A history of Europe characterised by constant Darwinian competition between states reads like a tract for our times
"In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined," AJP Taylor declared in the opening sentence of his classic study of 19th-century international relations, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, "violence was the only law, and life was 'nasty, brutish and short'. Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the Great Powers of Europe have always done so."
This principle, formulated by Taylor nearly 60 years ago, has been taken rather too much to heart by Brendan Simms, both in his earlier book The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, published in 1998, and now in this ambitious new survey. Like Taylor, Simms sees European states as engaged in perpetual, Darwinian competition, a rivalry that determined almost everything that happened not only in relations between them but also in the internal development of their polities and societies.
His book purports to demonstrate these points through a detailed chronological narrative from the fall of Constantinople to the present day. Yet few will be convinced by this one-sided picture. Even on Simms's own account, there have been long periods when the "struggle for supremacy" gave way to various kinds of international co-operation, whether it was between European powers rallying behind the Habsburg empire to fight off the threat posed by the Ottomans who laid siege to Vienna in 1683, or the "holy alliance" and the congress system, making common cause under the leadership of Prince Metternich to suppress revolution in the decades after the battle of Waterloo. Or the concert of Europe, though which the great powers settled disputes on issues ranging from colonial rivalries to Russo-Turkish conflicts in the 1870s and 1880s, or the post-Locarno order in the 1920s, or the power-blocs of Nato and the Warsaw pact in the cold war years, or the supranational institutions of the European Union in the decades since Maastricht.
Simms seems blind to these lengthy periods of common action between states, just as he seems insensible to the enormous changes that have taken place in the nature of international relations within Europe over the period he covers. Far from remaining "remarkably constant over the centuries", the principal security issues facing Europeans today – global warming, immigration, economic stagnation, terrorism, civil and human rights and much more besides – bear almost no resemblance to the key issues of the 16th century, which were posed above all by the clash between Protestants and Catholics in a continent dominated and divided by faith.
His belief in what he calls "the primacy of foreign policy" leads Simms into some very strange assertions indeed. These take the form of obiter dicta; no attempt is made to argue a case for any of them. Englishmen did not in fact revolt against Charles I "because he failed to protect the Protestant German princes on whom their own liberties depended"– the primary issues were ones of domestic religious conflict. Louis XVI of France did not lose his throne "because of his alleged subservience to Austria". Hitler did not come to power because of foreign issues, but because of the depression – indeed, reparations had been scaled down by the time the Nazi vote started to rise, and were ended altogether before Hitler was appointed chancellor.
Simms declares that foreign policy and conflicts between states were the motor of democratisation and the extension of civil liberties, as states were obliged to summon and consult legislatures to get the money needed for war, but one can think of many counter-examples where moments of failure in war, real or perceived, boosted authoritarian rule, from Robespierre's reign of terror in 1793-4 to the triumph of Mussolini in 1922. Civil liberties were crushed in Britain during the Napoleonic wars, not expanded. The trigger for the emancipation of the serfs in Prussia and Russia may have been defeat in war, but in practice, peasant revolts from below were bringing it about anyway. Often, contrary to what Simms asserts, representative assemblies lost influence and became less representative under the pressure of an arms build-up, as the Zabern affair showed in Germany in 1913 or the successively more restricted dumas in tsarist Russia after 1905.
Almost nowhere in this book is there any recognition of the role economic factors played in international relations, and where it does occur, it is often breathtakingly wrong-headed. Most historians, for example, would agree that blind adherence to the gold standard, compounded by the withdrawal of American loans after the Wall Street crash in 1929, was the main cause of the banking collapse and the onset of the depression in Germany, but Simms blames the French, who somehow "brought down" the Creditanstalt in Vienna because they wanted to stop a proposed Austro-German customs union. No evidence is provided for this surprising claim. Once more, the "primacy of foreign policy" is asserted on flimsy grounds.
The "primacy of foreign policy" doctrine was, like Simms's belief in international relations as a world of relentless competition for supremacy, largely a theory of the early decades of the 20th century, particularly favoured by German historians because it absolved Germans of any responsibility for the rise and triumph of Hitler: it was all because of the treaty of Versailles, so the Allies were the ones to blame. In practice, after a period in the 1970s when liberal and leftist German historians argued for the "primacy of domestic policy", explaining German aggression in 1914 and 1939 as a way for German elites to ward off economic, social and political threats to their dominance at home, historians have generally opted for a mixture of the two, stressing one or the other side of the interaction as historical circumstances dictate, and that's as it should be.
