Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon
424
Titan: The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon
424Hardcover(New Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806152059 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 06/14/2016 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d) |
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Titan
The Art of British Power in the Age of Revolution and Napoleon
By William R. Nester
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 William R. NesterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5205-9
CHAPTER 1
The Art of British Power
Power involves doing what one can to get what one wants. Politics and power are distinct but inseparable. Politics happens when two or more individuals or groups are in conflict. Power is the means that each uses to defend or enhance its interests in its conflicts. Since politics is integral to life, the exercise of power is an art that all people struggle to master, although few do.
So what, then, is that elusive but essential art of power? Two and a half millennia ago, Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu identified timeless principles of power. Although Sun Tzu explained the art of power in war, his principles apply to any conflict. Knowledge is the key — one must know the interests, values, aspirations, strengths, weaknesses, and psyches of one's enemies, one's allies, one's potential enemies, one's potential allies, and, above all, oneself. All of that knowledge will reveal the nature of the conflict and how best to prevail.
As such, the art of power is easier said than done. People tend to mistake their beliefs for knowledge, and beliefs are often no more than wishful thinking. The worse one's ignorance and delusions, the worse one's exercise of power. Among the most common reasons for power's poor exercise is a failure to know one's limits. Power is relative. Ultimately power is measured by how much one gets of what one wants. Those who reach even relatively modest goals are more powerful than those whose ambitions exceed their abilities. Another reason is a failure to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate power. Power has been explained in many ways, but the best explanation distinguishes among hard, soft, and smart power. Hard power is physical, soft power is psychological, and smart power is the selection and assertion of those elements of available hard and soft power necessary to prevail.
The challenges of mastering the art of power are magnified for sovereign governments ruling numerous diverse, complex, competing groups of people amid rival nation-states. Ideally, there is a virtuous relationship among national interests, policies, and power whereby each reinforces the others. Political actors wield appropriate powers according to appropriate policies to defend or enhance national interests. One constant national interest is to amass more power to defend or enhance all the other national interests. Here again, all this is much easier said than done.
Governments vary greatly in their ability to understand, let alone tap and assert, potential sources of power. Nation-states themselves are composed of a myriad of institutional, legal, and cultural components that in most cases emerged haphazardly over time in response to crises. Somehow leaders must transcend the tunnel vision of the bureaucrats, politicians, interest groups, editors, and the public at home, and the generals, admirals, diplomats, and spies in the field. Perceiving the common good in the midst of multiple competing interests, of course, is an enormous challenge under the best of circumstances.
A chicken-and-egg relationship exists between political and military power, succinctly expressed by Charles Tilley: "War made the state and the state made war." Such mutual reinforcement certainly characterized the development of European states from the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century, and the United States from World War II through the Global War on Terror and beyond. Yet, starting in the late nineteenth century, one might say that welfare also made the state and the state also made welfare. Regardless, by 1792 related advances in administration, finance, and technology enhanced the power of European states not just to wage war but to better deal with an array of other challenges. Wars pressured states to adopt these innovations sooner rather than later.
War is power's ultimate assertion and clearest measure, as it forces governments to grapple with and pay the consequences for responding to a series of vital questions. First, is the war worth fighting? If so, then how is it best fought? The answers come from knowing the ends and means of oneself and one's enemy. History records a seemingly endless parade of governments failing to perform this elementary task of power. A frequent reason for this is ignoring the reality that money is hard power's literal and figurative bottom line, what historian John Brewer aptly called "the sinews of power." Pasty-faced clerks and bookkeepers in dimly lighted counting rooms and warehouses are as important to national power as ruddy-faced, brawny soldiers in the field and sailors at sea. Yet money itself is not power unless it is invested in ways that protect or enhance national interests. Governments often squander potential economic power as senselessly as they do military power.
Governments are just as likely to misunderstand and thus misapply or neglect the exercise of soft or psychological power. Soft power must be believed to exist. People act on what they think is true. So manipulating the beliefs of oneself and others in one's favor is crucial to the art of power. For instance, one's reputation can enhance or diminish one's power. Potential aggressors tend to bully those perceived to be weak and bow before those perceived to be strong. Thus a reputation for toughness can be self fulfilling if it deters challengers. But here too the art of soft power can be tricky. All too many people mistake hubris for confidence, snobbery for sophistication, glorification for patriotism, and tyranny for leadership, and so undermine rather than advance themselves.
Nationalism, or a people's mass emotional belief in their common legacy, language, values, institutions, interests, and aspirations, is a relatively new source of power in history. Nationalism and war are often dynamically linked, with one promoting the other. Indeed, one could say that in the modern world nations make wars and wars make nations. The reason is at once simple and profound. Identity is as much about what one is not as what one is. People define themselves within one group opposed to other groups; the worse the antagonisms with other groups, the stronger one's identity. Eric Hobsbawn nicely expressed that phenomena: "There is no more effective way of bonding together the disparate sections of restless peoples than to unite them against outsiders."
