THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (36 page)

Every era asks, “What is the State supposed to be doing?” The answer to this question provides us with an indication of the grounds of the State's legitimacy, for only when we know the purpose of the State can we say whether it is succeeding. The nation-state is supposed to be doing something unique in the history of the modern state: maintaining, nurturing, and improving the conditions of its citizens. That is a different assignment from enhancing the national interest. Burke, speaking in 1774 for the state-nation in his most famous address, put it this way: Parliament was not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests… but… a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.”
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That nation is a corporate body with a national interest that is distinct from the accumulated interests of groups or individuals within that body. By contrast, the nation-state exists to determine the desires of its different constituencies and translate them into legislative action. The flow of legitimacy is from the people's judgment—the nation's—to the state; hence the importance to the nation-state of the broadening of the suffrage and the vexing problem of the nation-state, the question of self-determination, that is, the people's judgment on statehood itself.

The transition from state-nation to the nation-state brought a change in constitutional procedures. The plebiscite, the referendum, and indeed the whole array of participatory procedures do not derive from the American or French revolutions. In Federalist Paper #63 Madison could write that the distinction of the American government “lies in the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share” in the government. By the end of the American Civil War, however, the requirements of legitimation had changed. Similarly, in Europe, it was, again, the relation between constitutional change and strategic innovation that made this transformation both necessary and possible. This relation was manifested in, and accounted for by, history.

It is fascinating to recall that, as early as 1809, General Gerhard von Scharnhorst, the director of the Prussian War Academy and the creator of the Prussian general staff system, advocated such Napoleonic measures as a national army, general conscription, the appointment of commoners as officers, the abandonment of linear tactics in favor of light infantry and columns, and, astonishingly, the fomenting of popular insurrection in areas controlled by the French. Frederick William III was unwilling to
endorse such a radical state-national program;
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it was left to Scharnhorst's successors in Prussia to effect the next “revolution” in strategic and constitutional affairs, which brought the nation-state into being in Europe.

The state-nation mobilized and exploited whatever national resources it happened to find itself in charge of (including the colonial resources of otherwise stateless nations). It was not responsible
to
the nation; rather it was responsible
for
the nation. The nation, for its part, provided the raw material with which the state-nation powered the engines of state aggrandizement. Nowhere is this contrast more apparent than in the history of empire that began as colonization in the seventeenth century, was transformed into imperialism by the middle of the nineteenth century, and then was ultimately undone by the ethos of the nation-state and its demands for the constitutional recognition of national identities.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, most of the empires of European states were in place: the great subcontinent of India was already the most important possession of the most important empire. Ironically, at about the time the nation-state emerged in Europe with the creation of Germany and Italy, imperialism abroad intensified. This is the period, as Michael Doyle has observed, that “is associated with the full transfer of rights of sovereignty (usually marked by either treaty or conquest)”
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to the governing imperial state and it is usually dated from the 1880s and the scramble for African possessions. In only a few decades the state-nation would be destroyed in Europe proper, and with it the Concert of European states that had maintained peace.

The turning point occurred in the late 1840s, when, for similar but unrelated domestic political purposes, European politicians seized on the idea of national self-determination as the key element underpinning a program of political reform.
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This idea was antithetical to the Vienna system and cast doubt on the legitimacy of that system. Challenges to the system's program of strategic restraint further discredited the Vienna system. The Crimean War, the Italian wars, the unification of Italy, but most especially the unification of Germany were ever escalating challenges to the Vienna Concert that arose from the campaigns for popular sovereignty, so that by the last of these conflicts, in 1870, the state-nation in Europe was in rapid retreat.

It may seem to us today altogether natural that states should occupy
fixed and contiguous places on maps, but that, as we have seen, was not always the common conception. And it may also seem obvious that the geographical division of the world into states should fit the division of mankind into nations. But this too was not always so. As H. G. Wells put it, that the political world should be divided into nation-states, and that this must be so in order to ensure stability,

One could argue—as indeed Castlereagh did as a young man when he voted to disband the Irish parliament—that the coincidence of political boundaries with ethnic ones is actually a recipe for conflict. Nevertheless, it became a common belief among very different societies after the upheavals of 1848 that governments existed to better the lot of national peoples. Some have argued that this shift to welfare nationalism was a conscious strategy on the part of ruling elites to distract the masses from the exploitative practices of the industrial age. There is doubtless some truth in this, but nationalism was itself also a motivating factor among revolutionaries, and, in any case, that it was a card effectively played by politicians in several very different circumstances does not tell us why it proved so effective and transformative.