Simms borrows yet another outmoded concept from early-20th-century scholars when he repeatedly insists on the importance of "geopolitics". "Geopolitical turning-points" occur repeatedly through the book, but on closer inspection the term doesn't mean what it traditionally meant, namely the influence of geographical location and geographical features on a country's policies; it just refers to what Taylor called the balance of power, the only factor, he said, that kept the monstrous egoism of European states in check. Taylor did, in some of his writings, attempt to explain German history, not very convincingly, as the product of Germany's central location and lack of natural borders, but Simms doesn't seem to follow him in this argument.
Where he does follow Taylor, however, is in his obsession with Germany, which, he says repeatedly through the book, was and is the crucible in which Europe's fate has always been decided. This may have been partially true at the time of the thirty years war, but for very long periods, from Louis XIV to Napoleon and beyond, it was the French whose ambitions proved the decisive motor of war and peace, and they were not, except for very brief periods, primarily directed to the east of France but to the north and south and, crucially, in the 18th century, to India and the Americas, and later to Africa and Indo-China. The "central issue" at the congress of Vienna in 1814-15 was not "the German question" but how to keep the French in check. British foreign policy in the 19th century was dominated by the perceived threat from Russia and France; Germany was not regarded as very important until well after 1900.
Contestible assertions of this kind enliven what is for long stretches a tedious, cliché-ridden narrative, in which international relations appear as a kind of abstract game, much as they used to be described many decades ago, when diplomatic history was fashionable. Ultimately, as one goes through one dogmatic assertion after another, one begins to get the impression that it's not mainly about European history at all; it's a tract for the times. Simms, indeed, ends with the hope that the European Union will become a "more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere", with a single fiscal-military state built on unitary democratic institutions and a unified European army "with a monopoly on external force projection", as he put it in a recent article in this newspaper.
To call this bonkers would be an understatement, but then, realism has never been a hallmark of intellectuals in politics. The final sentence in the book warns that if Europeans fail to continue the narrative into the future, "history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting-point of a great-power project". This is an adaptation of a sentence from Max Weber's inaugural lecture of 1895, when he declared that Bismarck's unification of Germany in 1871 had to be not the completion, but "the starting point of a bid for German global power". And we all know where that ended.
• RJ Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.
"In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined," AJP Taylor declared in the opening sentence of his classic study of 19th-century international relations, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, "violence was the only law, and life was 'nasty, brutish and short'. Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the Great Powers of Europe have always done so."
This principle, formulated by Taylor nearly 60 years ago, has been taken rather too much to heart by Brendan Simms, both in his earlier book The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, published in 1998, and now in this ambitious new survey. Like Taylor, Simms sees European states as engaged in perpetual, Darwinian competition, a rivalry that determined almost everything that happened not only in relations between them but also in the internal development of their polities and societies.
His book purports to demonstrate these points through a detailed chronological narrative from the fall of Constantinople to the present day. Yet few will be convinced by this one-sided picture. Even on Simms's own account, there have been long periods when the "struggle for supremacy" gave way to various kinds of international co-operation, whether it was between European powers rallying behind the Habsburg empire to fight off the threat posed by the Ottomans who laid siege to Vienna in 1683, or the "holy alliance" and the congress system, making common cause under the leadership of Prince Metternich to suppress revolution in the decades after the battle of Waterloo. Or the concert of Europe, though which the great powers settled disputes on issues ranging from colonial rivalries to Russo-Turkish conflicts in the 1870s and 1880s, or the post-Locarno order in the 1920s, or the power-blocs of Nato and the Warsaw pact in the cold war years, or the supranational institutions of the European Union in the decades since Maastricht.
Simms seems blind to these lengthy periods of common action between states, just as he seems insensible to the enormous changes that have taken place in the nature of international relations within Europe over the period he covers. Far from remaining "remarkably constant over the centuries", the principal security issues facing Europeans today – global warming, immigration, economic stagnation, terrorism, civil and human rights and much more besides – bear almost no resemblance to the key issues of the 16th century, which were posed above all by the clash between Protestants and Catholics in a continent dominated and divided by faith.
His belief in what he calls "the primacy of foreign policy" leads Simms into some very strange assertions indeed. These take the form of obiter dicta; no attempt is made to argue a case for any of them. Englishmen did not in fact revolt against Charles I "because he failed to protect the Protestant German princes on whom their own liberties depended"– the primary issues were ones of domestic religious conflict. Louis XVI of France did not lose his throne "because of his alleged subservience to Austria". Hitler did not come to power because of foreign issues, but because of the depression – indeed, reparations had been scaled down by the time the Nazi vote started to rise, and were ended altogether before Hitler was appointed chancellor.
