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Frankfurt, Prague, Rome Figures: Louis-Philippe, abdicating · Klemens von Metternich, fleeing · Frederick William IV of Prussia, refusing the German crown · Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian · Giuseppe Mazzini, Roman · the Frankfurt Parliament, deliberating itself out of relevance The Springtime of Peoples Paris rises on 22 February 1848 over a banned political banquet. Louis-Philippe abdicates within two days. The Second Republic is declared on 25 February. Within six weeks the contagion reaches Vienna (Metternich resigns 13 March and flees in disguise to England), Berlin (Frederick William IV bareheaded behind the coffins of the March dead), Milan (the Five Days drive Radetzky's Austrians from the city), Venice (Manin's republic restored), Budapest (Kossuth's Hungarian Diet voting itself a constitution), Frankfurt (an all-German parliament convening at the Paulskirche), Prague, Rome, Palermo, Munich. The program is liberal-nationalist and broadly consistent: constitutions, parliaments, abolition of remaining feudal dues, freedom of press and assembly, and (where applicable) national unification or independence. The Concert (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) is, for a season, simply absent. What Failed and What Did Not By summer 1849 nearly every rising is suppressed. The June Days in Paris are crushed by Cavaignac. Windischgrätz retakes Prague and Vienna. Radetzky retakes Milan. A Russian army (sent by Nicholas I under the Holy Alliance's principle of intervention) destroys the Hungarian republic at Világos in August 1849. The Frankfurt Parliament, having debated all year, offers the German imperial crown to Frederick William IV of Prussia, who refuses it as a crown from the gutter. Italy and Germany remain disunited. Politically, 1848 fails. Structurally, it transmits the program. Serfdom is abolished in the Habsburg lands (and not reimposed). Constitutions granted in 1848 and then withdrawn are demanded again in 1860, in 1867, in 1871, and eventually conceded. The Marxist reading (see [[communist-manifesto-1848]], published three days before the Paris rising) reframes the failure as evidence that bourgeois revolution alone cannot resolve the social question. Italian and German unification (see [[italian-unification-1861]] and [[german-unification-1871]]) will be achieved within a generation by the more conservative means of war and dynastic consolidation. The Concert survives 1848 in form, but Video: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Budapest. The continental wave that failed politically and won the long argument for nationalism.
- — The Crimean War. Roger Fenton, 'Valley of the Shadow of Death', Crimea, April 1855, an early war photograph. Place: the Black Sea, Sevastopol, the Baltic; the Congress of Paris at the Quai d'Orsay Figures: Tsar Nicholas I, dying mid-war · Napoleon III of France · Lord Aberdeen and then Palmerston, Britain · Sultan Abdulmejid I of the Ottomans · Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia, joining for diplomatic reasons A Quarrel Over the Holy Places The proximate cause is a dispute between Catholic France and Orthodox Russia over custody of the Holy Places at Jerusalem and Bethlehem, both within Ottoman territory. The structural cause is the question of what happens as Ottoman power declines. Tsar Nicholas I has been calling Turkey the sick man of Europe in private since 1844 and proposes to Britain in 1853 a partition of its inheritance. Britain refuses. Russia occupies the Danubian Principalities in July 1853. The Ottomans declare war in October. The Russian fleet destroys the Ottoman one at Sinope in November. Britain and France declare war on Russia on 28 March 1854. The war is fought principally in the Crimea around the great Russian naval base at Sevastopol, besieged from October 1854 to September 1855. Florence Nightingale arrives at Scutari in November 1854 with thirty-eight nurses; the death rate in her wards falls from forty-two percent to two percent in six months. The telegraph and the steam press produce, for the first time, a war the home publics read about within days rather than months. Total deaths approach 750,000, most from cholera, typhus, and dysentery. The End of the Concert The Treaty of Paris (30 March 1856) is the first major peace congress since Vienna (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]). Russia loses the right to maintain a Black Sea fleet (a clause renounced unilaterally in 1870). The Danubian Principalities are placed under collective European guarantee, beginning the path to Romanian unification. The Ottoman Empire is formally admitted to the Concert of Europe and to the public law of Europe. The significance, however, is what the war ends rather than what the treaty creates. The 1815-to-1853 stretch had been the longest period without a Great Power war in Europe since 1648. The Concert's premise (that the great monarchies cooperate through congresses to maintain equilibrium and suppress revolution) does not survive a war among them. Russia, humiliated, withdraws from the European balance for fifteen years and turns inward; Alexander II's emancipation of the serfs (see [[emancipation-of-the-serfs-1861]]) follows from this withdrawal. Napoleon III, having broken the Holy Alliance's hold on Italian affairs, will assist Cavour against Austria in 1859. Bismarck, watching from Frankfurt, draws the operational lesson: the Concert no longer constrains a Video: Real Time History on the first great-power war since 1815, the war that ended the Concert of Europe as a working method.
