ABSTRACT
In many respects the War of the Spanish Succession was a prologue to the great upheavals and renewals which Europe was to experience a hundred years later. On both occasions it was a question of getting rid of power-relationships which were antiquated and lifeless but which up to then had always been clung to, and of making room for the newly-risen forces in the collective life of Europe to develop. The upheaval of the revolutionary period affected the entire political and intellectual existence of the nations; but that of the early eighteenth century only affected a part of each of these, for Europe was not yet ready for a wholesale renovation. The completely antiquated and senile system of the Spanish-Hapsburg collective power and dyarchy, which had been founded by Charles V and Ferdinand I, was successfully overthrown. The single pillar of this system was broken up altogether into its parts; and the Spanish power-complex, which had embraced Spain, Belgium, Milan and South Italy, was dissolved. This was an extraordinarily meaningful event, for the first mighty blow was thereby given to the historical tradition with regard to the shaping of European power and territorial relationships. Hitherto, generally speaking, only separate provinces and countries had been lost and won in the struggles between powers. But now there fell a whole system, a great empire of a universalist character. And the neighbouring countries hitherto ruled by it were abandoned to changing and uncertain fates, because their new possessors had in no sense won them entirely by their own strength, and did not hold them with all the firmness of an age-old possession. In addition the principal heir, Austria, was soon threatened with a fate similar to that of her sister power Spain, namely that the dying out of the male line should cause her to break up into pieces. Thus grew in strength that trait of insecurity and fluctuation, which was so fundamental a characteristic of the European system of States. A swift winning and losing and exchanging of countries arose. This gave a powerful stimulus to political ambitions; and they would have gone much further than hitherto, and would even have effected quite different 258upheavals from those which they actually achieved in the two decades following the War of the Spanish Succession, if the physical State-resources behind them had been stronger, and if it had not been that a moderating and restricting influence was exerted by the two strongest powers in Europe—France and England.
