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EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE EUROPEAN SYSTEM

IMANUEL GEISS*

The main emphasis on the study and political or ideological appreciation of modern Revolutions has been, so far, largely on domestic aspects-social, economic or political origins and consequences of revolutions, the struggles between established and rising social and political factors including the crown, estates, parliaments, classes, political parties. The perspective is mostly turned to the inside of the revolutionary subject. Repercussions abroad are not neglected, but, again also then mostly addressed to how potential or real revolutionary subjects reacted for or against the original Revolution, in particular since the French Revolution.

The classical approach to modern Revolutions may be summed up as one of the ‘Primat der Innenpolitik’, the primacy of the domestic dimension, to use a slogan of recent historiographic controversies amongst German historians. The legitimacy of that approach is not challenged or doubted for a moment, and the following paper is not to be misunderstood as an attempt to establish a counter- primacy, that of ‘Augenpolitik’, of the external or international dimension. It is rather only a modest proposal for complementing the necessarily and justly overwhelming emphasis on internal dimensions by adding henceforth the also important dimension of foreign policy or international relations. After all, revolutions as dramatic shifts of domestic power in Great European Powers, had their impact, too, at times no less dramatic, on the balance of power in Europe, i.e. on international relations between the revolutionised power and the other powers. One could also call my paper an exercise in analysing the impact of Revolutions on the balance of power and of war in their time.

The logically indispensible link between internal and external dimensions of

Revolutions is the nation-state. Revolution is a speciality of modern European History: The great European Revolutions took place within we&defined boundaries of emerging national states, even if their impact extended well beyond, on other societies and national states. National state and Revolution, both products and agencies of emerging modern economic forces, culminating into Industrialism, also represented power. Revolutions changed the power status of a society in the throes of political reorganisation, disturbed the balance of power between the Great Powers of the European Pentarchy. National revolutions in nations greater or small, thus, appear linked to the history of power within the European System that gradually emerged since the Middle

Ages. Revolution either weakened a society by internal conflicts or strengthened it by mobilising tremendous social energies that turned also outside. Usually, internal conflicts or civil wars weaken a society to the point of its becoming an at least relative power vacuum. But once a Revolution has established itself, it

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releases new social energies, at first in defending revolutionary achievements, and later in expanding the principles of revolution. Revolutions inside Great Powers were one of those great changes that were always accompanied by wars, internal or external ones, sometimes one after the other. On the other hand, wars with their financial, economic and social costs, could also pave the way for Revolutions.

Growth of power can even be seen as a consequence or as a motivation of revolutions in a given ‘national’ society, beginning with the secession of Holland from Spain and the English Revolutions of 1640-60 and 1688/89, the secession of the thirteen English colonies in North America to form the United States, the French Revolution, the abortive German Revolution of 1848/49 to the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions. The present paper wrll forthwith concentrate on the growth of power through revolutions in Europe, taking the initial phases of weakness for granted.

In order to avoid unnecessary and irritating vagueness by an inflated use of the category of Revolution, the term should be confined to those social and political upheavals that are clearly linked to the Industrial Revolution and its immediate forerunners: If the English Revolutions of the 17th century can be justly considered as the first modern European revolution, the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, leading 1581 to the establishment of the seven northern provinces as an independent sovereign new national state, threw up the Dutch as the leading commercial and naval power in Europe during most of the 17th century. This had certainly not been an aim of the rebels against Spain, but it became, nevertheless, the supreme result of their secession from Spain. Holland also became the much envied model of other national societies aspiring to what Adam Smith later called the ‘wealth of nations’. England, intimately linked to the Netherlands across the Channel, was the first national state to take up the challenge and to learn their lesson from the Dutch national Revolution, coupled with the emergence of modern economic forces.

