Small states in world politics: The story of small state survival, 1648-2016 9781526108531

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgments
Introducing small state survival as a historical phenomenon
Defining and quantifying the small state
Power politics and small state survival: the classic balance of power, 1648–1814
Small state survival in a system of collective hegemony: the concert system, 1815–1918
Small state survival and proliferation in twentieth-century systems of collective security and global governance, 1919–2016
The story of small state survival: past, present, and future
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The book challenges existing scholarship by re-focusing the discourse on vulnerability on small state survival. It provides an original long-term perspective on small state survival, something that has been missing so far, and it places small state survival firmly within the key debates International Relations. The investigation is focused on the causal link between small state survival, abolishment, or proliferation and the states system in its various historical incarnations. This provides the basis for the augment that variations in the states system’s main characteristics create noticeable changes in the system’s hospitality toward the small state and thus impact heavily on small state survivability. These dynamics lead to small state creation and termination, which is reflected in and thus explains the large up- or downward changes in the number of small states over time.

Front cover: TBC

Small states in world politics The story of small state survival, 1648-2016

Maass

Matthias Maass is Associate Professor of International Relations at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of International Studies in Seoul, Korea

Small states in world politics

Small states are survival artists. In a states system shaped by power politics and dominated by great powers, the survival and proliferation of small states is a remarkable phenomenon. But what is the actual magnitude of this phenomenon and how can it be explained? What is the story behind the survival of small and weak states in a world of great powers and crude power politics? The answer lies at system-level: this study’s key findings draw a picture of the small state as highly dependent on the states system in its efforts to survive.

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-7190-8273-3

9 780719 082733

Matthias Maass

Small states in world politics

Small states in world politics The story of small state survival, 1648–2016

Matthias Maass

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Matthias Maass 2017 The right of Matthias Maass to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN

978 0 7190 8273 3

hardback

First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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In memoriam Bolo

Table of contents

List of figures page viii Acknowledgmentsix 1 Introducing small state survival as a historical phenomenon 1 2 Defining and quantifying the small state 18 3 Power politics and small state survival: the classic balance of power, 1648–1814 45 4 Small state survival in a system of collective hegemony: the concert system, 1815–1918 90 5 Small state survival and proliferation in twentieth-century systems of collective security and global governance, 1919–2016139 6 The story of small state survival: past, present, and future 220 Bibliography 236 Index259

Figures

  1 Numbers of small and larger states, 1648–2016 page 7   2 Annual changes of small state total numbers, 1648–2016 35   3 Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1648–201637   4 Numbers of small and larger states, 1648–2016 38   5 Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1648–181463   6 Annual changes of small state total numbers, 1648–1814 64   7 Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1648–179166   8 Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1815–1917104   9 Annual changes in small state total numbers, 1815–1917 105 10 Number of small states, 1848–1860 106 11 Number of small states, 1872–1917 107 12 Number of small states, 1790–1830 109 13 Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1919–2016160 14 Annual changes in small state total numbers, 1918–2016 162 15 Numbers of small and larger states, 1648–2016  222

Acknowledgments

This book has been in the making for far too long, but I hope that the time the project was marinating has paid off and made it palatable. At the very least, it has allowed me to gather advice, hear critique, and receive encouragement from a number of good colleagues and dear friends. Their input was crucial and I am grateful to all of them. I do not want to mention them in any order suggestive of importance. Instead, I present them in the chronological order of their involvement. This book has roots that reach far back to my time as a PhD student. Alan K. Henrikson, Andrew C. Hess (both at The Fletcher School, Tufts University), and Robert H. Jackson at Boston University were critical in focusing my early ideas, pointing me in the right direction, and guiding my work towards a passable dissertation. The public expression of my gratitude is long overdue. Properly thanking Charles D. Kupfer at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg is a losing proposition. I cannot do it justice. To say that his advice and encouragement, and his friendship together with his family’s hospitality are truly appreciated is an understatement, and I trust he knows it. While still at Monash University, Peter Lawler stirred my interest in the theory of International Relations – although I fear the adoption of Realist theory to frame this book’s argument came as a disappointment to him. Be that as it may, his teaching in Melbourne provided its intellectual basis, and his mentoring after his move to The University of Manchester proved essential for getting this project off the ground. At the National University of Singapore, Bilveer Singh and Alan Chong (now at Nanyang Technical University’s Rajaratnam School of International Studies) quickly became friends rather than colleagues. Our lunch breaks across the border in Malaysia are legend. Alan Chong

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Acknowledgments

became a comrade in arms in the study of the small state. The completion of this book is due in no small part to his unwavering professional support and interest in the project. Burkhard Schrage (now at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam) gave indispensable support in ensuring the accuracy of the statistical analysis. Since our shared time as doctoral thesis-writing students, our professional paths have crossed, diverged, converged, and run parallel. But his friendship and his family’s hospitality have remained a constant, and I am the richer person for it. Here at Yonsei University in Seoul, Chung Min Lee succeeded in combining the role of a demanding Dean with that of a true mentor and good friend. In both roles, he excelled and helped create a fruitful intellectual environment at Yonsei’s Graduate School of International Studies. Equally important were the outstanding students I had the pleasure to teach in the seminars on small states. Their insights and in particular their persistence in challenging my work helped me to develop my arguments and claims much more rigorously. In addition, I had the distinct pleasure to rely on the help of a number of outstanding student assistants: Dongyoon Chung, Mimi Ahn, Se Rin Chung, Heeja Kim, Hyung Jeon So, Young Zu Wee, Min-Seo Kang, Wonjung Yu, Surra Lee, Jinny Moon, and Cesare Scartozzi. All of them were involved in the project at various stages and I thank them for their work and the comments and insights they shared. A major shout-out goes to the librarians at Tufts University, Harvard University, National University of Singapore, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Free University Berlin, Humboldt University, and the State Library Berlin. Only chronologically last is Frank Smith, who put his journalistic skills to work. He helped with polishing the manuscript and looking at a late draft with fresh eyes. His electronic comments in the margins were politely phrased but spot on. I am grateful for the reviewer’s extensive and insightful comments. They were instrumental in turning a draft into a proper book manuscript. I am equally grateful to Manchester University Press’s team of Jennifer Howard, Tony Mason, Alun Richards, Robert Byron, David Appleyard, and Diane Wardle. Without their expertise and commitment, the project would not have come together. Portions of chapters 1 and 2 have been published previously or are derived from earlier material. I wish to thank Michael Cox of International Politics, Brendan Howe of Asian International Studies Review, and Olivier Grouille of Cambridge Review of International

Acknowledgments

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Affairs for their kind permission to re-use some of the material here. “The Elusive Definition of the Small State.” International Politics 46, no.  1 (2009): 65–83; “Small States: Survival and Proliferation.” International Politics 51 (2014): 709–28; “The International States System since 1648 and Small States’ ‘Systemic Resilience.’” Asian International Studies Review 10, no. 2, December (2009): 31–52; “Small Enough to Fail: The Structural Irrelevance of the Small State as Cause of its Elimination and Proliferation Since Westphalia.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 29, no. 3 (2017). There can be no doubt that despite all the advice and constructive critique I received, all the encouragement, help, and support, the final text has weaknesses. Needless to say, these are my responsibility alone. Seoul, summer 2016

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

1 Introducing small state survival as a historical phenomenon

Small states are survival artists. In a states system shaped by power politics and dominated by great powers, the survival and especially the proliferation of small states is a remarkable phenomenon. But what is the actual magnitude of this phenomenon and how can it be explained? In short, what is the ‘big story’ behind small state survival? Understanding the survival of small states as one consistent historical phenomenon stretching over the past three-and-a-half centuries, the answers developed here are: 1) The overall picture of small state survival is uneven, with periods of general stability interrupted by major fluctuations in overall numbers. 2) Small states’ survival depends first and foremost on the key features of the states system. Larger changes in the number of small states are the result of broader changes in the states system. 3) The story of small state survival is shaped by their dependency on the states system for their security. Understanding the story of small state survival requires a clear focus on the international states system. This study finds that different variations of the Westphalian states system had very different effects on small state survival. The most hostile environment for the small state was the late nineteenth-century concert system; the most supportive was the bipolar world of the later twentieth century. Surprisingly, the crude balance-of-power system of the eighteenth century proved fairly accommodating of small state survival. Looking to the future, a modest rise in the number of small states can be predicted. Why study the small state’s struggle to survive? Singapore’s founder and long-time leader Lee Kuan Yew once answered the question “can we survive?” by pointing to dynamics beyond his

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small state: “It depends upon world conditions. It doesn’t depend on us alone. … So, it depends on whether there is an international environment which says that borders are sacrosanct and there is the rule of law.”1 The study proceeds along these lines and is focused on the external dynamics to which Lee alluded. Addressing the same question of survival, but from a historical perspective, fellow Singaporean Kishore Mahbubani admitted that “history is not comforting. Many successful city-states have disappeared from the face of the earth.”2 Picking up on his point, this study approaches the issue from a long-range perspective. In order to capture the larger, overall story of small state survival, the historical perspective is critical. To tell the full story of the small state’s fate in the Westphalian states system, the focus must be on the overall picture. In light of the existence of an abundance of case studies, it became necessary to re-focus the analysis away from the “particular cause” and on to the “general,” overarching cause.3 As a result, this study is not concerned with any particular small state but with the ‘generalized’ small state and its abstracted struggles to survive. And survival is understood here narrowly as the “irreducible minimum”4 of statecraft and as the ultimate state interest as preached by Niccolò Machiavelli.5 Studies of small state survival are relevant for stateswomen and -men. As Lee and Mahbubani point out, survival remains an acute problem for the small state, especially because it depends, at least in good part, on exogenous factors. Small states cannot take their survival for granted and need to understand where the key dynamics originate. Small states’ chances of survival are largely shaped by the states system. A better understanding of these dynamics can help shape the international environment in ways more supportive of the small state. The most obvious place to do so today would be at the United Nations (UN) and in International Law. There, the world can be made safer for the small state. In addition to policy relevance, an investigation into small state survival has scholarly significance. Robert Keohane famously posits: “If Lilliputians can tie up Gulliver, or make him do their fighting for them, they must be studied as carefully as the giant.”6 It must not be assumed that small states are simply downsized versions of larger states. In fact, some see the small state as a distinct category of state,7 and this underlines Keohane’s demand. The present study strongly suggests that small state survival is governed by different rules from those that govern great powers. Keohane’s general statement on relevance is flanked by the need to properly capture the phenomenon of the small state’s place in ­international affairs. The claim that “there are now more small states

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

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than ever”8 is not new,9 but has so far not been put to the test. This study fills that niche and rejects these claims. The number of small states in existence today is not unprecedented, and the various discourses on small state proliferation need to be adjusted. The observation of dramatically changing numbers of one type of a unit of a system – here the termination and proliferation of small states – immediately leads to the recognition that this entails vast shifts in the composition of the system. Losing or adding significant numbers of units actually changes the system’s overall anatomy. With respect to the system of states, the mixture of states of various sizes has effects beyond simple numerical relationships, presumably because it changes the state system’s very make-up. In fact, Hans Morgenthau pointed out that larger changes in a state system’s composition can have effects detrimental to its proper operation. The more great powers grew by absorbing small states, the fewer units were available in the system to maintain the equilibrium. The ongoing losses of small states also meant a shift in the states system, from a system with a multitude of actors of various sizes to an increasingly concentrated system of a handful of great powers and a few remaining small states. In the aggregate, the ongoing disappearance of small states changed the fundamentals of the nineteenth-century states system. More specifically, the fragmented status of Germany in the past had been critical to the proper operation of the balance of power and the concert system. First, the particularized Germany shaped the traditional framework for Europe’s powers, which were located along the periphery, around a non-integrated center. This implied a weak Germany and two counter-balanced great powers, Prussia and Austria. The situation changed drastically with German unification in 1870–7110 and the disappearance of all remaining German small states. Second, in the past a soft underbelly in the middle of Europe had allowed rising states to expand without challenging the territorial integrity of other major states. Additionally, a large number of units had benefitted from concert states’ efforts to fine-tune the equilibrium, making the disappearance of small states detrimental to proper balancing of power, as pointed out by Morgenthau.11 The analysis of the small state’s centuries-old struggle to survive may lead to a renewed appreciation of security as an analytical concept. Studying security from the perspective of the small and weak and in varying international environments promises new insights and lines of inquiry. To begin with, for the small state, proper security can only under the rarest of circumstances be generated by accumulating or even maximizing power.

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In this sense, small states fall outside the Realist paradigm. Rather, much of the small state’s safety depends on the core features of the states system. Worse yet, the states system has been shaped and remains dominated by great powers, and small states have very limited capabilities to adjust it to their own needs. In sum, for the small state, maximizing power does not generate the levels of security it does for middle and great powers. For example, being within striking distance of great and middle powers, Singapore cannot rely on its military forces only for protection, making it much more dependent on working power balances, international organizations that manage disputes, and the rule of law. Great powers may benefit from these features, but small states depend on them.12 The historical record only underlines this insight. The Saxony of the early nineteenth century had a strong army but still lost much of its territory during the negotiations in Vienna in 1815. The reason was the particular constellation of the balance of power which did not give the small state an opening to strengthen its position. Without top-down protection from the states system, its military power proved useless. All this points to the critical importance of reconsidering the concept of security and its application to the small state. Singapore’s Tommy Koh has pointed out that small states may sometimes “punch above their weight.”13 However, doing this successfully is the exception to the rule. After all is said and done, small states cannot assume they will win against heavyweights consistently. Where to advance the study of the small state? This study on small state survival contributes to the existing discourses in the discipline of International Relations and in Small States Studies along four pathways. First, and most obviously, the study’s statistical aspect fills two niches. Few scholars have addressed the quantitative dimension of small state proliferation. By far the best numerically informed study is that of Alan Henrikson, but his statistical data are limited to the twentieth century.14 Existing historical data sets, such as the Correlates of War project, only add the nineteenth century and do not separate out small states from larger powers.15 The quantitative aspect of the present study fills this vacuum by providing the full picture of annual small state numbers since the inception of the current states system in 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia. A second niche has been identified in overall small state scholarship. Writing in the 1960s, William T. R. Fox could still optimistically state: “More and more the survival of the small states has become the subject of systematic investigations.”16 About four decades later, Andrew Cooper and Timothy Shaw

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

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lament that “the analytic and policy attention towards these states has not matched their proliferation.”17 Second, the study of the small state suffers from incomplete integration into the theory of International Relations. In response, a definition is developed here which places the small state properly in one mainstream theory: Realism. By doing so and by investigating small state behavior in power-driven states systems, this study generates fresh insights on balancing, bandwagoning, and alliance building – all critical debates within International Relations theory. In addition, it speaks loudly on the concept of security and connects small state safety with the discourses on global governance – both major building blocks for theorizing about international relations. Third, fresh examinations of the small state in world politics promise to change the narrow focus on middle and great powers all too common in the discipline of International Relations and especially its theory. Many discourses center on great and middle powers, and the patterns of their interactions are then extrapolated for the study of international politics generally. Similarly, most of today’s theory on international relations is built on great power behavior. In contrast, studies of the small state, such as the present one, turn the traditional analytical perspective upside-down. Starting from a new viewpoint, the dynamics of international politics, and in particular the issues of security and survival, are recast in a new light. Fourth, this study returns to the earlier interest in small states’ traditional security concerns. In a post-Cold War and post-9/11 world of new and rising insecurities and renewed challenges to the traditional order, small states in particular must reconsider their security situation. What had concerned the Melians in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War appears to return to contemporary international affairs: small states are threatened by great powers’ military might.18 Singapore’s concerns have been mentioned above. Taiwan’s security remains tenuous. And for the Baltic States, Russia’s aggressive moves westward in the early twenty-first century began changing their regional security environment. In this context, the present project re-connects with a rich but dated literature on small state security. The initial revival of Small States Studies in the early Cold War was much concerned with small state security,19 but was soon superseded by foci on domestic issues and internal shortcomings that were posing unique challenges to small states in an era of globalization.20 An alternative perspective perceived small states as disadvantaged in today’s complex and interconnected world and thus deserving of support from the community of states.21 Despite the variety of approaches, little research fully integrates the systemic perspective

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and explores system-level dynamics and their importance for small state survival and proliferation. And it is on this point that the present study intends to advance the agenda. Climbing on giants’ shoulders This study builds on strong scholarship. Annette Baker Fox, Michael Handel, David Vital, and Robert Rothstein advanced the agenda on small state survival early on.22 Fox’s research centered on how “governments of small and military weak states can resist the strong pressure of great powers.”23 Her colleagues had related agendas and focused on how small states could prepare themselves better to withstand coercion and aggression or how their leaders could find ways and means to enhance state security. For all of them, small states’ security vulnerabilities stemmed from their internal weaknesses and therefore needed cures that could be generated by the state itself. This is where the present study plots a different course. The destination is the same – understanding how small states survive – but the route taken looks at the states system, rather than the state or its leaders. In the discipline of International Relations’ parlance, this study works at the systemic level of analysis. The systemic level is considered the “key explanatory factor”24 for two reasons. First, it is hypothesized that the larger trends in small state death, survival, and proliferation are driven by structures and dynamics at the system level. Second, the magnitude of changes and the uniformity of trends with respect to small state survival over the course of history strongly suggest the dominance of general, system-wide dynamics. Figure 1 shows the overall developments in the number of small states for the past three-and-a-half centuries. Nearly 400 small states were lost in less than 250 years and later 80 small states emerged in less than 50 years. To explain these changes and developments at the sub-systemic level assumes an extremely high level of parallel developments in dozens of small states at about the same time. This is considered analytically unsatisfactory here and therefore rejected. Instead, this study picks up on previous work that sees the states system as “decisive in setting the structure within which small states have to act,”25 and thus placing limits on their political options.26 This general line of inquiry is adopted here. More specifically, this study follows in the footsteps of investigations that focus more clearly on the system’s impact on small state security,27 and especially the work of Robert Rothstein and Michael Handel. Rothstein pointed to the importance of the states system in the relationship between a small state and

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Larger states totals

Figure 1  Numbers of small and larger states, 1648–2016

Number of states 1648 1658 1668 1678 1688 1698 1708 1718 1728 1738 1748 1758 1768 1778 1788 1798 1808 1818 Year

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Small states totals

1838 1848 1858 1868 1878 1888 1898 1908 1918 1928 1938 1948 1958 1968 1978 1988 1998 2008 2016

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a great power.28 His insight is transferred to the present study where it directs the orientation of the inquiry towards system-level dynamics. Looking at the states system opens the door to understanding the states system as the key determinant of small state security and insecurity. Herbert Butterfield describes the balance-of-power system as a protective and enabling mechanism: “[T]he balance not only guaranteed the existence of small states, but assured them of a certain degree of autonomy, a power of independent action. It guaranteed their independence at its most crucial point, namely, in the realm of foreign policy.”29 Michael Handel makes essentially the same point when he talks about small (conceptualized as weak) states’ “relative security”: “It is … ­possible to distinguish between cycles of security or insecurity, influence or impotence of the weak states in the international system. The position and relative security of any weak state must be gauged in terms of the specific international system in which it is operating.”30 These lines of investigation, as they were initially developed by Rothstein, Butterfield, and Handel, are picked up in this study. They will be the starting point for an investigation that goes further and deeper by looking at the specifics of the various incarnations of the modern states system and how these system-level features translated into different degrees of small state security. With this analytical orientation, this study finds itself also in agreement with Morgenthau, who states that “[s]mall nations have always owed their independence either to the balance of power …, or to the preponderance of one protecting power …, or to their lack of attractiveness for imperialistic aspirations.”31 The statistics of small state survival: a first cut Figure 1 shows the phenomenon under investigation here, the history of small state termination, survival, and proliferation over almost 370 years. The graph shows very different periods of development over time. The story of small state survival did not play out as one single trend. Periods of loss are followed by times of recovery. The changes up- and downward are remarkable in themselves; as Fox points out: “The continued existence and, indeed, startling increase in the number of small states may seem paradoxical in the age of superpowers and the drastically altered ration of military strength between them and the rest of the world.”32 Things become even more “paradoxical” if the ubiquity of war in earlier times is considered. In fact, given the anarchic nature of international politics since the middle of the seventeenth century and the general weakness of small states, one may reasonably assume that most losses of small states

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are the result of wars. Some correlations can indeed be found, the most ­prominent being the Napoleonic Wars and the dramatic decline in the number of small states during this period. Looking at the bigger picture, however, open military aggression seems not to be the primary cause of small state death. Many small states have died peacefully, although not necessarily voluntarily. Moreover, the reverse case is hard to find: periods of small state increase do not neatly tally with peaceful times.33 The “paradox” between small state survival on the one hand and their weakness vis-à-vis middle, great, and superpowers finds its explanation when the particulars of the states system are considered as the key explanatory variable. Stability and steady trends as well as shifts and changes in the number of small states, as shown in Figure 1, have their explanation at the system level, where the balance-of-power era was succeeded by the concert system, which was in turn replaced by systems of collective security and global governance. Setting up an analytical and theoretical framework A couple of assumptions were made at the outset of this project. First, survival is understood here in the true Machiavellian sense of preventing the complete annihilation of a state,34 or “state death.”35 The rate of survival is captured statistically by comparing the total annual number of small states. In this way, the rise and fall in total numbers describes the overall picture of success or failure of small state survival. Second, security is critical to survival. The more secure a state can be, the higher its chances of survival. Third, the small state is considered a distinct category of state and as such it can be counted.36 Fourth, all states exist in a system of states that can be traced back to the mid seventeenth century. Still today, the “Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order.”37 Fifth, the almost 370 years of Westphalian world order witnessed “big bangs”:38 “critical turning points” when the old order was changed, but not completely discarded.39 They will be used as short-hand markers for the change of one states system to the next. Sixth, the chances for small states to survive are determined by the various levels of security the system generates. A more supportive system leads to fewer losses of small states or additions of small states, and a less supportive system creates higher rates of small state death. This study views international relations since at least the mid seventeenth century to be driven by concerns over state power. Consequently, the study deals with power, weakness, and power politics. To do so properly, a theoretical framework was needed that puts power and power

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balancing front and center. And since the focus here is on the system, its structure, and its restraints on power, the framework must prioritize the system level of analysis. For these reasons, a composite theoretical framework that integrates the Realist, Structural Realist, and English School paradigms was developed. Power and power politics are important concepts in the academic discipline of International Relations theory, and particularly in Realist thinking. Following Edward Vose Gulick, the term power politics “characteriz[es] the totality of the struggle among states which are compelled to rely upon their own strength for security and survival. ‘Power politics’ implies no set aim or policy; it embraces all methods, equilibrist or expansionist alike.”40 Since antiquity, Realist thinking has focused on power. It is seen as critical for state security and the national interest.41 States amass power in a fundamentally anarchic environment, and the system of states is structured by the uneven distribution of power among states.42 In such a world, the major powers are critical, as Kenneth Waltz insists. The configuration between the great powers determines the system’s overall structure, and the great powers set the system’s polarity.43 The states system’s structure is further shaped by features that modify it and impact the application of power. In classical and modern Realism, raw power politics is modified first and foremost by power balancing. Morgenthau refers to balancing and additional features as “limitations of national power.”44 In addition to the balance of power, he suggests ethics, world opinion, and International Law act as key “limitations.”45 The English School describes these modifiers as societal norms. Hedley Bull refers to them as “values.”46 He highlights, consistent with Morgenthau, the balance of power and International Law but also suggests diplomacy and problematizes war.47 F. H. Hinsley uses the label “restraints;”48 Leslie Gelb refers to “international constraints on the strong.”49 Realism and English School theory overlap in various areas, such as the observation that unbridled power politics does not occur because the basically anarchic system is modified in order to “keep aspirations for power in socially tolerable bounds”50 and find meaningful order in an “anarchical society.”51 Whether conceived of as limitations of power or communal norms and values, these features co-determine, together with the power-based structure, the actual nature of the states system.52 More recently, Richard Little added that “social, ideational and material factors” are tasked with “ameliorating the effects” of otherwise unhampered great power interaction.53 Building on this scholarship, the states system is defined here by its core structure and its key modifiers. As the Westphalian states system

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developed, it went through various stages which featured different balances between the system’s overall structure and the most important modifiers of the era. This study uses Bull’s and Morgenthau’s ordering features and limitations as a starting point54 but goes beyond them where necessary. After all, different time periods witnessed the erosion of some limitations and rise of other modifiers. In order to develop a truly comprehensive picture of small state survival, an examination of the states system in its entirety, that is to say across time and space, is required. The contemporary states system is a variation of the Westphalian states system of the seventeenth century. Thus the data available to study the small state in its systemic environment reach back about three-and-a-half centuries, to the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Studying small state survival over the entire time span provides a richer and, arguably, more accurate picture. Admittedly, that states system emerged only over time,55 but the year 1648, when the Thirty Years’ War was formally ended with the Peace of Westphalia, is a reasonable starting point. The treaty’s extensive provisions are evidence of a consciously designed states system. Similar markers are the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919. These years saw the conclusion of major efforts to reconfigure the states system and are thus solid markers for long-range historical analysis. Today’s states system did not emerge in 1945, as Raymond Aron maintains;56 nor did the European states system end that year, as Paul Schroeder argues.57 Rather, the system continued but changed from an exclusively European, to a Europe-centered, and finally to a global system over the course of its existence.58 The system expanded geographically but maintained its core features and operating principles. In this sense, it remained one system.59 Put differently, the emergence of a truly global states system in the twentieth century was not achieved by the establishment of a new system but by the expansion of the existing states system in membership and geographic reach. To be sure, states existed outside the Westphalian system before European colonialism transferred European international relations abroad. As Morgenthau indicates: “The expansion of the European state system into the other continents by means of colonial empires, from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century, broke down the barrier that had separated the different systems of international relations.”60 However, only after a period of “isolation or subordination”61 was overcome and colonies transitioned into sovereign states did they become part of the states system as properly functioning units. Consequently, they are considered and counted here only after they had

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overcome colonial rule. To be sure, there are some exceptions. China, for example, had been a state long before Europe made peace in the mid ­seventeenth century, and Siam was able to avoid European colonization and protect its statehood. Overall, however, the current states system has its roots in the Westphalian system. Over time, it evolved from a European to a global system. Efforts to trace small state survival back in time thus lead back to Europe without necessarily becoming biased and Eurocentric. The European system’s evolution can be divided into three major eras. These ‘long centuries’ will be used to organize the investigation of small state survival which follows. They are also important for the analysis of the small state’s fate because each of these eras featured a different variation of the Westphalian system of sovereign states. The history of the contemporary states system is sub-divided into the era of the laissez-faire balance of power (1648 to the 1790s), the era of the concert system (1815 to 1914), and an extended twentieth-century era of power politics paired with collective ­security and global governance (1919 to the early twenty-first century).62 The road map The study develops in three stages. This introductory chapter will be followed by a combined definitional and statistical chapter. Next, three world historical periods and their respective states systems will be examined. These chapters form the heart of the study. Their key findings will be highlighted in a concluding chapter which extends the debate by offering an outlook on small state survival in the foreseeable future. This introduction has already begun to construct the analytical framework. It will be expanded in the following chapter, where the discussion turns to the definition of the small state. This is critical for two reasons. First, the sub-field of Small States Studies has not settled on a consensus definition. Different scholars have suggested different ways of describing the small state and explaining its behavior. These discourses need to be considered in order to evaluate strengths and weaknesses. Most critically, an examination of the literature showed that no properly developed definition of the small state existed that fit precisely the requirements of this project. Second, the research project required descriptive statistics to confirm or contradict a theory-driven claim. This in turn necessitated the collection of historical data on small states worldwide and for the last three-and-a-half centuries. Such quantitative research required a definition of the small state that was precise enough to count and code states and flexible enough to work across time and space. With the small state defined as a negligible unit of a power-based international states system, a data set of small and non-small states

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

13

was put together. The data are presented in the second half of chapter 2. The complete data set including the code sheet is available online at www.smallstate.info. Instead of reproducing the entire raw data here, the statistical exploration will rely heavily on graphics to visualize the key observations and on descriptive statistics. The purpose of the quantitative section is to showcase the particular phenomenon of small state survival, highlight its particularity, and support the claim that small state survival is linked causally to the states system. The total annual number of small states is presented, and the larger development, the rise and fall in the number of small states from year to year, is taken as an indicator for small state abolishment, survival, or proliferation. The data show that different historical eras can indeed be matched to particular trends in small state survival. Each of the next three chapters examines a major era of the international system of states. Chapter 3 investigates the era of the classic balance of power which began after the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and ended during the French Revolutionary Wars and the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. The fourth chapter looks at the concert system that was created in 1814–15 and vanished in the lead-up to the First World War. The fifth chapter examines the twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century states system’s features and record, starting in 1919 and ending nearly a century later. Each of these chapters is sub-divided into three parts. The first part develops an initial plausibility case for the claim that the era’s particular states system was relevant to small state survival. The system’s key features will be examined closely in order to evaluate if and how much they may favor or disfavor the small state. From that emerges a picture of a states system’s particular character with respect to the small state and its survival. The traditional balance of power of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it will be shown, was rather conducive to small state survival, more so than the concert system of the succeeding era. However, neither was a match for the supportive and protective nature of the twentieth-century system when it came to small states and their chances of survival. The second parts of chapters 3, 4, and 5 are brief but customized recapitulations of the numerical data presented in chapter 2. The purpose is to show the actual survival or proliferation trend during this era and to demonstrate how the proclaimed nature of the state system with regard to small state survival is reflected in the rise and fall of the actual numbers of small states. The third and final part of these three chapters examines the historical record. The history of international relations, first and foremost the history of international politics, is examined for three main reasons.