Simms declares that foreign policy and conflicts between states were the motor of democratisation and the extension of civil liberties, as states were obliged to summon and consult legislatures to get the money needed for war, but one can think of many counter-examples where moments of failure in war, real or perceived, boosted authoritarian rule, from Robespierre's reign of terror in 1793-4 to the triumph of Mussolini in 1922. Civil liberties were crushed in Britain during the Napoleonic wars, not expanded. The trigger for the emancipation of the serfs in Prussia and Russia may have been defeat in war, but in practice, peasant revolts from below were bringing it about anyway. Often, contrary to what Simms asserts, representative assemblies lost influence and became less representative under the pressure of an arms build-up, as the Zabern affair showed in Germany in 1913 or the successively more restricted dumas in tsarist Russia after 1905.
Almost nowhere in this book is there any recognition of the role economic factors played in international relations, and where it does occur, it is often breathtakingly wrong-headed. Most historians, for example, would agree that blind adherence to the gold standard, compounded by the withdrawal of American loans after the Wall Street crash in 1929, was the main cause of the banking collapse and the onset of the depression in Germany, but Simms blames the French, who somehow "brought down" the Creditanstalt in Vienna because they wanted to stop a proposed Austro-German customs union. No evidence is provided for this surprising claim. Once more, the "primacy of foreign policy" is asserted on flimsy grounds.
The "primacy of foreign policy" doctrine was, like Simms's belief in international relations as a world of relentless competition for supremacy, largely a theory of the early decades of the 20th century, particularly favoured by German historians because it absolved Germans of any responsibility for the rise and triumph of Hitler: it was all because of the treaty of Versailles, so the Allies were the ones to blame. In practice, after a period in the 1970s when liberal and leftist German historians argued for the "primacy of domestic policy", explaining German aggression in 1914 and 1939 as a way for German elites to ward off economic, social and political threats to their dominance at home, historians have generally opted for a mixture of the two, stressing one or the other side of the interaction as historical circumstances dictate, and that's as it should be.
Simms borrows yet another outmoded concept from early-20th-century scholars when he repeatedly insists on the importance of "geopolitics". "Geopolitical turning-points" occur repeatedly through the book, but on closer inspection the term doesn't mean what it traditionally meant, namely the influence of geographical location and geographical features on a country's policies; it just refers to what Taylor called the balance of power, the only factor, he said, that kept the monstrous egoism of European states in check. Taylor did, in some of his writings, attempt to explain German history, not very convincingly, as the product of Germany's central location and lack of natural borders, but Simms doesn't seem to follow him in this argument.
Where he does follow Taylor, however, is in his obsession with Germany, which, he says repeatedly through the book, was and is the crucible in which Europe's fate has always been decided. This may have been partially true at the time of the thirty years war, but for very long periods, from Louis XIV to Napoleon and beyond, it was the French whose ambitions proved the decisive motor of war and peace, and they were not, except for very brief periods, primarily directed to the east of France but to the north and south and, crucially, in the 18th century, to India and the Americas, and later to Africa and Indo-China. The "central issue" at the congress of Vienna in 1814-15 was not "the German question" but how to keep the French in check. British foreign policy in the 19th century was dominated by the perceived threat from Russia and France; Germany was not regarded as very important until well after 1900.
Contestible assertions of this kind enliven what is for long stretches a tedious, cliché-ridden narrative, in which international relations appear as a kind of abstract game, much as they used to be described many decades ago, when diplomatic history was fashionable. Ultimately, as one goes through one dogmatic assertion after another, one begins to get the impression that it's not mainly about European history at all; it's a tract for the times. Simms, indeed, ends with the hope that the European Union will become a "more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere", with a single fiscal-military state built on unitary democratic institutions and a unified European army "with a monopoly on external force projection", as he put it in a recent article in this newspaper.
To call this bonkers would be an understatement, but then, realism has never been a hallmark of intellectuals in politics. The final sentence in the book warns that if Europeans fail to continue the narrative into the future, "history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting-point of a great-power project". This is an adaptation of a sentence from Max Weber's inaugural lecture of 1895, when he declared that Bismarck's unification of Germany in 1871 had to be not the completion, but "the starting point of a bid for German global power". And we all know where that ended.
• RJ Evans's The Third Reich at War is published by Penguin Reported by guardian.co.uk 15 hours ago.