8
State and nation in nineteenth-century international political theory
Both the "state" and, perhaps less obviously, the "nation" are terms which recur in international political theory; nonetheless, both terms came to have rather different meanings from past usage in the course of the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover, the two meanings became interwoven one with another, such that in the course of our own century it has become common to regard them as almost synonymous, or at least both incorporated in the composite term "nation-state" - even though it is very difficult to arrive at a substantive definition of a nation which would allow more than a minority of the actual states of today to qualify, for all their membership of the United Nations. The purpose of the texts which follow this introduction is to set out the international implications of these changes in meaning.
If one were to attempt to encapsulate as simply as possible the nature of these changes, it would be by noting the emergence of the idea of an "ethical" state and the principle of national sovereignty. In past thinking - at least in the Christian era - the state had been understood as an institution which was either a necessary evil, as a partial antidote to human sinfulness, or a clever, contracted, solution to the problem of the egoism generated by the human condition in a state of nature. But, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, a number of different movements in thought converged on the proposition that the state could be a positive force for good, indeed that an ethical life actually required the existence of a particular kind of state. Moreover, although this thought was initially heavily influenced by, and envious of, classical Greek or Roman republicanism, in its most important manifestation in the writings of Hegel and his followers it came to be seen that there were specific characteristics of the modern state which made it an even more suitable carrier of the ethical idea than had been Athens or Rome. Again, whereas, in past thinking, a nation had been understood in rather loose terms as a "people" (gens), or even a wider grouping - as at the University of Paris in medieval times when the "English Nation" was a body
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of students who incorporated a number of different modern nationalities, some unconnected to England or even the British Isles - in the course of the nineteenth century it became widely believed that the world (or at least the "civilized" world) was naturally divided into nations, and that such nations formed the only legitimate foundations upon which a state could be built. Sovereignty came to be seen as something that grew out of, was exercised on behalf of, the "nation," which ultimately meant the "people" - hence the revolutionary symbolism of the change of title between Louis XVI, who was king of France (a place), and Napoleon I who was emperor of the French (the people).
In the nineteenth century both the ethical state and national sovereignty were resisted by powerful forces; utilitarians and "Manchester School liberals (see chapter 9) resisted the idea that the state could be anything other than a neutral force in society, anything more than a resolver of the dilemmas of collective action, while dynastic legitimists inevitably opposed the national principle. These movements of opposition continued into the twentieth century, but with rather less effect. The triumph of the national principle has been noted already; national self-determination has become one of the "settled norms" of international society (Frost, 1996). Much the same might be said of the idea of an ethical state; although the term itself is rarely used today, the idea that the state exists to promote in a positive way the good life for its citizens is more widely held now than it was in the last century. In short, when we study the emergence of these ideas in the nineteenth century, we are studying forces of great significance for our own era.
One preliminary point needs to be made. This chapter examines state and nation in nineteenth-century international relations, while the next, chapter 9, traces the impact of the emergence of industrial society on the international relations of the period. Although this division makes sense in presentational terms it is, nonetheless, artificial - one of the reasons for the emergence of new notions of the state and nation was the simultaneous emergence of industrial society; moreover, the chain of causation went in both directions, and the new national states which emerged then were critical for the spread of industrialism. In terms of the themes which run through this book, these two sides of the coin of nineteenth-century international relations - industrialism and the nation-state - largely pull in opposite directions. As we shall see, the dominant, liberal, view of industrial society, prefiguring later theories of "globalization," held that it was breaking down barriers between "insiders" and "outsiders," that it would provide a foundation upon which a truly cosmopolitan world order could be constructed. The theorists of state and nation whose work will be discussed in this chapter dispute this trajectory, arguing instead that the demands of the new nation-state, legitimized by the people, told in favor of a more particularistic account
of politics. In so far as the particularistic community has moral value its putative replacement by wider, more inclusive, structures cannot be seen as unproblematic. For most of the writers discussed in both chapters, the line between universal and particular was less clear cut than this account would imply, but the tension remains. In short, chapters 8 and 9 need to be read together as accounts of different aspects of the same broad story, rather than as discrete narratives.
