Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present

Preface

The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it has attained. It is obliged, therefore, to organize all its internal resources for the purpose of self-preservation. This is the supreme law of the state.

Leopold von Ranke, A dialogue on politics (1836)

History is European … it is quite unintelligible if treated as merely local.¹

William Ewart Gladstone, British prime minister

Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for purposes of defence.

Sir Halford Mackinder²

We are often told that the past is another country, and they certainly did many things differently in the 550-odd years covered by this book. To western readers, religious wars, slavery, Nazism and even communism all seem quite alien today. By contrast, our ancestors would have been puzzled by the current western consensus on universal adult suffrage, racial equality and the emancipation of women. More than likely, much of what we take for granted today will seem odd to later generations. Some things, however, never change, or change only very little or very slowly. This book shows that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries. The concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states and pre-emption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balance; the balance between liberty and authority; the tension between consultation and efficiency; the connection between foreign and domestic policy; the tension between ideology and reason of state; the phenomena of popular hubris and national performance anxiety; the clash of civilizations and the growth of toleration – all these themes have preoccupied European statesmen and world leaders (insofar as these were not one and the same) from the mid fifteenth century to the present day. This book, in short, is about the immediacy of the past.

That said, it must be stressed that the past was once open. Our European story always contained the seeds of many futures. We will therefore have to pay as much attention as possible to the roads not taken, or those which led nowhere, as well as to the great highway which leads to the international state system of today, and the domestic order underlying it. We will have to treat the losers with a due degree of respect, however trying that might sometimes be. There was, after all, nothing inevitable about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler. The coming of religious toleration, the abolition of slavery and the international slave trade, and the spread of western-style democracy in Europe were not preordained. Yet these outcomes were not random, either. As we shall see, the rise and fall of the great powers, the growth of freedom and the triumph of the west were closely linked. Whether they will remain so depends largely on what Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic do next. We shall have to make our own story, using history not as a manual, but as a guide to how these questions were approached in the past. It is for this reason that the final chapter ends not with a prediction, but with a series of questions. To have done otherwise would have made this a work not of history but of prophecy.

Introduction: Europe in 1450

Western and central Europe had enjoyed a sense of common identity since the high Middle Ages.¹ Almost everybody living there was a member of the Catholic Church, and acknowledged the spiritual authority of the pope in Rome; the educated classes shared a knowledge of Roman Law and Latin. Europeans were also united in opposition to Islam, which was on the retreat in the Iberian peninsula but fast advancing along Europe’s south-eastern flank. Most European polities had broadly similar social and political structures. At the lower end of the spectrum, the peasantry paid feudal dues to the lords in return for protection, and tithes to the Church in return for spiritual guidance. The many self-governing cities were usually run by an elite of guildsmen and magistrates. At the top of the pyramid, the aristocracy, higher clergy and – in some cases – the cities entered into a security compact with the prince in which they pledged military service and counsel in return for protection and the confirmation or increase of their land-holding.² This ‘feudal’ contractual relationship was mediated through representative assemblies across most of Europe: the English, Irish and Scottish parliaments, the States General of the Low Countries, the Estates General of France, the Cortes of Castile, the Hungarian, Polish and Swedish Diets, and the German Reichstag.³ The vast majority of princes, in short, did not wield absolute power.

Unlike the nearby Ottoman Empire or remoter Asian polities, therefore, European political culture was characterized by intense public or semi-public debate: about how much tax should be paid, by whom, to whom and for what purpose (almost always military). Although they were subjects rather than citizens in the modern sense, most Europeans believed in government by consent. Defending their rights – or ‘privileges’ in contemporary parlance – against princely encroachment was a constant preoccupation. Europeans did not live in democracies, but their elites were in an important sense ‘free’. Moreover, there was an increasing desire for political freedom throughout late-medieval Europe, even if this was more aspiration than reality the further down the social scale one went.⁴ This freedom was defended at home in the first instance, but sometimes a domestic tyrant could only be defeated with the help of neighbouring princes. For this reason, Europeans did not have a pronounced sense of sovereignty: many considered external intervention against ‘tyrannical’ rule not only legitimate, but desirable and even incumbent on all right-thinking princes.

