Key Points

• Two forerunner international societies were ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy.

• Two empires which contrasted with these inter­national societies and also served as a historical bridge between them were the Roman empire and its direct Christian successor in the West, the medieval Respublica Christiana.

• Greek international society was based on the polis and Hellenic culture.

• Italian international society was based on the stato and the strong urban identities and rivalries of Renaissance Italians.

• These small international societies were eventu­ally overwhelmed by neighbouring hegemonic powers.

European International Society

Medieval cathedrals took many years, sometimes centuries, to reach their final form: similarly, the classical European international society which began to be constructed as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was only completed in the eighteenth and nineteenth. The modern terri­torial state upon which it was based was a derivative of the Italian Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. The rulers of the new European states took their cue from the Italians and, as a result, the arts and sciences of the Renaissance, including the art of statecraft, spread to all of Western Europe. The political theology of Martin Luther—with its 'impulse towards disengaging political elements from religious modes of thought' (Wolin 1960: 143)—also disengaged the political legitimacy of the state from the religious sanction of the medieval Respublica Christiana. Machiavelli and Luther are important architects of the modern soci­ety of states.

In the modern era secular politics, and partic­ularly the politics of the state and the art of state­craft, was liberated from the moral inhibitions and religious constraints of the medieval Christian world. The sovereign state now shaped the relations of the main political groupings of Europe, and those relations were now recognizable interna­tional relations. Many European rulers were ambi­tious to expand their territories, while many others were anxious to defend their realms against exter­nal encroachments. As a result international rival­ries developed which often resulted in wars and the enlargement of some countries at the expense of others. At various times France, Spain, Austria, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Prussia, Russia, and other states of the new European international society were at war. Some wars were spawned by the Protestant Reformation which profoundly divided the European Christian population in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies. But other wars (increasingly a majority) were provoked by the mere existence of independent states whose rulers resorted to war as a principal means of defending their interests, pursuing their ambitions, and, if possible, expanding their territo­rial holdings. War became an international institu­tion for resolving conflicts between sovereign states.

The Catholic Habsburgs, who controlled a sprawling dynastic state which comprised exten­sive disjointed territories in Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Bohemia, Hungary, and other parts of Western and Eastern Europe, tried—in the name of the Respublica Christiana—to impose their imperium on a Europe that was fracturing into religious-cum-political communities, some Catholic and some Protestant, under the impact of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. That bid for European supremacy led to the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-48) in which the Habsburgs were defeated and peace treaties were negotiated at Westphalia in 1648 (Wedgwood 1992). That was not the first gamble for political mastery in Europe and it would not be the last. But after 1648 the language of international justification would gradually change, away from Christian unity and religious orthodoxy and towards international diversity based on a secular society of sovereign states. The treaties of Westphalia and those of Utrecht (1713) still referred to the Respublica Christiana, but they were the last to do that. For what had come into historical existence in the meantime was a secular European society of states in which overarching political and religious authority was no longer in existence in any sub­stantive sense.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation con­flicts made it clear by the mid-seventeenth century that Protestant states and Catholic states must coexist. The fundamental problem of their rela­tions was thus recognized to be political and not religious. The war itself was not fought along reli­gious lines: it was fought along political-territorial lines with some Catholic states—most notably France—aligned with Protestant states such as Sweden in an alliance against the Catholic Habsburgs. The anti-Habsburg alliance also demon­strated the doctrine of the balance of power: the organization of a coalition of states whose joint mil­itary power is intended to operate as a counter­weight against bids for political hegemony and empire. The doctrine of reason of state took prece­dence over any residual obligation to support Respublica Christiana which was now seen in many quarters as merely the ideology of one side in the conflict. That secular move away from religious legitimacy has been a cornerstone of international society ever since. The treaties of Westphalia formally recognized the existence of separate sovereign­ties in one international society. Religion was no longer a legal ground for intervention or war among European states. The settlement thus cre­ated a new international covenant based on state sovereignty which displaced the medieval idea of Respublica Christiana. The seeds of state sovereignty and non-intervention that those seventeenth-cen­tury statespeople planted would eventually evolve into the Charter of the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and other contemporary bodies of international law.