14

Small states in world politics

First, the overall claim of small states’ structural security dependency will be further strengthened by describing when and how small states failed to survive or managed to pull through and proliferate. Second, the specificities of each era’s survival story can be properly explored. Third, the causal link between the states system’s key features and small states’ chances of survival can be investigated in detail. The study will conclude with an analytical summary and outlook. The purpose of the former is to bring together the key findings of the previous chapters and build up the broader claim that the states system, regardless of type and era, pre-sets the chances for small states to survive or proliferate. The reason for the latter is to extend the current trend lines and consider the fate of the small state in the foreseeable future. With a number of candidates waiting in the wings, it is reasonable to assume that the number of small states will see a moderate rise over the next few decades. Notes  1 “Excerpts from an Interview with Lee Kuan Yew,” New York Times, 2007, www. nytimes.com/2007/08/29/world/asia/29iht-lee-excerpts.html?_r=0.  2 Kishore Mahbubani, Can Singapore Survive? (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2015), 9.  3 Montesquieu, Considérations sur le Cause de la Grandeur des Romain et de Leur Décadence, 18th ed. (Paris: Librairie Ch. Delagrave, 1748 (1913)). Also: Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 39.  4 George Liska, International Equilibrium: A Theoretical Essay on the Politics and Organization of Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 200.  5 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985).  6 Robert O. Keohane, “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas: Small States in International Politics,” International Organization 23, no. 2 (1969): 310.  7 Robert L. Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968).  8 Andrew F. Cooper and Timothy M. Shaw, “The Diplomacies of Small States at the Start of the Twenty-first Century: How Vulnerable? How Resilient?” in The Diplomacies of Small States: Between Vulnerability and Resilience, ed. Andrew F. Cooper and Timothy M. Shaw (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1.  9 Juan Enriquez, “Too Many Flags?” Foreign Policy 116, Fall (1999). 10 Christopher Clark, Preußen, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 1600–1947 (München: Pantheon, 2008), 631–4; Imanuel Geiss, Die deutsche Frage 1806–1990 (Mannheim: B.I.-Taschenbuchverlag, 1992), 27–77. 11 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 332–335. In this section, Morgenthau wavers between attributing the “inflexibility of the new balance of

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

15

power” to the reduction in the number of great powers or states generally, that is, including smaller states. 12 Mahbubani, Can Singapore Survive?, 13–16. 13 Tommy Koh, “Foreign Affairs,” in Singapore: The Year in Review, 1996, ed. Gillian Koh (Singapore: IPS/Times Academic Press, 1997), 68. 14 Alan K. Henrikson, Small States in World Politics: The International Political Position and Diplomatic Influence of the World’s Growing Number of Smaller Countries. Paper prepared for the Joint Commonwealth Secretariat/World Bank Task Force Conference on Small States, St. Lucia, 17–19 February 1999; Enriquez, “Too Many Flags?” 15 “The Correlates of War Project,” www.correlatesofwar.org/. 16 Quoted in Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, vii. 17 Cooper and Shaw, “The Diplomacies of Small States,” 1. 18 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (London: Penguin Books, 1972). 19 Annette Baker Fox, The Power of Small States (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959); David Vital, The Inequality of States: A Study of the Small Power in International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); David Vital, The Survival of Small States: Studies in Small/Great Power Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers. 20 Dame Eugenia Charles, Andreas Jacovides, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa et al., A  Future for Small States: Overcoming Vulnerability (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997); Eliawony J. Kisanga and Sarah Jane Dancie, eds., Commonwealth Small States: Issues and Prospects (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2007); Lino Briguglio, ed., Small States and the Pillars of Economic Resilience (Valetta: Islands and Small States Institute of the University of Malta, 2008). 21 Alan K. Henrikson, “A Coming ‘Magnesian’ Age? Small States, the Global System, and the International Community,” Geopolitics 6 no. 3, Winter (2001). 22 Annette Baker Fox, “Small State Diplomacy,” in Diplomacy in a Changing World, ed. Stephen D. Kertsz and M. A. Fitzsimons (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1959); Michael Handel, Weak States in the International System (Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1981); Vital, The Survival of Small States; Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers. 23 Fox, The Power of Small States, vii. 24 Jeanne A. K. Hey, “Refining Our Understanding of Small State Foreign Policy,” in Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, ed. Jeanne A. K. Hey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 186–187. 25 Charles et al., A Future for Small States, 5. 26 Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, “The English-Speaking Caribbean States: A Triad of Foreign Policies,” in Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, ed. Jeanne A. K. Hey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 45. 27 Charles et al., A Future for Small States, 11. 28 Robert L. Rothstein, The Weak in the World of the Strong: The Developing Countries in the International System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

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29 Herbert Butterfield, “The Balance of Power,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 142. 30 Handel, Weak States in the International System, 5. 31 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 170; Roslyn L. Simowitz, The Logical Consistency and Soundness of the Balance of Power Theory, ed. Karen A. Feste (Denver: Graduate School of International Affairs, University of Denver, 1982), 76. 32 Fox, The Power of Small States, vii. 33 Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), especially the table on p. 143. 34 Machiavelli, The Prince. 35 Tanisha Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 36 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers. 37 Kissinger, World Order, 6. 38 Peter J. Katzenstein is quoted in G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 7. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Edward Vose Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power: A Case History of the Theory and Practice of One of the Great Concepts of European Statecraft (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1955), 298. 41 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations. 42 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1979). 43 Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 159–223. 44 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 159. 45 Ibid., 219–317; the quote is on p. 159. 46 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 13. 47 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1977). 48 F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 220–226. 49 Leslie H. Gelb, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 5. 50 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 219. 51 Bull, The Anarchical Society (1977). 52 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 22; Bull, The Anarchical Society (1977), 13; Adam Watson, The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis (London: Routledge, 1992), 311. 53 Richard Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations: Metaphors, Myths and Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92.

Small state survival as a historical phenomenon

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54 Bull, The Anarchical Society 101–229; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 161–317. 55 Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3. 56 Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (New York: Praeger, 1966), 94–98. 57 Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), xiii. 58 Leo Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948,” American Journal of International Law 42, no. 1 (1948); Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 265–276. 59 Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 60 Hans J. Morgenthau, “International Relations,” in American Politics and Government: Essays in Essentials, ed. Stephen K. Bailey (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 227. 61 Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1951), 41–42. 62 Joseph S. Nye Jr., Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (New York: Longman, 2000).

2 Defining and quantifying the small state

Counting the great powers of an era [is very easy]. … The question is an empirical one, and common sense can answer it.1

No consensus definition of the small state exists. However, a proper understanding of the small state is critical to this study for four reasons: analytical clarity and transparency, the proper usage of statistical data, the applied theoretical framework, and the historical component of the investigation. First, calling for a proper understanding of the object of a scholarly inquiry is stating the obvious. Unfortunately, “[t]here is no internationally established or academically agreed upon definition of the ‘small state.’”2 However, the small state exists as a political entity. For centuries, small states have been “actual, living reality.”3 Moreover, the small state has proven to be a useful tool for analysis and the rationale for studying the small state remains strong today.4 Second, a rigorous definition is necessary to compile statistical data. The understanding of the small state as a structurally irrelevant unit of the states system was applied as the key filter for a database that categorizes all states of a given year (since 1648) as either small or non-small (i.e. larger). Third, a proper definition is necessary to place the small state properly in the study’s theoretical framework and, more generally, the related discourses in the discipline of International Relations generally. Fourth, the later chapters investigate small state survival not only from theoretical and statistical but also from historical perspectives. To do so properly, the essence of the small state must conform to the theoretical framework, be applicable across time and space, and be compatible with historical studies of diplomacy. This chapter will work towards a definitional framework for the study of small state survival. It will establish the small state as a structurally

Defining and quantifying the small state

19

negligible unit in the power-driven and power-structured international states system that emerged in the seventeenth century. Structural irrelevance has characterized the small states since at least the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In this sense, Saxe-Gotha of the seventeenth century was no different from today’s Kiribati. This is the central assumption on which the following discussion is built. A unified understanding of the small state across time and space will then provide the basis for a focused investigation of the phenomenon of small state survival. The definition allows for the compilation of a unique small states data set, available online.5 Its data will be surveyed briefly to provide a quantitative overview of small state survival over the past three-and-a-half centuries. It will give the subsequent analyses of small state survival and proliferation over time a general quantitative frame. Later chapters will also draw heavily on the statistical data as part of their explorations of different historical eras. The many challenges of defining the small state A number of challenges have plagued the search for a generally applicable definition of the small state. To begin with, identifying the truly characteristic features of common labels and terms of widely used ideas and concepts such as national power, a country’s weakness, or a state’s size poses major challenges to scholars of International Relations.6 Also, proper definitions require precision. With respect to the study of the small state, the demand for definitional precision has led to further, associated problems. First, the fixation on accuracy has confused the issues of ‘precision’ and ‘quantifiability,’ with only definitions that are based on hard, quantifiable data seen as sufficiently rigorous. In this context, the very possibility of developing a “rigid definition,” using “strictly defined criteria” has been doubted. Applying “rigid specifications” would lead to far too many exceptions.7 The best that can be done, it is suggested, is to apply a “loosely defined concept,” instead of a “definition” in the field of Small States Studies.8 That is to say, the possibility of developing a precise, rigorous definition of the small state is rejected because it is argued that state size cannot be sufficiently defined by quantifiable data. While the observation that a state’s size cannot be adequately boiled down to quantifiable criteria might be accurate, the conclusion that this also rules out any hope for a ‘precise’ definition is rejected here. Definitional precision is not limited by quantifiable data. Second, the search for rigor has led scholars to advance quantifiable criteria with fairly arbitrary cut-off points. Unfortunately, no degree of

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Small states in world politics

refinement has been sufficient to prevent distortions that result from absolute cut-offs. After all, is it appropriate, for example, to label a state with a population of one million ‘small,’ but categorize a state with one million plus one individuals ‘not small?’ These problems have been aggravated by two issues. First, a certain ‘disconnect’ between “theorists” who do not believe a definition of the small state is possible and “empiricists” who study the small state regardless of any definitional problems9 has undermined the case for a proper definition. Second, some studies have treated the definitional issue too lightly, preferring to mix and match criteria for smallness too casually, stating for example that “the notion of a small state is still widely used, and a large number of states perceive themselves or are perceived as small states. Switzerland is such a small state, though its economic strength is that of a middle-ranking power.”10 These issues are compounded further by the definitional challenges posed by a study of the small state over time. Here, the definition has not only to be rigorous but also ‘timeless.’ Similarly, it must be applicable across the geographical world. It must also be compatible with preferred scholarly approaches of historical studies and the “methodological-­ theoretical”11 approaches usually applied in the discipline of International Relations. Related to the discipline’s requirements is the need for a definition to be embedded in the theory of International Relations in order to move beyond description and on to explanation. What is needed, then, is a multi-disciplinary definition of the small state.12 Circumscribing the small state Although the term small state itself means different things to different people, it is used here only in the context of the disciplines of International Relations and Diplomatic Studies. However, the discipline of International Relations recognizes a number of ‘distant cousins’ of the small state; types of states that share a number of characteristics with the small state. Key examples are failing, fragile, and quasi-states, rogue states and outlaw states, and landlocked and small island states, as well as mini- and micro-states.13 Other foci are the particular dynamics of small states’ national economies14 and the associated exposure to exploitation.15 Yet another approach places small states low in a universal hierarchy of states of dominant and subordinate states.16 All these approaches interact fruitfully with the study of the small state but are quite distinct from the phenomenon of the small state investigated here. For the purpose of the current project, they are considered out of bounds. *  *  *

Defining and quantifying the small state

21

Since at least 1648, states have formed a system of states. The number of states in it has fluctuated over time, but during the entire time span under investigation here, no truly universal empire or world-state has existed. Rather the era is marked by the persistence of a considerable number of states which together formed one states system. Such a system emerged in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries17 and was firmly established by the early eighteenth century. Because the present study relies on statistical data of annual small states total numbers, it requires a fixed data point. It uses the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 as the starting date for the international states system. The existence of other states systems at different times in world history and in different regions of the globe is recognized, as is the Westphalian system’s initially limited geographic reach. However, during the eighteenth century it transformed into a truly universal system of states, and it remains in place today. This particular states system created what Morton Kaplan calls a “system-dominant” environment for all states.18 According to Kaplan, a “system of action” has a number of variables, all interrelated with one another either directly or indirectly. The unique feature of a system is that its processes follow “describable behavioral regularities.”19 Indeed these regularities allow for description, explanation, and prediction of outputs if the system is properly understood. For an investigation of small state survival, this means that the system’s output, the survival rate of small states, can be explained by the inner workings of the states system, the “description of [its] variables.”20 To do so properly, however, one has to recognize that systems change over time. Today’s international states system has maintained its core features since the seventeenth century but saw considerable evolutionary changes between the Peace of Westphalia and the War on Terror. Therefore, it is necessary to follow the system’s “successive states.”21 Accordingly, the present study is organized around the major evolutionary stages of the international states system. Since its inception in the middle of the seventeenth century, the international system’s units have been states. The terms “state,” “country,” “nation,” and “nation-state” are generally used interchangeably by diplomats as well as scholars; in the past, this list would have had to be augmented with the term “power.” Recognizing a rich literature on these labels,22 the term “state” will be used here to preserve consistency and clarity. Modern Customary International Law and the 1933 Montevideo Convention provide today’s generally accepted yardstick for statehood.

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Small states in world politics

To be considered a state, an entity must (a) have a defined territory; (b)  have a permanent population; (c) have a government in control; and (d) be willing to participate in international relations.23 The legal approach provides a solid baseline for a proper understanding of statehood, not only in International Law but also in international politics. In most of International Relations, and in particular in the discipline’s theory, states are understood as “like units,” that is, units that operate and function similarly. They do so despite considerable variations in many dimensions, including size.24 Small states, too, are “like units” in this sense and are states according to the standards of their time. Related to the question of statehood are issues of autonomy, independence, and sovereignty. With the Peace of Westphalia sovereignty was enshrined as a legal standard of all units in the emerging states system. For all practical purposes, great powers had already secured it for themselves, but in 1648, not being “molested” in their territory “by any whomsoever upon any manner of pretense” was transformed into a general legal norm applicable to all states, large and small.25 Sovereignty extended to foreign policy, too, as article LXV of the peace treaty made clear: “Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the States of the Empire, to make Alliances with Strangers for their Preservation and Safety.”26 Admittedly, the understanding of sovereignty in the seventeenth century was not identical to our current one. However, even if seventeenth-century sovereignty emphasized the ultimate decision-­ ­ making power of a state’s ruler,27 it was already strong enough in its rejection of any supranational authority. Neither then nor in more modern times has somewhat compromised sovereignty precluded a state from functioning as a proper unit in the states system. Western Germany during the Cold War is an example of partially withheld sovereignty which did not prevent statehood as pragmatically understood. Sovereignty does not guarantee actual independence; nor does it enable autonomy by itself. States may be formally sovereign but practically dependent on another state. The historical record is full of examples of partially dependent sovereign states. Limited independence has been a constant feature of many small states over time, to be sure. To identify states as such, and in particular small states, the standard of a “functionally independent”28 unitary actor in the system is applied here. Recognizing the near impossibility of small states being truly independent in the narrowest sense of the word, statehood will be assumed here if a small state has sufficient independence to function as its own unit in the states system. Autonomy has considerable overlap with independence, so much so that the terms are often used interchangeably. For the purpose of this

Defining and quantifying the small state

23

study, autonomy is ‘a step down’ from independence and describes a situation where a state is reasonably free to steer its own course. While an autonomous state is generally self-governing internally, it may be limited in foreign affairs. Some entities may have their autonomy curtailed and their independence impaired to such a degree that they have become, to all practical purposes, an annex to a larger state. In a related fashion, so-called spheres of influence have been a recurring phenomenon in international affairs. They pose a particular analytical problem for the present study because their impact on small state autonomy is difficult to gauge. For example, it has been claimed that after 1814 the principality of Parma-Piacenza “remained within the Austrian sphere of influence”29 because it was given to Marie-Louise, who was a daughter of Hapsburg emperor Franz II, but also the wife of the deposed and banned French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Similar examples are the United States’ sphere of influence over Central and South America that came into being with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and Soviet spheres of influence during the Cold War. For the purpose of this study, small states in spheres of influence and states with limited autonomy are still considered states with ‘good enough’ levels of functional independence, as long as they were not subjugated to a level that would completely negate their ability to maneuver. In sum, the prominent standards of units being “functionally independent”30 and “sufficiently unencumbered by legal, military, economic, or political constraints to exercise a fair degree of sovereignty and independence”31 are accepted and applied here. It can reasonably be argued that some states already existed before a proper system of states emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century. France of the early Baroque period is an example. However, in this study the starting dates of the states system and of states as units of that system must necessarily be synchronized. States, whether large or small, are considered here from 1648 at the earliest. This is not to deny the long histories of many modern states. Rather, pre-1648 data are simply irrelevant for the present project. However, in the early European-centered states system, most small states existed within the overarching Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and in this context the choice of 1648 as a cut-off needs explanation. For any of these German small states to be considered here, the umbrella structure of the empire needed to have faded enough to allow for sufficient small state autonomy to meet this study’s minimum requirement. By 1648 this was indeed the case, in particular in foreign policy.32 Four years earlier, for instance, the small German state of

24

Small states in world politics

Brandenburg had chosen neutrality in clear contravention of “the 1641 imperial Recess that forbade such arrangements without the emperor’s express approval.”33 From the previous discussions, it is becoming clear that determining proper statehood of small states cannot follow a rigid yes-or-no matrix. Instead, a spectrum, ranging from unchallenged sovereign independence to insufficient autonomy, must be considered, with most small states falling somewhere in between. Therefore, the standard of ‘good enough’ will be applied: in order to be considered as a proper state in this study, there has to be sufficient independence for the small state to function as a political unit in the international system. The focus on units’ functionability meshes well with prominent scholarship on the states system34 and contemporary small states scholarship, which views the small state as “a recognized political unit with significant decision-making authority.”35 These findings form the basis for a rigorous conceptualization of the small state in international relations. It will be used to frame the ensuing discussion of existing scholarship and the following construction of the definition of the small state used in this study. Rival conceptualizations of the small state: materially small vs. structurally irrelevant Most definition-oriented studies on the small state fall into one of two major groups. Small states are categorized as materially small or as systemically little and insignificant. In fact, the observation holds true not only with regard to specialized Small States Studies literature. Political Science and International Relations reference works offer different descriptions of the small state, although the criteria of population size and land area feature prominently.36 Most frequently, small states are seen to be defined by measurable characteristics, suggesting that the smallness of states can be quantified. Alternative approaches suggest qualitative dimensions of small statehood and frequently point to a lack of power and states’ inability to provide for their own security.37 In sum, descriptions of the small state fall into two categories. First, the small state is conceptualized by its physical dimensions, measurable for example through population size. Second, the small state is placed in relation to its environment and as an ineffective player in the states system. Put differently, reference works of the disciplines of Political Science and International Relations capture the small state as either small in absolute size or as little and weak with regard to its environment. In the specialist scholarship, a consensus definition of the small

Defining and quantifying the small state

25

state remains elusive.38 While the existence of small states as a distinct category of states is generally accepted, a consensus does not exist about which characteristics determine state size. More specifically, the discussion on how best to conceptualize and define the small state has been between proponents of quantifiable criteria such as population, Gross Domestic Product, military size or geographic size on the one hand, and proponents of criteria which link small states to relative positions of weakness in the states system on the other. Others have pointed towards unique behavior patterns of small states as their core characteristics,39 or to small states’ rank in a hierarchy of states.40 However, the latter two approaches are variations of the ‘physical’ small state, since hierarchy stems from the power resources of states and unique behavior patterns of small states are ultimately driven by size. It has been argued that a conference in Lisbon late in the Cold War marked the “beginning in the study of the question of country size.”41 Questions raised there have dominated the debate to this day. First of all, there was discussion about which criteria determine state size. If this question could be answered, one would have to set cut-off points for quantifiable criteria. In part in recognition of the problems associated with these issues, the debate then turned to the broader topic of what kind of definition was sought, and what type of definition was possible. Should state size be understood in rigorous, ideally quantifiable terms? Or should the size of states be used as a flexible concept? And finally how much arbitrariness is acceptable when setting the cut-offs?42 These issues remain controversial today. The main reason for this confusing discourse on small state size is an incomplete and inconsistent conceptualization of state size in the discipline of International Relations. This can be illustrated by an excursion into linguistics. In widely used dictionaries the listings under the entry “small” fall into two broad streams. The first category contains different entries that all describe “small” as having few units of measurement (quantity, value, operating scale, circumference, degree, intensity, scope, etc.). The second lists those meanings that describe small as “lacking significance” (being unimportant, trivial, immature, or of little consequence; lacking power, influence, status, strength, authority, etc.). Webster’s Third New International Dictionary states: “Small and little are often interchangeable, but small more frequently applies to things whose magnitude is formulated in terms of number, size, capacity, value, or significance … or modifies words like quantity, amount, size, or capacity. … Little is usu[ally] more absolute in implication, often carrying the idea of petiteness, pettiness, or insignificance in literal or figurative size, amount, quantity, or extent.”43

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Small states in world politics

In light of the above, an analogous dyadic pair of conceptual angles used to describe the smallness of states – partly overlapping but still sufficiently distinct – emerges. The small state can be understood as a unit that is materially deficient (small) or, alternatively, as a unit that lacks relevance (little). Understanding a state’s size in material and quantitative terms matches well with behaviorism’s insistence on rigorous scientific standards. Indeed contemporary studies are dominated by definitions that are based on measurable characteristics. For example, a state’s landmass can be measured precisely and then used to separate small from larger states. Other criteria, such as the size of the national economy44 and the state’s military (either in terms of men or in terms of military expenditure), are employed. Most recently, the trend has been to focus on the population of a state to separate out small states. A range of different population ceilings has been suggested although without establishing a consensus.45 It was noted above that identifying small states according to the size of their population only is analytically unsatisfactory. In response to the challenges of accuracy and reliability, scholars have reminded their critics that a state’s population size fairly reliably parallels state size expressed in other dimensions, such as the size of the military or the economy.46 They have also proposed the re-introduction of additional criteria in order to better capture the essence of the small state. An “expanded concept of size”47 and a “varied and flexible set of categories”48 have been suggested to analytically strengthen the categorization of states as small primarily on the basis of their population.49 Still, problems remain. As with other measurable categories, using a state’s population as indicator offers the chance to categorize states precisely, but in order to do so it is necessary to set cut-off points. However, exactly where to place these limits remains controversial and analytically debatable.50 Regardless of any modifications and adjustments, all these approaches conceptualize and define the small state essentially on the basis of one – or a combination – of the state’s internal capacities, expressed and measured in quantifiable criteria. In essence, these definitions follow the overall notion that small states are defined by their lack of significant physical resources. Applying the dyadic framing typology suggested above, these states are small, not little. An alternative approach conceptualizes the small state as a little unit. Here, “small state” is seen as a political term and is put in the wider context of the state system.51 And in this system, smallness leads to political vulnerabilities.52 This leads to two overlapping but distinct

