The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (20 page)

The English alliance which William III had cemented in 1689 was simultaneously the saving of the United Provinces and a substantial contributory factor in its decline as an independent great power—in rather the same way in which, over two hundred years later, Lend-Lease and the United States alliance would both rescue and help undermine a British Empire which was fighting for survival under
Marlborough’s distant relative Winston Churchill. The inadequacy of Dutch resources in the various wars against France between 1688 and 1748 meant that they needed to concentrate about three-quarters of defense expenditures upon the military, thus neglecting their fleet—whereas the British assumed an increasing share of the maritime and colonial campaigns, and of the commercial benefits therefrom. As London and Bristol merchants flourished, so, to put it crudely, Amsterdam traders suffered. This was exacerbated by the frequent British efforts to prevent
all
trade with France in wartime, in contrast to the Dutch wish to maintain such profitable links—a reflection of how much more involved with (and therefore dependent upon)
external
commerce and finance the United Provinces were throughout this period, whereas the British economy was still relatively self-sufficient. Even when, by the Seven Years War, the United Provinces had escaped into neutrality, it availed them little, for an overweening Royal Navy, refusing to accept the doctrine of “free ships, free goods,” was determined to block France’s overseas commerce from being carried in neutral bottoms.
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The Anglo-Dutch diplomatic quarrel of 1758–1759 over this question was repeated during the early years of the American Revolutionary War and eventually led to open hostilities after 1780, which did nothing to help the seaborne commerce of either Britain or the United Provinces. By the time of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic struggles, the Dutch found themselves ground ever more between Britain and France, suffering from widespread debt repudiations, affected by domestic fissures, and losing colonies and overseas trade in a global contest which they could neither avoid nor take advantage of. In such circumstances, financial expertise and reliance upon “surplus capital” was simply not enough.
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    In much the same way, albeit on a grander scale, France also suffered from being a hybrid power during the eighteenth century, with its energies diverted between continental aims on the one hand and maritime and colonial ambitions on the other. In the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, this strategical ambivalence was not so marked. France’s strength rested firmly upon
indigenous
materials: its large and relatively homogeneous territory, its agricultural self-sufficiency, and its population of about twenty million, which permitted Louis XIV to increase his army from 30,000 in 1659 to 97,000 in 1666 to a colossal 350,000 by 1710.
²⁶
The Sun King’s foreign-policy aims, too, were land-based and traditional: to erode still further the Habsburg positions, by moves in the south against Spain and in the east and north against that vulnerable string of Spanish-Habsburg and German territories Franche Comté, Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, and the southern Netherlands. With Spain exhausted, the Austrians distracted by the Turkish threat, and the English at first neutral or friendly, Louis enjoyed
two decades of diplomatic success; but then the very hubris of French claims alarmed the other powers.

The chief strategical problem for France was that although massively strong in defensive terms, she was less well placed to carry out a decisive campaign of conquest: in each direction she was hemmed in, partly by geographical barriers, partly by the existing claims and interests of a number of great powers. An attack on the southern (that is, Habsburg-held) Netherlands, for example, involved grinding campaigns through territory riddled with fortresses and waterways, and provoked a response not merely from the Habsburg powers themselves but also from the United Provinces and England. French military efforts into Germany were also troublesome: the border was more easily breached, but the lines of communication were much longer, and once again there was an inevitable coalition to face—the Austrians, the Dutch, the British (especially after the 1714 Hanoverian succession), and then the Prussians. Even when, by the mid-eighteenth century, France was willing to seek out a strong German partner—that is, either Austria or Prussia—the natural consequence of any such alliance was that the
other
German power went into opposition and, more important, strove to obtain support from Britain and Russia to neutralize French ambitions.

