This had occurred on 13 July. The King’s secretary Heinrich Abeken wrote a summary of the incident and sent it to Bismarck in Berlin with permission to release it to the press. As the story goes, Bismarck, with Roon and Moltke at the time and distraught over the seeming collapse of his French policy now that war seemed to be averted, was revivified by the telegram, whereupon he edited it, reducing the King’s conciliatory phrases and making the whole affair seem much more insulting to the French and also to Germans than it had actually been. It was then sent to the press and spread to foreign embassies, arousing German opinion against the seemingly importunate Benedetti and France and the French against an outright Prussian insult. France declared war on the 19th.

With this background we can better assess the issue of diplomatic intent. In this case it revolves around what role Bismarck had in the candidacy issue and, if he did have one, what his intentions were for it. It is a particularly interesting but also vexing problem, as based on the same evidence different historians have made entirely different explanations. The reason I find this troublesome is because these explanations are not assertions of opinion or interpretation, where one would expect to find often contradictory views, but rather are explanations of what, in the authors view, did or did not happen in a factual sense.

The issue starts with Bismarck himself, who at the time distanced himself from the Hohenzollern candidacy but not long after, and especially later in life, sought to fully stake his claim as the man who welded Germany together by stating that he had engineered the entire dispute with a view to defeating France and drawing the south German states into the North German Confederation.*1  As with any memoirs or recollections by historical actors, one has to be careful in taking Bismarck at his word. One historian who does not believe him is the indefatigable A.J.P. Taylor, who argues in his biography of Bismarck and in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe that there is no evidence that Bismarck worked for a war with France that summer, that if he had intended this fiasco to erupt into war he would have been at Ems with the King, and that overall his behaviour was ‘…improvised and is only consistent with the explanation that the crisis took him by surprise.’ This is demonstrated by the fact that when the Ems telegram arrived he was also working on a plan to present an ultimatum to France hoping to provoke a war.*2

Taylor, although a tremendous historian of insight rarely read in most works on international history, was also given to exaggeration and near fabrication in some of his works. Other historians have taken the exact opposite approach. William Carr argues that Bismarck, who claimed he had heard nothing about the candidacy issue until July, was well aware of it since February and sought a definite advantage by it.*3  Otto Pflanze, in his excellent first volume of Bismarck and the Development of Germany, states that Bismarck was directly involved in the candidature (while maintaining a facade of non-involvement)  which was a policy meant to set Prussia on a collision course with France, either to provoke a war or a diplomatic victory for Prussia. Part of his explanation for his certainty is is thoughtful yet still questionable: how could Bismarck, perhaps the greatest foreign policy practitioner of the century, who had handled prior crises with such aplomb, have allowed this situation to develop to the point where, as Taylor argues, he would be surprised and forced to improvise.*4  This is a compelling point, as it is somewhat hard to believe that Bismarck would, first, not be aware of the candidacy and, second, not once aware be totally alive to the explosive potential it would have on relations with France. At the same time, it does play too much into the myth of Bismarckian infallibility. Certainly he was a genius of diplomacy, but that is not to say that he could make mistakes, however unlikely they might be.

So what was Bismarck’s role in the candidature and what were his plans for France in the spring of 1870? Unclear, and likely to remain that way, although there seems to be evidence of Bismarck’s hand in the whole affair. Regardless, even supposing he was directly involved, what his intention was is entirely unclear. Pflanze’s explanation again seems the best. Most likely he had every possibility in mind. Bismarck’s goal remained fixed, but there were many roads to it. He was always careful to, whenever possible, keep as many roads open as possible, following the most dangerous one only as a last choice. Therefore that spring he likely intended to humiliate France, with war being one option.

But as to the issue of whether the candidacy crisis came as a surprise or whether it was one of Bismarck’s well laid plans, I suppose we must refer to the name of this blog and imagine that someone must be inventing at least part of their story.

B.E.L.

*1 William Carr, The Origins of the Wars of German Unification. Longman, 1991, 180.

*2 A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. Hamish Hamilton, 1955, 115; The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Oxford, 1954, 205 n. 2.