The ethical state and its external environment
Political legitimacy and the role of the state was an important issue in Enlightenment thinking but the positive value attached to these notions is a function of post-Enlightenment thought. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment either despised patriotism and the claims of the state -Hume, Voltaire, and Mozart - or valued it by reference to dubiously appropriate models drawn from Greece and Rome - as with the French Encyclopaedists and revolutionaries, and, perhaps, Rousseau himself. At best, and building on the contract tradition, there might be Kant's acknowledgement of the potential role of the state in overcoming humanity's "unsocial sociability." None of these authors welcomed the idea of popular participation in politics, much less democracy, unless, as in the revolutionary tradition, the people could first be turned into good republican citizens. Politics was widely regarded as the realm of irrationality and unenlightenment, and at the international level much of the thought of the period revolved around schemes of "Perpetual Peace" which were designed to overcome the impact of irrational particularistic identifications. Meanwhile, personal satisfaction was to be gained from "cultivating one's garden" (Voltaire's Candide) or contemplating the moral law and the wonders of nature (Kant) - two extreme expressions of the importance of a private life and a life of the mind. Only Rousseau - whose thought is notoriously difficult to classify - envisages the good life as a life lived publicly as a citizen; however, the terms under which he believed this to be possible, small autarchic face-to-face communities, had, as he acknowledged, gone for ever. After his death, revolutionary France with its mix of mob-rule and elitism parodied the classical tradition and demonstrated the unviability of that kind of republican life.
It was inevitable that this cosmopolitanism would provoke a reaction. For many involved in the "romantic" movement of the end of the eighteenth century, even revolutionary chaos seemed preferable to the desiccated rationalism of the Enlightenment. Drawing inspiration from folklorists such as J. G. Herder or the (possibly fake) Scots bard Ossian, and from their sense
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of the lost warmth of the communities of the ancient world, these writers developed a compelling critique of Enlightenment, but not a viable account of politics and the state. Part of the problem was that although they were critical of the rationalism and individualism of the Enlightenment, they were, in effect, a product of what they condemned; it was only because they were actually rational, self-determining individuals and not, in fact, defined by all-encompassing affective communities that they were able to critique the former and advocate the latter. What was required to escape this contradiction was a politics which preserved the notion of the self-determining individual, the Enlightenment's greatest achievement, while embedding this person in an affective community which could provide the warmth and sense of belonging banished by Enlightenment rationalism. It was this combination that G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) claimed to be able to provide (Avineri, 1972; C. Taylor, 1975; Plant, 1983).
Hegel is a notoriously difficult writer who offers a very ambitious system which claimed to comprehend everything of philosophical significance. Of particular importance to us are his Philosophy of History (Hegel, 1956) and his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel, 1991), lectures which give the fullest account of his notions of ethics and politics. Hegel understands history as the growing self-understanding of Geist which takes place through the emergence of ever more complex and ethically rich institutions and ideas, culminating in the rational, ethical state of the modern age - Geist is best translated as Spirit, although Mind would also be acceptable; the term has strong religious connotations. How Spirit or Mind can be said to achieve self-understanding has puzzled many very capable thinkers, and it is fortunate that it is possible to present an account of Hegel which does not rely too heavily on this notion. We can instead think of his work as an account of the development of freedom and the conditions required to create autonomous, self-determining individuals - it is because of the richness of his thought understood in these terms that he became, and remains, one of the most influential of all political philosophers.