- — The Emancipation of the Serfs. Photographic portrait of Tsar Alexander II, the Emancipator. Place: St Petersburg Figures: Tsar Alexander II, signing · Yakov Rostovtsev, head of the editing commissions · the 23 million serfs receiving personal liberty and a redemption debt Better From Above Than Below Russia in 1855 has just lost the Crimean War (see [[crimean-war-1854]]) to coalition powers whose industrial and military superiority has been demonstrated in the field. The new tsar, Alexander II, addresses the Moscow nobility in March 1856 with a sentence that becomes the program: it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below. Editing commissions work for five years on drafts. The manifesto is signed on 3 March 1861 (19 February in the Julian calendar still used in Russia) and read from every church pulpit on the following Sunday. Twenty-three million peasants receive personal liberty: the right to marry, own property, conduct business, sue and be sued. They also receive land allotments, calculated and assigned through a redemption process whose terms favor the gentry. The state pays the landlords up front in interest-bearing bonds and recoups the value from the peasants over forty-nine years. Modernization Without Constitution The emancipation is followed across the 1860s by further Great Reforms: the zemstvo system of local self-government (1864), a modernized judiciary with juries (1864), universal military conscription (1874), expanded municipal government. Censorship is relaxed; universities are partly liberated. Russia attempts what the rest of Europe had attempted in 1848 (see [[revolutions-of-1848]]), but under autocratic direction, deliberately without a parliament or constitution at the imperial level. The result satisfies no one. The peasants regard the redemption payments as a swindle and the land allotments as insufficient. The gentry regard themselves as ruined. The radical intelligentsia regards the half-measures as proof that the autocracy is incapable of genuine reform; the Populist going to the people of the 1870s and the People's Will, which assassinates Alexander II in March 1881, follow directly. Russia's twentieth century (the 1905 revolution, the 1906 Duma, the 1917 revolutions) is foreshadowed in the 1861 attempt to modernize the substance of sovereignty while keeping its form intact. The Westphalian state, in the Russian case, will be remade by collapse rather than by constitution Video: Alexander II frees the serfs in 1861 — the largest single act of European emancipation, told inside the Romanov arc.
- — Italian Unification. Photographic portrait of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1866). Place: Turin, the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy Figures: Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, first king · Count Camillo Benso di Cavour, prime minister · Giuseppe Garibaldi, leader of the Thousand · Giuseppe Mazzini, the republican kept on the outside Three Wars and a Sail to Sicily Italy in 1815 is what Metternich called a geographical expression: the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont in the northwest, Lombardy-Venetia under Habsburg rule, the Duchies of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany, the Papal States across the middle, and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. The Risorgimento works on all of them simultaneously through the 1830s and 1840s. The 1848 risings (see [[revolutions-of-1848]]) fail. Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont from 1852, adopts a method the republicans had not: dynastic war with French help. The Second Italian War of Independence (April-July 1859) is fought by Piedmont and France against Austria. Magenta and Solferino are won at horrific cost; the Red Cross is founded by Henri Dunant in response. Napoleon III pulls France out at Villafranca, but Lombardy passes to Piedmont. The central duchies vote for annexation in early 1860. Garibaldi sails for Sicily in May 1860 with a thousand red-shirted volunteers and conquers the Two Sicilies in six months. Cavour engineers Piedmontese annexation of Garibaldi's gains. The first parliament of a unified Italian state convenes at Turin in February 1861. Italy Made, Italians To Be Made Victor Emmanuel is proclaimed King of Italy on 17 March 1861. Venetia is added after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Rome falls to Italian troops on 20 September 1870, after the French garrison is withdrawn for the war with Prussia (see [[german-unification-1871]]); the city becomes the capital the following year. The Papacy retreats behind the Leonine Walls and refuses to recognize the Italian state for the next fifty-eight years. Massimo d'Azeglio's much-quoted line (Fatta l'Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani: Italy is made, now we must make Italians) registers the scale of what remains. A peninsula of 22 million people speaks perhaps two and a half percent Italian as a first language at unification. Literacy is below twenty-five percent; the economic gap between north and south is already wide. The Westphalian principle that one nation deserves one state has produced a state. The nation it presupposes will be constructed by schoolroom and railway over the next two generations, with results that include the Risorgimento's romance, the southern question, and (in due course) Fascism. Video: Kings and Generals on Cavour, Garibaldi, and the diplomatic and military mechanics of the Risorgimento.
