Search full-text for descriptive information plus full-text that occurs in a work. Not all works contain searchable full-text. Henry A. Download PDF Ask a question about this collection or object View all items from this collection. Three events completed the disintegration of the old ideal of unity. A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the medieval age, would have shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the center.
In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption.
The world, it was believed on biblical authority, was six-sevenths land and one-seventh water. Because the principles of salvation were fixed and could be cultivated through efforts in the lands known to Christendom, there was no reward for venturing past the fringes of civilization.
The modern era announced itself when enterprising societies sought glory and wealth by exploring the oceans and whatever lay beyond them. In the fifteenth century, Europe and China ventured forth almost contemporaneously. China continued to insist on the universal relevance of its principles of world order, but it would henceforth cultivate them at home and with the peoples along its borders. It never again attempted a comparable naval effort—until perhaps our own time.
Sixty years later, the European powers sailed from a continent of competing sovereign authorities; each monarch sponsored naval exploration largely in the hope of achieving a commercial or strategic edge over his rivals.
Both began to displace the existing trade monopolies and political structures. The age of three centuries of preponderant European influence in world affairs had been launched. International relations, once a regional enterprise, would henceforth be geographically global, with the center of gravity in Europe, in which the concept of world order was defined and its implementation determined. A revolution of thinking about the nature of the political universe followed.
How was one to conceive of the inhabitants of regions no one had known existed? How did they fit into the medieval cosmology of empire and papacy? A council of theologians summoned by Charles V in —51 in the Spanish city of Valladolid had concluded that the people living in the Western Hemisphere were human beings with souls— hence eligible for salvation.
This theological conclusion was, of course, also a maxim justifying conquest and conversion. Europeans were enabled to increase their wealth and salve their consciences simultaneously. Their global competition for territorial control changed the nature of international order. The second seminal event was the invention of movable-type printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, which made it possible to share knowledge on a hitherto- unimaginable scale.
Medieval society had stored knowledge by memorizing or laboriously hand-copying religious texts or by understanding history through epic poetry. In the age of exploration, what was being discovered needed to be understood, and printing permitted accounts to be disseminated.
The exploration of new worlds inspired as well a quest to rediscover the ancient world and its verities, with special emphasis on the centrality of the individual. The growing embrace of reason as an objective force of illumination and explication began to shake existing institutions, including the hitherto-unassailable Catholic Church.
A number of feudal rulers seized the opportunity to enhance their authority by embracing Protestantism, imposing it on their populations, and enriching themselves by seizing Church lands. Each side regarded the other as heretical, and disagreements turned into life-or-death struggles as political and sectarian disputes commingled. Christianity was split and at war with itself.
A century of intermittent wars attended the rise and spread of the Protestant critique of Church supremacy: the Habsburg Empire and the papacy both sought to stamp out the challenge to their authority, and Protestants resisted in defense of their new faith.
The Protestant princes were generally located in the north of Germany, including the then relatively insignificant Prussia; the Catholic heartland was the south of Germany and Austria. Yet faced with a choice between spiritual unity and strategic advantage, more than a few chose the latter.
Foremost among them was France. In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives.
A cadre of sophisticated and ruthless French ministers saw their opportunity and moved decisively. The Kingdom of France began the process by giving itself a new governance. A man of the cloth steeped in court intrigue, Richelieu was well adapted to a period of religious upheaval and crumbling established structures.
Lore holds that Richelieu completed his religious studies so swiftly that he was below the normal minimum age for a clerical appointment; he resolved this obstacle by traveling to Rome and personally lying to the Pope about his age. It is not known whether Richelieu was familiar with these texts on the politics of power.
He surely practiced their essential principles. Richelieu developed a radical approach to international order. He invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent entity existing in its own right. Hence it should be the basic unit of international relations. Richelieu commandeered the incipient state as an instrument of high policy.
Royal power would continue to be exercised by the King as the symbol of the sovereign state and an expression of the national interest. Richelieu saw the turmoil in Central Europe not as a call to arms to defend the Church but as a means to check imperial Habsburg preeminence.