The dimension of power was clearly of even greater relevance in the case ofthe English Revolutions of the 17th century. in particular in its first period, of

1640-60: Those groups whose agitation and actions-primarily for domestic reasons-prepared the way for the Civil War and the rule of Parliament under Oliver Cromwell, also pressed for English expansion overseas, in particular towards the West Indies against Spain. Their overall aim was to establish an English Empire in its own right in the New World, which would also claim a share in the developing World Trade to both Indies (East and West). The clash with the great super-power of the time, Spain, then in union with Portugal, thus became inevitable and was, indeed, linked to the internal conflicts in several ways, increasingly so under the Stuarts: The Crown was prodded into confrontation with Catholic Spain, ostentatiously for ideological (Protestant) reasons, but also for the motive of inaugurating England’s Expansion overseas. On the other hand, for internal reasons-mistrust against a king (Charles I) who was justly, as it turned out, suspected of inclining secretly towards both Catholicism and absolute government without Parliament-Parliament largely withheld from the Crown the financial, naval and military means necessary for fighting Spain effectively.

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Parliament having won the Civil War and reigning supreme through Oliver Cromwell, England turned immediately to her first phase of serious expansion overseas, laying the foundations of British commercial and naval power, finally of the British colonial empire: Charles I was executed in 1649, the reconquest of predominantly Catholic Ireland started in the same year. The Navigation Act of 1651 was, on the face of it, only an economic challenge against Holland and the Dutch near-monopoly in the carrying trade, but its implications went further: by reserving to English ships the carrying of English goods between England and her colonies at a time when England hardly possessed any colonies to speak of, she served notice to all interested that England intended to have enough colonies in future to be worth fighting Holland for, then the strongest naval power of the time. The First Anglo-Dutch War duly followed in 1652-54. After its conclusion the victorious Parliamentarians set out for Cromwell’s ‘Grand Design’-the conquest of Hispaniola. When it failed in 1655, at least smaller and less attractive Jamaica was conquered to become the real basis of England’s future colonial empire in the West Indies-sugar plantations and Negro slavery, which, in its turn, drew England into the Triangle Slave Trade across the Atlantic.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688189 was to consolidate the domestic gains of constitutional government against James II’s attempt to establish absolute government to end the compromise period of the Restoration of 1660. The personal union between England and Holland merged the raison d’ittat of both states against French aspirations for hegemony over continental Europa under Louis XIV-defence of Holland against French aggression, but also beating back France’s challenge to become the colonial super-power of the time by subordinating the Spanish colonial empire under French overule through a Bourbon King ruling in Madrid for England. At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession England, meanwhile in real union also with Scotland, had risen to become one of the European Great Powers.

The link between Revolution and Power through War is also massive in the case of the American Revolution, the first revolutionary secession in New Europa beyond the Atlantic from the rule of a Mother Country: During the hegemonial wars against France, from the War of the Spanish Succession to the Seven Years’ War, England had won supremacy on the northeastern seaboard of North America. At the same time, most American colonists in the thirteen English colonies were neither prepared to shoulder the financial costs of their defence against the French through increased taxes without the grant of more political rights, i.e. direct parliamentary representation in Westminster (‘No taxation without representation’), nor to stomach the at least temporary check to their expansion inland for the sake of protecting the native Red Indians, ordered by a well-meaning Central Government at home. Conflict with the English Mother Country became inevitable.

The American War of Independence, also called the American Revolution, created, along the pattern of the Revolt of the Netherlands, a new national state to become an even greater power, through a succession of international wars, small and great, and a bloody Civil War almost in the middle of U.S.-history. The vision of future imperial power was embodied in the very architecture of its Federal capital, Washington D.C., with its Capitol in neo-classical style-the

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Fourth Rome, after Constantinople and Moscow, staking out its claim to become a future World Power. ‘Manifest Destiny’ and Democracy for the World became the ideology, the prosperity of liberal capitalist industrialism the material basis of the future World Power, which appealed to a flood of new immigrants, first from Europe, recently also from other parts of the world, including Mexico. High-flung idealism notwithstanding, the U.S.A. could also resort to wars for further expansion on the Continent, against Red Indians and Mexico. But her real breakthrough as the greatest World Power of our time came through American involvement in two World Wars, when Europe proved unable to maintain her classical balance of power through European powers alone.