It would be wrong to think of the principal European polities as ‘great powers’ or states in the modern sense. None the less, a process of ‘state-building’ was visible from the high Middle Ages, as princes sought to increase military mobilization in order to expand, or at least to survive.⁵ Moreover, polities such as England, France, Castile, Poland and Burgundy had a clear sense of their own distinctiveness, strength and importance; in the English and French cases, at least, it is not premature to speak of a ‘national’ consciousness which had developed through political participation, a common language and war (mainly against each other). At the same time, however, Europeans were conscious of a common membership of ‘Christendom’ – a synonym for Europe – which still found expression in periodic crusades against the Muslims. Thanks to the travels of Marco Polo and others, they were aware of China and the east, but they were largely ignorant of the western hemisphere. Far from being ‘Eurocentric’, however, most Europeans still conceived of themselves cartographically as on the margins of a world centred on Jerusalem and the Holy Land.⁶ It was for this reason that the early exploratory voyages were made along the west coast of Africa to find an alternative route to the east, and thus to attack the Muslims from the rear. The Portuguese prince ‘Henry the Navigator’, for example, hoped to outflank Islam and perhaps even join up with the imaginary kingdom of ‘Prester John’ in Africa or Asia (nobody was quite sure where). In 1415 Portugal took possession of Ceuta near present-day Morocco. Europe ‘expanded’, as it were, in self-defence.

Europe was also a profoundly divided continent. It had been engaged in internecine conflict throughout the Middle Ages: between emperor and pope, between the principal monarchs, between city states and territorial princes, between various barons, between rival cities, and between peasant and lord. Catholic unity had come under attack from Lollards in England, Hussites in Bohemia, Albigensians in the south of France and various other sects; there were also many voices within the Church highly critical of abuses which had developed over the Middle Ages. In the mid fifteenth century, Europe was perhaps calmer than it had been in the early Middle Ages, but it remained a violent and fragmented place. The Italian states, especially Venice and Milan, were at each other’s throats, while Alfonso of Aragon was planning his own bid for predominance in the peninsula; Christians and Moors confronted each other in Spain, where the Muslims still held Granada; the Hungarians were about to embark on crusade against the Ottoman Turks; Philip of Burgundy was flexing his muscles, unsure of whether to go on crusade or to pick a fight closer to home; the Ottomans were gearing up to attack what was left of the Orthodox Christian Empire of Byzantium on the Bosphorus; and what would prove to be the Hundred Years War between England and France rumbled on.⁷

At the heart of this European contestation was the Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from Brabant and Holland in the west to Silesia in the east, from Holstein in the north to just below Siena in the south and Trieste in the south-east. It included all of present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, as well as large parts of present-day Belgium, eastern France, northern Italy and western Poland. It was presided over by the emperor, who was chosen by seven electors – the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, and the ruling princes of Bohemia, the Palatinate, Saxony and Brandenburg. He ruled in consultation with the lay and ecclesiastical ‘estates’ of the Empire – the electors, princes, counts, knights and cities – assembled at the Reichstag, the German imperial parliament. Far from being a deferential herd, Germans were constantly arguing with authority, be it the princes with the emperor or the peasants with their lords, through local or imperial law courts.⁸ The Empire was the fulcrum of European politics. More people lived there than in any other European polity. The cities of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, south Germany and northern Italy were – taken together – the richest, most vibrant and technically advanced in Europe. The Empire, or at least its most powerful princes, held the balance between England and France;⁹ the English cause never recovered from the breach with the Duke of Burgundy, a member of the French royal family, with lands straddling the border between France and Germany, in 1435. Above all, because of its origin in the empire of Charlemagne, the imperial crown was a matter of intense interest not merely to German princes, but to neighbouring kings as well, especially those of France.¹⁰ Uniquely among western European princes, its holder could claim universal authority as successor to the Roman Empire.¹¹

