ABSTRACT
The Peace of Utrecht is generally considered a crucial milestone for international relations. It is said that this peace opened a new era characterised by the spread of ‘rational’ forms of diplomacy. Based on the idea of the balance of power between different European states, this new diplomacy restrained the previous dynastic struggle fuelled by the political ambitions and territorial claims of monarchies supported by arguments drawn from private law. 2 According to this explanatory framework, the global conflagration that was the War of the Spanish Succession came out of the religious conflicts that had devastated Europe since the early sixteenth century and had now finally been replaced by mercantile and colonial competition. The various treaties signed in the cities of Utrecht, Rastatt and Baden between 1713 and 1714 were the outcome of this change in focus. 3 All this was further exacerbated by the increasing influence of propaganda and the press, which for the first time created a public space for debate capable of exercising a significant influence on decision-making processes. 4
In general, the exhibitions, conferences and seminars organised to celebrate the tricentenary of these treaties tend to emphasise this exceptionalist perspective. If anything, arguments have been put forth questioning the supposed secularisation of international relations and emphasising the continued presence of religious factors in the origins and eventual conclusion of the war. 5 In this volume, Tony Claydon even claims that the ascendancy of the power-balance system was hardly a novelty, since it was at the foundation of the struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism during the sixteenth century. These ideas have been eloquently presented in the interesting catalogue for the exhibition coordinated by Renger de Bruin and Maarten Brinkman. The exhibition establishes a genealogy for these treaties which seems to be based on the explosion of the religious Reformation and, obviously, on the revolt of the Low Countries against the tyranny of the Duke of Alba. This was the archetype of the expansionist policies pursued by the Catholic monarchy, a path that is directly connected with the Bourbon cause in the early eighteenth century. 6
antagonism between the Republic of the United Provinces, the modernising exception based on religious tolerance and mercantile growth, and the Spanish monarchy, paradigm of dynastic absolutism and the aristocratic values later embraced by Louis XIV. The multiple factors of interdependence created between Madrid and The Hague after the Peace of Westphalia – encouraged by the succession of European coalitions aimed at counterbalancing French expansionist policy in the second half of the seventeenth century – are intentionally put aside. 7 Without questioning the importance of the Treaties of Utrecht, we believe that reanalysis of Spanish-Dutch relations between 1648 and 1714 will – reflecting the spirit of this volume – open up new and hitherto overlooked perspectives from which to contest a number of common positions and claims that need to be revisited.