For the emergence of free individuals, Hegel argues, three dimensions of ethical life are necessary. The ethical family provides unconditional love, a context within which the individual comes to have a sense of his or her own worth. This is a necessary foundation for autonomy but not sufficient; individuals must leave this arena of unconditional affection and make their way in a wider world in which they must earn respect. In this wider world, which Hegel terms "civil society," individuals encounter each other as potential opponents and rivals, but also as rights-holders in a context where relations are governed by law. In civil society are to be found many of the institutions that from the perspective of Anglo-American liberalism are thought of as part of the state - public administration and the judicial system, for example,
or "the police and the corporation" as Hegel puts it. But, just as the family needs to be accompanied by civil society because autonomous individuals cannot be created in a world governed by unconditional love, so civil society on its own would be a realm of strife and tension were it not to be accompanied by a third ethical institution, the state. For Hegel, the state is not to be understood primarily as the site of decision-making on policy matters, which is its role in conventional liberal thought; instead the role of the state is to reconcile individuals to each other. As members of civil society individuals compete fiercely - albeit under terms governed by law - and inequality and a degree of civil strife is the inevitable result, but as fellow citizens they meet as equals and differences are reconciled; such at least is Hegel's claim.
Before moving to consider the implications of this position for international relations one or two points need to be clarified. First, this set of institutions - family, civil society, and the state - is, in their ethical forms, a product of modernity. In the world of classical Greece, freedom was available in the polis, but for some only and in an unreflective form .The Romans created universal legal categories but under the empire free institutions disappeared and the Roman family was based, indefensibly, on the untrammeled power of the father. It is only in the modern, post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment world that all the preconditions of freedom come together. At times Hegel seems to suggest that a fully ethical state has been achieved already, and "Right Hegelians" draw conservative lessons from this position; "Left Hegelians" argue - with at least equal plausibility - that Hegel's thought offers not a defense of the status quo but a call to reform; the ethical community is a possibility towards which we should strive rather than an achievement to be defended.
A second, very important, point concerns the nature of the state itself. Hegel regards the state as a critically important institution which overshadows every other aspect of communal life, in the process using language which has led many to accuse him of worshipping the state, and of preparing the way for totalitarianism. However, what is crucial to remember here is that Hegel's ethical state is characterized by the rule of law and the separation of powers. Hegel favors monarchy, but always constitutional monarchy in a Rechtstaat - a state governed by law and devoted to justice.
What kind of international relations might one expect to find in a world of Hegelian states? The first text presented in this chapter provides the answer, reproducing those sections of the Philosophy of Right on international law (§§ 330-40) (pp. 470-5 below). It will be noted that Hegel believes that states need other states in order to function properly; just as individuals cannot develop their individuality except by rubbing against other individuals (metaphorically speaking) so states can only develop their individuality by living in a world of other states; whether this is a helpful analogy can be disputed, but for Hegel it follows that states cannot surrender their
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sovereignty, that, therefore, war must always remain a possibility and schemes of "Perpetual Peace" - he mentions Kant in particular - cannot succeed.They rely on states limiting themselves and any agreement of self-limitation will always be "tainted with contingency." Moreover, Hegel is prepared to envisage a positive role for war in providing a context within which individuals can demonstrate self-sacrifice and the civic virtues - although it will be noted that he sees war as a public act in which harm to civilian life and property is excluded.
Is Hegel what has come to be called in twentieth-century International Relations theory a "realist"? One thing is clear - he most certainly does not believe that "might is right." The judgement of history is an important notion here - world history is a kind of world court, it is the place wherein the destiny of nations is determined in accordance with Ceist. Nothing of significance happens by accident, simply because of the application of force. Hegel is content to see war as an instrument available to states - in the manner theorized by his near-contemporary, Clausewitz - and, in any event, his account of sovereignty means that the possibility of war can never be eliminated from the system,but this is a different matter from an explanation of the causes of any particular war (Clausewitz, 1976; Suganami, 1996). He refers elsewhere in the Philosophy of Right to the expansionist tendency of states (§ 246) but it is noteworthy that this tendency is rooted in the economy and civil society rather than in the state as such.Some later Hegelians, such as the British Idealists, have resisted the idea that war is an incorrigible feature of international relations, as we shall see below.
