This article argues that, if we are to understand how and why the modern practice of intervention developed as it did, we need to understand the changing nature of international hierarchy during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The Introduction to this Special Issue proposes that intervention is a distinctive mode of coercive reordering in the international system. What makes it distinctive? There are, of course, many different ways of using force to change the order that exists either within or between states, and one way to distinguish between them is to compare how they impact upon the sovereignty of the weaker or defeated party. At one extreme is a public war between two states where the loser, although quite possibly diminished in size, remains nonetheless undiminished in its status as a fully sovereign entity. At the other is an act of outright imperial annexation, where force is used to obliterate altogether the sovereignty of some unfortunate state. There is a wide range in between, where sovereignty is neither fully affirmed nor fully denied. For example, the normal practice of many empires and state-unions has been to institute various forms of ‘divided sovereignty’, often ultimately upheld by coercive force. In a similar vein, the practice of intervention is to accept the sovereignty of international actors, but in a qualified or restricted manner: one sovereign claims a right to use force to reorder the domestic affairs of another, while at the same time claiming to respect the other's inevitably somewhat tarnished sovereign status.Footnote 1
My point is that the hierarchical structure of international society determines the specific qualifications and restrictions on sovereignty that operate within the practice of intervention at any given time, and so decides what is always one of the central questions: who has the right to intervene against whom. In order to chart the emergence of the modern practice of intervention, the article tells a tale of two hierarchies. Some thirty years ago, Hedley Bull remarked that the emergence of the doctrine of non-intervention was linked to the development of the idea of sovereign equality in the early eighteenth century, most notably in the work of Emerich de Vattel, but that the doctrine was undercut,
on the one hand by the ancient hierarchies of status and precedent among European monarchies and republics, curtailed but not eliminated by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and on the other hand, by the new hierarchy of rights determined by power, that gave rise to the especially modern idea of the rights and duties peculiar to the status of a great power, still embodied in the privileges of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.Footnote 2
In a nutshell, the article makes two claims about how the practice of intervention was shaped by these two kinds of international hierarchy. I begin by noting that there were plenty of examples of what we would unquestionably call ‘interventions’ in the early modern world, and that the law of nations was widely held to confer a right on other sovereigns to use force to protect the subjects of a tyrannical ruler. However, this was not turned into a specific doctrine of intervention by jurists, as distinct from their doctrines about the legality of war in general, and the right to carry it out was not attributed to a particular group of rulers but – as with the prerogative to wage war – was attributed to all princes in general. My first claim is that this feature of coercive reordering in the early modern international system, which I would prefer to call a form of ‘humanitarian war’ than ‘humanitarian intervention’, was due to three aspects of what Bull calls the ‘ancient hierarchies of status and precedent’. First, it was a status hierarchy that was not directly aligned with the distribution of capabilities, so superiors were not necessarily stronger than their inferiors. Secondly, it was a precedence hierarchy, which did not neatly fit with the idea that superiors had rights over inferiors. And thirdly, it was an individuated hierarchy, which worked against the idea that there were distinct classes of actor in international society and so made it harder to conceptualise a general doctrine of intervention, where one group were empowered to act to maintain international order more generally. In sum, this kind of hierarchy was not conducive to the development of a selectively attributed right of intervention, as distinct from the existing general right that all princes already had to wage war against each other. The debate was not about who had the right to wage war against whom, but what the purposes were that justified the use of force in general.
My second claim is that the crucial condition of possibility for the emergence of the modern practice of intervention was that, over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, international actors came to conceive of themselves simultaneously as equal sovereign states and as occupying differentiated positions within a hierarchical ‘grading of powers’.Footnote 3 I will not go into how this grading actually played out in terms of the practice of intervention that unfolded in the nineteenth century. Instead, my main focus here is on how international actors got to this position, because even in some of the more historically-inclined studies of intervention, the notion that there might be a special group of ‘Great Powers’ upon whom the right of intervening should be conferred sometimes seems to have sprung fully-formed from the fertile mind of Friedrich von Gentz at the Congress of Vienna, and little effort is made to explore its roots further back.Footnote 4 While acknowledging that the sources of this change must ultimately be located in profound social changes associated with the development of a bourgeois public sphere and the fluid, competitive dynamics of capitalism, here I shall focus on two specific points that have a more immediate connection to the theory and practice of International Relations: the emergence of new state challengers to the status order, and the development of a discourse that represented international actors in terms of their positions within a grading of powers. It is through such an approach, I believe, that an important connection between the historical sociology of modernity and the study of International Relations can be made.
