Table Of ContentTHE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPEAN
POLITICS 1763-1848
BY
PAU L W. SCHROEDER
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
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© Paul W. Schroeder 1994
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The transformation of European politics 1763-1848.
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1. Eur ope—Politics and government—1648-1789. 2. Europe— Politics and government—
1789-1815. 3. Europe—Politics and government—1815-1848. D295.T73 1994 93-26439 940-
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PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
THIS book has a simple central theme: European international politics was transformed between
1763 and 1848, with the decisive turning-point coming in 1813-15. A fundamental change occurred
in the governing rules, norms, and practices of international politics. Those of the eighteenth
century, with its competitive and conflictual balance of power, gave way to those of a nineteenth-
century concert and political equilibrium. This change led to striking results. The most obvious and
demonstrable was a dramatic decline in the incidence, scope, length, and violence of wars in the
nineteenth century as compared to the eighteenth. (Overall, the ratio of battlefield deaths to the total
population of Europe was about seven times as great in the eighteenth as in the nineteenth
1
century.) Just as important were the problems solved and crises peacefully managed by nineteenth-
century methods that had been insoluble without war by eighteenth-century ones. The devices of
international diplomacy—alliances, treaties, conferences, even the language of diplomacy itself—
changed significantly in form and intent. So did the spirit and goals of international politics. Aims
considered normal and permissible in the eighteenth century were banned in the nineteenth,
practices once routinely sanctioned or prescribed were proscribed. One dramatic illustration of the
change, frequently illustrated in the narrative to follow, is the frequency and normality of partition
schemes in the eighteenth century—plans devised and efforts made to partition various states, either
eliminating them completely or reducing them to impotence or dependent status, and the
disappearance of these schemes in the post-Vienna era, to be replaced by norms, rules, and efforts
devoted precisely to preserving the existence and guaranteeing the independence of the actors most
threatened within the system. Many more signs of a dramatic shift in the purposes and goals
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1
For the statistics, see J. S. Levy ( 1983); for this particular calculation, Schroeder ( 1986: 11).
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2
2
of international politics, some obvious, others more subtle, will emerge as the story unfolds.
The change could be called a revolution. This book, in fact, will argue that in this era more real
change occurred in the arena of international politics than can be demonstrated in other areas of
politics and society from other more celebrated revolutions—the French, the so-called Atlantic, the
Industrial, the Napoleonic, or those of 1830 and 1848. ‘Transformation’, however, is a more
accurate and useful word for what happened, less over-used and abused than ‘revolution’ and
without its excess baggage of emotion. Though the transforming process involved much violence
and force, certain characteristics usually considered essential to great political revolutions (the
violent overthrow of an existing political and social order, the destruction and replacement of the
ruling class, the imposition of new political principles by force) were not present here.
Moreover, while violence on a grand and in some respects unprecedented scale—twenty-eight years
of almost unbroken large- scale international war and upheaval—proved to be one necessary
condition of the transition from eighteenth- to nineteenth century international politics, it was not
really its main cause. International violence on a similar or greater scale had occurred before, in the
Thirty Years War or the wars of Louis XIV, without producing analogous results. The vastly greater
violence of the twentieth century would not do so either, at least for a long time after the two world
wars. The transformation was not simply or mainly the product of war, or of one side’s victory and
imposition of its will and ideas in the peace, but of Europe’s finding a way beyond war,
transcending violence, changing the previous goals and limits of power politics. The transformation
occurred first and above all in the field of ideas, collective mentalities, and outlooks. A religious or
theological analogy may in today’s world hinder rather than aid understanding. None the less, the
best clue to the heart of this transformation is the New Testament term for repentance, the Greek
metanoia, a turning around of the mind. What happened, in the last analysis, was a general
recognition by the states of Europe that they could not pursue the old politics any longer and had to
try something new and different. This book attempts to describe how that happened, and what it led
to; to explain the process by which European statesmen, taught slowly
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2
For brief analyses of the changes in the structure and language of international politics after
1815, see Schroeder ( 1986; 1989).
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and painfully by repeated defeats and disaster, finally and suddenly succeeded in learning how to
conduct international politics differently and better. J. H. Plumb has argued that political stability
need not always develop slowly by a gradual accretion of changes, but can form quickly at
3
particular moments. The insight fits this particular story of the long gestation and sudden birth of a
new international system.