To outraged complaints that, as a cardinal, he owed a duty to the universal and eternal Catholic Church—which would imply an alignment against the rebellious Protestant princes of Northern and Central Europe—Richelieu cited his duties as a minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political entity.
Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be redeemed. The basic threat to France was strategic, not metaphysical or religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to dominate the rest of the Continent.
For as long as this concept served as the essence of the European order, France was preeminent on the Continent. First, the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors.
Second, the statesman must distill that vision by analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a coherent and purposeful direction. He or she must know where this strategy is leading and why.
Because repetition of the familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required. The representatives meeting to negotiate it were more focused at the time on considerations of protocol and status.
By the time representatives of the Holy Roman Empire and its two main adversaries, France and Sweden, agreed in principle to convene a peace conference, the conflict had ground on for twenty-three years. Another two years of battle transpired before the delegations actually met; in the meantime, each side maneuvered to strengthen its allies and internal constituencies.
Unlike other landmark agreements such as the Congress of Vienna in —15 or the Treaty of Versailles in , the Peace of Westphalia did not emerge from a single conference, and the setting was not one generally associated with a gathering of statesmen pondering transcendent questions of world order.
Mirroring the variety of contenders in a war that had ranged from Spain to Sweden, the peace emerged from a series of separate arrangements made in two different Westphalian towns. With no official conference head or mediator and no plenary sessions, representatives met on an ad hoc basis and traveled in a neutral zone between the two cities to coordinate positions, sometimes meeting informally in towns in the middle.
Some of the major powers stationed representatives in both cities. Combat continued in various parts of Europe throughout the talks, with shifting military dynamics affecting the course of the negotiations. Most representatives had come with eminently practical instructions based on strategic interests. It was now taken for granted that peace would be built, if at all, through balancing rivalries. The Peace of Westphalia that emerged from these convoluted discussions is probably the most frequently cited diplomatic document in European history, though in fact no single treaty exists to embody its terms.
Nor did the delegates ever meet in a single plenary session to adopt it. The peace is in reality the sum of three separate complementary agreements signed at different times in different cities.
Yet the mechanisms through which they were to be reached were unprecedented. The war had shattered pretensions to universality or confessional solidarity. Much like the Middle Eastern conflagrations of our own period, sectarian alignments were invoked for solidarity and motivation in battle but were just as often discarded, trumped by clashes of geopolitical interests or simply the ambitions of outsized personalities.
Paradoxically, this general exhaustion and cynicism allowed the participants to transform the practical means of ending a particular war into general concepts of world order. With dozens of battle-hardened parties meeting to secure hard-won gains, old forms of hierarchical deference were quietly discarded.
The inherent equality of sovereign states, regardless of their power or domestic system, was instituted. Newly arrived powers, such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic, were granted protocol treatment equal to that of established great powers like France and Austria.
The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion.
Diplomatic exchanges, including the stationing of resident representatives in the capitals of fellow states a practice followed before then generally only by Venetians , were designed to regulate relations and promote the arts of peace.
The parties envisioned future conferences and consultations on the Westphalian model as forums for settling disputes before they led to conflict.
International law, developed by traveling scholar-advisors such as Hugo de Groot Grotius during the war, was treated as an expandable body of agreed doctrine aimed at the cultivation of harmony, with the Westphalian treaties themselves at its heart. The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive. The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order.
By the mid-twentieth century, this international system was in place on every continent; it remains the scaffolding of international order such as it now exists. The Peace of Westphalia did not mandate a specific arrangement of alliances or a permanent European political structure.
With the end of the universal Church as the ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power—which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow. Today these Westphalian concepts are often maligned as a system of cynical power manipulation, indifferent to moral claims.
Yet the structure established in the Peace of Westphalia represented the first attempt to institutionalize an international order on the basis of agreed rules and limits and to base it on a multiplicity of powers rather than the dominance of a single country.
