Systems of States

SYSTEMS OF STATES

SYSTEMS OF STATES

Martin Wight Edited with an introduction hy Hedley Bull

LEICESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

1977

First published in 1977 by Leicester University Press Distributed in North America by Humanities Press Inc., New Jersey Copyright

© Gabriele Ingaborg Wight and Leonard Keith Purkiss 1977

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Leicester University Press. Designed by Douglas Martin Set in Linotype Granjon Printed in Great Britain by Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol Bound by Remploy Ltd, Swansea ISBN 0

7185 1153

0

CONTENTS

Introduction: Martin Wight and the srudy of international relations, by Hedley Bull

I

I

De systematibus civitatum

2I

2

The states-system of Hellas

46

3

Hellas and Persia

73

4

The origins of our states-system :

5

geographical limits

IIO

The origins of our states-system: chronological limits

I29

6

International legitimacy

I 53

7

Triangles and duels

I74

Martin Wight: publications

20I

Notes

203

Index

223

Introduction: Martin Wight and the study of international relations

1 The papers collected in this volume, all of which relate to the theme of systems of states, were written by Martin Wight in the last eight years of his life for meetings of the British Committee on the Theory

of International Politics. Apart from the paper on 'International Legitimacy ', which appeared in slightly different form in the May

1972 issue of International Relations, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the editor, they have not previously been published. The British Committee on the Theory of International Politics has met

regularly since 1958 with the generous support of the Rocke­

feller Foundation. At the time of his death in July 1972 Martin Wight was Convenor of the Committee, having succeeded Sir

Herbert Butterfield in this role after the latter's retirement in 1967 from the Mastership of Peterhouse. When these papers were written the other members of the Committe� were Sir Herbert Butterfield,

Adam Watson, the late Geoffrey Hudson, the late Donald Mac­ Lachlan, Michael Howard, Coral Bell, Desmond Williams, Donald MacKinnon, Robert Wade-Gery, Maurice Keens-Soper and the editor of this volume. While they have no common view of the Theory of International Politics, their general approach to it is illustrated in Diplomatic Investigations, a sample of the papers written for the Committee, edited by Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, and published by Allen and Unwin in 1966. As the editors of that volume note in their Introduction, the Committee - by contrast with students of the Theory of International Politics in the United States of America - 'have probably been more concerned with the historical than the contemporary, with the normative than the scientific, with the philosophical than the methodological, with principles than policy' .1 The present papers represent Martin Wight's contribution to a collective exploration, by members of the

Systems of States Committee, of the concept of states-systems, the workings of the modern or Western states-system and of other historical states-systems.

2 Martin Wight was born in I9 I3, the son of a Brighton doctor, and educated at Bradfield and Hertford College, Oxford, where he took a first in Modern History in 1935 (Herbert Butterfield being one of his examiners). After a year in research at Oxford he joined the staff of the Royal Institute of International Aff airs, Chatham House, with which he had a lifelong association. He stayed at Chatham House from I936 until 1938, returned to it after the war from I 946 until I949, and was a member of the Council for the 20 years from 1952 until his death. His early period at Chatham House brought him into close contact with Arnold Toynbee, with whom he worked both on successive volumes of the Institute's Survey of International Affairs and on A Study of History, to Volume VII of which he contributed comments and notes.2 The young Martin Wight was profoundly influenced by Toynbee, and while he cannot be considered a disciple of the latter (his disagreement with his mentor on both historical and theological issues is evident in the notes to A Study of History,

and deepened with the passing of the years), he shared Toynbee,s

commitment to the study of universal history and his interests in the relationship of secular history and sacred history or divine provi­ dence. This commitment placed Wight, as it placed Toynbee, outside the mainstream of professional, academic historiography, even though he both taught and wrote history of a quite secular or technical kind. From 1938 to 1941 Wight was a schoolmaster at Haileybury, where the range and power of his mind, brought to bear both on historical questions and on the issues of the day, made a deep impression on his colleagues and pupils. One of his former pupils writes as follows: Martin came to Haileybury in succession to J. Hampden Jackson, who had followed C. E. Carrington. There was, therefore, a strong tradition on the history side and the subject attracted the

Introduction

3

more intellectually inclined boy.Martin moved into this situation without teaching experience .and at once established a reputation as a remarkable and brilliant teacher. His skills lay in a combina­ tion of a first rate intellect with a complete commitment to things of the mind. To be his pupil meant something much more than attending his classes. He expected, and got, from the small group who made up the History Vlth, working for Oxford and Cam­ bridge scholarships, an attention to history not merely as know­ ledge of the past but as a way of life in which all things were to be seen as having a moral content, all decisions as moral decisions. He was intensely serious minded, though with no solemnity and with a highly developed sense of the human and the ridiculous .... Martin . saw history as prophetic drama, 'philosophy teaching by examples,' and he taught it against a conceptual background

'

which was strongly T oynbeean.... This involved his pupils in elaborate and, I think, often preten­ tious debate on internal and external proletariats, on ' routs' and rallies' of civilisations, on yin' and 'yang' and on where we had •

•

then arrived in the great scheme of things.I am not now sure of its value as history but as intellectual stimulus it was immensely powerful.•

Martin Wight was at this time a Christian pacifist. His contem­ poraries at Oxford remember him as a passionate supporter of the League of Nations, much as it was later interpreted in Viscount Cecil's A Great Experiment; the Abyssinian crisis, which for Martin Wight was the formative international experience (as for later generations of students the Suez crisis or the Vietnam War was such an experience) brought disillusion with the League and a turn to pacifism, which he proclaimed in severe and uncompromising terms in an article in Theology in July 1936. In that year he got to know Dick Sheppard, the former Vicar of StMartin's in the Fields and Dean of Canterbury who at that time was residential Canon of St Paul's Cathedral, and was a founder of the Peace Pledge Union and the best-known spokesman for pacifism in England. Wight was strongly influenced by Sheppard, and for a period managed a pacifist bookshop for him on Ludgate Hill. The pacifism which the young Martin Wight expounded in the article in Theology was based upon the doctrine that it was contrary

4

Systems of States

to Christ's teaching to take hU:man life - whether in war, capital punishment, abortion or euthanasia. He did not advocate quietism or withdrawal, but saw pacifism as a long-range policy that would not triumph until one nation, at least, had offered itself as a sacrifice in the cause of peace.• His pacifism, however, was more doctrinal rather than practical: it derived less from the belief that pacifism would pro­

vide a viable technique for achieving results in this world than from the conviction that Christian principles allowed him no alternative.

The approach and outbreak of the Second World War brought him great moral anguish, not only because he felt the force of the argument that the struggle against Nazi Germany was a just one, but also because he had difficulty in convincing himself that he was wor­ thy to undertake what he saw as the high responsibility of being a pacifist. The application he lodged with the local tribunal on I 1 May I940 gave the following as the reasons that led him finally to declare himself a conscientious objector: I. That the War is the convulsion of a civilization that has forsaken its Christian origins, and become increasingly enslaved to secularism and materialism. It is a divine judgment upon Euro­ pean civilization for the corporate Sin (in which all share without distinction of religion or nation) which is the cause of the War: a judgment which is the consequence and punishment of past sin, itself taking the form of a more violent abandonment thereto. 2. That the method of the War can do nothing towards solving this fundamental problem of spiritual apostasy: it is one of the worst symptoms of that apostasy, and is utterly opposed to the Kingdom of God as shown in the life of Christ. The only method that can finally overcome the irrational and demonic forces of evil that have their fullest expression in Nazi Germany, is that of Calvary and the catacombs. 3· That the Christian who believes this, cannot avoid a refusal to take part in war, and must seek by other means to prepare the foundations of a new civilization that will be less in conflict with the Kingdom of God. While he felt that he as a Christian could not fight, the young Martin Wight had no illusions that pacifism could bring about the defeat of Hider, nor was he in any doubt as to which side he wanted to win. Nor did he hold that those Christians who chose to fight, in

Introduction

5

(he belief that the war was the struggle of sinful but free men against

. dae Prince of Darkness, were doing wrong. He followed the course of

the· war eagerly, and was a great admirer of Churchill; those who lis­ aened to Churchill's great radio speeches with Wight (who always had

the capacity

to make those with him feel in the presence of history)

ranember it as a powerful experience. As Wight grew older his

pacifism appears

to have dropped away; those who met him in later

·f H e found no inkling of it in his views, and learnt only with surprise .that this had been part of his background. What did, perhaps,

remain permanent in his outlook on the world was the combination ·of a stark! y realistic perception of the nature of international politics and a sense of personal moral revulsion from it. In I 94 I Wight returned to Oxford to join the distinguished team

.working under Margery Perham on colonial constitutions, and :remained there until 1 9 46. The fruits of this wartime work at Oxford were his three books on colonial questions:

·ment of the Legislative Council 16o6-1945

The D�v�lop­

(Faber and Faber,

1946), The Gold Coast Legislative Council (Faber and Faber, 194 7), and British Colonial Constitutions 1947 (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1 95 2). It was this experience also which led later to his co­ authoring (with W. Arthur Lewis, Michael Scott, and Colin Legum)

of Attitude to Africa (Penguin, 19 5 1), a popular work calling on Britain to adjust to the tide of nationalism in the African colonies. His work in the colonial field, however, while it was his most substantial contribution to technical or professional history, and

contributed

to

his moving away from the Toynbeean conceptual

framework of his early years, was not of his own choice, and does not express his central intdlectual and moral concerns. These concerns did find partial expression in

Power Politics ,

published by Chatham House in 1946. This slender pamphlet, now 'for many years out of print (dog-eared copies of it, annotated by successive generations of students, are to be found in libraries wher­ ever International Relations are studied), established him as a thinker and scholar of great distinction, and is still his best-known work. His second period at Chatham House, interrupted by a spell as the

Observer's

United Nations correspondent covering the sessions at

Lake Success in

1 946- 7,

Charles Manning, of

an

led to his acceptance, at the urging of

invitation to join the Department of Inter­

national Relations at the London School of Economics.

6

Systems of States

At the L.S.E. Martin Wight, while he enjoyed many wann friendships and commanded immense authority, verging on rever­ ence, among colleagues and students alike, was a somewhat aloof figure. Intellectually, his commitment to history, and more especially to the search for pattern or design in the grand sweep of universal history, tended to isolate him in a department which was concerned, in Manning's view, however tentatively, with the development of International Relations as a social science. Viewing education, as he did, as a process of being initiated into a great intellectual tradition, Wight saw the study of the present - the main concern of those around him- as an impoverishment of the mind. He was not, of course, uninterested in the present, but on the contrary devoted much of his own life to the study of it; he did, however, always see contemporary events against the background panorama of universal history. Fortified by his complete commitment to intellectual values and intellectual endeavour he was always reluctant to be drawn into the world of journalistic comment on current affairs and knowing pronouncements as to how they should be conducted, which beckoned him often enough. Wight at first lectured ·on International Institutions, which is usually taken to connote chiefly the League of Nations and the United Nations. Characteristically, he began with the Conciliar

Movement of 1409-49, and after dealing with seventeenth- and

eighteenth-century ideas of perpetual peace, presented the Congress System and the United Nations as the embodiment of the political ideas of Hobbes and the League as embodying the ideas of Locke. The subject, however, did not greatly interest him, and his mature assessment of International Institutions was stated in a seminar paper with this title, in which he argued that the League and the United Nations were merely pseudo-institutions; that the real in­ stitutions of international society were alliances, diplomacy and war; and that these were the institutions with which he proposed to deal. He later developed a course of lectures on what he called Inter­ national Theory and it was this subject which, more than any other, he made his own.a He saw it not as the attempt to develop a 'general theory, of International Relations that would serve to explain the present and predict the future - the enterprise that was then getting under way in universities in the United States - but rather as an account of the main traditions of thought about International Rela-

Introduction

7

tions in the past. These traditions he saw as three - the Realist, ·

Rationalist and Revolutionist traditions (alternatively, Machiavellian, Grotian, and Kantian) - and it was in terms of the perennial debate among successive representatives of these traditions that he presented the great issues, intellectual and moral, of world politics to a 1pellbound student audience. Some of the material from these lectures later found its way into his single most important paper, �Western Values in International Relations ', which was published in Diplomatic lnv�stigations in 1 966. : Wight remained at the L.S.E. from 1 949 unti1 1 96 1, spending one year teaching, at Hans Morgenthau's invitation, at the University of Chicago. When in 196 1 he went to the new University of Sussex as Professor of History and Dean of the School of European Studies 10me of his colleagues in London were surpri�d, but he was greatly excited by Lord Fulton's invitation to p�rticipate in the planning of a new university. Through the European Studies course he helped to devise at Sussex he sought ' to satisfy the educational needs of students as persons, to enable them to make sense of their lives, and to find a creative order in the knowledge they acquired and in their own experience. '8 The School of European Studies at Sussex was the first of its kind in a British university. From the stan Wight committed it firmly to the study of European civilization from the time of the Greeks onwards, and he became closely involved with its characteristic Courses on ' the European Tradition ' and ' the Modern European Mind '. He regularly gave tutorials himself in courses on Ancient History, on Dante, on Burckhardt, on various problems and periods in modern European history, and in his own field of International Relations. He was keenly alert to the needs, the talents, and the commitments of his younger colleagues, and in a system in which particular care was taken over the progress of individual students, he was unsurpassed in the combination of firmness and compassion he provided, and not only to those in particular difficulties. He was sometimes sceptical of some of the enthusiasms of a new university, and he could be openly hostile to anything he regarded as a lapse in integrity. But he had his own enthusiasms - Religious Studies, the History of Art, the University Library, and the 'Year Abroad ' for the students in his School - and he used to say that he enjoyed nothing more at Sussex than to participate in the meeting of deans

8

Systems of States

when imagination - more usually other people's than his own - had to be tied to practicalities. Wight 's own contributions were all the more resonant for their peculiar mix of restraint with a sense of purpose. These were at once happy and academically creative years. His School won the allegiance of large numbers of able students ; and once he had become persuaded that it should pay more attention to contemporary Europe than he had originally planned, its range was immense (it even included Russian Studies, both Orthodox and Communist). But given the breadth of his own mind, it remained a coherent whole, and many of his younger professorial colleagues testify to the singular influence that his profound and single-minded devotion to his School, and to the intellectual and educational en­ deavour it involved, h�d upon both their own thinking and upon the University more widely . During his I I years at Sussex much of his energy was taken up by academic planning and administration, not only for the University of Sussex but also for the University of Kent, of whose Academic Planning Board he was a member. But his research and writing continued to be directed towards International Theory, to which he still hoped to make a major contribution, and indeed it was during his period at Sussex that the papers collected in the present volume were written. Both at the L.S.E. and at Sussex Wight displayed a great gift for teaching simply person to person, and it was through the tutorial system that he most influenced his students, with many of whom he formed lasting friendships and corresponded in later life. While he was fundamentally a serious person, and his view of the world could be said to be stern and even severe, this was balanced by his humour and wit, including his ability to poke fun at himself : with a turn of phrase he could bring a discussion that had become too abstract or too heated down to earth, bringing relief and laughter.

3 The view of International Relations which Martin Wight pre­ sented in Power Politics was, in a loose sense, a ' realist ' one. This

Introduction

9

.,... not a term which he ever 'used to describe his own position, and it would be a mistake to confuse that position with others to which 1he· term is sometimes applied. He did not, of course, contend that all international politics was· about power or force: the term 'Power Politics' for him signified not Machtpolitik but simply the politics of Powers or states in their external aspect, and while he based his aposition on Stubbs' view that what distinguishes modern history

from medieval is the predominance of the idea of power over the idea Df right, he recognized that statesmen are moved by considerations of right, law, and justice.7 His was not the polemical or iconoclastic

tzealism, (developed in opposition to 'utopianism') of E. H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis (19 3 9)- a book, however, which greatly influenced him. Nor did he seek to present a systematic theory of 1he goals of all states, such as Hans J. Morgenthau put forward in

Politics Among Nations (1 948).

Nor yet did he have the purpose of pointing the way ahead to policymakers, after the fashion of such didactic 'realist ' works as George F. Kennan's American Diplomacy

(19 5 2).

What Wight does have in common with these other 'realist' thinkers is his pessimism: his rejection of the view that progress, away from power politics (in the sense of Machtpolitik) and towards more peaceful and just international order, has taken place or may be ·expected to take place. If Sir Thomas More or Henry IV, he a

wrote in

1 96o,

were to return to contemporary England or France

they might admit that their countries had moved domestically to­ wards goals of which they could approve. 'But if they contemplated the international scene it is more likely that they would be struck by resemblances to what they remembered . . . The stage would have become much wider, the actors fewer, their weapons more alarming, but the play would be the same old melodrama. International politics is the realm of recurrence and repetition; it is the field in which political action is most regularly necessitous. '8 This disposition to interpret international politics in terms of recurrent patterns led Wight always to suspect claims that some new or apparently new development (nuclear weapons, scientific advance, world public opinion, the growth of communications) was about to transform the international system. It led him also to seek out the historical precedents to which international events might be expected to conform: to view the polarization of power between America and

IO

Systems of States

Russia as a return to the polarization between France and the Habs­ burgs, or the ideological conflict between the West and Communism as a replay of the schism of Western and Eastern Christendom;' to see in Mussolini's invasion of France in the wake of Hitler's victories the same role of the jackal Power that had been played by Prussia before the battle of Jena, or in President Wilson's moral objections, as he sent American troops to intervene in the Russian Civil War, the equivalent of the tears shed by Maria Theresa as she despatched Austrian troops to take part in the partition of Poland.10 He saw Marxism as in essence a perversion of the New Testament, a secular­ ized debasement of the Messianic story, and National Socialism as a perversion of the Old Testament, the self-appointment of a new Chosen People.11 As between the view of International Relations Wight took at the age of 33, when Power Politics was published, and the view he developed in later life there is a difference of emphasis, if not of basic content. In Power Politics the emphasis is on the elements of conflict and anarchy in International Relations, even though it is conceded that this conflict and anarchy is restrained by a sense of common interest and common obligation: 'Powers will continue to seek security without reference to justice, and to pursue their vital interests irrespective of common interests, but in the fraction that they may be deflected lies the difference between the jungle and the traditions of Europe ,. 12 In his later writings it is these elements of common interest and co.trunon obligation that came to comman d his attention, most notably in the article on 'Western Values in Inter­ national Relations, (an account of the Grotian or Rationalist tradi­ tion) to which reference has been made, and in the papers assembled in the present volume. There is sometimes a note of moral revulsion, a hint of ohne mich, in Wight's clear-sighted descriptions of the cycle of power politics: most notably in his invocation of the 'occult and terrible law ' of the violent destruction of human species propounded by de Maistre- a law which, he thought, provided a more accurate account of the historical record than progressivist theory.u This helps to account for Martin Wight's attitude of Olympian detachment from public controversy about international affairs. He was not without strong fedings about matters of foreign policy: the contempt he felt as an undergraduate for Mussolini and for the policy of appeasement did

Introduction

II

not leave him; he felt strongly against Britain's invasion of Egypt,

and in favour of her entry into the European Economic Community.

Nor do his writings display any coy reluctance to call evil and ltupidity by their proper names. Nor yet again did he display any general unwillingness to stand up and be counted on public issues:

he was, for example, a co--founder of 'The Responsible Society ', a

body set up

in I 97'

to combat the commercialization and exploita�

tion of sex. u But in his attitude to international affairs he was remarkably

free of the impulse that drives so many students of the

subject to advocate policies or canvass solutions to the problems of the day. Wight emphatically did not stand for an attitude of what today is called political commitment, and this was because his

commitment, while it was very powerful, was not political in nature, but intellectual and moral - and, most fundamental! y of all, reli­

gious.

4 If Martin Wight's view of International Relations has as its central characteristic his pessimism, the sources of this view lie in his religious faith. Wight was, judged by the fashions of today, a very orthodox Christian- a devout Anglican- and was much impressed by the efforts of Herbert Butterfield and Reinhold Niebuhr to recall Christianity 'to the Old Testament or prophetic interpretation of history, with its belief in the sinfulness of human nature, in cataclysm and tragic conflict, in judgement and providence. 'U In the Christian's attitude towards the march of history, he thought, two attitudes should go hand in hand: on the one hand, the rejection of secular optimism; on the other hand, the acceptance of theological hope. 'Hope', as he once put it, 'is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue' .18 In his 1 948 article in the Ecumenical Review he attacks the Pelagian belief that 'we are on the whole wdl-meaning people doing our best, who will somehow muddle through', together with secular optimism, 'the belief that because we are wdl-meaning and doing our best, things will therefore tend to come right; or (for optimism sidesteps subtly in fatalism) that what does happen will be for the best anyway.' Neither of these beliefs, he says, is Christian.

12

Systems of States

We are not well-meaning people doing our best; we are miserable sinners, living under judgement, with a heritage of sin to expiate. We are doing our best like Caiaphas, for our idolatrous loyalties; we are well-meaning like Pilate, every day crucifying Christ afresh. We will not somehow muddle through; if we repent and cast ourselves upon God's mercy we have the promise that we shall be saved - a totally different thing, which carries no assurance of muddling through in this world.11 The belief in progress, which had infected Christian historical thinking since the seventeenth century, he thought, had produced 'a kind of welfare state, standard of living, United Nations Christian­ ity' .18 The secular hope upon which, above all, it focused, was the avoidance of war. This hope Martin Wight did not flinch from rejecting. War is inevitable, he proclaimed on the Third Programme

in 1 953, even though particular wars are avoidable.19 This is a point

of view that at least permits us to go on working to avoid the particular war that is threatening, even while recognizing, as a matter of statistical probability, that over a period wars will break out. In the early years of the cold war, however, Wight appears to have felt that the Third World War was one particular war that was

not avoidable. In a letter written from New York in 1 946 , after a day spent watching the Security Council debate, and feeling that 'it seemed like Geneva all over again only that the rules of the game are now a good deal less civilised', he wrote that: the Third World War is as certain as the return of Halley's Comet .... There is a great temptation for us all to think that though the League collapsed we have learnt our lesson, and the United Nations is in some sense an improvement on the League, and that if we worry enough about it it will work, and we shall be

enabled to live happily ever after. I am convinced that these are dangerous fallacies. Nor indeed do I know that Christians have any warrant for entertaining such secula . r hopes. And I do feel that it is time that the discussion of these matters among Christians proceeded from the realisation that the level on which a Christian political philosophy has to be worked out is ultimately that, not of the White House and Downing Street, but of the catacombs.2 0 He appears to have felt that even to pray for peace can involve a kind of impiety. 'Perhaps there is a sense today', he said in a broad-

Introduction cast in 1 94 8, 'in which we will have to say that the preservation of civilization and the averting of war are not important, before we can recover our balance and find again the way in which they are important. For what matters is not whether there is going to he another war or not, but that it should be recognised, if it comes, as an

act of God's

In his

I

fustice and if it is averted, as an act of God's Mercy.'21

95 I Cambridge sermon 'God in History', Wight called

upon Christians to return to the doctrine of Antichrist, the decline of which in Christian thought had gone

pari passu

with the growth of

the belief in progress. The Christian era had made possible what was

not possible before, but what Christ himself had foretold: a succession of false Christs and false Prophets. If I suggest that the doctrine of Antichrist is part of their theologi­ cal equipment which Christians might do well to refurbish, it is not to encourage the notion that the Book of Daniel or the Apocalypse of StJohn can be tortured into throwing light upon the current policies of Washington and Moscow, nor to revive the use of the word 'Antichrist', as a term of denunciation for Stalin or General MacArthur or Aneurin Bevan; for in this sense the word had by the seventeeth century become as depreciated by overuse as the word 'Fascist' has become with us today 22 .

Antichrist should be seen not as a person- as the Church of their day had seen Nero, or Julian the Apostate, or Cesare Borgia- but rather as a recurrent situation marked by apostasy, persecution, and demonic possession. By recognizing that theirs is an age of Antichrist, he held, Christians would find a safeguard against secular optimism, and at the same time a source of Christian hope. For as history moves towards a final concentration of Satanic evil, it moves also towards the divine act of judgment that will bring history to an end. 'What is the Reign of Antichrist but the prologue to the Second Coming, the sign that the forces of evil in history have come to a head and worked themselves out? '23

In the last 20 years of his life these views were less in the fore­

ground of his thought. They do not, for example, obtrude in the essays in the present volume. There is no reason to think that he abandoned or qualified his religious views, but having wrestled for many years with the moral and intellectual implications of being a Christian, and having come to a kind of truce, rather than an

Systems of States ultimate conclusion, he became more detached about these theo­ logical themes. His later writings, coming as they did after a very happy marriage, express a more mellow view of the world and reflect a lessening preoccupation with his own inner problems and tensions. But he does not seem ever to have wavered in his faith in funda­ mental Christian tenets; indeed, this unshakability of his most fundamental beliefs helps to account for the great solidity of his contributions to International Relations and the other subjects in which he was interested; in an age of doubt, in which others were uncertain of their bearings, he always spoke from a point of reference.

5 If Martin Wight was something of an odd man out both as an historian and as a student of International Relations this was because the questions which concerned him most were ethical and theologi­ cal; at a time when, in both subjects, this was unfashionable he saw the study of history and of International Relations as a means through which these questions could be probed. In his mature years, when the papers in this volume were written, the predominant influence upon the study of International Relations

in Western

coun­

tries was that of what may loosely be called the 'social scientific' school, which sought through techniques such as systems analysis, game theory, simulation, content analysis, communications theory and bargaining theory, to arrive at a general explanation of inter­ national phenomena. Wight's attitude towards the 'social scientific ' school - characterized as the school was by the undervaluing of purely historical understanding, by disdain of inquiry into the moral presuppositions of international behaviour, and by an under­ lying utilitarianism of purpose and motivation - was wholly un­ sympathetic. He made no serious effort to come to grips with it, or to set out the basis of his rejection of it, and his critics used to complain of his failure to do so. The truth is, however, that as be­ tween Martin Wighes view of the subject and that embraced by what I have called the 'social scientific' school there was simply no point of contact at all: the idea that an approach to the subject as

Introduction

secular, as anti-historical and as anti-philosophical as this might provide some guidance as to man's dilemmas in world politics is one that he would have found impossible to comprehend. While Wight's work is less well known than that of some of his more publicized contemporaries he had a profound impact on those ·who came into contact with him through his striking clarity of mind, his awe-inspiring erudition, his modesty and the sense he conveyed of being above the battle, his integrity and gravitas, and above all the very high standards, intellectual and moral, that he set himself. Partly at least because of the sense he always had of the inadequacy of his own work, judged by these standards, he never completed the great work on International Relations which he hoped to write, and of which his friends thought him capable. This was a revised and expanded Power Politics, over which he laboured for many years, ·and about which he wrote in I 97 I in a letter to a friend: I analyse with painful interest the perfectionism which seems to prevent me from being satisfied with anything. There is also that final act of will power which will seize a number of endless! y worked, disjointed, disparate chapters, and fuse them together into a whole in a blaze of creative integration. This is what I have been waiting for over Power Politics. Meanwhile the months flow by, and Nixon decides to go to China, and Japan enters the Great Power dance, and Britain joins the Common Market, and so many sentences have to be revised that one wonders whether a new chapter is necessary, and so on.24 It is hoped that an edited version of Martin Wight's unfinished revision and expansion of Pow" Politics will soon be published. The essays collected in the present volume were not intended by their author for inclusion in Power Politics, but stand on their own. Because they were written for a Committee of specialists, they assume a good deal of knowledge of the history and philosophy of Inter­ national Relations. Because they are part of a collective enquiry they ·occasional!y make reference to previous discussions of the Committee and papers by others of its members; the reader coming fresh to these essays will occasionally have the impression that he is eaves­ dropping on a conversation. Wight did not conceive these papers as chapters in a single book, but they do possess a unity of theme, all of them forming part of an enquiry into systems of states.

Systems of States 6

The concept of systems of states lies at the heart of the contem­ porary study of International Relations, and owes its vogue to the attempt of social scientists (principally but not exclusively American) to view the international political field as a whole as a particular kind of 'system of action'. 2� However, the idea that European states form a system was first given wide currency by early-nineteenth­ century historians such as Heeren and Ancillon, and is traced hy Wight to an essay of Pufendorf's published in 1675· Wight's ap­ proach to the subject may be said to have three distinguishing features. First, by contrast with those studies that derive from theoretical models of states-systems, actual and possible, Wight's approach is based on the comparative study of states-systems, that have actually existed. In these essays he deals comprehensively only with the modern or Western states-system and with the classical Greek or Greco-Persian system. However, he draws upon papers written by other members of the Committee on the fonns of universal political organization that existed in ancient India, in China during the Period of Warring States, in Imperial China, in Islam, in the Europe of the Dark Ages, and in Western Christendom. Wight takes a states-system to be simply a group of states that are sovereign, in the sense that they recognize no political superior, and have more or less permanent relations with one another, expressed in four institutions: messengers, conferences and congresses, a diplo­ matic language, and trade. On this definition there are only three reasonably unambiguous examples of states-systems. There is first the modern or Western states-system which (Wight argues) arose in Europe in the fifteenth century, and is now world-wide, and has six essential features or 'internal signs': sovereign states, their mutual recognition, great powers, a means of regular communication, inter­ national law and the defence of its common interests through maintenance of a balance of power. There is second!y the Hellenic­ Hellenistic or Greco-Roman system, which in Wight's treatment comprises not only the Greek or Greco-Persian states-system before the Macedonian conquest, with which he deals in the chapters on 'Bellas' and 'Bellas and Persia', but also the system of Hellenistic kingdoms between the death of Alexander and the Roman conquest,

Introduction

17

with which he proposed also to deal in a later paper that was never written. The Classical Greek city-state system, Wight argues, was unlike the modern Western states-system not only in that it was based on a common language and did not derive from a previously existing political unity, but also in that it operated without some of the most vital of the modern states-system's institutions: international law, resident embassies, great powers and the attempt to preserve a balance of power. And there is thirdly the states-system that existed in China during the Period of Warring States. The attempt to take account of those forms of universal political organization that cannot be treated as states-systems leads Wight to make a number of important distinctions. One is between inter­ national states-systems, or systems strictly of states that are sovereign, and suzerain state-systems, or systems in which one political unit asserts suzerainty or paramountcy over the rest: examples are the systems centring upon Imperial China, Byzantium, the Ahbasid Caliphate and (in relation to the principalities of the Indian sub­ continent) the British Raj. Another important distinction he draws is between primary states-systems, or systems whose members are states, and secondary states-systems, whose members are systems of states: examples are the relations of Rome and Persia, the relations of Egypt, the Hittites and Babylon, and the relations of Eastern Chris­ tendom, Western Christendom and Islam. Wight also makes a vital distinction between open and closed states-systems - between states­ systems that are impinged upon by outside forces (as the Hellenic system was by Persia and Carthage, or the European system by Tur· key) and those systems that are free of outside pressures, the contem­ porary global system being the first in history that is completely closed. A second distinguishing feature of Wight's approach is that by contrast with those studies of states-systems which view them as determined purely by mechanical factors such as the number of states in the system, their relative size, the political configuration in which they stand, the state of military technology, he places emphasis on the norms and values that animate the system, and the institutions in which they are expressed. A states-system, in Wight's view, pre­ supposes·� common culture. The Greco-Roman system, the ancient Chinese· ... system, and the· modern, Western system - his staple examples - were all founded upon such a common culture. The

t8

Systems of States

absence of any such culture in the rdations between the Hellenic states and barbarian powers such as Persia and Carthage, or in the relations between modern European states and Turkey before the nineteenth century, provide part of the case for doubting that the states concerned belong to any common states-system. Wight raises but does not answer the question whether the culrural unity that is a necessary presupposition of states-systems consists simply in a common morality and code, leading to agreement about the basic rules of coexistence among states, or whether it requires common assumptions of a deeper kind - religious or ideological such

as

he explores

in relation to the Western states-system in the

chapter on 'International Legitimacy'. He also places on the agenda of a comparative study of states-systems the question whether there is a wide variation between the common code of one system and another, or whether all such codes 'belong to the great pool of practices and platitudes, supposedly common to the human race, where men seek for Natural Law. ' 2 6 Wight notes that a characteristic tendency of the Western states­ system has been that its cultural unity is subject to recurrent fracture, as in the religious wars, the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the ideological conflicts of our own times. He also notes that all states-systems before the Western system in its current phase have had a sense of cultural differentiation from what lay outside: from this sense there has arisen the designation of outsiders as barbarians, and the distinction between just wars, or wars fought against members of the system to enforce its rules, and holy wars, or wars fought to defend the system

as

a whole against outsiders. The

central question about the global states-system of our own times is perhaps whether - given the international fracture to which it is at present subject, the disappearance of the sense of cultural differentia­ tion from what lay outside, and the expansion of the system of states beyond its original, European confines- any sense of cultural unity can still be said to exist. This is a question which Wight does not,

unfortunately, discuss systematically, although what he writes will help others to seek answers to it.