Furthermore, every war against the maritime powers involved a certain division of French energies and attention from the continent, and thus made a successful land campaign less likely. Torn between fighting in Flanders, Germany, and northern Italy on the one hand and in the Channel, West Indies, Lower Canada, and the Indian Ocean on the other, French strategy led repeatedly to a “falling between stools.” While never willing to make the all-out financial effort necessary to challenge the Royal Navy’s supremacy,
*
successive French governments allocated funds to the marine which—had France been
solely
a land power—might have been used to reinforce the army. Only in the war of 1778–1783, by supporting the American rebels in the western hemisphere but abstaining from any moves into Germany, did France manage to humiliate its British foe. In all its other wars, the French never enjoyed the luxury of strategical concentration—and suffered as a result.

In sum, the France of the
ancien régime
remained, by its size and population and wealth, always the greatest of the European states; but it was not big enough or efficiently organized enough to be a “superpower,” and, restricted on land and diverted by sea, it could not prevail
against the coalition which its ambitions inevitably aroused. French actions confirmed, rather than upset, the plurality of power in Europe. Only when its national energies were transformed by the Revolution, and then brilliantly deployed by Napoleon, could it impose its ideas upon the continent—for a while. But even there its success was temporary, and no amount of military genius could ensure permanent French control of Germany, Italy, and Spain, let alone of Russia and Britain.

    France’s geostrategical problem of having to face potential foes on a variety of fronts was not unique, even if that country had made matters worse for itself by a repeated aggressiveness and a chronic lack of direction. The two great German powers of this period—the Habsburg Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia—were also destined by their geographical position to grapple with the same problem. To the Austrian Habsburgs, this was nothing new. The awkwardly shaped conglomeration of territories they ruled (Austria, Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia, Hungary, Milan, Naples, Sicily, and, after 1714, the southern Netherlands—see Map 5) and the position of other powers in relation to those lands required a nightmarish diplomatic and military juggling act merely to retain the inheritance; increasing it demanded either genius or good luck, and probably both.

Thus, while the various wars against the Turks (1663–1664, 1683–1699, 1716–1718,1737–1739,1788–1791) showed the Habsburg armies generally enhancing their position in the Balkans, this struggle against a declining Ottoman Empire consumed most of Vienna’s energies in those selected periods.
²⁷
With the Turks at the gates of his imperial capital in 1683, for example, Leopold I was bound to stay neutral toward France despite the provocations of Louis XIV’s “reunions” of Alsace and Luxembourg in that very year. This Austrian ambivalence was somewhat less marked during the Nine Years War (1689–1697) and the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), since Vienna had by that time become part of a gigantic anti-French alliance; but it never completely disappeared even then. The course of many later eighteenth-century wars seemed still more volatile and unpredictable, both for the defense of general Habsburg interests in Europe and for the specific preservation of those interests within Germany itself following the rise of Prussia. From at least the Prussian seizure of the province of Silesia in 1740 onward, Vienna always had to conduct its foreign and military policies with one eye firmly on Berlin. This in turn made Habsburg diplomacy more elaborate than ever: to check a rising Prussia within Germany, the Austrians needed to call upon the assistance of France in the west and, more frequently, Russia in the east; but France itself was unreliable and needed in turn to be checked by an Anglo-Austrian alliance at times (e.g., 1744–1748). Furthermore,
Russia’s own steady growth was a further cause of concern, particularly when czarist expansionism threatened the Ottoman hold upon Balkan lands desired by Vienna. Finally, when Napoleonic imperialism challenged the independence of
all
other powers in Europe, the Habsburg Empire had no choice but to join any available grand coalition to contest French hegemony.