Armies had marched across Europe for generations under the banner of universal and contradictory moral claims; prophets and conquerors had unleashed total war in pursuit of a mixture of personal, dynastic, imperial, and religious ambitions.
The theoretically logical and predictable intermeshing of state interests was intended to overcome the disorder unfolding in every corner of the Continent. Limited wars over calculable issues would replace the era of contending universalisms, with its forced expulsions and conversions and general war consuming civilian populations. With all its ambiguities, the balancing of power was thought an improvement over the exactions of religious wars. But how was the balance of power to be established?
In theory, it was based on realities; hence every participant in it should see it alike. Hence the balance of power needs to be recalibrated from time to time.
It produces the wars whose extent it also limits. What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his Leviathan, published in , three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. Therefore: Concerning the offices of one sovereign to another, which are comprehended in that law which is commonly called the law of nations, I need not say anything in this place, because the law of nations and the law of nature is the same thing.
And every sovereign hath the same right, in procuring the safety of his people, that any particular man can have, in procuring the safety of his own body. The international arena remained in the state of nature and was anarchical because there was no world sovereign available to make it secure and none could be practically constituted. Thus each state would have to place its own national interest above all in a world where power was the paramount factor.
Cardinal Richelieu would have emphatically agreed. The Peace of Westphalia in its early practice implemented a Hobbesian world. How was this new balance of power to be calibrated? A distinction must be made between the balance of power as a fact and the balance of power as a system. Any international order—to be worthy of that name—must sooner or later reach an equilibrium, or else it will be in a constant state of warfare.
Because the medieval world contained dozens of principalities, a practical balance of power frequently existed in fact. After the Peace of Westphalia, the balance of power made its appearance as a system; that is to say, bringing it about was accepted as one of the key purposes of foreign policy; disturbing it would evoke a coalition on behalf of equilibrium.
The rise of Britain as a major naval power by early in the eighteenth century made it possible to turn the facts of the balance of power into a system. Until the outbreak of World War I, England acted as the balancer of the equilibrium. It fought in European wars but with shifting alliances—not in pursuit of specific, purely national goals, but by identifying the national interest with the preservation of the balance of power.
There were in fact two balances of power being conducted in Europe after the Westphalian settlement: The overall balance, of which England acted as a guardian, was the protector of general stability. A Central European balance essentially manipulated by France aimed to prevent the emergence of a unified Germany in a position to become the most powerful country on the Continent.
The balance of power can be challenged in at least two ways: The first is if a major country augments its strength to a point where it threatens to achieve hegemony. The second occurs when a heretofore-secondary state seeks to enter the ranks of the major powers and sets off a series of compensating adjustments by the other powers until a new equilibrium is established or a general conflagration takes place.
The French King had in the past ruled through feudal lords with their own autonomous claims to authority based on heredity. Louis governed through a royal bureaucracy dependent entirely on him. He downgraded courtiers of noble blood and ennobled bureaucrats. What counted was service to the King, not rank of birth. The brilliant Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, son of a provincial draper, was charged with unifying the tax administration and financing constant war.
No amount of wealth or possessions would avail him then. That was one reason why he liked to give his ministers authority over the highest in the Land, even over the Princes of the Blood.
With a unified kingdom spared the ravages of internal war, possessing a skilled bureaucracy and a military surpassing that of any neighboring state, France was for a while in a position to seek dominance in Europe.
In the end, as was the case with all later aspirants to European hegemony, each new conquest galvanized an opposing coalition of nations. The opposition to Louis was not ideological or religious in nature: French remained the language of diplomacy and high culture through much of Europe, and the Catholic-Protestant divide ran through the allied camp.
Rather, it was inherent in the Westphalian system and indispensable to preserve the pluralism of the European order. Its character was defined in the name contemporary observers gave it: the Great Moderation. Louis sought what amounted to hegemony in the name of the glory of France.
He was defeated by a Europe that sought its order in diversity. Situated on the harsh North German plain and extending from the Vistula across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline and public service to substitute for the larger population and greater resources of better-endowed countries.