During 1848, Poles, Danes, Germans, Italians, Magyars, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Romanians rose in arms, claiming the right of self-government. In February, a revolution occurred in France, and one of the great powers suddenly appeared to have taken up the cause of popular nationalism against the Vienna system. In March the French foreign minister declared that the new French Republic did not recognize the peace treaties of 1815 and would defend by force the rights of oppressed nationalities against any aggressor. This pledge was not immediately fulfilled, but a new leader emerged who was able to exploit sentiment in Europe for the nation-state and the self-determination of peoples. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, was elected president of the Republic by universal suffrage in December 1848. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he mounted a coup d'état in December 1851. A fresh plebiscite was held on a new constitution; 7.5 million persons voted yes, against 650,000 voting no, with 1.5 million abstentions. The seizure of constitutional power had been legitimated by an appeal to the people.

The use of the plebiscite to ratify changes in the constitution had been previously initiated by Napoleon I, but the differences in the two occasions are illuminating.

When Napoleon I used the plebiscite, he was attempting to legitimate his own role within a revolutionary state; when he sought to legitimate his role vis-á-vis other states, by contrast, he had himself crowned emperor by the pope. When Louis Napoleon resorted to the plebiscite, he first used it to legitimate a new constitution, and later in 1852 in order to confer the title of emperor and to make this title hereditary. In other words, Napoleon III (as Louis Napoleon then became) employed the plebiscite to legitimate not only his role, but the new role of the State itself. Moreover, the universal suffrage of Napoleon III, vastly larger than that called upon by Napoleon I, not only ratified constitutional changes, but was also the basis for legislative elections. The use of the national referendum to determine the constitutional status of a state is more than anything else the watermark of the nation-state. For on what basis other than popular sovereignty and nationalism can the mere vote of a people legitimate its relations with others? It is one thing to suppose that a vote of the people legitimates a particular policy or ruler; this implies that, within a state, the people of that state have a say in the political direction of the state. It is something else altogether to say that a vote of the people legitimates a state within the society of states. That conclusion depends on not simply a role for self-government, but a right of self-government. It is the right of which Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg.

Napoleon III desired to break out of the Vienna system, which he perceived, with some justice, as having been built to confine French ambitions, and he wished to invigorate the principle of national self-determination, which he believed, with somewhat less justification, to have been the guiding ideology of his late uncle. Accordingly, he carefully chose the place where he would confront the system: not Belgium nor the Rhineland nor the Italian states. Aggression against these states could be justified on grounds of frustrated nationalism, but such an attack would have united the Concert against him. Rather he chose to move against the Ottoman Empire. As Gildea has shrewdly concluded, the “Empire could be used safely as a laboratory for testing the principle of nationalities, and the precedent could then be applied to other parts of Europe.”
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The ten million Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire came under the protection of the tsar. But there were Roman Catholic Christians in the empire as well, mainly in Lebanon, where French missionary efforts had been steadily increasing their numbers throughout the 1840s. Napoleon III seized on this issue and demanded that the Ottoman governor remove the keys to the Holy Places from the Orthodox patriarch and give them to Catholic clergy, and further that a Latin patriarchate be established in Jerusalem. When the Ottoman authorities acceded to these ultimata, Russia responded by insisting on guarantees for Balkan Orthodox Christians, whose national movements the Russians had begun to aid. In July,
the tsar moved forces into the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Finally war broke out between Turkey and Russia, and in November 1853, the Turkish fleet was destroyed off the southern coast of the Black Sea. Napoleon III seized this opportunity to propose an alliance with Britain to prevent Russia from driving the Ottoman Empire from the Dardenelles and thus opening the Mediterranean to Russian fleets. Great Britain pledged to maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

In Britain, public opinion ran high against Russia. Although the Aberdeen cabinet was disposed to do nothing, its most formidable member, Lord Palmerston, resigned on the issue and took his case to the public. He was returned on a wave of popular feeling in favor of war. An alliance was concluded with France, and a combined fleet was sent to the Black Sea in January 1854.