The American and French revolutions revealed just how powerful nationalism can be. People believed so fervently in their nation that they were willing to kill and die not just to defend but even to glorify it. Yet, for monarchs, a dilemma was embedded in trying to conjure up nationalism — it appeared intertwined with a liberalism that championed natural rights and representative government. They sought to harness nationalism's power after gingerly detaching it from liberalism. No one was more adept at that than Napoleon.
State building and nation building are related but distinct processes, with the latter far more daunting than the former. State building involves expanding, transforming, and creating institutions, laws, and practices that better promote the dynamic between security and prosperity. Nation building is about converting often disparate identities into a common identity within and sometimes beyond the realm. The result is known as a nation-state. Yet nation-state building never truly ends. National identities change, and the state adapts to new problems with new institutions and policies. A nation-state's power to get what its leaders want is grounded crucially if not exclusively on how well "the state" works and how much "the people" identity with their "nation."
A nation-state's hard and soft power is, of course, relative to that of others in the same conflict. The more nation-states that are involved, the tougher the challenge for each government to calculate the distribution of power and manipulate it in its favor. Since each conflict is unique, a past winning strategy might be disastrous if asserted in the present. A fundamental question that governments face is whether to go it alone or form or join a coalition. If the decision is to seek allies, should one join (bandwagon) or oppose (counterbalance) the side that seems more powerful? Ideology can be decisive. One tends to join those of a like mind against those of the opposite, yet history is filled with other national interests trumping ideology. In a complex world, there is no magic formula. Henry Kissinger explained that "the effectiveness of diplomacy depends on elements transcending it; in part on the domestic structure of the states comprising the international order, in part on their power relationship."
British Interests, Policies, and Powers
For centuries British leaders tended to believe that their realm had no permanent friends, only permanent interests, and that survival is any state's number-one enduring interest, which in turn determines one's enemies and allies from one existential threat to the next. Like most truisms, these are more catchy than true. In reality, national interests are dynamically related to one's shifting friends and foes, and thus can and do change with time. As for survival, for nine centuries after the Norman conquest of 1066, the British Isles did not face a serious threat of being invaded, let alone vanquished, until 1940, not even in 1216, 1779, or 1805, although perhaps in 1588.
Nonetheless, centuries of acting on these beliefs fostered a distinct set of British interests, powers, and policies. From 1509 to 1763, a series of governments in London more or less transformed the realm from a peripheral into a great power. National interests expanded with the English, then British, empire until they girdled the world. In this transformation, aggressive trade and colonization policies backed by military force were crucial. In a virtual circle of power, revenues from foreign trade and colonies paid for the navy and army that protected the British Isles and its swelling foreign trade and colonies. All along, no interest was more vital than thwarting any one great power or alliance from dominating Europe.
A key reason why these policies worked was that they usually included appropriate and parsimonious measures of soft and hard power, and thus smart power. By 1789, policy makers could see only a handful of truly vital strategic spots worth fighting for around the globe, including the Low Countries, Hanover, Gibraltar, the Copenhagen strait, Cape Horn, Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, and Bengal for its saltpeter.
Of these, the oldest tripwire for shifting from diplomacy to war was a threat to the Low Countries, the Dutch and Austrian Netherlands spreading across the lower Scheldt, Meuse, and Rhine Rivers draining into the North Sea. Of the two countries, the Dutch Netherlands or United Provinces was more vital economically and strategically. Although the British and Dutch were perennial trade rivals that occasionally warred against each other, Whitehall had helped the Netherlands win independence from Spain and repeatedly fought to prevent its conquest by France. Then there was Hanover, whose fate would have elicited shrugs were it not the latest royal dynasty's ancestral home. Since George I took the British throne in 1714, the king was also Hanover's elector, a duty that entangled the realm in central Europe's politics and, inevitably, wars, and thus diverted and often squandered British power.
Aside from being obsessed with the fate of its trade, colonies, the Low Countries, and Hanover, British foreign policy shared essential elements with other states on the continent. A security dilemma trapped European states — the measures each took to protect itself at once threatened others. These threatened states naturally took similar measures, believing that they had no choice in the matter. The appearance of weakness seemed to invite aggression. The dilemma was that there was little peace in strength. As states raced to mass more arms and allies, they made war more likely. This drove diplomacy from one crisis of brinksmanship to the next. Although diplomats resolved many of these crises, by cruel necessity governments were either preparing for, waging, or recovering from war. As a result, threats arose much more from miscalculation than design.