A

third feature that distinguishes Wight's approach is that by con­

trast with those studies that seek to expound the nature and dynamics of states-systems

as

if a rigid line could be drawn between this parti­

cular form of universal political organization and others, Wight

Introduction recognizes and explores the uncertain boundaries between what is a states-system and what is not. In the study of world politics at the present time there is legitimate suspicion of attempts to explain inter­ national conduct - or to justify it - exclusively in terms of the states 1ystcm. Much of the history of modern world politics, particularly of JlOll-European peoples and states, lay outside the confines of any states­ tystem. Much of the present practice of world politics cannot be comprehended in terms simply of the relations of states, but requires us instead to recognize the role played on the world stage by groups JUch as international organizations, transnational associations, multi­ national corporations and world revolutionary and counter-revolu­ tionary movements. Whether or not the structure of the states system is in decline in world politics at the present time, many would argue that it has become an obstacle to the achievement of human goals such as peace, or economic justice, or the control of the environment. It is one of the strengths of Wight's work in this field that much of it is concerned with forms of world political experience that lie beyond the states system in any strict sense. Mention has already been made of his elaboration of the concepts of a suzerain state­ system, and of a secondary states system. His two chapters on ' The Origins of Our States-System ' explore, successively, its geographical boundaries and its chronological boundaries. In his paper on ' Hellas and Persia' he remarks : 'A historic states-system may seem a tolerably clear and distinct kind of community, or set of relationships and practices, when we study its internal structure and organic life. But when we examine its penumbra, look at its connections with what lies beyond it, explore the scaredy definable gradations by which it shades into its cultural and diplomatic background, it begins to lose its coherence and identity, and doubts may arise about the validity of the concept itself of a states-system. '2 7 Some would say that the study of world politics stands in need of liberation from the domina­ ting concept of the states system. Certainly it is the case that alternative forms of universal political organization have not received the attention that their historical importance warrants. Wight's essays contain some valuable hints as to how this vast territory might be explored. 'De Systematibus Civitatum ' was written for the Committee meeting of April 196 7 . 'The States-System of Hellas ' and 'Hellas and Persia ', which were written for the meetings of October I 964

20

Systems of States

and September 19 65 respectively, were envisaged as the first two parts of a four-part study of The States System of Greece and Rome which, had it been finished, would have dealt also with the Hellenis­ tic states-system and the changes following upon the intrusion of Rome. 'The Origins of Our States-System : Geographical Limits' was written for the meeting of July 197 1, 'The Origins of our States­ System : Chronological Limits ' for that of September I 97 I , ' Inter­ national Legitimacy ' for that of April 1 9 7 1 , and ' Triangles and Duels' for that of January I 972. Where references have been given for quotations in the text these have been checked and corrected, but there are a number of quota­ tions for which no references are given, and these have been left as they stand. No substantial alterations have been made to the text, apart from the deletion of some references to previous discussions of the Committee. I must thank Nicola Feakes for her work on the footnores, and Hester Gascoigne for her help with the proofs and index. I am particularly grateful to Gabriele Wight and Harry Pitt for their help and encouragement.

I

De systematihus civitatum

The title is Pufendorfs : a tract published in his Dissertationes llcademicae selectiores at Lund in I 675 . He was trying to make sense of the German constitution after the Peace of Westphalia. Effective sovereignty had been surrendered or lost by the emperor, but its passing to the princes was obstructed by the emperor's residual authority. ' There is nothing for it but to say that Germany is an irregular body, similar to a monster, if it is measured by the rules of civil science. ' But the conception of a states-system provided a new category of explanation, transferring the problem from the domain of constitutional law to that of international relations. His definition of a states-system is : ' several states that are so connected as to seem to constitute one body but whose members retain sovereignty ' .1 The term thus passed into juristic literature. States-systems were subdivided by later writers into ' unions ' (such as that effected in 1 6 88 between England and the United Provinces, Saxony-Poland, and Britain-Hanover) and ' confederations ' (the Empire, the Dutch, the Swiss). I have not been able to trace how ' states-system ' acquired the inclusive meaning it has for us of ' the family of nations '. Gierke's notes show that Thomasius in 1 6 87 distinguished a systema citJita­ tum from a confederation as ' perpetua unio inddinitae gratiae causa', . and that Nettelbladt in 1 748 described the society of peoples as ·systema gentium.2 Rousseau wrote in 1 756 that ' routes les Puissances de l'Europe forment entre elles une sorte de systeme '.• The French Revolutionary upheaval confirmed the need for a general term to describe the European condition that the French Revolution had upset ; Staatensystem appears in this sense in Gentz's Fragmente in I 8o6 ; and by the time Heeren published his Handbuch der Ges­ chichte des europaischen Staatensystems und seiner Colonien in 1 809 the transformation may be taken as complete. The O.E.D. gives the first appearance of the word ' states-system ' in English with the translation of Heeren's book in I 8 34· It might be added that it defines ' states-system ' as ' the federation of a number of states with

22

Systems of States

the object of preserving the actual balance of power ' - a definition that reveals the difficulties of the subject by magnificently begging two of the principal questions�. My aim in the present paper is to offer some notes towards clarifying the idea of a states-system, and to formulate some of the questions or propositions which a comparative study of states-systems would examine. Some of them may be beyond the limits of our enquiry ; many may be wrongly formulated. But they illustrate the kind of issue which I believe we should discuss systematically.

1 . DEFINITIONS AND DELIMITATIONS It is worth reminding ourselves that if we were to define the kind of states-system we are concerned with by enumeration, we have perhaps three clear examples : the Western, the Hellenic-Hellen­ istic or Graeco-Roman, and the Chinese between the collapse of the Chou empire in 771 B .C. and the establishment of the Ts'in Empire in 2 2 1 A.D. As I read Adam Watson's account of what he calls the Southern Indian sub-system I was wondering if this indeed was another example,4 for the states-system of which this sub-system is assumed to be a part remains unclear, and when the sub-system is described with such clarity it is easy to suppose that it may itself be the states-system which emerged after the collapse of the Satavahana Empire. One way of pursuing our enquiry is to ask what these systems have in common and extend the list. An alternative way of pursuing the enquiry would be to take a definition of a states-system and refine it. Montague Bernard offered this definition : a group of states having relations more or less permanent with one another '. Heeren's was more precise : the union of several contiguous states, resembling each other in their manners, religion, and degree of social improve­ ment, and cemented together by a reciprocity of interests '. 5 I shall try to combine the two procedures, and to examine, first, the states or political units which may be supposed to form the kind of group we have in mind - the members of the states-system ; and secondly, the kinds of communication or intercourse, arising from relations more or less permanent, which we consider ' systematic '. •

•

De systematibus civitatum

23

A . STATES, SUZERAINS, AND SYSTEMS OP STATES

Who are the members of a states-system? By 'states' we normally mean 'sovereign states', political authorities which recognize no superior. But for them to form a system we must mean something more : not only must each claim independence of any political superior for itself, but each must recognize the validity of the same claim by all the others. In modern Europe this has been formulated in the doctrine of the legal equality of states. The ancient Greek poleis and the Hellenistic Kingdoms, in a similar way, both claimed sovereignty and recognized one another's. The kind of states-system described in Geoffrey Hudson's paper on the Chinese is different from this.6 Here there is indeed a group of states having relations more or less permanent with one another, but one ruru>ng them asserts unique claims which the others formally or tacidy accept. This is the suzerain, the sole source of legitimate authority, conferring status on the rest and exacting tribute or other marks of deference. The conception of a presiding monarch seems deeply engrained in Chinese history, for it appears that even . before the internal unification of China by the Ts'in Empire, during the Period of Warring States, the independent Chinese principalities continued to recognize the shadowy authority of the Chou dynasty down to about 335 B.C. Perhaps the closest parallel to China is Byzantium. The Byzantine Basileus was in constitutional theory the overlord of the universe, combining the universal claims of the Roman Emperor with the duty of protecting and disseminating . the universal religion of Christianity. All other Christian princes were his representatives, and all lands that had formerly belonged to the Empire but were now lost would in due time return to their lawful sovereign. The theory of the Abbasid Caliphate was similar. As the Islamic empire decayed and its provinces became independent, self­ made sultans and emirs as far afield as the Slave Kings of. Delhi continued to apply to a titular caliph for a diploma of investiture. The most recent instance of this kind of system is the British Raj in India. The Blitish Indian Government did not claim to rule the world but within its narrower range it asserted an authority over the 6oo-odd native princes which was so effective that the Raj appears an extreme example of what we are discussing. And it was compelled to translate the position into modern juridical terms, when in I 8 9 I it officially declared that the principles of international law have no ·

•

Syst�ms of Stat�s bearing upon the rdations between the government of India as representing the queen-empress on the one hand, and the native states under the suzerainty of Her Majesty on the other. The paramount supremacy of the former presupposes and implies the subordination of the latter. ' 1 We might distinguish these from inter­ national states..systems by calling them

first

suzerain

state-systems (in the

phrase the word ' state ' should be in the plural, but in the

second in the singular). And we may note that, while the funda­ mental political principle of the first will be to maintain a balance of power, for the second it will be

divide �t imp�ra.

Can suzerain powers, or suzerain state-systems, themselves form a secondary states-system ? There have not been many of them together in the world at any one time, and we have at once the question, what is the minimum number of units we think of as constituting a states­ system ? The rdations between the Roman Empire and the Persian empire in its successive manifestations (Parthian, Sassanian, Abbasid Caliphate) might provide a test-case. These two world-empires had closer rdations with one another than either had with the contem· porary empires in India and China. Their cultural interdependence was notable, and in the intervals of mortal struggle there were periods

of high mutual esteem. In the years following 1945 these Roman­ Persian rdations were hopefully adduced by journalists and radio

commentators who wanted a historical precedent for peaceful co­ existence between world-dividing giants. None of them,

so

far as I

remember, found the text for their purpose in the Histories of Theophylact of Simocatta. He records a letter of the Great King Chosroes II to the Emperor Maurice : ' There are two eyes to which Divinity confided the task of illuminating the world : these are the powerful monarchy of the Romans and the wisely governed Commonwealth of the Persians. By these two great empires the barbarous and war-loving nations are kept in check, and mankind given better and safer government throughout. ' The occasion was unusual, because Chosroes was a fugitive at Maurice's court, seeking aid to recover his throne from rebels, and when he had been restored with Maurice's assistance, the two powers joined forces to suppress a

national revolt in Armenia which they had partitioned between

them. But if the letter had been typical of the relationship between the two empires, would their rdationship have amounted to a states­ system ? Wesdake gave an answer to the cognate question concerning

De syst�matibus civitatum the conditions for international law. In the time of the Roman jurists, he said, ' there was hardly an international society. The Roman and Parthian empires divided the world within which international relations on anything like an equal footing were possible. But the society which is to give birth to law must contain a sufficient number of members for the questions which arise among them to be viewed in

a

general light. Between two or three individuals particular

interests determine and general rules do not arise. ' At the other end of this scale is the case of the Near East in the latter half of the second millennium B.C. Here the revolution in communications due to the introduction of the horse and the in­ vention of cuneiform writing seems to have produced a states-system with Babylonian as the tem,

lingua franca,

a rudimentary diplomatic sys­

io.Yiolability of heralds and ambassadors, treaties of commerce

and marriage, dynastic alliances, and a rudimentary ideology of fraternity and peace. Egypt and the Hittites were the protagonists, with Babylonia and Crete holding the balance. Each of these was an empire, ' federation ,, or suzerain state-system. Of the Hittite royal

tide, Great King, Gurney says ' the title " Great King " belongs to the language of diplomacy and denotes the Hittite King's claim to be one of the great powers of the time, with dominion over lesser kings. '8 If we had a paper on this states-system, we should want to know how many were the powers between whom these relations existed, according to the evidence of the Tell el-Amarna and Boghaz­ koy documents (the minor powers, Elam, Assyria, Cyprus, the

Aramaean tribes, are mentioned by the historians but do not come

dearly into focus); and also the extent to which the powers accepted doctrine of equality among themselves. In the famous treaty between Egypt and the H ittite Empire of 1 272 B.C., Hogarth finds a

possible traces of a recognition of subordination by the Hittites. 9 For all that, the Armana age seems to be a virtually unique example of what I have called a secondary states-system, that is to say, one whose members are themselves not unitary sovereign states but complex empires or suzerain state-systems. The nearest analogue would perhaps be provided by international relations in the

Medi­

terranean in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D. Here there was a triangular relationship between Eastern Christendom, Western Christendom and Islam. But none of them was a single power-bloc. In the central act of the drama, the Fourth Crusade, Venice finally

Systems of St4tes established her own sovereign independence of the Byzantine Empire by placing it under Venetian management. The Second Bulgarian Empire played off the Crusaders against declining Byzantium, and defeated and captured the first Latin Emperor of Constantinople within a y�r of his accession. The West consisted of at least two powers, the Empire, with its ambitions and resources transformed by Henry VI 's marriage to the heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily, and the papacy. The Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem was the most distant fief of the Holy See, but the Eastern Emperor asserted suzerainty over the Frankish principality of Antioch. Islam was the most fragmented of the three. The vestigal Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad was eclipsed by the rival Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt ; and when Saladin suppressed the Fatimids he restored the titular supremacy of the Abbasids in order that his own Syrian-Egyptian empire should be able to function more effectively as an independent power. Equally independent was the Selj ug Great Sultanate of Rum, with which the title sultan came to replace that of caliph as the designa­ tion for the holder of supreme secular power. The relationships between these and the minor powers formed an animated drama of power politics and cultural interchange ; but whether they were sufficient! y organized to compose a states-system, in the sense in which we have been using the term, might be a matter for discussion. What seems to have been most lacking was a common ethos or ideology. Even the chivalric practices and feudal assumptions of the West were only partially reproduced in the social disintegration of Islam, and still less in the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless, if we are seeking a medieval states-system, it is perhaps only in these external relations that we shall find it. I agree with the conclusion of Desmond Williams' paper that in the Middle Ages there was not a states-system of the kind we are concerned with.10 If I might supplement his arguments, I would say that the i(!ternal arrangements of Western Christendom seem to be marked

y

b the following characteristics :

1.

!.h..�

. .

existence of a single undivided

societas christiana,

which

was the framework of all relationship and all roriflkt. There was a persistent theoretical emphasis on unity rather than separateness, and on hierarchy rather than equality. Consequently it is im­ possible to use the word ' international ' in speaking of medieval

De systematibus civitatum politics without serious anachronism and distortion. There was also, one might add, a persistent emphasis on questions of right · 'rather than questions of interest : one recalls Stubbs' distinction between the natures of medieval and modern wars. 2. A distribution and parcelling of power among an innumerable multitude of governmental units. Their interdependence and the restraints upon them followed, so to speak, pyramidal not hori­ zontal lines. A few of them slowly grew into the-ritlitates et regna to whom Aquinas in the later thirteenth century could apply the Aristotelian category of a ' perfect community '. These developed the internal organization and external claims which in due course gave birth to the conceptions of ' sovereignty ' and ' the state '. 3 · The claim of the Empire to universal j urisdiction in tempora­

libus.

This was never effective in fact, and the traditional excep­

tions slowly gained recognition, as the French king's claim to have no political superior was recognized by Innocent· III's decretal Per Venerabilem in 1 202. But the claim persisted, and characteris­ tically grew clearer and more defined after the Empire as a political institution had fallen to pieces. It was only in the fourteenth century that the maxim rex imperator in regno suo became current. Where Burckhardt emphasized the illegitimacy of the Renaissance despots, more recently historians have tended to emphasize the survival of imperial investiture in Italy : ' power came from below, from the peopl� : sovereignty came from above, from the emperor'. And as late as 1 4 1 6, Sigismund, when visiting the capitals of Europe, was incautious enough while attending a meeting of the Parlement ·of Paris to dub a French knight, and was consequently refused admission at Dover until he had formally declared that he had no intention of infringing the king's authority

in the realm of England. (The new mediatory role that Sigismund

had discovered for the imperial office has obvious resemblances to that of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Sigismund stood at the end of the long hittory of the international power of

the Holy Roman Emperor; many people see the Secretary-General of the United Nations standing on the further side of the centuries of international anarchy which we call a states-system, and hope that his office will grow in power. Perhaps it will re-enact the history of the imperial dignity' backwards.) 4 · The claim of the papacy to universal jurisdiction in spiritualibus.

Systems of States This, unlike the imperial claim, was made effective, through a massive international bureaucracy, which was the chief limitation on the rudimentary sovereignty of the civitates et regna, and prompted Figgis's dictum that ' the real state of the Middle Ages in the modern sense if the words are not a paradox - is the Church '. One might add that the real diplomatic system of the Middle Ages was the system of papal legates, who ' carry out direct papal goverrunent through the length and breadth of the societas' .11 The universal government of the papacy was dismanded only after the Council of Constance, with the development of national churches. The change was symbolized by the invention at Constance of the concordat, a new kind of diplomatic agreement on an equal basis between the papacy and the 'nations ', who were afterwards replaced by the kings . -

5 . The conflict between Empire and papacy for supremacy within the societas christiana. It was always essentially a conflict between two officers of the same undivided society, but degenerated into a struggle between two great powers, one territorially based on Germany, to which the Hohenstaufen were able to add Sicily, the other territorially based on the Patrimony of St Peter with effec­ tive! y organized backing throughout the societas. Both sides, in di.flerent ways, pursued the struggle by soliciting the support of the third world ' of the civitates et regna. In the course of the struggle the papacy was led to claim a supreme rulership, transcending its universal jurisdiction in spiritualihus, which prompted Hobbes's epigram that it was the true successor of the Empire of the Caesars. Ullmann has set the same development in a light which connects it with our concerns : •

This papal world monarchy was also the bridge builder between Roman and modern times. All the characteristic Roman features had impressed themselves upon the physiognomy of the papacy, the Roman Church. Not onl y the law ; also the conception of the universality of government. It was as universal monarchs that the popes pard y applied Roman principles, partly developed them, and partly created new ones, which have since gained universal recognition in international law . The protection of legates ; safe conduct of ambassadors ; secrecy in diplomatic nego­ tiations ; insistence on the adherence to treaties made between

De systematibus civitatum secular rulers ; condemnation of treaty violations ; papal annul­ ment and rescission of treaties and compacts ; fixation of treaty conditions ; excommunication and deposition of rulers ; orders for the release of prisoners, for their humane treatment and that . of hostages ; protection of exiles, aliens and Jews ; condemnation . � 'unjust' wars and piracy ; confirmation of peace treaties ; orders for the free passage of troops engaged in a 'just' campaign ; orders to rulers to enter into alliances ; ascription of occupied territories to a victorious belligerent party, and so forth . 1 2

1>oes

this suggest an alternative historical model for the develop­ ment of the Secretary-Generalship of the United Nations ? 6. The claim of the heads of the societas christiana, first the Em­ peror and then the pope, to � lords of all mankind. This was �parently first developed during the Investiture Contest by imperialist writers, and was a new facet of the old political ideal of renovatio Romani imperii. The success of the First Crusade in �propriating the pagans · and the revival of Roman Law produced eonditions in which Barbarossa could claim universal lordship explicitly : ' super omnes mortales constituti sumus' . About the same time St Bernard was arguing that Christ had left the govern� ment of the whole human race to Peter, and the canonists quickly took over the imperialist claim to world dominion. The doctrine oi the pope as dominus mundi influenced the geographical ex­ pansion of Christendom and underlay Alexander VI's arbitral division of the New World between Spain and Portugal, the first great territorial settlement of the modern states-system.

If medieval society provides an example of a states-system at all, which I am inclined to deny, it is a uniquely complicated dualistic or double-headed suzerain state-system . B. A SYSTEM : COMMUNICATION AND INTERCOURSE

'Having relations more or less perltlanent with one another '. How do they have relations ? What is the nature of the relations they have ? Most fundamental and difficult to answer, why do they have relations ?

i. Messengers. Having relations means first of all a system of com­ munications, which means messengers. It may be worth reviewing

Systems of States the kinds of diplomatic and military messenger we have so far come across. The basic messenger is the herald, an official ad hoc who carries a message from one power or prince to another, and especial! y pro­ claims war and peace. To establish the inviolability of the herald's person is the beginning of international law. No states·system, pre­ sumably, could work with heralds alone, because the herald does not negotiate. But the herald constantly reappears in the person of the special envoy. When Goering sent the Swede Dahlerns to London in August

1 939

with an appeal, when Wilson sent Sir Morrice James to

Salisbury with messages, one perhaps saw the herald supplementing more regular methods of communication. The Greeks distinguished the herald,

keryx, who only carried a message, from the ambassador or envoy, presbys, who was empowered to negotiate. They sent ambassadors ad hoc, and it was through ambassadors that their states­ system worked. (Was this the case with the Chinese ?) The

reciprocally recognized, is the unique

resident ambassador,

invention which has allowed the Western states--system to develop a suppleness and complexity hitherto unknown. The

proxenos

or resident agent was a Greek institution which,

Adam Watson reminds us, has parallels in Latin America.11 My paper on the Graeco-Roman States-System inclined to over­ emphasize the importance of the oddness.14 The

proxenos

because of its very

was not a negotiator (unless perhaps in

commercial matters), and

proxenoi alone. The spy deserves

proxenos,

a

states·system could not be

run

on

not to be forgotten. He is primarily a means of

information, but sometimes of communication. In the modern West, the world of intelligence, counter-espionage and double agents pro­ vides a reverse image of the states-system : the dark underside of mutual interdependence. In the early days of Western diplomacy, the ambassador and the spy were not fully distinguished. In totalitarian diplomatic practice, they become reassimilated. And it is interesting to note that Soviet diplomacy has consistently repudiated proposals for international inspection to verify disarmament (which from a Western viewpoint might seem a legitimate and organic development in the institutions of international government which themselves have grown out of diplomacy) as amounting to ' espionage \ Is the intelligence and espionage system complementary to and

De systematibus civitatum

31

iJII!peodent upon the dip�omatic system ? Has it been developed in any

_ l*cr states-system ? Ne1ther Greek nor Latln seems to have a word i.Jm quite the meaning of our international spy. Kataskopos and ,.,tor mean primarily a military scout, like Dolon in the Rhesus, *-)..cbe three men whom the Panhellenic Congress sent to Sardis to

· ·• what they could of Xerxes' preparations for the invasion, and omcerning whom Xerxes gave orders that they should be given full . fldlitics to see everything they wanted, and sent away unharmed. 1 1 ·�k spies, like Greek ambassadors, were not professionals follow­

:-lilg a career but individuals entrusted with a commission ad hoc. The principal kind of spy that figures in classical literature is the internal ·;py of an imperial system, the ' king's eye ' in the Persian Empire, the

·*��#or of the Roman. The two spies whom Joshua sent into Jericho .ae engaged on military reconnaissance. The Arthashastra is prob­

. .Yy unique among books on international relations in containing oaly one chapter on envoys and much more about spies. Was the early Hindu states-system run on espionage rather than diplomacy ? . · A slightly different institution of a states-system may be mentioned

here: the hostage. The hostage is not a messenger, but an instrument

« coercion against those from whom he has been taken without their

cao�ent, and a pledge by those who have given him willingly. The hutitution antedated the development of the states--system, and, one 181mes, was at its zenith in conditions of feudal warfare; but it sur.. Yived to coexist with diplomacy. Its fully developed form was a mu­

tual exchange of hostages, and this was a kind of communication : a aolcmn confirmation of readiness to observe pledges given. Mter Pavia Charles V extorted the surrender of Francis' Is two sons as security for 1he French king's fulfilling the Treaty of Madrid ; Spain and France

exchanged hostages after the Treaty of Cateav.-Cambresis (the Span­

ish hostages who went briefly to Paris being William of Orange and Egmont). The last surrender of hostages to ensure the performance of an agreement other than a military convention was apparendy at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in

1 748,

when ' the King of England

undertook to send to the King of France two persons of rank and consideration, to remain as hostages, until a certain and authentic acount should be" received of the restitution of Cape Breton and of all .the conquests made by his anns or subjects in the East and West Indies ' •1 6 But hostages continued to be taken in war, to secure legiti­ mate warfare, the prompt payment of contributions, compliance with

32

Syst�ms of Stat�s

requisitions, etc'., and the practice is regulated by international law, where it easily merges into the law of reprisals. The conception of the hostage has been rediscovered by the strategic analysts. The balance of terror, Schelling has said, is ' a massive modern version of an ancient institution, equivalent to a total exchange of all conceivable hostages '. Schelling has also suggested that the function of the

American troops stationed in Europe is that of hostages : they are

pledges that the United States will not evade her obligation to support her European allies in the event of conflict. In this

case,

one may

observe, the hostage is given by the stronger party to the weaker ; is it the same with the British hostages in I 74 8 ? It has been suggested, moreover, that when Harold Wilson met Ian Smith on the

Tiger in

November I 966, the Governor of Rhodesia was brought along in the role of a negative hostage : the representative of legitimate authority would not be allowed to return to the colony unless the rebel ruler returned too. ii.

Confer�nc�s and international institutions.

ferences have been the

set

Congress and con­

pieces punctuating the history of the

European states-system, moments of maximum communication. Are they an essential of a states-system ? They existed in ancient Greece, hut

seem

paradoxically to have been both less prominent and epoch­

making, and possibly more effective, than in Europe. In Greece the ambassador ad

hoc coming to a conference was the consummation of

the diplomatic process. In the modern world, the foreign minister or head of government coming to a conference (since I S I S) has only supplemented ' the usual diplomatic channels ', and often not con­ structively. What part did conferences play in other states-systems ? In China there appears to have been a disarmament conference attended by 1 4 states in 546 B.C. Was this unique ? We must also ask whether any states-system other than the Wes­ tern has attempted to erect constitutional machinery in the shape of a permanent conference. Almost certainly the Greeks did not. In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. there seems to have been a Chinese Central Confederacy with a permanent constitution and regular assemblies of the heads of state. But its aim seems to have been defensive against other Chinese powers, and not inclusive. The enquiry would need carefully to disentangle confederacies and federations from inclusive international institutions.

De systematihus cit1itatum

33

iii . .A diplomatic language. Is a common language, in addition to W:maculars, essential to communication between members of a states­

·if*m ?

The modern world has had first Latin, then French, now

English. The Hell�nic and Hellenistic �orld had A c :�k, supplemented by Lattn. I t may be worth nottng that effective

�ps

�

' tub-systems have grown up, in the modern world, almost exclusively

:ladong

states with a common language : as the German states, the

Italian, the Arab, the Latin American. Has any states-system oper­ ata! multilingually ? lY·. Trr:�de. The Western states-system grew up round the coalescence ff 'the two commercial worlds of the Mediterranean and of the Baltic ad .North Seas, and it seems that throughout its development the -omic horizon has stretched beyond the limits of diplomacy.

COmmerce has cast a nimbus of activity and connexions round the .fditical system, prefiguring as it were the next stage of its outward

powth,

whether that came about through colonial expansion

or

the

idmission of peripheral states to membership. The Greek states­ lfltem has similarities, though it never extended to embrace the

range of Hellenistic trade with Parthia, Arabia and India. Are the Western and Greek systems different from others in this respect, by rason of their common geographical configuration - proximity to

the

sea

and great varieties of natural advantage within a small area,

favouring a progressive extension of the market ? Or is it true of most states-systems that economic interdependence precedes diplomatic organization ?

2. CULTURAL QUESTIONS Are we going to concern ourselves with what might be called the sociology of states-systems ?

A . CUL'nJRAL UNITY

We must assume that a states-system will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members. The three states·systems that we have taken as paradigms, the Greek, the Western, and the early Chinese, each arose within a single culture.

SystemJ of States

34

What I have called secondary states-systems (like those of the Annana age and of the medieval Mediterranean world) might also be called ' inter-cultural '. Yet presumably there must have been sufficient community between these cultures - Egypt, the Hittites, and Babylon ; the West, Byzantium, and Islam - for a states--system between them to have been approximated to. How

we describe this cultural community ? Does it consist essentially in a common morality and a common code, leading to can

agreed rules about warfare, hostages, diplomatic immunity, the right of asylum and so on ? Does it require common assumptions of a deeper kind, religious or ideological ? Is there wide variation between the common code of one states-system and of another ? Or do they all belong to the great pool of practices and platitudes, supposed! y common to the human race, where men seek for Natural Law ? These questions are topical, because it may be thought that in the history of the development of the Westero states-system, diplomatic and technological interdependence have today outrun cultural and moral community. The states-system organized in the United Nations is qualitatively different from that of the Concert of Europe, as well as geographically wider. B. CULTURAL DIFFERENTIATION : EXTERNAL

The greater the cultural unity of a states-system, the greater its sense

of distinctness from the surrounding world is likely to be. The

Western states-system in the twentieth century is the first that has had no external relations except such as may arise from space dis­ covery. All other states-systems, including the Western in its earlier chapters, have expanded or had to defend themselves against alien pressures. Hence the designation of those outside the states-system as ' barbarians '. Hence also the idea of the ' Hoi y War • . The institution of the Hoi y War seems to have originated with the Jews, and to have reached its highest development in the Islamic

jihad,

whence it passed (though the matter is controversial) to the

West as the crusade. It is distinct, in theory and practice, from other kinds of war. One is tempted to say that the Just War is the norm within the states-system, the Hoi y War the norm between states­ systems. In the notion of the Just War, the premise is that all parties have their due rights, and war is the means of penalizing violation of right and ensuring restoration and restitution. It is

a

juridical con-

v� systematibus dvitatum

35

·;

.

·tiption, of war as the instrument of law. In the notion of the Holy war, the premise is that the true believers ar� right, and that infidels lie to be converted or extenninated. ' Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt &;tit '. It is a religious conception, of war as the instrument of God's .W, or of history. ,. But two questions follow. First, have all states-systems entertained jOIDe notion of Holy War in their external relations ? Or is it a uct of the Judae-Christian-Islamic tradition ? The evidence does � seem clear. In Greek thinking there is a strain of belief that Hdlenes and barbarians were by nature in a state of war with one

prod

another; and !socrates described the Panhellenic war that he advo-4 cated against Persia as ' more like a sacred mission than a military expedition '. On the other hand, Byzantium, whose raison d'etr� almost was to champion Christianity against the barbarians, had an attitude towards warfare · that was unmilitaristic, cautious and ttaoderate. ' To the realist outlook of East Rome the Crusades were llrgely incomprehensible.' : - Secondly, can we say that the institution of the Holy War is typical of a states-system, but precisely of those systems which we hetitate to classify as states-systems ? The jihad flourished under the

•ot

Caliphate, which was a world empire, a universal state, or in its decline a suzerain state-system. The crusade flourished in the medi­ eval West, which was an anomalous suzerain state-system, or an embryo states--system. Would it be possible to show that the tradition of the Hoi y War loses its strength as the states-system of modern ·Europe matures ? There seems to be much evidence against such a comforting conclusion, mainly by reason of the steady expansion of the European states-system at the expense of the world's barbarians and natives. The evidence ranges from the English conduct of war against the mere Irish, and the maxim 'The only good Indian is a dead Indian ', in the seventeenth century, to the French conquest of Algeria and the Anglo-Chinese Wars in the nineteenth. c. CULTURAL DI FFERENTIATION : INTERNAL

A characteristic feature of the European states-system has been its tendency to internal fracture. If we take the three conventional dates of the French invasion of Italy in 1494, Luther at Wittenburg in 1 5 1 7, and the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1 529, we may say that the first generation of the European states-system saw both the greatest

Systems of Sl4tes external pressure that the state�system has ever suffered, and its most fundamental internal schism. The connection between these three developments has never so far as I know been fully explored, in the way in which Braudel has explored the next chapter of the story in the second half of the century. It might perhaps be sym­ bolized by Sir Thomas More, imprisoned in the Tower of London before execution, writing the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribula­

tion,

with its pervading sombre theme, not of his own predicament,

but of the Turkish threat to Christendom. The Religious Wars marked the first fracture in the states-system ; the French Revolutionary Wars marked a second ; the totalitarian revolutions and wars of the twentieth century have marked a third. The effect in each case, as Burke put it, ' was to introduce other interests into all countries than those which arose from their locality and natural circumstances.

.

•

.

The warm parties in each state were

more affectionately attached to those of their own doctrinal interest in some other country, than to their fellow-citizens, or to their natural government, when they or either of them happened to be of 11 a different persuasion ' .

But there have been further effects. A doctrinal fracture or schism in the states-system undermines the tacit understanding that every member of the states-system in claiming sovereignty and political independence for himself acknowledges the same claim by every other member. To a militant Catholic or Jacobin or Communist state, its opponents do not have an intrinsic right to exist : they have a right only to be restored to the true faith or liberated or, as Khrush­ chev said, 'buried ' . In these circumstances the regular working of the states-system is deranged. And there are thus introduced within the states-system the assumptions and attitudes of the Holy War, and heretics or political opponents are assimilated to barbarians. One view in the controversy about the source of the idea of the crusade traces it back to the Augustinian idea of the bellum justum against the enemies of God, rather than to an Islamic source, and sees the Christian jihad as having been from its origins primarily inward­ turning and directed against heretics. Internal Holy War, originally of Christian inspiration but later of the secular ideologies deriving from Christianity in this respect if in no other, has certainly been a recrudescent feature of the Western states-system. Is it peculiar to Western Europe ? Burke found a precedent in the

r

De systematibus civitatum

,,

37

';,'Jirilion

of the Hellenic states-system between the democratic and ic ' factions ' - ' full as powerful and full as mischievous as ::. .... spirit of religious system had ever been ' .18 Our main evidence � J* these factions is scattered about in Thucydides, and summed up the passage where he says that the savageries of the Corcyraean ·

ftUprch

·,

.·

16

�nolution seemed the more atrocious because it was the first revolu­ .tkm that had occurred.

