European Power Politics Research Articles

Republicanism in a Monarchical World: The Early United States and the Southern European Republics

Republicanism was a deeply rooted belief of those who crafted early American foreign policy and often led policymakers to an isolationist approach in dealing with European monarchies. How did those same figures respond when dealing with republican states abroad? This paper integrates the American viewpoint—from letters, newspaper articles, government documents, and other sources—with the perspective of the republics they encountered—using primary sources and foreign-language scholarship—to demonstrate that American foreign policy was unaffected by the republican government forms of the southern European republics. The paper covers early American interactions with Venice, Genoa, San Marino, and Ragusa primarily during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The paper demonstrates that while individuals admired each of the various republics of the Old World, both the United States government—motivated by republican fears at engaging with European power politics—and the governments of the republics the United States interacted with consistently prioritized commercial relationships in diplomacy and did not treat republican states in any distinct manner from monarchical ones. This focus on American relations with European republics supports the literature that suggests an absence of ideologically motivated interventionism and internationalism in the early Republic.

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze

Reviewed by: The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History by Alexander Mikaberidze Geertjan Zuijdwegt The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History BY ALEXANDER MIKABERIDZE Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. xxiii + 936 pages. Hardback: $41.95. ISBN: 9780199951062. During the peace talks at the Congress of Vienna, in the autumn of 1814, the French negotiator Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand questioned the use of the term "allies" to denote Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia. Napoleon, after all, had just been defeated, so who was there to ally against? It was used for brevity's sake, Talleyrand was assured. He wittily replied: "Brevity should not be purchased at the price of accuracy."1 Looking at its sheer volume of almost 1000 pages, Alexander Mikaberidze's new global history of the Napoleonic Wars has equally refused to buy brevity at the price of accuracy. Lauded as a masterpiece by Andrew Roberts, the book offers a comprehensive account of Napoleon's wars. They are situated extensively in the historical contexts out of which they emerged: the French Revolution, the eighteenth-century international system, and the French Revolutionary Wars. The book is valuable primarily for the global dimension of its analysis. Even though it is neither the first, nor unique, The Napoleonic Wars lives up to its subtitle: it is the best and most comprehensive global history of the Napoleonic Wars to date. Given such ambitious scope, Mikaberidze's accuracy is not, in fact, [End Page 90] purchased at the price of brevity. Few readers will wish the book shorter. Few, also, could wish it better written (although slight grammatical mistakes, especially in the use of articles, might have been remedied in copyediting). A cynical observer might be tempted to attribute Mikaberidze's focus on the worldwide impact of the wars of 1789–1815 to a contemporary fad with extending European history beyond its European confines, but this would be a mistake. If Mikaberidze succeeds in showing anything, it is that the world at the turn of the nineteenth century was economically and politically interconnected to an extent that, to many readers, will come as something of a surprise. His analysis of the social, economic, and political impact of the French Revolution and the ensuing wars on the US and Canada, the Caribbean, South America, northern Africa (especially Egypt), the Middle East (especially Iran), and India is both convincing and revealing. This comes in addition to extensive and enlightening discussions of such impact on the more usual, European suspects: France, Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and a host of smaller nations, princedoms, and territories. All of this made possible by Mikaberidze's use of an extensive range of sources in a great variety of languages. Yet, The Napoleonic Wars remains first and foremost a military history. Sometimes derided at continental European history faculties, military history (with a realist bent when it comes to international relations—as Mikaberidze's has) is indispensable to understanding the global past, and Mikaberidze proves as much. In fact, his book is useful beyond its authorial intention. Its explication of early nineteenth-century European power politics enabled me to better grasp the long pedigree and dynamics of the current conflict in Ukraine. Readers of this journal will wonder, of course, what there is to gain from The Napoleonic Wars for the study of John Henry Newman. The answer depends on the level of analysis. For instance, religion, Newman's primary concern in life, is conspicuously absent from Mikaberidze's account. Although he pays some attention to French revolutionary ideology, religion is hardly a factor in his narrative, and this does, in fact, amount to a shortcoming. Yet, as a backdrop to the world Newman grew up in, Mikerabidze's book is a must-read. In much the same way as reading a history of World War I is key to understand an Englishman born in 1901, a history of the Napoleonic Wars is key to understand Newman, who was born in 1801. In later life, Newman vividly recalled lying in bed, age 5, looking at the candles stuck into the windows of his childhood home in Ham (Richmond) in celebration of Horatio Nelson's naval victory at Trafalgar over a maneuvering Franco...