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understandings of small states. First, small states are ineffectual international actors. Here the focus is on the small states’ lack of structurally meaningful capabilities. Individually, they cannot do anything to alter the overall structure of the environment in which they exist. Second, small states can be defined as irrelevant to the organization and operation of the states system. This viewpoint is centered on small states individually being irrelevant to the system’s structure. The structure of the system exists and evolves irrespective of any of its small states. Only collectively could small states become structurally relevant. Both approaches are grounded in structural thinking, but this is particularly true for the second, where the core claim is that small states do not matter as far as the structure of the states system is concerned, making them structurally irrelevant. This viewpoint captures well the traditional thinking on the small state in diplomatic history, which has looked at small states as largely irrelevant to the maintenance of the overall systemic order. Traditionally, small states have been seen as of little, if any, relevance to the structure of the international states system,53 causing them to be considered negligible units in politics and scholarship. The term “insignificant” is used here in the sense of small states generally lacking import or pertinence with respect to the states system’s core structures. This makes small states inconsequential and irrelevant vis-à-vis the form and operation of the states system. In eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century world politics, “insignificant” also implied contemptible, as major states looked down on small states as unviable and outdated units; Balkanization, fragmentation, and particularism described undesirable developments. However, this study rejects this negative connotation. The term “insignificant” does not carry qualitative judgment here. By way of illustration of what is meant here by insignificant or irrelevant states: the international system of states that emerged in the mid seventeenth century was shaped by power-balancing dynamics, and in this environment54 small states did not matter much as far as the overriding power-based structures were concerned. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, for example, states that were considered incapable of assisting in a meaningful way in upholding the new international order, that is, containing France, were seen as meaningless for the balance of power, and were thus treated as states of second or even third rank.55 In this sense, the concert system with its underlying balance of power was constructed without the small state. In the concert system, small states were given “no role”56 because they had no function. In 1919, small states were again sidelined by the victorious great powers,57 and history repeated itself after the Second World War. Small states remain structurally irrelevant in a world dominated by great

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powers and their relations. In such a political world, small states make no difference and thus are of no importance to the powerful states.58 Small states are little in two overlapping but distinct ways: small states are, first, insignificant to those powers that determine the system’s structure and are thus, second, also irrelevant and inconsequential to an international states system that is structured exclusively by major powers. Speaking abstractly and only with regard to the Westphalian power-centered states system, any singly small state does not matter because its creation, survival, or death leaves no noticeable mark. Clearly, small states matter, and obviously they leave a mark. In fact, it would be absurd to argue that the disappearance or emergence of even purportedly irrelevant states has no effect at all. The existence of Melos mattered to the Melians defending it and the survival of Florence mattered to Machiavelli and his fellow Florentines. The same has been true for all small states since. However, from the systemic perspective, the Greek system of city-states or the system of Renaissance Italy would continue in its basic form after the death of a small city-state. (Only) in this sense were they irrelevant. In light of the above, the focus shifts from measurable units as the key characteristic of the small state towards the political “weight” of a state in international politics. The key concept of smallness here is insignificance with regard to the structural context. Since the Peace of Westphalia, small states have been structurally irrelevant in a states system shaped and dominated by power and those holding most of it. Small state irrelevance meets weak state powerlessness A further investigation of small states’ irrelevance leads directly to their powerlessness. In the literature of Small States Studies this topic is generally framed as weakness. Smallness turns into weakness,59 which leads to two characteristic results. First, weakness leaves the state impotent in international power politics. Second, a weak state can be easily ignored and completely disregarded by truly powerful states. To be sure, a state’s weakness may be connected in a direct line to its lack of internal resources. Alternatively, weakness can be understood in relative terms, that is to say as stemming from a state’s relative power position in the states system. For example, relative to its immediate international environment, the Pacific region with its many small island states, Fiji is not weak. However, vis-à-vis the regional hegemon, the US, Fiji is helpless. Bringing in Michael Handel’s work on small states as weak powers,60 a state’s severe weakness in terms of power emerges as the decisive criterion for categorizing it as a small state. Key is not how

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little power a state may have in terms of measurable units, but the petiteness of its power externally. Such negligible power translates into security vulnerabilities. Handel argues that a critical concern for little states must be the constant danger of coercion by more powerful states.61 For George Liska, possessing “fewer of the active ingredients and attributes of power” leaves small states “more vulnerable to those of other nations.”62 Fox views small states as international actors that are unable to successfully apply power or resist the effective application of power on them by other states.63 The small state is uniquely threatened by coercion. Weakness creates vulnerability to power politics. This line of thought has a long history in the theoretical discourses of International Relations. Thomas Hobbes pointed out that the crucial concern of groups organized to achieve security was not their absolute size, but the group’s size in comparison to the size of the enemy’s group.64 Later, Hans Morgenthau warned against “disregarding the relativity of power by erecting the power of one particular nation into an absolute.”65 Similarly but much more recently, Joseph Nye argued that “power always depends on the context in which the relationship exists.”66 Waltz and John Mearsheimer both insist on measuring power in traditional categories of “capabilities” or “wealth,” but concede that these must be interpreted in light of the powers of the state’s rivals.67 However, in addition to their  lack of relational power, little states are further characterized by their lack of relative power in the states system. By way of illustration: one of the more popular sports analogies describes the situation when small states can play the role of a much larger state. It has been said that in such cases, small states “punch above their weight.”68 In fact, this analogy might be somewhat misleading. It suggests a duel. However, in reality small states rarely face other states in one-on-one situations. Rather, they interact with other states in a system that consists of dozens, at times even hundreds of states.69 If one chooses to pursue the route of analogies, it might be more appropriate to view small states not as athletes in boxing rings, but as individuals in rough inner-city neighborhoods. The issue is power relative to the entire environment. Or, in Martin Wight’s words: “The smallness we are  talking about when we speak of small powers is smallness relative to the international society they belong to.”70 Conceptualizing the small state in this fashion places it solidly in the context of the international states system.71 Georg Schwarzenberger views small states as international actors that have ridiculously little of the very “currency” that shapes the environment in which they exist.72

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Small states in world politics

Similarly, Wight emphasizes that the standard against which the size of a state must be measured is the international states system. Rejecting fairly common perceptions that Athens in antiquity, the Florence of Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, and the early modern Dutch Republic were “small political units,” he argues instead that “[e]ach was a great people, in terms of power or wealth or population, relative to the states-system of which it was a part.”73 In the context of “grading” states according to their size, he restates the systemic standard for size when he claims that “Venice … was undoubtedly a great power both in respect to the Italian system and to the wider Mediterranean-European system.”74 Small states can thus be seen as those states in the international system that are not only weak vis-à-vis other states, but are also negligible or irrelevant as far as the power-based states system is concerned. In fact, the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had already distinguished between (small) sovereign states on the one hand, and (relevant and meaningful) powers on the other.75 Systems theory and in particular its adaptations in International Relations similarly conceive of units that may be unable to impact the system of which they are a part. Power is seen as the critical feature which allows units to be distinguished between those that have sufficient power to resist systemically imposed changes and those that do not.76 The term “systemic power” encapsulates the ability to resist changes at the unit level that are imposed by the higher-level system on the one hand, and the capacity to impose changes on the outer environment on the other hand.77 Put differently, “the ability to be indifferent to the values of others and to adjust to altered conditions, and the ability to influence the environment so as to avoid the need to adjust to it, together constitute systemic power.”78 This line of reasoning applies to small states, too. Raymond Aron notes that small states must “adapt themselves to circumstances,” but that these circumstances “do not depend on them.”79 Thus, small states “exist in a large or complex system in which in order to maintain [their] autonomy or identity, [they] must develop both domestic and international instruments, capabilities allowing [them] to ‘match’ the complex system.”80 In sum, it is the states system which is critical to properly conceptualizing the small state, and it is the systemic level where the irrelevance of the small state is rooted and where the “problems and possibilities”81 of the little state are created. System-level approaches in the discipline of IR lend themselves to properly framing the small state’s structural irrelevance. This will allow for an understanding of the small state as being defined by its inconsequentiality

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within the system of states. In other words, small states’ sizes can then be understood “in the sense of weight or importance in the family of nations.”82 By far the best attempts to conceptualize states in their systemic dimensions have come from the Correlates of War project and its spinoffs. David Singer and Melvin Small looked at historical constellations in the international states system, attempting to detect correlations that would indicate the likelihood of war.83 However, the definitions used by Small and Singer for coding lead to a limited data set, which is much centered on states of contemporary prominence. Also, its coding guidelines are still largely grounded in capabilities-based conceptualizations of state size. To be fair, the purpose of the original Correlates of War project was the study of war, not the place of small states in international politics. Nevertheless, its data and the associated definitions cannot be transferred into this study. Instead, a strictly system-level definition of the small state is proposed here. By merging the argument that small states are ineffectual with regard to the environment in which they exist with the claim that as a minor power each individual small state is of no relevance to the structure of the states system, the following systemic definition of the small state is derived: small states are units that are individually irrelevant to the states system. The understanding of the small state as systemically irrelevant is placed soundly in Structural Realist thought. Structural Realism emphasizes the structure of the international system in which states have to operate. It claims that the structure of the international system itself is the main cause of its units’ actions. Because their behavior is dictated by the system’s structure, the situation is labeled “system dominant.”84 In such an environment all units are assumed to be autonomous and “functionally independent,”85 but featuring very different levels of power. As a consequence of an uneven distribution of power, the critical structural element of the system is, according to Kenneth Waltz, its polarity, either uni-, bi-, or multipolar.86 Neorealist thinking revolves around the great powers. John Mearsheimer explains why great powers matter most: “[Neorealist] theory focuses on the great powers because these states have the largest impact on what happens in international politics.”87 Waltz claims that in order to understand how the system functions it is sufficient to look at the dominant players which have the capability to shape or alter the system.88 For him, the major powers are not only “system-affecting” but in fact the only ones relevant with respect to the overall coordinates of the international states system.89 By implication, little states are system-

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ineffectual. Essentially, the states system consists of the great powers and the rest.90 Accordingly, Waltz insists on understanding international politics as a system structured by its “principal parts,” that is, great powers, because “[i]t would be as ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica as it would be to construct an economic theory of oligopolistic competition based on the minor firms in a sector of an economy.”91 Put differently, only the major states’ (and firms’) interrelations count in economics or politics, and their respective theories. Consequently, political analysis and international political theory have to focus “on the states that make the most difference.”92 However, a single small state cannot meet this standard since it cannot affect the overall systemic structure. Hence a distinction exists between structuring and structurally irrelevant states: great powers and middle powers on the one hand, and structurally irrelevant units – small states individually – on the other. In this sense, small states are system-­ irrelevant units of the states system. At this point it might be useful to clarify the usage of “irrelevant” and “ineffectual” in the literature and in the present study. “Irrelevant” indicates that a unit of the states system does not matter to its structure and is therefore dispensable, while “ineffectual” describes the power position of the state and its inability to affect the structure. Keohane argues convincingly for an understanding of small states as “‘system-ineffectual’ states.”93 He refers to their inability to do anything about the systemic forces to which they are subjected. Small states “can do little to influence the system-wide forces that affect them,” unless they form alliances.94 And talking about states as economic actors, Peter Katzenstein distinguishes in a similar fashion between large states as traditional “rule makers” and small states as “rule takers.”95 Others have portrayed small states as “price takers,” in contrast to great powers, which are described as “price makers.”96 Either way, small states are precluded from shaping the global economic environment in which they operate, making them ineffectual. Combining the earlier finding that small states have insufficient power to actively impact the structure of the system in which they exist with the previous Structural Realist argument that the system is shaped by its major powers as structuring states, small states emerge as units of no consequence to the system.97 In other words, each little state individually can be ignored as far as the structure of the international states system is concerned. The small state with its essential structural irrelevance is now placed within the theoretical framework of Structural Realism.

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Describing small state survival and proliferation statistically By applying the definition of the small state as a unit that is individually irrelevant to the states system it was possible to compile data on the annual number of small and larger states since the mid seventeenth century. And putting together this data set was necessitated by the absence of an existing database that could provide the data needed to explore the survival of small states since the inception of the current system of states. The need to tackle the quantitative issue of small state survival systematically is further underlined by the spread of estimates ranging from “some 300 petty states”98 to “more than 300 sovereigns,”99 to a count of 355 small states,100 or numbers “somewhere between 294 and 348 different states after 1648.”101 This did not provide a proper basis for a detailed study, especially if even bigger numbers around 1,800 entities102 and “more than 2,300 different jurisdictions”103 would have been considered. To address these problems, a new data set was compiled. The raw data itself, the graphs used here, a detailed discussion of the previously existing data sets’ features and their limitations together with the codebook can be found online at www.smallstate.info. The data set provides the statistical grounding for this study of small state survival. More specifically, it offers the data necessary for a statistical investigation into the fluctuations in the numbers of small states over time. For this purpose, descriptive statistics are used to show correlation and to demonstrate plausibility of a causal connection. To be sure, “[s]tatistical argumentation … is essentially deductive. The role of a statistical test is not to find a pattern in the data but to assess whether the data being analyzed are consistent with a particular pattern the investigator has predicted to exist among them.”104 Accordingly, the data presented below serve the purpose of showcasing the overall trends in small state survival and proliferation and to highlight the parallelism between numerical trends in small state survival and changes in the states system. The objects in the statistical presentation are small states. Large states are included in the database in order to complete the composition of the “universe we wish to study.”105 The mix of small and large states in the states system is expressed as a coefficient, arrived at by dividing the number of small states by the number of large states at each observation point. This particular way of calculating the coefficient was decided to make the numbers behave better. I refer to it here as the small states index. State size is differentiated only as either small or non-small (i.e. larger than small). The values are collected annually for the entire observation

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period 1648–2016, and are presented as a time series; each year is one observation point. Small states and non-small states are quantitative variables and are paired with a qualitative variable106 (the particular states system or an era). The number of small states per year is the quantitative variable and has a simple number value. The particular type of states system that was in operation during a particular period, however, appears as a qualitative variable. The former is the dependent variable, the latter the independent variable. The independent variable, the type of states system, its characteristic features, and their impact on small state survival will be developed in detail in the following chapters. Temporally customized graphs are integrated in the historical chapters below. Here, the following set of graphs shows the distribution of values and provides visual representations of the data. In 1648, the Westphalian states system started out with 438 states, of which 419 were small states and 19 larger states. A slow but steady downward trend in the number of small states persisted throughout the following one-and-a-half centuries, all the way to the French Revolutionary Wars. In 1792, the system still included 339 small states. However, by 1814, only one year before Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated, the number of small states had collapsed to 79. Over the next few decades, the total number of small states recovered slightly, reaching 96 in 1841 before declining again. Italian and German national unifications left their mark and in 1872, the year after German unification, only 53 small states were left in the system; they were accompanied by 20 larger states. The downward trend continued, and the number of small states reached its historic low point in 1904, with 35 small states. After that, the numbers began to climb again. A first jump occurred when the First World War came to a close. In 1918, the number of small states was 55, an increase of 13 states on the preceding year. However, it was not until after the Second World War that small state proliferation truly set in. Whereas the count of small states had been 50 in 1945, it had reached 59 one decade later. The 100 units mark was broken in 1970, to which nearly 25 percent were added by the beginning of the following decade. Just before the end of the Cold War, the world system consisted of 130 small states and 45 larger states. One year later, in 1991, 14 more small states had joined. Today 150 small states exist in the states system together with 49 non-small states. These developments are summarized in Figure 1 (p. 7). Figure 2 shows the changes in small state totals from year to year. It brings to the forefront three significant trends. First, an era of slow erosion ended abruptly at the end of the eighteenth century with major

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Figure 2  Annual changes of small state total numbers, 1648–2016

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Small states in world politics

losses of small states. Second, after only a brief moment of recovery, the downward trend continued throughout the nineteenth century. Third, the twentieth century, witnessed the reversal of the overall trend. Although an initial spike in the number of small states in 1918 was not sustained, by mid century, small state numbers showed annual gains, with almost no interruption until the early twenty-first century. These three larger trends in the accumulated death and creation of small states correspond to the major shifts in the states system, from a pure balanceof-power to the concert system and on to the current mixed system of power balancing and collective security. An exclusive look at the total number of small and non-small states has analytical limitations because it cannot properly account for the expansion of the system itself. At the time of the full-scale and universal implementation of the international system of states with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this “international” system was essentially a European system, by and large limited to that continent. Practically all its members were European states. However, beginning in the early nineteenth century more and more non-European states became part of the international system. The states system expanded over time from a European-centered system to a truly global one. The geographical expansion also changed the total number of states in the system. In order to capture the trends in small state survival regardless of the states system’s geographic reach, a simple index value is used. It identifies the share of small states within the total number of states in the system. In other words, this small states index “filters out” expansions or contractions of the system’s numerical dimension. Figure 3 gives a visual representation of the changes in the index values over time. As Figure 3 shows, the index value tracks the changes in the total number of small states fairly closely until the late nineteenth century. From then on, the trend is much shallower than the small state total, due to the parallel increase in the number of non-small states. Figure 4 is geared towards the overall claim that small state death, survival, and proliferation played out in three larger steps. To demonstrate this, trend lines for three distinct historical eras were added: the traditional balance of power, the concert system, and the modern mixed system of a power equilibrium and collective security. For the period from the Peace of Westphalia to the Napoleonic era, a linear trend line was added. Its R2 of 0.9524 shows a strong relationship. A second trend line was added for the period from Waterloo to the First World War. At 0.7588 its R2 is lower but still gives a strong relationship. Both time periods feature a downward trend in the number of small states and their trends are comparable in magnitude; the trend lines of

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Figure 3  Numbers and proportions of small and larger states, 1648–2016

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Figure 4  Numbers of small and larger states, 1648–2016

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Defining and quantifying the small state

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both time periods have negative slopes in a close range. The first period’s slope is –0.715 and the second era’s is –0.655. These numbers stand in stark contrast to the following era, the twentieth century. For the data 1919 to today, the trend line features an upward slope of +1.374. The trend line also features a strong relationship, with an R2 of 0.9255. In light of these numbers, the claim that the fate of the small state over the last three-and-a-half centuries proceeded through distinct phases gains support. In light of the above discussion, the argument that small state survival is shaped largely by the states system becomes highly plausible. The overall numbers, the annual changes, the share of small states, and the trend lines all suggest that small state survival and proliferation depend largely on the states system in operation at any given time. In each era, the total numbers of small states behave markedly differently. Building on the findings and insights generated by these descriptive statistics, the following chapters will proceed as theoretical and historical investigations. Notes 1 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 131. 2 Henrikson, “A Coming ‘Magnesian’ Age?” 56. See also Björn G. Olafsson, Small States in the Global System: Analysis and Illustrations from the Case of Iceland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998), 3. 3 “Lebendige Realität,” Heinrich Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, Kleinstaat Keinstaat? (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 88. 4 Keohane, “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas,” 310. 5 www.smallstate.info. 6 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 23. 7 Jeanne A. K. Hey, ed. Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 3; Handel, Weak States in the International System, 28. 8 Vital, The Survival of Small States. 9 Wilhelm Christmas-Moller, “Some Thoughts on the Scientific Applicability of the Small State Concept: A Research History and a Discussion,” in Small States in Europe and Dependence, ed. Otmar Höll (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983), 40.  10 Heiner Hänggi, “Small State as a Third State: Switzerland and Asia–Europe Interregionalism,” in Small states Inside and Outside The European Union: Interests and Policies, ed. Laurent Goetschel (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), 79.  11 Wolf D. Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System 1815–1914: Die Bedeutung des Endes der Deutschen Klein- und

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Mittelstaaten für die Europäische Ordnung,” XVI International Congress of Historical Sciences, Stuttgart, 25 August–1 September 1985, 2–3.  12 Ibid.  13 Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Alexander T. J. Lennon and Camille Eiss, eds., Reshaping Rogue States: Preemption, Regime Change, and U.S. Policy Toward Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Bala Indu, Compulsions of a Land-Locked State: A Study on Nepal–India Relations (New Delhi: Batra Book Service, 2001); “Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS),” AOSIS, http://aosis.org/; William J. Brisk, Anguilla and the Mini-state Dilemma (New York: New York University, Center for International Studies, 1968); John Barry Bartmann, “Micro-states in the International System: The Challenge of Sovereignty,” PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2235/, accessed 17 October 2016; Sonja Grimm, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, and Olivier Nay, “‘Fragile States’:Introducing a Political Concept,” Third World Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2014); Olivier Nay, “Fragile and Failed States: Critical Perspectives on Conceptual Hybrids,” International Political Science Review 22, no. 1 (2013).  14 Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, The Size of Nations (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003).  15 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline, (New York: International Publishers, 1984 (1916)), 124.  16 David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).  17 Eugene F. Rice Jr., The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 114.  18 Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1957).  19 Ibid., 4.  20 Ibid.  21 Ibid.  22 Friedrich Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat: Studien zur Genesis des deutschen Nationalstaates (München: Oldenbourg, 1908); Benjamin Miller, States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Tom Crowards, “Defining the Category of ‘Small’ States,” Journal of International Development 14 (2002): 153–159.  23 See for example Martin Dixon, Textbook on International Law, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105–108.  24 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 96.  25 “Treaty of Westphalia. Peace Treaty between the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France and their respective Allies,” Yale Law School, The Avalon

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Project. Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, http://avalon.law.yale. edu/17th_century/westphal.asp. Article LXVII.  26 Ibid, article LXV.  27 Stéphane Beaulac, The Power of Language in the Making of International Law: The Word Sovereignty in Bodin and Vattel and the Myth of Westphalia (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2004).  28 Barry Buzan and Richard Little, International Systems in World History: Remaking the Study of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40.  29 Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 430–431.  30 Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 40.  31 David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965 (New York: Wiley, 1972), 20.  32 Karl-Heinz Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte: Ein Studienbuch (München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1994), 177; Georg Wilhelm Sante, ed., Geschichte der Deutschen Länder, “Territorien-Ploetz,” Vol. 1: Die Territorien bis zum Ende des alten Reiches, (Würzburg: A. G. Ploetz-Verlag, 1964), 49.  33 Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 639.  34 Paul W. Schroeder, ed., Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Europe (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 89.  35 John H. Bodley, The Small Nation Solution: How the World’s Smallest Nations Can Solve the World’s Biggest Problems (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2013), viii.  36 Cathal J. Nolan, The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of International Relations, Vol. 3 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002), 1055; Joel Krieger, The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).  37 Chas. W. Freeman Jr., The Diplomat’s Dictionary (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1994), 350; Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham, The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 500–501.  38 Matthias Maass, “The Elusive Definition of the Small State,” International Politics 46, no. 1 (2009).  39 See for example Henrikson, “A Coming ‘Magnesian’ Age?”  40 See for example Steven L. Spiegel, Dominance and Diversity: The International Hierarchy (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1972).   41 Philippe Hein, “The Study of Microstates,” in States, Microstates and Islands, ed. Edward Dommen and Philippe Hein (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 18.  42 Peter R. Baehr, “Review: Small States: A Tool for Analysis,” World Politics 27, no. 3, April (1975): 459.  43 “Small,” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, ed. Philip Babcock Gove (Springfield, MA: MerriamWebster, 1986); “Small,” in Encarta Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).

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 44 Abramo F. K. Organski, World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1968), 358.  45 Colin Clarke and Tony Payne, eds., Politics, Security and Development in Small States (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), xvii; Commonwealth Consultative Group, Vulnerability: Small States in the Global Society: Report of a Commonwealth Consultative Group (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1985), 8–9; Hein, “The Study of Microstates,” 18; Handel, Weak States in the International System.  46 Commonwealth Consultative Group, Vulnerability: Small States in the Global Society, 8.  47 Hänggi, “Small State as a Third State,” 81.  48 Omer De Raeymaeker, “Introduction,” in Small Powers in Alignment, ed. Omer De Raeymaeker, Willy Andries, Luc Crollen, et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1974), 20.  49 Olafsson, Small States in the Global System, 8–10.  50 A summary of the different cut-off points for population size is given in: Jacqueline Anne Braveboy-Wagner, The Caribbean in World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-Speaking States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 4. See also the now slightly dated but very well organized table of various cut-offs in Appendix A of Hein, “The Study of Microstates.”  51 Vaughan A. Lewis, “Foreword: Studying Small States over the Twentieth into the Twenty-first Centuries,” in The Diplomacies of Small States: Between Vulnerability and Resilience, ed. Andrew F. Cooper and Timothy M. Shaw, (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xi–xv; Vital, The Inequality of States.  52 Anthony Payne, “Small States in the Global Politics of Development,” The Round Table 93, no. 376 (2004): 634.  53 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 12.  54 Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 56–77; John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).  55 Zamoyski, Rites of Peace; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 78–102; Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity, 1812–1822 (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1946), 134–47; Michael Erbe, Revolutionäre Erschütterung und Erneuertes Gleichgewicht: Internationale Beziehungen 1785–1830 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004), 343–346.  56 Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Leicester University Press, 1978), 65–66.  57 Graham Ross, The Great Powers and the Decline of the European States System (London: Longman, 1983), 39–41.  58 Vital, The Survival of Small States, 9.  59 Handel, Weak States in the International System; A. G. Hopkins, “Quasi-states, Weak States and the Partition of Africa,” Review of International Studies 26 (2000); Joel S. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Marshall R. Singer, Weak States in a World of

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Powers: The Dynamics of International Relationships (New York: Free Press, 1972).  60 Handel, Weak States in the International System.  61 Ibid., 10.  62 Liska, International Equilibrium, 25.  63 Fox, The Power of Small States, 2–3.  64 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1983), 107.  65 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 149.  66 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 2.  67 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 55–137; Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 129–131.  68 Koh, “Foreign Affairs,” 68.  69 Matthias Maass, “The International States System Since 1648 and Small States’ ‘Systemic Resilience,’” International Studies Review (Korea) 10, no. 2, December (2009).  70 Wight, Power Politics, 61–62.  71 Georg Schwarzenberger, Power Politics: A Study of World Society (London: Stevens & Sons, 1964), 109.  72 Ibid., 101–109.  73 Wight, Power Politics, 62.  74 Ibid., 300.  75 See the underdeveloped section in ibid., 301.  76 John W. Burton, Systems, States, Diplomacy and Rules (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 30–31.  77 Ibid., 31.  78 Ibid., 18.  79 Aron, Peace and War, 98.  80 Lewis, “Foreword,” xii.  81 Erling Bjøl, “The Small State in International Politics,” in Small States in International Relations, ed. August Schou and Arne Olav Brundtland (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1971), 33–34.  82 Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, Kleinstaat Keinstaat?, 77: “wenn man Größe im Sinne von Gewicht oder Wichtigkeit in der Völkerfamilie versteht.”  83 J. David Singer and Melvin Small, “The Composition and Status Ordering of the International System 1815–1940,” World Politics 14, no. 1 (1966).  84 Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics.  85 Buzan and Little, International Systems in World History, 40.  86 Waltz, Theory of International Politics.  87 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 5.  88 Kenneth N. Waltz, “Realist Thought and Neorealist Theory,” Journal of International Affairs 44, no. 1 (1990): 29.  89 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 72.  90 Liska, International Equilibrium, 24–25.  91 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 73.