*3 Carr, 180.

*4 Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, Vol. I: 1815-1871. Princeton, 1990, 446-462.

China would find anything but this, at least until Mao’s death in 1976. The names “Hundred Flowers”, “Great Leap Forward” and “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” conjure up images of brutal denunciation campaigns, mass famine, and out-of-control violence. Mao was of the opinion that the revolution was a ongoing process. Any apparent stagnation would only lead to an ossified bureaucracy that would never achieve the communist utopia. But China did make strides under Mao. The cost was terrible, and the intense terrors of the period from 1966 to 1969 left an indelible mark on Chinese society.

Since 1976, and despite the initial leadership of Hua Guofeng, China has followed a different path. It is still a one party state, but Mao’s Trotskyist idea of a permanent revolution (which was rather risky at first, as his first expressions of it occured while Stalin was still alive), has, quite rightly, been binned by the party. Instead, the party has made a form of social contract with the people: stability and economic prosperity for the people and a compliant populace that will continue to accept the current mode of government. It has worked well to this point. The inherent dangers in the system I will get to below.

To return to the people I saw on the road today. I wondered if they were expressing their joy for China as a nation or for the regime whose anniversary it is today. In some ways I imagine that it is both. Modern China has been created under the current regime, and it seems difficult to think about the mainland Chinese nation as something separate from that party state. The regime made a great show of strength today in a mass military parade, the likes of which have not been seen since the Cold War (excepting North Korea which likes to show off its 1950s vintage equipment). There is great pride in China and the international Chinese community that a country that was prostrate a century ago is now a great power and perhaps poised to be a genuine superpower. The Communist Party of China has made this happen, or at least enabled it, since 1976.

But beneath the veneer of a cohesive and happy people under the rule of benevolent leaders there lies much that is troubling. I’m not writing of the standard human rights abuses, which of course exist. Rather, it is the more systemic or structural problems that China has, ones that will be much harder to fix. One is that all of China’s much touted economic boom has been geographically concentrated on the coast. The interior, where most people live, is still largely poor, rural, and isolated. The countryside also features a considerable excess of labour. Numbering in the millions, this casual labour force roams the countryside, picking up work during harvests but is not able to find steady work. Even the prosperity has perhaps been built on sand. The boom came on low wages and a manipulated currency, neither of which are tenable in the long term. Eventually they will be forced to abandon these policies, at least in part, and China will become subject the the recessions and depressions that we are used to. The regime will have trouble justifying its unchallenged existence if this were to happen.

The roaming population is one source of another major problem facing the regime: protests and small-scale revolts against local party authorities throughout the country. The government naturally tries to keep these as limited and secret as possible. Reliable numbers on the disturbances are impossible to know. What is known though is that they are widespread and much more common than one might think. Some of it comes down to ethnicity, such as the major Uyghur unrest in Xinjiang earlier this summer and the always ongoing Tibetan issue. But Han Chinese are increasingly chafing at what they see and experience: mass corruption at the local party level and among local party bosses. An entirely unresponsive government apparatus that covers up manmade environmental disasters and catastrophes caused by the corruption and incompetence of officials. Witness the schools that collapsed and killed thousands of students during the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes. Corruption and embezzlement were clearly involved in the poor condition of the new school buildings. The understandably angry parents, many of whom of course lost their only child, were in turn suppressed by the government when they tried to protest this corruption and incompetence. Unless the party apparatus becomes more responsive this will only get worse. Of course, becoming more responsive could actually lead to more dissent and a further unravelling of their power, much like what happened in the Eastern Bloc in the late 80s.

China could be a truly dominant world power, but I am not sure if its political system can handle the rigours of dealing with its own population over the long term. This is the one thing that could truly stop China’s ascendancy. Despite this, I do think that the the people on Spadina today have good reason to be proud of China, and can be grateful for some of the things that this regime has done. But the Chinese people are demanding much more and I think this will become more open and apparent as we move through the next decade of the PRC.

B.E.L.

