THE RISE OF MODERN DIPLOMACY Also available from Longman by M.S. Anderson The Ascendancy of Europe 1815-1914 (second edition 1985) Europe in the Eighteenth Century 1713-1783, (third edition 1987) THE RIS,E OF MODERN DIPLOMACY 1450 -1919 M.S. Anderson Pirst published 1993 by Longman Group Limited Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Rautledge is an imprint af the Taylar & Prancis Graup, an infarma business Copyright © 1993, Taylor & Prancis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. 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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-21237-4 (pbk) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A cataloguc record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Dilta Anderson, M. S. (Matthew Smith) Thc rise ofmodern diplomacy, 1450-1919/ M.S. Anderson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical referenccs and index. ISBN 0-582-21232-4 (cased). -- ISBN 0-582-21237-5 (paper) 1. Diplomacy--History. 2. International relations--History. 1. Tide. ]X1635.A53 1993 327.2'09--dc20 92-34237 CIP Sct by 7B in 10/12pt Bembo Contents Priface VII Introduction VIII 1. The 'New Diplomacy' of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth 11. Centuries The new diplomatie world takes shape 1. Praetiealities and arehaisms 20 2. Old Regime Diplomacy at its Height, c. 1600-1789 41 The legaey of the past 41 Change and developmcnt 69 Divisions and unities: frontiers and language 96 3. Coming to Terms with aChanging World, 1789-1919 103 The strugglc to modcrnise 103 New tasks and widcning scope 128 4. The Balance ofPower 149 The origins: to the age of Louis XIV 149 Thc golden age: thc cighteenth eentury 163 Thc nineteenth eentury: ehallenge and survival 181 5. The Quest for International Peace 204 Thc first aspirations: to the end of thc scvcntccth eentury 204 The eightccnth eentury: eseapc from thc state of nature? 219 Thc nincteenth ecntury: hopes and realitics 236 Conclusion 291 Sugs;estions for FlIrther Reading 294 Index 300 Thispageintentionallyleftblank PreJace This book, which is based in part on many years of teaching at the London School of Economics, attempts to supplement in some significant ways conventional histories of international relations for the period which it covers. It does this by concentrating on some aspects of the subject which tend in the normal undergraduate course to receive relatively little attention and to be forced to the periphery of what is discussed. It deals therefore with a number of topics which collectively cover a large area of historical ground and which are somewhat varied. Each has its own interest and importance: each has been written about extensively over this long period. I have attempted to use this large body of historical writing to paint a coherent picture, both of the developing framework of diplomacy which more and more bound the states of Europe together throughout much of the continent's modern history and of the parallel discussion of the meaning of these links and of the objectives to which they might or should be directed. Inevitably, given the length of the period and the many-faceted nature of the subject, the picture has been painted with a fairly broad brush. I hope, however, that what may have been lost in terms of the finer details has been counterbalanced by gains in scope and breadth. A book such as this is impossible to write without access to rich library resources. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the indispensable help, with this and much other writing, which I have received over many years from the British Library, the London Library and, in my own college, the British Library ofPolitical and Economic Science. M.S. ANDERSON London Vll Introduction Any group of independent states with interests and ambitions of their own, living side by side and united by some basic community of oudook and traditions, must have some degree of formal and organised contact with one another. What has distinguished the states of Europe in this respect throughout modern history has been the increasingly dose and wide-ranging nature of this contact, the growth of a network of institutions through which it has been carried on, and the way in which it has come to transcend, from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the merely governmental sphere and to spill over into a wide range of others, technical, intellectual and economic. During the middle ages the mlers of Europe could not avoid maintaining relations with one another, even though these often had a large element of symbolism and conspicuous displayas much as of genuine political content. But there was then litde or nothing in the way of institutions concerned solely or even mainly with the formulation and conduct of foreign poliey. Professional diplomats and any idea of diplomacy as a career with a distinct nature and demands of its own did not exist. The ideal of some effeetive unity of Christendom against an alien and generally hostile outside world retained genuine power and popular appeal, however unreal it might now be beeoming in praetice; but beyond this there was litde which eould be ealled international theory. Respeet for the papaey as a potential arbiter in disputes between secular mlers, and perhaps for the Holy Roman Emperor as a monarch in some sense superior to others, were not enough to justify the use of such a term; and otherwise there was litde rationale for the relations between states apart from the endless eonflicting dynastie and other claims of individual monarehs. With the world outside Europe, Vlll Introduction indeed outside western and eentral Europe, relations were slight in the extreme, diplomatie eontacts rare and usually marked by mutual suspieion and misunderstanding. Until at least the end of the sixteenth eentury an embassy even to Russia was a eonsiderable and possibly dangerous adventure and one to the sultan in Constantinople or the shah of Persia even more so. By the beginning of the twentieth eentury, as the generations whieh saw the formation of the modern Europe-shaped and Europe-dominated world drew to a dose, all this had ehanged. Foreign poliey was now a major preoceupation of every European government. Often, in a politieal environment marked by growing eompetition between states and by teehnological developments which made any confliet between them mueh more potentially destructive, it was their main preoeeupation. The major states of the middle ages, in which power was normally diffused widely among the subordinate struetures - provincial or noble assemblies, self-governing cities, corporate bodies of all kinds - which made them up, had the vitality and powers of survival of so many primitive and undeveloped organisms. Though they might suffer defeat on the battlefield they were diffieult or impossible to eonquer in any lasting sense. The mueh more sophistieated and centralised ones of the deeades before 1914 were more vulnerable beeause they were so mueh more advaneed. They were therefore foreed to give more, and more continuous, attention to the activities and possible intentions of their neighbours. Diplomacy, moreover, was now, and had for generations been beeoming, at least a kind of profession. Everywhere foreign offices, now rapidly beeoming larger, more complex in their organisation and, with some reluctanee, wider in their view of what eonstituted international relations, executed and sometimes planned foreign poliey. A network of institutions whieh had grown up over a long period in response to practical necessities now provided the foundation for unpreeedentedly dose and eontinuous relations between the states. Moreover, this institutional framework was now being extended beyond Europe and beginning to embrace not merely her great independent offshoot in North Ameriea but the few other non.,.European states, notably Japan, whieh already eonducted signifieant foreign policies of their own. The process whieh would soon extend this European system to the world in general was now under way. The four eenturies or more between the end of the middle ages and the First W orld War also saw the development of a body of generally aeeepted rules whieh defined and safeguarded the position and status of diplomats. At the same time their aetivities came increasingly to be seen in terms of ideas and ideals whieh gave unity and so me underlying intellectual strueture (if that is not too elevated a term) to the growmg IX