'.:· But

•.

afterwards practically the whole Hellenic world was con­

: · vulsed, in every state the democratic leaders trying to bring in the

. Athenians, and the oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In .. ·,time of peace there would have been no pretext and no inclination · to ask for their intervention. But in war-time, allies were available

to either side to get the better of its opponents and strengthen its

. . own position, and those who wanted a change of government had ·

plenty of occasions to call in outside help.19

}d the Peloponnesian War swung against Athens, the leaders of the oligarchic revolution of 4 I I in Athens set about replacing democra­ . ci.es by oligarchies in the subject cities, but ' found that most of the business had

(lletairot)' .20

already been accomplished by the local

parties

Three years later Lysander, the new Spartan comman­

·der in the Aegean, organized the various oligarchical clubs (laetairiot) in the Ionian states, ' promising that if his undertakings were success­ ful he would put each group in control of its city' .21 Xenophon refers

to

these as ' Lysander's friends', who intrigued against Lysander's

successor in the command.22 When Lysander had been reappointed and Athens defeated, ' he introduced governments in all the cities under the Spartans in accordance with the policy of the Spartan government, establishing dekarchies, the rule of ten men, in some and oligarchies in others ' .2 8 All these arrangements collapsed within half a generation. It is difficult on such slight evidence to draw a comparison between international stasis in the Greek world and Holy War in the modern. But four comments are possible. I . The Hellenic factions, so far as we know, were not united by an ideology, a fanatically held philo­ soph y of life or doctrine of politics. They simply recognized common political interests across state frontiers. 2 . The inspiration of the Hellenic factions seems to have been spontaneously local. Their Greek name, hetairia, is usually translated ' club ', and the word

Systems of States denotes a religious or craft guild more often than a political asso­ ciation. There seems to be no evidence of inter-state organization about them, no element of international ' Church ' or ' Party '. We do not hear of any groups of political missionaries resembling the Jesuits and the Calvinist preachers, the Jacobin societies and the Communist Party. 3· The great power on either side seems to have been corresponding} y more detached from the interests of its poten­ tial partisans abroad than perhaps has been the case in modern Europe. De Romilly points out that Thucydides never presents the international democratic leaning towards Athens : as being anything more for Athens than an instrument which she uses to facilitate her conquests, but which in no way explains the principles which lead her to act. (For instance, the Athenians are sorry that they attacked Syracuse, a democratic city like Athens, for they are unable to spread discontent and make friends there). It is the natural tendency for democracies to unite which will help to bring about the predominance of Athens, not this predominance which will foster an ideal union of democracies. 24 Lysander tried to organize the oligarchic clubs of the liberated states, but as much in the interest of his personal aggrandisement as in that of Sparta herself, and with only the most temporary effect. 4 · The international stasis that was produced by the strains of the Pelo­ ponnesian War on the states-system died away, and was not repeated in any later chapter of the story. It was not a recurrent feature of the Graeco-Roman states-system. To the extent that these comments are sound, Burke's comparison loses its force. Has any other states-system shown an internal cultural differentia­ tion leading to ideological schism and crusading attitudes ? A familiar aspect of the intellectual history of the modem Euro­ pean states-system has been the way in which its theory has fallen into three main traditions. Those whose outlook has been missionary and messianic have emphasized the ideal unity of international society as the standard for condemning the empirical divisions within the society and believing them to be transitory. They implicitly repudiate the validity of the states-system. The repudiation has usual} y taken the militant and crusading form discussed above ; less often it has taken a liberal idealist, pacifist and Tolstoy an form ; they

De systematibus civitatum

39

are two versions of a common international theory. On the other side are the children of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who regard the existing states--system as an expression of the state of nature, and see all in terms of raison d'etat, of survival in a situation that is

,_,ncy

eSsentially one of anarchy. In between are those who accept the statewystem as constituting a valid society of mutual right and ons; of these Grotius is usually taken as the great exemplar.

lwigati

There are

many intermediate positions, but the three traditions are

diltinct. tr.r. Can a comparison be made with the schools of thought in ancient .

(;bina, which arose during the Period of Warring States ? The &cbool of Law, the Legalists, are commonly compared to Machiavelli; ludiur Waley describes them under the name ' Realists ' ; and

The Jook of the Lord Shang has been compared to Kautilya's Arthasha­ fJIW· The Legalists grew up against the conservative tradition of Confucious, Mencius and the Mohists, who, with many variations

�

inconsistencies, seem to represent a moralist and natural-law

.pproach to politics. ' Like the Confucians ', says Waley, and one may idd like Grotius, ' Mo Tzu believed in the Righteous War, in which a · good King, at the command of Heaven, punishes a bad one '. 2 5 (This in European terms is the conception of the Just War, not the Holy War). What seems most difficult to find in China is a counter­

part to the messianic and missionary strand in European thought. The nearest is provided by the Taoists, who were (translated into

European terms) anarchist and pacifist in their outlook, looked back to a golden age, dreamed of the ideal state, and asserted the harmony

of · interests. What is lacking in the comparison is the crusading or militant impulse. Indeed, the Taoists seem to have been the objects rather than the inspirers of violence. Soothill says, ' Whilst wars of extermination have been prosecuted by the state against the Moslems

in China, as also against the Taoists - chiefly on political grounds religious wars between the three religions, or the horrors of the Inquisition on account of religion, have been unknown, for intensity of religious feeling has never been sufficient! y strong to produce extremities of so virulent a character '.2 8 Did the Chinese schools of thought contain sufficient! y coherent theories of the nature and obligations of the states-system for a parallel with Europe to be sought ? Is there anything similar in other cultures?

Systems of States 3.

POLITICAL QUESTIONS

Even more insistent than the cultural questions, if we are attempting a general study of states-systems, are certain political questions. A. THE NUMBER OF MEMBERS OF THE STATES-SYSTEM

One of the prime questions about any society for a historian or social scientist is the size of its population. Is there an analogous question about the size of membership of a states-system ? The membership of the modern European states-system was drastically lowered in number by the Revolutionary Wars and the Vienna Settlement; it was then reduced to its minimum by the unification of Italy and Germany, though the liberation of the Balkan states was beginning a counter-tendency which became dominant with the Versailles Settlement. (Between 1 8 7 I and I 905, when Norway seceded from Sweden, there seem to have been only twenty sovereign states in Europe. This excludes the American states, which only assumed a formal role in the states-system at the Hague Conferences.) To what extent, if any, can the characteristics which distinguish the nineteeth-century states-system from that of the eighteenth or twentieth centuries be attributed to this ? The number of poleis in the Hellenic states-system before Alexan­ der seems to have been at the other extreme : perhaps I soo. How was this number related, whether as cause or effect, to the inveterate factiousness and parochialism of the Greek states ? Ancient China seems to have resembled modern Europe rather than Greece . According to Elbert D. Thomas, it was divided into so­ odd kingdoms, not counting the peripheral tribes. 27 Needham lists 25 'feudal states of the Chou period ' which were eventualI y unified in the Ts'in Empire.28 Is a smaller membership likd y to make for greater stability, mutual understanding and cooperativeness in a states-system ? Under what conditions is the multiplication of states likely, on the one hand, to increase the occasions of conflict, and on the other hand, to enrich and lubricate the working of the balance of power? B. KINDS OF MEMBER AND HOMOGENEITY OF MEMBERSH I P

What is the effect on a states-system of variety or similarity among its members ? Here we must distinguish the structure of the state

I � .

De systematibus civ;tatum

: (e.g. city-state, feudal kingdom, nation-state, federation) from the ··cture of government (e.g. democracy, dictatorship). ·:�� · The states-system of ancient Greece seems to have had a high ·:lt;gree of homogeneity as regards the kind of state it embraced. The vast majority of its members were poleis. The exceptions, like pre­ . �Jkilitical Arcadia, or the tribal kingdom of Macedon, were so few :that their very membership of the system is uncertain. The post­ Alexandrian states-system was more varied, with the great Hellenistic monarchies overshadowing the city-states. The modern European states-system has had a heterogeneous membership. Before 1 789, when international legitimacy was based on prescription, the system included multi-national monarchies like Austria and Britain, national monarchies like France and Sweden, provincial monarchies like the German electorates, overgrown dty-states like Venice and Tuscany, a confederation of overgrown city-states in the United Provinces, a confederation of cantons in Switzerland. Since 1 789, national self-determination has replaced prescription as the doctrine of international legitimacy, and between 1 9 1 9 and 1 939 the states-system achieved a degree of transient homogeneity on this basis. Since then, with national self-determina­ 'tion being applied in conditions so different from those in which it originated that the word ' nation' has lost any distinct meaning, heterogeneity has returned. The states represented at the United Nations are more various in origin, size and structure than were the states represented at the Congress of Westphalia. It is not possible to distinguish state-structure complete! y from government-structure. Both have been made matters of ideology in the modern West, by apostles of homogeneity within the states­ system. Mazzini held that the states-system would not be just or effective until all its members were nationally free, and assumed that nationality meant democracy. Wilson wanted to make democracy a qualification for membership of the League. The Western states­ system has come nearer than any other to erecting the structure of government into a principle of international legitimacy. Does homogeneity of membership make for the stability of a states­ system and cooperation between its members ? Are there characteristic differences between a states-system of city-states and one of nation­ states ? Or are the internal political arrangements of the members of a states-system for the most part irrelevant to its working? ,

·

Systems of States C. HIUAit.CHY

The modern European states-system, while formulating the principle of the equality of states, has modified it by establishing the class of great powers. Since 1907, if not since I 8 1 5, their responsibilities and privileges have been recognized in international law. Do other states-systems have this natural aristocracy ? If so, has it been institutionalized anywhere besides Europe ? Has the modern states-system gone further than others in trying to put their great powers under some kinds of restraint, and in encouraging their transformation (as Zimmern once said) from great powers into ' great responsibles ' ? D. DYNAMICS

If we take the European states-system as our example, we the following questions :

can

ask

Do other states--systems show a succession of hegemonies, in which one great power after another tries to transform the states-system, or even to abolish it, by reducing it to unity ? Do other states-systems embody a system of the balance of power ? Does the balance of power system arise only in response to the threat of a hegemony ? Has there been any states-system that was innocent of the idea or practice of the balance ? Do other states-systems colonize or conquer their peripheral regions and afterwards admit these regions to membership ? Do other states-systems develop sub-systems, and under what conditions ? E. PHASES

The Western states-system may be seen as having gone through four phases or periods. In each phase, there has been a highly organized geographical core, with a periphery of powers or regions more loosely connected with the system. To 1 500

core, Italy ; periphery, Transalpine Europe

1 500-1 763

core, Western Europe ; periphery, Eastern Europe

1 763- 1 94 1

core, Europe ; periphery, the Americas and the traditional states of Asia

De systematihus civitatum .Since 1 94 1

43

core, roughly the states which helped to found or were members of the League of Nations ; periphery, the ex-colonial states, especially in Africa

· . The

Graeco-Roman states-system had three clear phases. Before

Alezander came the Hellenic states�system of city-states ; after Alex­ ander, the Hellenistic states-system in which the great powers were

tbe successor-states of his own Empire, large half-orientalized monarchies towering above the surviving city-states. Alexander in

Greek history combined the roles of Christopher Colombus, George tWashington, and Napoleon. But a third phase must be distin�

guished.

When Rome conquered and destroyed the Macedonian

kingdom at the battle of Pydna in

168

B.C., she transformed the

ltatcs-system into a suzerain state-system. Its international relations thenceforward were subordinate to the domestic politics of the

Roman Republic itself. Nothing like this has happened in the

Western states-system.

Have other states-systems passed through a sequence of marked phases ? What varieties of pattern do they show ? F.

TERMINUS AD QUEM ?

Most states�syst�s have ended in a universal empire, which has swallowed all the states of the system. It has been particularly clear

in the case of the primary states-systems, those that are the political

expression of a single culture. The Chinese was unified by the Ts'in Empire, the Hellenistic by the Roman, the Indian by the Moghul. It seems

also the case with our clearest example of a secondary stat�

system, that of the Amarna age. This ended in the Assyrian Empire, the first of the ancient empires to unite both Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt, and the militaristic forerunner of the more benign and civilized Persian Empire. In a similar way, the medieval Mediter­ ranean states-system (if such existed) ended with the Ottoman Em­ pire, which absorbed the Islamic and Byzantine sections of the states-system and threatened to absorb the Frankish (Bayezid I declared his intention of feeding his horse at the altar of St Peter's, and Mehmed II planned the conquest of Italy to confirm his capture of Constantinople). These examples surely suggest the two most important questions that we can ask about states-systems. The first is factual, a matter of

Systems of States

44

history or political science. Is there any states-system which has not led fairly directly to the establishment of a world empire ? Does the evidence rather suggest that we should expect a states-system to culminate in this way ? If so, what can be said about the possible causal connections? It might be argued that every states-system can only maintain its existence on the principle of the balance of power, that the balance of power is inherently unstable, and that sooner or later its tensions and conflicts will be resolved into a monopoly of power. The second question is a matter of theory, or of judgment, and goes deeper; indeed, it underlies our choice of states-systems as a subject of study. For what reasons are we inclined (as I think we probably are) to judge a states-system as per se a more desirable way of arranging the affairs of a great number of men than the alterna­ tives, whatever these may be ? For what reasons, or should we say, under what conditions ? George Orwell imagined, for I 984, a divi­ sion of the world between three totalitarian great powers, locked together in interdependent hatred, like the characters in Huis Clos, or Ugolino and Archbishop Roger on their sea of ice in the Inferno. This too is a picture of a states-system. It may he worth remembering that some of the historic generations which have experienced the end of a states-system have done so with relief and rejoicing. St Augustine expressed a preference for a world of small nations over the Roman Empire. But he qualified the statement in a highly characteristic manner, which makes it both instructive and relevant. He is asking whether it is appropriate for good men to rejoice in extension of empire. The implied answer is no, for the world would be a better place without empires. 'Human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighbourly concord (concordi vicinitate laetantia : the ideal of a states-system) ; and thus there would have been very many nation-states (regna gentium) in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city '. 29 Why then has this state of affairs not come about? Because 'the iniquity of those, against whom just wars are waged, favours the expansion of a state'. Here, as in another passage, Augustine takes the view that the wars by which the Roman Empire was created were on the whole just. 'Therefore, to carry on war and to extend dominion over subjugated peoples seems to bad men to be felicity, but to good men necessity . Moreover, since it would be worse that the more 10

De systematihus civitatum

45

criminal should rule over the more righteous (injuriosi justioribus), it is not incongruous after all to describe empire as felicity. (But beyond question', he adds, 'it is greater felicity to have a good DCighbour at peace, than to subjugate a bad one by war). ' 11

2

The states-system of Hellas

A states-system presupposes a common culture. The classic descrip­ tion of the community of Hellas is in Herodotus, in a speech the Athenians make to reassure the Spartans that Athens will not accept the Persian overtures for a separate peace : There are many great reasons why we should not do this, even if we so desired. First and foremost, the burning and destruction of the statues and temples of our gods, whom we are bound to avenge to the uttermost rather than make terms with the perpetrator. And next, because the Hellenes are related in blood and language, and

have shrines of the gods and sacrifices in common, and a simi­ lar way of life. It would ill become the Athenians to betray all this.1

Blood, the belief in a common descent, was systematized by inventing the eponymous ancester Hellen from whose three sons were sprung the tribes of the Aeolians, Ionians and Dorians.

was the obj ective test of being a Hellene, as to speak a language other than

Language

Greek was the test of being a barbarian. In both these respects Greek civilization made an assumption of its own unity and homogeneity that contrasts with the Romano-German culture of medieval Chris­ tendom, amalgamating two strains at least. A states-system whose members are bound together by having a common language - this is one contrast with the modern Western states-system that Hell as offers. It led nineteenth-century historians to write of the ancient Greeks as a ' nation ', and to think of their states-system in terms of the linguistically homogeneous modern sub-systems such

as

Italy and

Germany, whose manifest destiny was a union or federation which the ancient Greeks unaccountably missed.

Religion,

by contrast

again, had more variety of cult and was less organized than Western Catholicism in the early Middle Ages. But it had some common shrines and important common oracles, of which Delphi was the

The states-system of Hellas

47

foremost. Way of life is illustrated by the Panhellenic games, those at Olympia above all. .i

Perhaps the most important difference between the Hellenic states­

lystem and the Western is that the Western states-system developed out of the theoretical institutional unity of the Respublica Christiana,

With its diarchic structure of Sacerdotium and Regnum, while the Hdlenic states-system had no historical background of this kind. In Bellas the state seems to have existed well before the states-system . The Greeks invented the

polis

as the normal unit of social cohesion

.lomewhere after 1 000 B.C. Behind it lie only the shadowy Mycen­ aean monarchies of Homer,s Achaean kings, which are the equiva­

lent perhaps of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Theodoric. The polis is Cfevdoped in the Greek Middle Ages, and is the historical counterpart

'of the feudal principality of the European Middle Ages as well as,

perhaps even more than, of the modern European nation-state. · The states-system which the pokis formed may be considered

· ..

'nnder five heads : Panhellenic institutions, international law, a diplo­ matic system , a balance of power, and international public opinion.

The first three correspond roughly to an order of historical evolution. I . PANHELLENIC INSTITUTIONS These were religious in origin, the common shrines and festivals of the Hellenes. The two most famous are the quadrennial festival of ·

the Olympian Zeus whose chief feature was the Games, and the oracle of Apollo at Delphi. Both were geographically central. Olym­ pia is on the western edge of the Peloponnese, remote from the

Aegean and Ionia ; but it was correspondingI y more accessible to the Greeks of Sicily and Italy, and its rise may be connected with the rise of the Western colonies. Del phi was more central still, and its position enabled it to replace the older oracular shrine of Zeus at Dodona, in the highlands of Epirus. The sanctuary of Olympia was in the territory of Pisa, and its control was coveted by Elis, which succeeded in usurping the presidency of the festival. Elis was backed by Sparta ; Argos, the hereditary enemy of Sparta, therefore backed Pisa. The Eleans were in control from the beginning of the sixth century. In 420, during the Peace of Nicias that punctuated the Peloponnesian War, they

Systems of States were even strong enough to exclude Sparta herself from the sanc­ tuary and the Games, for failing to pay a fine imposed for breach of the Olympic law.2 In 364, when Thebes had replaced Sparta as the dominant power, an attempt was made to restore the rights of Pisa by Argos and the Arcadian league. There was fighting in the sanc­ tuary, and the victorious Arcadians plundered the sacred treasures to pay the Allied army. The general moral condemnation of this sacrilege was sufficient! y strong to do lasting damage to the Arcadian league. a During the celebration of the festival a sacred truce was observed, and the Eleans claimed that for this period their territory was inviolable ; they themselves violated the sanctuary in 3 64, however, when the Pisatans were once more in control. The festival had political importance as a forum and a sounding�board. The texts of important treaties were inscribed on pillars set up at Olympia as well as at Delphi:' When Mytilene revolted from the Athenian Empire in 428, the Spartans instructed the Mytilenaeans to come and state their case at the 01 ympian festival, which they did at length. 5 At the

festival of 408 Gorgias protested against the alliance between Sparta

and Persia ; in 3 8 8 Lysias used the festival to denounce Persia and Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse as twin dangers to Greek liberty ;6 and the

Panegyricus

of !socrates, his greatest political tract, was

composed in the form of an oration to be delivered perhaps at the

following 01 ympiad.

The Oracle at Delphi had greater political importance than the Olympian festival : it was the nearest equivalent in Hellas to the papacy in Christendom. From the eighth century it enjoyed universal prestige as the supreme shrine. It acquired a political role as the adviser of the Greek states during the great period of colonization, when it was regularly consulted in advance on choice of site. Later it was resorted to as arbitrator of international disputes. 1 The Delphic priesthood became a repository of geographical and political know� ledge. But the dissimilarities from the papacy are more striking than the resemblance. The Oracle had no doctrinal authority ; it did not censor morals ; it did not exercise political rule through an ecu­ menical legal and fiscal system. Even its political advice was largely rigged. ' Greek states did not ask Apollo to originate or direct their policy, ' said Bury ; ' they onl y sought his authority for what they had already determined '. 8

49

The states-system of Hellas

In general the priesthood leaned to conservatism and had aristo­

:tratic sympathies. The Oracle usually gave its support to the power

that was on the upgrade, like The Times newspaper in British

politics,

and unlike the papacy in international politics. The rise of

.Jbe Oracle is associated with Spartan predominance. At the begin­ iiing of the fifth century the Oracle accepted the Persian invasion

and discouraged Greek

resistance ; it is remarkable that it recovered

ia political influence after this blunder. It supported Sparta in the �oponnesian War, and Athenian resentment has been traced in

Euripides' jibes at Apollo and Aristophanes' satirical treatment of .oracles. During the war both Delphi and Olympia were in the aritorial control of the Peloponnesian league, and the Corinthians proposed using the treasuries of the two temples to finance the allied war-effort ;9 but there is no evidence that this was done. A hundred years later Delphi backed Philip of Macedon : ' the Pythia is philip­ pizing', said Demosthenes.10 . Like other international institutions, the Oracle was manipulable

by the dominant power of the time. A valued privilege was the

promanteia,

or right of first consultation with the prophetess. The

Delphians (themselves forming a small

polis)

usually claimed it for

themselves, and accorded the right of coming next to different states at different times. Thus the

promanteia

was an index of political

influence, as the choice of a papal conclave has sometimes been. When Croesus was at the height of his power and loading the Oracle with rich gifts, the Del phians granted the

promanteia

to the

Lydians.11 In 44 9, after the end of the First Peloponnesian War, Sparta intervened to support the Delphians in their conflict with Phocis. In return, the Spartans were granted

promanteia,

and had

the decree inscribed on the forehead of the bronze wolf that stood in the sanctuary. Pericles promptly counter-intervened and restored Phocian control of Delphi; he secured the grant of

promanteia

for

the Athenians, and had it chiselled along the right flank of the same wolf.1 2 Was this simply a dispute about diplomatic precedence ? It is not clear whether Sparta had not previously enjoyed the

promanteia;

nor whether the Athenian action restored the balance by asserting an equal right to the privilege, or deprived Sparta of it. Athens seems to have retained her precedence in consulting the oracle until she lost it to Philip - here it is clearly a privilege that only one power holds.11

Systems of St4tes

so

2. INTERNATIONAL LAW AND ORGANIZATION Delphi was the centre of the best-known and most important Amphictyony, or religious league. Originally it had been organized round the temple of Demeter at Anthela near Thermopylae, but the upkeep and administration of the Delphian temple became its main purpose. The league consisted of I 2 tribes, mainly in central

and northern Greece. At the beginning of the sixth century Delphi was dominated and the shrine was exploited by the neighbouring

polis

of Kirrha. The

Amphictyony invoked the penalties of sacrilege against Kirrha, de­ clared a holy war, and duly annihilated her.u It was the first of the Sacred Wars, fought by the Amphictyony against one or more of its members on behalf of the Pythian Apollo. The Sacred Wars are not comparable to the Crusades. They were punitive wars within a religious league instead of a religious war against an alien civiliza­ tion, and their circumstances were parochial rather than ecumenical. The Second Sacred War was begun by the Phocian seizure of Delphi in about 449, which prompted the intervention of Sparta and Athens already mentioned. But the Third (355-46) gave Philip of Macedon the opportunity to intervene in Central Greece, and the Fourth (34o-3 6) provided the occasion for his conquest of Thebes and Athens, the remaining great powers. The members of the Amphictyony were bound by an oath, not to destroy any

polis of the Amphictyons,

nor starve it out, nor

cut off its running water in war or in peace; and if anyone should violate this oath, to march against him and call up [ ? ] the

poleis;

and if anyone plunders the shrine of the god, or abets plunder, or has any designs against the sanctuary, to punish him with hand and foot and voice and all one's power•13 This oath was the foundation and almost the summary of what international law the Greeks possessed. Modern pacifist writers have praised the moral sense of the Greeks for declaring that their water-supplies should be mutually inviolable. But it seems that the oath was practically ineffective, since its imputed violation by one party released the others from its obligations. The First Sacred War is said to have been brought to an end by a stratagem suggested by Solon : first he diverted the river that supplied water to Kirrha, and

r

The states-system of Hellas

(

when this was not decisive, he allowed it to resume its course and

. pMsoned it with hellebore, which disabled the defenders.18 It might almost be said that Thucydides' history of the greatest of · - Greek wars is intended to show that the customs of war were minimal and that they were generally disregarded, at least by Athens . The only restraints on savagery were not accepted custom nor agreed · law, but a dim fear of committing impiety on the part of the con­ - lel'Vatives, and prudential calculations on the part of the progressives . . It was considerations of the latter sort that made the Athenians JJCVe:rse their original decision to destroy Mytilene by killing the men and selling the women and children into slavery ; considerations of the former sort, urged by the Melians, failed to deter the Athenians from inflicting this fate on Melos. There is a famous passage in the Republic which has been re­ prded as one of the earliest pleas for the rule of Jaw in international relations. The discussion turns to ' how our soldiers will deal with enemies '. It is agreed that the enslavement of Greeks by Greeks, the stripping of corpses on the battlefield, the ravaging of land and the burning of houses, ought to be abolished. A distinction is made between war (polemos) 'when Greeks fight with barbarians, whom we may call their natural enemies ', and civil strife or stasis as the appropriate term for dissension within Hellas. ' Is not the city that you are planning to be a Hellenic city ? and won't the inhabitants be philhellenes, lovers of Hellas, and won't they regard all Hellas as their fatherland, where they share in one common religion with the rest ? '17 But this part of the discussion occupies three pages out of 300 a fair reflection of the proportion of Greek writing about political theory that is given to international relations. For the Greeks, the object of systematic social thought was the polis itself, not classes within the polis nor the states-system of which it was a part. Moreover, what is under discussion is the ideal state, which may or may not be capable of realization. A cardinal difference between the Hellenic and modern Western states-systems is that the Hellenic system had no notion of interna­ tional law. The Greeks did not conceive of the polis as possessing rights, and being subject to obligations. Partly this was because of the early development of the polis as the final term of human organi­ zation already alluded to. Partly it was because they did not have the enormous inheritance of legal codes, legal thinking and legal practice .

-

SyJtems of States

which modern Europe derived from the Civilians and Canonists, and out of which the rules of nascent international society were educed. There was no Greek Vitoria or Grotius. The general absence of legal norms from the Greek conception of their states-system rna y be illustrated from their procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes. This practice apparent! y became common from the seventh century onwards, and we have fairly complete evidence (mainly epigraphic) of 8 I such transactions. Thucydides makes it clear that the Thirty Years Peace of 446 be­ tween Athens and Sparta provided for the conciliation of disputes, and that Pericles gained a moral advantage in the diplomatic nega. tiations preceding the Peloponnesian War by emphasizing the Spartans' refusal to honour the treaty in this respect.18 Thucydides gives the texts of the armistice of 4 2 3 and of the Peace of N icias of 421, both of which contained a conciliation clause ;19 he also records Argos in 4 1 8 as offering ' a fair and impartial arbitration of any complaint which the Lacedaemonians had against the Argives '. Modern internationalist writers are accustomed to treat these provi­ sions as examples of ' arbitration ' in the proper sense, but generally this seems a mistranslation of the key-word dike, which means only the determining of right by appropriate proceedings. For example, the clause in the armistice of 42 3 runs : 'You shall go to law (dike) with us, and we with you, in accordance with ancestral custom, settling our disputes by peaceful means (dike) instead of war '. Most of these instances were of conciliation rather than arbitration. When impartial third parties were appealed to - another city or the Delphic Oracle - they were expected to exercise wide discretion, to think in terms of equity rather than law, to make a moral rather than a legal decision, to re-establish friendship between the disputing states rather than to achieve a technically satisfactory settlement of the dispute itself. The only body of international law the Greeks developed was the Rhodian maritime law, but this was in Hellenistic times. The Delphic Amphictyony was one among a number of amphic­ tyonies or leagues connected with temples and the maintenance of cults. But as the Temple of the Pythian Apollo was the most impor­ tant shrine in Hellas, so the Delphic Amphictyony became the most important league. Transcending its local origins, it acquired a Panhellenic character, and became the only international organiza20

53

tion which had a claim to be co-extensive with the states-system. Yet its primary function remained religious ; Freeman compares it to an

Ecclesiastical Synod in rdation to Western Christendom. 2 1 The Reformation prevented modern Europe from having any counterpart to the long and continuous history of the Delphic Amphictyony.

Originally it was composed of 1 2 tribes, having arisen before the full development of the polis. Each had two votes in the assembly

which took place twice a year. The constitution of the Amphictyony seems to have endured unchanged, when most of the members had

sunk into petty tribes some of which were not even independent

political communities, while the Dorian and Ionic tribes had fathered great powers like Sparta and Athens. It had small political impor­ tance, or the archaic constitution would not have survived. Thessal y dominated it in the sixth century, Sparta thereafter. After the defeat

·of the Persian invasion, Sparta proposed that the Amphictyony

should expel from membership all cities which had collaborated with the Persians (this was aimed at Thebes and Thessal y) and even

those which had remained neutral (this was aimed at Argos). This

attempt to capture the Amphictyony was prevented by the diplomacy of Themistocles.32 It may be characteristic of the difference between the sluggish defensiveness of Sparta's foreign policy and the resource­

ful aggressiveness of Philip's, that Sparta apparently made no diplomatic use of the Amphictyonic League in the Peloponnesian War, while Philip employed it as a means for subverting Greece. At

the end of the Third Sacred War in 3 4 6 the votes of the Phocians were transferred to Philip and his descendants, 28 the first recorded change in the ancient constitution, a monarch replacing a tribe. But the 24 votes remained until Augustus, after founding Nicopolis to commemorate his victory at Actium, enlarged the Amphictyon y to include Nicopolis with six votes.

3. DIPLOMATIC SYSTEM The master-institution of the modern Western states-system is the diplomatic network of resident embassies, reciprocally exchanged. This Italian invention seems to be unique, and found in no other civilization. The Greeks did not know it. Their counterpart was proxeny. The traditional translations of

Systems of States

54

proxmos are consul ', agent', or ' resident ', none of which is ade­ quate. The ess ence of the modern diplomatic system is that a government sends one of its own countrymen abroad to represent its interests, and that he is accorded certain agreed immunities and privileges by the government to whom he is accredited. The essence of the proxeny was that a polis conferred guest-friendship on a citizen of another polis, on condition that he would help and protect the citizens of the first polis when they visited the other. In the modern system, the diplomatic representative is the subj ect and servant of the government that sends him, and diplomatic privileges are accorded, in conformity with international law and custom, by the state that receives him. In the ancient system, the proxenos is a citizen of the polis with which links are sought, and has to be wooed; diplomatic privileges are conferred by the foreign polis which see ks his services. We know something of the privileges which Athenian proxenoi en­ joyed when they visited Athens: they included equality with citizens in taxation (instead of being subject like other foreigners to higher taxes), and a front seat at the public games. Proxeny is found as early as the beginning of the sixth cenrury. Probably the office was originally self-chosen: Thucydides mentions an example of a volunteer-proxmos of the Athenians in Corcyra, who combined the role with leadership of the popular party.2• But the office became formalized, and a matter of appointment. At Athens and most Greek states, every other state chose its own proxenos. At totalitarian Sparta, the proxmoi were appointed by the Spartan authorities themselves.2 11 The most celebrated Athenian proxenos was the poet Pindar in Thebes. The most celebrated proxenoi of another state in Athens were Kimon and Alcibiades, who in their generation were diplomatic agents for Sparta. The function of proxeny was sometimes exercised by whole families and became hereditary. 2 8 In the Laws Plato says ' I t is probably the universal experience of boys anywhere that when they are told they are proxenoi for a certain state, they conceive an affection for that state from earliest youth, and each regards it as a second fatherland, next only to his own '.2 1 It is not easy to assess the difference between proxeny and the modern diplomatic system. The following comments may be offered. First, proxeny by itself was never enough. The chief duty of the proxenos was to entertain and help the citizens of the polis for which •

•

The states-system of Helkls

55

he acted when they visited the polis of which he was a citizen and where he lived. ' You are their proxenos, and their foremost citizens are always being entertained at your house '. 28 He could not con­ tinuous!y represent the interests of the polis for which he was proxenos, in the manner of a modern diplomatist, since he was not in the confidence of that polis and did not receive instructions from it. Second, it was a consequence of this that when major issues of policy had to be argued between one polis and another, an envoy or ambassador (angelos, presbys) was sent. These seem to have been the agents of diplomatic negotiation in the political sense. Thucydides is full of examples of the representative of one state arriving in another, and often stating his own state's case before the assembly of the state he visits. This was the equivalent of a modern ambassador's being received by a foreign minister, not of an honorific address by an admired foreigner to a joint session of Congress. The proxenos in such circumstances had the special duty of giving hospitality to the ambassador. Third, an influential proxenos might neverthdess count for much in improving commercial relations between two states. 29 Fourth, the proxenos of a great power was likd y to be the local representative of that power's ideological interests, the local leader of its potential fifth column. The Spartan proxenoi in Athens were the leading laconizers. The Athenian proxenoi were the leaders of the democratic faction, as in the case of the Athenian proxenos in Corcyra mentioned above. 80 This is a function for which modern international politics has often had to supplement the diplomatic system. Fifth, the logical culmination of proxeny was the grant of citizenship to the proxenos by the state in whose interests he acted. •When, as was frequently the case from the fourth century on, proxeny was conferred together with the citizenship, and when it became possible to hold more than one citizenship at the same time, the end was reached, and the true meaning of the institution was lost. Beside it, and replacing it, came the honour of a golden wreath or a statue '.81 Thus Churchill (a hereditary half-American) has been a kind of United States proxenos in Britain. What is the correspon­ ding logical culmination of the modern diplomatic system ? Is it the position achieved by a Stratford Canning at Constantinople, and by a Soviet ambassador at Warsaw and Bucharest ? Should we regard proxeny as a more primitive system of

Systems of States international intercourse than modern diplomatic representation,. and say that as proxeny required to be supplemented by the sending of embassies

ad hoc,

so

modern diplomatic representation has required

to be supplemented by conferences of foreign ministers or heads of states ? Or should we say, rather, that the Hellenic states--system was not built upon the same theory of representation as the modern states-system . The modern ambassador government, as the prince or

represents his prince or his government represents its subjects or

citizens in the international community ; conceptions unknown in ancient Greece. The modern system is weak in giving expression to the sympathy of individuals for foreign peoples, exemplified by the concern of many Victorian Englishmen for United Italy, of R. W. Seton-Watson for the Central European and Balkan nations, of

C. A. Macartney for Hungary, of T. E. Lawrence for the Arabs, of Denis Brogan (honorary citizen of La Roche Blanche, Puy-de-Dome) for France as well as the United States. Such sympathies in the modern world are eccentric, slightly suspect, and mainly confined to scholars. It was precisely these sympathies that the Hellenic system of proxeny institutionalized.