- — The American Civil War Ends. Alexander Gardner, photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln, November 1863. Place: Wilmer McLean's parlor, Appomattox Court House, Virginia Figures: Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies · Robert E. Lee, surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia · Wilmer McLean, the unlucky householder · Abraham Lincoln, assassinated five days later The Parlor at Appomattox Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, reduced to perhaps 28,000 effectives, is cut off west of Petersburg in the first week of April 1865. On 9 April, after a final attempt to break through fails, Lee asks for terms. Grant and Lee meet at the house of Wilmer McLean, a merchant whose previous home, in Manassas, had been used as a Confederate headquarters during the first battle of the war in July 1861. McLean is fond of remarking, after the surrender ceremony in his parlor, that the war began in his front yard and ended in his front room. Grant's terms are deliberately generous: officers and men paroled and sent home, officers keeping their sidearms and horses, no prosecutions for treason. Lincoln's reasoning, communicated through Grant, is that magnanimity in victory is the precondition of reunion. Five days later, on 14 April, Lincoln is shot at Ford's Theatre. He dies the following morning. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, becomes president. Sovereignty That Cannot Be Divided The war that ends at Appomattox has killed approximately 620,000 soldiers (a number revised upward in recent demographic studies) and an unknown number of civilians, by far the greatest mortality the United States has ever sustained in any conflict. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolishes slavery. The Fourteenth (1868) guarantees due process and equal protection against state governments. The Fifteenth (1870) prohibits racial denial of the vote. The Westphalian implication of the verdict is precise. Sovereignty in the United States is national, not state-by-state. The compact theory of the Union (states retain a residual right to withdraw) is killed at Antietam, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and finally Appomattox. The Reconstruction Amendments translate this into constitutional text: there are individual rights the federal government may enforce against the states, against the states' will if necessary. The American experiment, after 1865, is recognizably a single sovereign state on the European pattern, with federalism reduced to an administrative arrangement rather than a residue of original sovereignty. The Westphalian principle of indivisible internal sove Video: The Trust marks the 160th anniversary of Lee's surrender to Grant on 9 April 1865, the moment a continental federal nation-state was preserved by force of arms.
- — German Unification. Anton von Werner, 'Proclamation of the German Empire' at Versailles, 18 January 1871 (1885 version). Place: Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles Figures: Wilhelm I of Prussia, proclaimed German Emperor · Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor, in the white uniform of a Prussian cuirassier · Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff · the assembled German princes, ratifying by acclamation Three Wars in Six Years Bismarck arrives at the Prussian ministerial presidency in September 1862 with a constitutional crisis on his hands and a strategy in his pocket: the German question will be answered by iron and blood. The Second Schleswig War of 1864 against Denmark, fought jointly with Austria, produces an occupation condominium designed to generate conflict with Austria. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 settles that conflict at Königgrätz in a single afternoon, ejecting Austria from German affairs and producing the North German Confederation under Prussian leadership. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 absorbs the South German states (Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Hesse) into a unified German Empire. The proclamation ceremony is staged with deliberate symbolism in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the palace built by Louis XIV to overawe Europe and now the headquarters of the besieging German armies. Wilhelm I is reluctant (he had wanted Emperor of Germany; Bismarck insists on German Emperor to placate the other princes). The ceremony is held on 18 January 1871, the 170th anniversary of the day the first King in Prussia was crowned in Königsberg. The European Balance Is Over The new German Empire contains 41 million people, possesses the strongest army in Europe, leads the continent in steel production within a decade, and sits squarely in the center of the European map. The Vienna settlement (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) had been designed precisely to prevent any single continental power from achieving this position. The Holy Roman Empire's loose confederation of three hundred sovereignties, dissolved by Napoleon in 1806, is now replaced by a single Prussian-dominated industrial Great Power. Bismarck spends the next nineteen years building an alliance system designed to keep France diplomatically isolated and to manage Russian and Austrian rivalries in the Balkans (the Three Emperors' League, the Reinsurance Treaty, the Dual and Triple Alliances). The system requires continuous personal attention from Bismarck and a willingness to maintain contradictory commitments. After his dismissal by Wilhelm II in March 1890, the system unravels. The Franco-Russian alliance (see [[franco-russian-alliance-1894]]) follows within four years. The Concert is dead; the alliance blocs that produce 1914 are taking shape. Alsace and Lorraine, annexed from France in 18 Video: Real Time History's full documentary on the war that ended with Wilhelm I crowned German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors, the keystone of Bismarck's three-war unification project.