The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire, by Adrian Finucane

Taking forward recent work by a number of scholars—particularly Satsuma Shinsuke in his excellent Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower and the Atlantic (2013)—Adrian Finucane considers relations between Britain and Spain, notably over Caribbean trade in the early eighteenth century. The complexities of links, from government to the role of individuals, emerge clearly, although the context, in Britain, Spain and the Caribbean, was far from consistent. For example, the Tory ministry that negotiated a settlement with France in the Peace of Utrecht of 1713, ending British participation in the War of the Spanish Succession, was committed, in part in reaction to Whig interventionism on the Continent in the 1700s, to a policy of commercial growth and trans-oceanic expansion. There was also Tory political interest in the Pacific and in the lands around the estuary of the River Plate. However, those ideas lacked the military, economic and logistical practicability of power-projection and commercial penetration that was needed to develop the greater Caribbean, as key British interests more plausibly sought. Indeed, the Philippines and the Plate were marginal to the main thrust to the Spanish New World. In contrast, the Whigs, who came to power in 1714, lacked the Tory commitment to trans-oceanic possibilities. They focused, instead, in accordance with the wishes of George I (r. 1714–27), on European power politics and on trade in the Caribbean, rather than territorial expansion. The significance of trade to the Spanish New World in the Caribbean region was reflected in its being covered in maps produced in London.

Activist with opt-outs: Denmark, the European Union and the American world order

Is Danish European policy activist? Danish European policy is surprisingly activist in the sense that it strategically, independently and boldly pursues the defense and promotion of Danish interests and values, even to the extent of defying the vision of Europe promoted by EU’s Franco-German engine. However, activism is typically formulated by Danish decision makers as the “politics of necessity” combining a pragmatic defense of the Danish welfare state with proactive agenda-setting in selected issue areas. Using a neoclassical realist explanatory model, the article explains this policy as a the result of policy makers grounded in a Danish liberal-egalitarian political culture navigating an international space characterized by a combination of an American liberal order and negotiated and institutionalized European power politics.

A Rhetorical Foundation of International Negotiations: Callieres on Peace Politics

The negotiation theory that Francois de Callieres (1645-1716) built promotes peace politics in the international arena. First, the paper develops the political rationality that prevailed in the 17th Century, essentially under the realm of Louis XIV, whom Callieres served as a diplomat. European power politics is dominated by the recurrence of wars, interrupted by truces only. In that context, negotiation is crucial, but essentially conceived as a means at the disposal of a bellicose agenda. Reversely, Callieres is shown to propose a more ambitious alternative vision for future negotiators, and suggests they could be the key-players in peace politics, as long as the use of powerful persuasion serves legitimate ends. Princes should exhaust all the means of reason and persuasion that negotiation offers before waging wars. Then, according to Callieres, European nations, with the interdependence of their interests could form one republic aspiring to common prosperity.

Greek naval policy and the Great Powers, 1931–40

This article focuses on the inter-relationships between Greek naval development, domestic financial constraints and international naval political affairs. It begins with a survey of international naval disarmament during the early 1930s, which reinforced the adoption of the ‘flotilla navy’ concept by the Venizelos administration. This concept was further forced upon the Greek Navy by the poor state of Greece's finances. The increasing polarisation of European power politics towards the middle of the decade did not result in any significant strengthening of the Greek fleet or its supporting infrastructure, despite legislative and diplomatic initiatives. By contrast the Ethiopian crisis stimulated the establishment of a generally comprehensive Greek coastal defence system. In the countdown to the Second World War, the closing of the ring around Greece obliged the Metaxas administration to rely exclusively on anticipated British diplomatic and naval support, which was, however, hardly forthcoming for economic as well as political reasons. Indeed, the satisfactory performance of the Greek Navy during the Second World War stemmed from the successful application of a British-modelled Greek naval educational system rather than any direct and material British naval assistance.

The Art of Coercion

During latter stages of World War II, policymakers on both sides of Atlantic faced an unenviable task: deciding what to do with a war-ravaged Germany-a country that had seen its economy decimated, its infrastructure destroyed, and its state capacity crippled. US Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, with initial support of both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, favored reducing Germany to a state of quasi-feudalism. Other US advisors, most notably Senator Robert Taft, preferred withdrawing US troops from European soil and thereby from duplicities of European power politics. In Germany, many influential policymakers, including Jakob Kaiser, a highly placed Christian Socialist and former resistance leader, made case for a demilitarized Germany, pinned back behind its prewar borders. Given this range of options, it seems remarkable that it was perhaps most unlikely of policy prescriptions-the institutionalization of Germany at heart of alliance-that emerged from political tumult. Indeed, some 50 years after Germany declared its full sovereignty, it is difficult to recall considerable material resources ($3 billion provided by United States to Germany alone between 1945 and 1955) and enormous symbolic shifts that this policy required. Perhaps most important feature of Civilizing Enemy: German Reconstruction and Invention of West, by Patrick Jackson, is that it reminds us of uncertainties and contingencies that lay behind Germany's reconstruction from enemy of West to cornerstone of civilization. By doing so, Jackson rescues an important and much contested historical process from what E.P. Thompson (1968:13), British historian, famously derided as the enormous condescension of posterity. Jackson focuses on public rhetoric that underpinned Germany's reconstruction, in other words, on how Germany's real world geopolitical position was reinterpreted through a discursive move that placed Germany at center of Western itself. Jackson argues that integration of German reconstruction with notions of civilization provided a discursive resource, which, in turn, provided a space that made certain policy decisions likely (in particular end of Occupation) and others taboo. This notion that rhetoric can be, at least in part, coercive-providing tools that close down possibilities for action-is an important addition to both constructivist theory in international relations and post-positivist turn more generally. In addition, by highlighting emergence of idea of civilization in first half of twentieth-century, Jackson demonstrates how notions of a clash between East and West, or between and rest, were a fundamental part of Cold War itself, investing this struggle with a Manichean fervor. Much of Civilizing Enemy provides a detailed investigation into how Germany was reimagined as an indispensable part of the West by intellectuals