4. HEGEMONIES AND THE BALANCE OF POWER The Greek Middle Ages show the dim oudines of a succession of political hegemonies. Argos was supreme in the Peloponnese in the seventh century. Thucydides traces the sequence of thalassocracies since Agamemnon of Mycenae, with Corinth the most important. But from the sixth century Sparta was the leading state, with a recognized primacy as ' president of Greece ',

prostates tes Hellados. 32

This was based on her military supremacy, and on the awe or admiration felt for her Prussian constitution. She intervened freely in other states to overthrow tyrants and restore conservative aristo­ cracies. And in the sixth century she organized her predominance in a

Hellas-wide coalition. This was the alliance usually called ' the Peloponnesian league ' -

misleading! y, since it extended beyond the limits of the Peloponnese. Its contemporary description was ' the Lacedaemonians and their Allies ' . It was a complex of bilateral defensive military alliances contracted between Sparta and other states; the military command

The states-system of Helias

57

-s to have been automatically in the hands of Sparta. In modern Bwopean terms, a predominant power organizing its hegemony through an alliance appears odd : the predominant powers of the modern states-system have in general been lone wolves, and alliances have been the instruments of the supporters of a balance of power. Against whom was the Spartan alliance, and what interests did it .erve ? The answer seems threefold. First, it was against the serf majority of conquered Helots and Messenians within the Spartan state itself. Sparta affords perhaps the clearest example in history of the primacy of domestic policy, since her domestic policy was nothing but the conduct of a permanent war by the Spartiates against the subjugated majority of the population ; and this preoccupation governed every other aspect of policy. The earliest of her recorded alliances, with Tegea, bound the Tegeans to expel Messenians from their territory. Second, it was against Argos, Sparta's inveterate enemy, the only state in the Peloponnese that could sometimes play the part of a military rival. Third, it expressed the international oligarchic interest, threatened everywhere by the appearance of tyrants who promoted the interests of the rising hoplite middle class. The alliance only became operative in time of war, but its existence was bound to influence politics generally, and to have what the Spartans regarded as a ' stabilizing' effect. Thus in 5 1 o Sparta intervened by force in Athens to ' liberate ' the city from her tyrants; the nobles proceeded to reorganize the government, and Athens probably joined the Spartan alliance. Immediately after this, proposing to intervene again in Athens, Sparta summoned a conference of her allies, and found them unani­ mous against her." Henceforward the congress of the allies appar­ ently became a regular feature of the alliance. In the debates recorded by Thucydides before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, one finds the Peloponnesian league arriving at its decision by a double process : a debate in the Lacedaemonian assembly, which decides policy for Sparta, the head of the league; and a concurrent debate in a congress of the allies held at Sparta, where each ally (Sparta in­ cluded) has a single vote. Thus, at the moment of the Persian invasion, which was the decisive historical experience of the Greeks, the Hellenic states­ system has two organs. One is the Delphic Amphictyony, which is nearly Panhdlenic but not political, and so irre_levant to the crisis. as

ss

Systems of States

The other is the Spartan alliance, which is political but not Pan­ hellenic. And the decisive circumstance is that the Hellenic states­ system has split wide open. Most of the states of northern Greece have offered submission to Xerxes, and half the remainder are sitting on the fence. Now there emerges a new and distinct coalition. It is described as ' the Greeks who declared war on the barbarian ', 38 and ' the Greeks who had chosen the better part for Hellas '.56 These states send delegates to a Panhellen.ic congress at the Isthmus, i.e. Corinth . Most historians have assumed that there was only one congress that coordinated Greek resistance. N. G. L. Hanunond suggests that there were two. 57 First, a meeting in Sparta at Hellenium. 88 Here ' the Greeks that had the better purpose for Hellas ' pledged them­ selves to resist the Persians jointly, agreed on post-war measures against the Greeks who had voluntarily submitted to Persia, and ' resolved in debate to make an end of all their feuds and their wars against each other, from whatever cause arising '." They also sent envoys to Argos, Syracuse, Corcyra and Crete, asking for military support, ' for they hoped that since the danger threatened all Hellenes alike, all Hellenes might cooperate for one common end ', 4 0 and they agreed on a joint command, in the hands of Sparta . There was a move to give the naval command to Athens, but the allies (Sparta's allies, or the other states in the new coalition ?) said that if Sparta were not their leader they would rather break up the fleet that was preparing than be led by the Athenians ; and the Athenians waived their claim. 41 These measures having been taken at the preliminary congress, if indeed it was a separate gathering, a congress assembled at the Isthmus 'of delegates from all the Greek states that were loyal to the common cause of Hellas '." 2 Several questions can now be asked. First, how distinct was the new coalition from the Spartan alliance ? If there was a preliminary congress at Sparta, it was presumably summoned on Sparta's initia­ tive. Moreover, the envoys to Syracuse come in the name of ' Sparta and her allies ',45 just as later, when the crisis is nearly over, ' Sparta and her allies ' offer refuge to Athenian non-combatants as an inducement to Athens not to sign a separate peace."" Two things may be set against this. From the first mention of the Greeks who decide to stake everything on resisting the Persians, Herodotus describes them consistently by a different form of words.u If ' Sparta

59

The states-system of Hellas and

her allies ' is a technical term, then its replacement by another term must be given equal weight. Moreover (and Herodotus em­

phasizes that what he says will be unpopular), it was the Athenian

decision to resist that was decisive. ' By choosing that Hellas should

remain free they and none others roused all the rest of the Greeks

who had not gone over to the Persians, and did under heaven beat the King o£1 '."8 This may be a little unfair to Sparta ; at least it is not a

description of the Spartan alliance in action. Second, what was the Panhdlenic character of the new coalition ?

It is described henceforward as ' the Hellenes '

tout court

-

as if the

states--system had become fused into a united nation. This is the coalition (acting through its Congress ?) which wins the war. It decides strategy, appoints to the command, levies taxes on its mem­

bers.47 It culminates after victory in a general assembly of the Hellenes, which decides on an annual commemorative meeting at Plataea of delegates from the whole of Hellas, and institutes festival games of deliverance for every fourth year. "8 Third, what qualifications of its Panhellenic character have to be made ? It must be admitted that it was something of a fiction. Only potentially did the coalition represent all Hellas. One of its pre­ occupations was suitable penalties against states which were not

supporting the common cause."9 Only 3 I states took part in the war :

their names were inscribed, after the crowning victory of Plataea, on the bronze pedestal of three intertwined snakes which was dedicated at Delphi as first fruits of the spoils won from the enemy, and which

still stands in the Hippodrome in Istanbul .Go So these 3 I must have been a very small proportion of the total membership of the Hellenic states-system, and Themistocles himself used their fewness as an argument against the Spartan proposal in the Amphictyonic league to disenfranchise the rest. If the coalition became inclusive, it was because the majority of states climbed on the bandwaggon when victory was in sight. Nevertheless, in Hellenic tradition the league against the Persians marked the highest point of unity and cooperation ever achieved by the Hellenic states-system. And thenceforward the configuration of the states-system was altogether different from what had gone before. The Persians had been driven back beyond the Hellespont, but the war went on - until the Peace of Kallias in

44 9 ·

Athens took over

the leadership from Sparta, and reorganized the Panhellenic alliance

6o

Systems of States

on a permanent basis as the Confederacy of Delos. The two alliances, the Spartan and the Panhellenic, had largely overlapped ; now they became disentangled from one another. The traditional Spartan hegemony was replaced by a diarchy ; Sparta retained her continental supremacy, but conceded Athenian supremacy at sea ; the parmership of the two great powers which had defeated the Persian invasion was institutionalized. The conservative party in Athens, led by Kimon, hdd to this tradition. It was summed up in the only frag­ ment of Kim on's oratory which has survived, when he persuaded the Athenian assembly to respond to an appeal from Sparta for military assistance against her subject population : ' you should not allow Hellas to be crippled, nor our own Polis to be robbed of its yoke­ fellow '. 81 But several years before this speech was made, Spartan policy had already been prompted by dislike and fear of the way Athens was transforming the Delian Confederacy into an empire. Thasos had revolted from Athens and tried to secede from the Confederacy, and Sparta had secretly promised the Thasians the help for which they appealed, though circumstances prevented its being given. 5 2 When the final breach between Athens and Sparta occurred in 461, the Athenians ' abrogated the alliance which they had made with Sparta against the Persians, and entered into an alliance with her enemy Argos'.58 This was the end of even the pretence of Hellenic unity. It had lasted 40 years. There followed the classic example of what from the standpoint of the states-system as a whole is an unstable diarch y, or from the stand­ point of the competitors is a rivalry of hegemonies. Athens played the role of Prussia within the Germanic Body, of the Soviet Union within the United Nations. The latter parallel has been noticed with misgiving by contemporary American writers. For Athens versus Sparta is also the classic instance in history of a rivalry where our sympathies are on the side of the restless, aggressive, imperialist power, and against the quiescent, law-abiding, status quo power. Political leadership in Athens had passed from Kimon to his young rival Pericles, who aimed at Athens' becoming in Hellas what Sparta used to be before the Persian Invasion. In the First Peloponnesia.11 War (459-445 ) Athens put forth her greatest strength. She con­ tinued to wage the Persian War, in Cyprus, Phoenicia and Egypt. At the same time, challenging Sparta at Sparta's own game, she con­ quered a land empire in Central Greece. The gigantic effort of war

The states-system of Hellas f.��? . · lli.i �twa fronts wa� too much for her.. She made . peace with Persi� in lt9, and then, cnppled �y a revolt tn the empue, made the T�trty �� Truce with Sparta tn 445· But before the war ended, Pencles ... . . I

' ' .

�ed

a project for reorganizing the states-system which showed jl·more than Napoleonic grandeu r.

; · : By way of inciting the Athenians to cherish yet loftier thoughts aod to think themselves worthy of great achievements, he intro­ duccd a decree in the assembly, that all Hellenes wheresoever ·

·,.

·

.

resident in Europe or Asia, small and large poleis alike, should be ' . invited to send delegates to a Congress at Athens. The agenda was to be : (a) the Hellenic sanctuaries which the Barbarians had burnt down [primarily those on the Acropolis, still unrestored ] ; (b) the sacrifices due to the gods in the name of Hellas, in fulfilment of vows made during the war with the Barbarians ; (c) maritime security, that all might sail the sea fearlessly and keep the peace.11'

Commissioners were sent all over mainland Greece, the Aegean

islands and Ionia, from Byzantium to the Peloponnese. But Sparta

.�aged to wreck the plan, and the congress did not meet. It was the boldest attempt Athens made to institutionalize her hegemony. With its failure, she fell back on other measures. The organization of her empire was tightened up ; the Parthenon was built from the tribute of her allies instead of from Panhellenic contributions ; the uneasy diarchy with Sparta was provisionally accepted. 'The dualism had now to be accepted until it could be smashed ' .115 It was smashed in the second, or great, Peloponnesian War ; but by the defeat of Athens herself instead of Sparta. Athens was defeated

for two reasons : because she failed· in her grandiose attempt to

conquer the Greater Hellas of Sicily, to call in the new world of the West to redress the balance of the old ; and because Sparta called in the ancient enemy of the East, Persia. As a result, Sparta emerged once more as hegemon of Hellas. She was the dominant power from the Athenian surrender in 404 down to her own defeat of Leuctra in 37 I by Thebes. But the great wars of the fifth century had brought changes to the states-system which were reflected in the more squalid conflicts of the fourth century. All the poleis had become coarsened and weakened, bereft of broad policies and grand conceptions, and incapable of carrying them out had they had them . The Pelopon­ nesian War had left Sparta victorious, but depopulated, impoverished

Systems of States and corrupted. Her restored hegemony was a different matter frorn the traditional leadership of the sixth century. It was brutal, oppres­ sive and clumsily Machiavellian, and its disappearance left no regrets. After their victory at Leuctra the Thebans liberated Messenia, which destroyed the economic basis of the Spartan state, and ended its role as a great power. The states-system had now become more flexible ; the weights moved more £reel y. The dominant power did not have the towering ascendancy over its fellows that Athens and Sparta had both had in the days of the diarchy. A multiple balance of power had come into being, and Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Argos and Corinth combine and recombine against one another with an even greater absence of continuity or principle than the Italian and Transalpine powers in the time of Charles VIII and Louis XII . But it is · now that the idea of collective security can, for the first and last time, be detected. The Theban supremacy lasted for half a generation after Leuctra, and was punctuated by another great but indecisive battle against an alliance of Sparta, Athens and minor powers at Mantinea in 362. After it, the exhausted states made a general peace and alliance. It seems that the new league was styled ' the Hellenes ', like the Pan­ hellenic League of 4 So, and that it embodied the principle that an attack on one was an attack on all. 56 Is it significant that the principle of collective security is recognized at the very beginning of the modern European states-system, in the Most Holy League that

accompanied the Peace of Lodi in 1454, while it does not appear in Greek international politics until the Hellenic states--system is ex­ hausted and near its end ? The new league was entirely ineffective, as every system of collec­ tive security has been. The inheritor and transformer of the states­

system was already at hand : a vigorous outsider, a new national monarchy instead of an effete polis, and she swept the board. Philip took the opportunity of the Third Sacred War to intervene in Hellenic politics in 3 5 3 · He exploited the procrastinations and feuds of the Greek powers so skilfully that in 33 8, ' at that dishonest victory, at Chaeronea, fatal to liberty ', the Macedonian conquest of Greece was complete. He now summoned a congress of the Greek States at Corinth. All attended except Sparta, still resentfully sulking. A new league was formed, the Hellenic league. It embodied a general mutual guarantee of the independence and constitution of each

The states-system of He/las i

.ber, and the principle of collective security. It had a council, =�ding by a majority, on which members had unequal representa­ 'lt)n according to their importance. The council was a federal itrhority with unlimited competence in organizing war, finance, and

i;bitrating disputes. So much to restore peace and security within the ..Cttts-system. Hut Philip had wider ends in view. At its first meeting 6e league entered into a perpetual offensive and defensive alliance trith the Macedonian kingdom, declared war on Persia, and elected

·�p

commander-in-chief. To this position, this instrument and thctc aims Alexander succeeded. · Historians make two kinds of judgment on Philip. Some em­ the Hellenic league, as showing a broad-minded international

phasize

ttatesmanship of a quality that the Hellenic world had not seen since Pericles, and a recognition of the needs and susceptibilities of the

Greek states which Pericles had not shown. Others emphasize the hegemony, and see the Hellenic league as resembling the Bismarck­ ian constitution of Germany more than the Panhellenic league of 4�0. But two conclusions seem to stand out. One is, that the Hellenic States-system was only redeemed from anarchy by forcible conquest from without. The second is, that the immediate aim of the union once achieved was war against an external enemy. Another aspect of the states-system after the Peloponnesian War must be mentioned : it had a wider geographical range . Commercial activity was more widely diffused throughout the Mediterranean region and economic interdependence increased. There are growing evidences of commercial treaties, trading privileges, international banking, arbitration, etc. All this has its political counterpart. On the one side, Persia had been brought into the balance again; now she was playing the part of a great power in the Hellenic states-system. On the other side, the states of Greater Hellas, in Sicily and Italy, wete being drawn more closely into the system. Here �ere was a great power, in Syracuse. Herodotus says of Gelon, despot of Syra­ cuse at the time of the Persian Invasion, ' Now the power of Gelon was said to be very great, far greater than that of any Hellenic people ,, 151 and he makes Gelon himself say that his military and naval resources greatly exceed Sparta's.118 Gelon at that time had a simultaneous Carthaginian invasion of Sicily on his hands, and for the next 6o years Syracuse was occupied in extending its power in Sicily and along the Italian coast as far north as Cumae.119 The

Systems of States invitations to Pericles's Panhellenic congress did not include the Western Greeks, but Pericles had a policy of western expansion for Athens. Perhaps one of its aims was to impede the unification of Sicily by Syracuse, which was a Dorian state and sympathetic to Sparta. When the Peloponnesian War began the Dorian states of Sicily, with the one exception of Camarina, joined the Spartan alliance, but took no active part. eo AI though nominal, this seems to be the first recorded involvement of the Western Greeks in the international politics of the Old Greek World. Thucydides does not mention it as a justification for Athenian intervention in Sicily ; indeed, he makes Hermocrates say that the Athenians rightly despise the Syracusans for not having helped Sparta to destroy them.11 Athens sent her first expedition to Sicily in 4 2 7 , and a stronger one the next year. The Sicilian states reacted by convening a conference at Gela and sinking their own differences. Here the Syracusan states­ man Hermocrates made an appeal for continental solidarity : We are neighbours, and dwell together in a single land encircled by the sea, and are called by a single name - Sicilians. We shall have our wars, no doubt, whenever occasion arises, and we shall make peace again by agreement among ourselves. But when foreigners invade us, we shall if we are wise always act in concert, and repel them, since an injury to one of us endangers us all. And let us never hencefotward invite their intervention, whether as allies or mediators. If we can agree on this, we shall not deprive Sicily of two things that are immediate! y essential - getting rid of the Athenians and our civil wars. And for the future we shall inhabit a land that is free and in less danger from abroad. 82 It was perhaps the last occasion for a century on which the doctrine of Greater Hellas as an alter orbis could carry conviction. When Nicias appealed to it in the Athenian assembly as an argument against the Sicilian Expedition8 8 he was voted down. Thucydides does not offer an estimate of the strength of Syracuse compared with that of the two great powers. But he emphasizes that Syracuse as a polis was as large as Athens, u and that Athens was now attacking a power, not only of her own size, but of her own kind: a resourceful democracy with a great navy, the opposite of the sluggish, cautious Sparta. The Sicilian Expedition brought Syracuse fully into the war. If a

The states-system of Hellas

pt power is a power which can protect its interests and make its ttrength felt throughout the whole extent of a states-system, the

Athenian disaster in Sicily made Syracuse a Hellenic great power, more definitely than the defeat of the Spanish Armada made England one. Hennocrates urged the Sicilians to take part in finishing Athens olf,18 and in 4 1 2 led a Syracusan fleet into the Aegean to support the new Peloponnesian navy ;68 henceforward they are prominent in the war.17 A Syracusan wrote up the story of the Anabasis before Xenophon's account was published.68 In the same year that Athens surrendered, Dionysius the Great made himself tyrant of Syracuse, and he maintained the alliance with Sparta, sending an expeditionary force to Sparta's aid against Thebes in the Boeotian War.69 Diony· sius's pursuit of prestige at the Olympic festival and in the tragic contests at Athens became as celebrated as the unhappy intervention of Plato in Syracusan domestic politics under Dionysius II. But as Macedon rose to power in the Aegean basin, Greater Hellas sank into isolation again, weakened by social and international conflict. It is only when Alexander has established his world empire and is receiving congratulatory embassies in Babylon that Sicily and Italy reappear in the states--system, and then they are already overshadowed by the rising name of Rome. 70 It might be argued that the Greeks seem to have had a funda­ mentally hegemonial theory of the states-system. From the sixth century they seem to have thought of it as having a natural leader or president', and they had several terms for this concept prostates tes Hellados , hegemon. It was only under the unparalleled stress of the Persian Invasion that a more collective conception appeared. The outcome was a transient diarchy of Sparta and Athens which quickly resolved itself into a struggle for primacy, leading within 1 50 years to acquiescence in the decisive hegemony of a power which outclassed the rest. And the hegemonial theory was linked with a generally egalitarian assumption about the members of the states-system. This showed itself in the survival of the archaic Am­ phictyonic constitution. It showed itself, moreover, in a notable contrast with the modern European states-system - the absence of a hierarchic conception of international society. The Greeks do not seem to have had any term corresponding to 'great power ', and the use of the modem phrase in writing about Hellenic politics (as it has been used in this paper) may lead to serious distortions. In modern •

-

66

Systems of States

Europe the idea of a great power is as old as the states-system itself. Was it derived from the aristocratic society in which the states-system grew up ? Again, the Hellenic states-system does not show any developed idea of the balance of power. One or two random examples of the use of the metaphor may illustrate this. Herodotus says that at the moment of the Persian invasion Athenian policy was decisive : ' for whichever side they chose, that way the balance would incline', or ' that would preponderate '. 71 Diodorus says of the Theban-Spartan alliance at the beginning of the First Peloponnesian War, that the Spartans believed ' that if Thebes were strengthened she would be a kind of counterweight, antipalon, to the increasing power of Athens '. 72 (Does the phrase reflect the late Hellenistic ideas of Diodorus's own time, or did he find it in his sources ?) Thucydides, as has often been noticed, is full of comparisons of power in different situations, but never formulates a theory of the balance. When Corcyra sought the alliance of Athens against Corinth, her envoys to Athens clinched their argument thus : The Hellenes have only three navies worth mentioning - yours, ours, and the Corinthian fleet. If now you let two of them be united, by Corinth getting control of ours first, you will have to fight at sea against both Corcyra and the Peloponnesians [whose main naval Power Corinth was] ; but if you ally with us, you will be able to maintain the struggle with your Beet and ours together. 7 3 Here also is the advice that Alcibiades gives to Tissaphernes, which has sometimes been seen as the earliest expression of a policy of ' holding the balance of power ' : he argued that Persia's interest was ' to wear the Hellenes out upon one another. . . . He therefore urged him, first to wear out both sides, then to curtail the power of the

Athenians as much as possible, and finally to get the Peloponnesians out of his country. ' H There is nothing much here for a theory of the balance of power. If Thucydides does not provide one, it is because the Greeks did not possess one. Just as they had no diplomatic system and no public international law, so they had no sense of an equilibrium of power being the foundation and as it were the constitution of international society. In modern Western international relations the three have been interdependent. It is in the subsequent Hellenistic chapter of the

The sttJtes·system of Hellas ._ucient states.system that the first glimmerings of the doctrine of the balance of power appear, in Polybius' description of the policy of Hicro of Syracuse during the Punic Wars : He was convinced that it was in his own interests, both for the security of his Sicilian possessions and for his friendship with Rome, that Carthage should be preserved, and that the stronger Power should not be able to attain its ultimate object entirely without effort. His policy was very wise and sensible. This aspect of affairs should never be neglected, and we should never contri­ bute to a Power becoming so preponderant that none dare dispute with it even for acknowledged rights.13 But still this is only a glimmering - the starting-point of modern doctrine and practice.

5. INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION It might be a matter for discussion whether a states-system can exist without an international public opinion. If there is no sense of cultural interdependence or common interest between states that come into contact with one another, can they be said to form a system ? If their contacts are continuous and regular, will they not give rise to a sense of interdependence and so to an international public opinion ? Modern history has several instances that raise these questions : for example, the slow extension of the Western diplomatic system to include the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, and the maintenance of international relations across an ideological gulf,

as

with Soviet Russia and Communist China. There was certainly an international public opinion in Hellas. The

international festivals and competitions, the 01 ympic Games and their more frequent lesser counterparts, the Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games, the Delphic Amphictyony and the lesser amphic­ tyonies, were evidence for it. At the same time they revealed how little effect international public opinion had on the actions of states. When we talk about public opinion we usually mean a kind of consensus or collective judgment, a prevalent sentiment of approval or (more likely) disapproval crystallized by current debate. Thus

68

Sysums of States

public opinion, we say, condemned Turkish misrule in the Balkans, or aggressive war after I 9 I 9 ; that it demands (an inverted condem­ nation) great power negotiations, or disarmament, or the ending of colonial rule. The Greeks had a similar conception of a collective political judgment. The word Thucydides uses for it, with some degree of precision, is eunoia. It means goodwill, approval, sympathy, readiness to help. Thucydides describes the condition of international public opinion at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in these words : All the rest of Hdlas was in anxious suspense as its two Great Powers came into conflict with each other. . . . International public opinion,

eunoia, .

however, inclined decidedly to the side of the

Spartans, especially since they proclaimed that they were liberating Hellas. Every individual and every

polis was

deeply committed to

helping them in every possible way, whether by word or deed, and each man thought that unless he took a personal share in things the whole effort was being handicapped. So bitter was the general feeling against Athens, some wishing to be delivered from her rule, others afraid of falling under it. 76 Gomme in his

Commentary 71

observes that this sweeping and cate­

gorical statement is not borne out by Thucydides' narrative of the war; there is little other evidence of a general enthusiasm for the Spartan cause, though Thucydides repeats the generalization when he describes how, after the Sicilian disaster, neutrals and Pelopon­ nesians and subject states of Athens ' were more than ever animated by a common eagerness ' to finish off the tyrant city. 7 8 But the statement establishes one pole, so to speak, of the Thucydidean interpretation. The other pole is represented by Pericles' extra­ ordinary valedictory disquisition on the logic of imperial power. ' Hatred and abhorrence for the moment have always bee n the lot of

those who have aspired to rule over others. But if one has a great aim

in view, this burden of envy must be accepted, and it is wise to accept it. Hatred does not last for long ; but the splendour of the present is the glory of the future stored up in everlasting remem­ brance. '79 And though on the one hand this defiance of eunoia, of international public opinion, is for Thucydides a mark of the h uhris that brings Athens to ruin, on the other hand he suggests that eunoia is ineffective unless it produces a superiority of power, 80 and that the

The states-system of Hellas

Spartans are interested in conciliating world opinion only in so far as it promotes their own hegemony. 8 1

· . But Thucydides's conception of eunoia has another dimension. The term is used to describe what we should call ideological loyalties, which cut through the states-system horizontally, and attract classes factions in one polis to their counterparts in others. In the Mytilen8Ca.D debate, Diodotus tells the Athenian assembly : ' At present the broad masses, the demos, in every city are well-disposed (eunous, the or

adjective of eunoia) to you. Either they do not support the upper classes in revolting against you, or if compelled to do so they remain

all the time hostile to the rebellion, so that when you use force against the rebels you will have the masses as your allies '. 82 Thucydides repeats it in his famous description of stasis : Practically the whole Hellenic world was convulsed, since in each state the leaders of the democratic factions were at variance with the oligarchs, the former seeking to bring in the Athenians, the latter the Spartans. And while in time of peace they would have had no pretext for asking the intervention of these Powers, nor any inclination to do so, yet now that war had broken out each faction, if it wanted to overthrow the government, found it easy to call in allies, for the discomfiture of its opponents and the promotion of its own cause. And so revolutions brought many calamities in the various states - as happens and always will happen while human nature remains the same, though there may be different degrees of savagery and so on according to circumstances.83 This is one of the great themes of the History, and one of the shock­ ing characteristics of the war. It also provides perhaps the most striking parallel between the Hellenic states-system and the modern European. Burke saw it as the closest precedertt for the ideological division of Europe by the French Revolution, since unlike the international factions introduced by the Reformation, it was free from the special motive of religion. But Burke also acutely pointed out a contrast between the Hellenic and modern factions. ' Secret cabals and publick alliances were carried on and made, not upon a conformity of general political interests, but for the support and aggrandisement of the two leading states which headed the aristocratick and democratick factions ,. 8 • He implies that the international factions in modern history have had

Systems of States more detachment from the power struggle - that it was only after a hundred years that the Protestant interest in Europe found in Sweden a great power to give it leadership, as Spain was already leader of the Catholic interest. Thucydides, too, sees stasis as a product of inter­ national war, and ideological loyalties as always subordinate to ' the fundamental motives which inspire the two sides : for Athens, the desire to rule, for the others, the desire to be independent'. &G Brasidas, recognizing that the class-war on the whole worked to the interna­ tional advantage of Athens, repudiated it when he liberated the cities 88 of Thrace. The Athenians realized that one of their miscalculations in attacking Syracuse was that Syracuse's being a democracy deprived 87 them of the ability to promote a fifth column there. And when Athens was beaten to her knees, 20 years after Brasidas's campaign in Thrace, the triumphant Lysander could sail through the Aegean installing oligarchic governments as agents of Spartan hegemony. In the fourth century there is no writer about international politics with Thucydides's analytical power and intellectual precision. When Xenophon describes the apogee and decline of Sparta's hegemony, he does not use Thucydidean terms, and say that Sparta had flouted the world opinion which had previously helped her to defeat Athens, though his own evidence makes it clear that this had happened. He uses instead the old-fashioned concept of divine retribution. 'One could mention many other incidents, both among Greeks and bar­ barians, to prove that the gods do not fail to notice wicked and unrighteous actions. Here I will speak of the case under considera­ tion . Sparta had pledged herself to respect the independence of other states, and then had committed aggression against Thebes by seizing the citadel there. And although Sparta had never before been de­ feated by any Power, she now was punished by the very Thebans, 88 unaided, who had been thus wronged ' . But as Professor de Romill y has argued, the writers of the fourth century are all engaged in discussing and digesting the experience of

the fifth century : why it is that the Athenian Empire failed, the 89 relation between might and right. The kind of international public opinion that contributes to ideological cleavage grows fainter ; stasis is no longer a feature of international life. But eunoia is constantly discussed. For !socrates the cultivating of eunoia is the true aim of foreign policy. For Demosthenes eunoia is something Athens should attract and organize to arrest the steady advance of Philip's aggres-

The states-system of Helias lion. And at the same time, the meaning of the word eirene was devdoping from simply the opposite of war, a state of peace, into a treaty of peace. The new idea of a common or general peace among all Greek states was appearing, and nine such multilateral pacifica­ tions have been distinguished .90 Nevertheless, what stands out is the tDta1 inability of international public opinion to affect the march of events. In practical tenns, !socrates failed to influence policy as defin­ itely as did the post-Kantian peace movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The new general peace-treaties were all concerned to guarantee the independence of states ; they did nothing to end the feuds, mitigate the particularism, or promote cooperation. They had the novel feature that they were concluded without time-limit; but they proved more evanescent than the solid ' truces ' of the previous tentury. In circumstances and in character alike Demosthenes was a Churchill manque, who ran away at the battle of Chaeronea, spent another I 5 years in futile opposition to Alexander the Great, and after staging a last unsuccessful revolt sucked poison concealed in the end of his pen and so died. It is with the notion of international public opinion that the study of international relations comes closest to the general culture of the society of states. At this point we become most aware of the prevailing

ideas of the ' world ' whose collective opinion we postulate . In ancient Greece, the notion of international public opinion was expressed by a word, eunoia, importing an emotional and moral disposition to­ wards some

polis or Nicomachean Ethics,

person. Eunoia, as Aristotle observes in the is the beginning of friendship.91 It is, so to speak, a bilateral impulse ; it does not seem to attain any meaning of the love of mankind in general. The opposite of eunoia is fear. The Mytilenaean delegation which visits Sparta to ask for assistance against Athens describes the relations between their city and Athens in these words : ' They courted us in time of war only because they were afraid of us, while we acted in the same manner towards them in time of peace. Good faith, which in most cases is made steadfast by good will, eunoia, was in our case made secure by fear '. 92 Or the opposite of eunoia is hatred. ' In place of the eunoia which was accorded us by our allies ', wrote I socrates, ' and of the good repute in which we had been hdd by the rest of Hellas, our empire brought us so much hatred that our country scarcely escaped being enslaved '. 98 I have wondered if it would be accurate to exemplify the greater

Systems of States richness and complexity of modern international thought by saying that, in the modern states·system, the notion of international public opinion comes dose to meaning the spirit and purpose of mankind. Its connotation is multilateral ; its objects are general and universal. And it implies, not simply benevolence towards some agent in international society, but adherence to some standard of action. We often use the phrase with the suggestion of a moralistic or revolution­ ary condemnation of a practice on the ground that it violates a principle or falls short of an ideal. World opinion condemns apart­ heid, we like to say, or demands an end to American bombing in Vietnam. The antithesis of world opinion, therefore, is no longer simply a primary emotion like hate or fear. It is the condition of moral obtuseness or delinquency which public opinion seeks to correct. The chief mark of this condition is absence of knowledge and information, whether through sloth or secrecy ; for it is the theory of public opinion that all it needs for its health and growth is a free flow of information. Hence Kant's transcendental formula of public law, that all actions relating to the rights of other men are unjust unless their principle is consistent with publicity. u Hence Wilson's speech about the draft Covenant at the Peace Conference in 1 9 1 9 : ' throughout this instrument we are depending primarily and chiefly upon one great force, and that is the moral force of the public opinion of the world, the cleansing and clarifying and com­ pelling influences of publicity, so that intrigues can no longer have their coverts, so that designs that are sinister can at any time be drawn into the open, so that those things that are destroyed by the light may be promptly destroyed by the overwhelming light of the universal expression of the condemnation of the world' . This is a statement that would have puzzled, but in different ways, Thucy­ dides and Plato, !socrates and Demosthenes.

3 Hellas and Persia

When w� contemplate the Hellenic states-system we are likely to be �truck by two features of it. First, it was the most complex and highly organized of which history seems to have record before our

own. This makes for comparison with the modern European states­

system. Second, it was to an unparalleled extent dominated by a neighbouring world-empire. This makes for contrast. At the begin­ ning of fully historic times, the Persian Empire made a deliberate attempt to conquer Hellas. Five generations later, a Hellenic power, ·which had unified the Hellenic states-system by force, conquered and transformed the Persian Empire. It seems to be the story of a unique symbiosis. We have to ask, were Bellas and Persia members

of a common states-system ? Or was Hellas a states-system with an

external suzerain power ? The memory of Marathon and Salamis, and the Herodotean interpretation of the Persian Wars, suggest at once the answer no to

both questions.