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 92 Ibid., 72–73.  93 Keohane, “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas,” 296.  94 Ibid.  95 Peter J. Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets: Industrial Policy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), passim; 22, 191.  96 Godfrey Baldacchino, “Thucydides or Kissinger? A Critical Review of Smaller State Diplomacy,” in The Diplomacies of Small States: Between Vulnerability and Resilience, ed. Timothy M. Shaw (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 26.  97 Crowards, “Defining the Category of ‘Small’ States.” Footnote 2 hints at this.  98 Arthur Hassall, The Balance of Power, 1715–1789 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 10.  99 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 65. 100 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations. 101 The Times Atlas of European History (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 127. 102 Matthew Smith Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1713–1783 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 197. 103 Mark Almond, Jeremy Black, Felipe Fernández-Armesto et al., The Times Atlas of European History (London: Times Books, 1994), 127. 104 Thomas J. Archdeacon, Correlation and Regression Analysis: A Historian’s Guide (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 12. 105 David J. Hand, Statistics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22. 106 Archdeacon, Correlation and Regression Analysis, 15–32.

3

The classic balance of power, 1648–1814

Power politics and small state survival: the classic balance of power, 1648–1814

Elle [la politique] maintient l’Europe indépendante et libre. [Frederic the Great]1

How safe was the largely unbridled balance of power of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the small state? This chapter will show that the balance-of-power system was in fact rather accommodating and allowed small states to survive in historically large numbers. Moreover, small state death was measured and gradual only. In short, the loose and fairly unrestrained balance-of-power system turned out to be a surprisingly safe environment for the small state. The time span under investigation in this chapter is bookended by two major peace summits: the Peace of Westphalia, concluded in 1648, and the Congress of Vienna, held in 1814–15. It is considered to be a single phase for two reasons. First, the view that “[t]here is no major change in the structure of the system till the end of the period”2 is widely shared among scholars. Similarly, the general consensus is that “[a]fter 1815, yet a different type of system arose.”3 During this era, the particular balance of power that defined it was also the main cause of the moderate decline in small state numbers. Second, the entire period shows a fairly consistent rate of decline in the number of small states, almost to its very end. The European laissez-faire balance-of-power system, 1648–1814 The Westphalian states system emerges The year 1648 marked a milestone in European international history,4 when the so-called Peace of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) to an end. Its two peace treaties put state sovereignty front

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and center.5 The transformation of European affairs into a system of sovereign states had now reached its tipping point. Claims to a Christian empire in Europe belonged to the past, and the future belonged to sovereign states, large and small. Early in the seventeenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Germany, Ferdinand II, a staunch Catholic, had attempted to rebuild the empire, regain his political strength, and reassert his religious authority against the political and religious advances of Protestantism.6 His program met massive domestic resistance from kings and princes of the empire who saw the principle of “Libertät,” their autonomy in the empire, threatened. The conflict triggered a new round of Europeanwide power politics, and the emperor was soon faced with persistent foreign intervention as well.7 The ensuing Thirty Years’ War was a system-wide conflict of the embryonic European states system, and in this way amounted to the first world war. When it finally came to an end, some saw this as nothing less than a miracle.8 At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Ferdinand’s ambitions were beaten back and the traditional hierarchical authority soundly rejected. State rulers “great and small had finally won their freedom”9 and were now “the true rulers of their territories.”10 States became sovereign states and sovereignty implied formal equality and in this sense negated power, rank, status, or indeed size as ordering principles. The downside was that Europe had now lost its old, familiar order. In its stead, a system of independent states emerged. In this post-Westphalian world, a crude balance of power became the key ­ mechanism of European international politics. Unfortunately for the small state, the new international system for state interaction was not meant to maintain the peace11 or protect all states. Rather, it was geared towards balancing large states’ ambitions and thus protecting the plurality of sovereign states.12 By setting out the major political principles which would order international politics and provide legitimate forms of state interac­ tion,  the Peace of Westphalia laid the groundwork for future international politics.13 The new order was anchored by a plurality of equally sovereign states as autonomous actors in international affairs. Together, they willfully formed a system of states, and a meaningful degree of order was provided by an equilibrium of power among the major states, International Law, and elements of collective security  – the latter exclusively within the Holy Roman Empire, however.14 In  this  harsh and somewhat anarchic international environment the small state would do surprisingly well and survived in numbers never reached again.

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The laissez-faire balance of power of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries The states system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a balance of power, in fact a largely unencumbered, unrestrained balance of power. It emerged with few restraints and was in this fashion similar to ultra-liberal laissez-faire economics. This nature of the international political environment was clearly understood at the time. The contemporary statesman’s understanding of the balance of power is particularly relevant here because it provides for a more accurate assessment of how exactly the balance of power operated at the time. During the later seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries, an overall equilibrium among the powers characterized the European international states system, and maintaining this balance of power was an accepted primary ordering principle of international politics.15 The emergence of sovereign states and the dissipation of supranational actors and mechanisms had made security and survival top priorities for all states. And the balance of power was quickly recognized as critical to state security, allowing François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon to state: Neighbouring states are not only obliged to observe towards each other the rules of justice and public faith; but they are under a necessity, for the security of each, and the common interest of all, to maintain together a kind of society and general republic; for the most powerful will certainly at length prevail and overthrow the rest, unless they unite together to make a counterweight.16

During the seventeenth century, “Europe entered upon a condition of international anarchy in which only two public principles seemed to be recognized – security and aggrandizement.”17 These principles required all the autonomous states to balance against each and every other state, “thus converting international anarchy into a ‘system,’ though one that was never very stable”18 and providing “the central guiding principle of European international relations.”19 To be sure, power politics did not come on the scene suddenly in 1648 and continued to harden for decades after the conclusion of peace in 1648, making the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 for some the era’s more appropriate starting point.20 While it is impossible to pinpoint an exact starting date for the balance of power, by 1648 the evolution of the states system had reached a tipping point. The “golden age of the balance of power”21 would come only fifty years later, but after the Peace of Westphalia power balancing structured European politics,22 even if it continued to evolve. The European balance of power certainly appeared developed enough to contemporary diplomats. For example,

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Johan Adler Salvius, a member of the Swedish mission at Westphalia, observed the following: The first principle of statecraft is that in the equilibrium of the single realms consists the security of the whole. When one of them begins to become too powerful and a threat to the others, they throw themselves by means of leagues and alliances into a scale against it, so as to create a counterweight and to preserve the balance.23

Similarly, the Scottish thinker David Hume considered the balance of power an established principle of statecraft of the eighteenth century,24 and for his contemporary Emmerich de Vattel the balance of power was a “well-known principle.”25 The rapid growth of the balance of power at this time finds further ­evidence in the early balancing activities. They were triggered by the ambitious and expansionist policies of Louis XIV’s France.26 French designs threatened the security of many states, but most immediately that of the many small states along the river Rhine. Without any higher authority to provide protection and faced with French ambitions, “equilibrist thinking” emerged quickly as “an outgrowth of a shared concern on the part of the actors in the system about their autonomy.”27 Already in the seventeenth century, the label “balance of power” was a commonly understood technical term of statecraft. In the Peace of Utrecht, reference is made to “iustum potentiae aequilibrium,”28 indicating the diplomats’ familiarity with the term and concept. Beyond diplomatists and statesmen, prominent political thinkers at the time, from Fénelon, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Vattel, were also well acquainted with the balance of power.29 In straightforward fashion, Vattel described the set-up as a mechanism that denied individual states hegemony: “This is what has given rise to the well-known principle of the balance of power, by which is meant an arrangement of affairs so that no State shall be in a position to have absolute mastery and dominate over the others.”30 Writing at the same time, François-Marie Arouet Voltaire called it a “wise policy of maintaining an equal balance of power between themselves so far as they can.”31 Writing later in the eighteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz further pointed towards the restraining effect of the balance of power, “by virtue of which none of [any neighboring states] can violate the independence or the essential rights of another without effective resistance from some quarter and consequent danger to itself.”32 Johann Gottlieb Fichte highlighted the link between the universality of hegemonic desires and the equally “natural” equilibrium these great power ambitions generate.33 Neither the existence nor the basic anti-hegemonic

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and restraining purpose of the balance of power was in any doubt among the contemporary intellectual elite. For the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statesmen, too, the balance of power was a fact of international relations. Frederic II of Prussia, for example, speaks of counter-balancing without much reflection or analysis. He presents it simply as part and parcel of international politics.34 Similarly, his forefather Elector Friedrich Wilhelm advised his successor to defend Brandenburg’s sovereignty by balancing actions.35 In sum, “the balance of power … was the dominant political and military strategy of those years.”36 In parallel to the emergence of the balance of power, Europe transitioned into a single political entity. For Montesquieu,37 for example, “Europe was a single whole,”38 but composed of individual states.39 In other words, the European states did not exist in a political vacuum but were part of a larger whole, a “coherent”40 and “unified international system.”41 The European balance-of-power system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was thus fairly homogenous. Homogeneity in turn implied shared “norms of conduct,”42 especially the restraint put on violence. Although inter-state violence could not be avoided, it was to be guided by rationality and not driven by emotion and hate.43 In this way, “the brutalities of power politics were mitigated,”44 even if the reality of war remained unquestioned and unchallenged. Small states were particularly vulnerable to the waging of aggressive war by a larger state and benefitted from a normative restraint, however tentative and vacillating. However, any normative limitation on power was countered by two opposing dynamics. First, the balance of power was much less efficient in comparison to earlier hierarchical orders of international authority.45 Instead of order provided by a supranational authority, self-interest had to be triggered, shaped into policy, and translated into counter-action in order to maintain the equilibrium. Second, balancing did not address any potential injustices. Rectification of or punishment for aggression became lower-ranking priorities. Although thinkers, theoreticians, and philosophers still defended the validity of normative ideas such as fairness and harmony, kept their desire for a harmonious order, and preferred fair and even dispute resolutions,46 the use of force was largely unconfined. All in all, small state security was not much enhanced by moral standards at the time. Proper balancing of power required significant changes in statecraft. First, it assumed an abstract understanding of the sovereign state in a secularized international world. Now, the state had its own existence and thus its own interests. These interests must be prioritized and be the “sole objective” of statesmen.47 State policy had to be guided by the raison d’état.48

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French cardinal Richelieu implemented this policy without hesitation, and Catholic France supported Protestant Sweden against the fellow-Catholic German Emperor. This “had revolutionary implications”49 for international affairs because it laid the groundwork for countering any threat, regardless of which sovereign or which state presented a danger. As the balance of power began to dominate international politics, religious or dynastic concerns in statecraft were sidelined, allowing King William III of England to claim that, had he to face Hapsburg’s hegemonic ambitions a century earlier, instead of France’s challenge in the seventeenth century, “he would have been ‘as much a Frenchman as he was now a Spaniard.’”50 In this secularized international world, great power support for small states of the same Christian denomination was no longer forthcoming. A second ingredient critical to the emergence and formation of the balance of power was the transfer of scientific insights and of nature’s principles to international politics. New discoveries of the Scientific Revolution,51 and in particular Newtonian physics, were widely accepted. They were appealing as natural rules with general validity. A general “l’èsprit géométrique”52 translated into the belief that the world can be deciphered, understood, and explained properly through mathematical relationships. A “universality of the Laws of Nature”53 extended to the interaction of humans, peoples, and states. To the eighteenth-century mind, international relations would, quite naturally, be governed by natural law.54 In this intellectual environment, the extension of scientific and geometric findings to the international level seemed logical and appropriate. From here, it was only a small step to apply the scientific notion of equilibrium to the field of international politics.55 A balanced state of international affairs made scientific sense, and it appeared convincing that mechanistic procedures would limit chaos, bring some order, and create a natural state of equilibrium even among states.56 Against this background, it is not surprising that the eighteenthcentury philosopher Hume described balancing actions among states as the straightforward application of common sense.57 In sum, the balance of power that shaped international politics from the mid-seventeenth century on was seen as the natural outgrowth of the arrangement of sovereign states found at Westphalia. And small states had no angle to complain about unforgiving power politics if the entire system in which it played out was seen as nature’s default position. Like observers and statesmen centuries ago, scholars today see the balance of power (at a minimum) “as a system for managing power relationships among states,”58 with the key purpose of preventing hegemony.59 Beyond that, opinions vary widely. Some have pointed

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out the concept’s vagueness60 and its definitional shiftiness,61 rendering it “essentially meaningless”62 for analytical study. Others have worked towards improved clarity of the concept, distinguishing between the labels “balance of power” and “equilibrium” as process and outcome respectively.63 Richard Little’s distinction between an “adversarial” and “associational” view of the balance of power is of particular use here.64 Little describes the international environment in which states operate as anarchical, so that in order to survive, states must prioritize their security. Given the very unequal power distribution across the system, states must respond to each other’s strength by balancing actions. The balance of power that emerges is “a product of the insecurity experienced by states operating in an anarchic international system.”65 The logic of the system prompts states to counter any other state’s attempt at establishing hegemony. This in turn drives the system back towards the state of equilibrium. Thus balancing is a systemically generated process which through its own logic generates an equilibrium. In contrast to the adversarial balance of power, balancing action in the associational type of the balance of power is a deliberate intervention and aims at a mutually agreeable equilibrium among the main actors. In this sense, the associational balance of power is meant to be manipulated and steered towards an outcome that is considered fair and thus accepted as just. To be sure, the adversarial and the associational versions of the balance of power are ideal types. As such, they do not lend themselves to accurately describing historic events, and the record of international politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows no clear preference for either interpretation of balancing action. In the eyes of contemporary statesmen and thinkers, the era’s laissez-faire balance of power was adversarial at times and associational at other times. Overall, hegemonic rise was seen as the worst case scenario because it threatened the entire system. In the absence of such an overriding threat, the focus shifted towards the maintenance of generally agreeable and secure equilibrium as the second priority. The states system of the era that started with the Peace of Westphalia and ended during the French Revolutionary Wars can best be understood as a “soft” associational balance of power. In its basic set-up, the international environment was anarchic and states had to ensure their own survival. To prevent a state from achieving hegemony and becoming a threat to all other states, counter-balancing became critical.

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The balance of power as a “limitation of national power” The balance of power modified an otherwise anarchic states system66 and limited the scope of power politics,67 because it pitted ambitious great powers against each other. In this fashion, each country’s power held the others’ in check. This limited power politics and benefitted small state survival in various ways. The post-Westphalian balance of power was first of all a balance of opposed ambitions. With “a de facto equilibrium among greater powers” in place,68 preventing excessive gains by any one state was critical, because they threatened to unbalance the arrangement. Unreasonable aggrandizement and hegemonic ambitions were the ultimate threat to the system and all its states. In a hegemonic system, all states except the hegemon lose their political autonomy. To defend the equilibrium against the rise of a hegemon, balancing against any emerging hegemon was the instrument of choice. At the same time, all states equally share a deeply engrained urge to amass power and aggrandize themselves.69 International standing was connected to size, and security to power, urging states to enhance their capacities. These two dynamics, ambition and fear of submission, made the Westphalian balance of power work. Ambitions cancelled each other out70 and threats triggered counter-balancing. And the harder a state tried to overturn it, the stronger the counter-force would be.71 States were not only functionally “like units,”72 but they shared the same strategic objectives. This condemned states to jealously watching their neighbors and denying other states what they aspired to themselves.73 The need to resist other states’ ambitions assumes impartiality. Each state, regardless of dynastic ties, affinities, and historic links had to be countered if its actions threatened to unbalance the states system.74 The result was, in its most basic form, a policy of blocking any other state’s road to hegemony.75 In this world of power politics, small states were no competitors. But they could be beneficiaries of power balancing, because the threat to a small state by one great power could very well be neutralized by the counter-move of a balancing second great power. The overriding task of the balance of power was to prevent the rise of a hegemon and to facilitate proper counter-balancing actions to this end. In this regard at least, the balance of power achieved its major goals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.76 The success translated into protection of its major actors from overly ambitious territorial desires.77 Generally speaking, anti-hegemonic actions work towards

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overall state survival. Roslyn Simowitz summarizes this claim, stating: “In systems where all nations pursue policies aimed at equalizing the power d ­ ifference of opposing actors, nations in the system are assured survival.”78 Conversely, if states are not preventing the establishment of hegemony, they lose the system’s protection when it turns into hegemony.79 In other words, by opposing the rise of a hegemon and joining the weaker side, states are indirectly protecting the independence of most states in the system.80 In this fashion, balance-of-power theory can account for state survival.81 However, small states are not included. It has been suggested that the logic and process of power balancing protects all the units of the states system. In the eighteenth century, Antoine Pecquet argued that the balance of power aims at providing stability and good relations between all nations.82 Two centuries later, Morgenthau also stated that in a balance of power, all states of that system are protected.83 However, contextual reading reveals that “all” in fact means “all balancing states,” that is, all great (and possibly middle) powers, but not small states. In short, the balance-of-power system shields only its large states.84 Thus the claim that the balance of power only “made it possible for a considerable number of states to remain in existence”85 seems more accurate. The reason is that the survival of small states was a low priority in the balance of power. As Michael Sheehan points out: “The great powers were protected by the operations of the system because their existence and continuing effectiveness were essential to the successful working of the system. The weak states, by contrast, were not, and therefore were not protected to the same extent.”86 Thus small states survived mostly for exogenous reasons. It was “mutual jealousy of the Great Powers [that] preserved even the small states, which could not have preserved themselves.”87 Whether it was competition, jealousies, or anti-hegemonic behavior that triggered balancing, small state security was enhanced when great powers faced off against each other.88 A case in point is the rivalry between Hapsburg’s Austria and Prussia. Most of the small German principalities were fairly safe as long as Vienna and Berlin blocked each other.89 The Prussian king Frederic II was fully aware of this dynamic and described it accurately in his political testament of 1768: The two major powers [of the Holy Roman Empire] are the house of Austria and the house of Brandenburg. Their equilibrium maintains the privileges, domains, and liberty of this republic of princes. … Since the Peace of Westphalia, the [Austrian] Emperor’s power has been properly limited and is constrained by the rivalry with Prussia.90

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Frederic II describes German small states as passive free riders of two great powers’ stalemate. Logically, however, small states were not ­confined to passivity. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century balance of power, small states had three options to build up their security: balancing and alliance building, bandwagoning, and admonishing. Generally speaking, balancing was too big a task for small states at the time. Because of their size, their contribution to a counter-balancing maneuver rarely, if ever, mattered. Nevertheless, small states have avenues open to them for active involvement in the balance-of-power operation. For one, small states could form alliances, improve their security collectively, pooling their resources, and oppose a great power as a unified block.91 However, taking into account the large differences between the majority of small states and the major powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alliances of dozens if not hundreds of small states would have had to come together to oppose a great power. Given the practical problems involved, this was difficult but not impossible to achieve. The alternative to balancing was bandwagoning.92 This occurs when a state sides with the more powerful state instead of balancing against it.93 In fact, Quincy Wright, who coined the term, and later A. F. K. Organski claim that this behavior is the norm in a balance of power, not the exception.94 Kenneth N. Waltz, however, disagrees and argues that “balancing, not bandwagoning, is the behavior induced by the system,”95 a finding that was extended to the behavior of “weak states,” too.96 When left with no alternative, however, small states were quick to bandwagon. Especially during France’s domination of the international scene around the turn of the eighteenth century and later during the rise of Napoleonic France at the turn of the nineteenth century, small states within reach of French weapons saw no viable alternatives to bandwagoning and thus sided with France. They hoped to secure their survival by sacrificing much of their independence. However, this was not a general behavior pattern but an emergency response. It owed its logic to the particular semi-hegemonic constellations in the European balance of power at these periods. And even then, weaker powers first looked for possible allies against overbearing French ambitions. As the contemporary historian Leopold von Ranke observed: “The less powerful could unite against the accumulation of power and the political preponderance. They concluded alliances, associations.”97 In between passively free riding on a favorable great power stalemate and proactively building counter-balancing alliances fell the tactic of admonishing a great power to start to counter a rival’s move. In other

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words, small states might actively try to trigger balancing action by a third party but in their own defense. In the balance-of-power system, small states generally depended on greater powers to maintain the equilibrium and do the “dirty work” of power balancing. But instead of hoping for that to happen, small states might appeal to third states’ sense of obligation to balance. A small state could reconstruct the threat it faced as a challenge to the equilibrium and remind middle or great powers of their own interest in a well-balanced system and the implicit obligation to counter-balance whenever necessary. If this failed, it might predict that its death could upset the equilibrium, which in turn would trigger intervention by rival great powers. The era’s system certainly had sufficient flexibility for such maneuvers and featured greater powers in sufficient numbers, ensuring that there was almost always someone to approach.98 In the era’s laissez-faire balance of power small states had a set of choices and it seems that free riding on a properly working balance of power would be an obvious first choice. When threatened themselves, they might consider their second-best option, attempting to trigger great power counter-balancing. When all failed and no balancer was available, small states would have to take their least favored option: bandwagoning. Neither choice, however, guaranteed their survival. In any event, the balance-of-power system did not leave the small and weak states completely defenseless against the desires of stronger powers. In fact, the proper operation of the balance of power itself limited the full application of power by a middle or great power and small states would benefit. In light of this, it is not surprising that small states quickly became guardians of the balance of power.99 Small states continued to face the threat of being used as bargaining chips. In this fashion and despite the advantage of balancing and bandwagoning, the underlying logic of a balance of power proved to be a double-edged sword for the small state. Small states were readily available objects for great powers trying to address imbalances. When a territorial concession imposed on a weaker state promised to satisfy a great power and dissuade it from violent conflict, small states could quickly become the unfortunate subjects of appeasement. What is more, since repulsing a hegemon was prioritized and the protection of the system was considered more important than keeping the peace, the sacrifice of small states could easily be construed as necessary for – and consistent with – the balance of power.100 From this perspective, small state death would be the direct result of the pursuit of balancing, and the historical record bears this out. It shows that “[t]he balance was

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frequently maintained at the expense of the smaller states. Many of the major peace settlements saw small states disappear in large numbers.”101 Worse still, using small states as bargaining chips and disposable units for re-balancing undermined the norm of state equality. Great Britain’s prime minister William Pitt, for example, not only proposed using small states as objects in negotiations among great powers, but denied small states equal status, claiming that they were not viable states to begin with. In this sense, small states were denigrated as only objects for satisfying, pacifying, or compensating competing larger states.102 And for Morgenthau, such actions were simply part of the “methods of the balance of power.”103 After all, great powers had no systemic restraint to consider.104 For small states, the harsh reality was the denial of an equal “right to exist”105 on top of their abuse as bargaining chips. Despite its long history in statecraft, neutrality did not offer a way out of the dynamics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century power p ­ olitics. Indeed in Thucydides’ Greece, small states like Melos failed in  their efforts to use neutrality for protection. In Renaissance Italy, too,  neutrality was dubious state policy. Many saw it as “wrong to remain neutral when neighbours are at war,”106 and Machiavelli warned against “bring[ing] oneself into hatred and contempt” by resorting to neutrality.107 Neutrality was considered unwise and deplorable statecraft. The seventeenth-century international lawyer Hugo Grotius came to a similarly negative conclusion, claiming that refusing to support a combatant fighting a just cause was wrong.108 Refusing to help may easily be construed as disregard for justice, as refusing to do what was right and denying assistance to those who had been wronged. In short, neutrality seemed morally reprehensible.109 The result was that refusing to take sides would not enhance small states’ security at all. It might actually work against small state survival. At this point in time, neither the moral or legal concepts themselves, nor the legal obligations of neutral states, nor the obligations of warring states towards neutral states, had yet gathered critical mass.110 Consequently, it was not the proclamation of neutrality that provided security, but external forces. As Morgenthau states: “The ability of such small nations to maintain their neutrality has always been due to one or the other of all of these factors [the balance of power, great power protection, lack of attraction].”111 Only when the concept of just war itself eroded much later in the eighteenth century could a niche for neutrality in International Law emerge,112 and only then did neutrality become a viable political option for the small state.113

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Although the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the 1793 Proclamation of Neutrality gave “the most significant impetus to the crystallisation of the modern concept of neutrality,”114 neutrality alone did not provide reliable protection from outside intervention. Consequently, the US adopted “armed neutrality,” a policy of neutrality paired with military deterrence.115 When all was said and done, neutrality remained largely meaningless as protection for small states throughout the eighteenth century. In sum, the balance of power that emerged in the seventeenth century was a mixed bag with respect to small state survival. On the one hand, counter-balancing and maintaining the equilibrium among the great powers could easily come at the expense of weaker states.116 Small states could be used as bargaining chips and to appease an ambitious great power. Also, aggression and aggrandizement at the expense of small states could be ignored by other great powers if deemed minor and not worth the risk and effort to counter. After all, the balance of power was only a limitation on an otherwise anarchical international system. On the other hand, not only great powers, but small states, too, “benefited by it.”117 Small states’ benefits came in the form of added security. When small states faced the “desire for expansion”118 of one great power, there was a good chance that another great power would step in and oppose aggrandizement. The effect of such counter-moves would not only be the protection or restoration of the overall equilibrium among the major powers – the original objective – but also the protection of small states from attack. The contemporary jurist Gaspard de Réal de Curban described this effect: “Each nation, while it tries to rise above the others, is occupied with maintaining a certain balance, which bestows upon the smallest states the force of a large section of Europe, and preserves them in spite of the weakness of their armies and the defects of their governments.”119 In light of the discussion above, it does not come as a surprise that small states were champions of power balancing and experts in using it to ensure their survival.120 While the balance of power was the strongest restraint on larger states’ power, it was not the only one. International Law in particular grew into a meaningful limitation on power. Beyond balancing: law as restraint on power The European balance-of-power system that emerged around the middle of the seventeenth century was further shaped by a number of additional “constituent institutions.”121 They were key features of the states system and further restrained large states’ use of power. They were, in

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Morgenthau’s words, “limitations on national power.”122 Indeed for eighteenth-century international lawyer Christian Wolff balancing was not simply a politically expedient tool to restrain power politics, but legitimate state behavior in the context of International Law. Small states and contemporary International Law

With the emergence of the Westphalian sovereign state and the evolution of a system of interacting states, rules for state interaction became necessary, and modern International Law emerged quickly to fill a vacuum.123 The traditional legal thinking along hierarchical lines and canon law was now overtaken by rules applicable to equal states in a flat, horizontal system.124 To be sure, in its early form International Law was a particularly weak restraint on power. Its purpose was to limit state violence, not conquer war.125 It disapproved of territorial conquest in principle but did not outlaw it outright. It was recognized that aggressive warfare was incompatible with universal peace and with justice, but the conquest of territories was not considered illegal.126 This last loophole in particular invited exploitation. Later in the seventeenth century, French claims to a right of intervention and to expand to “natural borders” was thinly veiled expansionism and came at the expense of many small states.127 Similarly, London’s decision in 1807 to strike against Denmark and to sink its fleet preemptively was unjustified, but was defended as militarily necessary.128 Overall, small states could not assume that international legal norms would guarantee their safety, even when their innocence was undisputed. In this era, International Law was mostly positive law. The rules were created voluntarily and by the states themselves. Yet states frequently neglected even those obligations they had created themselves. This was partly due to a lack of commitment to the principle of law governing state interaction. For an “unscrupulous state” it was very much possible simply to “disregard it.”129 The successive partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) showcase such disregard for the law by great powers. With the first partition in 1772 already, “the sanctity of lawful ownership … had disappeared.”130 Despite its weaknesses and flaws, International Law could work to the advantage of small state security. First, the emerging body of International Law codified norms of behavior and set standards for state actions. This allowed for a particular state policy to be legally judged as right or wrong and allowed states to frame threats in a legal context. When faced with coercion and unwarranted action, small states could make an international legal case and call law and justice

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to their defense. A solid legal case could offer a willing protector a stronger argument or could motivate a protector to step in to defend the law. Second, International Law, however weak, began to restrain power politics. Scholars from the English School, from Morgenthauian Classical Realism, and from Diplomatic History agree that International Law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries served the purpose of restraining state behavior in the balance of power. International Law did not change the fundamental dynamics of state behavior in anarchy, but it played a role in funneling state action into types of behavior that were respectful of legal norms.131 With international affairs channeled towards norms and negotiated settlements, a “basic order” for relations among sovereign states emerged.132 The rapidly hardening legal norm of sovereign equality of all states, regardless of their size, power, or ruling dynasty, further enhanced small state survivability. The more the small state came to be seen as an equal or, in the words of the German philosopher Leibniz, like “brothers and persons of equal condition,”133 the more protected they were from great powers. The danger to small states’ existence was not only their abuse as bargaining chips among balancing great powers, but also the notion that small really meant too small. Being seen as undersized and lacking critical mass could lead to a general disqualification from statehood and the denial of membership in the states system. This viewpoint was deeply embedded in a power-based perception of statehood. In contrast, under the Westphalian principle of sovereign equality, small states lacked size but were granted legal personality. As Vattel put it: “A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is: a small republic is no less a state than the most powerful kingdom.”134 At the same time, Vattel was certainly aware that equality before the law was of little use in and of itself. Only when sovereign equality was backed up by the balance of power did it have significance. Equality needed to be “protected by a balance of power.”135 In this sense, the balance of power was the necessary facilitator of the legal norm of equality, and “the European states system remained, despite significant differences in the size of its members, a system of autonomous and independent states.”136 In the final analysis, though, it seems that the norm of equality benefitted from a working balance of power much more than the other way around. Small states gained little from their newly gained equality before the law.