If this book succeeds at all in making the case for this transformation, it could have certain
implications for historiography in general. One is that historians of this era will no longer, while
routinely acknowledging and/or endlessly debating and analysing other supposed revolutions
(French, industrial, bourgeois, radical, Jacobin, liberal, democratic, socialist, and even Napoleonic
or aristocratic), describe even greater, more drastic, and more palpable changes in international
politics in such terms as ‘a restoration of the old order’, a ‘renewal of the balance of power’, a
‘return to stability and monarchic solidarity’, or even ‘an era of reaction and repression’.
The work also aims to bring international politics back into the centre of this era of European
history, where it once was and where it still belongs. The goal is not, of course, to return
international politics to the position of primacy it had for Leopold von Ranke and a host of
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians, as the central driving force of history and chief
motor of change and progress. That kind of Primat der Aussenpolitik is gone, and no one wants it
back. But international politics does belong in history on its own terms, as an equal and autonomous
element, inextricably interwoven, naturally, with other parts of the collective human endeavour, but
to be understood and approached primarily from the standpoint of its own system and structure, and
not as a dependent variable of any other systems or structures in society.
This book aims, among other things, to offer a concrete refutation of the view, not uncommon in
recent decades, that so- called diplomatic history is superficial event history, meaningless if not
attached to an analysis of the real forces shaping history and society and forming only a small part
of them, the kind of history which, pursued for its own sake, gets nowhere and misses the forest for
the trees. It will try, by detailed historical exposition rather than theoretical argument, to meet the
view of Marxists that international history without a Marxist perspective misses
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3
( 1966: introd.).
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the roots of international politics lying in socio-economic conditions, class structures, and relations
of production; of Annales historians that it misses the essential framework of history, the deeper
structures and conjunctures of serial and total history; of Gesellschaftsgeschichte that it misses the
driving force of modern history, the transformations wrought by industrialization and
modernization. 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.
Above all, I believe that there is a way of conceiving and doing international history that offers the
possibility of avoiding all these misdirections. It is to see and understand the forest of international
politics as a professional forester would do, with knowledge of and respect for scientific forestry as
an autonomous discipline, closely related to others and drawing on them, but also possessing its
own rules and system. It means deliberately studying forests as forests, as entities important in their
own right and not simply as the key to something else (climate, ecology, the economy of forest
products, the social organization of forest animals and dwellers, or what have you). It requires
posing as one’s central questions the issues of what makes forests grow or die, what role chance and
necessity, contingent events and deep organic developments, play in their growth or decline, what
different forms and structures forests may take, how they gradually change over time, and what is
required to keep forests from giving way to desert. In short, international history must be done
systemically and ecologically, and must be done as international history, not primarily as a branch of
or contribution to anything else.
It is important, I believe, that this be done precisely for this era of history, one treated intensively in
the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century by many historians, including some of the greatest,
from Leopold von Ranke to Georges LeFebvre and Charles K. Webster, but one which in recent
decades, despite individual works of real merit, has lain largely fallow. There is no better example
of its neglect or fall from favour in recent years than the flood of publications accompanying the
bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989. Though much of what appeared was fluff, pièces
d’occasion, the occasion also produced much serious scholarship and some major historiographical
results. Among other things, the reigning Marxist ‘bourgeois revolution’ paradigm was
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dethroned and a new political-cultural one erected in its stead. Yet this revival of the politics of the
French Revolution occurred without reconsideration of, almost without reference to, the
international developments of the era—despite the undisputed and decisive importance of
4
international politics in the course and fate of the French Revolution itself from at least early 1791.
5
To use Theda Skocpol’s phrase, we have now brought the state back into society for the
revolutionary era; but we have not brought international politics back into the state, society, and
human affairs in general, or on the right terms. The task is worth doing not just in this era, but in
history and politics in general.
I have tried in researching and writing this book to take relevant international-relations theory into
account; it is a field I find fascinating and valuable, though I am far from expert in it. Readers may
detect from time to time the influence of regime theory, hegemony theory, coalition theory, theories
of perception and misperception, political economy, and game theory, and should have no difficulty
seeing where the book stands on the idea of balance of power and on realist political theory, both
classical and structural. The book is written, however, in what political scientists call the
historiographical mode, with theory used only to illuminate particular developments rather than the
other way round. Still, certain assumptions are important. The first is an agreement, for once, with
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Kenneth N. Waltz on the superiority of system-level explanation and structural analysis over unit-
level explanations of international politics. Explanations of outcomes in international politics based
simply on studying the policies of individual actors and how they clashed or interwove are
inadequate; it is vital also to show how systemic rules and structural limits influenced and shaped
these outcomes. Hence I consciously attempt in this book to go beyond unit-level to systemic
analysis, though my understanding of ‘system’ and ‘structure’ differs from that of Waltz and realist
theory, and rejects the balance of power as a necessary conceptual basis for that dimension.
