ABSTRACT

The previous chapters have shown that since geographically sovereign states replaced the horizonal structure of medieval Christendom, a propensity to hegemony, that is a tendency to move back from the more absolute forms of multiple independences, was inherent in the European system. The desire of the strongest state to lay down the law for the whole system, at least in the external relations between its members, was made more acceptable by the advantages that a measure of authority in the system brought to others too. It was not that the kingship must reside somewhere. The pre-eminence claimed by the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of France, and the rights and obligations that were held to go with this claim, did not amount to hegemony. The legitimacies established by the settlements of Westphalia and Utrecht were anti-hegemonial, Utrecht explicitly so. But even anti-hegemonial statesmen were aware that hegemony brought certain benefits; and they intended the conscious observance of the balance of power and of international law to provide some of these benefits in other ways. Such was the propensity to hegemony that even the anti-hegemonial alliances which such statesmen formed to resist a specific bid for hegemony installed, by their very success, the strongest power in the coalitions-first the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and then the Bourbon-Habsburg king of France-in a hegemonial position. The formal commitment of the eighteenth-century sovereigns’ club to a multilateral balance of power at Utrecht lasted for three-quarters of a century. During that time power was effectively balanced. No state was conspicuously stronger than the others; and France, potentially the strongest state in the system, did not at that time achieve its potential.