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Small states and the permissibility of warfare

The balance-of-power era did not know of a legal or “general prohibition of war,”137 and small states were under constant threat of military aggression. War was common and not reserved to great powers. Small states, too, used military force to secure their statehood. Brandenburg’s Great Elector did not mince words and insisted that his military strength and diplomatic maneuvers were geared to protecting the principality.138 War was a common instrument for aggrandizement. Military might was used frequently to gain territory. Often enough, small states would be the victims. Moreover, at times war served as a “means of preserving the balance of power.”139 If the equilibrium could not be maintained or restored by peaceful means, war was seen as a perfectly acceptable alternative. To be sure, war for religious reasons was disallowed now,140 but it remained a prominent feature of international affairs, especially with respect to maintaining the balance of power.141 As the European states system was based on an equilibrium, warfare was supposed to be limited,142 and considerable efforts were made to bridle warfare. Contemporary thinkers from William Penn, to Charles Irénée Castel de Saint Pierre and Immanuel Kant proposed ways of limiting or even overcoming war.143 Particular stipulations in peace treaties, the revitalization of mediation, and the evolution of arbitrational courts are evidence of political efforts geared towards the limitation of interstate warfare.144 In parallel, first attempts were made at collectivizing security. To begin with, it was argued that the defense of the international status quo was an obligation of all states.145 This obligation arose from the shared, “collective interest in opposing aggression and preserving peace.”146 Flanking this integration of a “collective interest” into the concept of the raison d’état was the realization that, in a system of states, bilateral issues could have major international ramifications.147 Unfortunately, even with a growing understanding of the collective nature of security in the modern states system, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ embryonic elements of collective security suffered from poor implementation and half-hearted commitment at best.148 The peace of 1648 did not create a general security regime149 and war remained a prominent feature of seventeenth and eighteenth-century international affairs.150 In sum, the threat of war remained a largely unmitigated threat to small states during the post-Westphalian era. War was neither illegal nor criminal, nor, for that matter, uncommon. All this could not but work against small states’ struggle to survive. While it is hard to see how small states could have proliferated in an

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environment dominated by ambitious great and middle powers, small states could nevertheless lean on a number of system-level dynamics that helped them in their struggle to survive. The core dynamic of the system, balancing power among the major actors, could work in support of small state survival, but could also be the cause of small state termination. Beyond great power rivalries and jealousies, the era’s states system featured few and only weak limitations on power politics. Nevertheless, the balance of power imposed significant restraints on power politics, especially on drastic, system-altering changes of the equilibrium. This prevented abrupt or large-scale disappearances of small states from the system, which would only change dramatically when the French Revolutionary Wars brushed the traditional balance of power aside. Quantifying small state survival: descriptive statistics Expectations In light of the previous discussion of the balance-of-power system and small states, it seems reasonable for there to be a noticeable decline in the number of small states during the second half of the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries. The assumption here is that the decline is beyond any “natural” attrition rate of small state dynasties simply dying out. On the one hand, the era of the laissez-faire balance of power featured few institutions to protect small states, leaving them largely to their own devices. And small states most certainly remained targets for territorial expansion of larger, more powerful states. All in all, King Frederic II of Prussia, who reigned for much of the eighteenth century, could fairly safely predict the continuation of small state death.151 On the other hand, jealousies and rivalries among greater powers opened the door for small states to find protectors. The great powers were suspicious of each other and watched each other’s moves, ready to counterbalance and defend the equilibrium of power. This dynamic, too, could translate into the defense of small states by great powers. In sum, the era was not destined to see the “destruction of small powers,”152 but decline nonetheless. On balance, the expectation of a permanent but measured erosion in the number of small states is most consistent with the previous investigation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ states system. Data presentation In 1648 the European-centered states system consisted of 419 small states and 19 larger states, or 22 small states for every single larger state. With over 95 percent of the total number of all states, small states constituted an overwhelming majority of units. In 1664, the highest number of

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small states for the entire three-and-a-half centuries examined in this study was reached when 427 small states existed in the states system together with 19 larger states. By 1715, the end of the reign of Louis XIV, who had almost achieved French hegemony, the number of  small states had declined to just fewer than 400. Towards the end of the ­eighteenth century, the total had further slipped to 339 small states in 1791. Still, with nearly 95 percent small states still constituted an overwhelming majority. No doubt, the states system had not in fact “succeeded in preserving the existence of all members of the modern state system,” as Morgenthau claims.153 However, practically all great powers and nearly 81 percent of small states survived until the late eighteenth century. But when Napoleon Bonaparte’s France was able to overcome the balance of power and dominate Europe militarily, the number of small states virtually collapsed. Without a balance of power and with French military hegemony over most of Europe the number of small states was cut by roughly three-quarters in about one decade. In 1813, only seventy-seven small states were left. In the same year, the system still included nineteen larger states. Figure 5 provides a visual summary of the measured decline of small states during the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries and the dramatic drop in the number of small states during the Napoleonic era. Descriptive statistics The data represented in Figure 5 are remarkable in a number of ways. First and foremost is the survival of small states in large numbers, even though a steady decline is clearly visible. The Thirty Years’ War and the peace settlement of 1648 had already led to small state death and it continued afterwards. Nevertheless, the states system that emerged in the middle of the seventeenth century featured a number of small states which was never reached again. Over 95 percent of all states were small states. Also, an unbroken downward trend, starting in 1648 and lasting for nearly 150 years, is clearly detectable. (Figure 7 below zooms in on this development.) During the fifteen decades between the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars, the number of small states declined by 19 percent. The decline happened gradually, however, and kept the number of small states at a high overall level. In other words, during the time of the laissez-faire balance of power, most small states were able to survive, but state creation, to the extent that it happened, took place at a rate lower than small state death. Small states survived in large numbers, but losses were rarely recovered, result-

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ing in steady erosion in the number of small states. This overall picture characterizes the entire era up to the Napoleonic Wars. When France under Napoleon began to subdue nearly all of Europe, however, the number of small states declined sharply. Figures 5 and 6 illustrate this most dramatic drop-off. Napoleon first ignored and then nearly destroyed the traditional European order. Counter-balancing had been too little for too long, and French hegemony was nearly achieved. During this time, small states were the primary victims and their number fell by 80 percent in just over two decades, from 339 in 1792 to 79 in 1814. It has been argued that “[w]hen the balance [of power] disappears, it [the small state] usually disappears with it.”154 For two decades around the turn of the nineteenth century at least, the data bear out this claim most stunningly. Larger states, too, suffered when Napoleon led the French Empire. The loss of four larger states, however, pales in comparison to the losses of small states. The overall stability in the number of larger states means that the overall trend in the small states index and its sudden drop-off was driven by changes in the number of small states. Put differently, the re-composition of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century states system at the end of the era was primarily the result of small state death on a massive scale. Figure 6 shows the changes in the number of small states from one year to the next. It, too, illustrates the unprecedented fall in numbers that starts in the eighteenth century’s last decades and decimates small state totals in three massive blows during the first decade of the nineteenth century. This stands in stark contrast to the measured changes of the preceding 150 years. As we have seen, for this time period, an overall steady trend in measured decline in small state total number is easily detectable. This time period saw only minor ups and downs in annual changes. To be sure, during this time the reductions were more numerous and more frequent than additions. Thus, in the aggregate, small states were lost from the total amount on a consistent basis. Figure 7 highlights the consistency in small state losses but also the moderate level at which small state decline took place before the rise of Napoleonic France. By cutting the data range off at the year 1791, the steadiness and shallowness come into clear view. A linear trend line has been added to highlight this feature. The index line is much less steady than that of small state totals. This is due primarily to the changes in the number of larger states. To be sure, the numerical changes of larger states are minor in absolute terms, but they have a disproportionate impact on the index line because of their small percentage in the entire states system’s composition. *  *  *

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Overall, the data show a remarkably steady downward trend in small state numbers. The numbers erode constantly and over the entire period and do so at an even rate. However, a huge drop-off begins in the 1790s and small state numbers plummet at an unprecedented rate and to an unprecedented low. The picture is one of overall steadiness during the laissez-faire balance of power until the equilibrium falls victim to the poorly counter-balanced hegemonic ambitions of Napoleonic France. This suggests, first, the existence of a fairly permissive environment for small state survival, but not for small state proliferation. And second, as long as it worked properly, the traditional balance of power was accommodating to small state survival. These findings are particularly intriguing in light of contemporaries’ pessimism regarding small state survival in an unfair balance of power.155 So far, it seems that when it comes to small state survival, the balance of power may be significantly more accommodating to small state survival in reality than its image suggested. Small state survival in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century balance-of-power system In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world of international politics, small states were lost to the aggrandizement of larger powers. The settlement of 1648 set the tone, with the new peace order “preceded by the wholesale elimination of small states.”156 For example, to entice France to make peace with the Holy Roman Emperor, Alsace was sacrificed and given to France.157 At the same time, a balance of power offered meaningful protection. Moreover, small states were lost at a measured rate only, and hundreds of small states survived the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this era, small state survival depended on counter-balancing by great and middle powers, and so the story of small state survival is characterized largely by balancing, free riding, and admonishing. When the system was out of balance, small states had to resort to bandwagoning and even had to face termination. On balance, however, a states system which pitted rivalrous great powers against each other, forcing them to counter each other’s moves, produced dynamics that let small states survive in large numbers. During the first few decades after the Peace of Westphalia, Europe’s balance of power worked well enough for small states to find protection. Their survival was assured by great power rivalries and ­counter-maneuvering. An early example is the case of Bavaria. With an eye towards its Hapsburg rival, France allied with the minor power Bavaria in 1670. This maneuver by the ambitious King Louis XIV of

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France158 was not motivated by altruism. Rather, Paris guarded against Vienna’s ambitions in Germany and saw an opportunity to line up a German kingdom on its side to use as a wedge.159 Regardless, as France thought and acted as a power balancer, Bavaria’s chances of successfully resisting a threat from Austria increased dramatically. Even when geography or old dynastic jealousies did not play a role in balancing considerations, small states succeeded repeatedly in finding allies. In 1679, Hamburg came under pressure from Denmark and Prussia, but Brunswick and France sided with the city-state. Danish and Prussian attempts to coerce Hamburg were effectively blocked.160 The survival of the small state fell squarely into the logic of blocking aggression and preserving the equilibrium among states in Europe. From balancing to bandwagoning and back: small state survival during the era of Louis XIV France’s rise continued after 1648 and accelerated when Louis XIV took over the reins in 1661. Under the future Sun King, France embarked on an expansionist foreign policy, and French ambitions along the Rhine threatened German small states. In response, many of them attempted to counter the threat with alliances. A number of small states formed the Frankfurt Alliance of 1679. Still, a rising France under an ambitious king was not impressed by this counter-move. In 1681, France seized Strasburg. German states responded with an enlarged alliance and the direct involvement of the emperor through the Laxenburg Alliance of 1682. Sweden and The Netherlands associated themselves with it, too. These efforts led to the Augsburg Alliance of 1686, which brought in an even wider circle of small states and larger powers. However, as a counter to French power and ambition, these alliances proved insufficient. The emerging “French era” would not be stopped.161 The episode demonstrated the severe limitations small states faced in protecting themselves against a determined great power through a defensive alliance. What was missing was an equally determined anti-hegemonic counter-movement by great powers, especially Hapsburg. By 1685, France had secured a dominant position in Europe,162 and “the balance of power was tilted high in his [Louis XIV’s] favour.”163 France was not a hegemon, but it was getting close.164 And its king’s “vaulting ambition”165 began to threaten not only Riparian German small states, but also the European balance of power. France’s strategy, its politique des Reunions, translated into constant expansion of French territory and influence.166 A fair number of small states that had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire were incorporated into the French state. Some had remained occupied by French forces since the

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end of the Thirty Years’ War; some were targeted in later conflicts and disputes. All of them were in essence the result of concessions made by major powers to satisfy the desire of a great power. A concerted counteraction was not deemed necessary as long as the overall balance was not upset. Appeasement and the sacrifice of a limited number of small states seemed a reasonable move by Europe’s larger states for now. In other words, with France’s ascent and the corresponding loss of the balance of power’s rigor, small states were the first to suffer. In the following decades, France cemented its dominant position in Europe. However, French dominance had not yet reached the tipping point where counter-balancing would be unavoidable. That is to say, although France under Louis XIV was uniquely powerful, the imbalance in the system did not yet force great powers to take action. In the absence of willing balancers among Europe’s great powers, small states were cut off from their preferred security strategy and now turned to bandwagoning. To be sure, France was willing to assist small states in this. Instead of annexing all small states within reach, Paris paid a good number of them handsomely for their allegiance.167 Accepting financial gifts in return for their loss of foreign policy autonomy allowed a number of small states to escape outright annexation. Others bandwagoned strictly out of fear of state death. Without the balance-of-power counter-action kicking in, smaller states saw no alternative. For example, Franz von Fürstenberg of Cologne “believ[ed] that the essential problem of statecraft in this part of Europe consisted in coming intelligently to terms with the rising power of France.” 168 He steered a middle course, defending Cologne’s autonomy while accepting the role of a French ally.169 Numerous other small state leaders in the ‘French hemisphere’ had to find ways to serve France without becoming French.170 The Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William, came to the same conclusion: “In the present state of affairs, so far as human prudence can judge, it seems that no prince will henceforth find security and advantage except in the friendship and alliance of the King of France.”171 Bandwagoning did not guarantee survival, but depended on the cooperation of France. However, in the absence of balancers and given the inability to form an effective counter-alliance on their own, the balance of power forced small states to bandwagon. In light of the continuation of France’s rise, Europe’s great powers could not avoid balancing much longer. Increasingly, statesmen in Europe’s capitals perceived French expansion as unreasonable and threatening. King Louis XIV’s ambitions now went well beyond small border adjustments.172 France came to be seen as challenging the moral and political orders. As a result, counter-actions became unavoidable.173

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After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, King William III’s England switched sides and joined his motherland, the Dutch Republic, in opposition to France. This realignment was cemented in 1689 in the form of the Grand Alliance.174 Its purpose was to balance against a now alarmingly dominant France. England’s maneuver was necessitated by Europe’s balance of power. It had little to do with the French court or the Bourbon dynasty and much to do with keeping a balance of power. It certainly had nothing to do with the welfare of the small state. But France could not be allowed to break the bounds of the balance of power, making England’s realignment “a textbook case of the functioning of the balance of power.”175 When counter-balancing returned to Europe’s states system, small states benefitted immediately. Savoy could enlist the Holy Roman Empire for protection from France. But France, too, returned as a balancing protector for small states and not much later was called upon to assist Savoy against the emperor’s ambition. In an almost identical case of the mid seventeenth century, Venice found help against Spanish designs.176 The more the states system returned to a state of proper balance, the more small states benefitted in their efforts to protect themselves. The Holy Roman Empire, particularism, and small state survival The Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries featured an institution that assisted small state survival: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. From its peak at the dawn of the thirteenth century, the empire was on the decline and was slowly but steadily being undermined by the evolution of princely territories into mostly small states. Soon, it was an empire in name only.177 However, despite its many weaknesses, the Holy Roman Empire evolved into a meaningful protector of small states. It also remained critical to the era’s states system and its equilibrium.178 In many ways, the European equilibrium was constructed around this fractured geographic center. Here, German small states served three important functions. First, their existence prevented the creation of a massive central European power. Second, their large numbers together with their individual weaknesses were instrumental in maintaining and fine tuning the equilibrium among Europe’s main powers. Third, a particularized Germany served as a large buffer zone into which rising states could expand or where great powers could oppose each other indirectly, through proxies. Against this background, it is easy to see why the particular state of affairs in Germany – a weak empire built on a splintered political landscape – was preferred abroad. France in particular was both a beneficiary and a supporter of German particularism. Morgenthau called it

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a longstanding and “unvarying principle of French foreign policy either to favor the division of the German Empire into a number of small independent states or to prevent the coalescence of such states into one unified nation.”179 Regardless of French policy, small states gained protection from the empire itself, its particular political status, and its internal legal order. Its emphasis on a legal order strengthened the law in general, favored adherence to proper proceedings, and advocated non-violent, law-based conflict resolution. Put differently, the purpose and set-up of the empire pushed for ‘right before might’ for states that were part of it. Needless to say, it was in the small states’ best interest to support the Holy Roman Empire wherever possible. The empire was in the small states’ own national interest: “Those who did not have the power to survive on their own, had to support the implementation of the imperial laws, because he himself depended on the law’s protection.”180 The empire became a defensive organization,181 featuring embryonic elements of collective security.182 Its internal set-up emphasized co-existence among its member states and incentivized subdued levels of conflict.183 The institution remained weak and unreliable, to be sure, but at the very least it provided small states with a ready-made infrastructure to consider, plan, and manage coordinated or even collective action. It was also a tool for German small states to speak with one voice.184 Overall, the Holy Roman Empire benefitted small state s­ecurity  in a noticeable way. As members, they not only had a better chance of survival but also were less exposed to the risk of being occupied and plundered.185 In stark contrast, “the situation was less favorable” in northern Italy, where small states were left to their own devices and much more exposed to annexations by Austria and Savoy-Piedmont.186 Unfortunately, the benefits which the Holy Roman Empire generated for its small states were undercut by German particularism, which the empire came to symbolize. Particularism gained a bad reputation quickly because the phenomenon was regularly interpreted as a misguided celebration of the small state. The image was one of pompous, arrogant, narcissistic, narrow-minded, unambitious, and economically incompetent187 leaders clinging to their statelets for no good reason and without a meaningful understanding of a larger, abstract raison d’état.188 Contemporary statesmen generally shared this disparaging view. William Pitt wanted small states to be “disposed of,”189 and King Frederic II of Prussia looked down on small states and their maneuvering in a “web of knaveries.”190 Even the German particularism prior to Westphalia received the label “curse of its time,”191 and the German

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philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz lamented the absence of a proper German nation-state.192 Small states had to deal with a peculiar problem: their bad reputation. “Kleinstaaterei” had a strong negative connotation. Their chances of survival were undermined by a widely shared disrespect, especially in regards to German small states under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire. On balance, however, the Holy Roman Empire was a blessing for German small states. It offered an additional layer of protection, something their fellow Italian or Swiss small states did not have. With his death in 1715, the age of Louis XIV came to an end. France had made strategic annexations, generally small states, along its periphery, but this had come at the cost of increasing isolation.193 French domination was already waning by the 1690s,194 when Europe’s leading powers were working on resetting the equilibrium. The second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth century saw the whole spectrum of small state maneuvers in a balance of power, from free riding to balancing and bandwagoning. Most had been able to survive thanks to the dynamics generated by the balance of power and, to a much lesser extent, an embryonic regional institution. Europe’s laissez-faire balance of power and small state survival, 1715–91 The death of the Sun King did not change the fundamentals of Europe’s states system, however.195 “The interrelations of the European states continued to be dominated by the idea of the balance of power.”196 In fact, the balance of power hardened and its supremacy in international politics found a clear expression in the “system of Utrecht.”197 In 1713–14, the War of Spanish Succession between coalitions centered on France and Austria came to a close. The preamble to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht proclaimed that a “just Balance of Power” would be the basis for the entire settlement.198 This balance system stayed in place for most of the eighteenth century.199 For much of the first half of the eighteenth century, the European balance of power had a rather consistent, basic constellation, pitching France, Spain, and a handful of German states against Austria, Great Britain, and the Dutch Republic.200 This set-up created an equilibrium among the major powers in Europe. However, despite the “apparent symmetry of this arrangement”201 it would not last past the mid century mark. The so-called diplomatic revolution of 1756 showed that balancing had now become the policy standard for all states across Europe. The War of Austrian Succession, 1740–48, had still seen the traditional constellation of opposing powers. However, by the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63, the alignment had shifted fundamentally, across old dynastic

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ties, religious affinities, or historical alignments. This revolutionized diplomacy202 and pushed Europe’s states system further towards an ideal-type balance of power. In such a system, every state is prepared to ally with any other state to oppose a third state’s hegemonic ambitions without any religious, dynastic, or other concerns. Overall, the system’s further evolution towards an ideal-type balance-of-power system ­benefitted small state survival. The less the arrangement was compromised by the existence of a dominant power or remnants of traditional loyalties, the better it could work to block great powers’ ambitions. And small states were immediate beneficiaries. Throughout the eighteenth century the dynamics of power balancing “afforded small states protection.”203 In addition to free riding on the overall equilibrium, small states found opportunities to exploit bilateral rivalries and regional power constellations to protect themselves. First, small states could free ride great power counter-balancing. If a threat to them amounted to a threat to the equilibrium in the eyes of the great powers, they would feel it necessary to counter the aggression. In such cases, small states may not even have had to remind a great power of its interests in and obligation to balancing. If the case was blatant enough and the threat to the equilibrium significant enough, small state survival would be almost guaranteed. By way of example: towards the end of the century, Bavaria was saved twice from Austrian annexation. Full usurpation by Austria would have been a major blow to the established equilibrium among Europe’s major powers. Thus it could not be allowed. The actual result was a peace settlement in 1779 that not only ended the War of Bavarian Succession (1778–79), but also rebuffed Austria’s territorial desires on Bavaria. Prussia had led a military coalition, while France and Russia aligned themselves with a diplomatic front that strongly opposed Vienna’s designs.204 The Peace of Teschen allowed Austria a face-saving retreat but granted it only limited territorial gains. Key was that Austria’s acquisitions would not upset the overall equilibrium.205 Admittedly, the settlement ignored Bavaria’s full territorial sovereignty, but it saved it from annexation. Five years later, Austria made another attempt to take over Bavaria but was again repelled by thirdparty resistance. This time, France took the lead. Paris feared Hapsburg’s domination of German lands and of the Holy Roman Empire.206 With France taking over the lead role from Prussia, the actors had changed but the logic remained the same. Austria’s ambition threatened to unbalance the European order and had to be repelled. France’s urge to counter-balance Austria’s designs guaranteed Bavaria’s survival. Second, small states were able to get help through regional dynamics

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that linked up to the overall balance of power. In the mid to late 1740s, for example, Genoa came under mounting pressure from Sardinia. At the same time, the War of Austrian Succession split Europe into two opposing camps. The war drew all the attention of Europe’s great powers. Sardinia was associated with one side, leaving Genoa no choice but to join the other side. Joining the French camp paid off in the end, when France insisted on the restoration of Genoa at the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.207 Genoa’s maneuver cannot be described as balancing. In fact, it had little interest in responding to the rise of Prussia or Austria’s counter-moves. Neither was Genoa bandwagoning, since France was not a clearly dominant actor in northern Italy. Rather, Genoa joined one camp in a broader conflict in the hope of being on the winning side in the end. Third, small states could play on bilateral tensions between great powers to acquire protection from aggression. In 1715, for example, Savoy-Piedmont assured its survival against a threat from Austria by exploiting the tensions and traditional dynastic rivalry between Austria and France. It proposed an anti-Austrian league208 and thus interjected itself into a hostile relationship in order to gain French protection from Austrian aggression. By doing so, Savoy-Piedmont also relied on the larger balance of power, which pitted the two great powers against each other at this time. Again, the small state did not balance, nor did it bandwagon. Instead it used to its own advantage the tensions between two great powers and their opposition in the contemporary balance of power. Similar, but less complex, were the small state of Salzburg’s maneuvers in the 1750s to rebuff Bavarian designs and escape its ­coercion.209 Salzburg relied on the mutual jealousies and rivalries between Bavaria and Austria, neither of which would allow gains to the other. As a result, Salzburg survived as a small, independent state until Napoleon Bonaparte re-drew much of the European map half a century later. The survival of many existing small states was not paralleled by small state proliferation, certainly not in Europe. First, great powers did not put a premium on the restoration of small states lost in war. Second, nobody favored a further fragmentation of Europe into more small states. Indeed Europe was largely closed off to small state proliferation during the eighteenth century. Third, great powers were more interested in annexing vacant land than in state creation. Any vacuum left behind by declining and retreating states was quickly filled by the e­ xtension of a rising state’s territorial reach. When Sweden declined from a s­eventeenth-century great power to