Friendly critics have charged that, while attacking the familiar omnibus phrase ‘balance of power’
as often useless and misleading for analysis and dangerous and unworkable in practice, I replace it
by another phrase as protean and meaningless or worse, ‘the
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4
Blanning ( 1991) discusses this phenomenon; his book ( 1986) is one of the major exceptions to
the general neglect of international politics in the era.
5
( 1979).
6
( 1979).
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international system’. The charge is plausible, the danger real and to an extent unavoidable. The
term ‘system’ is inherently elastic and slippery; it can apply equally to things precisely defined
(‘solar system’, ‘cardio-vascular system’) or broad and vague (‘business system’, ‘social system’).
‘International system’ obviously belongs more in the latter category. A careful definition may help,
but nothing is easier in history and other disciplines than to start with a reasonably precise definition
and then gradually expand or alter it in practice. Let me therefore offer a definition of what is meant
by ‘system’ and ‘systemic analysis’ in this book, not with the idea of making the term fully precise
or eliminating all ambiguity, but in the hope of explaining what is meant by ‘system’ here, and
helping readers judge whether the concept has real content, makes sense, and is used hereafter with
reasonable consistency.
By ‘international system’ I do not mean what is usually meant by political scientists, i.e. the number
of major international actors in permanent, regular contact and interaction with each other, and the
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distribution of power among them. This is a perfectly good definition for many purposes, but not
for analysing the process of change described in this book. Instead, ‘system’ in international politics
means here essentially what I understand Michael Oakeshott to mean by the constituent rules of a
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practice or a civic association: the understandings, assumptions, learned skills and responses, rules,
norms, procedures, etc. which agents acquire and use in pursuing their individual divergent aims
within the framework of a shared practice. Examples of a ‘system’ in this sense are the structure,
grammar, and rules of a common language; the rules and understandings involved in playing a game
or practising a profession; and, in this case, the rules and understandings underlying the practice of
international politics. ‘Systemic analysis’ means simply a consistent attempt to determine not only
how the game of international politics turned out and how the decisions, policies, and actions of
individual states led to that outcome, but also how these individual policies and actions were shaped
and limited by these shared rules and understandings, and how these collective understandings were
in turn challenged and altered, sometimes violently, by violations or different versions of the rules.
The idea, though simple, is easily ignored or forgotten and its importance overlooked. The rules of
the game in international politics, as in many games, are not simply restraining, but also
empowering; one set of rules permits outcomes that under another
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7
e.g. Snyder and Diesing ( 1977: 28).
8
( 1972).
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are imposible or unthinkable. No amount of analysis of internal foreign policy-making or the
decision-making process in particular states, vital though this is, can substitute for this kind of
systemic analysis, because it cannot take into account, or even see, the restraints and possibilities
which only the prevailing ‘system’ imposes. If this book succeeds, it will illustrate the point time
and again.
A further assumption is that the history of international politics is not one of an essentially
unchanging, cyclical struggle for power or of the shifting play of the balance of power, but a history
of systemic institutional change—change essentially linear, moving overall in the direction of
greater complexity, subtlety, and capacity for order and problem-solving. In other words, the history
of international politics is essentially like the history of capitalism, parliamentary government, or
business—a history of change and even, in a certain sense, of progress. Once again, the exposition
is supposed to back up this assertion.
I hope one day to try to show how this is true for the longer period in which one can speak of a
European states system, 1648-1945. This book will not attempt to sketch that development, but will
start abruptly in 1763, at the close of the Seven Years’ War. This date marks in a sense the high
point of the eighteenth-century balance of power system, the end of its most exhausting and decisive
war. If ever eighteenth-century balance- of-power politics was capable of producing stability, it
should have done so in the period after 1763; many scholars have supposed that this happened. The
year, therefore, marks a good place to begin the story of how this did not happen, and why
systemically it could not.
I owe an apology for the length of time it took me to research and write this book, and thanks to
those who helped me in it, supported the research, and waited patiently for it. I admire historians
who can write history quickly and beautifully, like an artist painting a landscape; others who, like
sculptors, take longer, but produce work smooth, polished, and massive; and still others whose
history impresses one as architecture, bold and imposing in design. The only way I know to do
history resembles working in wrought iron. It requires gathering and combining an intractable mass
of raw materials, and then endlessly refining, heating, and beating them into the shape one feels
ought to emerge. The end- product may not be beautiful, possibly not even graceful; the marks of
the hammer will never be polished out. But wrought iron has one virtue: if made well, it can bear
considerable weight.
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