The "classic balance of power system" dominated Europe from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution's eruption in 1789. For nearly a century and a half, concrete interests like filling vacant thrones or snipping off bits of territory from one's neighbors rather than abstract ideals like which version of Christianity should prevail determined diplomacy. Shorn of ideological motives, statesmen followed the timeless maxim "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." One's ally in one war was often one's enemy in the next. Weaker states tended to act on their common interest in allying against stronger states that might diminish or outright conquer them. During that century and a half, Britain naturally played off different sides against each other and backed the weaker. George Canning, who would list foreign secretary and prime minister among his numerous government posts, explained why: "We can be but precariously safe as long as there is no safety for the rest of Europe."
A new age began with the French Revolution. For the next quarter century, the related ideologies of liberalism and nationalism were diplomatic wild cards, complicating and at times outright confounding the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" maxim. Nonetheless the traditional orientation of British foreign policy persisted. With France firmly in mind, Canning explained: "We shall proceed upon the principle that any nation of Europe that starts up with a determination to oppose a power which, whether professing insidious peace or declaring open war, is the common enemy of all nations ... [and] whatever may be the existing political relations of that nation with Great Britain, becomes instantly our ally."
The Power of the Nation-State
Essential to any country's power is the nature of the government that rules it. The key is how effective or "smart" the political system is in letting its leaders swiftly select and assert appropriate resources of hard and soft power to thwart threats, seize opportunities, alleviate chronic problems, and forestall future challenges, all in the name of national interests.
The nation-state "Great Britain" is the most enduring result of English imperialism. It took several centuries for England to subdue and engulf its neighbors into one state. England and Wales joined their parliaments in two stages by Acts of Union in 1536 and 1543. In 1603 the thrones of England and Scotland joined when Scotland's King James VI became England's James I. Great Britain finally emerged in 1707, when a third Act of Union created the United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Scotland. To realize that end, the founders took three vital steps, two substantive and one symbolic. The Scots dissolved their parliament for seats in England's parliament, and gave up their currency for what was thereafter known as the British pound sterling. Two national flags became one, with the crosses of England's St. George and Scotland's St. Andrew superimposed on a blue field; the new flag soon became popularly known as the Union Jack. Even then Great Britain was not complete. The next decisive territorial and institutional stage came in 1800, with an Act of Union whereby Britain's parliament absorbed that of Ireland.
Forging this state was prolonged and challenging enough. The process of morphing English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish into "Britons" was far more complex and, inevitably, incomplete. Wars against common enemies were vital in transforming identities and loyalties by inspiring in each subsequent generation greater meaning in a shared flag, tongue, coin, government, army, navy, and market. As important was the reality that the English not only far outnumbered but diluted with commerce, settlements, and language the "Celtic fringe" of Welsh, Scots, and Irish that they were trying to blend into Britons. Fouling this process was the harsh political, economic, and social bigotry by the Anglican majority against "dissident" Protestant sects and Catholics.
Vital to the process of developing a nation-state was the debate among political philosophers over what Britain was and what it could or should be. Although most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers supported the notion of Great Britain as a national identity, they clashed sharply over how power should be distributed in the state. Tories propounded an absolute monarchy, with parliament acting mostly as a rubber-stamp assembly for the king's will. Whigs championed a constitutional monarchy, with the bulk of power in parliament. The divisions within each camp were often as sharp as those between them.
Yet, regardless of which version they advocated, Britons were largely united in lauding their government as superior to all others. Home Secretary William Grenville captured that prevailing view with this exuberant assurance to King George III: "The Constitution of Great Britain is sufficient to pervade the whole world." Setting aside the question of its universal appeal, a more fundamental problem stalked, and still stalks, Britain's constitution: where is it? Unlike virtually all other peoples, the British never got around to composing a formal blueprint for government. Britain's "constitution" is a hodge-podge of documents, principles, practices, and institutions that emerged from nearly a millennium of political struggles. In spite of this, during the eighteenth century, a dynamic equilibrium of power symbolically prevailed among institutions in three different sites — Westminster, Whitehall, and Windsor. The political system's essence, however, was the relationship between the parliament and the monarchy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Titan by William R. Nester. Copyright © 2016 William R. Nester. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Maps xiii
1 The Art of British Power 3
2 Pitt the Younger 48
3 The Great Debate, 1789-1792 67
4 The First Coalition, 1792-1797 80
5 The Second Coalition, 1798-1802 136
6 The Third Coalition, 1803-1805 188
7 The Fourth Coalition, 1806-1807 217
8 The Fifth Coalition, 1808-1809 233
9 The Sixth Coalition, 1810-1814 256
10 The Seventh Coalition, 1814-1815 302
11 Legacies 324
Notes 341
Bibliography 371
Index 395