Split into two noncontiguous pieces, it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and Polish spheres of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the discipline with which it marshaled its limited resources. Its greatest assets were civic- mindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well-trained army. When Frederick II ascended the throne in , he seemed an unlikely contender for the greatness history has vouchsafed him.
Finding the dour discipline of the position of Crown Prince oppressive, he had attempted to flee to England accompanied by a friend, Hans Hermann von Katte. They were apprehended. The King ordered von Katte decapitated in front of Frederick, whom he submitted to a court-martial headed by himself. He cross-examined his son with questions, which Frederick answered so deftly that he was reinstated.
Frederick concluded that great-power status required territorial contiguity for Prussia, hence expansion. There was no need for any other political or moral justification. In the process, Frederick brought war back to the European system, which had been at peace since when the Treaty of Utrecht had put an end to the ambitions of Louis XIV. The price for being admitted as a new member to the European order turned out to be seven years of near-disastrous battle.
Russia, remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European balance of power. At the edge of defeat, with Russian armies at the gates of Berlin, Frederick was saved by the sudden death of Catherine the Great. The new Czar, a longtime admirer of Frederick, withdrew from the war. Hitler, besieged in encircled Berlin in April , waited for an event comparable to the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg and was told by Joseph Goebbels that it had happened when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt died. The Holy Roman Empire had become a facade; no rival European claimant to universal authority had arisen. Almost all rulers asserted that they ruled by divine right—a claim not challenged by any major power—but they accepted that God had similarly endowed many other monarchs. Wars were therefore fought for limited territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing governments and institutions, nor to impose a new system of relations between states.
Tradition prevented rulers from conscripting their subjects and severely constrained their ability to raise taxes. International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals.
National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality every Russian foreign minister until was recruited abroad , or when a territory could change its national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct.
This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral convictions of a common European outlook. Europe was never more united or more spontaneous than during what came to be perceived as the age of enlightenment.
New triumphs in science and philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of tradition and faith. Spreading through nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything along with it which stood in its way. The political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances later institutionalized in the American Constitution.
He went on from there into a philosophy of history and of the mechanisms of societal change. Surveying the histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused by accident. All [seeming] accidents are subject to these causes, and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state as a result of a single battle.
In short, it is the general pace of things which draws all particular events along with it. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment period, took Montesquieu a step further by developing a concept for a permanent peaceful world order.
The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics pledged to non- hostility and transparent domestic and international conduct. The Enlightenment philosophers ignored a key issue: Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities the Burkean view? The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist rather than the organic view of political evolution.
In the process, they contributed— unintentionally, indeed contrary to their intention—to an upheaval that rent Europe for decades and whose aftereffects reach to this day. So it was with the French Revolution, which proclaimed a domestic and world order as different from the Westphalian system as it was possible to be.
It demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French Revolution.
Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime. In the game you have many options or "policies" in which you can enact to one of numerous i believe 80 countries around the globe in a hope to raise your prestige, and as title goes, alter the "balance of power".
These polocies include Military Aid, Economic Aid, Aid to insugents, interveneing for goverment helping them , intervening for Rebels helping rebel forces , treaty, trade polocy, destabalizing, and diplomatic preasure.
A small note, all these options are available on the new "Moltipolar" level, whereas they are limited on all the other difficulties. Regarding the above, there is also a new game difficulty. Multipolar gives the player a wider variety of gameplay inwhich he can now go to war, and other neat stuff.
Good points- Addicting if your into politics - While games seem similar, different thing can happen every new game, such as different nations going to wars, and nations getting coup'd and the likes. Summary Basically, because I love geopolitical simulations, though am saddened by the short gameplay if you got to play out each month of a year, from to , it'd be a different story.
I give this game a 4. This is for more 'hard core' political simmers in my opinion cause you actually need to use your head in a hope the AI or your friend, who you could very well hate in the end if you ever finish a game, doesn't screw you over.
Learning the Right Lessons from the Afghan War. September 7, August 31, View all content associated with this program. Emeritus Chair in Strategy U. Strategic and Defense Efforts About Dr.
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