There are many elements that have remained relatively constant through history. States relate to one another through diplomacy. They use various forms of force, sometimes more soft and coercive, sometimes more open and violent, to achieve what some people within states see as their interests. In the theoretical world it is often argued that the international system is and has always been anarchic, a position associated with Realist scholars. Michael Mandelbaum has written that the anarchic state of affairs has persisted from the days of Athens and Sparta to our own time. Despite modern innovations such as the United Nations, states fundamentally still act on their own and largely on what important groups within states see as their national interest.*1 Mandelbaum argues that there have been important changes, such as the Napoleonic wars, the First World War, and the advent of nuclear arms. However, despite efforts after all three of these to consruct a new international system, states always fell back on older concepts of a balance of power within an anarchic system.*2

Mandelbaum writes from a political science perspective, and my days as a poli sci student during my undergraduate years left me with a strong distaste for theoretical musings on international relations that largely ignore the nuance of historical study. But I do think that Mandelbaum’s most basic notion of limited change is important. F.H. Hinsley, who was certainly more given to solid historical research and explanation than Mandelbaum, wrote these sobering words in the 1960s:

“That a civilisation which has broken through immense barriers in almost every other direction, and which has surpassed all its predecessors on innumerable fronts, should still hold views and pursue programs in international politics that it held and pursued when it was young – this is the outstanding failure of recent times. Only one thing is more surprising: we do not yet recognise this failure.”*3

When I look at the situation that states find themselves in today, I am inclined to agree with Hinsley’s assessment. Many of the tragedies wrought by our modes of international relations, such as warfare as a means of policy, are still with us today. Indeed, it may seem that rather then being cyclical or progressive, our international history has been regressive, with warfare over the centuries increasing in scope, intensity, and the means of violence used.

Regardless, even if many of the fundamentals remain the same, we have learned, or at least attempted to learn, how to manage ourselves better in the face of technological innovation that could destroy us. Hinsley himself admits that such learning has taken place. An example is the change that took place during the era of the Congress of Vienna, where there was a conscious effort to move beyond the two types of balance of power that had existed prior; the first was that which attempted to keep down a hegemonic power. The second was the competitive and ultimately destructive balance of power system that existed during the era of roughly equal power in the second half of the 18th century. The statesmen at Vienna wanted something different, and it was an example of learning.

Paul Schroeder has made a similar point in a more elaborate way in his book The Transformation of European Politics, which sees 1813-1815 as vital years in this transformation. The key point is that the way states related to one another was not changed in any fundamental way. They were still separate entities, pursuing their own interests. However, they began to learn that restraint and maintaining a less outrightly competitive balance could, in the long run, be much more beneficial to their interests that older modes of statecraft. Schroeder has written that “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.”*4  Indeed, he goes so far as to answer a question posed above: his position is that international politics are less cyclical and more progressive, with subtle changes advancing over time.*5

My own view on this is that the state is only one element of human society. It is an artificial construct, but it has an extraordinarily long history and has been important in how human society is organized. Of course there are always powers above and below the state,*6  but there is no denying the existence of its importance, despite efforts by some to do so.

I think that Schroeder is right to say that there is some progress amidst what I stated above as some regression. Indeed, much of the regression has not come from international relations itself, but the instruments of international relations, such as weapons technology. People may not be any more warlike than in the past, but their ability to damage their enemies and themselves has grown nearly beyond human comprehension. There still is tremendous danger, but we have learned. If we acted like states of the 18th century I think that a nuclear war would have obliterated the planet long before I had the chance to write this, and probably even before I was born.

The building blocks of the international system are still largely the same as they have always been. What I think is vital is that we have added new things above, like the United Nations. What is even more important is what has happened below. Those of us who are not leaders, who are regular people living within states, are the ones who since 1792 have increasingly borne the weight of warfare as an instrument of international politics. As the political consciousness of the masses has fully bloomed over the past two centuries there has been definite pressure from below on those who direct international politics to change how policy is carried out. Large parts of human society have revolted against the standard methods of international politics, and although this cannot always change how states relate to one another, it is cause for hope for the future and, indeed, a sign of progress in international relations.

B.E.L.