Was there a practice of intervention in the early modern world?
In their recent study of the history of humanitarian intervention, Brendan Simms and David Trim argue that ‘in early modern Europe states threatened or used force … against foreign regimes which ill-treated minority people groups’, and that ‘influential contemporary theorists specifically located the basis for such actions in the nascent Law of Nations’.Footnote 5 Trim identifies the origins of this in early sixteenth-century Spanish attitudes towards Native American rulers, and argues that later in that century, ‘the right to act against tyranny and oppression was extended to Christian princes, and was characterised as a duty’.Footnote 6 In the early seventeenth century, Trim continues, perhaps the most celebrated juristic theorist of his day, Hugo Grotius, ruled out rebellion, but maintained that under certain circumstances ‘While subjects had no right to take up arms against their sovereign … another sovereign could take up arms on their behalf.’Footnote 7 This was not utopian pleading: Trim points to plenty of examples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century states acting to protect what they saw as unjustly suffering innocents in other countries, and Simms adds further examples from the eighteenth-century Holy Roman Empire.Footnote 8 Trim concludes that, ‘This conjuncture of state behaviour and principles underpinning and moulding it indicates that a norm of intervention had emerged in early modern Europe.’Footnote 9
If these actions were to happen today, we would almost certainly call them interventions; but did people at the time think that they were engaged in a distinctive practice of intervention? They would not have used the word ‘intervention’ itself to describe what they were doing. Percy Winfield pointed out a long time ago that, not only is ‘No trace of any phrase corresponding to it … discoverable in the De Jure Belli ac Pacis of Grotius’, but ‘So far from imagining that there might be that intermediate state between peace and war nowadays denoted “intervention”, Grotius expressly negatives any such idea by citing Cicero to the effect that between war and peace there is no medium.’Footnote 10 Instead of using the vocabulary of intervention, De Jure Belli ac Pacis is, as the title implies, essentially concerned with identifying various forms of war: ‘Acts of violence which have been treated in latter-day international law as interventions, Grotius regards as ordinary wars.’Footnote 11 Of course there was a cosmopolitan, universalistic dimension to much thinking about the law of nations in this period, consistent with the natural law idiom that was so prominent within it, and this may with some reason be described as ‘humanitarian’. But what we have here might rather be described as a species of ‘humanitarian war’, rather than ‘humanitarian intervention’, if we are to retain any sense of a distinction between them as different modes of the use of force.
I do not want to get embroiled in the question of whether it is appropriate to use our current vocabulary to make intelligible the practices of people living in the past, and so whether or not we should call these wars or interventions, because I think that that risks becoming an unproductive squabble over semantics. A more interesting line of enquiry is to ask why jurists such as Grotius did not think to make a stronger distinction between war and intervention as two different instances of the use of force; why instead they preferred to draw distinctions between different kinds of war, as just and unjust, for example, or as public and private;Footnote 12 and how that makes this practice of coercive reordering (whether we call it ‘intervention’ or ‘war’) different from that which subsequently evolved in the nineteenth century.