The coalition war against Louis XIV at the beginning of the eighteenth century and those against Bonaparte at its end probably give us less of an insight into Austrian weakness than do the conflicts in between. The lengthy struggle against Prussia after 1740 was particularly revealing: it demonstrated that for all the military, fiscal, and administrative reforms undertaken in the Habsburg lands in this period, Vienna could not prevail against another, smaller German state which was considerably more efficient in its army, revenue collection, and bureaucracy. Furthermore, it became increasingly clear that the non-German powers, France, Britain, and Russia, desired neither the Austrian elimination of Prussia nor the Prussian elimination of Austria. In the larger European context, the Habsburg Empire had already become a
marginal
first-class power, and was to remain such until 1918. It certainly did not slip as far down the list as Spain and Sweden, and it avoided the fate which befell Poland; but, because of its decentralized, ethnically diverse, and economically backward condition, it defied attempts by succeeding administrations in Vienna to turn it into the greatest of the European states. Nevertheless, there is a danger in anticipating this decline. As Olwen Hufton observes, “the Austrian Empire’s persistent, to some eyes perverse, refusal conveniently to disintegrate” is a reminder that it possessed hidden strengths. Disasters were often followed by bouts of reform—the
rétablissements
—which revealed the empire’s very considerable resources even if they also demonstrated the great difficulty Vienna always had in getting its hands upon them. And every historian of Habsburg decline has somehow to explain its remarkably stubborn and, occasionally, very impressive military resistance to the dynamic force of French imperialism for almost fourteen years of the period 1792–1815.
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Prussia’s situation was very similar to Austria’s in geostrategical terms, although quite different internally. The reasons for that country’s swift rise to become the most powerful northern German kingdom are well known, and need only be listed here: the organizing and military genius of three leaders, the Great Elector (1640–1688), Frederick William I (1713–1740), and Frederick “the Great” (1740–1786), the efficiency of the Junker-officered Prussian army, into which as much as four-fifths of the state’s taxable resources were poured; the (relative) fiscal stability, based upon extensive royal domains and encouragement of trade and industry; the willing use of foreign soldiers and entrepreneurs; and the famous Prussian bureaucrats operating under
the General War Commissariat.
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Yet it was also true that Prussia’s rise coincided with the collapse of Swedish power, with the disintegration of the chaotic, weakened Polish kingdom, and with the distractions which the many wars and uncertain succession of the Habsburg Empire imposed upon Vienna in the early decades of the eighteenth century. If Prussian monarchs seized their opportunities, therefore, the fact was that the opportunities were there to be seized. Moreover, in filling the “power vacuum” which had opened up in north-central Europe after 1770, the Prussian state also benefited from its position vis-à-vis the other Great Powers. Russia’s own rise was helping to distract (and erode) Sweden, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire. And France was far enough away in the west to be not usually a mortal danger; indeed, it could sometimes function as a useful ally against Austria. If, on the other hand, France pushed aggressively into Germany, it was likely to be opposed by Habsburg forces, Hanover (and therefore Britain), and perhaps the Dutch, as well as by Prussia itself. Finally, if that coalition failed, Prussia could more easily sue for peace with Paris than could the other powers; an anti-French alliance was sometimes useful, but not imperative, for Berlin.

Within this advantageous diplomatic and geographical context, the early kings of Prussia played the game well. The acquisition of Silesia—described by some as
the
industrial zone in the east—was in particular a great boost to the state’s military-economic capacity. But the limitations of Prussia’s real power in European affairs, limitations of size and population, were cruelly exposed in the Seven Years War of 1756–1763, when the diplomatic circumstances were no longer so favorable and Frederick the Great’s powerful neighbors were determined to punish him for his deviousness. Only the stupendous efforts of the Prussian monarch and his well-trained troops—assisted by the lack of coordination among his foes—enabled Frederick to avoid defeat in the face of such a frightening “encirclement.” Yet the costs of that war in men and material were enormous, and with the Prussian army steadily ossifying from the 1770s onward, Berlin was in no position to withstand later diplomatic pressure from Russia, let alone the bold assault of Napoleon in 1806. Even the later recovery led by Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the other military reformers could not conceal the still inadequate bases of Prussian strength by 1813–1815.
³⁰
It was by then overshadowed, militarily, by Russia; it relied heavily upon subsidies from Britain, paymaster to the coalition; and it still could not have taken on France alone. The kingdom of Frederick William III (1797–1840) was, like Austria, among the least of the Great Powers and would remain so until its industrial and military transformation in the 1860s.