5 - THE LETHAL MINUET: WAR AND PEACE AMONG THE PRINCES OF CHRISTENDOM, 1715–1814

Summary

It is certainly a remarkable occurrence, that in the course of three most eventful centuries, amid so many bloody wars, so various and decisive negotiations, so frequent changes of power …, amid a general anarchy of all social, civil, religious, and political relations, not one independent state was annihilated by violent means.

Emmerich de Vattel

Powerful sovereigns succeed only too often in winning for themselves partisans and allies who are blindly devoted to their designs. Dazzled by the glitter of a present advantage, seduced by their greed, deceived by unfaithful ministers, how many princes become the instruments of a power which will one day swallow up either themselves or their successors.

Friedrich von Gentz

The War of the Spanish Succession did not suggest that something may have been wrong with the structure, actors, or processes of the new system. Quite the contrary: it demonstrated that it was working very well. The international problem of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was not war. It was hegemony, Louis's version of the old drive for domination that had animated Charles V and the Spanish imperialists. It was the success of the system in solving that problem, via the operation of the balance of power, that helps account for the absence of concern about the problem of war.