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middle power status in the eighteenth century, it lost control over large tracts of land along the southeastern Baltic seaboard. However, no sovereign Baltic state emerged. Instead, a rising Russia moved in and took over regional control.210 As this case showed, small state creation was fairly effectively countered by great powers’ ambitions to expand. Worse yet, the balance of power could also generate dynamics that led to small state death. Being used by great powers as bargaining chips or as pawns in dispute settlement was a constant threat to small states. Great powers could also use small states to realign the balance without making any sacrifices themselves. This scenario played itself out over and over again as “[t]he balance was frequently maintained at the expense of the smaller states.”211 The 1718 Treaty of London is a case in point:212 This treaty and its aftermath marked a further advance in the principle that the establishment of international stability justified the setting aside – by force if necessary – of the preferences of small states and their rulers. Thus Victor Amadeus of Savoy had no alternative but to exchange Sicily for Sardinia, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany no voice in the succession to his inheritance.213

Overseas, the European balance of power did not work in favor of the small state, either. As the states system expanded geographically, more and more territories were brought into an increasingly worldwide system of states. In principle, this should have led to state creation and opened the door for new states to join the system. However, European colonialism largely preempted state creation outside of Europe. Instead of states being built, peoples were subdued, oppressed, and exploited. Instead of state creation,214 Europe exported colonization, with only a handful of territories able to defend their independence. Frequently, newly acquired foreign lands were used as assets in European affairs and served the function of compensating one great power for the gains elsewhere of another European power.215 As with small states in Europe, colonies abroad were repeatedly used to re-­ calibrate the equilibrium between the great powers. The peace settlement of 1763 which ended the Seven Years’ War in Europe and the French and Indian War in northern America saw massive land swaps of British, French, and Spanish colonial possessions overseas.216 State creation overseas was denied. It was not even considered, and no small state emerged from European colonies in the eighteenth century. The one exception is the United States of America. In 1776, state creation was achieved, but its successful struggle for independence, ­sovereignty, and recognized statehood was flanked by dynamics stemming from the balance of power. The American War of Independence was won with

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help from France and Spain and took place in the context of a systemwide struggle between major powers.217 In this sense, the US owed its independence in good measure to the balance of power. The second half of the eighteenth century saw old rivalries among Europe’s great powers flaring up again and new ones emerging. With it, the balance-of-power system became more tense and balancing became fiercer. In addition the power constellation lost flexibility. As J. H. Shennan observed: By the middle of the eighteenth century, therefore, international relations in Europe had indeed reached a watershed. The second half of the century would be dominated by the intense rivalry of two sets of foes, Britain and France and Prussia and Austria, with the unpredictable power of Russia capable of tipping the balance one way or the other.218

Intense competition among the great and middle powers of a balanceof-power system works to the advantage of weak and small states. As  in  earlier years, great power rivalry significantly increased the chances of small state survival. When threatened, small states had a good chance to gain protection from a great power rival. And the stronger the rivalries in play, the quicker and faster the help would be forthcoming. As a result, small states enjoyed the relative safety of a rigorous balance of power until Napoleonic France overturned the entire system. Alternatively, small states could form an alliance and oppose a threat as a counter-balancing collective. Thus when the Prussian-led Fürstenbund was created in 1785, over a dozen small German states joined. To be sure, they were not immediately threatened by Austrian designs, but Vienna’s ambition to annex Bavaria had alarmed not only Prussia but also sixteen German small states, which felt it necessary to balance against Austria.219 And indeed, they were successful, proving that collective arrangements by small states could suffice to counterbalance against a hostile great power. However, there were limits, unfortunately. While the maneuver deterred Austria, an alliance of small states would prove no match for the onslaught of revolutionary France only a few years later. In light of the above, it is not surprising that the overall losses in the number of small states before the rise of Napoleonic France remained limited, and continued the general trend of unhurried, measured decline which had also characterized the previous decades. Despite the support offered by the balance of power during the second half of the eighteenth century, a number of dynamics of this harsher

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balance of power worked against small state survival. After the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the states system showed increasing signs of tension, when great powers gained much strength and grew more ambitious. One indication of their ambition was their increasing colonial efforts. Another was their readiness to abandon the tacit agreement to restrain their ambition in favor of stability. Towards the end of the century, what remained of this gentlemen’s agreement broke down quickly and completely. In the end, “there was no consciousness of common interest, no capacity among the European states of acting in general Concert.”220 This loss of restraint, together with their growing territorial desires, locked the great powers into conflicting relationships and a ‘perverted’ balance of power.221 In this changing environment, small states became easy prey for great powers’ need to satisfy their territorial ambitions. As Arthur Hassall states: “With the widespread desire of aggrandisement, and the universal longing for compactness of territory, the idea of the balance of power continues to be a living force, though in a perverted form. The greed of acquisition becomes strong, and the smaller are threatened by the greater Powers with extinction.”222 Not only did the “greed of acquisition” grow, but also the great powers’ willingness to restrain their ambitions in the interest of a mutually acceptable equilibrium deteriorated. In this new environment, a good number of small states lost their autonomy, parts of their territory, or were terminated.223 Worse still was the emergence of great power cooperation. Instead of opposing each other, great powers began to coordinate their strategies. Their desire to expand their territories was as strong as ever and they were becoming unwilling to show restraint. Given that an individual small state did not matter as far as the overall equilibrium was concerned, small states were convenient targets. And by coordinating their actions in sharing the spoils coordinated great power aggression would not upset the equilibrium. They essentially outflanked the traditional dynamic of counter-balancing, and weak states became easy targets. The partitions of Poland in the last third of the eighteenth century showcased the effectiveness of great power manipulation of the balance of power. They also showed how this type of coordinated aggrandizement came primarily at the expense of smaller states.224 Unfortunately for targeted smaller states, these maneuvers and in particular the partitions of Poland were consistent with the logic of the balance of power. After all, they helped forestall the escalation of great power disagreement into open conflict.225 Russia’s victory in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–74) threatened the Balkans, where Austria had its own designs. Prussia feared that Austria might take the opportunity to recover Silesia,

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which it had lost to Prussia earlier. This triangle of jealousies carried the risk of escalating into a major conflict. The great powers averted a crisis by appeasing each other with territory from a state that had not been directly involved: Poland.226 The settlement preserved the equilibrium but had not even “the ­pretense of legal justification.”227 Poland was carved up partly in 1772 and again in 1793; the remnants of the Polish state were absorbed by neighboring great powers in 1795. Despite the open illegality and immorality, a balance was maintained among the great powers, but at the expense of small state mutilation and, ultimately, extinction. This was not a case of a perversion of the balance of power or its dysfunction, as has been claimed.228 Rather, it demonstrated that only major powers were truly safe. Smaller states were not critical in the balance of power and were therefore not guaranteed to survive. Neither Poland’s long history, nor its innocence in this case, nor International Law, could hold back the necessity of re-balancing the Austria–Prussia–Russia triangle. The breakdown of the traditional balance of power, 1792–1814 The French Revolutionary Wars ushered in a “new era … for Europe and the world.”229 Under the cumulative pressure of French military campaigns and the spread of France’s revolutionary message, the traditional balance of power among Europe’s conservative states collapsed. Without any self-imposed restraint or any immediate and effective counter-balancing, French military power conquered most of Europe. For about two decades, the balance of power was paralyzed, and, as a result, small states suffered massive losses. Initially, Europe’s great powers attempted to manage the new challenge with the traditional instruments of balancing and with compensations at the expense of small states. In 1797, trying to stem the tide of French expansion, Austria-Hungary agreed with France in the Treaty of Campo Formio (1796) to terminate the small state Venice and divide northern Italy among them.230 However, by now France was no longer interested in changes within the existing European order. Instead, Napoleon Bonaparte “tried to make a new European system, all his own, under French dominion.”231 It became clear that Napoleonic France aimed at domination and at overturning the old European arrangement of a multitude of sovereign states. “Napoleon’s will to dominate”232 and “to remould Europe”233 threatened the states system itself.234 There could be little doubt that in a Napoleonic world, sovereign small states in particular would have no place.

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Napoleon successfully outmaneuvered the uncoordinated and at times half-hearted attempts of counter-balancing235 and succeeded in enlarging France to an “international empire” after the turn of the century.236 Clearly, the balance-of-power system had failed in its primary purpose of preventing hegemonic rise. The claim that “[w]hen the balance [of power] disappears, [the small state] usually disappears with it”237 found its most dramatic confirmation in this period. With no resort to the dynamics of the balance of power, small states turned to bandwagoning. A few small states were able to switch sides at the right moment. Bavaria, for example, sided with France early and accommodated French ambitions. Submission and accommodation even allowed it to enlarge its own territory. Moreover, Bavaria was also successful in abandoning Napoleon just before his final military defeats in 1814 and 1815, which allowed the small state to secure much of its territorial gain.238 But however impressive Bavaria’s policy of consecutive bandwagoning was, it was the exception. France was building an empire and Napoleon’s design did not include hundreds of small states in central Europe. Some small states turned to neutrality, but to little avail. As a norm, neutrality had not hardened enough to counter a stronger state’s interests, as Denmark would find out in 1806. By the time that the conflict between Great Britain and Napoleonic France was at its height, Denmark had been neutral for over four decades. And again, Denmark resisted taking sides and kept access to the Baltic Sea open.239 However, in 1806 the British sank the Danish fleet in its harbor in a preventive strike aimed at denying Denmark’s ships to Napoleon. Whether Denmark suffered as a result of preemptive balancing or a simple disregard for a norm is secondary in the sense that a small state’s sovereignty was massively infringed upon. Either way, neutrality was not of much help to small states trying to escape great power conflict. As pointless as neutrality was membership in the Holy Roman Empire. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the empire’s ability to shield its small member states from aggression had vanished. It was not able to transform itself into a cohesive block and oppose Napoleon as a collective. It had also lost any remaining internal cohesiveness and third parties could now easily ally themselves with single states and manipulate imperial politics in their own interests.240 The empire’s value as a defensive shield for small states was approaching nil. Without a balance of power or any other restraint on power to help them survive, small states vanished rapidly. “Weaker powers, whether allies or defeated, were victims, their possession and resources to be used for the benefit of Napoleon’s diplomatic and military ­calculations.”241

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In 1803, France annexed Piedmont for geostrategic reasons.242 In 1806, small states were used as compensation for losses due to Napoleon’s reordering of the European political map, the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the disbandment of the Holy Roman Empire.243 The empire’s termination led to the immediate death of vast numbers of small states.244 Far more than a hundred small states were lost almost immediately.245 Without a functioning balance of power, small states had no defense against termination. The number of small states in the states system dropped by 77 percent, from a total of 339 in 1791 to 79 at the end of the Napoleonic era. Only rarely did Napoleon’s imperial ambitions allow for small state creation, as in 1807, when the emperor found it convenient to secure his defeat of Prussia with the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw.246 Overall, small state creation was on a scale far too small to compensate for the termination of small states on a massive scale. In the end, Napoleon overreached. The scale and the ambitions behind his conquests pushed Europe’s great powers to unite. Their goal was to defeat France, return the Westphalian system of sovereign states, and reestablish the balance of power.247 The recovery of the many small states lost under Napoleon, however, was not on the allies’ agenda, as the peace negotiations in Vienna would clearly show. Despite the era’s dramatic end, small states survived in large numbers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the entire period, a picture emerges of small states benefitting from the balance-of-power system’s core dynamics in a number of ways and therefore surviving despite its underlying anarchy and the dominance of power and power politics. Small state security was enhanced by the competitive dynamics which the balance of power imposes on great powers. Overall, the era’s laissezfaire balance of power was highly conducive to small state survival. Unsurprisingly, small states benefit the most in a well-balanced and properly working balance of power where they can free ride on great powers cancelling out each other’s ambitions and moves. Still, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries small states demonstrated their willingness to engage in counter-balancing themselves and to form alliances to counter a mounting threat. The era’s additional limitations – the balance of power itself, International Law, and restraints on warfare – proved fairly ineffective, with the partial exception of the Holy Roman Empire. When all else failed, small states tried to bandwagon, although even this maneuver depended on the willingness of the great powers to allow it. But in the end, it was the balance-of-power system which “made it possible for a considerable number of states to remain in existence at all.”248

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Notes 1 “It [the policy] keeps Europe independent and free”; Heinz Gollwitzer, Europabild und Europagedanke (München: C. H. Beck, 1964), 76. 2 Evan Luard, Conflict and Peace in the Modern International System (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 10. For an alternative perspective, see  Peter H. Wilson, A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 1–8. 3 Luard, Conflict and Peace, 10; Andreas Osiander makes a similar point, stating that the “‘classical’ European states system” started to evolve around mid century. See Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 316. 4 Heinz Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen: Internationale Beziehungen 1559–1660 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 590. Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Scholarship has pointed out that any abrupt break in international affairs is an oversimplification and that a better way of understanding the historical moment of 1648 is to conceptualize it as a catalyst to developments that began before and continued after the peace ceremonies. See for example: Daniel H. Nexon, The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009), 265, 273–288. 5 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 77; Marie-Hélène Renaut, Histoire du droit international public (Paris: Ellipses, 2007), 79–123; Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty,” Foreign Policy January/February (2001); and Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 6 David Kaiser, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 83; Wilson, The Thirty Years Wargedy, 269–313. 7 Kaiser, Politics and War, 83; Wilson, The Thirty Years War. 8 Siegrid Westphal, Der Westfälische Frieden (München: C. H. Beck, 2015), 10. 9 John Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 1648–1688 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 7.  10 “[D]ie Fürsten waren im vollen Sinne Regenten ihrer Länder”; Arnold H. L. Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems und seiner Kolonien, von der Entdeckung beyder Indien bis zu Errichtung des Französischen Kayserthrons (Göttingen: Johann Friedrich Röwer, 1811), 174. See also Geir Lundestad, ed., The Fall of Great Powers: Peace, Stability, and Legitimacy (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994), 3.  11 R. B. Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 1451–1789 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1971), 299.  12 Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 593–600.  13 Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 176; also: Osiander, The States System of Europe (1994), 16–89.

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 14 Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 593–600; Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia”; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 56.  15 Luard, Conflict and Peace, 10.  16 Quoted in Moorhead Wright, ed., Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914: Selected European Writings (London: Dent, 1975), 39.  17 Quoted in Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 298.  18 Ibid.  19 Michael Sheehan, The Balance of Power: History and Theory (London: Routledge, 1996), 37–38.  20 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 133; John B. Wolf, The Emergence of the Great Powers, 1685–1715 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951), 14.  21 Abramo F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1966), 292.  22 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 120–147.  23 Quoted in Ibid., 81.  24 Quoted in Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 62–63.  25 Ibid., 72.  26 Leopold von Ranke, Die großen Mächte (Hamburg: Tredition, 1833), 19.  27 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 123.  28 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 177.  29 Evan Luard, The Balance of Power: The System of International Relations 1648–1815 (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1992), 8–25; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 209–210.  30 Quoted in Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 72.  31 Quoted in Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 206–207.  32 Quoted in Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 94.  33 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Napoleonic Wars and their Aftermath,” in Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, ed. Moorhead Wright (London: Dent, 1975 (1859)), 90.  34 Friedrich der Große, Testament Politique: Das Politische Testament von 1752, trans. Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1974), 66–67.  35 Richard Dietrich, ed., Politische Testamente der Hohenzollern (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1981), 64–65.  36 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 302.  37 Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.  38 Quoted in Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 162; see also 66.  39 Ibid., 187.  40 Luard, The Balance of Power, 31.  41 H. M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 1740–1815 (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2006), 4; Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 593; Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 187; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Leipzig: Amazon Distribution, 2013 (1806)), 151–152; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 209; Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 181.  42 Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 4.

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 43 Aron, Peace and War, 99–101.  44 Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 5.  45 Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 167.  46 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 67.  47 Richelieu, The Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu, trans. Henry Bertram Hill (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 76–79.  48 Große, Testament Politique, 66; Rohan is quoted in: Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 35; Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 182–185.  49 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 62.  50 Ibid., 72.  51 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 46–47, 52.  52 Wolf, The Emergence of the Great Powers, 211–216.  53 Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, xiv.  54 Ibid.  55 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 200–202.  56 Jeremy Black, European International Relations 1648–1815 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 6–8; Paul Seabury, ed., Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler Publications Company, 1965), 6.  57 Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 62–63.  58 Inis L. Claude, Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), 24.  59 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 182–186.  60 William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660–1800, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford  University Press, 1992), 266; Claude, Power and International Re­­ lations, 11.  61 By way of illustration, see Ernst B. Haas, “The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept or Propaganda?” World Politics 5, no. 4 (1953); Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), 151; Claude, Power and International Relations, 10–25.  62 The quote is from Kalevi J. Holsti. Quoted in Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations, 10.  63 Seabury, Balance of Power, 6.  64 Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations, 19–87.  65 Ibid., 11.  66 Bull, The Anarchical Society.  67 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations.  68 Luard, The Balance of Power, 29.  69 Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 150.  70 This logic is analogous to James Madison’s insight on domestic politics: “Ambitions must be made to counteract ambition.” See Federalist number 51 in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Mentor, 1961), 320–25. The quote is on p. 322.  71 Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 151; Ludwig Dehio, The

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Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the European Power Struggle, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 40–93.  72 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 95–96.  73 Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 150–151.  74 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 67; Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 210.  75 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 58.  76 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 196.  77 Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 226.  78 Simowitz, Logical Consistency, 75.  79 Ibid., 74.  80 Ibid.  81 Ibid., 8. See also Ernst B. Haas, “The Balance of Power as a Guide to PolicyMaking,” Journal of Politics 15 (1953): 371.  82 In Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 70–71.  83 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 163.  84 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 34. See also Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72.  85 Butterfield and Wight, Diplomatic Investigations, 142; emphasis added.  86 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 73.  87 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), xix.  88 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 166–171.  89 Ibid., 170.  90 Dietrich, Politische Testamente der Hohenzollern, 358–359; translation by the author.  91 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers.  92 Quincy Wright, A Study of War, abridged by Louise Leonard Wright, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942); Organski, World Politics (1968), 291–293; Stephen M. Walt, “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power,” in The Perils of Anarchy: Contemporary Realism and International Security, ed. Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995); Simowitz, Logical Consistency, 3.  93 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 162–163.  94 Wright, A Study of War, 290–92; Organski, World Politics (1966).  95 Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 126.  96 Eric J. Labs, “Do Weak States Bandwagon?” Security Studies 1, no. 3, Spring (1992).  97 Ranke, Die großen Mächte, 19; translation by the author.  98 Black, European International Relations, 42.  99 Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, 150. 100 Bull, The Anarchical Society, 107–109. 101 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72. Also: Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1952), 193; Black, European International Relations, 190–191.

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102 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72–73; Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 11. 103 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 172–187. 104 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 11; Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72. 105 T. V. Paul, James J. Wirtz, and Michel Fortmann, eds., Balance of Power: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 7. 106 Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (New York: Collier, 1962), 22. 107 Quoted in ibid., 90. 108 Heinz Duchardt, “From the Peace of Westphalia to the Congress of Vienna,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 637–638. 109 Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 388–390. 110 Efraim Karsh, Neutrality and Small States (London: Routledge, 1988), 13–20; C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press, 1937); Wilhelm G. Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1984), 433–460. 111 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 170. 112 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 190. 113 Luard, The Balance of Power, 312–316; Karsh, Neutrality and Small States, 15. 114 Karsh, Neutrality and Small States, 17–18. 115 Ibid., 16–17. 116 Martin Wight, “The Balance of Power,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966); Alastair Buchan, Power and Equilibrium in the 1970s (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), 65. 117 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 298. 118 Black, European International Relations, 191. 119 Quoted in Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 34. 120 Luard, The Balance of Power, 5. 121 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 202. 122 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 159. 123 Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia”; Christoph Seidler, “Westfälisches Vexierbild,” Der Spiegel, Geschichte. Der Dreissigjährige Krieg, Die Ur-Katastrophe der Deutschen, Vol. 4, 2011, 139. 124 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 81–98; Gross, “The Peace of Westphalia”; Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 323–498. 125 Guglielmo Ferrero and Theodore R. Jaeckel, The Reconstruction of Europe: Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 37–38. 126 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 49–51. 127 Duchardt, “From the Peace of Westphalia,” 649. 128 Ibid., 650. 129 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 227. 130 Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 565.

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131 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 298; Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 592–593. 132 Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 592. 133 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Patrick Riley, Leibniz: Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Patrick Riley, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16–17. 134 Quoted in Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 203. 135 Ibid. 136 “So blieb das Staatensystem von Europea, bey aller noch so großen Ungleichheit sener Glieder, doch ein System selbständiger Staaten”; Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 226. 137 Luard, The Balance of Power, 321–329. The quote is on p. 324. 138 Joachim Mohr, “Mit Militär und Migranten,” Der Spiegel Geschichte 2011, 27, 29. 139 Bull, The Anarchical Society, 184–9. The quote is on p. 189. 140 C. V. Wedgwood, Der Dreißigjährige Krieg, trans. A. G. Girschick, 2002 ­re-issued; 1967 orignal ed. (Hamburg: Nikol Verlag, 2002), 456–458. 141 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 196. 142 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 206. 143 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 189–190. 144 Ibid., 188–189. 145 Luard, The Balance of Power, 296. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., 302. 148 Ibid., 296–303. 149 Seidler, “Westfälisches Vexierbild,” 140. 150 Charles W. Kegley Jr. and Gregory A. Raymond, Exorcising the Ghost of Westphalia: Building World Order in the New Millennium (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 148. 151 Dietrich, Politische Testamente der Hohenzollern, 207–208. 152 Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 193. 153 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 196. 154 Amry Vandenbosch, “The Small States in International Politics and Organization,” Journal of Politics 26 (1964): 86. 155 Henry Reeve, “Balance of Power,” in Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914: Selected European Writings, ed. Moorhead Wright (London: Dent, 1975 (1875)); Richard Cobden, “The Balance of Power,” in Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914: Selected European Writings, ed. Moorhead Wright (London: Dent, 1975 (1836)). 156 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 196. 157 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 105, 11. 158 Ibid., 123, 142–144. 159 Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 199. 160 Black, European International Relations, 42.

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161 Frederick L. Nussbaum, The Triumph of Science and Reason 1660–1685 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953), 174–5. Wilhelm Georg Grewe and Michael Byers, The Epochs of International Law (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000); Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 176–209. 162 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 115–206; Grewe and Byers, The Epochs of International Law; Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 176–209. 163 Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 281. 164 Geoffrey Symcox, ed. War, Diplomacy, and Imperialism, 1618–1763 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 39. Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 187–215. 165 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 141. 166 Imanuel Geiss, Geschichte im Überblick: Daten und Zusammenhänge der Weltgeschichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1986), 297–300. 167 Kaiser, Politics and War, 194. 168 Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 199. 169 Ernst Walter Zeeden, ed., Großer Historischer Weltatlas: Dritter Teil, Neuzeit, Erläuterungen (München: Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, 1984), 167–168. 170 Stoye, Europe Unfolding, 199. 171 Quoted in Nussbaum, The Triumph of Science and Reason, 171. 172 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 141. 173 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 66; Black, European International Relations, 103. 174 J. H. Shennan, International Relations in Europe 1689–1789 (London: Routledge, 1995), 7–8; Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 145–147. 175 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 69. 176 Luard, The Balance of Power, 5. 177 Geiss, Die deutsche Frage, 18–26. 178 Black, European International Relations, 191; Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 175–176. 179 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 172. 180 “Wer nicht die Macht hat, aus eigener Kraft zu bestehen, der mußte für die Durchführung des Reichsgesetzes eintreten, denn er war selbst auf den Schutz des Gesetzes angewiesen”; Horst Kraemer, Der deutsche Kleinstaat des 17. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel von Seckendorffs “Teutschem Fürstenstaat,” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1922 (1974)), 86. 181 Schilling, Konfessionalisierung und Statsinteressen, 590–591. 182 Peter Claus Hartmann, Das Heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation in der Neuzeit 1486–1806 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 2005), 158; Axel Gotthard, Das Alte Reich, 1495–1806, 4th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 122–123. 183 Hartmann, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 84. 184 Kraemer, Der deutsche Kleinstaat, 91–92. 185 Hartmann, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 84. 186 Black, European International Relations, 191. 187 Karl Braun-Wiesbaden, Bilder aus vier Jahrhunderten, 1570–1870, 3rd ed., Vol. 1 (Hannover: Karl Rümpler, 1881), 88; Kraemer, Der deutsche Kleinstaat, 31–2, 58–59, 84–98.

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188 Kraemer, Der deutsche Kleinstaat, 28. 189 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 73. 190 Friedrich der Große, Testament Politique, 101. 191 “Fluch seiner Zeit”; Braun-Wiesbaden, Bilder aus vier Jahrhunderten, 1, 110. 192 Pierre Gaxotte, Geschichte Deutschlands und der Deutschen, I. Von der Völkerwanderung bis zur Kleinstaaterei um 1700 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Rombach, 1965), 518–519. 193 Nussbaum, The Triumph of Science and Reason, 147–178. 194 Hassall, The Balance of Power, 1. 195 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 207. 196 Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 144. 197 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 76. Also: Osiander, The States System of Europe (1994), 90–165. 198 Quoted in Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 16. 199 Osiander, The States System of Europe (2004), 133. 200 Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 163. 201 Ibid. 202 Clark, Preußen, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 252; Hassall, The Balance of Power, 206–40; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 69. 203 John H. Herz, International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 73; Simowitz, Logical Consistency, 76. 204 Black, European International Relations, 197–8; Jeremy Black, EighteenthCentury Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 347; Doyle, The Old European Order, 289–290. 205 Shennan, International Relations in Europe, 68. 206 Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 348. 207 Black, European International Relations, 42. 208 Ibid., 42–43. 209 Ibid., 42. 210 Shennan, International Relations in Europe, 28. 211 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72. 212 Ibid., 26–27. 213 Ibid., 27. 214 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change. 215 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 173–174. 216 Shennan, International Relations in Europe, 59. 217 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 285. 218 Shennan, International Relations in Europe, 47. 219 Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 184–185. 220 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 278. 221 Hassall, The Balance of Power, 298–299. 222 Ibid. 223 Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 343; Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 117–121, 363. 224 Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, 336.

