III. THE ASSEMBLY OF THE
CONSTITUENT IDEAS
It was important that, by the end of the sixteenth
century, Machiavelli was
coming to have his most
significant period of influence. He was no longer
en-
tirely disreputable, for men like
Justus Lipsius (who
was so influential amonst both Protestants and Catho-
lics) were separating the results of his
dry, scientific,
and realistic approach from some of his political
maxims, which were still too crafty and cruel for ac-
ceptance in respectable circles. Henceforward, even
those who were far from being governed by wishful
thinking in the matter
were ready to learn from
Machiavelli that the state is associated with
force, and
that politics must be envisaged as power politics. The
very
men who deplored the fact were now ready to
recognize a certain
unanswerability which makes force
so formidable a matter. People who in the
twentieth
century deprecated the notion of the balance of power
on the
ground that it regarded international politics
as too much a game of power
politics were really
addressing themselves to this point. At the same
time
the wider recognition of the role of force meant the
provision of
something that was vaguely measurable,
and it opened the way to the notion
of Europe as a
diagram of forces—indeed to a type of thought
some-
what more analogous to the
scientific.
After 1600 the references to the balance of power
become more numerous, and
at least the language is
less clouded by ambiguities. Francis Bacon, by
1612,
describes Henry VIII, Charles V, and Francis I as
having been
nervously in equilibrium; like Guicciar-
dini, he notes the need for unremitting vigilance and
talks of
princes “keeping due sentinel.” For much of
the
seventeenth century, however, it is the dissemi-
nation rather than the actual development of the idea
that
strikes the eye. The age is chiefly important for
the emergence of both the
political conditions and the
type of thinking that were to lead to a more
sophis-
ticated view of the matter;
also for the production of
single ideas that were to be involved in the
final syn-
thesis.
Quite early in the century the peculiar anxiety about
the problem of
menacing war led to some thinking
that paid attention to Europe as a whole.
In a different
realm, but with similar preoccupations, Grotius pro-
duced a significant advance in modern
international
law. Apart from this, one can see that diplomacy itself
was becoming an object of serious reflection among
some of the people who
were practicing it. This meant,
not the adoption of the teaching of
Machiavelli but
the application of the method in a field where Machi-
avelli himself had not pursued it very
far. An impres-
sive example of this in the
second quarter of the cen
tury is Cardinal Richelieu, who recognized his debt
to the
Italian writer.
Richelieu shared the main preoccupation of the
theorists of the balance of
power when he put to his
monarch the alternative of a reforming policy at
home
or an active policy abroad, while insisting that the
adoption of
the former would mean the sacrifice for
an indefinite period of any chance
of checking the
hegemony of Spain. By the conscious confrontation
with
the problem which the conflict with Spain then
presented to a genuine
Catholic, he set out the terms
for what we today would call a
“non-ideological”
foreign policy—a policy
that was indispensable to a
mature theory of the balance of power. Grasping
the
crucial distinction, he regarded it as a desperate neces-
sity to check the menace of Habsburg
dominion, but
also he resolved (and tried to keep to his resolution)
that his Church should suffer as little as possible from
this. He adopted a
parallel attitude to the Huguenots
inside France, whom he determined to
destroy insofar
as they were an armed “state within the
State,” though
he would tolerate their religion and hoped that
this
example of charity would be conductive to their ulti-
mate voluntary conversion. The later theorists of
the
balance of power realized the importance to their
system of the
processes which helped to bring Europe
out of the fanaticism of the wars of
religion; and there
is something in the diplomatic ideas of Richelieu
which
extracts matters of faith from the objectives of diplo-
macy and war, and even hints at the idea
of war for
limited purposes only. He preached, furthermore, that
negotiation should never cease, that states should ne-
gotiate even when there was no issue between them
and
simply for the cultivation of good relations. It is
surprising that at
least the theorists of the balance of
power should not have followed him in
his further
injunction: that diplomacy should not be abandoned
even in
time of war.
Only after about the middle of the century, however,
do the references to
the balance of power itself begin
to come in something like a flood,
bringing the sugges-
tion that the topic has
awakened general interest. The
prelude to this is found, in the 1640's, in
the despatches
of Richelieu's successor, Mazarin—despatches
which
show that the practicing diplomats are now having to
pay
attention to the matter. The idea is associated with
Venice, and this means
that it is treated as having
special implications. Mazarin regards Venice
as making
a fetish of the balance of power because she has an
interest
in seeing that the status quo shall be preserved.
Mazarin himself is
willing to adopt the policy where
it has the same implications; and in a
treaty of alliance
which he concluded with Denmark in 1645, there is
a
clause which says that since the interest of commerce
require the maintenance of the status quo in the
Atlantic, the
North Sea, and the Baltic, the two powers
will “work to secure
that this ancient and salutary
equilibrium shall be maintained without any
altera-
tion.” The balance of
power is interpreted as the policy
of those who want to keep territorial
arrangements as
they now stand.