Nationalism and international society
Interestingly, the Hegelian ethical state is not necessarily a national state - it is the ethical nature of the institutions which make up the community that is central, not their national quality. Although Hegelian ideas do feed into nineteenth-century nationalist thought, the initial impetus for nationalism comes from elsewhere, from the folklorism of Herder, and the political experiences of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Nowhere was this latter experience felt more deeply than in Italy - which was divided amongst a number of small, generally oppressive states, and dominated by the Habsburg empire which, post 1815, still owned Lombardy and Venice - and no-one expressed this kind of nationalism more passionately than the Italian revolutionary and thinker, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72).
As Mack Smith has demonstrated, there was a time when Mazzini was regarded as one of the most important political thinkers of the nineteenth century (Mack Smith, 1994:151).Partly this was because of his romantic life as an
Italian revolutionary, fighting on behalf of a cause which was held dear by right-thinking people everywhere, but it also rested on the popularity of his writings, in particular of the articles collected and published in 1840 as On the Duties of Man (Mazzini, 1907). This work went through a great many editions and translations in the nineteenth century, but more or less disappeared in the twentieth. The reason for its popularity then is clear enough, and is the same reason for its disappearance today. Mazzini gives a passionate account of the affective qualities of the national community and ties nationalism into all the good things life has to offer - but he has precious little sense of the difficulties of the notion, difficulties which have become all too apparent in the twentieth century. The flavor of Mazzinis thought is well captured in an early, messianic, text. Faith and the Future (1835):
We believe therefore in the holy alliance of the people as the broadest formula of association possible in our age - in the liberty and equality of the peoples, without which association has no true life - in Nationality. Which is the conscience of the peoples, which assigns to them their share of work in the association, their office in humanity, and hence constitutes their mission on earth, their individuality: for without Nationality neither liberty nor equality is possible - and we believe in the holy Fatherland, that is, the cradle of nationality, the altar and patrimony of the individuals that compose each people. (Mazzini: 1907, italics in original)
The Holy Alliance of the People is to be set against the reactionary Holy Alliance of Empires. The national principle is in no sense in contradiction to universal principles; all nations can and should live in harmony, one with another. Political freedom is enhanced by the national principle, democracy and nationalism go together.
These positions are developed at greater length in On the Duties of Man. This book begins with an invocation to the Italian working man, but immediately moves to God and the Law. Sections of the next two chapters "Duties to Humanity" and "Duties to Country" are reproduced below (pp. 476-85). It will be noted that for Mazzini duties to humanity come before duties to country both in the text and in life ("You are men before you are citizens or fathers") but, what is rather more to the point, there is little sense that there might be a contradiction here.That there is, in fact, at least a potential contradiction is clear enough. Mazzini argues for a redrawing of the map of Europe on national lines to create states based on Countries of the People and "between these Countries there will be harmony and brotherhood." However, his account of the borders of Italy ("the best-defined country in Europe") suggests that this would be an implausible outcome. Along with assigning Corsica to Italy, he suggests that a semicircle drawn with Parma as the base and the mouths of the Var and the Isonzo as starting and end points will mark the frontier that God has given Italy. The reader is invited to try this, and contemplate the reaction of the gods of France, Switzerland, and Slovenia.
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A rather more thoughtful justification of liberal nationalism is offered by John Stuart Mill (1806-73), albeit in less inclusive terms and without solving the underlying dilemma. Rather than approach problems of nationality from the perspective of an account of pre-given nationhood. Mill sees the issue in terms of "self-determination" - the right of a people to determine their own form of government. In Considerations on Representative Governmenthe endorses this right in terms which make it clear that the national principle rests upon popular will:
Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of a nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves. (Mill, 1972:361)
However, in the same paragraph, he adds a different and stronger claim -"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. This is highly revealing — perhaps unintentionally - because it clarifies somewhat the meaning for Mill of nationality. Since virtually no countries are actually mono-national this would seem to be a counsel of despair, but since Mill clearly does not believe that free institutions are next to impossible in, for example, multi-national Great Britain, what it actually suggests is that he is working on a more restrictive account of nationality than might at first seem to be the case. It is only some "divisions of the human race" that ought to be free to determine their own fate.