The flying Mede, his shaftless broken bow; The fiery Greek, his red pursuing spear This is the classic picture of the triumph of Europe over Asia, of freedom over despotism, of civilization over barbarism. There was a great deal of mutual incomprehension between Greeks and Persians. They were at the opposite extremes of political experience. After their military victories the Greeks came to enter­

tain

more contemptuous opinions about the Persian Empire, but a

basic feeling about it was wonder at its mere extent. It may be illustrated from Xenophon's Cyropa�dia, a puzzling book, a roman­ tic ·biography of Cyrus the Great and a philosophical case-study in the art of ruling, suffused with a sense of the magnitude of the Empire. Cyrus, says Xenophon, was unlike all other kings. They are well content if they can maintain themselves in power over their own subjects. Thus the peoples of Europe - Scythians, Thracians,

74

Systems of States

Illyrians - as well as the Greeks have always been free and inde­ pendent. But Cyrus by art and conquest acquired dominion over ' very many nations of which one could not even tell the names '. He ruled over these nations, even though they did not speak the same language as he, nor the same as one another. And he was able to cover so vast a region with the fear which he inspired, that he astonished all men and no one tried to withstand him. And he was able to inspire in all men so great a desire to please him, that they always wanted to be governed by his judgment. Moreover, the peoples he made dependent upon himself were so many that it is a difficult matter to travel to them all, in whatever direction one begins one's journey from the palace - whether towards the east or the west, the north or the south.1 This is the antithesis of the Aristotelian optimum size of the polis. And on the other hand, Persian contempt for the agora-centred commercially-inspired Kleinstaaterei of the Greeks is suggested by a famous story in Herodotus. Sparta had sent a diplomatic mission to Cyrus at Sardis, warning him to abstain from any hostile act against the Ionian Greek states, since Sparta would not tolerate it. The story goes on that when the envoy had made this d�marche, Cyrus asked the Greeks in his entourage, 'Who are the Spartans ? How many divisions do they have ? ' While he was making the inquiry, he remarked to the Spartan envoy, ' I have never yet felt afraid of people who have a place reserved in the middle of their towns for meeting together and cheating each other on oath. These folk, unless there is something wrong with me, will soon have not merely the Ionians' troubles to chatter about, but their own '. These words of Cyrus's were a hit at the Hellenes in general, because they have market-places for buying and selling. The Persians never buy in the open market, and indeed do not have a single agora in the empire. 2 It was out of such elements as these that Herodotus wove his theme of an eternal conflict between East and West going back to the Troj an War, a struggle between the vast numbers, indefinite terri­ torial extent, and political shapelessness of Oriental despotism, and the compact, limited, maritime, free communities of Europe. It is a theme that seems to explain recurring features of European history,

Hellas and Persia

75

when Christendom has been threatened by the Abbasid Caliphate and the Mongol Empire, the West by the Ottoman Turks and the Soviet Union ; and it has influenced historians down to Karl Witt­

fogd

and Northcote Parkinson. But the period of the Persian Wars

itself is capable of a less heroic interpretation than Herodotus gives

it, and events after Herodotus' time show a more complicated picture. It is necessary to consider the extent to which the Greek states

accepted Persian suzerainty, the phenomenon of medizing, the Greek attitude to the Persians even after the Persian Wars, the sub­ sequent role of the Persian Empire in the international affairs of Hdlas, and the final Greek conquest of Persia. It is also necessary to

glance at the cognate question of Carthage.

1 . PERSIA AS SUZERAIN POWER The political ambiguity of the Hellenic states-system is the conse­ quence of its geographical extension sprawling on both sides of the Aegean (not to mention the Greater Hellas in the western Mediter­ ranean). The Ionian Greeks along the Anatolian seaboard were likely to be dominated by a great power with continental resources in the hinterland, unless they joined forces in a federation or union, which they sometimes talked of but conspicuously failed to do any­ thing about. (In exacd y the same way the peninsular Greeks, given their own failure to unite, were in the long run due to be dominated by a great power in the Balkan hinterland.) The Persian Wars arose because a large part of the Hellenic states-system, having been tribu­ tary to Persia for some so years, revolted. Herodotus says that all Greek states had been free and independent

until the time of Croesus, king of Lydia. He it was who first made the Ionian coastal cities dependent, though he failed to subdue the island states. s Lydia was a familiar neighbour to the Greeks, com­ mercial! y dependent on them and partial! y Hellenized, with a tradition of devotion to the Delphic Oracle, and herself almost a member of the Hellenic states-system. Croesus was remembered afterwards, at any rate in contrast with the Persians who succeeded him, as a mild and good ruler : ' the kindly generosity of Croesus

fadeth not ', says Pindar So years later.• Croesus had friendly rela­ tions with Sparta, and when the Persian threat developed took the

Systems of States initiative in making a Spartan alliance.8 Cyrus, on his side, in his diplomatic preparations for the Lydian war, invited the Ionian states to revolt against Croesus. They refused. After the defeat of Lydia, they offered to become Cyrus's subjects on the same terms as those which they had had under Croesus. It was Cyrus's turn to refuse : now

he

would make the conditions. The Ionian states called a

hurried conference at the Panionium, their international centre, and sent to Sparta for help. 6 In this way the Greeks became the Persian Empire's north-west frontier problem. Cyrus remained in Sardis long enough to reject the diplomatic representations of Sparta ; then he marched east again. ' At first he gave the lonians no high priority, ' says Herodotus. ' He had Babylon to think about, and Bactria, and the Sacae on the north-east frontier, and Egypt. He intended to conduct campaigns against them in person and to leave the Ionians to one of his generals ' . 7 At this juncture two of the Seven Sages of antiquity gave advice which showed that political sagacity was not among their qualities. Thales of Miletus, the philosopher, proposed federal union for Ionia. Bias of Priene proposed collective migration to Sardinia followed by political union : ' thus they would escape subjugation for themselves and gain prosperity, possessing the biggest island in the world, and ruling others. But if they stayed in Ionia, he said, he could sec no prospect of independence for them ' .8 Bias's advice was a practical precursor of Gibbon 's speculation that, if a savage conqueror, issuing from the deserts of Tartary, should ' carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society ; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and instirutions '. 9 These suggestions of Thales and Bias were as ineffective as those of the Cruces and St Pierres, the Coudenhove-Kalergis and Clarence Streits of every age. Nothing seems to be a more constant feature in the history of the Hellenic as of the Western states-systems than the inability of independent states to make an effective voluntary union so

as to avert an imposed unification by force. The more highly

developed the states-system, the more obstinate the parochialism· of its members. ' Take away the independence of those city-states ', Barraclough has said, ' and it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how what was of enduring value in Greek civilisation could have been

Hellas and Persia

77

secured. In other words, the independence of the city-states had the same roots as Greek civilisation itself; it was ineradicable so long as that civilisation lasted ' .1 0 The Ionians were duly subjugated. The inhabitants of two states migrated

en masse

to avoid the inevitable fate, the Phokaians to

Corsica and the Teians to Thrace. The rest ' were for the second time enslaved : and when Harpagus, the Persian commander, had conquered the Ionians of the mainland, the Ionians of the islands, fearing the same fate, surrendered themselves to Cyrus ' .11 The Persians learned how to take advantage, not only of the lack of unity among the Greek states, but also of class divisions within them. As a rule they supported tyrants, who might represent commercial in­ terests or the many or the poor, but would owe their position largely to Persian backing.1 2 For nearly

30

years the Persian government was employed on

other frontiers, and the Greek question was quiet. In this interval Samos, under the pirate-tyrant Polycrates, became the greatest power

in

the Aegean.18 Then Darius resumed the Persian advance. He

sent a small naval squadron to make a reconnaissance throughout the Hellenic world. Leaving from Sidon, ' they set sail for Hell as, where they explored and took notes on the coasts to which they came; until having surveyed the greater and more famous parts they reached Tarentum in Italy '. Here they ran into political diffi­ culties, used threats of Persian intervention, ' and sailed back for Asia, abandoning any attempt to reconnoitre the further parts of Hellas . . . . These Persians were the first who came from Asia into Hell as '. u Soon afterwards Darius conquered Samos, u and Lesbos and Chios accepted Persian suzerainty. With these resources he undertook his first invasion of Europe. A Samian engineer bridged the Bosphorus for the army to advance, and the Ionian fleets sailed in support through the Black Sea and up the delta of the Danube to meet the expedition.16 Darius aimed to establish Persian power on

the north side of the Black Sea, and crossing the Danube advanced some way into the Ukraine. Among his vassals on this campaign was the Athenian Miltiades, now general and tyrant of the Cher­ sonites of the Hellespont, later to be the victor of Marathon.17 At the end of the campaign Darius left his general Megabazus with a directive to subjugate all the Hellespontine states which had not supported Persia, and then to conquer Thrace. Macedonia also gave

Systems of Staks the symbolic ' earth and water' in token of submission.18 In the years immediately following, Darius reorganized the satrapies of the Empire. In inscriptions at Persepolis and Susa, two new administra­ tive districts appear. Besides Ionia and ' Those on the Sea ' (i.e. the Aegean island states) there are now ' Those beyond the Sea ' (i.e. roughly what is now European Turkey and Bulgaria) and Skudra (i.e. Thrace and Macedonia).19 Persian power was now established on the north as well as the east of the Aegean. The first offer of submission from the peninsular Greeks in the west came, by an irony, from Athens herself. She had expellee the tyrant Hippias, and was going through a democratic revolution. Sparta threatened to intervene in the interests of oli­ garchy. The revolutionary government under Cleisthenes sent a delegation to Sardis to ask for Persian hdp. The viceroy made the

usual condition : the giving of earth and water in recognition of Persian suzerainty ; and the envoys consented. But Athenian vassal­ age to the Persian Empire lasted a shorter time than King John's fealty and homage to the Holy See. When the embassy returned from Sardis the emergency had passed, and the Athenian govern­ ment could reap the popular advantage of repudiating what it had done, or silently falsify the record later.20 Eight years later the great Ionian Revolt against Persia broke out, and Athens accepted a plea to intervene on the side of the rebels. Perhaps the main cause of the Revolt was hatred of the tyrannies, and Persian statesmanship was never better shown than after the Revolt had been stamped out, when all the Ionian despots were deposed and democracies were set up instead. 2 1 But it was now Darius' policy to end the Greek Question for good and all by bringing peninsular Greece under control ; prestige also required the chastisement of Athens. 22 He controlled the Hellenic states up to and including Macedonia. 2 1 He now sent envoys to every independent state in Hellas demanding submission. All the island states, including Aegina, and many of the mainland states complied. u Herodotus names only Athens and Sparta as refusing the demand. 'The Persian envoys were thrown into the pit for condemned criminals in one city, and into a well in the other, and told to take from there the required earth and water to the King '.25 And the second Persian invasion of Europe was launched, which ended at Marathon. The third Persian invasion of Europe, the Great Invasion, was the

·

79

Hellas and Persia most elaborate!y prepared, and came nearest

to

absorbing what re­

mained of the Hellenic states-system. The Greek states under Persian suzerainty furnished their part of the expedition. 2 6 Throughout the campaign the Macedonian king acted as a satrap.27 From Sardis, Xerxes had sent envoys demanding submission from every indepen­ dent Greek state, excepting only Athens and Sparta because of the fate of Darius's envoys ten years before ; the returning envoys met him when he had reached Thessal y. ' Among those who gave

earth and water were the Thessalians, Dolopes, Erienes, Perrhae­

bians, Locrians, Magnesians, Malians, the Achaeans of Phthiotis, Thebes, and all the other states of B�otia except Thespiae and Plataea. These were the peoples about whom the Allies against Persia swore their oath : that if they should be victorious, they would confiscate the possessions of all the Greeks who had voluntarily submitted to Persia, and dedicate them to the god of Delphi '. 28 The majority of the states of the Peloponnese, Herodotus writes, ' sat apart from the war, and if I may speak frankly, were neutral on the side of Persia '. 2 8 The most important of these was Argos, Sparta's hereditary enemy, which had recendy undergone a crushing defeat at Sparta's hands, and now had an understanding with Xerxes, if indeed she had not encouraged Persian intervention. 80 Corcyra sat on the fence; the Cretans refused to help the resistance.81 Gelon the tyrant of Syracuse, who was preoccupied with an imminent Cartha­ ginian war in Sicily, offered help on condition that he himself should be commander-in-chief. When the Allies refused the condition, Gelon reinsured and sent a squadron, with an appropriate sum of money and a stock of diplomatic phrases, to watch the event of the war from Delphi. If the Persians won, the money was to be offered to them, together with earth and water on behalf of Gelon's dominions. If the Greeks won, the money was to be brought home again.3 2 The power of Persia seemed so inexorable that perhaps half the membership of the Hellenic states-system had submitted to it and half of the remainder were ready to follow suit. This unedifying and perhaps discreditable picture was later blurred by the legend of an eagerness for freedom which ' animated the mass of Greeks ' against Persia ; Demosthenes employed the legend in order to assert the decline of Greek morale in his own day. 38 The truth was told by

the Plataeans when, in the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, they had to remind Sparta of their services to the common cause

50 years

So

Systems of States

before : ' at that time it was a rare thing for Hellenes

to

oppose their

courage to the might of Xerxes '. 84 Herodotus, writing about the same time, when Hellenic opinion now strongly favoured Sparta against Athens, was constrained to record the conclusion to which his researches had led him, although ' most people will find it invidi­ ous '. If Athens had given up the struggle, he said, the whole of the Hellenic resistance would have collapsed. Sparta might have fortified the Isthmus and tried with her remaining allies to defend a Fortress Peloponnesus ; her allies would inevitably have been worn down by Persian

sea

power, and Sparta would at last have stood alone, to

come to terms or perish heroically. 815

2. MED ISM The Greek verb ' to medize ' meant to collaborate with the Persians. If used of states, it meant submitting to Persian overlordship. This was the subject of the previous section. If used of individuals, it meant defecting to the Persians. This as a phenomenon of political psychology deserves separate mention. Bury pointed out that the very word ' medism ' shows the antiquity of the practice, going back to the time when the Medes were still a separate power from the Persians, and the Ionian Greeks played the Medes off against their suzerain Croesus of Lydia. ' For if such intriguing had first come into fashion after the rise of Persia and the fall of Lydia, the name chosen to designate it would naturally have been

persism '

.

88 The Greeks recognized their proneness to treachery

and faction. Pausanias, the traveller and geographer of the second century A.D., in his

prodosia,

Description of Gr�ec� has a long invective upon

treason, as the besetting sin of Greek politics, and begins

with the examples in the Persian Wars. 87 The individual who medized most flagrandy and influentially was Apollo. His oracles at Branchidae near Miletus in Ionia, and more particularly at Delphi, consistendy recommended submission to Persia. It looks as if consulting the oracle, for states which wanted . an excuse for temporizing or inaction, played a similar role to that which referring a problem to the League or the United Nations has had in recent history. The shrine of Apollo at Magnesia on the Maeander was under Darius' especial protection. 88 Xerxes on his

Hellas and Persia advance did not occupy Delphi, probably by prior agreement ; Hero­ dotus has an edifying story of a supernatural occurrence which discouraged him, recalling the way in which Pope Leo the Great warded off Attila the Hun from Rome in A.D. 452.89 ' And such was the prestige of Delphi that no extant literary source questions

this story '. �0

No doubt the priesthood of the oracles was venal . Perhaps the Persians found how to bribe them. 41 Perhaps the priesthood made an honest political calculation that an imperial peace would be for the common good and also their own. The defeat of the Persians did not discredit the oracles. The mutually jealous states of Greece competed for the favour of Delphi, and the oracle, in an age of dawning scepticism, kept its prestige remarkably, not least in the •

circle of Socrates. Like many undoubted facts in history, it is very odd, and not at all what one might have expected '.4 2 The history of the papacy has parallels. A generation after the incorporation of the Ionian Greek states in the Persian Empire, we have the first records of Persia being used as a factor in the politics of independent Greek states. Was she so used by Greek politicians, or did the Persian government take the initiative ? It is difficult to tell. The preceding section tried to review the evidence for the progressive Persian conquest of Greece. But how far this policy of expansion was based on knowledge of Hellenic affairs and preceded by calculated intervention in Hellenic domestic politics is unclear. When the embassy went from revolutionary Athens to Sardis to solicit a Persian alliance, and had stated their case according to their instructions, the Persian viceroy said, ' Who are you, and where do you come from, that you want a Persian alliance ? '41 Herodotus gives it the same contemptuous inflection as Cyrus's question about the Spartans ; hut the implication surely is not that the viceroy did not know, but that he was putting the Athenians in their place. Again, when Darius was told that Athens had given assistance to the Ionian Revolt and even taken part in the burning of Sardis, the story goes that he did not give a thought to the Ion­ ians, knowing perfectly well that they would get their punishment, but he asked " who are the Athenians ? " '44 But this was ten years or so after both the Persian expedition to reconnoitre the Mediterranean and Darius' first invasion of the Balkan peninsula. How and Wells describe it as ' a characteristically oriental ignorance of Greece on •

Systems of States the part of the Persians ', n but the advance of historical knowledge has given us a less patronizing view of the Persian Empire since they wrote, and one wonders if it may not be part of Herodotus' dramatic art to exaggerate the insignificance of David in the eyes of Goliath. But the evidence we have suggests that it was Greek politicians who took the initiative, to borrow the expression of Representative

G. Ford, in playing footsie with the power�mad Persian leaders. The Peisistratid tyrants of Athens in their decline began it. When Hippias was feeling his position insecure, he married his daughter to the son of the tyrant of Lampsacus, ' perceiving that this family had great influence with King Darius '. On being deposed and banished, he retired first to Sigeium in the Troad, then to Lam psacus, then to the court of Darius.•6 It became the regular itinerary of discomfited Greek politicians. Walker was a little unfair therefore to say that ' the first chapter of the long and squalid history of medism had been written ' with Cleisthenes' subsequent request for a Persian alliance.4 1 It is clear that during the revolution in Athens two parties were prepared to solicit Persian intervention - not only the Peisistratid faction, but also the great ' Whig ' family of the Alcmaeonidae, led by Cleisthenes, which organized the popular forces. The role of Darius resembled that of Louis XIV in English politics in the later seventeenth century. Hippias in exile, like James II, ' did all he could to bring Athens into subjection to himself and Darius ' . The Athen­ ians according! y sent a second embassy to Sardis, to deprecate the political activities of exiles. ' Artaphrenes [ the viceroy] replied with an ultimatum demanding the restoration of Hippias. Athens rej ected this ultimatum when it was reported back, and decided to accept the consequences of open war with Persia ' .48 Herodotus emphasizes that this was the moment when Athens received a request from Miletus to intervene in the Ionian Revolt; which she accepted ; and so it is difficult to accept Cary's judgment that ' in this round the Greeks were the aggressors '. 49 But there were medizing tendencies in Athenian politics throughout the Ionian Revolt and the first Persian Invasion of Greece. The Persian expedition was accompanied and guided by Hippias, now aged nearly S o, and the Alcmaeonid party sent the heliograph signal to the Persians from unprotected Athens on the day of Marathon.30 It was only that resounding victory which united the Athenians for the greater struggle that followed.

Hellas and Persia

After this, medizing appears as the expedient of individuals rather than the policy of parties. Damaratus, king of Sparta, when he was deposed took refuge in Persia. A nobler version of Hippias, he accompanied Xerxes in the great invasion, and gave him much good advice about the Greeks ; no doubt if Persia had won he would have been restored as vassal king. According to Plutarch, Aristides was recalled from exile by the Athenians at that crisis for fear he should go over to the Persians : a significant fear, though a misjudgment of the man. The defeat of the great invasion and the withdrawal of the Persians from Europe left the Persian Empire intact as the greatest power on the eastern side of the Aegean, and as a continuing dement in Greek political consciousness. In the very aftermath of victory, the arrogant and ambitious Spartan commander Pausanias began intriguing with the Persians, with some plan in mind of making himself master of Hellas : he lived in Persian style, wore Persian clothes, and travelled with a Persian bodyguard.62 His down­ fall involved Themistocles, the greatest and most famous of all Greeks who medized. Perhaps he is also the most excusable. He was the object of jealousy in Athenian politics because of both his genius and his arrogance, and his aristocratic enemies manufactured stories about his having intrigued with Persia during the war. At the same time he made himself unpopular with Sparta by resisting the restora­ tion of her hegemony in Greece and asserting the independent status of Athens as a great power. When the Athenians ostracized him, both his own city and Sparta made Greece too hot to hold him, and in a sense he had nowhere else but Persia to take refuge. So having been both William III and Marlborough to Athens during the war, he ended as Bolingbroke - a Bolingbroke who never returned. After him there is no important medizer in Greek international politics until Alcibiades at the end of the Peloponnesian War. 81

3.

BASILEUS AND BARBAROS

Much of the psychological development of the Hellenic states-system would be recovered if we could write a history of the two concepts hasileus and harharos. Basileus is the Greek word for king; the Greeks used it for the king of Persia in a peculiar way, without the definite article. There were plenty of kings in Greek experience.

Systems of States

They survived from earlier times in the constitutions of many poleis : Sparta had a double kingship ; in Athens the basileus had become an annual magistrate with certain religious and judicial functions. On the fringe of the Hellenic states-system there were kings, as in Macedonia and Epirus and Cyprus; and within the Persian Empire there were vassal kings. But the word basileus without the definite article was reserved for the king of Persia. Less frequently he was called ho megas basileus, the Great King.u !socrates, the panhellenic publicist of the fourth century, makes indignant reference to this usage : the Greeks should feel it a disgrace to see the descendants of Cyrus, ' who as a child was cast out by his mother on the public highway ', addressed by this more exalted title than the kings of Sparta, who are descended from the deified Heracles.1" But I do not know of any surviving Greek comment upon the usage of basileus without the article. This usage seems to have had the connotation, in the Hellenic states-system, of the word ' emperor ' in the early Western states­ system. By a paradox, it was abandoned in the later part of the Graeco-Roman story, when the states-system was evolving into an imperial world-state. If Alexander was in one aspect the successor of the Great King, he was other things as well, and possibly aimed at some even more transcendent role. ' It became clear to all men that there was present!y to be neither King of Macedon nor Captain­ General of Hellas, nor Great King of Persia, but an Emperor of Europe and Asia ' .n It is possible that the dramatic burning of the great palace of Persepolis, which announced that the Hellenic crusade against Persia was accomplished and that Xerxes' burning of the temples at Athens was avenged, symbolically marked the ending of the Persian basileia.116 After this Alexander assumed the new style of Kyrios tes Asies, Lord of Asia, and the word basileus in its original form, with the definite article, came in informal! y to describe him and his successors.u Thus Menander refers to them in language different from that which Aeschylus used of Xerxes. This was the usage that became current, popularly and unofficially, for the Roman Emperors, when the official Greek word to translate Imperator was A utokrator. 11 8

The word barbaros was onomatopoeic in origin, describing the jabber of those who did not speak Greek. (fhus it differs from the Hebrew counterpart goyim, which means 'nations '. What is the

Helias and Persia Qllnese word ? Herodotus, in a curious parenthesis,8' says that the Egyptians call all men barbarians who do not speak the same lan­ guage as themselves.) The Greeks did not develop a terminology to enable them to distinguish between civilized peoples, in the sense in which we would apply that term not only to the Greeks but to Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians as well, and the simpler indi­ genous tribal or nomadic peoples of the Balkans, the Ukraine, Sicily and Italy. Their cultural arrogance was similar to that of nineteenth­ century Europeans, for whom ' European ' was apt to be synonymous with ' civilized '. Plato remarks in the Politicus, 26 2D, on the logical fallacy of giving the countless unrdated non-Greek peoples of the world a single name ' barbarian ', and then thinking of ' barbarians ' as a single species. And though this passage seems to confl.ict with the more famous statement in the Republic, 4 7oC, that Hellenes and barbarians are by nature in a state of war with one another, there is ample evidence in Plato, as in Herodotus and Xenophon, of an awareness of the Greeks' cultural debt to the great civilizations of the Middle East. The linguistic difference carried a sense of cultural difference, and barbarians were prima fade outside the Hellenic states-system . The subjugation of the Ionian Greeks by the Persian Empire made the Persians, in Greek writing, the ' barbarians ' par excellence. The Greeks' astonishing victory in the Persian Wars not only gave them self-confidence ; it made them overweening, and produced attitudes of racial superiority. The word ' barbarian ', from having been neutral, now acquired a derogatory flavour; it became the equivalent of ' Oriental ', or even ' wog'. The view became prevalent which Euripides puts in the mouth of Iphigeneia, that it is proper for Greeks to rule barbarians, but not the other way round, because barbarians are slaves by nature but Greeks free.60 In the fourth century the supposed decadence of the Persians was canvassed, es­ pecially by !socrates, as a compensation for the manifest confusion and decline of Hellenic affairs. Isocrates drew the conclusion that the proper way to solve the problem of international anarchy in the Hellenic states-system was to rediscover the lost unity against the external enemy. ' It is not possible for us to cement an enduring peace unless we join together in a war against the barbarians, nor for the Hellenes to attain to concord until we wrest our material advantages from one and the same source and wage our wars against

86

Systems of States

one and the same enemy '.81 He describes his project by a word for which the appropriate translation would be ' crusade ' . ' For this war is the only war which is better than peace ; it will be more like a sacred mission, theoria, than a military expedition ' •8 2 This line of thought, contrasting Greek valour and freedom with barbarian

degeneracy and servility, culminated in Aristotles advice to Alexan­ der - ' to treat the Greeks as a leader, but the barbarians as a master; to cultivate the former as friends and kindred, but to manage the latter as if they were animals or plants ' .81 But there were at the same time two other strands of thought about the antithesis of Hellene and barbarian. There is evidence that the

sophists in the fifth century were already beginning to deny the

antithesis and to assert, in some sense, the unity of mankind. a. Such a view appears in Euripides and in the early Cynics. More important, the Greeks were coming

to

recognize that the cultural frontier

between Hellene and barbarian was not rigid, that the Greek language and Hellenic culture were inherently expansive, that by force of circumstances or by desire barbarians might be

converted

into Hellenes. The most illustrious proselyte was Macedonia. It seems

that admission to the states-system, or diplomatic recognition, took

the form of admission to the Olympic Games, after scrutiny of the applicant's Hellenic lineage. It was Alexander I (c.

498-54)

who

first brought Macedonia into the Hellenic community. He colla­ borated unwilling! y with the Persians during the Great Invasion, was afterwards an ally of Athens, and pursued a systematic policy of hellenization of his country. He dedicated a golden statue at Delphi. 8� Herodotus says that when Alexander entered the fidd at Olympia, the Greek competitors tried to bar him, saying that the contest should be for Greeks and not barbarians. Alexander there­ upon went before the presiding committee, the Hellenodikai, and proved his descent from the Heraclid dynasty of Argos. They ac­ cording! y judged him to be a Greek ; ' so he contended in the furlong race and ran a dead heat for the first place ' . 68 This genealogy of the royal family thus became an important element in Macedonian nationalism. 87 But it was !socrates who saw the general process at work a century later. Athens, he said, ' has brought it about that the name of Hellene suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, and that the word Hellene is applied rather to those who share our culture than to those who share a common blood '. 88 Again, in his

Hellas and Persia eulogy of Evagoras the despot of Salamis in Cyprus, he says that •citizens of barbarian birth he transformed into Hellenes, cowards

into warriors, and obscure individuals into men of note '. 69 The

Hellenic states-system was the framework of a proselytizing culture. Not less important than the theory of relations between Greek and barbarian states was their actual inextricable involvement in a com­ mon political and economic system. The role of Persia in inter­ national affairs in the fourth century is the great example ; this is described in the next section. But the Second Athenian Confederacy,

whose charter was promulgated in 377, was in theory open to bar­

barian as well as Greek states (provided they did not owe allegiance to

the king), an astonishing contrast with the Delian Confederacy. In

fact the barbarian kingdom of the Molossi, in the highlands of Epirus, under Alketas and his son Neoptolemus, were members and they were not qualified for admission to the Olympic Games. 70 Of these attitudes and beliefs about the relations of Greek and barbarian, Philip and Alexander provided a Marxian synthesis. For reasons about which no evidence survives, Philip adopted the Iso­ cratean policy of uniting Hellas in an anti-Persian crusade : 'for it was coming to be his ambition to be designated generalissimo of Hellas and to wage the war against the Persians'. 1 1 Alexander inherited the policy and transformed it into a campaign of hellenization through­ out Asia. And he rose to a conception of the unity of mankind. Eratosthenes, the third-century scholar, recorded Aristotle's aston­ ishing advice to Alexander quoted above, but added that Alexan­ der disregarded it, thinking it better to distinguish men according to their virtues and vices, ' since among the Greeks there are many worthless characters, and many highly civilized are to be found amongst the barbarians ' . 1 2 ' Since he believed that he had a mission from God to harmonize men generally and to be the reconciler of the world, those whom he could not unite by reason he coerced by force of arms, bringing men from everywhere into a unity and mixing their lives and customs, their marriages and social ways, as in a loving-cup. He enjoined them all to consider the whole inhabited earth as d1eir fatherland, his camp as their citadel and guard-post, good men in general as their kindred, bad men only as aliens. For the distinction between Greek and barbarian should not be a matter of clothes and weapons [ N.B. language has now become an obsolete test] , but the mark of the Greek should be seen in virtue, and the

88

Systems of States

mark of the barbarian in an evil character '. 71 This lofty conception temporarily dissolved the Hellenic states-system in a wider unity, and illustrated, perhaps for the first time in history, the incompatibility of the cosmopolitan ideal with the existence of any states-system.

4. PERSIA AS PRIMUS INTER PARES One of the most striking events in Greek history is the Persian come­ back. Beween 480 and 4 7 5 Persia is defeated on land and sea and driven out of Europe. Within a century, the Great King ' sends down peace ' to the warring Greek powers and is recognized as arbiter of the Hellenic states-system. The crowning mercies of Salamis and Plataea, like the defeat of the Spanish Annada, came at the beginning, not as the conclusion, of a long-drawn-out war. The war went on until the generation · of Xerxes and Themistodes and Aristides was dead and the new generation of Pericles was already in middle age. Athens organized her allies, liberated even more Greek states and added them to her Confederacy, pushed Persian power back and back, beyond the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, lost an expeditionary force in supporting an Egyptian revolt against the king, and at last made peace in 449, the peace known from the Athenian diplomatist who negotiated it as the Peace of Kallias. 74 At this point, if at all, Persia was decisively thrust out of the Hellenic states-system, and the new configuration of that system as an Atheno-Spartan diarchy was confirmed. The Peace of Kallias was an incident in the First Peloponnesian War (4 5 9-44 5) Pericles ended the war with Persia because he had learned that Athens was not strong enough to fight Persia and Sparta simultaneously. Thucy­ dides, concentrating on the breakdown of the diarchy, does not mention the Peace of Kallias at all. In his account of the First Pelo­ ponnesian War his only mention of Persia is of her failure to secure Spartan intervention against Athens when the Athenian expedition­ ary force was in Egypt (i. 1 09). It might be made a criticism of his whole History that he virtually ignores the strength of Persia, waiting in the wings. Wade-Gery has elucidated the Peace of Kallias and its conse­ quences in a classic essay, which will be followed here . 73 The Peace .

Hellas and Persia of Kallias was a negotiated, not a dictated, peace. Athens after her

Egyptian disaster could not impose terms ; each side made conces­ sions ; hence a stable and lasting settlement. 7 8 Athens recognized Per­ sian sovereignty over Cyprus, Egypt and Libya. Persia recognized the Ionian Greek states as autonomous, but they continued to pay a modest tribute to the king. 77 To the east of them, a demilitarized zone was established, both on land and at sea off the southern coast

of Asia Minor. ' By covenanting this, the Persian Empire was con­ verted from an offensive power, treating the world as its prey, into a defensive power, living on terms with its neighbours '. 78 A compari­

son might be drawn with the Peace of Zsitva-Torok of I 6o6, the first in which the Ottomon Sultan recognized the Habsburg Emperor as a political and diplomatic equal. The settlement lasted for a generation. Even when the great war

between Athens and Sparta broke out, Persia prudent! y refrained from taking part, despite attempts by Sparta to involve her. She accepted an Athenian initiative and renewed the Treaty of Kallias in

424. No doubt the ministers of Artaxerxes I and Darius II were able

to formulate for themselves the advice that was later given them by Alcibiades, that it was in Persia's interest to see the two Hellenic great powers grind down each other's strength . It was not until the Athenian disaster in Sicily had shifted the balance of power through­ out the Hellenic world that Persia intervened. Even then she only did so under Athenian provocation. By an act of folly eclipsing the decision to send the Syracusan expedition, Athens herself repudiated the renewed Treaty of Kallias, by officially supporting the revolt of the satrap of Lydia. ' We threw away the king's power, as if it were no use to us, and chose instead Amorges's friendship, thinking it more in our interest. Whereupon the king, in his resentment against us, allied with the Spartans, and subsidized them with s,ooo talents for the war, until he had overthrown our empire '. 79 It was the combination of Persia and Sparta that defeated Athens

in the Peloponnesian War. Sparta could not defeat Athens without a navy ; Persia supplied her with the means to build one, and even subsidized the naval pay . But Persia had her own interests to secure. The Treaty of Kallias was now dead, and she reoccupied the de­ militarized zones. Moreover, in the first treaty of alliance between Persia and Sparta in 4 1 2 (Thucydides gives its text, viii. 1 8) the first clause was ' Whatsoever territory and cities the king holds or the

go forefathers of the king held, shall belong to the king '. A Spartan diplomatist, Lichas, pointed out that this was a monstrous claim : its effect would be to restore Persian sovereignty over the island states and central Greece as far as Boeotia, and instead of liberating Hellas, Sparta would be reimposing the Persian yoke.8 0 Accordingly the third Persian-Spartan treaty, in 4 1 1, contained a vaguer formula, which dominated the diplomacy of the next s o years : ' The king's country, as much of it as is in Asia, shall be the king's ; and con­ cerning his own country the king shall determine as he pleases '. 8 1 But when the Spartans were at last triumphant, and with great enthusiasm began to tear down the walls of Athens to the music of flute-girls, thinking that this day was the beginning of freedom for Hdlas,8 2 it was at the price of revising the settlement of the Persian Wars. But there was now a balance of power as different from the Persian ascendancy of the end of the sixth century as it was from the Atheno­ Spartan diarchy that had followed. The Great King no longer ex­ tended his suzerain claims diplomatic intercourse ; the heard again, even in Asia, Wars had reduced Persian

to Europe. He accepted the forms of

old demand for earth and water is not after the Peace of Kallias. The Persian pretensions, as the Peloponnesian War

had reduced Athenian pretensions, and there was now a system of great powers of comparable strength : Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Corinth, Syracuse - and Persia. Persia was both within the Hellenic states-system and outside it. The greater part of the Empire Iay beyond the system, but the only deadly external threat to the Empire came from the Greek powers. The Empire had internal weaknesses : the irremediable disaffection of Egypt and Babylon, the two more ancient cultures reluctantly incapsulated within the Persian structure, and the tendency of so vast and complex a commonwealth to split up

through the independence or disloyalty of the satraps and vassal rulers. Moreover, the hellenization of the Empire was proceeding steadily, and itself had a disintegrating effect, above all in the mili­ tary field : the Persian authorities, both central and local, increasingly

liked to recruit Greek mercenaries. But against the Greek powers, Persia had great sources of strength . She had enormous man-power ; . and though no Persian infantry was a match for Greek hoplites, Persian cavalry remained superior to anything the Greeks possessed. She had inexhaustible finances, and became the paymaster of the

Helias and Persia Hdlenic states-system. ' I t was the belief of the Persian King that by

possessing himself of colossal wealth, he would put all things in subjection to himself. In this belief he tried to engross all the gold,

all the silver and all the most costly things in the world '. 88 Above all,

Persia had superior diplomatic skill, and taking every advantage of

the incurable dissensions of the Greek powers she learned how to divide and rule.u But her application of the maxim was now defen­ sive; ' rule ' did not mean ' conquer ' ; her vital interest was to prevent any single Greek power from dominating the Aegean. Historians usually describe the

30

years following the Peloponnes­

ian War as a Spartan hegemony. So it was, if Sparta's dependence on

Persia be remembered. 811 Of course the two powers quarrelled, as soon as their common enemy had been crushed. Sparta was embar­

rassed by the Persian alliance, which spoiled her claim to be liberator of Hdlas. She gave unofficial assistance to the putsch against the Great King by the younger Cyrus, which is the subj ect of Xenophon's most famous work. Then the Asiatic Greeks appealed to Sparta,

although she had acknowledged Persian suzerainty over them. Ac­ cordingly Agesilaus, the lame king of Sparta

(3 99-60),

Xenophon's

friend and hero, who dominates the international politics of the time,

invaded Asia Minor with a romantic aim of ' paying back the Persian in his own coin for the former invasion of Greece ' . 8 8 This was the

first post-Athenian attempt at the anti-Persian crusade, which !so­

crates tireless! y preached and Alexander afterwards carried to success.