- — The Berlin Conference. Contemporary engraving of the Berlin Conference (Kongokonferenz), 1884 to 1885. Place: Reich Chancellery, Wilhelmstraße 77, Berlin Figures: Otto von Bismarck, host · Henry Morton Stanley, present as technical adviser to the United States delegation · Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, French explorer · Leopold II of the Belgians, conspicuously absent and entirely the point · the African polities, all uninvited Fourteen Powers at the Wilhelmstraße Bismarck convenes the conference at Leopold II's request and partly to assert German interests in a scramble that France and Britain are otherwise dividing between themselves. Fourteen delegations attend: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. No African polity is represented. The session opens on 15 November 1884 and closes on 26 February 1885 with the General Act of Berlin. The Act establishes free trade in the Congo and Niger basins; bans the slave trade; declares the Congo Free State (Leopold's private holding) a neutral zone. Article 34 establishes the principle of effective occupation: a claim to African territory is recognized only when accompanied by demonstrable administration on the ground. Article 35 obliges the occupying power to maintain authority and protect existing trade. The legal effect is to convert the West African coast and the great river basins into a grid of claims that must be filled in by actual conquest. Westphalia Goes Planetary The Berlin Conference is the first formal European agreement on the partition of an entire continent. In 1880, perhaps ten percent of Africa is under European rule; by 1914, all but Ethiopia and Liberia is colonized. The Westphalian state's project of extending itself to the planet is now coordinated through treaty rather than improvised. The Congo Free State (1885-1908) becomes Leopold's personal property; the rubber regime imposed there kills perhaps half the population over twenty-three years before Belgian state annexation in 1908. The conference's deeper innovation, which will outlive the formal empires it organizes, is the principle that sovereignty outside Europe is a status to be conferred by Europeans on European terms. African polities, including ancient states with continuous administrative traditions (Ethiopia, Bornu, Asante, Oyo), are treated as objects of recognition rather than as subjects of it. The double standard that the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]) will formally repudiate sixty years later is here written into the public law of Europe. Decolonization, when it comes, will use Westphalian categories against the very system that codified them. Video: The Berlin Conference inside the broader scramble for Africa it formalized.
- — The Franco-Russian Alliance. French fleet at Kronstadt, July 1891, the naval visit that prefigured the Franco-Russian Alliance. Place: St Petersburg and Paris; the convention signed at Krasnoe Selo Figures: Tsar Alexander III · President Sadi Carnot of France · Sergei Witte, Russian Finance Minister · General Boisdeffre and General Obruchev, drafters of the military convention Republic and Autocracy Bismarck's careful diplomacy after 1871 had rested on keeping France isolated and on maintaining the Reinsurance Treaty (1887) between Germany and Russia. When Wilhelm II dismisses Bismarck in March 1890 and refuses to renew the Reinsurance Treaty later that year, the strategic premise collapses. Russia, suddenly without a German connection and uneasy about the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, since 1882), turns to the only other Great Power similarly unattached. France, isolated since Sedan, lends Russia capital on enormous scale through the 1890s; Paris becomes the principal source of Russian sovereign borrowing. The French fleet visits Kronstadt in July 1891; Alexander III stands bareheaded as the Marseillaise is played, an act of considerable symbolic violence given that the Marseillaise is a republican anthem written against monarchies very like his own. A military convention is initialed in August 1892, ratified by exchange of letters between St Petersburg and Paris in early January 1894. Blocs Replace Concert The convention's terms are defensive and explicit. If France is attacked by Germany or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia will employ all available forces against Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany or by Austria-Hungary supported by Germany, France will employ all available forces against Germany. The mobilizations of the two powers will be coordinated. The arrangement is renewable, and is in fact renewed throughout the next twenty years. The Franco-Russian Alliance does for the European system what Bismarck had feared. The flexible diplomacy of the Concert (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) gives way to a structure of opposing blocs. Britain, traditionally a balancer, signs the Entente Cordiale with France in 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907, completing the Triple Entente. The two alliance systems mobilize automatically when the crisis comes. The pre-1914 historian Christopher Clark's argument (that the sleepwalkers of July 1914 follow timetables their alliance systems wrote for them) is the historical judgment on what the January 1894 ratification permits. The Balkan trigger (see [[balkan-wars-1912]]) finds the gun already cocked.