Again a different turn can be seen in the interplay between wars and Revolution in the case of France. Since the battle of Bouvines 1214, France had been the first, and for centuries the only Great Power in medieval Latin Europe. Great Powers arose as a direct or indirect result of French aspirations under Louis XIV to conquer hegemony over Continental Europe, in league with the Ottoman Empire at the apparent height of its power, first Austria after defeating the Turks before Vienna m 1683, then England at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Inevitably, the new Great Powers in their turn curbed French ambitions as the hegemonial power. A succession of French de- feats since the costly War of the Spanish Succession ushered in the great crisis of the absolutist Ancien Regime. Every defeat, which strengthened England’s expansion overseas, in particular in India and North America. further weakened the absolute monarchy in France. According to Tocqueville, stnce about 1750 whatever the Government did. it worked mto the hands of the commg Revolu- tion. This would well accord with the smarting setback after the War of the Austrian Succession in the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in 1748. Again according to Tocqueville, the burden of public debt, then still represented by the Indebtedness of the Crown to private debtors, rose twentifold durmg the War of the Spanish Succession, and it grew to the dimensions of an avalanche that was to bury the Ancien Regime in the French Revolution. Even an apparently successful war-French intervention into the War of American Independence as a kind of revanche for the losses incurred through the Seven Years’ War since 1778- added to the impending financial catastrophe. which forced the Crown to appeal to the General Estates that had not been m session since 1614. It was the central problem of just taxation through a national representation that made the convening of the General Estates unavoidable and precipitated the downfall of

the absolute monarchy. The French Revolution is the supreme example of how a national revolution,

by social reorganisation and emancipating new social forces, was able to dynamise society and to set free tremendous energies that could upset the prevailing balance of powers: but for the humbling defeats of an inept absolute monarchy and an aristocracy, made increasingly parasitic through the very Crown to eliminate rebellious noblemen as serious rivals to the absolute King ruling supreme, France still was in 1789 the most populous Great Power in Europe, with the highest cultural prestige.

Revolution in the then still greatest Great Power of Europe was bound to upset the precarious balance of power of the European Pentarchy, that had been

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completed by the rise of Russia as the hegemonial Great Power in the East by 1721 and of little Prussia, largely as a client state of rapidly expanding Russia by 1763 or 1772. Under new ideological banners-first revolutionary Re- publicanism, then the Napoleonic Empire of the exJacobin Bonaparte and his followers-modernised France for a brief period seemed to have reached what had eluded the Ancien Regime, hegemony over vast parts of the Continent, only to be shared for a few years (1807-l 1) with Tsarist Russia. But by 1813 the anti- hegemonial bias of the European system mobilised all other Great Powers and some medium powers such as Sweden into a Grand Alliance that alone proved able to fight down Napoleon. Yet revolutionised and modernised France had proved so overwhelmingly powerful that the coalition of almost the rest of Europa had become necessary to defeat France in all but complete isolation.

The lesson was not lost on the other Great Powers: holding down future national revolts by the Concert of Powers and to avoid, if possible, major wars involving all the Great Powers at the time, because such a general conflagration could pave the way to revolution at least in the one Great Power defeated and exhausted by a Great War. Later on Bismarck, during and after the founding of the Second German Empire, was to make that consideration the very cornerstone of his conservative foreign policy. Since the Crimean War and the ensuing deep crisis of the Tsarist Ancien Regime, superficially ended by the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, Russia seemed to be the most likely candidate for the next revolution in one of the Great Powers.