This point becomes clearer when one examines Mill on the subject of the reverse side of the coin to the principle of self-determination, the principle of non-intervention. Mill's essay of 1859, "A Few Words on Non-Intervention," extracted below (pp. 486-93), sets out the case for the general principle of non-intervention, and for the necessary exceptions to the rule, employing arguments some of which have been re-employed in the late twentieth century by writers such as Michael Walzer. According to Mill, non-intervention is generally the right policy because it is not possible for outsiders to create free states; peoples have to take freedom for themselves, they cannot be given it, and the exceptions to this rule largely concern circumstances where intervention would be, in effect, counter-intervention - action taken in order to counter the prior intervention of an oppressing power. However, it will be noted that these principles apply only to cases where the nations concerned are of the same, or roughly the same, level of civilization. The rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity, but barbarians will not reciprocate. The underdeveloped barbarian mind is incapable of growth without the assistance of the higher civilizations. Thus it is that British
imperialism in India, or French in Algeria, is justified in its acts of intervention in a way that, say, Russian intervention on behalf of Austria against the Hungarians in the rising of 1848/9 is not. Much of the beginning of this essay is devoted to showing that those who describe this attitude as hypocritical are missing the point.
Mill's Eurocentric account makes uncomfortable reading a hundred and fifty years later, but a number of points need to be made, if not in mitigation, then at least in order to provide a context. First, Mill in these comments was doing no more than express both the norms of international society in the nineteenth century, and the common viewpoint of the vast majority of educated Europeans. As to the first, full membership of International Society was largely restricted to European states and ex-colonies, and the notion of the "Standards of Civilization" codified the idea that certain kinds of socio-economic and legal norms needed to.be met before membership could be granted (Gong, 1984). As to the second, it is far more difficult to find prominent nineteenth-century Europeans who were not convinced of the superiority of European civilization than it is to find the opposite. Mill was one of the foremost liberals of the day but conservative thinkers were even more dismissive of non-European values, while, to move further to the left, the terms with which Marx and Engels dismissed non-European civilizations are if anything more patronizing and hostile than those of Mill - "barbarian egotism ... undignified, stagnatory and vegetative life ... man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow" is Marx's account of life in India before the impact of British rule, which is motivated by selfish greed but has beneficial effects nonetheless (Marx, 1973: 306). A further point may be made on Mills behalf; for all that his reasoning is offensive, he does at least understand that there is a real issue here, that it is not possible simply to endorse all nationalisms in the manner of Mazzini. From the perspective of the twentieth century this is refreshingly realistic, even if Mill's attempt to distinguish between "good," progressive nations and "bad," backward-looking nations cannot be allowed to stand.
Power and the nation-state
As suggested above, Hegel was not a believer in "power-politics" and his defense of the state is cast in ethical terms. Clearly neither Mazzini nor Mill fit the bill here either; Mazzini's faith in the universal brotherhood and harmony links him to later liberal internationalist thought, while Mill's commitment to a norm-governed international society is also incompatible
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with power-politics or any other crude version of realism. To find a true nineteenth-century precursor of the "realist paradigm" it is necessary to refer to the works of the German political scientist Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-96). Von Treitschke was born a Saxon, but, as a professor in Berlin, made himself the foremost intellectual defender of Prussian expansionism. His work was enormously influential in Germany at the end of the last century, and had a major, albeit indirect, influence on at least some currents of twentieth-century realism.
Like Mazzini.but for very different reasons, Treitschke largely ceased to exert direct influence after the First World War. Whereas Mazzini's optimism seemed out of place in the post-war world, in Treitschkes case it was the more overtly nationalist, reactionary, anti-Semitic, and sexist nature of his writing which has made him intellectually persona nongrata.There is a sense in which Treitschke represents the dark side of the realist approach to international relations; when junior students (and some of their senior colleagues) produce caricatured accounts of realism, accounts which implicitly describe such profoundly moral human beings as Hans Morgenthau or George Kennan as ruthless power-worshippers, we rightly condemn them, but were their fire to be directed at Treitschke it would come closer to the mark. Moreover, his writings are characterized by an unpleasant moralizing: thus, his Christian principles are repeatedly invoked to explain why an immoral foreign policy is unacceptable - which is said to be in contrast with Machiavelli's instrumen-talism and Hegel's supposed deification of the state - while the body of his work makes it plain that in his case the shackles of any kind of morality are worn very loosely, if at all.