Agesilaus's expedition quickly ended. Sparta's continental ex-al lies, Thebes, Corinth and Argos, formed with Athens a coalition against Sparta behind her back, which was financed by Persia, 87 and the

Spartan government recalled Agesilaus to Europe. Plutarch records

several examples of Agesilaus' s political wit. ' It was at this time, as we are told, and as he was evacuating, that Agesilaus said to his

friends, " The King has driven me out of Asia with

3o,ooo archers " ;

for the Persian coin has the figure of an archer stamped upon it '. 88

The war, which goes by the name of the Corinthian War, lasted another six or seven years, and came to an end when Persia switched sides from Athens back to Sparta. Athens had recovered her strength, begun to re-establish her empire, and supported Evagoras of Cyprus,

a rebellious vassal, against the king.89 Modern historians differ in

assigning the diplomatic credit for negotiating the peace to Sparta or Persia. Olmstead, the Chicago historian, who retold the whole story

Systems of States as

champion of the undervalued Persians, and T. T. B. Ryder, in his recent study Koine Eirme, might be taken as contrasted representa­ tives. But the ancient authorities agree in regarding the peace as a Persian triumph, and therefore as a Greek disgrace. Sometimes the Greeks refer to it as the Peace of Antalkidas, after the chief Spartan plenipotentiary ; more commonly they call it simply the King's Peace. Our surviving accounts of it show the king being accepted as the president or arbiter of the Hellenic states-system. As early as 393 Sparta had sent Antalkidas to Sardis to discuss terms with the satrap Tiribazus. These bilateral negotiations had been enlarged, against Sparta's will, into an abortive conference of all the belligerents, over which Tiribazus presided.90 In 388 Antalkidas was sent up to Susa for a second try. The following year, therefore, Tiribazus presided again over a conference of ambassadors from the belligerent states. He 'summoned those to he present who wanted to listen to the terms of peace that the king had sent down. And when they had assembled, Tiribazus showed them the king's seal and read the document. It ran as follows : " Artaxerxes the king thinks it just that [specific terms follow] . And whichever of the two sides refuses to accept this peace, upon them will I impose military sanctions (in concert with those who approve the peace), by land and by sea, both naval and financial ''. '91 The terms which the king thus guaranteed were simple and funda­ mental. First, the Greek states in Asia, including Cyprus, were recognized as his possessions. SecondIy, all other Greek states, small and great, were assured their independence. An exception was made of Lemnos, Imbros and Scyros, which were to belong to Athens as of old (they had anyway been inhabited by Athenians for generations). The sacrifice of Asia to the king was the point most attacked after­ wards by philhellenes, as a betrayal of the cause of Hellas and an abandonment of all that had been won since the Ionian Revolt in 499· It was, however, for diplomatists an acceptance of the existing facts of power, like the recognition of Soviet ascendancy in Eastern Europe in 1 945. And in the view of philhellene enthusiasts, this disgrace was almost offset and compensated for by the principle of the autonomy of other Greek states. This principle was skilfully designed to appeal to the inextinguishable passion of the polis for parochial sovereignty, and to keep the states-system atomized and incapable of common action. ' Autonomy ' was left conveniently un­ defined. It was generally understood to mean at least freedom from

H�llas and Pn-sia

93

foreign garrisons and from payment of tribute to another power; also that a state ' should possess its-own territory ', however this might be understood . 92 And it was bound up with two unprecedented features. The King's Peace was a common or general peace, k.oin� eirme, applicable to all states whether or not they had fought in the Corinthian War ; and it was cond uded without a time-limit, and so marked a growing belie£ that war should be the exception, peace the

rule, and that peace·treaties should therefore aim at a permanent settlement.98 This doctrine was given expression by Xenophon in a

pamphlet he published in his old age. 96

The King's Peace reflected the interests of Sparta as much as of

Persia. The principle of autonomy weakened Sparta's potential

rivals. It dismanded the reviving Athenian confederacy ; it deprived

Thebes of her hegemony over the other states of Boeotia ; it compelled Argos to renounce her recent

Anschluss

with Corinth. With regard

.to lesser states, Sparta interpreted the principle to suit herself. She

was the executor and policeman of the peace; Persia did not inter­ vene in Hellenic politics, did not need to, for a good many years

afterwards. 98 When someone deplored the King's Peace to Agesilaus, saying ' Alas for Hdlas, now that the Spartans are medizing ', he replied, ' Isn't it rather the case that the Medes are laconizing r s e The King's Peace of 38 7 was the fundamental Hellenic peace

settlement of the fourth century. It recorded the lasting dements of the balance of power more accurately than the peace which Sparta

and her allies had imposed on Athens at the end of the great war in 404 . In the next 30 years there were several more pacifications

which were popularly called ' the King's Peace ', and which in the surviving literary sources, tend to be confused one with another. They reaffirmed or modified the original peace, but all had the characteristics of accepting the Icing's sovereignty over the Asiatic

Greeks, and of being common to all the other Greek states of the mainland (the Western Greeks were never included, as the states of the American continent were never included in the affairs of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century). In most of them the king seeins to have taken the initiative, and to have been accorded

the presidential role. 9 7 When one surveys the whole history of Persia's role in the Hel­ lenic states-system after the failure of her attempt to incorporate the system within her Empire, it seems that Persia developed a policy of

94

Systems of States

collaborating with each successive power that exercised a hegemony. Her motive was now defensive, and it was through the dominant power that she found �erself able to divide and rule - or divide and deter. The policy was worked out in the time of Athenian hegemony. Because the Peace of Kallias of 449 was a negotiated settlement arrived at by compromise, Persia was able to accept it, and loyally observed it until Athens herself tore it up. Persia then transferred her support to Sparta, and backed Sparta (so long as Sparta was coopera­ tive) down to Sparta's catastrophic defeat by Thebes at the battle of Leuctra in 3 7 1 . Leuctra destroyed Spartan prestige

in

Asia, and

when the Theban statesman Pelopidas went up to Susa in 3 6 7 on a diplomatic mission, Artaxerxes readily transferred to him the con­ fidence he had hitherto reposed in Antalkidas. 98 Thebes could now cash in on her long tradition of medism. Pelopidas was able to remind Artaxerxes ' that his people were the only ones among the Greeks who had fought on the side of the king at Plataea [in 4 79 ] , that they had never afterwards undertaken a campaign against the king and that Sparta had gone to war with them for the very reason that they had refused to take part in Agesilaus's expedition '. The Persian-Theban alliance remained fairly stable. Artaxerxes III readily gave Thebes financial assistance during the Third Sacred War, in

3 50, and Thebes responded by sending him a force of x ,ooo hoplites to help reconquer Egypt in 343.99 Of all the successive dominant powers in Greece, Thebes offered least potential danger to Persia. By contrast the growth of Macedonian power, in Thrace and

in the

Hellespont, alarmed the king, and he intervened against Philip even before Philip had conquered Central Greece.1 00 Thebes' medizing policy gave Philip's relations with her a tinge of suspicion . and hostility lacking in his relations with Athens or Sparta ; and a dread­ ful logic of power brought it about that the crowning act of violence by which Macedon consolidated her hegemony of the Hellenic states­ system in preparation for the crusade against Persia, was Alexander's destruction of Thebes.

5. CARTHAGE Was Carthage a member of the Hellenic states-system ? Her position had resemblances to Persia's. They were kindred powers. Carthage

Hellas and Persia

95

lay on the flank of the Western Greeks as Persia lay on the flank of

the Asiatic Greeks. They were to the Greeks the two principal bar­ barian powers, and at times they cooperated. Carthage was a colony of Tyre. It was founded, with the name of

' the New Town ', at the end of the ninth century. There were other Phoenician trading settlements as well in the western Mediterra­

but Carthage became the most prosperous. Though indepen­ dent, she remained united with Tyre by the ties of filial friendship

nean,

seen also in the relations of Greek colonies with their mother-cities. Tyre herself, which half a century earlier had resisted conquest by Nebuchadnezzar through a 1 3 years' siege, and her fellow Phoeni­ cian city-states, submitted to the beneficent imperialism of Cyrus the Great with such prudent conunercial promptitude that it is virtually unrecorded.1 0 1 Thenceforward these Phoenician states provided the backbone of the Persian navy. But when the son of Cyrus, Cambyses, who conquered Egypt, planned also to extend Persian rule along the North African coast to include Carthage, ' the Phoenicians would not consent. For they said they were bound by a strict treaty, and could not justly attack their own sons. And the Phoenicians being un­ willing, the rest were of no account as fighters . Thus Carthage

escaped being subjugated by Persia. For Cambyses would not coerce the Phoenicians, seeing that they had willingly accepted Persian suzerainty and that the whole fleet depended upon them ' . 1 0 2 Phoenician colonization almost certainly antedated Greek in the western Mediterranean. For several centuries the expansion of Carthaginian interests was commercial, confined to establishing trading-posts or factories along the coasts, without any aim of territorial dominion.1 0 8 The first armed clash with the Greeks was in the year 6oo, when the Phokaians in order to found their colony of Marseilles had first to beat the Carthaginians at sea.1 04 Carthage ' knew the intruders on her ancient home, the young light-hearted masters of the waves ' - of whom historians are far more ready to use such words as ' aggressors ' and ' pirates ' than they were a genera­ tion or two ago. In the next century the Greeks were challenging the Western Phoenicians along the coasts of North Africa and Spain, in Sardinia and Corsica, and above all in Sicily. In the eastern Mediter­ ranean the greatest of barbarian powers was pressing upon the Greeks ; in the western Mediterranean it was the Greeks who were pressing upon the barbarian powers. The Persian conquest of Ionia

Systems of States seems to have had its repercussions in the west, by sending across a wave of displaced Greeks, which in n�rn provoked Carthage into

defensive alliances and counter-attack. There is evidence also of

concerted policy between Carthage and Persia. The whole Mediter­ ranean for the first time fell into a single pattern of organized power, and danced to a common measure. Carthage entered upon a policy of territorial expansion in Sicily ' in the time of Cyrus ', according to a late and bad authority ;10 5

modern historians date it between 5 5 0 and 540. She then apparently

first developed a large army, assumed the hegemony of the other

Phoenician cities in Sicily, and gained control of the western corner

of the island. There is no evidence as to whether her aims were

aggressive or preventive. But her army was transferred from Sicily to Sardinia at about the time that Bias proposed that the inhabitants of

the Ionian Greek states should migrate collectively to Sardinia to escape the Persians. 1 00 Bias's advice was not taken ; but in the same crisis half the population of Phokaia (the mother-city of Marseilles)

migrated to Corsica. There they harried and plundered their neigh­

bours. The consequence was an alliance against them between Car­

thage and the Etruscans, who drove them out of Corsica at the battle of Alalia in 5 3 5 . 1 0 1 The alliance between Carthaginians and Etrus­ cans became so constant a feature of the international scene that

Aristotle, more than a century later, could take it as an example of a union for mutual defence or economic intercourse that just fell short of fonning a single state. 108 A little later we have our earliest diplo­ matic document in the western Mediterranean, the first treaty be­

tween Carthage and Rome, which Pol ybius had difficulty in transcribing out of the archaic Latin. Its date is 5 09, ' 28 years before

the crossing of Xerxes into Greece ', the first year after Rome threw off the Etruscan yoke and expelled her kings. It is an agreement

to

delimit spheres of influence. It does not mention the Greeks, but

perhaps it shows that Carthage was intent on mending her political

and strategical fences and thought it valuable to come to terms with the new republic.1 09 Meanwhile a regular balance of power had developed in Sicily,

cutting across the distinction between Greek and barbarian, and

producing the phenomenon of Greeks who ' phoenicized ' (a word that does not seem to have been used in the political sense). Syracuse,

under its able despot Gelon, had rapidly become predominant, and

Hellas and Persia

97

by far the largest state in Sicily.1 10 Syracuse allied with Akragas,

and

counter-alliance was made by Selinus, and the tyrants of Rhegium and Himera, with Carthage. Akragas retaliated by intervening in a

Himera and expelling its tyrant, who then appealed for Carthaginian aid . 111 This was the local situation when Syracuse was invited by the Hellenic congress to send help against Xerxes' invasion of Greece,112 and helped to explain her temporizing response. It adds to the picture

of Helleno-Carthaginian involvement that Hamilcar, the suffete of

Carthage at this juncture, was the son of a Carthaginian father and a Syracusan mother. 11 3

The relations between Carthage and Persia when Xerxes was

preparing to invade Greece, and Carthage to invade Sicily, provide

the most important unsolved problem in the history of the Hellenic states-system . In the

5 20s

Cambyses had entertained his project for annexing Carthage to the Persian Empire . In about 5 1 8 Darius at the begin­

ning of his reign had sent his naval expedition to reconnoitre the Mediterranean. 1 u In the 4 9 0s he had accepted a proposal for making Sardinia tributary to Persia ; 11 1S not only was it ' the greatest of is­

lands ,, it was the only island in the western Mediterranean that had not been occupied by either Carthage, the Etruscans or the Greeks.

But it was Xerxes, according to one account, who replaced plans for

direct Persian intervention in the west by establishing what might be called a Persia-Carthage Axis. When he had resolved upon his in­

vasion of Hellas, he ' sent an embassy to Carthage to urge her to join

him in the undertaking, and made an agreement with them, that he

would wage war upon the Greeks who lived in Greece, while Car­ thage should at the same time gather great armaments and subdue

the Greeks living in Sicily and Italy. In fulfilment of the agreement,

therefore, the Carthaginians accumulated a large war-chest, and

enlisted mercenaries from Italy and Liguria, and from Gaul and Spain as well. In addition to these, they mobilized the citizen forces

of the whole of Libya and Carthage. At last, after three years of

assiduous preparation, they collected more than and 200 warships , . 11 8

3oo,ooo

infantry,

The joint Persian-Carthaginian plan has been doubted because Herodotus, writing a century earlier than Ephorus, does not mention it. 11 7 Herodotus suggests that Syracuse was concerned like the rest of the Greek world with the threat from the east, and was taken by

Systems of States surprise when the deposed tyrant of Himera called in the Carthagin­ ians.118 Whether or not the two invasions were concerted, they were simultaneous, and were defeated at about the same time. The Car­ thaginian expedition was totally destroyed by Gelon of Syracuse at the battle of Himera. Selinus was on the Carthaginian side.119 Hero­ dotus records the tradition that the victory of Himera fell on the very same day as the victory of Salamis ;12 0 Diodorus makes it the same day as Thermopylae. 1 2 1 Pindar, writing his first Pythian Ode to celebrate the winning of the chariot-race of 4 7 0 by Gelon's brother and successor, commemorates the triple victory against the barbarians of Salamis, Plataea and Himera. Carthage immediately sued for peace, fearing that Gelon might invade Africa, and Gelon granted

generous terms, not only to Carthage but also to the Sicilian Greek

states and rulers who had been on the wrong side.122 His moderation ensured for more than two generations Syracusan predominance in Sicily, with Carthage still entrenched in the western end of the

island.

The affairs of the western and eastern halves of the Hellenic states­

system continued to show parallels after the great crisis of 4 8 o. The barbarian power having been pushed back and successfully con­ tained, there was a long period of peaceful coexistence, which

enabled the victorious Hellenic great power, Athens in the one case

and Syracuse in the other, to develop its empire. In 445 a general pacification of the world was achieved : Athens had made the Thirty

Years' Truce with Sparta to conclude the First Peloponnesian War,

and Syracuse had defeated Akragas and definitely established her

hegemony in Sicily.128 From this date there is increasing evidence of Athens' strengthening her diplomatic connections with the Sicilian

states opposed to Syracuse ; Syracuse herself traditionally leaned

towards her mother-city Corinth, which was Athens's chief commer­ cial rival, and towards Corinth's ally Sparta. When the clash of

interests between the Greek powers led to the Peloponnesian War,

and its subsidiary international conflicts in Sicily, Carth age like Persia refrained from intervening. Thus she refused an appeal from Segesta for help against Selinus in 4 1 6 .124 But Athens, having already

sent an inconclusive expedition to Sicily to support her anti-Syracusan allies in 42 7-5, answered a similar appeal from Segesta, and launched her great expedition in 4 1 5. In 4 8 o the two halves of the Hellenic

states-system had been brought close together by external violence, a

Hdlas and Persia

99

conj oint barbarian attack from the east and the west. Now the two halves momentarily coalesced through internal violence, a wanton

aggression by Athens, the dominant power in the one, against

Syracuse, the dominant power in the other. Athens was responding to a request for help from an ally, as an

excuse for embarking upon a plan of conquest that would establish

her supremacy throughout the western Mediterranean. A hostile · critic might have said that she was uniting the ambitions of Hamilcar

against Sicily and of Cambyses against Carthage herself, in order to fulfil the ambitions of Darius and Xerxes against the whole Hellenic

states-system. Alcibiades, who led the expansionist party, aimed to conquer Carthage as well as Sicily.12 5 In public he spoke of acquiring ' empire over all Hellas ' .12 8 Popular enthusiasm supported him. The young men in their sports-grounds and the old men in their

workshops and places of entertainment would sit in clusters draw­ ing maps of Sicily [in the sand] , and charts of the surrounding

seas

and of the harbours and coastal districts opposite Africa. For

they did not regard Sicily itself as the object of the war, but rather as a mere base of operations, from which they would extend the conflict to Carthage and conquer both North Africa and the seas as

far as the Pillars of Hercules.127

When Alcibiades had defected to Sparta he described his strategic plans freely :

we .sailed to Sicily to conquer first, if we could, the Sicilian

Hellenes, and after them the Hellenes of Italy as well, and then to

attack the Carthaginian empire and Carthage herself. If these

objectives were gained, or the greater part of them, we intended to make our assault on the Peloponnese, bringing with us all the

additional Hellenic forces which we should have acquired in the

west, and engaging large numbers of barbarian troops, Spaniards

and others who are now recognized as the best barbarian fighting

material. We should have constructed many more triremes in addition to our existing Reet, as Italy has timber in abundance.

Thus we should have established a total maritime blockade of the

Peloponnese. At the same time we should have mounted an in­

vasion by land, and taken some cities by storm and the rest by siege. We hoped in this way to bring the war to a successful con­ clusion and after that to be masters of the whole Hellenic world

I OO

Systems of States

[ of the whole Hellenic states·system, arxein ] .1 28

tou xympantos Hellenikou

When the Syracusan assembly debated defence measures against the impending invasion, Hennocrates surveyed the possible allies. It seems to me that we ought to make a diplomatic approach to Carthage too [ he said] . They would not be unprepared for it; indeed they live in a perpetual apprehension of Athenian attack.

They will very likely think that if they pursue a policy of non­ intervention now, they will soon find themselves in danger, and

so they may be inclined to help us in one way or another, secredy

if not openly. They could give us more assistance than any other existing power, if they chose. They have the greatest reserves of gold and silver, which are the sinews of war and of everything else.1 2 9 This is the only surviving piece of evidence, indirect and biased, of what Carthaginian attitudes may have been in this crisis. So far as we know she sent no aid to Syracuse. Some months later, when the Athenian expeditionary force was passing its first winter in Sicily without having achieved any military successes, the Athenians them­ selves cast about for allies. They it was (the leaders of the expedition, not the people at home) who now ' sent a trireme to Carthage on a goodwill mission, to see if any help might be got from there ; and they also sent one to Etruria, where some of the cities had offered of their own accord to join them in the war'. The Etruscans sent three pentekonters with some troops who did stout service in the final struggle. 1 8° Carthage preserved her neutrality. (Thucydides' careful enumeration of the belligerents on either side191 is decisive.) Carthage was probably content to see Syracuse and Athens fight it out. Like Persia, she entered the general struggle after the Athenian disaster in Sicily, though her occasions and motives were different. In

4 t o the frontier dispute between Segesta and Selinus flared up again, and Segesta, whose appeal for help to Athens had been the occasion of the Athenian expedition to Sicily, and whom the defeat of Athens had left in a state of great anxiety, now appealed for help to Carthage and offered themselves to Carthage as a protectorate. ' When the envoys arrived and laid their instructions before the Senate, the Carthaginians were presented with no small problem. On the one hand they were eager to acquire such a strategically attractive city ; on

Hellas and Persia

IOI

the other, they had considerable fear of Syracuse, having only re

..

cendy witnessed her defeat of the Athenian annada ' . On the advice of Hannibal, suffete for that year and grandson of the Hamilcar defeated and killed at Himera in 480, they decided to intervene. First they artfully invited Syracuse to arbitrate the Segestan-Selinun­

tian dispute, being confident that Selinus would reject arbitration

and

so

lose the moral support of Syracuse. The negotiations took the

expected course, and at the end Syracuse decided to sit on the fence, ' maintaining her alliance with Selinus, and her good relations with Carthage '. The dispute between Segesta and Selinus now had to be fought out, and Carthage supplied troops to Segesta, including 8oo Italian native mercenaries who had been hired for the Athenians in the war against Syracuse, and had since been without an empl oyer.112 These antecedents of the second Carthaginian invasion of Sicily fonn the most elaborate passage of diplomacy between Carthage and the Sicilian states that Diodorus records. The attempt to neutralize Syracuse was a failure ; within a year the two great powers were openly involved on opposite sides of the conflict between Segesta and Selinus. Carthage invaded Sicily in 409 with a great force, and

conquered and sacked first Selinus, and then Himera, in revenge for the defeat of 480.19 8 Three years later she resumed her offensive with a still greater armament, aiming now at the subjugation of the whole island, and having sought diplomatic support as far afield as Athens.18t The main result of the ensuing war, in which Carthage increased her conquests, was the seizure of power in Syracuse by Dionysius the Great, who dominates the politics of the Western world for the next 40 years. He came to terms with Carthage, recog­ nizing her conquests and virtually partitioning Sicily with her, on the tacit understanding that she supported his despotism. This was in 405, a year before the end of the Peloponnesian War: Diodorus takes the double pacification as marking an era.185 Dionysius was, in one aspect, the greatest of phoenicizers. Men attributed to him the policy of ' exploiting the fear of Carthage in order to dominate securely the remaining Sicilian states ' .1 8 8 His opponents said that to be tributary to Carthage was preferable to submitting to Dionysius ' lawless tyranny .157 He later waged three wars against Carthage, and reduced the extent of her dominion. But ' we must recognize that it was a fixed principle in the policy of Dionysius not to press the Carthaginians too hard and that he never

1 02

Systems of States

aimed at making Sicily a Greek island. He seemed to have considered

it more expedient for Syracuse and himself to suffer the Phoenicians as neighbours, hoping by their menace to protect his own despotic rule , .1 8 8 His detached realism and freedom from Hellenic sentiment illustrates the transformation of Greek international ideas in the

fourth century no less than the incipient cosmopolitanism of the sophists. When Alexander was conquering the Persian Empire he met desperate resistance from Tyre, which had been the most loyal and contented member of the Persian commonwealth. There were reli­ gious envoys from Carthage in Tyre at the time, and the Tyrians hoped for help from Carthage ; but there is no evidence that they had grounds for expecting an intervention which would have been far

beyond Carthage's sphere of interest. All she did was to give asylum to non-combatants from the doomed city .139 But the design was attributed to Alexander, after his return from India, of a 'campaign against the Carthaginians, and the others who live along the coast of North Africa and Spain and the adj oining coastal region as far as Sicil y ' .140 It was also said that embassies came to him in Babylon, to congratulate him and solicit his favour, from all the nations of the known world, including Carthage and the Etruscans, and even

Rome.141 Both these stories - of the embassies to Babylon and the plan of conquering the western Mediteranean - are subjected to destructive criticism by Tam and reduced for the most part to later fabrications. u2 Whatever the decision on this, it is manifest that the

career and conquests of Alexander did not draw Carthage into the general movement of the H ellenic states�system as did the great crises of 48o and 4 1 5-13. Nevertheless, the survey we have made shows that Carthage was a constant factor in the western Mediterranean balance of power. She was in regular diplomatic contact with Syracuse, intermittent contact with Athens. She had allies among the Greek states of Sicily, as well as individual supporters (Empedion of Selinus, for example). us Was she, then, a member of the Hellenic states-system ? Was she ' ac­ cepted ' ? There are two oddly concurrent scraps of evidence about early Greek attitudes to Carthage and the Etruscans. Herodotus has a famous description of Carthaginian methods of silent barter with the natives on the coast of West Africa.1u What he emphasizes is that

Hellas and Persia

1 03

neither party defrauds the other,. The Carthaginians were trust­ worthy; one might almost say, the Carthaginian's word was his bond. The hostile Roman tradition of ' Punic faith ' is not found until the second century .1 411 And the geographer Strabo, writing at the time of Augustus, says of the Etruscan city-state Caere that it ' enjoyed a high reputation with the Greeks for bravery and justice; for it abstained &om piracy, despite being very powerful, and set up at Delphi the building called the Treasury of the Agyllaians - for the state was formerly called Agylla, though now it is Caere '.148 In the age of colonial expansion some Greeks, it may seem, could recognize some barbarians as having political and commercial standards higher than their own. The passage from Strabo shows a connection between the Etrus­ cans and Delphi. Carthage had no connection with Delphi ; like the Jews, the Carthaginians were cut off from the Hellenic world by their religion. Pausanias the traveller, writing 1 5 0 years later than Strabo, describes a Treasury of the Carthaginians at Olympia which contained spoils won from them in battle.147 It is possible that the Treasury of the Agyllaians at Delphi was likewise not the offerings of barbarian piety but war-booty won at their expense.us But Hero­ dotus too describes a mission from Agylla to Delphi.149 The helleni­ zation of the Etruscans was deeper and more pervasive than that of Carthage. Agylla had sent to Delphi for advice about lifting a curse occa­ sioned by an act of sacrilege. After the battle of Alalia the Carthagin­ ians and Etruscans had drawn lots for their Greek prisoners; the Etruscans had got the bigger share, and massacred them; a blight then fell upon them and attested their bloodguiltiness. This has more resemblance to the character that Carthage had among the Greeks. It was a reputation for savagery and cruelty, unmitigated by any recourse to Del phi in atonement. Eratosthenes describes ' repelling strangers ' as ' a practice common to all barbarians', and illustrates it by the Carthaginians' habit of drowning strangers who sailed past on their voyage to Sardinia off the Pillars of Hercules. 'This is the reason ' he adds, ' why geogr�phical information about the west is unreliable' .1"0 The implication seems to be that the Greeks asserted not so much the freedom of the seas, as respect for human life except in time of war, and Carthage regarded herself as in a state of per­ petual war. Diodorus's account of the Carthaginian sack of Selinus •

Systems of States

in 409 rises into unaccustomed eloquence when he describes the Greeks' horror at barbarian practices in war. 'They mutilated even the dead, according to their national custom, some carrying dis­ membered hands in bunches about their bodies, and others heads which they had spitted on their javelins and spears , .11J1 The Greeks could be as indignant about the continued practice of human sacri­ fice, which with them had become obsolete, as twentieth-century Englishmen about the survival of slave-trading. Plutarch has a story that in the peace-terms imposed on Carthage after the defeat of Himera in 480, Gelon included a prohibition of the practice of sacrificing children to Moloch.u2 If this is true, it is an interesting case of an ' unequal treaty ,, intervening in the domestic affairs of a defeated state to suppress practices that offend the civilized standards of the victor Whether true or a later edifying invention, it suggests that Greeks would have regarded Carthage as belonging to their states-system, if at all, only in the dubious and marginal way in which Europeans regarded China in the nineteenth century as be­ longing to the family of nations. And the Greeks did not fail to note occasions when Carthage reverted to human sacrifice, such as Hamil­ car,s propitiation of his dead grandfather, the sacrifice of a boy at the siege of Akragas, and of 200 children at Carthage.1 u For the Greeks, there were three contrasts between Carthage and Persia. First, Carthage did not have ecumenical claims and imperial status. Or to put it in terms of power and not of authority, Carthage was never in a position of threatening to subjugate the entire Hel­ lenic states-system, as Persia was. Second, Carthage was a city-state, not a despotic empire. This was the single point of affinity between Carthage and the Greeks. She was a power of a kind they could appreciate from their own political experience, and admire as a particularly stable and effective specimen of the polis. It is remarkable that the three constitutions which Aristotle examines as approximat­ ing to the ideal are those of Sparta, Crete, and Carthage. Carthage had a mixed constitution, blending the advantages of aristocracy (merit), oligarchy (wealth) and democracy (numbers); it was un­ usually free from civil dissensions and from attempts at tyranny.155 Plato, with a similar admiration for political effectiveness, commends the Carthaginian law that forbade soldiers on active service from drinking liquor.158 Third, however, Carthage did not represent, as Persia did, a high .us

Hellas and Persia

1 05

culture. The political sphere apart, no Greek could write about Car­ thage as Herodotus or Xenophon wrote about Persia. Persia herself, her chivalry, her system of training the young, her imperial genius, claimed the admiration of philosophical Greeks ; and she had united in her commonwealth more ancient cultures from which the Greeks knew their own civilization was largely derived. This perhaps was the deepest reason why the Greeks felt themselves bound up with Persia in a way they were not with the barbarian great power of the West. In due course they transformed their states-system by the incorporation and hellenization of the Persian Empire. But perhaps it was not only due to the logic of power that in the second part of the story Rome, the successor of Alexander, completed his work by the destruction of Carthage as something utterly alien. 6. CONCLUSION

historic states-system may seem a tolerably clear and distinct kind of community, or set of relationships and practices, when we study its internal structure and organic life. But when we examine its penumbra, look at its connections with what lies beyond it, explore the scarcely definable gradations by which it shades into its cultural and diplomatic background, it begins to lose its coherence and iden­ tity, and doubts may arise about the validity of the concept itself of a states-system. This sketch of the relations between Greece and Persia suggests that the conventional picture of a system of Hellenic states, separated from the outer barbarian world by the possession of the Greek language, is in important respects inaccurate. Two reflections may be added about the Hellenic states-system in the wider sense in which it may be said to embrace Persia. The first concerns ideological conflict, and the second imperial authority, within this wider system. When two cultures and systems of power are as closely interdepen­ dent as the Hellenic states-system and the Persian Empire, their relations often appear, not as a conflict of civilized with barbarians, nor as a clash of civilizations, but as an ideological struggle within a single community. Thus the Hellenic states-system knew two kinds of ideological tension and ideological drive. One was that for which Thucydides used the word stasis151 in the sense of class-war, civil

A

1 06

Systems of States

war, revolutionary dissension cutting across the boundaries of states

and dividing the states--system horizontally as international war

divides it vertical}y. Plato proposed a different

use

of the word

stasis

when he said it ought to be employed for conflict within the core of the Hellenic states-system, and the word for war,

polemos,

reserved

for war between Greeks and barbarians ; as if wars between Greek

states would be transformed from the condition of inter-state war into the condition of civil war by exhorting philhellenes to think of

all Hellas as their homeland.us Demosthenes described something similar to Thucydides'

stasis

when ·he said that democracies could

never have lasting good relations with oligarchies, because oligarchies

by their very nature threatened the constitutions and liberties of democracies ; but he described the resulting conflicts by the word

polemos.159

But in addition to the conflict of democracy and oligarchy there was the conflict between hellenism and medism . The acuteness of

this second tension was in direct relation to the political and military pressure of Persia upon the states-system . It was at its greatest during the period of the Persian Wars, when it produced many medizing

individuals as well as states ; then it diminished, and reappeared in a milder form in the age of the King's Peace, with more hellenizing in Persia now than medizing in Greece. And the second conflict,

though distinct in its origin, had an inherent tendency to combine with and reinforce the first. Persia was the natural enemy of demo­ cracy, the natural supporter of tyrants at the end of the sixth century

and of oligarchies in the fourth.