The counter-concept to the conservative strategy for avoiding Revolution was that of Mazzini’s for a European Revolution: The European nations were to liberate themselves by overthrowing their princes in a series of national upheavals and to unite in a bond of peaceful brotherhood subsequently-‘Young Europe’ against ‘Old Europe’. The one great European war would be a kind of crusade against Tsarist Russian, the bulwark of Reaction and Conservativism. The minimum aim would have been the liberation of Poland from the yoke of Tsarism, the maximum aim the overthrow of Tsarist autocracy in Russia as well to secure Revolution and Peace for liberated democratic Europe. Such a European-wide Revolution seemed to be in the offing in the ‘Spring of Nations’ in 1848, when the Provisional Government in France after the February Revolution sought to mobilise the national movements against the monarchical forces of the status quo and when the liberal March Government in Prussia appeared prepared to open the war for the liberation of Poland against Tsarist Russia.’ But most nationalities fell out with each other.2

In contrast to the more straightforward relation between Revolution and national power expressed through wars, in the cases of Holland, England, the U.S.A. and France, we have a much more complicated picture in the case of Germany, full of contrasts and discrepancies. Germany, in the first phase of her medieval Empire, the first power centre in Latin Europe from 955/962 to 1198. had been for most of her history a relative power vacuum, fragmentated behind the facade of the Old Empire. Since the late 17th century regional powers had risen, Austria and Prussia, but they cancelled out each other by their rivalries and invited foreign intervention into Germany even more so. As European battlefield par excellence since the Thirty Years’ War, Germany suffered from a power

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deficit that made her almost helpless vis-h-vis the other European powers. The aftermath of the French Revolution destroyed also the facade of the Old German Empire, executed by the heir of the French Revolution, Napoleon I, in 1806.

With the end of the Old German Empire the perennial German Question was opened, the question, how the Germans were to be organised in such a way, that they and their neighbours were content at the same time. After Napoleon’s downfall the European Powers barred the resurrection of another German Reich, because they feared that the union of all Germans in one national state would make a new Reich automatically the hegemonial power in Europe. It would disrupt the new balance of power that was to be sought after reducing France to the size of a normal Great Power. The German Confederation (Deutscher Bund), therefore, was a kind of modified continuation of the Old German Empire, slightly modernised and simplified. Basically, it remained a structure to organise Germany as a retative power vacuum in the European System, sanctioned by international law. But the rise of modern nationalism and industrialism after the French revolution encouraged also nationalism in Germany. It crystallised around the idea of creating a new German Reich. The German Revolution of 1848/49 within the European Revolution, therefore, centred politically, notwithstanding social aspects, on the problem how and with which structure to establish another German Reich. The effort failed for internal conflicting concepts-‘grolJdeutsch’-‘kleindeutsch’-that drove German na- tionalism into paralysis. Also the attitude of the other Great Powers, in particular Russia, contributed to the failure of German patriots to resurrect a new Reich in 1849. The German Revolution of 1848/9, thus, was also motivated by the beckoning opporturuty of power for a German Reich,’ but it failed to overcome the by now traditional status of a power vacuum in the first round.

The second round came with Bismarck, who did succeed, where the liberal revolutionaries of 1848 had foundered. Even his Little German Empire propelled Germany into the position of the strongest Continental power, now on the basis of a dynamic industrialisation, leading to economic and demographic growth. From now onwards, German unification of 1871 was called by Disraeh ‘the

German Revolution’, which he equalled to the French Revolution. This was another definition of ‘German Revolution’, now restricted to the sphere of international relations. Seen against the background of Power and Revolution, that metaphorical use of ‘Revolution’, applied to Germany, might well be justified, because the founding of the German Empire in 1871 led, in a twisted path though, to the terrible upheavals of two World Wars, ending with the destruction of the German Reich in 1945.

Yet, there was another concept of German Revolution, non-political as it behove the status of Germany at the time. Heinrich Heine, in 1835, when explaining to the Frenchmen what was brewing up East of the Rhine in the deceptively calm of the Biedermeier, called the stupendous cultural explosion of Germany’s classical period the ‘German Revolution’, on the same level as the Industrial Revolution of England and the political Revolution of France. Both kinds of ‘German Revolution’, can. indeed, be seen as belonging together, even though in a very intricate and ambivalent manner, which cannot be explained here in any detail. The German Revolution of 1848/49. which failed in its central political aim, creating another German Reich. can also be linked to the German

European Revolutions and the European System 3.57

Revolution in November 1918, at the End of World War I. The German collapse inside then was the normal reaction of a society against a grievious military defeat outside, but instantly and in the hour of defeat. Again the German Revolution of 1918 was linked to the dimension of power, but negatively, as it were. The next so-called ‘German Revolution’, at least in the understanding and propaganda of their exponents, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, had the explicit aim to overcome the power deficit of the Weimar Republic and to raise Germany again to the status of a power centre in its own right. The net result was the Greater German Reich of 1938 and the Second World war of 1939-45, which ended in the destruction of the German Reich altogether.

