Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village

Chapter Five THE NATURAL ‘REPUBLIC’ OF EUROPE [T]he political order in this part of the world is, in certain respects, the work of nature. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau1 THE EUROPEAN STATE SYSTEM AND INTERNATIONAL THEORY For better or worse, Europe has decisively shaped the last half millennium of world history. Beginning around 1500 and culminating in the earlytwentieth century, European imperialism and colonialism influenced or dominated virtually every corner of the planet. Interacting with and fueling this outward expansion, revolutionary developments in science, technology , economy, society, and culture also transformed Europe itself from a relative backwater to the most dynamic civilization in modern times and saw the emergence in Europe of fundamentally novel political forms. Europe’s globe-spanning empires almost completely have vanished in the second half of the twentieth century, but the modern world is largely the result of the European vortex and the reactions or emulations of others to it. The intellectual legacies of the European experience loom equally large in international theory. Despite a few ancient precursors, the modern Europeans largely invented the enterprise of theorizing about international politics, and international theory—and Realism in particular—remains largely a set of generalizations from—and arguments about—European experiences. Enlightenment theorists first employed the expression ‘states system,’ and the early modern European, or Westphalian, system remains the epitome of state systems. For all Realists the early modern European state system is the paradigmatic model of a multipolar ‘balance of power’ system. Similarly, contemporary ‘society of states’ Realists and constructivists direct their attention to the European institutional inventions of mutually recognized sovereignty, permanent diplomacy, and public international law.2 Reflecting the continued centrality of European legacies in international theory, diplomatic and intellectual historians, political theorists, and international relations theorists have generated a vast literature critically examining the ideas of particular European theorists (beginning with such THE NATURAL ‘REPUBLIC’ OF EUROPE 137 titans as Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant, and extending to a myriad of lesser figures) and specific topics (most notably the balance of power, sovereignty, diplomacy, international law). This vast outpouring is in turn dwarfed by the immense empirical and narrative literature produced by diplomatic historians of innumerable European battles, wars, armies, navies, statesmen, generals, alliances, diplomatic relations, and peace settlements. Despite this importance and attention, a central cluster of early modern European international theory is oddly out of focus in contemporary treatments. The key fact, conceptually awkward for contemporary approaches , is that Enlightenment international system theory was cast in the terminologies of physiopolitics and republicanism. A wide array of Enlightenment theorists spoke of Europe as a whole as a ‘republic’ that was in part ‘by nature,’ in an effort to comprehend the European political order as structured by a multiplicity of restraints on power, which, as in other republics, prevented the twin perils of full anarchy and full hierarchy . This claim encompasses the now conventional ideas that Europe was a system of multiple interactive parts, that it lacked an overall hierarchical authority (or ‘universal monarch’), and that the ‘balance of power’ was an important mechanism of restraint. But more was meant as well. In calling Europe a ‘republic,’ the early moderns were offering a more complex view in which topographic divisions, the mixture of land power and sea power creating a special balancer state, practices of division, and societal elements of community and equality operated along with the balance of power to produce restraint. Some of the ideas of Enlightenment natural republican international theory (most notably the concepts of system, balance of power, and society of states) remain pivotal in contemporary international theory; but others, most notably division and mixture, are almost ignored. In combination , these familiar and unfamiliar concepts add up to a substantially different overall image of Europe than that found in any contemporary theoretical treatment. In addition to gaining a better understanding of the origin of key contemporary international theoretical concepts, there are three main reasons for recovering this overall lost argument. First, contemporary international theorists see European-wide political patterns—a state system—as the prototypical international or interstate pattern.3 In contrast, Enlightenment materialist republican theorists saw Europe as novel and anomalous as a persistent state system. Continuing the broad comparative analysis begun by ancient empirical political science , but equipped with the much larger ‘data set’ produced by the voyages of exploration,4 Enlightenment theorists perceived that other regions in Eurasia with comparable sizes, populations, and levels of material civilization were tending to consolidate into the...