Most eighteenth-century writers and politicians rendered a cynical verdict on the behavior of the states making up their contemporary Europe. “Each nation in its natural state,” averred one widely read author in the 1740s, “must be considered as the enemy of all others; or as disposed to be such.” “We cannot rely on virtue,” conceded another sadly, some decades later; “it is weak or equivocal, or hidden and unknown;…we must thus take as our starting-point only the possible and even probable abuse of power.” Prussia's Frederick the Great, reacting in 1742 to concerns invoked by the specter of his fearsome army “living off the land” in neighboring Moravia, commented harshly that “it is the kingdom of heaven which is won by gentleness; those of this world belong to force.” And, more tellingly perhaps, even an individual like France's Rene-Louis de Voyer, Marquis d'Argenson, touted by his friends as a “philosopher” in public office, could pragmatically remark in 1739: “A state should always be at the ready, like a gentleman living among swashbucklers and quarrellers. Such are the nations of Europe, today more than ever; negotiations are only a continual struggle between men without principles, impudently aggressive and ever greedy.”

Thus was the endless competition for security and power and prestige among the European states, great and small, of that age. If this was not yet the twentieth century's global system of geopolitics, influencing the lives of all human beings for better or for worse, matters were nonetheless heading in that direction.