The Hundred Years' Peace [ 5 ]
peace once the world economy on which it rested had failed. This ac-
counts for the abruptness with which the break occurred, the incon-
ceivable rapidity of the dissolution.
But if the breakdown of our civilization was timed by the failure of
world economy, it was certainly not caused by it. Its origins lay more
than a hundred years back in that social and technological upheaval
from which the idea of a self-regulating market system sprang in West-
ern Europe. The end of this venture has come in our time; it closes a
distinct stage in the history of industrial civilization.
In the final part of the book we shall deal with the mechanism
which governed social and national change in our time. We shall also
deal with the human situation. Broadly, we believe that the present
condition of man is to be defined in terms of the institutional origins
of the crisis.
The nineteenth century produced a phenomenon unheard of in the
annals of Western civilization, namely, a hundred years' peace—1815-
1914. Apart from the Crimean War—a more or less colonial event—
England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in
war among each other for altogether only eighteen months. A compu-
tation of comparable figures for the two preceding centuries gives an
average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the
fiercest of nineteenth-century conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian
War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year's duration with the de-
feated nation being able to pay over an unheard-of sum as an indem-
nity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned.
This triumph of a pragmatic pacifism was certainly not the result
of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Almost continuous shifts in
the internal and external conditions of powerful nations and great
empires accompanied this irenic pageant. During the first part of the
century civil wars, revolutionary and antirevolutionary interventions,
were the order of the day. In Spain a hundred thousand troops under
the Due d'Angouleme stormed Cadiz; in Hungary the Magyar revolu-
tion threatened to defeat the emperor himself in pitched battle and
was ultimately suppressed only by a Russian army fighting on Hungar-
ian soil. Armed interventions in the Germanies, in Belgium, Poland,
Switzerland, Denmark, and Venice marked the omnipresence of the
Holy Alliance. During the second half of the century the dynamics of
progress were released; the Ottoman, Egyptian, and the Sheriffian em-
[ 6 ] The Great Transformation
pires broke up or were dismembered; China was forced by invading
armies to open her door to the foreigner, and in one gigantic haul the
continent of Africa was partitioned. Simultaneously, two Powers rose
to world importance: the United States and Russia. National unity was
achieved by Germany and Italy; Belgium, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria,
Serbia, and Hungary assumed, or reassumed, their places as sovereign
states on the map of Europe. An almost incessant series of open wars
accompanied the march of industrial civilization into the domains of
outworn cultures or primitive peoples. Russia's military conquests in
Central Asia, England's numberless Indian and African wars, France's
exploits in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, Syria, Madagascar, Indo-China, and
Siam raised issues between the Powers which, as a rule, only force can
arbitrate. Yet every single one of these conflicts was localized, and nu-
merous other occasions for violent change were either met by joint ac-
tion or smothered into compromise by the Great Powers. Regardless
of how the methods altered, the result was the same. While in the first
part of the century constitutionalism was banned and the Holy Alli-
ance suppressed freedom in the name of peace, during the other
half—and again in the name of peace—constitutions were foisted
upon turbulent despots by business-minded bankers. Thus under
varying forms and ever-shifting ideologies—sometimes in the name
of progress and liberty, sometimes by the authority of the throne and
the altar, sometimes by grace of the stock exchange and the checkbook,
sometimes by corruption and bribery, sometimes by moral argument
and enlightened appeal, sometimes by the broadside and the bayo-
net—one and the same result was attained: peace was preserved.
This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of
the balance of power, which here produced a result that is normally
foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different re-
sult, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely
postulates that three or more units capable of exerting power will al-
ways behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units
against any increase in the power of the strongest. In the realm of uni-
versal history, balance of power was concerned with states whose inde-
pendence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by contin-
uous wars between changing partners. The practice of the ancient
Greek or the Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars
between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence
of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same prin-
The Hundred Years' Peace [ 7 ]
ciple safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the
states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Miinster and West-
phalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht,
the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they
thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guaran-
tees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium
of war. The fact that in the nineteenth century the same mechanism
resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the his-
torian.
The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute
peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as being
outside the scope of the system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and
arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might
pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state ac-
tion it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments
subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that
could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate
means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a commu-
nity than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As
late as the second half of the eighteenth century, J. J. Rousseau ar-
raigned tradespeople for their lack of patriotism because they were
suspect of preferring peace to liberty.
After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the
French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolu-
tion in establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metter-
nich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not lib-
erty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and
throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their argu-
ments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms
of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the
nascent economies.
The bearers of the new "peace interest" were, as usual, those who
chiefly benefited by it, namely, that cartel of dynasts and feudalists
whose patrimonial positions were threatened by the revolutionary
wave of patriotism that was sweeping the Continent. Thus for approx-
imately a third of a century the Holy Alliance provided the coercive
force and the ideological impetus for an active peace policy; its armies
were roaming up and down Europe putting down minorities and re-
pressing majorities. From 1846 to about 1871—"one of the most con-
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