After all that has been said, it still remains true that
it was the decades
of Louis XIV's personal rule (i.e.,
the period after 1660) which were the
most important
for the idea of the balance of power, producing the
remarkable developments and the extraordinary cur-
rency of the idea. And now, at last, it seems that the
maintenance of the equilibrium comes to be regarded
as the supreme object
of international politics. The
significance of the idea was greatly
heightened by the
fact that, in this period, governments paid
considerable
attention to propaganda in time of war, and the con-
flicts associated with Louis XIV's reign
provoked in
various countries many pamphlets and topical treatises.
Both in its origin (which one can trace back through
Partition Treaties)
and in its course, the War of the
Spanish Succession reveals the degree to
which the
policy of states was now being determined by consid-
eration for the balance. The
European settlement at
Utrecht involved a redistribution of territory in
which
that consideration was paramount; and if the idea of
balance had
put England at first on the side of the
Habsburg candidate, the same idea
helps to explain
how Britain could accept a Bourbon candidate when
a
change in the situation of the Habsburg made him,
in turn, a possible
threat to the equilibrium. By this
time the doctrine was repeatedly
appearing in diplo-
matic despatches, state
papers, treaties of alliance, and
treaties of peace.
But the very notion of balance had suffered a great
transmutation by this
time, achieving a pattern of
which Guicciardini and Bacon themselves can
have had
perhaps only a glimpse. In writings of considerable
importance in the seventeenth century, the main con-
flict between France and the Habsburgs had still been
the main
theme, and what was envisaged was, even
at that stage in the story,
something analogous to a
pair of scales. Still, as in the sixteenth
century, it was
said by some writers that the British represented the
“tongue” of the balance, and by others that this was
the role of the Dutch.
The reign of Louis XIV added a new chapter to the
history of man's modern
experience; and, if the appro-
priate
conclusions were soon drawn from it, we might
say that whenever they have
been forgotten since that
date, the world has been the loser. It became
clear
that, after fighting for so long against the threat of
“universal dominion” from the Habsburgs—fighting
often on behalf of smaller states as well as on her own
behalf—France herself had emerged as the aggressor
and the
dominating power, and Louis XIV now ap-
peared
as the continental bogy. The truth was not
recognized as early as it might
have been, and histori-
ans have sometimes
noted that certain governments
persisted too long in the view that Spain
was still the
general enemy. In time, however, even long-standing
alliances came to require readjustment; and, towards
the end of the
seventeenth century the principle of
the balance of power was being used as
a weapon
against France. Official circles in that country tended
therefore to disapprove of the idea.
But, in a famous case, it becomes evident that the
true consequences were
drawn from reflection on the
fact that Spain had been the menace in one age
while
France was the aggressor in another. Fénelon
(François
de Salignac de la Mothe), a representative of the dis-
sidents in this latter country, did not
rest content with
the answer that the Spaniards had been wicked at one
time, the French at another time. He produced the
thesis which was the most
essential of all for the mature
doctrine of the balance of power in the
eighteenth
century. He insisted that it was the disposition of forces
which made Spain the menace in the sixteenth century
and France the
aggressor at a later date. If a state were
allowed to rise to a position of
predominance, one
would no longer be able to rely on its good
behavior,
no matter how moderate it had hitherto been in its
policy.
It might have struggled for the balance of
power and defended the interests
of small states—it
might even have combated the whole idea of
“universal
dominion”—but once it found
that it could do what
it liked with impunity, it would throw overboard
the
old inhibitions, and no longer confine its purposes
within
accustomed channels. Indeed the very process
of resisting the predominant
power of today would be
likely to generate the new aggressor, who,
demanding
more and more securities against the enemy, might
slide
imperceptibly into lust for “universal dominion.”
As a consequence of all this, Fénelon not only in-
sisted on the importance of the balance of power but
held that its claims were of an overriding nature, the
equivalent of an
overruling law. Even the laws which
prevailed in the interior of a
country—the rules gov-
erning the
succession to the throne, for example—
should give way, he said,
to “the right that so many
nations had to security.”
Also, a nation which had no
quarrel on its own account with a
predominating
power had the right to take precautionary measures
against it for the sake of European liberty in general,
though care must be
taken to limit one's objective, and
never seek the destruction of a power
under the pre-
tence of curbing it.
Supposing the objection were made that a state
might find itself lifted to a
predominant position at
a moment when it was being directed by a
virtuous
ruler, Fénelon had his answer ready. Such a state
might
conduct a moderate policy for a single reign, he said,
but its
merit could hardly endure longer than that.
Important factors in the
situation itself would produce
the wrong policy or bring the wrong kind of
ruler to
the top.