Palmerston's strategic objectives were by no means confined to simply opposing Russia over the straits. In a secret memorandum he prepared for the cabinet in March 1854, he wrote of the Russian empire's

Such a program appealed to Napoleon III's desire to inflame Polish, Romanian, and Italian nationalism, but it required a total military defeat of the Russians, which France could not afford: to lose Russia completely would sacrifice important protection France might need against Prussia. The hazards of destroying the Vienna system began to dawn on French policymakers.
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In September 1855 Sevastopol fell to the British and French. Palmerston, who had become prime minister the preceding February, was eager to press the attack, but he was also fearful of a separate peace between France and Russia. Finally he gave in to the rest of the cabinet and to the views of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and concluded a peace treaty. The terms were harsh: Russia lost her protectorate over the Danubian principalities, as well as about a third of Bessarabia. These areas became the state of Romania, the formation of which markedly increased the intensity of nationalist sentiment in other Balkan states. The provision that no warships could traverse the straits in peacetime was extended to the entire Black Sea.

Russia's defeat completed her constitutional transition to a state-nation. Because service in the army was rewarded by emancipation, serfs had to be recruited for long periods; otherwise, the number of those bound to
the land would have plummeted. Thus recruitment provided only about 700,000 men. There was no reserve. Such measures did not fill the needs of contemporary warfare, which required universal, short-term conscription, followed by service in the reserve. An adequate system, however, would move all serfs through the army in a generation. Therefore modern conscription and reserve service meant the emancipation of the serfs. And this is precisely what happened, in yet another example of strategic imperatives flowing back into the constitutional structure that strategy is supposed to serve. In 1861 the serfs were freed; universal military service followed in 1874. Six years' active service and a nine-year reserve commitment created a total force of 1.35 million. Various other efforts were made to focus the energies of the entire nation on service to the state. Thus evolving, Russia entered a period from which most of the great powers were just emerging; it would take another military catastrophe, in 1916, to bring a nation-state into being.

With the successful conclusion of the Crimean War, Napoleon III moved from being a mere egoist to becoming the most prominent personage in Europe. Ever mindful of his public, he next turned to Italy, where the strategic objectives of France could again be married to the support of local nationalist sentiments. In 1859, France intervened in Italy after Napoleon III concluded a secret agreement with Cavour, the Piedmontese prime minister, providing that the kingdom of Piedmont would be extended into a Kingdom of Upper Italy to include Lombardy, Venetia, and the Romagna. France would receive Nice and Savoy. A Kingdom of Central Italy, composed of Tuscany, Parma, Modena, Umbria, and the Marches, would be given to Napoleon's cousin, Prince Napoleon. As with the French demands against the Ottoman Empire, French intrigue had singled out another vulnerable multinational state-nation: the Austrian empire.

Fighting broke out in April, most of the warfare taking place between French and Austrian forces. The battles of Magenta and Solferino were actually French victories, not those of the Piedmontese or Italian volunteers. The decision to cease fire was also French, and an agreement was signed between Napoleon III and the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph on July 11, 1859. This truce clearly sacrificed Italian nationalism to French ambitions. Lombardy was given to Piedmont but Venetia remained with the Austrians. Nothing was said of the French agreement with Cavour. The settlement ignited a firestorm of reaction among the Italians, who had not been consulted. Cavour resigned his premiership. Assemblies called by Tuscany, Parma, Modena, and the Papal Legations
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met and requested annexation by the kingdom of Piedmont.

At first Napoleon III demurred and fell back on a call for a European congress to settle the question of central Italy. This approach might have strengthened the system of collective security in Europe, but then, in December, he changed course. Relying on Britain, where Palmerston and his foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, supported the principle of self-determination, Napoleon III renewed the agreement between France and Piedmont. Cavour returned to power in less than a month.