ESF-LiU Conference
REFORMING THE EUROPEAN STATE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Session 1 - Small states and empires in the long eighteenth century
The rise of commercial empires like Britain and France, which were locked into competition for trade and influence that resulted in a series of global wars, altered the survival strategies of Europe’s smaller states in the eighteenth century. As Adam Ferguson wrote in An essay on the history of civil society (1767), small states were no longer masters of their own destiny because they could not defend themselves; in refusing to give up their precarious liberty they had become ‘neither masters nor slaves’. Many of the citizens and subjects of these states turned to Britain as the only state capable of sustaining a commercial empire whose prosperity was dependent upon international peace, or at least upon peace in Europe. In describing such an empire, the members of the smaller states were forced to speculate on the likely future of Britain, and more especially upon the effects of Britain’s ‘mercantile system’, which had been seen to be the fundamental impediment to Britain’s pacific role in international affairs, a source of reason of state politics, war and the likely cause of the collapse of Britain’s empire. Those who had no faith in Britain’s commercial and constitutional experiment placed their hopes in a reformed France playing a hegemonic but pacific role in European power politics, or alternatively in the rise of new empires, based on agricultural development, such as Prussia, or Tom Paine’s global union of republics, founded on rational religion and moral commerce. In these debates, the question of the number of European states compatible with peace, global markets, and empire came to the fore – by 1815, of course, the map of Europe had been re-drawn with the loss of hundreds of small states. In such circumstances, pessimism was also rampant, and the long eighteenth century was littered with predictions of the inevitable decline of commercial empires, because ancient history showed that the rise of a new Carthage or Rome (Britain and France) always led the number of the states in Europe to fall, and leaving Europe open to a new wave of barbarian invasions. The aim of all of the papers of the session is to broaden our understanding of the themes, which were prominent during the movement from early-modern to modern European history.
Confirmed speakers: Istvan Hont (Cambridge), Richard Whatmore (Sussex), Béla Kapossy (Lausanne), Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge)
Session 2 - Nordic political economy and the future of Europe
What outlooks did people like Anders Nordencrantz – who wrote on the demise of the Gothic constitution in Sweden, Spain and Europe, agricultural development and the reform of Swedish finance – form on the past and future of the Swedish and Danish constitutions, the economic competitiveness of Nordic states and their possible roles in the interstate system as it might develop as a result of eighteenth-century upheavals? This session confronts the ideas of a Danish-Norwegian and Swedish-Finnish writers on these matters with the images shared by a number of European writers on Nordic constitutional and legislative liberty, simple manners and a strong capacity for agricultural productivity. Nordic (particularly Swedish) liberty, these writers believed, came closest to an ideal of a society unspoilt by the trade and manufacture based early-modern political economies that dominated Western Europe. One of the objectives of this session is to open up traditions of national political historiography and show that Nordic writers operated to a large extent within the same political discourses as authors elsewhere and were taking part in a larger European debate on the French and British models for interstate relations. Recently, the Danish and Swedish debates about monarchies have been reconsidered. But it has not been explored in what way these debates shaped views about Swedish and Danish politics in relation to what they thought European interstate dynamics were going to look like in years to come. Important starting questions would be: what foreign political economic models could and should Sweden and Denmark follow, according to writers at the time? Which French, British, German, etc thinkers were influential in the Nordic countries and for what reasons? What – divergent – moral and political sets of ideas lay behind the coups by Struensee-Guldberg and Gustav III in 1772 and what generated the movements that triggered the frequent transitions, both in Sweden and Denmark during the eighteenth century in attitudes towards closing off or opening up the national economy towards the outside world?
Confirmed speakers: Lars Magnusson (Uppsala), Antonella Alimento (Pisa), Henrik Horstbøll (Copenhagen), Koen Stapelbroek (Rotterdam)
Session 3 - Justice, law and war and the idea of a Jus publicum europaeum
Among the many contexts in which during the eighteenth century the idea of Europe was shaped were those of theories of Perpetual Peace and of the concept of jus publicum europaeum. Both notions revolved around the domestication of war in its relation to right, even if right was conceptualised in each notion along highly divergent lines. The objective of the papers in this session is to inquire, on the one hand, into the statute and the articulation of different levels of right that regulate interstate relations – natural law, the law of nations and the jus publicum europaeum – and how these are held to be instruments for regulating and overcoming conflict. On the other hand, the intention is to test the validity of the concept of jus publicum europaeum as it was systematised by Carl Schmitt and largely utilised in contemporary juridical and political literature, and which came to its end in the events of international politics during the twentieth century. A critical rethinking of notions like the dogma of statehood, the distinction between inside and outside and the transcendence of the notion of ‘just war’ constitutes the central theme in the papers presented in this session.
Confirmed speakers: Luca Scuccimarra (Macerata), Simone Zurbuchen (Fribourg), Olaf Asbach (Augsburg), Gabriella Silvestrini (Alessandria)
Session 4 - Vattel and the foundations of international law
Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) was by far the most important book on the law of nations of the eighteenth century. Vattel likened Europe to a large republic where an “eternal and immutable law of nature” obliged a state, not only to respect and to treat all other states as equals, but also to provide mutual aid. But Vattel alsoinsisted on the primacy of self-preservation, claiming that prudence prevented existing states from making mutual aid the guiding principle of foreign politics. His defence of a natural law of nations together with his insistence on state sovereignty earned him a reputation for incoherence, or, as many international law theorists writing after thefirst World War maintained, for being an unconditional supporter of reason of state, who, as one of them put it, “disguised his evil intentions through words of sublime charity.” The aim of this session is to reassess Vattel’s vision of a workable European order in the light of recent scholarship in the history of political thought. Special attention will be given to his idea of the state, his theory of natural law as well as the moral theory which he claimed underlined his idea of international law.
Confirmed speakers: Knud Haakonssen (Sussex), Tim Hochstrasser (LSE), Thomas Ahnert (Edinburgh), Petter Korkman (Helsinki)
Session 5 - The rise of modern diplomacy 1714-1814
This session brings into focus the importance of diplomacy in the development of the European state system in the eighteenth century. Traditionally, diplomatic texts have been studied, predominantly as sources for establishing various political, cultural, literary and economic histories; i.e. with objectives very different from the analysis of the rise of the profession of the diplomat in the modern system of international relations. The papers in this session aim to demonstrate how the European state system in the long eighteenth century took on certain specific characteristics, also with regard to the development of diplomatic careers, as an autonomous profession, that differentiated itself profoundly with respect to the system of ambassadors of previous times, which hinged upon clientele relations between persons and the sovereign. Another characteristic of diplomacy in the eighteenth century is the development of consular relations and of international legislation on consular affairs. The presentations in this session will thus engage with the birth of the modern profession of the diplomat and of schools of diplomacy, the definition of his imperatives and activities and the international agreements of the eighteenth century concerning reciprocity, immunity and rank, the transformation of the diplomatic document and its function, the differences between consular and ambassadorial activity, the problem of precedence and of social and economic status of diplomats. In the final instance, the speakers will connect their findings on these matters to the question how different visions of the role of diplomacy fit in with alternative visions of European state cooperation, just like concomitant arguments about economic and fiscal reform, theories of international law, etc did. Thus, the session seeks to bring out how debates about modern diplomacy represented wider perspectives on European state system reform.
Confirmed speakers: Serguei Karp (Russian Academy of Science, Moscow), Antonio Trampus (Venice), Charles-Edouard Levillain (Lille), Eric Schnakenbourg (Nantes)