One way into that question is to ask who they thought held the right to use force in these situations, and against whom. In the sixteenth century, only a few jurists thought that the right to take up arms even against a tyrannical sovereign was vested in the people at large on the basis of their natural liberty, although of course that line of thought would gain in force through the eighteenth century, as ideas about popular sovereignty, the ‘social contract’ and resistance developed. Some earlier theorists – one might call this a more mainstream Huguenot position, for example – took the slightly less incendiary view that the right of resistance was restricted to a class of ‘inferior magistrates’ in between the people and the sovereign. But in comparison with both positions, it was much easier to argue that sovereigns had the right to use force against other sovereigns who were tyrants, for the simple reason that it was generally accepted that sovereigns had a right to use force more or less whenever they chose and against whomever they chose.Footnote 13
Hence, what may be seen as the early modern right of ‘intervention’ was seen at the time as an aspect of the right to make war, and so was promiscuously extended to all Christian princes, who seem also to have held the right unilaterally to judge when another ruler was enough of a tyrant to warrant the use of force against him. One point, incidentally, that Trim does not pick up is that Grotius's specific position, nurtured by his experiences in the Dutch ‘Revolt’, was that the possibility for sovereign prerogatives to be divided amongst several authorities within a political community meant that there might be many entities who possessed at least a bit of sovereignty, and, as he ingeniously argued, ‘whoever possesses a part of the sovereign power must possess also the right to defend his part’.Footnote 14 Because this early modern ‘norm of intervention’ was not very clearly distinguished from very long-established norms about war making, it was a right that was, in effect, held by every sovereign against every other sovereign, or even the holders of any bit of sovereignty. Non-sovereigns might still use force, but that would then be a case of ‘private’ (or possibly ‘mixed’) war, and their different rules would apply. That makes how these jurists thought about the use of force sharply distinct from the modern practice of intervention that evolved in the nineteenth century, where sovereignty was understood to confer a general right of non-intervention; but where a select group of ‘great powers’ had, if they agreed among themselves, an almost blanket right to intervene against lesser powers. During the early modern period, general normative constraints were proposed on when sovereigns should or should not use force, but there was not that sense of differentiated rights between sovereigns that is so characteristic of the modern practice of intervention.
Early modern European hierarchy and intervention
So, this brings us to another question: why was a right of intervention not more selectively ascribed to a particular group of early modern princes? Far from being seen as a very flat, egalitarian kind of world made up of undifferentiated Christian princes or sovereigns, international relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are generally and rightly understood to have been thoroughly riddled with hierarchical ideas about status and precedence.Footnote 15 To understand what these ideas were requires us to move away from the literature that has typically occupied the attention of historians looking at the development of the concept of sovereignty – such as Grotian and Vattelian works on natural law and the law of nations (a genre into which Trim's focus on the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos and Simms' on Burke fit quite well) – and examine instead one that was concerned with the practical consideration of diplomatic ceremonial and partly produced by those responsible for diplomatic protocol within courts, who therefore had to resolve questions of precedence as a matter of course.Footnote 16 If anything, this literature is much closer to heraldry than to the more standard legal or political treatises, although that is a distinction that should not be overstated, since the line between heraldic and legal ‘sciences’ was not so great as one might think.Footnote 17
One of the earliest is a famous scheme drawn up by Pope Julius II's Master of Ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, in 1504, which defined the relative positions of rulers in the ceremony of the papal curia, divided into two different orders, an order of kings and an order of dukes. It is difficult to know whether the list was meant to be definitive, and there is room for doubt about how generally accepted it was.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, there is evidence that it was not only known elsewhere, but was treated as possessing a certain authority. It continued to be used as a kind of benchmark after a hundred years, and was still being cited as an authority over two hundred years later by one of the leading early eighteenth-century commentators on diplomatic precedence, Jean Rousset de Missy. He argued that Julius II had been trying to claim for himself ‘the right and the authority to regulate rank and ceremony between the powers’, and that Paris de Grassis's scheme constituted to all intents and purposes ‘une Loy positive pour le réglement de leurs rangs’.Footnote 19