Yet another combination of Revolution, Power and War can be seen at work in Russian History. As all other Great Powers, also Russia forced her entrance into the European Pentarchy by wars, first against Poland in the 16th and 17th centuries, in the 18th and 19th centuries mainly against the Ottoman Empire. Her real breakthrough as the hegemonial Great Power in the East came with the Nordic War (1700-21) against Sweden, which also brought declining Poland within the expanding orbit of Russian imperial power and coincided with the First Russo-Turkish War (1710-l 1). The rapid change of theatres ofwar leading to Napoleon’s downfall-from Moscow 1812 to Paris 18 14-injected first liberal ideas into Russian society on a broader basis-Russian officers going West as far as Paris, brought back into autocratic Russia subversive ideas of Constitution and social reform, leading to the ferment of the Decabrist Revolt of 1825.

Because of Russia’s backwardness compared with the West and the fragility of her rare modern superstructures, in particular the Army, the dialectical interplay between war and Revolution was particularly massive, with escalating brutality: Tsarist Russia had been the rocher de bronze of autocracy against the floods of revolution and democracy in the European Revolution of 1848/49 and was decisive in beating down the revolutionary upsurge by military intervention in 1849-actually executed in the Danube Principalities and Hungary, obliquely threatened in Germany, prompting Prussia into action instead. The very victory of autocracy, however, only increased Russia’s distance to the West, as was shown dramatically by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of the Western industrialising powers. Immediately after, Russia was thrown into the throes of threatening social revolution on the land, inarticulate, chaotic and menacing Russian society as a whole. In order to canalise the social movement the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861 emerged as a compromise solution, trying, at the same time, to take a leaf out of the experience of the Prussian Reforms after 1807. But Bismarck, then Prussian minister to St. Petersburg, from then onwards saw Revolution lurking behind the imposing facade of autocratic Tsarism. The height of Russian expansion at the end of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877/78 saw Russian troops before Constantinople, but also inside Russia the first revolutionary upsurge of the terrorist wing of the Narodniki. A continuation of the war in 1878 might have led to even more serious revolutionary trouble. Russia’s serious defeat in her next major war at the hands of Japan in 1904/5 immediately provoked the first Russian Revolution of 1905. The First World War brought even more serious defeats and general dislocation owing to the general backwardness of the country, cut off from Western supplies. The Russian Revolutions of 1917, culminating in the victory of the Bolsheviks, were the

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immediate consequence: ‘The October Revolution, born out of War’, as Lenin himself put it. Like the USA, the Soviet Union emerged from the Second World War, in which, however, at first she played an ambiguous part.

What we presently witness under Gorbatchov is a desperate attempt to save the position of an over-commited and over-extended Communist World Power by reducing its overcommitments abroad in order to save money and personnel for overdue reforms at home. The net result of the most revolutionary operation the Soviet Union experienced since its beginning could well be the retreat from untenable positions in the world on the one hand, internal conflicts to the point of civil war, on the other. Such an extreme outcome of Gorbatchov’s perestrojka would be disastrous to all concerned. It is already now leading the principle of Communist revolution ad absurdum in a welter of threatening chaos.

Universitiit Bremen

imanuel Geiss

NOTES

1. James Chastam. The Liberatron qf Foreign Peoples. The French Forogn PU/KJ~ ~tf 1848 (Athens Ohlo: Ohlo Umverslty Press, 1988).

2. Jean Slgmann, Eighteen Fortyelght. The Romantic and Democrartic Revolurrons in

Europe (London: Allen and Unwm, 1973). 3. Giinter Wollstein. Das GroJdeutschland der Pauls-klrche (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1977).