*1 Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics Before and After Hiroshima, Cambridge UP, 1981, 5.

*2 ibid., 15-20.

*3 F.H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States, Cambridge UP, 1963, 3.

*4 Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848, Oxford UP, 1994, viii.

*5 ibid., xiii.

*6 An important recent article in this regard makes clear that international relations takes place below the state level. Renaud Morieux has shown this in his study of English and French fishing villages that conducted their own diplomacy and constructed truce agreements at various points during “The Second Hundred Years War” from 1689-1815. See Renaud Morieux, “Diplomacy from Below and Belonging: Fishermen and Cross-Channel Relations in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 202 (February 2009), 83-125.

This evening Mr. Frum, during a discussion of the current health care debate, noted the perhaps faulty accounting of President Obama’s health care plan, which will apparently pay for itself through savings and efficiencies. I have no idea whether or not that is true, but Frum then stated that a similar situation happened before the Iraq War; neoconservative boosters of an invasion had been touting since the mid-1990s that any invasion of Iraq would pay for itself. Frum stated that President Obama should keep that in mind for his current health care ideas.

What Frum clearly neglected to mention was that he himself was the self-satisfied mouthpiece of all those neocons who had supported the war with all their arguments that have since proven wildly optimistic at best. So he stands on CNN acting as if he is an independant force who sees through the nonsense of both sides. Wolf Blitzer is so spineless that he obviously said nothing about it.

B.E.L.

*Limited Time Offer

The final round of The Open Championship from Turnberry, after it was all over and I was moping about Tom Watson’s swift and devastating collapse (shades of Greg Norman’s meltdown at the 1996 Masters, although not nearly as brutal), made me think about a golf tournament as an analogy for historical causation. By the end of the tournament on Sunday there was one winner, Stewart Cink. This was the effect. What was the cause? In the immediate short-term, it was because Tom Watson hit a series of poor shots in the playoff and Cink played almost perfectly over those four holes. To step back further, the playoff happened because Cink birdied the final hole to get within one stroke of Watson who shortly after bogied 18, which left the two tied. Two causes are then the birdie putt and the bogey putt. But, to put Nietzsche’s idea into effect, each only became a cause of the specific outcome because of the outcome itself. If Watson had made par on 18 then Cink’s birdie putt, which in retrospect is so vital to the outcome, becomes meaningless.

Even without Nietzsche’s wrench thrown into the mix, sorting out causation in the E.H. Carr sense becomes nearly impossible the further back we go in the tournament. Every single stroke made by Watson, Cink, and indeed every other player could be a cause. And yet that in effect is to say that the tournament as a whole is the cause of victory. While true, that lacks the precision that we would hope to find in an analysis of cause and effect. There is a tremendous amount of variables in a golf tournament that can lead to an outcome. Perhaps earlier, say on Friday, Watson lipped out a short putt for par. Days later that could be the one stroke he needed to win. And a golf tournament is perhaps virtually infinitely filled with those “what-if” moments.

Thus I came back to why Stewart Cink won the tournament and decided that it is impossible to say with any precision. And history, which has infinitely more variables than a four day golf tournament, is obviously much harder to sort out. If history is a study of causes, as Carr stated, then complexity beyond human comprehension seems to be the only result. For any one cause only reveals innumerable further causes the further one peels back from the immediate effect, much in the way the golf tournament becomes extraordinarily complex the further back we go from the final hole in Sunday.

Despite this, and despite the fact that the cause and effect hierarchy is in part a scientific artifice, the study of causation is still valuable, if only as an analytical tool to look at a element of history from a variety of angles, “backwards” and “forwards”, to see the variety of relationships that could possibly exist; all the while accepting that cause and effect are not nearly what E.H. Carr thought they were in history.

B.E.L.

*1 Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? Vintage Books, 1961: 113.

*2 Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History, W.W. Norton, 2000: 3.

*3 F.R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” in The Postmodern History Reader, Keith Jenkins ed. Routledge, 1997: 282-283.