By the early to mid-eighteenth century, when Rousset was writing, perceptions of how this hierarchy was organised had changed very considerably from the early sixteenth century.Footnote 20 Rousset treated the division of every society into different ranks (peasants, citizens, and nobles) as a basic, and indeed natural, fact, and further contended that at the head of each society was a sovereign, who again fell into different categories with respect to one another. In other words, there were ‘diverse sortes de Souverains’: emperors, kings, princes, dukes, marquisses, counts, barons, etc.Footnote 21 Rousset's basic position here was that within each band a principle of equality reigned: kings, for example, saw each other as equals in dignity and standing. By the end of the eighteenth century, this tendency towards grouping rulers into bands or classes had gone even further. In his influential Precis du droit des gens moderne de l'Europe, George Friedrich von Martens took issue with what he saw as the emerging tendency to divide up states with reference to their relative size or strength, something that other authorities on public law were beginning to do by at least the middle of the eighteenth century.Footnote 22 By contrast, he preferred to reserve the term ‘great states’ for ‘those which are entitled to royal honours’, while identifying a number of ‘non-royal sovereign states’, and even a group of ‘demi-sovereigns’.Footnote 23
There are three reasons why this type of international hierarchy was less favourably disposed to the cultivation of a practice of intervention, which would give a select group of states a right to intervene against others. First, the attribution of status within it did not, at least originally, follow the distribution of capabilities, and so superiors did not necessarily have the strength to intervene in the affairs of inferiors. Status was based on title and tradition, and thus implied a continuity that deliberately cut across the fluidity of power politics. For example, Sir William Segar's intention in his use of Paris de Grassis was probably to promote the status of the King of England, and invoking the papal origin of his title (albeit perhaps of dubious merit) may have been a way of doing so. Other authors on precedence from around this time used various other ways of trying to decide competing claims (with, of course, an eye on their immediate patrons' positions), sometimes using heraldic argument about the honour attached to particular ‘blazons’ and images, religious devotion or piety, and also appealing to material greatness as an index of rank, but not always in military terms. As one early seventeenth-century French heraldic commentator put it, ‘Spain shall never walk Peere-like, for abundance of people, fertilitie of all good things; excellence of ground; temperature and wholesomenesse of the Ayre; length and largenesse of her whole extendure … with France.’Footnote 24
Secondly, precedence did not translate in any direct way into superior rights, and so there was no clear sense that a higher position in the status order should confer a privileged right of intervention. We should not confuse the precedence that is at the core of the ranking of princes with authority: while, for example, the emperor might have been generally recognised as pre-eminent – after the Pope – in early modern (and, for that matter, medieval) Europe, this did not translate into a right to intervene in the affairs of lower ranking princes. There were, of course, occasions when emperors tried to convert their precedence into something more substantial, and moments when even kings appeared to submit to them. For example, Henry II of England famously wrote to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to offer that ‘we place our Kingdom and everything subject to our rule anywhere at your disposal … Let there be between us and between our peoples an indivisible way of peace and love and of safe commerce, yet in such a way that the authority to command shall go to you who holds the higher rank.’ This has often been taken as an indication not only of the precedence of the emperor, but also of his greater authority, and was later used by some imperial publicists as part of the campaign to assert his ascendancy.Footnote 25 However, it has also been argued that this was mere posturing, polite words to cover up the fact that Henry was not returning an important relic to the emperor. Certainly, while it was to play a role in subsequent squabbles between pope and emperor, it seems to have translated into little practical imperial involvement in English domestic affairs, as a matter of right.Footnote 26 Another classic moment of imperial assertion in the middle ages also demonstrates the limits of imperial authority: Henry VII's encyclical letter announcing his election in 1312, in which he asserted that all things had been placed under his imperium. Not only did this attract a stinging response from Philip the Fair of France (who had earlier successfully resisted similar assertiveness by the Pope), in which France's refusal to recognise any temporal superior was made crystal clear; but it also had its hollowness revealed in Henry's own largely fruitless struggle with Robert of Naples.Footnote 27 A relationship between a lord and a vassal – or more tenuously between the head of a dynastic house and his sons or its cadet branches – might give such a right, but not necessarily so, and in any case the precedence hierarchy was not, by and large, organised along these lines: the King of France may have been inferior in status to the Pope or the Emperor, but he was a vassal of neither. They would have found it extremely difficult to translate their diplomatic precedence into a right to reorder French domestic authority arrangements through the coercive use of force, even if they had had the means available to do so. This, in essence, is the whole story of how the legal notion of sovereignty eclipsed other views of the relative standing of international actors.