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225 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 18; Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 279. 226 Black, European International Relations, 186–189. 227 Shennan, International Relations in Europe, 66–67. 228 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 18; Hassall, The Balance of Powe, 298–299. 229 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 297. 230 Guglielmo Ferrero, Bertha Pritchard, and Lily C. Freeman, The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796–1797 (New York: Walker, 1961). 231 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 300. 232 Black, European International Relations, 219–224. 233 Ibid., 220. 234 Mowat, A History of European Diplomacy, 300; Geoffrey Bruun, Europe and the French Imperium, 1799–1814 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1938), 54–61. 235 Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des Europäischen Staatensystems, 565–566. 236 Bruun, Europe and the French Imperium, 129–133. 237 Vandenbosch, “The Small States in International Politics and Organization,” 86. 238 Sante, Geschichte der Deutschen Länder, 346. 239 Black, European International Relations, 43. 240 John B. Wolf, Toward a European Balance of Power, 1620–1715 (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1970), 193. 241 Black, European International Relations, 221. 242 Ferrero and Jaeckel, The Reconstruction of Europe, 11–12. 243 Hartmann, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 160–161. 244 Matthias Schulz, Normen und Praxis: Das Europäische Konzert der Großmächte als Sicherheitsrat, 1815–1860 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2009), 47. 245 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Das Heilige Römische Reich Deutscher Nation: Vom ende des Mittelalters bis 1806, 4th ed. (München: C. H. Beck, 2009), 113. 246 Ferrero and Jaeckel, The Reconstruction of Europe, 12. 247 Bruun, Europe and the French Imperium, 207. 248 Butterfield and Wight, Diplomatic Investigations, 142.

4

The concert system, 1815–1918

Small state survival in a system of collective hegemony: the concert system, 1815–1918

In the new system small states are annihilated by a combination of the great. In the old, small states were secured by a mutual jealousy of the great. (Sir James Mackintosh, London, House of Commons (1815))1

The Congress of Vienna, 1814–15 was a critical marker in the shift from spontaneous balancing to a managed equilibrium. The Congress was also the tipping point in the “transition from a naturalistic to an artificial conception of the balance of power.”2 At Vienna, the so-called concert system was introduced. How did the small state fare in the nineteenthcentury system? After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the restoration of small states was done half-heartedly at best. A short period of recovery was soon followed by an accelerating decline in the number of small states. After the eclipse of large numbers of small states during Italian and German unification, the historic low point in the number of small states was reached around the turn of the twentieth century. The loss of small states stemmed largely from the particular ‘oligopolistic’ features of the concert system and its key modifiers. Small state survivability decreased as great powers formed a cartel, which later split into two increasingly hostile camps. Towards the end of the period, the number of small states reached an all-time low, making the concert system the most inhospitable states system for the small state.

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The European concert system in nineteenth-century world politics, 1815–1918 The Congress of Vienna: building “great power tutelage over the rest of Europe”3 The victorious members of the anti-Napoleonic alliance, Austria, the United Kingdom, Prussia, and Russia, met in Vienna in 1814–15. They agreed that many of the changes Napoleon had enforced needed to be reversed, that territory had to be returned and redistributed, and – most critically – that the eighteenth-century balance of power had failed. It had proved inadequate in stopping aggressive French expansion. Therefore, a much more effective balancing mechanism, one that would be guaranteed to check France and protect against hegemonic rise, was urgently needed.4 At the same time, Europe’s victorious great powers found themselves in a dilemma. They “were obsessed by the need for a balance in the earlier sense but revolted against the thought of returning to balance of power politics as between themselves.”5 The result was a consciously designed new European order,6 the so-called concert system.7 It rested on the core dynamics of the previous era’s balance of power but featured significant changes. First and foremost, the great powers assumed a privileged position. They formed a great power collective, a “coalition of the managing chief powers.”8 Its purpose was exclusive great power stewardship of international politics. As “concert states” the great powers claimed it to be their collective prerogative to manage the international system. Their “group norm”9 would be to supervise international politics and make changes as needed. For this to work, they were willing to restrain their own interests “in the pursuit of an international system.”10 Instead of following their national raison d’état and relying on balance-of-power dynamics to maintain an international equilibrium among them, they would be proactive in managing order and stabilizing international politics.11 Revolutionary France had also posed an ideological threat. The revolution, the overturn of the Bourbon monarchy, and the progressive ideas French soldiers and administrators had exported across Europe threatened European dynasties. Therefore, the victorious monarchies also wanted to establish a system that would prevent the revival and further spread of French revolutionary ideas. The fear of a rekindling of the revolutionary spirit was the second major impetus that motivated the victorious allies to cooperate in designing and maintaining a new world order.12 The victors formed two alliances. The “Quadruple Alliance” consisted of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain. Despite its aggressive past,

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France was allowed to join the “Quintuple Alliance” in 1818 because it remained a major part of the European system.13 The “Holy Alliance” focused entirely on the ideological challenge but was not joined by France and Great Britain. Only Austria, Prussia, and Russia promised each other assistance against anti-monarchical movements. The two treaties formally established the nineteenth-century concert system. Formation and devolution: two distinct periods of the nineteenth-century concert system The concert system was not invented at Vienna. In fact, its roots reach far back into the eighteenth century.14 The collaborative element of the concert system had already begun to be used by some of the major states in the 1790s. The great power cooperation that cleared the way for the division of Poland is a prominent example. The collaboration of Austria, Prussia, and Russia foreshadowed the concert system of the following century.15 From 1815 to 1822, the concert system existed in its purest form, institutionalized in the form of the Quadruple Alliance.16 Even after the admission of France to the ruling states of the concert and the abandonment of regularly scheduled conferences in the early 1820s, the concert system continued to suppress war among the major states and thus provided overall stability to the system.17 However, in the mid 1820s the system’s effectiveness began to erode. Arguably, the concert system had already entered its “twilight”18 and was now on its downswing.19 But it remained in place, albeit as a distinctly different concert.20 And it kept its emphasis on coordination. Great power cooperation was less visible but was not abandoned.21 In fact, during the entire first half of the nineteenth century, the concert system structured international relations effectively and was indeed a “functioning balance of power system.”22 This in turn translated into “a period of international peace, of low armaments, [and] of little change in the state-system established in Vienna in 1815.”23 It was the time when the concert system worked largely as intended. However, by the end of the Crimean War of 1853–56, the concert system had lost much of its earlier cohesiveness. To be sure, the Crimean War between the great powers France, Great Britain, and Russia did not bring down the concert system,24 but it was a catalyst that turned the concert’s erosion into devolution. Europe’s concert states had failed to resolve peacefully the disputes stemming from the decline of the Ottoman Empire on the one hand and an expansion of Russia on the other. However, in the end overly ambitious Russia was defeated militarily and thus the threat to the system caused by this fast-rising country was contained.25

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During and after the Crimean War, the concert system maintained its major characteristic of international political management by the great powers. However, collaboration and negotiation26 in the states system were now rapidly superseded by contestation as the system shifted from, “in Gulick’s terminology, a reversion from the ‘coalition equilibrium’ [to] a competitive alliance equilibrium.”27 The permanency of great power cooperation through regular congresses was replaced by an ad hoc arrangement. The increasing level of competition took its toll and collaboration became less frequent and increasingly pragmatic and needs based.28 As a result, the system became “more ineffective than before the Crimean War.”29 During the century’s second half, the concert system regressed from a regime for political coordination to an arrangement that barely restrained great power rivalries.30 It thus became a particularly dangerous environment for the small state because, as the contemporary journalist Henry Reeve observed, “the minor states can appeal to no certain engagement or fixed general principle for protection.”31 The nineteenth-century concert system of deliberation and cooperation Regardless of the level of internal rigor and the frequency of international conferences, the concert system was a fixture in nineteenthcentury diplomacy. It existed as a de facto institution in the minds of diplomats and observers of the time. Statesmen openly referred to it in  international treaties throughout the nineteenth century and did so with striking frequency.32 A prominent example is the Treaty of Paris which ended the Crimean War in 1856, where reference is made to “Le Concert Européen.”33 The treaty provides no further definition of the term, indicating the commonality of the concept even if it went by different names.34 The nineteenth-century concert system integrated the previous era’s balance-of-power thinking into its operation. After all, for states to check and counter each other’s power was “a doctrine founded on the nature of man” according to the contemporary British prime minister Lord Palmerston.35 As in the previous era, analogies to nature and natural law remained a very prominent “intellectual justification of the balance of power.”36 Widely shared was the mechanical analogy of a pendulum.37 A pendulum swings back and forth but must always come back to its proper state of equilibrium. When this picture was applied to international politics, it suggested natural dynamics working to forestall extreme changes and always pulling things back towards the center. A point of perfect equilibrium, of a natural state, existed. With respect to the realities of international politics, all treaty parties at Vienna shared

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the goal of at least a “partial equilibrium” among the major European powers.38 System-wide order was to be achieved by consultation and diplomacy. Article VI of the Treaty of Paris, concluded between defeated France and the victorious anti-Napoleonic coalition in 1815, required the signatories to consult with each other regularly. Whenever problems arose that threatened Europe’s overall order and stability, concerted action was to be the norm.39 In light of the emphasis put on consultations as an overall ordering instrument, Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, called it a “‘deliberative system.’”40 Austria’s Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich valued the system’s inherent tendency to restrain the national interest in favor of a shared interest in stability and order. For him, the concert system was “transcending” the national interest.41 Deliberation and coordinated national interests put the concert system apart from the previous era’s laissez-faire balance of power. Whereas the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century order relied on states’ jealousies and hostilities to create an equilibrium of power, the nineteenth-century concert system required human interference, “deliberation,” and purposeful steering by enlightened statesmen. In other words, the concert system “recognized at least in theory that the balance of power required a more conscious, rational management than the ad hoc coalitions” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.42 Great power harmony, however, was not required. Although the earlier sense of great power partnership had nearly vanished by mid century,43 rivalries did not preclude the great powers from collaborating throughout the nineteenth century.44 In this sense, the concert system was understood at the time as a hybrid system, with great power cooperation built on top of basic balance-of-power principles. The nineteenth-century concert system as a ‘hegemonic equilibrium’ On the face of it, the concert system was a threatening environment for small states. What had kept hundreds of them safe in the past, great powers’ rivalries, envies, and animosities, was now to be put aside, and great powers would cooperate in running international affairs by their own standards. The managed concert system appeared much more threatening to the small state than the previous era’s rather anarchical balance of power. The concert system did not replace the balance of power completely. Instead, it integrated features of the traditional balance of power with hegemonic elements, making it in essence a hybrid: part balance of power, part collective hegemony.45 In this sense, the post-Napoleonic

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European order was a “refined” balance of power, “a logical evolution of earlier equilibrist theory and practice”46 which now relied on great power coordination to manage the equilibrium of power. At the core of the concert system was “plurilateral” equilibrium of a handful of great powers.47 This, together with the exclusivity of the group of concert states, closed small states off from earlier defensive tactics, such as inflaming the rivalries of major powers or triggering counter-balancing actions against expanding powers. The new concert system seemed ill-suited for small state survival. The shift away from juxtaposing one state’s ambitions with another state’s jealousies took away a meaningful layer of protection from small states. With the great powers starting to manage their competition and cooperating, small states were largely prevented from triggering counter-balancing. And in the absence of an alternative security regime, their situation became perilous. After the Napoleonic era’s chaos and upheaval, the great powers desired overall stability and general peace among them more than ever before. They interpreted stability as protection of their respective positions, both vis-à-vis each other and in the states system.48 That translated into the continuation of the general status quo and the equilibrium among the great powers.49 If changes became unavoidable, though, intervention was possible, but only with the goal of re-creating an overall equilibrium of power. Adjustments were acceptable, but they had to be narrow and pragmatic. They required consensus among the concert states or at the very least tacit acquiescence. This assured acceptance of changes by all concert states.50 In contrast, unilateralism was clearly unacceptable.51 Given the above, the interests of small states did not matter when overall stability among the great powers was the issue. Small state creation, survival, or death had to submit to the concert states’ demands. Curiously, this led to two opposing dynamics: the protection and the victimization of small states. On the one hand, small states received protection when they contributed to the balance of power52 or when their survival was deemed helpful. The concert states might consider small state survival, or even small state creation, to be useful in the larger scheme of things. In this sense, it was only logical for the concert states to assist in Belgium’s secession from The Netherlands in 1830. On the other hand, the denial of Belgium’s independence just fifteen years earlier, when the great powers had deemed a larger Dutch state to be critical for containing France, had been just as logical. Small states remained bargaining chips and easily movable pieces in the eyes of the concert states. This was particularly true when the danger of war among the great powers themselves arose. Thus British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone saw

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no difference between “the Concert as tutelage of the great powers over the smaller, and the Concert as a means of preserving the peace of Europe by preventing war between the great powers themselves.”53 Peace among the great powers was the other main purpose of the concert system. More accurately, it was designed to achieve a “peace order” and “peace culture.”54 This was to be attained through multiple security layers, consisting of the Quadruple Alliance, the German Confederation, and integrated elements of collective security.55 And in fact, this arrangement proved remarkably successful in furnishing, for Europe,56 “a century of peace based on equilibrium and sustained common values.”57 However, the system was geared towards expediency on the part of its leading states.58 Peace was understood as the absence of great power conflict in Europe, not a principled rejection of military force. Similarly, stability was understood as protecting the status quo among the concert states and did not imply a guarantee of all states’ sovereignty and territory. In general, peace and stability should work in favor of small state survival. However, in the context of the concert system and great power primacy, the effects on small state survival were uncertain. The most prominent feature of the nineteenth-century concert system was its congresses. To be sure, summitry was not new, but for congresses to be held regularly was innovative. Vienna was followed by Aix-laChapelle in 1818, Troppau in 1820, Laibach in 1821, and Verona in 1822. Later decades witnessed the abandonment of regularly scheduled congresses and instead saw only sporadic summits, summoned only ad hoc and as necessary. Nevertheless, concert states’ congresses remained the key feature of the concert system throughout the nineteenth century. For the congresses to be productive, the concert states had to adopt an “associational view”59 of international affairs and perceive of international policy making as a collective effort.60 In fact, a generally high level of cooperation among the large states was achieved,61 especially in the first half of the nineteenth century.62 However, small states were now systematically sidelined. They were not invited to join meetings unless they were directly involved in an item on the agenda.63 Otherwise, they were excluded from the debates and the decision making. Moreover, they had to accept the decisions made at these conferences, even those that affected them directly, such as the imposed neutralization of Luxembourg in 186764 and the denial of Belgian secession in 1815. Last but not least, their diplomatic marginalization meant that they were severely handicapped in shaping international politics and the structural environment which was so critical for their survival. *  *  *

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Small state marginalization extended beyond congresses and into the overall management of international affairs. The members of the Quadruple Alliance claimed exclusive “custodianship”65 over the international system, promising to strive “for the happiness of the World.”66 They justified their exclusive “club”67 with their recent military achievements against Napoleon. It was the Quadruple Alliance that had defeated Napoleon and it was now not only their right but also their responsibility to assume the position of primus inter pares and steer the system.68 Through their self-anointment, the largest states distanced themselves from all other states.69 In addition, only they were strong enough to affect the international system itself.70 By implication, all other states were considered second class. In fact, small states were termed “third tier.” This did not bode well for small states. It suggested inequality and provided a rationale for marginalization. Third-tier small states existed in the concert system but were never truly part of the system. The original four great powers were soon joined by France.71 Later, the Ottoman Empire became an associate member,72 Italy a junior partner, and even the US associated itself with the concert system “for some purposes.”73 In contrast, small states were never considered participants or partners of the concert circle. The structure of the concert system effectively excluded them from any direct participation. Worse still, the downgrading of small states to second or third tier fed into the belief that small states’ existence was not guaranteed – in stark contrast to great powers’. For the latter, state survival was the “highest principle.”74 At Vienna, the First French Empire was terminated, not French statehood or great power status. Accordingly, with the restoration of the Bourbons, “France ceased to be a monster and became a great power once more.”75 No small state could hope for such an automatism. Small state sovereignty and small state survival were low priorities in the concert system. Positive effects on small state survival were side-effects of a system geared towards the needs and desires of great powers. And for these European great powers, small states were ready-made, easily obtainable, and quickly dispensable units for great power balancing. Unsurprisingly, then, Europe’s concert turned out to be a system that “was frequently maintained at the expense of the smaller states.”76 The nineteenth-century concert system’s modifiers Although during the nineteenth century great powers dominated international politics like never before, their supremacy remained “restrained by traditions and principles as well as by physical checks.”77 Power politics proceeded but “within a framework of principles,”78 most

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importantly the evolving International Law and neutrality. In addition, nationalism grew into a major international political factor. Together with power and power balancing, these features shaped the environment in which small states had to survive. Restraints on power: modern International Law, limitations on warfare, and neutrality

International Law was a comparatively weak limitation on power politics during the nineteenth century.79 Legal positivism dominated the era,80 and International Law knew of only a few universal norms. None of these was directly geared towards the security of weak and small states. Worse still, International Law was “used widely for politics’ interests,”81 was broken frequently, and lacked meaningful enforcement mechanisms. Despite its many shortcomings, International Law developed into a comprehensive legal system, with its thematic reach, its comprehensiveness, and its overall robustness growing throughout the nineteenth century. The practice of congress diplomacy,82 the emerging grass-roots pacifist movement,83 and the “shift from international law of coexistence to international law of cooperation”84 contributed to a steady “juridification of international relations”85 and the growth of International Law into a meaningfully effective restraint on power politics. The body of International Law grew; the proceedings and solutions of the many international meetings created legal standards; international treaties proliferated; multilateral regimes, universal institutions, and international organizations emerged.86 Small states would be primary beneficiaries of these developments, in particular when and where legal norms restricted coercion and the application of force.87 The evolution and hardening of International Law throughout the century generally worked in favor of the small state. Law began to limit states in when, where, and how they could use their power. And small states embraced the law as a counter-point to crude power. As a statesman from the city-state of Bremen noted: “Large states contribute power and strength to the confederation, the smaller provide love of justice and constituent capacity.”88 Although they were pushed to the political periphery in the concert system, small states benefitted from the restraint it put on aggressive war. The great powers’ “sense of collectivity”89 implied that they would prioritize peaceful conflict resolution among themselves. The system’s focus on order and stability had the same effect.90 In this fashion, “the system of relations which prevailed between [the European states]”91 constrained them from resorting to open war. Moreover, war became less tolerable. New forms of warfare in the

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Industrial Age made it less and less acceptable to emerging civil societies. The American Civil War of 1861–65 exposed the brutality of contemporary warfare, and pacifism emerged as a political factor in the later nineteenth century. Starting in the 1840s periodic international peace congresses were held. A journal dedicated to international peace was founded in 1899, the Nobel Peace Prize was endowed in 1901, and the Carnegie Endowment set up nine years later. A growing pacifist movement in particular pushed moral and legal agendas and contributed to the evolution of soft and hard law.92 And even if war were not formally banned, law limited its usage and conduct.93 Militarily weak small states were prime beneficiaries of a development that would lead to multilateral peace conferences in 1899 and 1907, the growth of international arbitration,94 and the creation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in 1899. A more peaceful world helped reduce small states’ military vulnerabilities. The growth of neutrality as a legal norm during the nineteenth century95 appeared promising but this promise was not fulfilled. Whereas neutrality had been far too weak as a norm to add any detectable degree of security to the Helvetic Confederation in 1815, the rights and duties of neutral states were clarified in treaty form by 1907.96 Even then, neutrality remained a weak security strategy for small states, as Belgium found out when it was invaded by Germany in 1914. Neutrality remained a weak norm throughout the nineteenth century and neutral states relied heavily on third parties’ moral inclination to respect it. As a legal norm, neutrality suffered from a lack of rigorous enforcement mechanisms, as did International Law generally. Worse still, neutrality was not seen as a noble and highly respectable principle of statecraft by all. Rather, it was seen as inconsistent with the idea of just wars. Not supporting a just cause but staying neutral seemed morally deplorable. During the nineteenth century, neutrality remained a risky security strategy. This was especially true for small states that lacked the military strength to defend themselves if neutrality failed. Despite of the growth of International Law generally and its advances seen in reining in warfare specifically, the legal realm remained a weak limitation on state power. And neutrality had not evolved into a meaningful security strategy for the small state, either. Thus during the nineteenth century small states remained vulnerable because they “[could] appeal to no certain engagement or fixed general principle for protection.”97

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Small states and nineteenth-century nationalism

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, nationalism ran counter to the traditional conservatism shared by Europe’s monarchies. During the French Revolution “the ideas of individual and collective liberty” were merged in the form of nationalism,98 turning nationalism into a Liberal threat to conservatism. From then on, nationalism would evolve further and develop into a major political factor impacting international politics. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, nationalism became an important feature of the international political environment. The developments in Germany in 1848, when the demands for a Liberal and united country were suppressed with military force, illustrate the conservative elite’s fear of nationalism. The conservative elites in Europe’s capitals felt increasingly challenged by a new, Liberal nationalism that saw the nation-state and the constitutional Liberal state as two halves of the same walnut. At mid century major shifts in nationalism were becoming manifest,99 culminating in a full “transformation of nationalism” soon thereafter,100 when it became a “historical force.”101 First, nationalism transferred from Liberal elites to much wider sections of the population.102 Second, nationalism entered high politics, where it lost its Liberal and idealistic component and instead gained an undertone of realpolitik. By appealing to this new, conservative German nationalism, Prussia’s prime minister Bismarck was able to outmaneuver the resistance of German small states to giving up their sovereignty and joining a united German state. To be sure, the rise of nationalism was not a uniquely German phenomenon. All over the continent, nationalism had been on the rise since the eighteenth century.103 After the mid nineteenth century, it became an irresistible political force across Europe,104 and state governments across Europe were now “allying” with nationalism105 to mobilize populations and legitimize state policies.106 At the same time, the very popularity of nationalism across Europe threatened to undermine state governments’ control over policy by having to submit to national desires. The impact on the small state was twofold. First, small states came under domestic pressure to accede to a larger, national cause and leave particularism behind. Second, the concert states’ commitment to moderation and self-restraint became more difficult and careful status quo politics more problematic. As Gulick puts it: “Nationalism rooted out the principle of moderation fundamental to equilibrist theory and practice.”107 As a result, the popularity of nationalism pushed great powers to abandon self-restraint and look for ways to satisfy nationalist desires for aggrandizement. The danger to small states of falling victim to nationalism was particularly acute in German and Italian lands because its peoples lacked their own unified nation-states. *  *  *

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Nationalism can be an “integrative” force and lead to small state death, but it can also be a “disintegrative factor” and lead to small state creation.108 That was particularly true in the nineteenth century. As Hinsley remarks, “the force of nationalism in the late nineteenth century was helping both to disrupt large political units and to produce the concentration of small political units into great states.”109 In the cases of German and Italian unification, nationalism caused the death of many small states. By contrast, in the Western Hemisphere and the Near East nineteenth-century nationalism worked in the opposite direction. There, nationalism combined with anti-colonial desires and an emerging norm of self-determination to break up old colonial empires.110 And in its wake, new states emerged. First was the Western Hemisphere in the early nineteenth century. There, the development started with Haiti in 1804 and came to a halt in 1839 with Honduran independence. In the Near East small states sprang up as the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration played itself out during the second half of the century. However, enduring European colonialism and rising imperialism put a hard ceiling on small state creation overseas. As great powers became imperial powers, they competed viciously for overseas territories, which largely prevented the emergence of sovereign states on territory ‘discovered’ and claimed by European states. In fact, the entire logic underlying European colonialism was detrimentally opposed to the notion of selfdetermination and the creation of non-European states. Overall, the concert system was more a curse than a blessing for small states. To be sure, by prioritizing stability and order, it benefitted small state survival. The concert also favored the status quo and put structural and normative limitations on power politics. This, too, helped with small state survival. Any larger territorial change required the plurilateral approval of the concert states, because it could affect overall stability.111 The latter in particular worked to the advantage of a small state, if a threat to its independence had the potential to upset the equilibrium and disturb the tranquility among the concert states. However, small states were threatened by the concert states’ oligopoly on power and their dominance in international politics. In this context, small states were frequently seen as ready-made objects for great power balancing.112 The concert states viewed the sacrifice of small states in the interest of maintaining the larger equilibrium as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. For them, systemic stability and great power consensus trumped sovereign equality.113 And the implementation of these policies was easy enough.114 In light of the above, Castlereagh’s description of the concert system as “a refuge under which all the minor states, especially on the Rhine,

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may look forward to find their security upon the return of peace, relieved from the necessity of seeking a compromise with France,”115 seems overly optimistic, even if his geographic qualification is taken into account. Rather, the concert system presented a challenging environment for the small states, and certainly one more threatening than the previous, post-Westphalian balance of power. Quantifying small state survival: descriptive statistics Expectations Trygve Mathisen has claimed that the nineteenth century was characterized by both integration and dissolution, the appearance and disappearance of small states.116 But what was the net effect? Did the concert system allow for small state proliferation? Or did it lead to a decrease in the number of small states? How then did the mix of states, large vs. small, in the system change? On the basis of the previous discussion of the concert system’s key features, it is reasonable to suspect a downward trend as the continuation of the overall trend of the previous one-anda-half centuries. The concert system’s goals of order and stability and of peace among the concert states suggest the possibility of an increase in the number of small states. Indeed a peaceful world with satisfied great powers in a stable equilibrium may allow for a significant increase in the number of small states. However, the largely unencumbered dominance of the concert states as a group and their readiness to coerce smaller states suggest otherwise. Their collaboration in managing world politics was a serious threat to small state survival. On balance, a slightly accelerated but still moderate downward trend in small state numbers can be expected. Data presentation When the Congress of Vienna came to an end, the states system counted eighty-four small states and nineteen larger states, giving a ratio of 4.42:1. By 1840 there were ninety-six small states. However, threeand-a-half decades of recovery did not return the losses of small states incurred during the Napoleonic era. Plus, the additional states were not revived states of the previous period but new states, outside of western and central Europe, plus some overseas. The conference at Vienna did not restore small state numbers to the status quo ante. Worse still, just before mid century, and after leveling off for a few years, the positive trend reversed and the numbers of small states began to decline. Italian and German unifications accelerated the decline. After both unifications were completed, only fifty-three small states were left.