In the circumstances, it might be asked why his writings are being presented here at all, given these faults. The answer is because, for all these sins of omission and commission, he is one of the clearest and most intelligent defenders of a full-blown, unapologetic account of the sovereign state as a power-based institution which is inevitably drawn into conflict with other states and which can brook no restrictions. He puts into words what many others in his century and ours have believed, but generally have not dared to make explicit. For this, at least, he deserves our thanks - but beyond this grudging praise, it will also be clear from his writings that Treitschke possessed a subtle intelligence, and a very good grasp of the diplomatic realities of his age. We may not like the picture he paints, but it is largely drawn from life.
In Tolitics Treitschke begins by defining the state as "the people, legally united as an independent entity" (Treitschke, 1916: 3). The state protects the people, the state is power, it demands obedience. The state is, and must be, sovereign. Restraints on states can only be self-imposed and can only apply rebus sic stantibus - so long as circumstances do not change. Sovereign
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states must be self-sufficing as far as possible - only the great powers are truly sovereign - indeed, small states are lacking in "that capacity for justice which characterizes their greater neighbors." What is interesting about these positions is, first, the way in which they draw on writers such as Hegel and Herder, while subverting their purposes, and second, the extent to which they are devoid of the kind of theological justifications common among the "righteous realists" of the twentieth century (M.J. Smith, 1986; Rosenthal, 1991). Original sin and human frailty do not feature here - the state is simply power and the will to prevail.
The conduct of war is a prime role of the state and war is the one remedy for an ailing nation. There is no apology here for its destructiveness, none of the qualifications that Hegel attached to his own account of the positive role of warfare.The extracts from Book 11 of Politics presented below set out in more detail Treitschkes view of the comity of nations and international law (pp.494-505). Although he endorses a number of procedural principles such as diplomatic immunity he is deeply skeptical of more substantive attempts to circumscribe state behavior. In his account, much of this kind of international law represents the will of the powerful - the argument here will be repeated by Carr in 1939; "haves" make the law, and it is futile to blame the "have-nots" for refusing to accept its legitimacy (Carr, 1939).
The First World War and the ethical state
Treitschkes book was first translated into English in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, and was, with some justification, employed to demonstrate the evils of German militarism. Certainly, Bethmann-Holweg's famous remark to the effect that the treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality was a mere "scrap of paper" whose violation could not justify Britain's intervention against Germany was totally in keeping with Treitschkes views. What was rather less intellectually justifiable was the tarnishing of all German philosophy, and especially Hegelianism, with the same, militarist, brush. Unfortunately such blackguarding became common and unexceptionable; L. T. Hobhouse's attribution of responsibility for German air raids to the Hegelian theory of the god-state" was treated far more seriously than it deserved (Hobhouse, 1918: 6). This was hardly a reasonable attack on Hegel -although as we have seen he does lay himself open to misunderstanding in his enthusiasm for the ethical state and in his account of the role of war - but it was particularly inappropriate as a critique of the British Idealists, each of whom had rejected key elements of Hegel's view of war. The Idealists fought back, but it is fair to say that Hegel's reputation within the
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English-speaking countries went into a decline after 1914 from which it did not recover until the 1960s and 1970s, and only then largely on the back of Western Marxism.