This is not to suggest that high-ranking rulers in the precedence order were entirely lacking in any kind of special role within the system. But perhaps the most significant aspects of their role lay in the normative and legal realms. Rather than directly intervening as such, one might say that these high authorities set the parameters of the system, relying on others to conform to their wishes. Sometimes they went further, for example in the papal sending of judges delegate to other countries.Footnote 28 But perhaps their most significant role was in the authoritative management of the order of precedence itself. Pope and emperor were founts of ennoblement and entitlement.Footnote 29 Rulers who wished to improve their positions often looked to the papal and imperial courts to try to substantiate their claims and gain new titles: the Medicis' campaign for a grand-ducal title is an outstanding and highly successful example, which also illustrates, incidentally, the growing role that money and strength were beginning to play in the ranking of princes. This is a point that I shall pick up later.
Thirdly, as the above point about the King of France, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor suggests, the original status order was individually articulated: it was a ranking of princes relative to one another. This worked against any notion of a general doctrine of either non-intervention or intervention; the latter could only come into being when states were understood as belonging to certain categories or classes within international society, as was the case with both the idea of sovereign equality and the grading of powers. The trend towards more abstract ways of conceptualising the ‘state’ by political theories is relevant here,Footnote 30 but it was also bound up in diplomatic developments. By the time we get to the mid-eighteenth century, with authors such as Rousset or Martens, we are beginning to see the precedence ranking described in terms of broad types: possessors of closed crowns, for instance, or, in Martens's formulation, royal sovereigns, non-royal sovereigns and demi-sovereigns.Footnote 31 And, as we have seen Rousset argue, within each band there was a growing sense of the equality of sovereigns. Diplomats were worrying less about precise seating arrangements, often agreeing to seat themselves ‘pele-mele’; kings would write to one another as ‘brothers’, without unduly worrying about questions of their exact precedence over one another. Within the ranks of the ‘royal sovereigns’ at least, one can begin to detect a certain egalitarianism creeping into international relations, also perhaps an increasing desire on the part of non-royal sovereigns to join their ranks, and a growing anxiety at the dangers of slipping into the realm of the ‘demi-sovereign’.
This sense of a greater equality within each class of sovereign, but also a growing distance between the classes, is one of the most significant changes in the structure of the early modern international hierarchy. It is in this context that one can, I think, begin to understand the movement in Vattel's account of the law of nations towards the idea of the equality of sovereigns. By effectively ignoring the position of demi-sovereigns, Vattel is left with the assumption that the only difference that matters is one of size, making for his famous comparison between giants and dwarfs, and the claim that differences in size – or, one might say, physical strength – did not matter to one's rights. The separation that Vattel sought to achieve between size and rank or rights, however, was not one that could seriously affect the conduct of international relations. The growing importance of the grading of powers was, within a few decades, translated into a novel kind of inequality of sovereigns, following the logic of employing differences in power to distinguish the rights and duties of the members of international society. This change, which had been slowly percolating through the eighteenth century became manifest in the nineteenth.
Towards a grading of powers
Thus far I have argued that the old status order of precedence did not lend itself to the development of a distinctive notion of intervention, which helps us to understand why early modern thinkers tended to describe what we would today call intervention in terms of the practice of making war. The early modern hierarchy did not present an obvious high status group that was capable of exercising such a right, and the basis of their superiority was not founded on any clear right to intervene in other jurisdictions. The order of precedence was not, however, the only game in town. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries it was coming under increasing pressure, and I shall try to bring out two of the reasons why: the increasing fluidity of the old status order, and the emergence of a new discourse about the ‘grading of powers’. These were not, of course, the only factors. As the Introduction to the Special Issue suggests, we are dealing here with the whole force of modernity, and a major part of any explanation of how the order that Rousset describes of title, tradition, and precedence was giving way to a competitive order that was more sensitive to the distribution of material capabilities must of course ground itself in deeper underlying social changes. That accepted, however, it remains important to think about how this new world was making itself felt in terms of the theory and practice of International Relations, and it is on those aspects that I shall concentrate here.