Luso-Johor-Dutch Relations in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, c. 1600-1623

The study of the early European colonial presence in Asia has been stimulated in recent years by a series of excellent works. These have been both of general and specialist nature, written not only by historians, but also by political scientists as well as specialists of international relations. The truly excellent study published in 2002 by Edward Keene, can be taken as a point in case. Central to his revisitation of seventeenth-century treaties of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) with the Emperor of Kandy, is the notion of divided sovereignty expounded by Hugo Grotius around 1600-1610. It was against the backdrop of such concepts of divided sovereignty that the VOC could ultimately conclude its complex web of treaty relationships that broadly characterise the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies up the advent of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There is some legitimacy in contending that Keene's postulations effectively rework and reinterpret, at the level of international relations, what was once conveniently dubbed the ‘Age of Partnership’, i.e. an age characterised by trade-driven colonial empires that grew upon a complex, sometimes self-contradictory network of treaty relationships as well as formal and informal cooperation garnered from native elites. Admittedly such relations were often but not always based on unequal power and treaty relationships. Despite the uneven playing fields created by many such Euro-Asian treaties, especially those forged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the conclusion of treaties was assumed on the basis of the nominal co-equality of sovereigns and plenipotentiary agents acting on their behalf. European and Asian treaty partners were accepted as contracting equals, and this is particularly stunning given that the feudal world of European power politics at the time was, by comparison, probably more complex and legally structured than Asia. Certainly, the underlying power relations behind these early modern agreements were completely different from those imposed by the mature colonial powers on Asia at the zenith of nineteenth-century imperialism!

Trade, Ships, and the Neutrality of the Netherlands in the First World War

accordance with the Netherlands' established policy of remaining aloof from European power politics, Queen Wilhelmina declared her country's neutrality on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. 1 The Netherlands, with its six million people, had much to lose and nothing to gain by taking sides. The longer the struggle between the Central Powers and the Allies lasted, however, the more difficult neutrality was to maintain. To be successful, it had not only to rest on the sovereign decision to remain impartial and abstain from participation, but also to be recognized by the belligerents.2 This article explains the competing economic, political, and strategic demands on the Netherlands made by Germany, on one side, and Britain and the United States, on the other.

The Formative Years of the American Society of International Law

The United States at the dawn of the twentieth century was just beginning to comprehend the influence it could have on the international scene. It had no desire to become involved in the European power politics that had produced, in the lifetimes of many Americans then living, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War and the essentially European Boer War in South Africa. Nevertheless, a distinct strain of expansionism could be found in American foreign policy. The belief was stirring in those concerned to establish a nonviolent world order that the interaction of nation-states would benefit from exposure to American values, American economic dynamism and the lessons to be drawn from the American federal experience. This belief, combined with a deep aversion to what was seen as essentially a European proclivity for settling disputes by resort to war, motivated some of the more influential participants in the American peace movement. That movement, in turn, gave birth to the American Society of International Law.

French War Aims and the American Challenge, 1914–1918

Between 1917 and 1919 the United States made its first, spectacular intrusion into European power politics. For President Wilson, entry into the First World War was a chance not only to eliminate an immediate threat to American interests but also to transform international relations. The time had come to weld the industrialized countries into a community of interest, based on a shared loyalty to representative government and the market economy, expressed by membership of a League of Nations, and in which economic and territorial causes of tension would have been removed. But hardly had the German obstacle to this programme been overcome before, at the peace conference of 1919, Wilson ran up against almost equally determined obstruction from his former allies. This article examines one source of that antagonism, in the latent conflict before the armistice between American war aims and those of France. It argues that French policy was moulded by a tension between the Paris leaders' own desires for the settlement with Germany and their need to preserve a system of alliances deemed essential for French security in the future as well as for the war itself. By 1917 French governments were already confronted with dilemmas which were to harass them for the succeeding twenty years.

Dynastic Relations and European Power Politics (1848-1918)

Previous articleNext article No AccessDynastic Relations and European Power Politics (1848-1918)Robert A. KannRobert A. Kann Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 45, Number 3Sep., 1973 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241021 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1973 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jan Vermeiren Notions of solidarity and integration in times of war: the idea of Europe, 1914–18, European Review of History: Revue européenne d'histoire 24, no.66 (Sep 2017): 874–888.https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2017.1349739 Historiese Tydskrifte/Historical journals, Kleio 6, no.22 (Aug 2007): 74–75.https://doi.org/10.1080/00232087485310141

European Power Politics and the Refugee Problem

European Power Politics and the Refugee Problem