The pressure of a barbarian Greek power upon a states-system will

tend to produce strains resembling ideological conflict, and rein­ forcing existing ideological conflicts . The ambiguities of Persia's

relations with the Hellenic states-system have resemblances to those of the Ottoman and Russian Empires with the Western family of

nations. Darius and Xerxes claimed and exercised more authority in Hellas than the Ottoman Sultan claimed or exerted in sixteenth­ century Europe, when nevertheless there were individuals as well as

provinces who turned Turk. And fourth-century Persia's role in the Hellenic states--system was as important as Russia's in the European system in the time since Catherine the Great, when there has been nevertheless a recurrent assertion of the view that, whether Tsarist or Soviet, she is a despotic barbarian outsider. To illustrate this assimila-

Hellas and Persia

ti.on of cultural to ideological conflict, I append a pleasant recon­ struction of the Persian Invasion of Greece in terms of Soviet radio­ bulletins during the Russo-Finnish War, which appeared in Punch in January 1 940, over initials one guesses to be those of Sir John Squire. The Persian Empire marks a historical watershed, Jaspers' Ach­ senzeit, scarcely less notable in the development of the West than the Roman Empire. When Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, the decisive victory in the founding of the Empire, he ' heaped up the ancient titles ', stretching his hand back to the imperial figures of the past, Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal and Nebuchad­ nezzar : ' I am Cyrus, the King of the universe, the Great King, the King of Babylon, the King of the land of Sumer and Akkad, the King of the four quarters of the world . . . ' (The Cyrus Cylinder in the British Museum). When two centuries later the pupil of Aristotle took over Cyrus's empire, his titles were more complex, varied and restrained. They were essentially three, and he kept them distinct, each requiring its own legal and constitutional procedure. He was hereditary king of Macedon ; he was nominally elected hegemon or generalissimo of the League of Corinth, the organization of the core of the Hellenic states-system ; and he was king of Asia by right of conquest.160 He seems to foreshadow the complexities of the political position of an Augustus, a Charles V, even perhaps a President of the United States in the age of NATO. This was the effect of the fusion of the most politically sophisticated of cultures with the greatest world-empire that had yet arisen. APPENDIX RADIO PERSIA CALLING,

480-479

B.C.

§ Propagandists of the capitalist aggressors of Athens and Sparta are

informing neutrals that we are at war with them. This is one more characteristic and propagandist lie. No war has been declared and the Greek incident is progressing towards a natural solution, namdy, the extermination of the Greek aggressors. § It is announced from the Greek Front that our Hero-Father

Xerxes has dug a canal through the Athos isthmus. This should be a

1 08

Systems of States

strong line of defence against the Greek Imperialists, who hate our Persian freedom and democracy. § Our beloved Xerxes, with the devoted help of our noble army, has thrown bridges across the Hellespont. This will thwart the criminal

Greek scheme of invading Persia by way of the Caucasus. The Athenian White Guards are in retreat, and everywhere the liberated populations are giving our men a frenzied welcome. § Yesterday happened the greatest incident in the Greek Incident.

A regiment of our Persian heroes advancing across the Plain of Ther­ mopylae encountered an immense army of Spartan capitalists under the command of the notorious aristocrat and White Guard Leonidas. As our men approached, it was seen that these effete Imperialists were too busy combing their hair to notice them. The effects of their surprise were overwhelming. The Greek aggressors offered only the slightest and most ineffective resistance and were slaughtered to a man. § To-day, in honour of the victory of our gallant Persian comrades

against overwhelming odds on the vast open plain at Thermopylae, our Beloved Hero-Father Xerxes has awarded himself the Highest Order of the Empire, which has never been earned by anybody else. § Last night our Beloved Xerxes received a cordial message from

the President of Carthage congratulating him on his glorious victory over the Spartan capitalist exploiters. § Messages from the Greek Incident Front report that Athens has

been captured without a blow. Our noble troops were received with immense enthusiasm by the population, with whom they shared their rations. § The Greek Incident may now be regarded as almost closed, and it

is probable that the workers of Greece will now unanimously vote for union with our democratic Persia, under our Hero-Brother, Father, and Uncle, Xerxes. A few Greek ships are still somewhere in hiding under the notorious liar and aristocrat Themistocles, but it is likely that our brave Persian sailors will shortly clear them out of their holes, after which the Greek Incident will be closed and the Athenian and Spartan oppressors, aggressors, reptiles and Egypto­ philes will have been cleared from the face of the earth.

Hellas and Persia

1 09

§ Messages from Salamis report that one of our brave Persian ships

has had a skirmish with the remaining Greek trawlers under the aiminal-pirate·traitor Thermistocles. The capitalist exploiters were driven off; a few of our beloved sailors were killed by Hellenophile­ Egyptologist treachery. Our dear Father Xerxes announces that the Greek Incident may now be regarded as almost closed, so that the greater part of our small reconnoitring expedition may now be withdrawn. § There is little to add to our last bulletin except that almost the

whole of our reconnoitring force in Greece is now in the process of withdrawal. A very small garrison has been left in Greece under the command of our Beloved Hero--Comrade Mardonius. § Our gallant Comrade Mardonius yesterday encountered a wan­

dering band of Greek-capitalist-Imperialist-aristocrat-White-Guard­ exploiter reptiles at Plataea. The engagement was only a brush but entire! y successful, our noble comrades pushing on to another position. Our Beloved Hero-Leader Xerxes has consequently decided to with­ draw the last of the reconnaissance garrison platoons from Hellas, and states that the Greek Incident may now be regarded as entire! y closed. Medals have been distributed to all the troops, and our Beloved Xerxes has bestowed upon himself the Order of Xerxes (First Class). Indefatigable as ever, our Hero-Comrade will now devote himself to the suppression of the Hellenophile-Egyptologist sabotage by reptiles in Babylonia, where some remains of the aristo­ cratic exploiters whom we too mercifully failed to exterminate en­ tirely are endeavouring, though utterly in vain, to spread discontent by diabolical and rep_tilian lies amongst the liberated Babylonian workers . § P.S. - Fifteen Years Later. The abominable tyrant, reptile, White

Guard and Egyptologist Xerxes was jusdy executed to-day by our Hero-Brother Artabanus. Punch, January 1 940.

4

The origins of our states-system: geographical limits

The simplest speculation about the origins of the Western states­ system is about the question as to when it can be deemed to have come into existence. This is bound up with the question as to when modern history began. Guicciardini gave the answer which his authority made classic, in the opening words of the Storia d'ltalia ' lo ho deliberato di scrivere le cose accadute alla memoria nostra in Italia, dappoi che rarmi de' Franzesi, chiamate da' nostri Principi medesimi, cominciorono con grandissimo movimento a perturharla '. This embodied the widespread belief in Italy that 1494 had been a turning-point, a belief first expressed by two contemporary writers, the Florentine diplomatist Bernardo Rucellai, who had himself played a part in affairs, in his De Bello ltalico Commentarius, and the Milanese historiographer Bernardino Corio, in his Storia di :

Milano.

But the houses of Valois and Habsburg had an older cause of quarrel than Italy : Burgundy. Callieres observes that since the dis­ putes of France and Austria took their origin in the relations and treaties existing between the King Louis XI and Charles, the last Duke of Burgundy, from whom the House of Burgundy descends, it is vital that the negotiator of our time should be well acquainted with all the treaties made at that period and since '. It is said that when Louis XV visited the tomb of Mary of Burgundy at Bruges, he remarked, Here is the origin of all our wars '. But there seems to have been little contemporary recognition of the international signifi­ cance of Mary's marriage to Maximilian in 1 477· French writers were more concerned to record the national consolidation through the recovery of those parts of the Burgundian inheritance that Louis XI successfully seized. Commynes's stock of ideas, when he is moved to reflect, allow no more than a censure upon Louis's handling of the •

1

•

The origins of our states-system : geographical limits

r

11

Burgundian succession on the grounds that his military movements were oppressive to the French Kingdom.2 In his

Letters on the Study of History,

Bolingbroke seeks to dis­

tinguish the point in time up to which a gentleman after which, if he is attached to the service of his

reads history, but country, he studies

it. He says that the chain of connexion between events sometimes seems to become broken, not only by extraordinary and violent occurrences, but also by slow and imperceptible changes. ' When such changes as these happen in several states about the same time, and consequently affect other states by their vicinity, and by many differ­ ent relations which they frequently bear to one another ; then is one of those periods formed, at which the chain spoken of is so broken as to have little or no real or visible connexion with that which we see continue.

A new situation,

different from the former, begets new

interests in the same proportion of difference ; not in this or that particular state alone, but in all those that are concerned by vicinity or other relations, as I said just now, in one general system of policy

.

.

•

The end of the fifteenth century seems to be just such a

period as I have been describing, for those who li�e in the eighteenth, and who inhabit the western parts of Europe'. 8 When he particular­ izes, he finds the beginning of modern history in the reign of Louis

XI, but the beginning of a states-system, recognizable by the balance

of power, in the rivalry of Charles V and Francis I . This is the classic doctrine, that the states-system originated about the end of the fifteenth century. It is an interpretation that attributes an impetus to Valois aggrandisement, seen both in the Burgundian succession and the invasion of Italy - to the assertiveness of those whom Polydore Vergil called ' Franci super omnes mortales, ampli­ andi imperii avidi ' ! From the conventional date of 1 4 94, rudimen� and premonitions of the states-system can be sought further back, and confirmations further forward. The Congress of Mantua pan-European gathering to

be

in

1 4 5 7-60 was the first

frustrated by the national egoism of

the powers. The Peace of Lodi and the Most Hoi y League of Venice in 1 4 54 founded the Italian Concert and the first system of collective security. The Turkish conquest of Constantinople confirmed the re-erection on the Bosphorus of an Eastern Empire which, expanding or declining, conditioned international relations for four and a half centuries to come. The Council of Constance was the last parade of

1 12

Systems of States

Latin Christendom presided over by an Emperor, as well as the first Council of the Church to be organized by ' nations '. In his introductory note to the first volume of the Cambridge Modern History, in 1 902, Creighton found the criterion of modern

times in a sense of familiarity : ' the period in which the problems that still occupy us came into conscious recognition, and were dealt with in ways intelligible to us as resembling our own . . . On the hither side of this line men speak a language which we can readily under­ stand ; they are animated by ideas and aspirations which resemble those animating ourselves ; the forms in which they express their thoughts and the records of their activity are the same as those still prevailing among us'. The Times Literary Supplemmt recendy reviewed the new reprint of the Cambridge Modern History, and described this ' classic vision ' as a ' breathtaking unreality Does a .

•

•

.

Luther, a Cromwell, a Louis XIV " speak a language we

can

readily understand " ? '6 But Mattingly uses the same argument in a more pointed form in 1 954· ' One may date the beginning of the

new time from the battle of Nicopolis, or of Agincourt, from the fall of Ceuta, or of Constantinople, from the Council of Constance or of Basle, from the martyrdom of John H uss or of Joan of Arc, but somewhere within the lifetime of Bernard du Rosier [ fl. 1 4 3 5 ] the forces which were to make the modern world began decisive! y to over-balance the old. Chief among these forces was the new territorial •

state with, as a notable weapon in its arsenal, the new diplomacy '. 8 In an earlier article, avowedly influenced by the events of the 1 930s, Mattingly placed the decisive break after 1 4 94, at the Failure of the Universal Peace of London of 1 5 1 8, which had concluded the first chapter of the Italian Wars. In June 1 5 22, as a result of Charles V's visit to England, the Emperor and Henry VIII joindy declared war upon France. ' And so ended . the last hope of Wolsey-s great scheme of European peace, the first European nonaggression pact, by which the powers sought to ward off the dangerous consequences of their own new strength . So ended, too, the last public expression of

•

the unity of Catholic Christendom. Before the guns were silent again, the Turks had overrun Hungary ; and England and half of the Teutonic North were no longer Catholic ' . 1 Another American writer, in a book about the Humanists, has marked the same point : ' As nearly as I

•

can

fix the moment, it was during these French

wars of 1 5 2 2-23 that the once grand medieval concept of a common

The origins of our statcs-syj·tem : geographical limits

1 13

Christendom finally expired and assumed the practical status of a myth. Perhaps few or no men then living were or could have been aware of it, but events speak with a clarion voice. To the Pope's anguished appeals the great Christian princes were not only indiffer­ ent, they were. . . now even incredulous. . . . From this moment on­ ward to our own day, broadly speaking, the Christian humanist concept of a good life based on reason and common justice (as in Utopia) has been submerged by a radically different and, internation­ ally speaking, frankly anarchic form of "reason" raison d'etat, which was progressively substituted for the ideal of justice common to and a right of all humanity. From 1 5 22 onward, all peaces would be, as Frederick Duval says, of iron, and the '' natural " relation of states would be chronic war'. 8 There is, however, an alternative conventional starting-point to 1494 : the Peace of Westphalia in 1 648. Westphalia became the legal basis of the states-system. Subsequent peace treaties, down at least to Teschen in 1 779, expressly confirmed Westphalia and were codicils thereto. Similarly, Italian peace treaties down to 1494 confirmed the Peace of Lodi. Satow says that the preambles of the treaties of Osnabrii ck and Munster introduced the Latin word 'con­ gressus' into international language. 9 In retrospect, Westphalia was believed to mark the transition from religious to secular politics, from ' Christendom ' to ' Europe', the exclusion from international politics of the Holy See, the effective end of the Holy Roman Empire by the virtual recognition of the sovereignty of its members, the formal admission of the United Provinces and the Swiss Confedera­ tion to the family of independent nations, and the beginning of the system of the balance of power. The prestige of Westphalia was buttressed by that of Grotius, whose reputation as father of inter­ national law was due to a work prompted by the same general war that Westphalia ended. It seems to have been Grotius, incidentally, who brought the word ' system ' into the vocabulary of international politics, though not yet in the sense of the whole diplomatic com­ munity.10 The Westphalian interpretation of the history of the states-system fits in with the doctrine that the Scientific Revolution marks a more important epoch in the general history of Europe than does the Renaissance. There has been much historical writing in the past generation to emphasize the international changes in the period -

1 14

Systems of States

following Westphalia, the 'emergence of the great powers ', the Military Revolution of 1 5 6o-1 66o, the rise of standing armies and the beginnings of conscription, the professionalization of diplomacy, the organization of foreign offices and of war finance. If it is seen as beginning after 1 648 rather than after 1494, the states-system wears a different aspect. Secularized politics, raison d'etat or national interest, and a multiple balance of power become the norm, and the ideological strife of the French Revolutionary period and the twentieth century an aberration. If we go back to 1494, though Machiavelli writes the foreword to the story, it quickly moves into a chapter he neither foresaw nor was capable of under­ standing, and we watch the states-system being shaped by the strains of four generations of doctrinal conflict, and of a bipolar balance of power. At the same time the Westphalian starting-point is itself eroded by the historiographical desire to establish continuity and the tendency for 'origins' to slide ever backwards in time. The turning-point may be found, for instance, in Richelieu's committing Louis XIII to war against the Habsburgs in 1 629 instead of to domestic reform and to extirpating heresy. Or Koenigsberger can say that ' the European state system was beginning to crystallize ' at the point where the Dutch abandon their search for a foreign sovereign and are accepted as equal partners in alliance by France and England.11 2

What eludes the grasp in these speculations is a criterion by which to identify the states-system. There are two theoretical questions, one concerned with chronological, one with geographical limits : 1 . What are the internal marks by which we will tell the states-system ? We can expect them to develop slowly, but we must have an idea of what we are looking for. 2. What are the boundaries of the field of en­ quiry ? What are the frontiers within which we expect to find the states-system ? Let us consider the second question first. h will serve to remind us that there is yet another conventional date besides 1494 and 1 648 for the beginning of modern international history : 1492. Whether or not we agree with Adam Smith that ' the discovery of America and

The origins of our states-system : geographical limits

1 15

that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are

the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind ', those events largely governed the development of inter­ national society. If we lean towards the classic interpretation, we shall remember that these events occurred during the lifetime of Machiavelli, that in the preface to his greatest work he compared his own intdlectual adventure to the Great Discoveries, and that the pope who had to handle King Charles VIII when he entered Rome at the head of his armies on the last day of 1494 was the same pope who had already apportioned the new found lands between Portugal and Spain. If we lean towards the Westphalian interpretation, we shall say that the Nine Years War, because of its commercial aspects, was the first European conflict that extended to the rest of the world.12 Was the states-system, therefore, world-wide from the beginning ? Did it include all mankind ? Was Prester John (if he could be found)

a member of the society of princes ? Was the Grand Turk ? Was the Sultan of Bijapur, from whom the Portuguese wrested Goa ? Were Montezuma and Atahualpa ? Or if we descend to the lower date,

was the Great Moghul Aurungzeb ? Was the Emperor K'ang-hsi, who entertained the Jesuits ? Were the Six Nations of the Iroquois ? More to the point, was Alexis Michailovich,

tsar

of Muscovy ?

The orthodox answer to these questions is one that was worked out mainly in retrospect. It is the answer of the positivist phase of international law, which flowered in the nineteenth century, and its motive was

ad Europae maiorem gloriam.

' It is scarcely necessary to

point out ', pronounces W. E. Hall magisterially, ' that as interna­ tional law is a product of the special civilisation of modern Europe, and forms a highly artificial system of which the principles cannot be supposed to be understood or recognised by countries differently civilised, such states only can be presumed to be subject to it as are inheritors of that civilisation. They have lived, and are living, under law, and a positive act of withdrawal would be required to free them from its restraints. But states outside European civilisation must formal!y enter into the circle of law-governed countries. They must do something with the acquiescence of the latter, or of some of them, which amounts to an acceptance of the law in its entirety beyond

all

possibility of misconstruction . It is not enough consequently that they shall enter into arrangements by treaty identical with arrangements made by law-governed powers, nor that they shall do acts, like

1 16

Systems of States

sending and receiving permanent embassies, which are compatible with ignorance or rejection of law ' 1 8 Such a belief in the necessity of formal admission to the states-system lay behind article vii of the Treaty of Paris 1 8 56, in which the signatory powers 'declare the Sublime Porte admitted to participate in the advantages of the Public Law and System (Concert) of Europe , . Such reasoning equally underlay the spread of capitulations, those unequal treaties imposed .

by European powers, to exempt their subjects from local jurisdiction

in a non-European country. What I have called the orthodox answer was not confined to inter­ national lawyers stricti y of the positivist school. The great opposite

of W. E. Hall in his generation was James Lorimer, Regius Profes­ sor at Edinburgh of Public Law and of the Law of Nature and Nations, a splendid title, revived for him after the chair had been untenanted for 30 years.u H e distinguished his tenure by a deter­

mined attempt, in the teeth of prevailing doctr:ID& south of the Border, to revive the principles of natural law. And it is he who gives the most lucid, comprehensive and philosophical statement of the orthodox answer : As a political phenomenon, humanity, in its present condition,

divides itself into three concentric zones or spheres - that of civil­ ised humanity, that of barbarous humanity, and that of savage humanity. To these, whether arising from peculiarities of race or

from various stages of development in the same race, belong, of right, at the hands of civilised nations, three stages of recognition ­ plenary political recognition, partial political recognition, and natural or mere human recognition. I ntensively, the first of these forms of recognition embraces the two latter ; extensive! y, the third embraces the two former. The sphere of plenary political recognition extends to all the existing States of Europe, with their colonial dependencies, in so far as these are peopled by persons of European birth or descent ; and to the States of North and South America which have vindi­ cated their independence of the European States of which they were colonies. The sphere of partial political recognition extends to Turkey in Europe and in Asia, and to the old historical States of Asia which have not become European dependencies - viz. to Persia and the

The origins of our states-system : geographical limits

1 17

other separate States of Central Asia, to China, Siam, and Japan. The sphere of natural or mere human recognition, extends to

the residue of mankind; though here we ought, perhaps, to dis­ tinguish between the progressive and non-progressive races .

It is with the first of these spheres alone that the international jurist has directly to deal ; but inasmuch as jural progress consists not

merely

in

perfecting the

relations which

arise within

the sphere of political recognition, but in its gradual expansion, he

is

brought into continual contact with the external spheres, and

must take cognisance of the relations in which civilised communi­ ties are placed to the partially civilised communities which sur­

round them. He is not bound to apply the positive law of nations

to savages, or even to barbarians, as such ; but he is bound to

ascertain the points at which, and the directions in which, bar­

barians or savages come within the scope of partial recognition. In the case of the Turks we have had bitter experience of the conse­

quences of extending the rights of civilisation to barbarians who

have proved to be incapable of performing its duties, and who

possibly do not even belong to the progressive races of mankind.

Should the Japanese, on the other hand, continue their present

rate of progress for another twenty years, the question whether

they are not entitled to plenary political recognition may have to be determined. 1 15

The orthodox answer, then, to the question about the limits of the

states-system, is that it was originally confined to Western Christen­ dom out of which it grew; that the European colonies in North and

South America became peripheral members of it when they attained independence ; that the first non-European state to be admitted was the Ottoman Empire in 1 85 6 ; that Persia, Siam, China and Japan (but not yet Ethiopia or Liberia) were admitted with different degrees of grudging patronage in the later part of the nineteenth century;

that this extension of the system beyond Europe and America first

received legal recognition in the Hague Conferences of 1 899 and 1 907 ;18 and that the transformation of the Western European system

into a world system was finally performed through the League of Nations and the United Nations.

This interpretation of international history was roundly attacked in 1 967 by C. H . Alexandrowicz.1 1 From a study of the treaty

1 18

Systems of States

relations between Christian and non-Christian powers, as well as of the classic controversy over the East Indies and the freedom of the seas between Grotius and the Portuguese publicist Seraphim de Freitas, Alexandrowicz concludes that the expanding European powers were compelled by the facts of the case to treat with the non-European powers in regular diplomatic relations, whose princi­ ples were derived as much from non-European practice as from European. Accordingly he emphasizes those European publicists who assert a legal community of the whole of mankind (including Burke's defence of the status of the Rajah of Benares !n the trial of Warren Hastings), and who argue that unequal treaties - veaties of protection, tribute or va ssalage - are not necessarily prej udicial to the sovereignty of the weaker party. ' The ideas of natural law and the universality of the family of nations had been inseparable compan­ ions ,, he says.18 They waned together as Europe grew powerful and arrogant, and yielded to the positivist doctrine that there is no inter­ national law save what states have ' posited ' in their recognized customs and express treaties, and the constitutive doctrine that new states derive their legal existence from the will of states already established, through the act of recognition. The argument has topical interest, with certain important legal consequences. Are the ' emergent ' states which have been emanci­ pated from colonial rule since 1 94 5 new creations, or recovering an ancient sovereignty ? Is Ceylon the legal successor of the Kingdom of Kandy ? Is the Republic of India the legal successor of the Maratha Confederacy, or of the Moghul Empire ? Is Algeria the successor of the Bey of Algiers, the Malagasy Republic of the Hova queens of lmerina, Indonesia of Sri Vijaya and Majapahit, Ghana of Ghana ? (Was Poland of 1 9 1 9 the legal successor of Poland of 1795 ? Was Portugal of 1 640 the legal successor of Portugal of 1 5 8 0 ?)19 Alexandrowicz 's thesis deserves careful and sympathetic scrutiny. All I offer here is an impression and some comments. The impression is that, in order to correct an interpretation of the history of the states-system that was exaggerated (as well as being today politically unfashionable), he exaggerates upon the other side. I believe that a proper view of the nascent states-system will be stereoscopic, seeing in the states-system a dual nature, two concentric circles, European and universal . The following reflections aim to describe aspects of this view, and to qualify Alexandrowicz's argument.

The origins of our states-system: geographical limits

1 rg

A. THE UNIVERSALISM OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM

Obviously the states-system developed out of Western Christendom But the Western Christendom it developed out of was itself a peculiar culture. It combined universalist claims with a missionary dynamic. Perhaps China, or Byzantium, may be considered as having had universal claims also, since they considered the rest of the world to be actually or formally in a tributary status ; but they lacked the energy to give the claims effect. The Roman emperors had asserted in a general way that they were lords of the world, and the claim was formulated in the Digest. It descended to the Western Emperors as well as to their Byzantine rivals. It was asserted by the Hohenstau­ fen.20 But the Papacy trumped the imperial ace by playing the universality promised to the Christian religion. In the end it was the Vicar of Christ, not the emperor, who had the dominium mundi. ' I psius vox', said St Bernard, ' est hodie per universum mundum '. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; 'ergo ', wrote a later papalist, ' er papae est terra et plenitudo ejus '.21 ' The papalist claim to world monarchy ', says Ulmann, ' was the direct result of the stimulus afforded by the crusades. '22 It is interest­ ing that the claim reached its full development under Innocent IV, in the mid-thirteenth century, when the expansionism of Western Christendom was temporarily exhausted, the Crusades had failed and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was lost, and the Mongols had conquered Poland and Hungary, defeated the duke of Silesia at Liebnitz and almost reached the Adriatic at Fiume. But as the tide of Mongol conquest ebbed, their Empire became a mission field. The Franciscans penetrated to Karakorum, and provided the first archbishop of Peking. The papal claims were the earliest version of the European assertion of superiority in the nineteenth century, and the missionaries were the forerunners of the conquistadors and the gunboats. And the most far-reaching exercise of papal world­ sovereignty was the four bulls of 1493 by which Alexander VI, in the plenitude of his apostolic authority, conferred on Ferdi­ nand and Isabella the dominion over lands discovered or to be discovered at one hundred leagues to the west and to the south of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. 2s Alexandrowicz mentions, but discounts, the ambiguity of this medieval universalism. The pope, according to the canonists, had rightful jurisdiction over all men, faithful and infidel alike. He had

1 20

Systems of States

the right of peaceful penetration into the infidel world, the right of unrestricted (and unreciprocable) missionary activity that Nehru afterwards complained about. He had a right of direct interference in non-Christian countries, to protect Christians there, to c�rrect misgovernment, and even in extreme cases to depose their rulers. The lofty language of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doc­ trine, 'Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation ', is a secularized adaptation of the lofty language of the canonists. The final question was whether infidels had rightful dominion over their lands at all, and whether Christians might make conquests of them. It was debated theoretically in the thirteenth century, and with immediate practical bearing in the sixteenth, when Las Casas con­ fronted Sepulveda in the disputation at Valladolid. The canonists conceded, on the whole, that infidels were capable of acquiring rulership by prescription, and that it was wrong to use force against them, except to redress an injury received. But when the Christians were driven by greed of gain, and enjoyed technological superiority, it was easy for worse theory to prevail over better. B . THE UNRECI PROCATING WILL OF TH;E UNSPEAKABLE TURK

The doctrine of the universality of human society found its greatest obstacle, in the sixteenth century, in the peculiar relationship between Christendom and the Turk. Had Christendom been contiguous only with mild Hindoos, polished Chinese, and noble savages, it is possible that the two concentric circles would have blended into a homo­ geneous society with fewer convulsions; though the attitude of the Spaniards towards the repulsive civilization of the Aztecs, or of the Dutch and English colonists towards the Red Man, of whom it was being said already in the seventeenth century that the only good one was a dead one, give litde grounds for confidence. But the principal external society with which Christendom had to do, in the centuries when it was transformed into the states-system, was regarded by it as a historical, even an eschatological, embodiment of evil. Perhaps the deepest reason for this is the very similarity between the two cultures, both of them combining a universal faith with proselytizing zeal and energy, the very origin of Islam as the greatest and most successful of all Christian heresies. During the Middle

The origins of our states-system : geographical limits

121

Ages the Saracens were by many standards more civilized than the Frankish Crusaders, and there was fruitful cultural exchange be­ tween them in Spain and in the Levant. But by the sixteenth century the Saracens had given place to the Ottomans, who were both more primitive, and incomparably more powerful and dangerous to Western Christendom. Not only did they lead Islam ; they re·erected and enlarged the Greek Empire. But no Saracen ruler, and no Eastern Emperor, had threatened, like Bajazid, to feed his horse on the altar of St Peter's, and that he would come to France after he had finished with Austria. The Ottoman power in the second half of the fifteenth century was a threat to Christendom of a kind and scale that had never been known before. It is a commonplace that the Western powers quickly learnt to do business with the Grand Signior, and included him in their diplo­ matic machinations. Alexandrowicz quotes the remarkable letter of

Francis I to Paul III, in which he j ustifies the Franco--Oto t man alliance of I 535 by arguing that the Turks were not outside human society, that if nations were divided it was not by nature but by tradition and usages, and that diversity of cult and custom cannot destroy the natural association of humanity. ' Paroles glorieuses ', says Nys, ' qui ouvrent dignement l'epoque moderne '.24 All the same, they are typical of neither Western Christian nor Western European opinion. The generation of Pol ydore Vergil and Thomas More was very frightened of the Turk. More's

lation,

Dialogue of Comfort against Tribu­

written in the Tower in I 5 34, takes the Turkish conquest of

Hungary as the great example of contemporary misfortune and misery. The simplest explanation of the Turkish danger, and one that had a long history behind it, was to identify the Turkish power as anti­ christ. This had much currency in Germany, which was in the front line. Luther had persuaded himself that the pope was antichrist, but the Turk could not be omitted. ' Antichrist is the pope and the Turk together ', he said, with a fine power of synthesis ; ' a beast full of life must have a body and soul ; the spirit or soul of antichrist, is the pope, his flesh or body the Turk ' . This was the reasoning of a beleaguered and fragmented Christen­ dom, not of the belief in human society. In the language of diplo­ macy Francis I, before he had found the advantage of a Turkish alliance, wrote to Leo X in I 5 I 6 about a crusade as communis

omnium Christianorum causa.

The notion of this common cause

1 22

Systems of Stotes

survived Lepanto. Grotius came off his naturalistic fence and asserted the obligation of all Christians to join an alliance against the enemies of Christianity, ' an impious enemy raging in arms . . . All Christians ought to contribute men or money, according to their capa�ity, ad

causam hanc commu n em '. 2 5

The common cause flickered into life

again in the Holy League of

1 6 84-99·

In his last speech in the

House of Commons, Burke used language that looks back to More and forwards to Gladstone, and is far more characteristic of the tradition of Western Christendom (be it said without any implication

of approval or blame) than Francis l's letter to Paul II I :

He had never before heard it held forth, that the Turkish empire was ever considered as any part of the balance of power in Europe. They had nothing to do with European power ; they considered themselves as wholly Asiatic. Where was the Turkish resident at our court, the court of Prussia, or of Holland ? They despised and condemned all christian princes, as infidels, and only wished to subdue and exterminate them and their people. What had these worse than savages to do with the powers of Europe, but to spread war, destruction, and pestilence amongst them ? 26

Burke here pointed to a curiosity of the international position of the Ottomans. Though Turkey had been in a sense part of the diplomatic community ever since the Venetians and the pope first intrigued with it in the fifteenth century a generation before the French alliance, it had never yet entered upon that regular exchange of diplomatic representatives that was the test of full membership. But this revealed a deeper disharmony. Turkey professed an in­ tolerant creed, preventing it from accepting what Lorimer called ' the postulate of coexistence ', and excluding ' the presumption of a reciprocating will '. During the great Eastern Crisis, at the beginning of the academic session of I 8 77-8, Lorimer regaled his class of public law with an introductory lecture entitled ' Does the Coran supply an Ethical Basis on which a Political Superstructure can be Raised ? ' The answer was a resounding no, because ' the premises from which a Mussulman deduces his rules of conduct towards an unbeliever are precisely the converse of those from which he deduces his rules of conduct towards a believer '. This was the reason for ' what we often talk of as the inconceivable obstinacy and bad faith of the Turks ' . 27

The origins of our states-system: geographical limits C.

1 23

Tll!.ATIES OP CESSION

For all the treaties that Alexandrowicz examines, it seems that Christian Europeans approached the non-Christian world with a c:lliierent set of assumptions from th�se with which they approached one another. Here is one piece of negative evidence, one question that Alexandrowicz fails to ask. It seems to have become established within Europe, by the end of the fifteenth century, that a conquest needed to be sealed, and given . legal effect, by an act of cession, normally embodied in the peace treaty concluding the war. Under the Treaty of Bretigny, 1 360, for example, which marked the high point of Edward III's conquests in France, the king of France ceded to the king of England Guyenne, Gascony, Poitou, etc., in full sovereignty, together with Pontheiu, Calais and Guines. Under the Treaty of Bagnolo, 1484, which ended the War of Ferrara, the duke of Ferrara ceded Rovigo and the Polesina to Venice. But when Albuquerque seized Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur in I 502, no treaty of cession followed. Let me assert the negative to invite cor­ rection. Alexandrowicz cites the standard collection of Portuguese treaties, but no treaty conferring legal possession of Goa is to be found there. The Portuguese viceroy at Goa was later in treaty relations on behalf of his sovereign with the Sultan of Bijapur, as with other Indian powers, and this might be taken (and perhaps was by the Portuguese) as signifying tacit acquiescence in his presence. But it seems that a state of affairs which within Christendom would have been regularized, in partibus infidelium was not considered by the Christians to require regularizing. The Republic of India does not appear to have made use of this argument in the debate concern­ ing its seizure or recovery of Goa in I 96 I . D. PA.IX MARITIMES AND PA.IX CONTINENTALES

Diplomatic practice recognized the dual nature of international society in a more regular and important manner. A distinction was sometimes made in the eighteenth century between pair maritimes and paix continentales, since it was in the eighteenth century that the struggles for mastery in the two regions, Britain and France overseas, and Austria and Prussia in Germany, diverged most widely. Thus the Anglo-French treaties of 1 748, 1 763 and 1783 were all classified as pair maritimes.28 But the distinction went back very nearly to the classic beginning of the states-system.