Much of this Idealist fight back was in reply to direct criticism by liberals such as Hobhouse - several examples are given in a recent collection of texts by the British Idealists (Boucher, 1997). However, the final reading in this section was written before the anti-Hegelian storm broke, and is, accordingly, rather less apologetic in tone. "Patriotism in the perfect state" by Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) is the text of a lecture delivered early in 1915 (pp. 506-17 below); Bosanquet provides a short but penetrating account of Hegel, identifying those elements of his thought that have misled the unwary, and a much briefer denunciation of the true power-worshippers such as Treitschke, but the bulk of the essay is an account of the way in which the patriotism that the perfect state requires in order to exist is in no sense incompatible with a commitment to humanity and a rejection of war. The state rests on popular will, and no state can judge another or surrender its sovereignty to another - until a universal will develops, international government is not a possibility - but war, far from being necessary for the health of a nation, is itself a sign of disease, a symptom not the cure.
In this text, an occasional work by a great philosopher, categories break down. The particularism associated with the Hegelian notion of an ethical state is revealed to be compatible with a wider universalism - we are both human beings and citizens, cosmopolitans and members of a particular community. We participate in the universal through our membership of particular communities. The line between internal and external must be clearly drawn if our communities are to work, but this is not a line that runs through our moral life in such a way that on one side - the outside - there are no moral obligations at all. On the contrary our obligations to humanity are part and parcel of our obligations to our fellow citizens. International society is composed of states, but these states are not simply the concentrations of sovereign power envisaged by Treitschke .The state is the way in which we express our universal aspirations, and its external conduct cannot be exempt from the moral law, nor should we wish it to be. There is clearly an element of utopianism about this, and as between Treitschke and Bosanquet it is the former who is a forerunner of realism and has probably had the greater indirect influence - but it may be as unrealistic to think that power is all-important as it is to believe that the universal and the particular can be reconciled in this way. Certainly one could have wished that Bosanquet's vision of the future had had more impact and influence than it did. The liberal internationalists of the post-1914-18 era could have used this particular form of Idealism more constructively than they did. In any event, it is to the forerunners of these liberal internationalists that we now turn.
FURTHER READING
The recent revival of Hegel studies owes a great deal to Charles Taylors outstanding and monumental general study (i97S)> but rather more accessible for the beginner are Shlomo Avineri's account of Hegel's theory of the modern state (1972), and Raymond Plants introductory volume (1983). Until recently, the most sustained work by Hegelians in English was produced by the British Idealists of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Bernard Bosanquet (1965), F. H. Bradley (1988), and T. H. Green (1941) are the key names here; David Bouchers recent collection of The British Idealists (1997) contains a good selection of writings by these and other authors, and Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant have produced a good survey volume (1984). Modern Hegel-influenced writers on international political theory include John Charvet (1981, 1995) and Mervyn Frost (1996). The literature on nationalism is very extensive. Elie Kedourie (i960) regards nationalism as a doctrine invented at around the time of the French Revolution; Anthony Smith (1998) sees primordial ethnic identities lying behind modern nations, while Ernest Gellner (1983) and Benedict Anderson (1991) understand nationalism as a response to industrialism and the destruction of traditional societies. J. S. Mill's variant of liberal nationalism is ably represented today by Michael Walzer (1977,1983) and David Miller (1995). The statism of von Treitschke is placed in a wider context by Friedrich Meinecke in his monumental study of Machiavellianism (1957). The gap between the ideas of twentieth-century realists and von Treitschke's 'power politics' is set out in studies by Michael J. Smith (i986),Joel Rosenthal (1991), and Alastair Murray (1997).
SOURCES
G. W. F. Hegel, from Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§ 330-40, pp. 366-71.
G. Mazzini, "On the Duties of Man" (1840) in Mazzini's Essays (London:
Everyman's Library, Dent, 1907), pp. 41-5,49-59. J. S. Mill, from "A Few Words on Non-Intervention" (1959), in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. xxi: Essays on Equality Law and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984) - italicized editorial matter then pp. 376-84.
H.
von Treitschke, from Politics (1897) (London: Constable, 1916), vol. n, pp. 587-620, extracts. B. Bosanquet, "Patriotism in the Perfect State" (1915), in The International Crisis in its Ethical and Psychological Aspects, by Eleanor M. Sidgwick, Gilbert Murray, A. C. Bradley, L. P. Jacks, G. F. Stout, and B. Bosanquet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915).