First, there was the challenge of new rising powers who were trying to improve their position within the status order, often with highly destabilising effects. The result was that traditional sources of status, such as antiquity of lineage or title, began to be replaced by what one seventeenth-century author perceptively described as the role of fortune, and the ‘continual revolutions’ in the ‘order of powers’.Footnote 32 Campaigns by the Russian Czar to have his imperial title acknowledged, the Savoyard search for a royal title, and what Heinz Duchhardt has called a ‘wave of regalization’ among German rulers, were all examples of how this process was beginning to escape the traditional authoritative controls of papal or imperial entitlement and points to the increasingly competitive and fluid nature of the ranking of princes in the early modern period.Footnote 33 These were, it should be noted, still often expressed in terms of campaigns for new and better titles, and so in some respects still fitted into the traditional order. But their entire thrust was to try to shift the status order of the international system into one in which status ultimately depended on capability, and where, even among the most traditionally respected rulers, the contest over precedence was becoming more fluid and even violent.Footnote 34 Challenges to the traditional authorities – the effects of the Reformation on papal influence (a major part of the assertion of quasi-imperial kingly sovereignty), and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in the context of the violent struggles surrounding the French Revolutionary wars – compounded the problem, as did Napoleon's personal revolutionisation of the dynastic order of Europe, and the fact that the Congress of Vienna deliberately chose not to pursue the fantasy of a perfect return to the ancien régime world.
A second, more discursive kind of threat was the emergence of entirely different way of thinking about the positions of international actors in terms of a ‘grading of powers’. Martin Wight once remarked that he could not find ‘anybody before [Giovanni] Botero who develops the international grading of powers, and gives substance to the class of middle power’, but that even then it was not really picked up until the mid-eighteenth century work of the Abbé de Mably.Footnote 35 Wight's point about when this way of thinking emerged is reinforced by two other considerations. First, to the extent that the relative positions of states were not understood in terms of an international grading of powers, it was difficult to conceptualise their relations in terms of cognate ideas such as a distinct class of ‘great powers’. Hamish Scott observes, for example, that ‘the third quarter of the eighteenth century was the period at which the term and, more important, the modern concept of “great power” definitively entered the political lexicon’.Footnote 36 While one does occasionally run across the expression before then, it seldom has its modern meaning, and can hardly be said to have been part of mainstream diplomatic or political discourse. As far as I am aware, one of the earliest official uses of the label is the courtesy title that was formally given to the United Provinces, who were collectively known as ‘Hautes Puissances’, and whose individual members were known in diplomatic correspondence as ‘Nobles et Grandes Puissances’ or simply as ‘Grandes Puissances’.Footnote 37 This title, while clearly acknowledging the exceptional commercial and military prowess of the Provinces, on the basis of which they were usually granted royal honours despite being a republic, also reflects the fact that they were not part of the family of European monarchs, who at this time would customarily refer to one another as ‘Majesty’, a designation that had once been reserved to the Emperor alone, and implied more respect than ‘Puissance’.Footnote 38 Indeed, by the early nineteenth century, many monarchs would have been delighted to be seen by others as a ‘great power’, where their predecessors might conceivably have taken offence at such an appelation a couple of hundred years earlier.Footnote 39
The other consideration that supports Wight's mid-eighteenth-century origins for the ‘grading of powers’ is that the science of ‘statistics’ – namely, as one of its pioneers described it, ‘the branch of political knowledge which has for its object the actual and relative power of the several modern States’Footnote 40 – cannot be said to have begun in any serious way until the middle of the eighteenth century. In the seventeenth century, often drawing on the Italian literature on ‘reason of state’, a number of studies in French, German, and English had begun to talk about European politics using the language of ‘powers’, ‘interests’, and ‘balance’, but they seldom advanced to any attempt at actually measuring or quantifying the relative capabilities of different states, and hence it is hard to describe them as conceiving of a grading of powers in any precise way.Footnote 41 A fairly typical format for such a survey combined potted histories of the various European countries with general observations on their constitutional systems, alliances and treaty relationships, national character, geography and political interests, but with little if any concrete information on matters such as the size of