Despite its critical importance and proud heritage, however, the Empire was in a state of acute crisis by the mid fifteenth century.¹² The power of the emperor, an Austrian Habsburg since 1438, had been whittled away through concessions made as a condition of his election, the Wahlkapitulationen. Private feuds were endemic, banditry rife and commerce subject to a slew of more or less criminal extortions. The imperial Church was sunk in a profound crisis and demoralized by abuses. Above all, the Empire was struggling to provide for the common defence. Unlike the English parliament, the Reichstag proved unable to agree a regular mechanism for taxation to fund imperial wars against the Hussites, the Turks and increasingly the French.¹³ The Empire was also in the throes of an identity crisis. It aspired to represent Christendom as a whole, and it included people of many ‘nationalities’ among its subjects, including speakers of French, Dutch, Italian and Czech, but most of its subjects considered themselves German, or at least spoke dialects of German. They did not yet speak much of ‘Germany’, but from around 1450 contemporaries increasingly added the rider ‘of the German Nation’ to the term Holy Roman Empire.¹⁴

This book will show that the Holy Roman Empire, and its successor states, lay at the heart of the European balance of power and the global system it spawned. It was there that the strategic concerns of the great powers intersected. In friendly hands, the area could serve as a decisive force multiplier, in hostile hands it would be a mortal threat. What happened there mattered to England because it was the anchor of the ‘barrier’ in the Low Countries protecting its south coast from attack, and the hinge of the European balance; to Spain because it was the source of the imperial title and vital recruits, and served as the strategic hinterland to the Spanish Netherlands; to the Austrians later for the same reason; to the French because it was both a buffer and an inviting target for expansion; to Prussia because it ultimately provided the springboard for eastward and westward expansion; to early-twentieth-century Americans because of the Kaiser’s intrigues in Mexico; and to the Americans and Soviet Union, whose main objective was to either win that area or deny it to the enemy.

The Empire, and its successor states, has also been the principal source of political legitimacy for anybody who wants to speak for Europe. For hundreds of years, the major protagonists have sought the mantle of Holy Roman Emperor, to take up the legacy of Charlemagne. Henry VIII wanted it, so did Suleiman the Magnificent, Charles V had it, French kings from Francis I to Louis XVI sought it, Napoleon seriously thought about it, the echoes in Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’ could not be clearer, and the European Union originated from the same area and in the same spirit, though with a very different content. In short, it has been the unshakeable conviction of European leaders over the past 550 years, even those who had no imperial aspirations themselves, that the struggle for mastery would be decided by or in the Empire and its German successor states. Queen Elizabeth I knew it; Cromwell knew it; Marlborough knew it; the two Pitts knew it; Bismarck knew it; the Allied high command in the First World War knew it; Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew it; Stalin knew it; Gorbachev knew it; the Russians who furiously resisted the eastward expansion of NATO after the fall of the wall know it; and the elites trying to keep the European Union together today for fear of allowing Germany to slip its moorings know it. Whoever controlled central Europe for any length of time controlled Europe, and whoever controlled all of Europe would ultimately dominate the world.

It is therefore not surprising that the struggle for mastery in Germany also drove the process of internal change in Europe. Englishmen revolted against Charles I because he failed to protect the Protestant German princes on whom their own liberties depended; Frenchmen broke with Louis XVI because of his alleged subservience to Austria; and Russians gave up on the tsar because he failed to get to grips with the Second Reich. Germany was also the crucible of the most important ideological changes in Europe: the Reformation, Marxism and Nazism were all incubated there, and shaped global geopolitics in decisive ways. The search for security and the quest for dominance also drove the expansion of Europe, from the first Columbian voyages to the nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’, and it lay behind the process of de-colonization as well. This was, to be sure, not always driven by German considerations, but the issue was never far from the surface, witness the attempts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English mariners to maintain the balance in the Empire by intercepting the supply of New World bullion to their rivals, William Pitt’s remarks about ‘winning America in Germany’, the late-nineteenth-century French quest for imperial expansion to balance imperial Germany, and the attempt to mobilize Jews world-wide against the Kaiser through the Balfour Declaration, which culminated in the creation of the state of Israel after the Second World War.

Brendan Simms

EUROPE

The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present

ALLEN LANE

Contents

Maps

Maps

Preface

Introduction: Europe in 1450