Box 2.5. Westphalian International Society

Westphalian international society was based on three principles. The first principle was rex est imperator in regno suo (the king is emperor in his own realm). This norm specifies that sovereigns are not subject to any higher political authority. Every king is independent and equal to every other king. The second principle was cujus regio, ejus religio (the ruler determines the religion of his realm). This norm specifies that out­siders have no right to intervene in a sovereign juris­diction on religious grounds. The third principle was the balance of power: that was intended to prevent any hegemon from arising and dominating every­body else.

The procedural starting point of modern European international society, speaking very gen­erally, is thus usually identified with the Peace of Westphalia. That at least is the conventional view. Martin Wight (1977: 150-2) argues, somewhat to the contrary, that Westphalia is the coming of age but not the coming into existence of European international society, the beginnings of which he traces to the Council of Constance (1415) which, in effect, transformed the papacy into a quasi-secular political power with its own territory. F. H. Hinsley (1967: 153) argues, on the other side, that modern international society only fully emerged in the eighteenth century, because prior to that time the Respublica Christiana was still in existence. But how­ever we choose to look at it, the multinational treaties of Westphalia, and those which came after, were conceived as the foundation of secular inter­national law or what came to be known as the 'pub­lic law of Europe' (Hinsley 1967: 168).

Adam Watson (1992: ch. 17) captures the Westphalian moment very aptly: 'the charter of a Europe permanently organized on an anti-hegemo-nial principle.' That European society of states had several prominent characteristics which can be summarized.

Box 2.6. Grotius and International Law

The emerging idea of international law was spelled out by Hugo Grotius, a Dutch Protestant diplomat and philosopher, whose Laws of War and Peace (1625) provided an intellectual foundation for the subject that was enormously influential and is still regarded as a founding text. Grotius hoped to restrict war and expand peace by clarifying standards of con­duct which were insulated against all religious doc­trines and could therefore govern the relations of all independent states, Protestant and Catholic alike.

• First, it consisted of member states whose polit­ical independence and juridical equality was acknowledged by international law.

• Second, every member state was legitimate in the eyes of all other members.

• Third, the relations between sovereign states were managed, increasingly, by a professional corps of diplomats and conducted by means of an organized multilateral system of diplomatic communication.

• Fourth, the religion of international society was still Christian but that was increasingly indistin­guishable from the culture which was European.

• Finally, a balance of power between member states was conceived which was intended to pre­vent any one state from making a bid for hege­mony.

The anti-hegemonial notion of a countervailing alliance of major powers aimed at preserving the freedom of all member states and maintaining the pluralist European society of states as a whole was only worked out by trial and error and fully theo­rized much later. The greatest historical threat to the European balance of power before the twenti­eth century was posed by Napoleon's bid for conti­nental hegemony (1795-1815). British and later American foreign policy can be read as historical lessons in attempting to preserve or restore the bal­ance of power. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain often played the role of the defender of the balance of power by adding military (especially naval) weight to the coalition which formed against the hegemon, most notably in the case of post-revolutionary Napoleonic France. The United States played a similar role in the Second World War against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and in the cold war against Communist Russia. Insofar as both Britain and the United States accepted and indeed defended the principles of international society against contrary revolution­ary ideologies, they could not themselves be regarded as hegemons in the classical political meaning of the term.

In sum: the first fully articulated conception of the theory and practice of international society as an explicit covenant with a legal and political foun­dation is worked out in Europe among its sovereign states. Edmund Burke, with his eye on the alleged threat posed to monarchical and dynastic Europe by republican and revolutionary France, went so far as to refer to eighteenth-century Europe as 'virtu­ally one great state having the same basis of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments'. Burke saw European interna­tional society as based on two fundamental princi­ples: a Taw of neighbourhood' — recognition of neighbouring states and respect for their indepen­dence—and 'rules of prudence' — the responsibility of statespeople not only to safeguard the national interest but also preserve international society (Raffety 1928: 156-61). Similar ideas were expressed by many European publicists of the day and there is little doubt that modern international society is rooted in the political culture and polit­ical thought of the European peoples.