their armies or economies, and hence they are virtually useless as a way of determining their relative strength.Footnote 42 Later eighteenth-century studies went much further in their insistence on the importance of states' power positions, and in their efforts to quantify the populations, territory, military forces, and commercial activity of the various states, such as works by the Mably and those of a contemporaneous commentator on European affairs, John Campbell, which developed, respectively, the notions of different classes of power with different interests, and the measurement of the distribution of capabilities, in order to place individual states within the international system.Footnote 43 By the later eighteenth century, the two come together in what one could call recognisably modern ‘realist’ accounts of the European system. By 1760, for example, the German diplomat Jacob Bielfeld could support with statistical analysis his frank claim that ‘one must disabuse oneself of the speculative ideas held by ordinary men about justice, equity, moderation, candour, and the other virtues of nations and their rulers. In the end, everything depends on power.’Footnote 44 All of this was part and parcel of a growing journalistic literature that played a vital role in the development of a public discourse about international affairs that was as influential at the time as more juristic authors such as Grotius or Vattel, and which forges a link to the emerging bourgeois public sphere, hungry for the news on the ‘present state of Europe’ that journalists such as Rousset were producing.
Conclusion: sources of the modern practice of intervention
My argument has been that the changing nature of international hierarchy was a crucial part of the origins of a distinctive modern practice of intervention. In the old world, status honour was grounded in title and lineage, which established an order of precedence. When it came to the use of force, however, such considerations had little purchase; the vocabulary of the practice of war, relatively permissive and egalitarian in its attitudes towards the rights of the sovereign makers of war, did the bulk of the work here. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries, thinkers were starting to describe international actors as ‘sovereigns’, who had certain ‘liberties’ with which others should not interfere, and although religious controversy added a strong supranational element to relations between sovereigns that encouraged them to step in when they saw their co-religionists under threat, no distinctive idea of intervention as a particular mode of coercive reordering emerged.
I have suggested that this was because the nature of international hierarchy did not present a picture of relations between superiors and inferiors where the former had either the right or the ability systematically to use force upon the latter. Higher status actors were not necessarily stronger than their inferiors; precedence did not confer authority; and, since in its earliest form the precedence order was individually articulated, the only form that any practice of intervention might take would be if, due to relations of vassalage or any other kind of feudal dependency, or out of the paternalistic rights of the head of a dynastic house, an individual ruler had specific rights to interfere with the jurisdiction of another individual ruler. This would not be a general practice of intervention, so much as a contingent individual relationship of super- and subordination. This was not a fruitful environment for a practice of intervention.
That state of affairs was changing, especially during the eighteenth century. Princes were being placed into more general categories, which made possible the notion of an equality of rights within a group; but an inequality of rights between groups. And precedence itself was becoming increasingly fluid. Rising powers such as Russia or Prussia were able to use their strength to assert improved titles for themselves. Yet more significantly, a growing body of opinion, in tune with an emergent public, was beginning to picture international hierarchy in terms of a grading of powers rather than the diplomatic precedence order. The French Revolution, and the accompanying wars and dynastic upheaval, facilitated, reinforced, and accelerated a process that was already underway in terms of the rise of this new kind of hierarchy as dominant within the international system. Its devastating effects on old patterns of lordship and international rights should not be underplayed, but it did not begin the process. By the end of the Napoleonic wars there was a new alignment between status and capability, with the former increasingly based upon the latter. There was a new kind of élite in international society, who as Great Powers had the ability, and successfully asserted the right, to intervene in the affairs of those who, as sovereigns, at the same time belonged to an inferior group of lesser powers. Thus, as I suggested at the beginning, hierarchy determines how intervention mediates between state sovereignty and transnational social forces, and the changing form of international hierarchy in the eighteenth century is a crucial part of the story of why the modern world was one in which a distinctive practice of intervention that we still live with today emerged.
