Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I A HISTORY OF INTERNATIONALIST THEORIES
- PART II A HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATES' SYSTEM TO 1900
- 8 The Beginnings of the System
- 9 The First Fifty Years
- 10 The Concert of Europe
- 11 International Relations in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- References
- Index
9 - The First Fifty Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I A HISTORY OF INTERNATIONALIST THEORIES
- PART II A HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATES' SYSTEM TO 1900
- 8 The Beginnings of the System
- 9 The First Fifty Years
- 10 The Concert of Europe
- 11 International Relations in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
- PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- References
- Index
Summary
In the year 1800 in L' État de la France à la Fin de l' An VIII, an anonymous publication written for the French government, Hauterive, perhaps the earliest director of a modern Ministry of Information, criticised the international system as it had operated in Europe since 1760.
At the outbreak of the French Revolution, he wrote, an effective law of nations had no longer existed. ‘The true principles of Europe's political and federal constitution were neglected or forgotten.’ Indeed, they had been destroyed―by the rise of the Russian Empire as a factor in the north of Europe and ‘the intervention of this in the intercourse of the rest’; by the development of Prussia to ‘a Power of the highest rank’, and especially by her resort to war, to a new form of government, to new military tactics, to the policy of accumulating treasure in the interests of power, which steps had forced all the states into an unnatural and enervating concentration on struggle; by ‘the rise and progress of the commercial and colonial system’ of Great Britain, which had had equally destructive consequences. By 1789 on account of these developments ‘there had long ceased to exist any maxims of government, any federal union, any fixed political principles in Europe….
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States , pp. 186 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1962