- — The Balkan Wars. Bayonet charge at the Battle of Lule Burgas, First Balkan War, October 1912. Place: Macedonia, Thrace, Albania, the Aegean; treaties of London (1913) and Bucharest (1913) Figures: Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria · King Peter I of Serbia · King George I of Greece (assassinated at Salonika, March 1913) · King Nikola of Montenegro · Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottomans · Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrian Chief of Staff, urging preventive war against Serbia Two Wars in Ten Months The Balkan League (Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro), assembled in spring 1912 with quiet Russian encouragement, declares war on the Ottoman Empire on 8 October. Within six weeks Ottoman forces are driven back to the Çatalca line outside Constantinople. Salonika falls to the Greeks the same day Bulgarian troops arrive at its outskirts. The Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 confirms that Ottoman Europe is reduced to a strip around the capital. Five hundred years of Turkish rule in the Balkans ends in eight months. The victors quarrel over Macedonia. On 29-30 June 1913, Bulgaria attacks its erstwhile Serbian and Greek allies in the night. Romania and the Ottomans join the war against Bulgaria; the Second Balkan War is over in five weeks. The Treaty of Bucharest, signed 10 August 1913, leaves Bulgaria humiliated and territorially diminished. Serbia, by contrast, has nearly doubled in size and population. Albania, carved out under Austrian and Italian pressure to deny Serbia an Adriatic coast, becomes nominally independent in November 1912. Austria-Hungary Reads the Map The strategic consequence for the alliance system (see [[franco-russian-alliance-1894]]) is precise. Serbia, now the largest South Slav state, becomes for Vienna an existential threat: its territorial ambitions extend into Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Habsburg province of two million Serbs annexed in 1908. Austria-Hungary had hoped to seize Serbian-claimed territory during the Balkan upheavals and was prevented from doing so by Russian and German pressure. Conrad von Hötzendorf has been calling for a preventive war against Serbia since 1908; by 1913 he has nearly succeeded in winning the argument. The Sarajevo assassination of 28 June 1914 finds the alliance system primed and the Habsburg general staff already convinced that the Serbian question must be settled by war. The Austrian ultimatum to Belgrade of 23 July 1914 is drafted to be rejected. Russia mobilizes; the Franco-Russian convention triggers; the German Schlieffen Plan triggers; the Belgian neutrality of 1839 (see [[belgian-independence-1831]]) is violated; the British guarantee triggers. The First World War begins from a Balkan crisis the Balkan Wars themselves had made structurally combustible. The Long Nineteenth Century en Video: The Great War channel on the two short wars that broke Ottoman Europe and primed the powder keg Sarajevo would ignite eighteen months later.
- — The Hague Peace Conference. The Peace Palace at The Hague, built 1907 to 1913 to house the institutions born of the 1899 Hague Conference. Place: Huis ten Bosch palace, The Hague, Netherlands Figures: Tsar Nicholas II, convenor in name · Count Mikhail Muravyov, Russian Foreign Minister, the actual mover · Léon Bourgeois, French · Andrew Dickson White, United States · Frederic de Martens, Russian jurist, drafter of much of the legal text A Tsar Proposes Disarmament On 24 August 1898, Count Muravyov circulates a Russian note to all governments accredited to St Petersburg proposing an international conference on arms limitation. Russia's actual motive (it cannot afford to match the new rapid-fire field artillery the Austrians and Germans are introducing) is given a humanitarian wrapper. The proposal is met with some embarrassment in Berlin and Vienna and some enthusiasm in Britain and the United States. Twenty-six states accept. The conference opens at The Hague on 18 May 1899, Nicholas II's birthday, in the seventeenth-century summer palace of the House of Orange. Ten weeks of negotiation produce three conventions and three declarations. The First Convention establishes machinery for the peaceful settlement of international disputes and creates the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The Second codifies the laws and customs of war on land, drawing heavily on the work of the jurist de Martens. The Third extends the Geneva Convention to maritime warfare. Three declarations ban dum-dum bullets, projectiles diffusing asphyxiating gases, and (for five years, renewable) the discharge of explosives from balloons. Law That Cannot Bind The conference does not achieve arms limitation; the Germans block any binding cap. What it does achieve is the first systematic attempt to overlay the Westphalian system (see [[congress-of-vienna-1815]]) with codified multilateral law. The Permanent Court of Arbitration handles its first case in 1902 and a handful per year thereafter. The 1907 follow-up conference, with forty-four states attending, expands the conventions. A planned third conference for 1915 is cancelled by the war that begins the previous August. The poison-gas declaration is comprehensively violated at Ypres in April 1915. The dum-dum ban is violated throughout the war. The Belgian neutrality treaty (see [[belgian-independence-1831]]) had been similarly violated the previous August. The Hague conventions remain in legal force; they bind no one whose interest in violating them is sufficient. The League of Nations and the United Nations will inherit the same problem on a larger scale. The Westphalian system can codify itself; it cannot, by codification alone, compel its members to obey the codes they sign. The subject dates from 1899; this photograph was taken in 2007.