This work does hold insights into our contemporary era as well. Kissinger argues, as do most scholars, that the major short-term strain on the Vienna settlement was the issue of intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states in Europe. Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary of a relatively stable and secure Britain, argued that the purpose of the Quadruple Alliance, the major security arrangement formed during the peace negotiations, was simply to stop the emergence of another power vying for continental hegemony. Castlereagh believed that any threat to Europe would be political in nature. Metternich argued that the greatest threat to Europe was social upheaval, and therefore to maintain stability interventions in revolutionary situations would be necessary. This vital split was tested between 1815 and 1822 with uprisings in Spain, Naples, and Greece.

The argument of Kissinger’s that I found most fascinating was that Metternich successfully managed to make the internal concerns of the Austrian Empire the policy of Europe. He sat atop a teetering and divided state, and indeed for him a social upheaval could spell the end the Habsburg polity. The “legitimate” management of the European system became, at least for a few years, a copy of the “legitimate” basis of the Austrian state.

Intervention in the affairs of other states is still an important issue. The major change is the humanitarian impulse which was virtually non-existent in 1815. Still, there are parallels between how Metternich saw Austria’s survival as a polity within an international system and how the United States acts today. Metternich chose to intervene in foreign revolutions like that in Naples because he saw it as a threat to the internal structure of the Habsburg state; there is much evidence that Metternich was correct in this assessment.The United States has tended to intervene in areas it considers vital to its interests, often with the notion of promoting democracy. The question is this: does the continued global prominence of the United States and its domestic structure depend on bending foreign states to its particular vision of democracy? One of the reasons that the United States invaded Iraq was indeed a ham-fisted effort to begin democratization in the Middle East. Whereas Metternich could legitimately argue that the survival of Austria as a viable state depended on Europe conforming to his particular conservative views, it seems that the United States would have more trouble making this case, a case that, at least in American rhetoric, is often made.

Austria was perhaps the weakest great power in Europe in 1815 (with the exception of Prussia), with very little ability to project power beyond its borders and with a ramshackle internal structure. Divising and then implementing an international system geared to Austrian needs was the only way to survive. The United States is by far the most dominant power in the world today. Simply because of that preponderance the international system is largely centred around the United States. It is interesting then that it would tie its own democracy and its survival to goings on in petty states like Iraq. At least part of the answer seems to be the point argued by Michael Hunt in Ideology and American Foreign Policy that nearly since the inception of the Republic, the Hamiltonian view that the United States needed a vigourous world policy has prevailed. This quite naturally met up with and was buttressed by concepts such as manifest destiny and the frontier thesis. Metternich believed that Austria’s survival depended on running the system on his terms, but there was nothing particularly ideological about this. It was a logical policy based on Austria’s objective position. Similarly in Hamilton’s time this was a logical policy, as the United States was vulnerable after its formation. This belief has maintained its power though, and it is not surprising that Americans often still tie their domestic democracy to events around the world. How this has manifested itself more recently has shown what are perhaps genuinely ideological dimensions of this belief and also shown how distortive that ideology can be to a state’s foreign policy.

B.E.L.

I certainly do not find it dull, nor do I suppose that a great deal of it is invention (although almost certainly some of it is). But as I have become more seriously involved in historical scholarship the conception of history as invention has caused two impulses. One is to never take myself and my work too seriously; one must keep in mind that interpretations are indeterminate and in some cases can turn out to be mere invention. The second is nearly the opposite but still a logical extension of the first point; to do my work with maximum rigour to avoid invention in interpretation wherever possible. I imagine that nearly every historian worth the title follows the latter precept. I also think that most follow the first, although there are likely many exceptions.

It is the indeterminacy of how we understand history that has intrigued me as I have become more involved in the profession. It is, however, the vastness of human history, the tremendous achievements and also harrowing follies that we have seen over the millenia, that has always drawn me to our past. And it is this inheritance that we have today, the triumph and tragedy and all in between, that encourages me to try to limit the invention as much as is possible.

If I have a philosophy of history, which I suppose I do but existing in an unsystematic form, then this would be it. In the future I will write here about my thoughts on history and also on contemporary events that I feel are of importance. I hope to do so in the spirit of this philosophy.

B.E.L.