1 24

Sy_stems of States

The first round of the Italian Wars, from 1 4 94 to I 5 I6, was pursued separately from the exploration and delimitation of the Eastern and Western Indies by Portugal and Spain. But in I 5 20 Cortes sent to the king of Spain the first of Montezuma's treasure, the treasure that Diirer marvelled at in Brussels; in 1 5 2 I he conquered Mexico City ; in 1 5 22 the second round of the Italian Wars began; in I 53 5 Pizarro conquered Peru. As the resources of the Indies slowly began to affect the European struggle, the European struggle began to send its repercussions through the Indies. The Peace of �brai, I 5 29, was perhaps the last peace settlement between the great powers that could ignore the trans-European penumbra of the states­ system. During the uneasy peace that followed, in 1 534, Jacques Cartier discovered and charted the gulf of the St Lawrence, thus breaching the Spanish monopoly of America. During the third round of the Italian Wars, which began with the French invasion of Savoy in I 536, Francis I sent Roberval on Cartier's third voyage, as viceroy of Canada, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the French seized a treasure fleet coming to Spain from Cortes. The Peace of Crepy, 1 544, was the first to be a paix maritime as well as continen­ tale. The French, whose fortunes were at a low ebb, undertook to abandon Canada, and to respect the rights of the Spaniards and the Portuguese in all the Indian lands. Fifteen years later, at the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis, 1 5 59, the two circles of the states-system acquired a form of diplomatic recog­ nition that remained lasting. Despite their momentary concession at Crepy, the French had hitherto insisted that title to overseas terri­ tories came not from discovery but from occupation and settlement, that the line of demarcation between Portugal and Spain under the Treaty of Tordesillas, I494, was not part of the public law of Chris­ tendom but a private agreement between the two crowns, and that the preceding papal bulls and subsequent papal confirmation added nothing to its force. In the negotiations at Cateau-Cambresis, where the French bargaining position was stronger than it had been at Crepy, the positions of the two great powers on this issue were irreconcilable. But they could agree to safeguard the European peace, which both sides needed, from the consequences of continued dis­ agreement about the Indies. In a verbal arrangement, that formed no part of the treaty, the delegates decided on the meridian of the Azores and the tropic of Cancer as a line, to the west and south of '

Th � origins of our states-sysum : geographical limits

I

25

which acts of hostility would not violate the treaty nor constitute grounds for complaint, and whoever was strongest would pass for master. Thus the papal ' lines of demarcation ', which in theory or legend was an arbitral award to preserve peace, gave way to the 'amity lines ', which divided the zone of peace from the zone of war. Other powers besides France, especially England, appealed to the arrange­ ment. Its original meaning was negative and concessive; it acquired a new interpretation, positive and permissive. ' No peace beyond the line ' became almost a rule of international law, giving freedom to plunder, attack and settle without upsetting the peace of Europe. Its original application, moreover, was to the West Indies, the realm of those whom Lorimer was to designate as savages; but it was soon extended to the East Indies, where the great European companies circled round the kingdoms of the barbarians. No better conventional date for the appearance of the dual states-system could be found than Cateau-Cambresis, I 55 9. In the twentieth-century states-system, divided still concentrically between the world city and the world rural district, the amity lines have reappeared. One of the unwritten understandings of the Cold War has been that the peace of Europe shall be warily preserved while the struggle is pursued for influence and position throughout the Third World. E. niE DUAL STATES-5YSTEM IN GllOTIUS

The dual aspect of the states-system is at last formulated, like so many other things, though clumsily, by Grotius. On the one side there had been the Respublica Christiana. Every­ body knew what this was. Though its legal unity was broken by the Reformation, it was a historical and cultural unity; the religious wars were its internal wars; Poland-Lithuania belonged to it but Muscovy did not. It was appealed to in the Treaty of Vervins ; it did not appear, perhaps significantly, in the Treaties of Westphalia ; it last appeared in the Treaty of Utrecht. On the other side were the visionary asserters of natural law and the unity of the human race. ' Totus orbis, qui aliquo modo est una republica ', said Vitoria. ' The human race ', said Suarez, ' though divided into no matter how many different peoples and nations, has for all that a certain unity, a unity not merdy physical, but also in a

Sysums of States sense political and moral. This is shown by the natural precept of mutual love and mercy, which extends to all men, including foreign­ ers of every way of thinking. Wherefore, though any one state, republic or kingdom be in itself a perfect community and constant in its members, nevertheless each of the states is also a member, in a certain manner, of the world, as far as the human race is concerned '. Similarly Fenelon : ' Toutes les nations de la terre ne sont que les differentes families d'une meme republique dont Dieu est le pere commun ' . 29

Grotius puts the two together. He asserts a common interest of the human race, and a law of nature that binds it. ' If other ties are wanting, sufficit humanae naturae communio '.so The last and widest reason for taking up arms, is

hominum inter se conjunctio, ' the

connexion of men with men as such, which alone is often sufficient to induce them to give their aid'. 8 1 Thus treaty relations with infidels were lawful, and even encouraged by the Gospel, 82 and conquest of infidels on the grounds that their lands are

terra nullius, that they

are immoral, or have wrong notions of God and dull intellects, or are natural enemies, is unlawful . ss There is a mutua gentium inter se societas," a communis societas generis humani.35

But within human society, there is a particular bond uniting Christian states. ' All Christians are members of one body, who are bidden to bear each other's sufferings and sorrows. Just as this principle applies to individuals, so it applies to peoples qua peoples, and to kings

kings. For every man ought to serve Christ not only personally, but also with the power entrusted to him ' .18 Among Christians in general it has been established that captives of war are not to be enslaved.87 Again, it is the duty of Christians to abstain

qua

from such violence as storming cities : ' The tie of Christians among each other is closer than that of the ancient Greeks, and yet there was an Amphyctionic decree that in their wars no Greek city should be destroyed '. 88 But the most important reference to the Christian community (which Grotius does not call the Respublica Christiana) is this : Especiall y are Christian kings and princes bound to try this way of avoiding war [viz. arbitration] . For if both Jews and Christians appointed arbiters for themselves, in order to avoid judgment by judges not of the true faith, and Paul prescribes the practice, how

The origins of out' statespsystem : geographical limits

1 27

much more should this be done to avoid a much greater disadvan­ tage, namely, war . . . For this and other reasons it would be useful, indeed it is almost necessary, to hold certain congresses (conventus) of Christian Powers, in which disputes may be settled by those who do not have an interest in them, where in fact measures may be taken to compel the disputants to accept peace on equitable tenns.89 Trying to pick a path once again through the baroque thickets of Grotius's work, where profound and potent principles lurk in the shade of forgotten arguments and obsolete examples like violets beneath overgrown gigantic rhododendrons, I find that he does not say what I thought he said. Inaccurate memory suggested that he described the possibility, within the universal society of the human race, of subordinate societies of states bound by regional variants of the jus gentium : a multi-cultural or multipcivilizational international society. He does not say quite this. When he distinguishes between narural law and jus gentium, he says that scarcely any law apart from natural law is common to all nations. ' Indeed ', he adds, ' often in one part of the world there prevails a jus gentium that is not found in another '. But he does not relate this variety of law that he glimpse& to difference of culture. He has just defined jus gentium as ' law which has received an obligatory force from the will of all nations, or of many ' .40 The only regional or civilizational systems of law whose possibility he recognizes are versions of divine law. 'There is one nation in particular to whom God has given his laws, the Jews'.41 And there is the law of Christ, the last of the three sets of law given by God to the human race.42 Being of divine origin, Christianity has a special status, and Christians have the benefit of the doubt in their relations with infidels. 'No right whatever is sufficient to warrant what may be considered harmful, directly or indirectly, to religion. For we must seek in the first place the kingdom of God, that is, the propagation of the Gospel ' .u In several places Grotius describes limited grouping of states. ' The association (consociatio) of several peoples, either by themselves or by their heads, is a league (fedus) '. 44 'Between contracting parties there is a closer society than the common society of mankind '. 4� He is thinking of what we would call alliances, though giving much

Systems of States weight to semi-permanent alliances like the Peloponnesian League and the Achaean Confederacy; it is for these that he borrows the word systema. ' Again it can happen, that several peoples have the same head, though each of these peoples constitutes a perfect com­ munity. For though in a natural body there cannot be one head for several bodies, there may be in a moral body '. 46 Here he is thinking of a cluster of sovereignties held by a single Habsburg, or of the British Commonwealth. These descriptions do not apply to Christendom or any similar cul� tural grouping. It is true that he himself goes on, a little later, to speak of Christendom as a league. He says that Christian princes need to help one another against infidel aggression, ' which cannot conveniently be done, unless a fedus is made for that purpose ; such a fedus was made a long time ago, and the leader of it was created by common consent, Roman Emperor ' .47 But here, using a faulty historical argument, he momentarily degrades Christendom to make it fit one of his political categories. He does not conceive categories to fit Christendom and its rivals. To conclude : Grotius presents the dual or concentric conception of international society. There is an outer circle that embraces all man­ kind, under natural law, and an inner circle, the corpus Christian­ arum, bound by the law of Christ. The inner circle is unique. Grotius still accepts implicit! y the traditional Christian view . of history, and does not have sufficient knowledge qf the non-European world to develop a more complex picture.

5 The origins of our states-system: chronological limits

The first part of this paper [i.e. Chapter questions :

1.

above - Ed. ] put two

4

What are the internal marks by which we would be

able to recognize our states-system, when we scan the past for its first appearance ?

2.

What are the geographical limits within which

we look for such marks ? On the latter question, the first part of this paper then made some disconnected observations. Here answer the former question. We must remember that when we

' scan

I

shall try to

the past ' we are not

scanning a void, expecting a new object to swim into it. We are scanning a society, that of Western Europe, in slow but constant change. By the time of the Congress of Utrecht,

1 7 1 2-I 3,

the

international articulation of Western Europe had become manifestly different from what it had been at the time of the Council of Con­ stance,

I 4 14- I 8 ;

the states-system is there.

I

suggest that its internal

marks, which have become progressive! y dearer during those three centuries, are first, sovereign states ; second, their mutual recognition ; third, their accepted hierarchy ; fourth, their means of regular com­ munication ; fifth, their framework of law ; sixth, their means of defending their common interests.

I . SOVEREIGN STATES The nununum condition of a states-system is the presence of a multitude of sovereign states. Historians of political thought have been traditionally interested mainly in the notion of political obligation, the authority of the ruler and the rights of subjects. They have traced the development of internal sovereignty, of a supreme law-making authority in each

1 30

Systems of States

community. Marsiglio of Padua marks an important stage on this road. We are more concerned with the development of external sove- . reignty, the claim to be politically and juridically independent of any superior. On this road, a similar place to that of Marsiglio is marked by his slighdy younger contemporary, Bartolus of Sassoferrato ( 1 3 1 3-5 7), the prince of civilians. A doctor of Roman Law, deeply respecting his text, he was concerned also to adapt its truths to a historical situation in which the Holy Roman Empire was in full decay. He recognized that a city-state that did not acknowledge the emperor as overlord, and whose citizens were free people, was itself its own emperor, ipsamet civitas sihi princeps est.1 In his time the formula rex in regno suo est imperator regni sui became current. It used to be thought to have originated in Italy, but it has now been pushed back to French origin, in the conflict between the papacy and Philip the Fair at the beginning of the century. Bartolus also made a famous assertion, that it is probably a heresy to deny that the emperor is the lord of the world. Grotius thought it worth dismissing as ' stultum ', 2 and it has sometimes been taken as evidence of the doctrinaire nature of fourteenth-century imperialist lawyers. It has been left for a very recent writer to make the observa­ tion that this ' is not a quibble to save the face of the imperial laws : it is a reminder that political thought implies the consideration of problems not only of national but also of international government'.8 However, to assert their independence of the Empire was not necessary for the more important of the emergent states of Europe, and particularly the great national monarchies of Western Europe, which had never acknowledged the Empire's overlordship. Though probably a majority of the ' states ' of Europe were nominally within the Empire, they were smaller and less powerful. Those in Italy did not find it difficult to reduce imperial suzerainty to nothing. Only those in Germany had to traverse the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War before arriving at the same end. The international framework of the system that preceded the states-system was provided, not by the fictitious Empire, but by the Church . The sentence needs to be modified in two respects which show how our vocabulary for discussing these things itself presup­ poses the states-system within which it has grown up. The word ' international ' is anachronistic when applied to the Middle Ages :

The origtns of our states-system: chronological limits

"

(

I3I

we need another word, perhaps ' ecumenical ' would serve. And what the Church provided was more than a framework . ' The real State of the Middle Ages in the modern sense - if the words are not a paradox - is the Church ', said Figgis. ' There was no doubt that the canonists meant by the [pope's] plenitudo potestatis everything that the modern means by sovereignty '. 4 The modern secular sovereign states-system arose from the ruins of the medieval international papal monarchy. The dividing line between the two is clearly marked by the Council of Constance, which is as far hack as one need go in the search for the origins of the states-system. The chief aim of the Council of Constance was to heal the Great Schism. This had divided Latin Christendom into two - and later three - obediences under rival popes. It inevitably strengthened the secular powers. They now had some freedom in choosing their pope, and could make him pay for their support. Lorenzo the Magnificent afterwards observed, ' The division of power is advantageous and, if it were possible without scandal, three or four Popes would be better than a single one '. 6 The growth of national churches and Erastian principles in due course gave his thought a fulfilment he did not foresee. Nevertheless, the public opinion of Christendom, which was perhaps the same as the interests of the Church, demanded an end to the Schism, as well as a more general reformation of the Church. At Constance, then, there was a three-cornered struggle : public opinion, led by the reforming party, the reunited papacy, and the secular powers. The first had hoped to use the last to discipline the second. What happened was that the second allied with the third to frustrate the first, and was itself soon subordinated to the third. The Council of Constance was not yet an international congress, but it was very nearly so. It was a General Council of the Church, . with the aim of reforming the Church ; at the same time it had an unprecedented amount of secular business. It was composed primar­ ily of bishops and abbots, but doctors, i.e. the intelligentsia from the universities, and princes also had the vote. There were interesting questions of procedure, which foreshadow much that becomes fami­ liar later. To counteract the preponderance of Italians, the English proposed to organize the Council according to ' nations ', a principle borrowed from the universities, and the proposal was accepted. The nations were four large regional groupings : Italy, France, Germany (which included the Scandinavian countries), and England (which

Syst�ms of Stat�s included the other British countries). When the Spaniards arrived late, they made their attendance conditional on being recognized as a fifth nation. Matters were first discussed by each nation separately, then by a general congregation formed of an equal number of deputies from each nation. After three years of the Council, when it had removed three popes and elected a new canonical pope in their stead, its capacity to put through a programme of reform had dwindled to nothing. It allowed reforms to be agreed bilateral! y between the new pope, Martin V, and each nation. To these agreements the new name of concordat was given. The content of the concordats was not very important, and the English government had already unilaterally enacted what it wanted in the statutes of Provisoes and Praemunire 50 years before. But the concordats carried an assumption of diplomatic equality between the pope and the nations, and hastened the process by which the secular princes usurped many papal rights of presenting to bene­ fices, controlling appeals and taxing the local clergy. Thus they forwarded the transformation of the international papal monarchy into a system of secular states. There is one other respect, possibly the most important of all, in which the Council of Constance foreshadows the experience of the states-system. It is the greatest attempt before the League of Nations to provide a legal and regular constitution for the international sys­ tem, a constitution on constirutionalist principles.8 Again, our politi­ cal vocabulary is inadequate for writing in the same sentence about the states-system and its medieval precursor. The Council of Con.6 stance does not yet inaugurate the states-system. It is the last Ecu­ menical Council of undivided Latin Christendom, whose failure to effect reform of the Church makes revolution inevitable. It attempts to reform the international system of Christendom, which is the papally-centralized Church. Its failure leads direcdy to the break­ down of the system and to rebellion within the Church. The reforming party, who dominated the early days at Constance, was composed of highly intdligent and rational academics with a powerful political doctrine. The only way to deal with the scandalous siruation of three rival popes was to appeal to the older, latent authority of a general council. A council had the right to correct and even depose a scandalous pope. Gerson, Pierre d'Ailly, and Nicholas of Cusa have a notable intellecrual resemblance to Lord Robert Cecil,

The origins of our states-system : chronological limits

I 33

Gilbert Murray, and Norman Angell, as apostles of a League of Nations that had the right and duty, as a last resort, to impose sanc­ tions on a lawless great power. The Council of Constance culminated in the decree Sacrosancta (14 15); ' The Council of Constance, an ecumenical council, derives its power direct from Christ, and all men, including the pope, are bound to obey it in matters of faith '. Figgis called it ' Probably the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world . . . . striving to turn into a tepid constitutionalism the Divine authority of a thousand years. The movement is the culmination of medieval constitutionalism. It forms the watershed between the medieval and modern world '. 7 Sacrosancta was followed by the decree Frequens (14 17) which laid down that general councils should henceforward be regular : the next in five years time, the next after that in seven years, by which time the reform of the Church might be completed, and thereafter every ten years. Figgis saw the Conciliar Movement as the precursor of the consti­ tutional principles which later triumphed in the Netherlands and in England, against the autocratic principles of the restored popes, Martin V and Eugenius IV. 'Eugenius IV is the forerunner of Louis XIV '. But the Conciliar Movement is the precursor too of the con­ stitutional principles which have never yet transformed international life. Frequens was so far observed that in 1423 a council was sum­ moned at Siena, but at once prorogued; after the prescribed seven years another met at Basle, which quick! y ran into conflict with Eugenius IV, was dissolved, resisted, elected the last of the anti­ popes, and protracted a futile and invalid existence for another ten years to disappear in 1 449. That was the end of the Conciliar Move­ ment. It left a strengthened papacy on a narrower foundation, and an international anarchy of strengthened secular powers. A subjective awareness of an international anarchy provides some evidence for the existence of a multitude of sovereign states, though not yet for a states-system. Perhaps the earliest description of inter­ national anarchy is one which comes immediately after the end of the Conciliar Movement, and dates appropriately from 1454, the year of the Peace of Lodi, the conventional beginning of the Concert of Italy. The fall of Constantinople the previous year had created general concern and a desire for European pacification. Nicholas V had issued a summons to a crusade. The Emperor Frederick

1 34

Systems of States

III organized a European congress at Regensburg, inviting France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland and Hungary, as well as the powers of Italy and Gennany. Most ignored the invitation ; some sent excuses (Christian of Denmark, for instance, that he was engaged in an expedition against Norway) ; Frederick himself found it conve­ nient to stay away; the only great powers, if the term may be used, who attended, were Philip of Burgundy in person, and representa­ tives of Casimir IV of Poland, who came, however, to prosecute the Polish dispute with the Teutonic Knights. The Congress met in May 14 54, made some fictitious schemes for joint action, and agreed to meet again in September. Aeneas Sylvius had been a member of the Imperial delegation, and a few days after the Congress had dis­ solved he wrote a pessimistic letter to a friend in Italy, as follows : You will say that the hope of successful action depends upon whether it is a well-attended congress (conventio grandis) or whether few Powers turn up. What do you think ? How do you see the future ? I prefer to hold my peace. I would rather my opinion were totally wrong - to be proved a false than a true prophet. All the same, I shall tell you my own presentiments. I do not hope for what I would like. I cannot persuade my own better judgment. You ask, why ? I answer, why should I entertain rosy hopes ? Christendom has no head, whom everybody is willing to obey. Neither the Pope nor the Emperor is rendered what is his due. There is no reverence, no obedience. We look on Pope and Emperor alike as names in a story or figures in some picture. Each state has its own king. There are as many rulers as there are prince! y families. How will you persuade as many leaders as there are in the Christian world to take up arms ? Let us just suppose that all these kings join together for war. How will you organise the command ? What order will there be in the army ? How are military discipline and obedience to be maintained ? How can such a host be provisioned ? Who will understand the different lan­ guages, and control the different national customs ? Who will reconcile the English with the French, Genoa with Naples, the Germans with the Bohemians and Hungarians ? If you lead a small army against the Turks, you will be easily defeated ; if it is a large one, you will be lost in confusion. On every side there are prob­ lems.8

The origins of our states-system : chronological limits

1 35

2. MUTUAL RECOGNITION

It would be impossible to have a society of sovereign states unless each state, while claiming sovereignty for itself, recognized that every other state had the right to claim and enjoy its own sovereignty as well. This reciprocity was inherent in the Western conception of sovereignty. It was confirmed by the legalism of feudal society, with its asswnption that every potentate has his rights, notwithstanding cantiWl�_l litigation vi et armis concerning conflicts of rights. Aqui­ nas, in a iscussing the limits of the proposition that all men are bound by law, observes as a matter of fact that ' the citizens of one city or realm are not bound by the laws of the ruler of another city or realm, just as they do not come under his dominion '. There were two com­ plementary principles : Chacon est maitre chez soi; personne n'est mattre hors de chez soi. 9 From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries it was assumed that the states of Western Christendom fell into al!_ierarch y. Feudal society was hierarchical ; the society of princes, though each claimed to acknowledge no superior, likewise ' observed degree, priority, and place, office and custom, in all line of order'. Hence the rules of the papal curia, with their tables of the rdative dignity of the monarchs and republics of Christendom.10 Hence the recurrent disputes be­ tween powers about precedence. The movement from a hierarchical to an egalitarian principle was probably inherent in the reciprocal recognition of sovereignty. Books have been written about the development of the doctrine of the equality of states.11 It was helped forward when Sweden entered the Thirty Years War as the enemy of the Holy Roman Emperor and the ally of the premier king of Europe, to neither of whom would she concede precedence, asserting the equality of all crowned heads. It was furthered by the confirmation of sovereign powers for the estates of the Empire at Westphalia, their acquiring the right to make their own foreign policies and, with Leibniz as their advocate, to equal diplomatic representation with other powers at the Congress of Nymwegen. It was formulated at last by Wolff, ' Natura gentes omnes inter se aequales sunt ',12 and more fully by his disciple Vartel : Puisque les hommes sont naturellement egaux, et que leurs droits et leurs obligations sont les memes, comme venant egalement de Ia

Systems of States

I

Nature, les Nations composees d'hommes, et considerees comme autant de personnes libres qui vivent ensemble dans l'etat de Nature, sont naturellement egales, et tiennent de la Nature les memes obligations et les memes droits. La puissance ou la faiblesse ne produisent, a cet egard, aucune difference. Un Nain est aussi bien un homme, qu'un Geant : Une petite Republique n'est pas moins un Etat souverain que le plus puissant Royaume.u This facile and uncritical statement conceals rather than reveals that the doctrine of the equality of states can mean no more than that all states recognize the right of all other states to equal treatment in law and in ceremony. The levelling of the international community was completed by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The abolition of the Holy Roman Empire removed the ancient president of the European Republic ; the defeat of Imperial France ended the pretensions of the Empire's ancient rival. The Congress of Vienna replaced the hierarchy by length of appointment between diplomatic representatives resident in each foreign post, and alphabetical order of states in the French language for signature of treaties. It is ironical that the same Congress that introduced this rational and egalitarian system, first also formal! y recognized the grading of states according to their power. 3. GREAT POWERS

The grading of powers is a matter of !heory. The managerial func­ tion of the great powers is a matter of practice. It is convenient to treat the two separately, since )ack of evidence prevents more than speculation about how they may have interacted upon one another. The earliest grading of powers known to me is in terms of political organization. Bartolus laid it down that there are three classes of state : 1 . Magna in primo gradu magnitudinis ; such are city-states, which ought to be direct democracies ; 2. Major, et sic in secunda gradu magnitudinis ; such are states too large by their extent of territory for direct democracy, like Venice or Florence; they are best governed by aristocracies ; 3· Maxima, et sic in tertia gradu magnitu­ dinis ; these are so large that it is necessary for their good government and unity to be ruled by monarchs. 14 The threefold classification of

The origins of our states�system : ch ronological limits

137

governments is commonplace. What seems not to be commonplace is the argument that each form of government can be appropriate, according to the size of state.u In thct. fifteenth century Concert of Italy the notion of a great power was fa41iar, and the phrase was taking shape. Commynes reports Lodovico il Moro, when he welcomed Charles VII I at A�ti in Sep­ tember 1 494, as having encouraged the French king with these words : ' En Ytalie, [il y] a trois puissances que nous tenons grandes, dont vous avez l'une, qui est Milan. L'autre ne bouge, qui sont Veniciens. Ainsi n'avez a faire que a cdle de Napples '1 8 Machiavelli speaks of ' i maggiori principi', Guicciardini of ' i maggiori Potentati '.17 I do not doubt that such phrases could be found earlier in the diplomatic documents. But the Italians were keenly aware that their classification was relative to their own little world : the true great powers lay beyond the Alps. Lodovico imme­ diately goes on to say to Charles VIII, sycophantically, of the Italian great powers : ' et plusieurs de vos predecesseurs nous ont batuz, quant nous estions tous ensemble '. During the period, roughly from 1 4 94 to 1 5 29, when the Italian states-system is losing its existence in a wider European system, the difference of status seems to coincide with the difference of religion : Italy is the field of the more important small powers ; France, Spain, the Emperor, England, perhaps the Swiss, are the great powers. But as the House of Habsburg and the French kingdom rear themselves ever higher above the rest, the class of great powers becomes overlaid and lost beneath these two dominant powers. Various phrases for describing them become current, and last through the seventeenth century, when circumstances are greatly changed. Burghley in his state papers generally calls them ' the two Monarchies'. Fulke Greville calls them ' these two Emperiall great­ nesses '. Rohan describes them as ' the two Poles, from whence des­ cend the influences of peace and war upon the other states '. Sir William Temple calls them ' the two Great Crowns ', Bolingbroke simply ' the two great powers '. I have not found any common dipl� matic phrase that admits to their company Elizabethan or Cromwell­ ian England, or the steadier greatness of the United Provinces, or the Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus.18 Diplomatic theory was conserva� tive, remaining well in the rear of the changes in relative power. The only power that was seen, by some writers, as in the same .

•

•

·

Systems of States class as Spain and France, was the Ottoman Empire. Botero begins his Ragione di Stato (1 5 89) with the ' divisions of dominion ' : per­ haps the first classification of states in terms of international power rather than domestic politics : Some dominions are small, others large, others medium; and these are not absolute but comparative, and with respect to their neigh­ bours. So a little state is one that is not able to maintain itself alone but has need of protection and of the suppon of another, as the Republic of Ragusa, and of Lucca. A medium one is that which has force and authority sufficient to maintain itself without the need of the help of another, as the Dominion of the Signory of Venice, the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Duchy of Milan, and the County of Flanders. Then we call those states great which have ' notable advantage over their neighbours, as the Turkish Empire, and that of the Catholic King .19 The examples of medium powers were obsolete at the time he wrote, and his two great powers were what today we call super-powers. Campanella described them a few years later in terms of unive���l ambitions : ' casa d' Austria e casa Ottoman aspirano alia somma delle cose umane ' .20 A more realist description was given a little later in the Discours des princeJ et estatJ de la Ch retientl of 1 623 or 1 624, which was the original for much of Rohan's De l'interet des princes et etats de la ch retiente of 1 638. ' Les grands puissances qui tiennent en contre­ poids Ies autres princes de Ia chrestiente sont les Maisons de France et d'Autriche : car ce sont les seuls qui peuvent sans secours d'autrui faire la guerre et l'entretenir tant qu'elles veulent, ne manquant pour cet effet ni d'hommes ni argent' .21 Thus, if we allow Campanella's criterion of universal aspiration to be the equivalent of the 'general interests' asserted by the great powers at the Par:is Peace Conference in 1 9 I g, and the independent war­ making capacity postulated by the Discours as a forerunner of the Raiikean ability ' to maintain itself against all others, even when they are united ', 22 we can say that the two principal modern definitions of great power status go back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. Let us return from theory to practice, and consider Hedley Bull's criterion of a managerial function. Let us notice, also, the grim way

� e originJ of our JtateJ-JyJtem : chronological limitJ

1 39

in which he describes this managerial function, in the opening sentence of his paper ' Super-Power Preponderance and International

Order ' : ' The super-powers contribute to international order in two main ways : by managing the balance of power between each other, and by exploiting their preponderance in relation to the rest of the world'. (A little later he says, ' only the super-powers are today in the full sense great powers ', so that it seems permissible to conflate the two classes, applying to the older what he says of the newer.) Nothing here about Great Responsibilities : about ' la vraie politique d'un grand etat c'est de proteger les petites nations ' (Thiers), ' the great nations rightly struggling for mastery, for supremacy of higher civilisation and higher political principles ' (L. S. Amery), ' the Great Powers must seek to serve and not to rule ' (Churchill). So much the better. It makes the managerial function of the great powers easier to look for, in the early centuries of the states�system. All the secondary accounts of the Italian Concert of the fifteenth century which are available to us show the great powers exercising the rather limited and self-interested managerial function that Hed­ ley Bull describes. Read for example in the eighth chapter of Matting­ ly, how the three great powers, Venice, Milan and Florence, make the Most Holy League between themselves in August 1454, inviting all the other powers of Italy to join them in a system of general pacification and collective security, how the fourth great power, the papacy, immediately joins, then all the smaller allies and neutral powers, lastly the fifth great power, Naples. In this, and the sequel, the managerial role of the great powers follows natural Iy from the preponderance they enjoy, just as it did in the nineteenth century . I guess that in this respect, as in most respects in international history,

reflection and formulation follow slowI y upon practice, so that the diplomatic documents would not yet have adequate analysis or description of what the great powers were manifestly doing. The quarter century from 1494 to 1 5 1 8 , when the consequences of the Franco-Spanish destruction of the Italian system are working themselves out, and Italian diplomatic practices are spreading north of the Alps, has a special flavour. The first frosts of winter for Italy are a springtime for Western Europe. There is a youthful folly and extravagance about the military expeditions of Maximilian, Charles VIII, James IV of Scotland, Henry VIII, Francis I, a clumsiness of inexperience about the diplomatic combinations of Louis XII, Julius

Syst�ms of S14t�s II, and afterwards Wolsey, as they fumble for the rules of power politics. Only Ferdinand at this time looks to us - and to Machiavelli - like a mature player, who know what he is doing and can bend his capacities to his aims. It is, moreover, a time more than any other in international history when there is a transient equality of status between the Transalpine powers. The new kingdoms seem more conscious of their equality of opportunity for adventure than of their inherent differences of strength and incipient differences of class. The League of Venice of March 1495 was the first European combination to include the powers of the old Italian system and the new Transalpine system on an equal footing : Milan plus Venice plus Spain plus the Emperor plus the pope plus Naples versus France.23 The Holy League of 1 5 1 I - I 2 was the last such combination ; only the papacy and Venice could any longer negotiate on equal terms with the Transalpine great powers. But the network of enemy-neighbours and encircle­ ment now spread across Europe from Valladolid and Naples to Edinburgh : Ferdinand plus Julius plus Venice plus the Swiss plus (later) Maximilian versus France versus England versus Scodand. Because the coalitions change so rapidly, because allies are picked up and discarded so easily, because there are no general congresses with the diplomatic questions that they raise, no consideration is yet given to differences of power and function. Such considerations begin to appear when Wolsey negotiates the multilateral Treaty of London in I 5 I 8, whose five principle contracting powers are an enumeration of the nominal great powers of the day : the pope, the Emperor, the three kings of France, Spain and En land. And these invite the lesser powers to adhere, as auxiliaries of one or another of the great. It is as clear an instance of great power management as one could wish. But the Austro-Spanish dynastic marriage, originally formed against French preponderance, had already encircled France terri­ torial! y with Habsburg power, and the election to the Empire of the Austro-Spanish instead of the French candidate, in I 5 I 9 gave French aggressiveness a defensive tinge. The 40 years' struggle that followed was to consolidate the power and clarify the raison d'etat of the two super-powers. Gradually they developed a sense of com­ mon interest, and the war ended with an example of great power management in the ideological sphere. The Peace of Cateau-Cam-

g

The origins of our states-system : chronological limits

14 1

bresis in I 55 9 was made possible for three reasons : Henry II of France was ready to abandon his dynasty's claims on Italy in ex­ change for solid aggrandisement on the Lorraine frontier, the two powers were financially exhausted, and they had found a common cause for concern in the growth of heresy and subversion. They made peace, partly, in order to extirpate Protestantism in their own territories and then throughout Christendom, as Henry II incau­ tiously told the young William of Orange, who was a delegate at the congress.2 4 That the two 'gret Monarchees ' are combined to enforce ' all christian Realmes to receave the Counsell of Trent', becomes the theme of Cecil's memoranda on English foreign policy. For wherof long Contynuance, France and Burgundy, and France and Spayn, wer commonly at Inmyte, and therby allweise on of them sought, for ther own Defence, to be allyed with England, and that for the most part was Burgundy, in respect that France was all yed with Scotland; now they both ar so combyned, (speci­ ally even in that Nature of Allyance, that is most contrariooss to the Crown of England, which is to avance the Sea of Roome,) that not only none of them doth desyre the Amyty of England, but ar rather bent to dayly Quarrells, and certenly intend the Overthrow of the Quenes Majesty of England; and this Lack of Allyance being evidendy seeme to the World, maketh many moor, both abrode and at home, more careless of hit Majesty. 2 11 The two great powers did not in fact co-operate to this end, but they were widely and reasonably feared to be exploiting their prepon­ derance, for ideological purposes, in relation to the rest of the world. 4. MEANS OF REGULAR COMMUNICATION

The regular means of conununication between sovereign states in our states-system have been I . Exchange of resident ambassadors, the ' diplomatic system ' par excellence; 2. Summit meetings; 3· Con­ gresses and conferences. The rise of the diplomatic system has been the most thoroughly explored by historians. Resident ambassadors are generally agreed to have first appeared in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and to have been regularly exchanged first in Italy after the Peace of Lodi.

Systems of States There is still debate about whether Venice or Visconti Milan took the initiative. It is a matter of distinguishing a resident ambassador from the many other kinds of envoy that were commissioned for longer or shorter periods, by potentates more or less sovereign, with varying degrees of reciprocity. But something that strikes the student of the controversy is the extent to which the evidence under discussion illustrates a pan-European diplomatic system, not one confined to Italy, although it is in Italy that it first becomes coherent and regular.2 6 Summit meeting is Churchillian language for a meeting of heads of governments, with the aim of expediting the processes of regular diplomacy. In medieval diplomacy such meetings were as common as in modern. There were a number of meetings between emperors and kings of France. 2 7 But

in

the fifteenth century summit meetings

acquired a new quality, because of the growing sense that great issues of state power might depend on them. Two such meetings attracted much contemporary attention by their dramatic quality, and became famous. One was the occasion when Louis XI went to visit Charles the B