Negotiation, the essential activity of diplomats, is an important phase in the process of shaping and executing foreign policy.* “Il faut négocier, négocier et toujours négocier,” suggested Talleyrand. Sir Harold Nicolson has even expressed the wish that the word “negotiation” be substituted for the word “diplomacy” because of the disagreeable flavor of the latter to many people. Success or failure of foreign policy is greatly influenced by the skill of negotiators, whose behavior can be more important for the course of history than is generally recognized. The skill of a negotiator, however, is determined not only by personal ability, but, more importantly, by the total political context, domestic and foreign, within which he operates.

The political history of France, as usually recorded, appears to be a conflict of parties, ideologies and ideologists: liberals against conservatives, royalists against republicans, and radicals against politicians of moderate tendencies. The Marxian conception of history has fortunately contributed to directing scientific research toward economic factors which might explain the attitude taken by this or that social group in certain circumstances, or might account for the progress of some parties in a specific region. Yet, research in that direction does not appear to have achieved any sensational discovery: to reduce all political history to a struggle between the “haves” and the “have-nots” is oversimplification and does not account for the disconcerting complexity of political strife in nineteenth century France.

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.

In the midst of the European Revolution of 1848, T. B. Macaulay offered the classical Whig explanation for England's immunity to it. England needed no revolution in 1848 because it had had its own safe and sane revolution of 1688, climaxed by that masterpiece of political wisdom, the Whig settlement. Without wholly superseding this distinctly Whig interpretation of England's stability in the midst of Europe's mid-nineteenth century cataclysms, Elie Halévy has supplemented it by pointing to the stabilizing influence of the Methodist-Evangelical Movement.Macaulay and Halévy overlooked one important element in Britannia's ability to rule the waves of revolution. It is an element somewhat repellent to liberal-minded historians, both in its nature and its source. For one of the factors in England's stability was the growth of a xenophobic, anti-revolutionary, nationalistic spirit and it was closely connected with anti-Catholicism. This anti-Catholicism was fostered and given direction by the Conservatives between 1832 and 1845, at which time it split that party wide open over the issue of the grant to the Roman Catholic Seminary of Maynooth in Ireland, as it had sixteen years earlier over Catholic Emancipation. The remarkable success of the Conservatives in rallying Englishmen to the anti-Irish “no-Popery” standard has been obscured by the traditional view that the period 1829–1848 saw the triumph of the liberal ideology, beginning with Catholic Emancipation, passing through the Reform Bill of 1832, and culminating in the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Out of what is sometimes called the dream world of pretenders have come some of the freshest, most common sensical political writings of contemporary France. Indeed, the doctrines advanced during the last twenty years by Henri, Comte de Paris (born in 1908), heir and pretender to the French throne, have earned him the epithet of “Revolutionary Prince.” To the many paradoxes of modern France must be added that of a pretender who has better understood the fundamental prerequisites of successful democratic government than many of the traditional Republican leaders.

“So then,” to quote the unforgettable Stephen Leacock, translating from the Greek, “the mighty hero Ajax leapt (better: was propelled from behind) into the fight.” Here is the paradox of British attitudes toward European unity. On the one hand, Britain has been a member or close associate of nearly all the European institutions so far brought into being. The first important moves in the defense of Europe after the Second World War were the Dunkirk Treaty (1947) between Britain and France, and the Brussels Treaty (1948) between these two countries and Benelux. A few years later the European Defense Community was being discussed, and Britain promised what amounted to little less than membership of it. When E.D.C. collapsed and Western European Union took its place, Britain joined W.E.U. and undertook to keep on the mainland of Europe its main ground force and tactical air force. These forces are not to be withdrawn from the mainland against the wishes of a majority of the W.E.U. powers.