of the Polish Succession (1733–38), the War of the Austrian Succession
(1740–48), and the Seven Years War (1756–63) – all of which were multi-
lateral, if not European-wide wars – were long-drawn-out affairs.
If these observations do not
per se falsify Schmitt’s thesis of a ‘war-in-
form’, they are thrown into sharp relief when read in conjunction with the
‘rationality’ of war-declarations, aims, and endings and the actual con-
duct of war. Given that military conflicts were essentially inter-dynastic
conflicts between
magni homines, the predominant contemporary form of
conflict was, next to naval trade wars, the war of succession. This
appellation indicates that the
casus belli were rarely, if ever, motivated by
a rational calculus of costs and benefits – a self-limiting Clausewitzian
move that calibrated the war-effort as a rational exercise to a clearly
defined political interest. The proximate causes of these wars of succes-
sion resided in the ‘irrational’ biological accidents of dynastic vacancies
and inheritance disputes among the European fraternity of princes
(Kunisch 1987). War-declarations, aims, and endings were decisively
shaped by these inter-dynastic conflicts that were, at a deeper sociological
level, property disputes. As sovereignty was a personal adjunct of dynastic
houses, every death of a reigning monarch led to succession crises that
turned immediately into multilateral affairs, as most royal houses were
connected through elaborate marital strategies in which states married
states to aggrandize their territory-as-property. Correlatively, the logic of
trade wars, notably the sequence of Anglo–Dutch naval wars, was
grounded in the mercantilist imperatives for the militarized control of
exclusive trading routes.
In this context, war aims were not ‘limited’, but assumed an imperial,
totalizing character, as Europe was regarded by dynastic rulers as a kind
of property-map. As control over ‘land and people’ constituted the main
source of income for rulers in pre-capitalist Europe, even though it was in
finite supply as a natural monopoly, geopolitical accumulation – the
horizontal need to accumulate territories – led to intense re-distributional
conflicts among the personalized owners of sovereignty in zero-sum
conflicts over limited European territory. The divisions of Poland exem-
plify this totalizing logic. It was this, given Schmitt’s lack of any causal
account of war, which drove the intense military rivalries at the time.
Wars were not ended by rational design, but by mutual exhaustion and
financial-military attrition, leading to unsustainable public debts and,
repeatedly, to public bankruptcies. These deepened the concessions that
rulers had to make to their nobilities, tax-farmers, and financiers. But as
absolute sovereignty was essentially a contested institution – relying on an
unstable compromise between dynasties and their nobilities – war-endings
also blended quickly over into prolonged civil wars, as evidenced by the
Fatal attraction: Schmitt’s international theory 205
French Fronde, a noble rebellion against the cutting of their privileges
after the Peace Treaty of Westphalia.
The conduct of war was not humanized, either in terms of
ius in
bello, or in terms of a clear distinction between combatants and non-
combatants. The effects of war on civilian populations were devastating.
As war-logistics were not properly developed and soldiers lacked per-
manent provisioning, early modern armies lived ‘off the land’, either from
looting and pillaging on foreign soil, or by way of sequestration and
ransom. Armies tended to ransack civilian areas in an effort to feed
themselves, causing plunder, rape, famines, and population displacement.
Bellum se ipse alet (war feeds off itself) captures this predicament.
The absence of a clear set of rules and powers of enforcement concerning
the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants implied their ransom for
money or other prisoners, if they were not killed outright.
18
Forced
conscription of civilians was a common practice. Any sociology of con-
temporary armies shows that in spite of all the (Weberian and Fou-
cauldian) emphasis on the increasingly rationalized, professionalized, and
disciplined character of the new standing armies, soldiers were generally
not salaried bureaucrats, but ‘in pay’ of noble officers who had usually
themselves bought their military commissions. Armies were not public
armies, but precisely ‘the king’s armies’; yet, essentially beyond their
disciplinary control (Kroener 2000, 205).
19
War was not, as Schmitt suggests, an intermittent, temporally limited,
and formalized affair of a polity’s outward relations, neatly divorced from
the inner constitution of pre-existing entities, but the central preoccupa-
tion of early modern polities that directly penetrated their internal con-
stitution and their very
raison d’eˆtre. War was the central axis of early
modern geopolitics and money its engine (
pecunia nervus rerum) – and the
ultimate arbiter over defeat and victory. Across Europe, public finances
were dominated by war expenditures and associated debt-servicing.
20
War was the state’s
prima and ultima ratio. As wars grew ever costlier,
taxation-rates increased, social discontent mounted, public debts multiplied,
and royal bankruptcies proliferated, until revolution and reform reconfigured
property and authority relations, tax systems and public finance – and
18
For the slow and uneven growth of state control in relation to these practices, see
Contamine (2000b).
19
Nor did a ‘non-discriminatory concept of war’ imply that moral–legal war legitimations
were no longer required by the
ius publicum, or provided by warring parties (Repgen 1985).
20
‘The great scourge of public expenditure was the growing proportion devoted to war
(
y
) – 40 per cent of the total in the fifteenth century, 27 per cent in the sixteenth, 46 per cent in
the seventeenth and 54 per cent in the eighteenth’ (Ko¨rner 1995, 416; cf. Bonney 1999).
206
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