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The year after German unification was completed in 1871, the number of larger states had risen to twenty, intensifying the ongoing shift in the composition of the states system. By now, the ratio of larger and small states was 1:2.65. The trend continued over the next three decades and reached its historic low point in 1904, at 1:1.35. The year 1904 marks the all-time low of the total number of small states as well. Only thirty-five small states existed in this year. However, a moderate recovery set in and returned the number of small states to forty-two in 1913, the year before the First World War broke out. Figure 8 summarizes these developments. Descriptive statistics The above analysis of the concert system’s core features suggests an uneven picture of small state survival. While stability and order may have worked in their favor, the dominance of the concert states and the prioritization of their collective interests, together with a practical inability to challenge concert states’ coercion, diminished the chances of small state longevity. Both trends are detectable, although for the entire era a significant overall loss in total numbers of small states suggests a states system that was inhospitable to the small state. The volatile shifts in the numbers of small states (and in the index value) stand out. However, these changes correspond to the broader dynamics at the system level, discussed above and explored in historical detail below. The noticeable overall upswing in the number of small states matches those decades during which the concert system worked properly. That is to say, until about mid century, the concert system was a fully “functioning” system,117 and order and stability shaped a sufficiently tolerant international environment. Small state numbers increased. Figure 9 puts the focus on the annual gains and losses of small states. It highlights how the minor restoration in 1815 was immediately countered by a subtraction of much of those gains. It also shows prominently the repeated gains in the number of small states during the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s which, when added up, account for the moderate gain in total numbers during the first half of the century. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the erosion of the cohesion in – and commitment to – the concert system. The weaker the system became and the more great powers asserted their dominance in international politics, the slimmer the chances for small state survival became. A corresponding downward trend in the number of small states manifests itself at about mid century. Figure 9 shows the annual losses and highlights the few exceptional years, when minor gains in small state numbers were achieved. The substantial losses caused by German unification in 1870–71 stand out. After that, minor gains are

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Figure 10  Number of small states, 1848–1860

insufficient to change the ongoing downward trend in the total number of small states. The ongoing losses in small states which follow German unification can be seen as the continuation of a trend that had already started at mid century with the Italian unification process. By way of illustration: the downward slope of the trendline for the period 1848 to 1860 is –0.2857, which is not much different from the following periods; for the years between 1872 and 1917, the trendline’s downward slope measures  –0.3416 (see Figures 10 and 11). By controlling for the ­ national unifications of Europe’s two main late-comers in this fashion, the overall speed of small state losses during the second half of the nineteenth century comes into clear view. Finally, the historic low of small states and of the states system’s ­composition index stands out. This does not correspond to a major event of historic proportions impacting the states system. What is more, it is followed by ten years of uninterrupted recovery. These phenomena do not correspond to a structural break of the size and scope of earlier events such as the Westphalian or Viennese reordering of international politics. They appear to be aberrations of broader trends. The all-time low in total numbers of small states is not a unique outlier, and the period’s trendline features a strong fit between the data points and the trendline (R2 = 0.7081) (see Figure 11). Much the same applies to the decade of rising small state numbers. Here, both diversions are considered deviations from an otherwise robust trend. *  *  *

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Figure 11  Number of small states, 1872–1917

Looking at the concert system data in their entirety, the overall loss of half the number of small states is bookended by numerical increases. The states system, it appears, maintained its capacity to generate small states throughout, but was overwhelmed by the force of integrative nationalism in those European countries that had been the traditional homeland of particularism: Italy and Germany. The concert system proved capable of spawning small states but incapable of protecting small states from integration into two new nation-states in Europe. Given the overall size of unrecovered losses, the concert system proved inhospitable, but not hostile, to the small state. The small state under pressure: survival and elimination of small states in the concert system, 1815–1918 The negotiators at Vienna largely accepted the defragmented political landscape in Europe that Napoleon had created. Small states were not restored at even remotely the numbers prior to the French Revolution. The victorious powers’ attitude in this regard was indicative of what was to come: more losses of small states. When compared with the previous era’s balance of power, the nineteenth-century concert system proved to be less protective of the small state. Particularly telling is the sustained peace between the great powers on the one hand, and ongoing decline in small state numbers on the other. Peace among the great powers did not translate into survival for small states. In fact, at no point in time has the Westphalian states

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system counted fewer small states than towards the end of the concert system. Three causes stand out. First, the concert system turned the rivalrous great powers of the previous era into collaborators, leaving small states much less room to find a safe niche. Second, the European empires kept their colonies under tight control and prevented small state creation on a large scale. Third, in the latter half of the century, nationalism overpowered what was left of the concert system and left Italian and German small states no choice but to integrate and form large nation-states. The Congress of Vienna and the small state At Vienna, it became obvious that the victorious great powers now formed an oligopoly of power. A “period of stability” commenced in 1815, but such stability was “preceded by the wholesale elimination of small states.”118 About 75 percent of all small states had been lost during the Napoleonic era. However, at Vienna no meaningful effort was made to restore the small states Napoleon had eliminated.119 The restoration of small states at Vienna is barely noticeable. The case of the small Italian state of Lucca, which requested and was granted its re-constitution in 1814, was a rare exception.120 Figure 12 shows the absence of small state restoration at the Congress of Vienna. The reasons for the failure to return to the status quo ante are twofold. First, the allies had fought an anti-hegemonic war, not a war to defend the sovereignty of small states. Since there had been no deep commitment to collective security before the Napoleonic challenge, there was no obligation to restore any small state after it. Venice, for example, had existed as an independent small state until 1797. But instead of restoring its independence, it was given to Austria by the concert states in 1815.121 Similarly, few of the former German territories across the Rhine were restored. Here, middle and great powers were unwilling to return territories they had gained through bandwagoning or as members of the victorious alliance. At the time, the capture of territory and the forced incorporation of small states into larger neighbors was not balanced by a norm of extantism,122 which rejects a challenge to a state’s existence and requires the resurrection of states that have been forcefully ­terminated. Small states could thus not expect as a matter of principle their revival after an aggressor had been defeated. Second, the concert states saw good reason to refuse the re-­ particularization of Europe. Europe’s balance of power needed to be reorganized and strengthened, and thus put into a better position to defeat any future challenges on the part of France. For this purpose, fewer but

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larger states were considered much more helpful than a return to the high numbers of small states seen in the past. In light of this, withholding ­independence was perfectly in line with the logic of the concert system’s underlying balance of power. Belgium was denied its independence outright. The great powers prevented it from seceding from The Netherlands. As its own state, it would be weak militarily and thus ineffective in blocking future French ambitions. A larger United Kingdom of the Netherlands was deemed a much more meaningful check on any future French designs.123 Similarly, Prussia’s expansion westward was sanctioned in good measure as structurally necessary to counter future French expansion. For this reason, the minor state of Saxony was coerced into ceding a major slice of its territory to Prussia. Saxony’s fate was determined by the needs of the new political order in Europe, and these needs were rigorously enforced by the concert states at the small state’s expense. As the Belgian and Saxonian cases illustrate, the creation and longterm maintenance of stability in the system was the undisputed priority of the concert system. Any other considerations had to submit to the need to create and stabilize order among the major actors of the European states system. The objective was not to protect or restore small states as independent units, but to arrange the states system in such a way as to achieve maximum stability. Consequently, strengthening the opponents of France, even at the cost of small states, was seen as a sine qua non for international stability.124 The great powers’ priority of a more robust equilibrium and their emphasis on stability and order quickly led to the marginalization of small states. The processes and procedures at Vienna already foreshadowed what was to come. From its inception, the nineteenth-century states system was centered on an international political hierarchy. The rationale for small state exclusion was their lack of power.125 Small states had offered little resistance to French expansion and had contributed even less to the great powers’ efforts to restore the balance of power at the height of the crisis. The victorious allies concluded that small states would be of no use in the future, either. The separation of states into “puissances” and “des autres États de l’Europe”126 appeared common sense. As a result, small states were largely sidelined at the Congress. They had little influence on agenda setting, on re-tooling international politics, or on re-drawing the European map. Small states were hardly involved at all in shaping the post-Napoleonic order. After the Congress at Vienna had adjourned, small states remained relegated to second-tier status in international politics. In fact, for some, small states ranked a distant third, behind even middle powers.127

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Despite its imprecision, to contemporary statesmen the labeling was clear enough.128 “Throughout this period [1815 up to 1919] the Small Powers were assessed according to their effect upon the relations between the Great Powers: there was seldom any idea that their ­interests, their opinions, still less their votes, could affect a policy agreed upon by the Concert of Europe.”129 Fortunately for the small state, however, attempts at expanding the  categories into diplomacy and to “establish an order of precedence”130 failed. At Vienna, a committee on diplomatic precedence had deliberated on this matter and formally rejected the great powers’ request for a third group which would have allowed for historical seniority.131 In the end, the small states’ place in international politics was second grade, although sovereign equality and their legal status were not compromised.132 In light of the weakness of International Law, however, legal equality did not offer much protection from great power abuse. While the great powers now worked in concert to ensure and exploit their privileged position, they remained in an equilibrium of power between them. Their maneuvers at the negotiation table are testament to the continuation of power politics and power balancing. Without a sense of moral obligation to restore the small states which had fallen to French expansion and with little regard for legal equality of states, the victorious allies felt entitled to territorial compensation for their war efforts. With the exception of Great Britain, the allied great powers saw territorial gains as proper currency for repayment. After all, they had defeated Napoleon at much cost.133 For them, past and future protection from hegemony, restoration of order, and reinstatement of an equilibrium were not communal goods, and small states were not invited to free ride. Prussia showed no shame asking for all of Saxony when its delegation arrived at Vienna. Berlin’s initial claim to the small state’s entire territory was reduced at the negotiation table – not out of concern over the fate of the small state but because Prussia, too, needed to be kept to a size conducive to a stable European equilibrium. Defeated France saw in the struggle over Saxonia an opportunity to advance French interests, not small state security, to be sure. Respect for Saxonian honor and past achievements might have helped, but were secondary to the French envoy at the negotiations at Vienna, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. He presented France as a sponsor and defender of small states generally, and especially Saxony.134 What motivated him, however, was not the survival of small states but the relative strength of France in the re-created European equilibrium. In this context, the weaker Prussia, the better for France. Prussia’s ambition

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and France’s defensive counter-move helped small Saxony survive, even if severely amputated. With regard to the Holy Roman Empire and its territories, the great powers’ priority of a robust equilibrium to keep France in check ­overruled calls for revival and restoration. As a result, Napoleon’s consolidation of German territories, which had come at the expense of many small states, was carried over to the arrangement under the concert system.135 Instead of restoring the Holy Roman Empire and its plentitude of small states, the allies decided to make only minor territorial changes but otherwise keep this new, consolidated body as a key part of a new German Confederation. Together with Austria and Prussia, Denmark, and The Netherlands,136 those small states that had survived Napoleon’s reordering of Germany formed this union. Total membership was thirty-nine states.137 In essence, the victorious allies attempted to reconcile two opposing goals. On the one hand, the new European order needed larger units, strong enough to contain France. On the other hand, a fully united and integrated Germany or an overly strong Prussia were considered incompatible with a well-balanced European states system. The outcome was an arrangement that brought German states together just enough to form a meaningful defensive bloc against France while not integrating German territories to a level at which the new European order would become unstable.138 In return, German small states now found themselves in a “regional security system,”139 and in a political stalemate where the rivalry between Austria and Prussia cancelled out their territorial ambitions in Germany. Second, the German small states were now integrated into the new European order.140 Collectively, they had become a pillar in the defensive arrangements against France, and individually, as legitimate German states, they were important in stalling the emergence of a united and overpowering Germany.141 For decades, the German Confederation was the de facto guarantor of German small states’ independence.142 Early in the nineteenth century, the principle of neutrality was not an effective survival strategy for the small state. It was not respected widely enough. However, over the course of the century a modest shift for the better became detectable.143 The legal recognition of Swiss neutrality in 1815 was still due to great power maneuvering. For Austria’s Metternich in particular, the goal was to withhold the Swiss territories from France, and the recognition of Swiss neutrality seemed an appropriate tool. It was not respect for the institution of neutrality but pragmatic statecraft that led to the formal acknowledg-

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ment of Swiss neutrality. Much the same is true for the cases of Belgium and Luxembourg. The decisions to neutralize them in 1839 and 1867 respectively were not taken with  the interest of the affected small state in mind, but followed the negotiated interests of the concert states. Their concern was the maintenance of the system through order and stability, and these objectives were served with the small states’ neutralization.144 Even though small states’ neutrality had still to be granted by the concert states, the concept gained in respect and strength, especially towards the turn of the twentieth century. The 1907 Hague Convention’s sections V and XIII stipulate in detail the privileges and obligations of neutral states in times of war.145 There can be little doubt that the hardening of International Law on neutrality and its codification early in the twentieth century reflected its increasing significance. With it came a growing acceptance of neutrality in international political relations. Given these developments, neutrality grew into an enticing policy option for small states. If it worked, it provided the small state with a care-free exit from great power politics. Unfortunately, neutrality never did reach the level of a true security guarantor for the small state. To begin with, it was still difficult for small states to unilaterally choose neutrality because they had to contend with the wishes of the concert states. Even as a formally neutral small state, survival was not guaranteed, as the case of Belgium’s occupation by Germany in 1914 attests. Even the geographically favored Switzerland struggled to defend its armed neutrality during the First World War. Overall, the early concert system showed little concern with the plight of the small state. It monopolized power in the form of the concert states, which created the new system at Vienna without any thought to restoring the small states that had fallen victim to French aggression. Not only would small states struggle to survive, but proliferation appeared unrealistic. Small states in a rigorous concert system From the Congress at Vienna to the Crimean War, the concert system worked, by and large, as intended. The concert states decided according to their shared interests and what they perceived was required for the stability of the system. Small states remained sidelined as petty units of a concert system that was defined and steered by its great powers. Contemporary British prime minister George Canning expressed this attitude well when he stated that he was simply not “prepared to carry out his championship of small powers to quixotic lengths.”146 In other words, small states may deserve pity, but not protection. *  *  *

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No doubt, the concert states’ desire for stability dominated the early nineteenth century, and this spelled danger for the small state. First, when sacrificing small states’ sovereignty appeared conducive to systemic order and stability, the concert states showed no compunction about doing so. The norm of maintaining stability clearly and unequivocally won over normative concerns about small state survival. Second, the concert states subordinated small state creation to the need for systemic stability, also without hesitation or compunction. The emergence of small states in the Balkans was blocked, in particular by Great Britain, because it feared ethnic disputes might invite outside intervention. The great powers “resisted the breakup of the Ottoman Empire because they were convinced that the smaller nations emerging from it would undermine international order.”147 A standard of self-determination for small states was readily sacrificed in order to enhance overall stability. Third, small state creation, survival, or termination were always contingent on the concert states’ priorities at the time. Despite a preference for stability and the status quo, the concert system was not static. When the underlying balance of power required, changes were made. Thus decisions by the concert states were final in the sense that there was no appeal process, but they remained subject to future reconsideration and change. The case of Belgium has already been mentioned above. But after the creation of a sovereign state had been prevented in 1815, only a decade and a half later, things had changed. Now the allies not only favored the creation of an independent Belgium but in fact enforced it against an unwilling Dutch monarch.148 The reason for the allies’ change of mind was simple: France had been gaining political influence in the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The French were hoping that soon the southern, Belgian part of The Netherlands would secede and unite with France.149 For the other great powers, containing France and keeping the balance now required a shift in policy.150 Consequently, they reversed their course on Belgium.151 The larger balance-of-power dynamics required the allies to shift from preventing to insisting on state creation. Clearly, the fate of the small state of Belgium depended entirely on the allied great powers’ position and repositioning vis-à-vis a French threat. Great power counter-balancing completely dominated the ‘story’ of Belgium early in the nineteenth century. The Belgian case is illustrative not only of the dominance of power politics over normative arguments, but also of the great powers’ readiness to use coercion. With the Dutch king still balking at letting Belgium secede, military coercion was used to have him submit to the desired change.152 Fourth, and most dangerous, was the concert states’ coordination of their balancing action. Instead of balancing against each other’s ambi-

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tions, they now opted for balancing as re-stabilizing the system, and more often than not this came at the expense of the small state. In fact, the concert system invited great powers to coordinate their aspirations and direct them at third parties instead of each other. In Europe, small states became threatened by the selfish collaboration of concert states. Great power collaboration could negate the protection small states gained from a properly functioning balance of power. But instead of ambition being checked by counter-action, early negotiations among the concert states allowed for amicable settlements. This in turn made territorial gains feasible without triggering counter-moves or destabilizing the system. The case of Krakow’s death as a state illustrates how collaboration among concert states could quickly lead to small state death. The aligned interests of three concert states, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, had protected the small state of Krakow since 1815, when they had joined to guarantee its independence. In 1846, however, they collaborated in the forceful incorporation of the city into Austria, regardless of their prior commitment.153 The concert system required the great powers to coordinate their policies and avoid destabilizing the system. It did not require them to act morally or unselfishly. In this context, small state death was a minor concern at best. The situation was made worse by the highly incentivized collaboration among great powers, because it moderated jealousies and undermined an important moderating feature of the balance of power. Clearly, some of the restraints on power politics, in particular vis-à-vis small states, were largely lost under the concert system. Colonial empires and small state creation: potential and real

While small states in Europe suffered persistent losses, chances for small state creation opened up overseas. Since about the turn of the nineteenth century, the Europe-centered system had been transitioning into a global states system,154 and weakening empires allowed for small state birth. On the North American continent, the US had been able to gain and defend its independence and had repeatedly benefitted from European great power rivalries. Recognizing this, then-former US president Thomas Jefferson felt that peace between France and Britain in 1815 might pose a threat to the still weak US. The rivalry between the two European great powers had been instrumental in the young American republic gaining and defending its independence. Now, British designs might not trigger a French counter-move anymore.155 In South America, Europe’s concert system did not assert itself. Early in the nineteenth century, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America were able to break loose and establish independent states. Their successes

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were helped by the rapid decline of the region’s Iberian colonizers. At Vienna, Spain and Portugal were no longer major actors, and neither became a true concert state. Hence their imperial decline did not affect the concert system immediately, in particular since their former colonies were not taken over by other major states. In these peripheral cases, the concert system was quite accommodating and allowed for small state creation. As a result, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay emerged as independent states during the 1820s.156 Soon thereafter, they came under the umbrella of the US with the so-called Monroe Doctrine of 1823. With tacit British support, the US precluded small state death through re-colonization in South America. To be sure, US policy was expansionist itself as it reserved an entire continent for its future economic penetration. However, for the region’s small states, the effect was beneficial. Unfortunately, European colonialism kept a strong grip on Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In these regions, colonialism was practiced not by declining empires but by strong and rising great powers. As a direct result, the political and security environment in these areas was detrimental to small state creation. In Africa, only Ethiopia managed to maintain its integrity. And the only case of small state creation was Liberia, which was a poorly implemented American project. In essence, “Liberia was the product of the pure and disinterested philanthropy of a society of American whites.”157 Otherwise, the continent was carved up almost completely by European states during the nineteenth century. They suppressed any attempts at native liberation and decolonization. In sum, European colonialism prevented small state creation overseas almost completely. With large areas left to conquer and colonize, the balance of power did not protect territories from occupation. The great powers found it possible to find colonies without running into major opposition. The exception is South America, where the US repulsed Europe’s concert states and guarded the newly created small states. Overall, the early years of the concert system saw a states system that was neither particularly unfriendly to the small state nor supportive enough to allow for the recovery of the massive losses during the Napoleonic era. At Vienna, small states were marginalized and treated as negligible second-tier states. However, to the extent that the balance of power came to the fore, small states benefitted from great power competition. And over the early decades of the system, small states recovered in a now somewhat accommodating environment of systemic stability and a consensus-based equilibrium among the great powers. However, colonialism in particular killed off any possibility of major small state creation outside Europe.

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Small states in a decaying concert system During the second half of the nineteenth century, the concert system’s cohesiveness and effectiveness deteriorated. This led to the Crimean War in 1853, in which concert states fought each other directly for three years. The concert system survived this shock,158 but it never recovered its full cohesiveness and strength.159 In this environment,  small states continued to decline in numbers until the end of the century. As the cohesiveness of the concert system deteriorated, great powers’ conflicting interests reasserted themselves. National aspirations kept in check by a commitment to coordinated policy of all concert states now reemerged. During the second half of the nineteenth century, great power rivalries and competition among the concert states shaped the international political environment more prominently than before. Despite the competitive turn of the concert system and the associated decline in the concert states’ collegial policy coordination, they still all favored overall stability, general peace, and an equilibrium of power. In this environment, torn between increasingly conflictual policies and strategies of the concert states, small states could be beneficiaries as well as victims of great power policies. Small states benefitted from two concerting maneuvers in particular. First, small state creation became a popular tool to settle territorial disputes. Being midwives and godfathers to small states allowed competing states to avoid the loss of a zero-sum game. It allowed both sides to deny territory to a competitor when the lands could not be secured for oneself or when the acquisition was opposed by other great powers concerned with the balance of power. The situation arose in the late 1870s when British, Russian, and Austrian-Hungarian ambitions clashed in the Balkan region, where the decline of the Ottoman Empire had begun to create instability. At the Berlin Congress of 1878, Romania and Montenegro had their statehood confirmed, Serbia was also recognized as a state, and Bulgaria’s autonomy was also accepted, although at the expense of significant territorial concessions.160 The creation of small states in effect denied too much gain to any of the contesting concert states. As in earlier times, strong rivalries among the great powers benefitted the small state. The decade before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 saw the reversal of the downward trend in small state numbers. This was due in no small part to the continuing practice of small state creation as a tool to tackle conflicting territorial disputes between concert states. In other words, small state creation opened up a way out when the status quo could no longer be maintained. Before they could further escalate, disputes between great powers could be defused by neutralizing the

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­ isputed ­territories in the form of new small states. The birth of Albania d is a prominent example of such preemptive state creation. Early in the twentieth century, it had become clear that the further rise of Serbia and Montenegro could not be held back by the Ottoman Empire much longer. The danger was that their aggrandizement at the expense of the Ottoman lands, including Albanian territory, would lead to the intervention of Austria in the region. Vienna considered this region within its zone of influence. Such intervention, however, carried with it the danger that Russia might get involved. Moscow was the self-proclaimed protector of Serbia, a fellow Slav and Christian-Orthodox country.161 Russia was waiting for opportunities to expand into the Balkans as the strength of the Ottoman Empire waned. By now, large parts of the Balkans were no longer calling for reforms, but demanding outright independence.162 With a brewing crisis at hand, the concert states stepped in. At the 1912 London Conference, France, Germany, and Great Britain successfully restrained Serbia and Montenegro,163 and then presented a plan that protected the infant state of Albania, albeit at considerable territorial expense. The new small state was central to a final arrangement because it made the deal acceptable to all members of the concert, including Russia and Austria.164 As long as Russia did not extend its reach, Austria-Hungary was satisfied, and vice versa. Small state creation kept the peace for another two years. Second, crisis management by the concert states could work to the benefit of threatened small states. The defense of Luxembourg in 1867 is an example. By the 1860s, the Second French Empire was looking for expansion in Europe, possibly by annexing Luxembourg. After a preliminary deal had been made with Prussia, however, power relations shifted, and Prussia reneged,165 even though the king of The Netherlands was willing to sell his Luxembourgian lands.166 The ensuing French–Prussian dispute now threatened to escalate further, and a conference was convened in London in 1867. There, the concert states decided that the best way to return stability to the system was to insist on Luxembourg’s independence,167 thus denying it to France and Germany equally. In fact, the conference not only insisted on Luxembourgian independence but also reconfirmed the small state’s neutrality. It prevented Luxembourg from taking sides in the future, from bandwagoning, and from joining a ­counter-balancing alliance. Neutrality was a second layer of defense, after the confirmation of its independence, against a recurrence of a great power dispute over this small state. In the end, the small state survived against all odds – not because of its indigenous capacities but because of exogenous forces, great power rivalry, and a states system geared towards stability and the status quo. *  *  *

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Unfortunately for the small state, the rivalrous dynamics of the later concert system did not consistently protect them. Crisis management and dispute settlement in the late nineteenth-century concert system did not always lead to small state creation or defense. The opposite dynamic can be detected just as frequently. Understanding “the concert as a means of preserving the peace of Europe by preventing war between the great powers themselves,”168 as British prime minister James Ewart Gladstone did, could just as easily work against small state security. Most critically, small states continued to be subject to great power deal making. For the concert states, the least painful way to settle a dispute among themselves was to impose “a settlement on some third party, preferably a smaller state.”169 This dynamic considerably undermined the chances of small states to survive because it legitimized the submission of their sovereignty to the needs of the concert system. And as it turned out, the nineteenth-century conference system was an ideal instrument to impose political settlements. Even though minor states were invited by the concert states to participate in their meetings on occasion, and the small states’ concerns were heard when they were involved in a dispute directly, small state perspectives were rarely considered. Small states remained marginalized, while the great powers created and re-created the international security environment of states, large and small. The settlements of 1878 not only created new small states in the Balkans, but also prevented small state creation. Instead of allowing the birth of two or three more small states, Bosnia and Herzegovina were given to Austria-Hungary and Cyprus to Great Britain. Both state creation and the prevention of state birth were part of the deal the concert states struck. The disintegration of the concert system in the latter half of the nineteenth century posed new challenges to the small state. Most threatening to the small state were situations when the concert system’s procedures were bypassed and concerns about the balance of power ignored. In such a case, small states could not count on the concert states’ restraint and preference for stability nor on the counter-maneuvers by rivalrous great powers. Such a situation arose in 1860, when France demanded compensation for Sardinian expansion in Italy and was offered Savoy and Nice. When news of the deal reached London, British Foreign Secretary Earl Russell objected on the grounds of France’s aggressive past and the need to maintain the power equilibrium in order to keep the peace: Her Majesty’s Government … must be allowed to remark that a demand for session of a neighbor’s territory, made by a State so powerful as France,

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and whose former and not very remote policy of territorial aggrandizement brought countless calamities upon Europe, cannot well fail to give umbrage to every State interested in the Balance of Power and in the maintenance of the general peace.170

France ignored the British objection, however, and went ahead with the annexation of the territories. Neither Britain nor any other concert state intervened. Neither the principle of restraint balancing nor the concert states’ pledge to great power consensus triggered anti-French counteraction. Instead, France got away with a unilateral maneuver and its dismissal of British objection. Clearly, small states could no longer count on the concert system to restrain the territorial ambitions of great powers. Nor could they assume that the demands of the underlying balance of power would spring into action and trigger counter-balancing. With the concert system in rapid decline and the unreliability of counter-balancing, small states had to look elsewhere to help their ­ chances of survival. One alternative was to bandwagon with regionally dominant states.171 Thus when Romania felt squeezed by two regional powers, Russia and Austria-Hungary, in the early 1880s, it showed little faith in the balance of power and instead “chose to ally with what clearly seemed to be the stronger side,”172 Austria-Hungary. This maneuver came at a significant diplomatic price,173 but faced with an ineffective balance of power, bandwagoning was the next best option. Romania’s bandwagoning did pay off, at least in the short term, because it satisfied its “imperatives for immediate security.”174 With the complete breakdown of the concert system in 1914, Romania was again struggling against its neighbors’ designs. Then it switched sides and abandoned its earlier alliance partners, hoping that it had made the right bet. However, this time bandwagoning misfired, as German and AustrianHungarian troops won on the battlefield and imposed a harsh settlement. Fortunately for Romania, the central European great powers were defeated in the First World War, and the small state was able to reassert itself in 1918. The case showed the vagaries of bandwagoning, when each change in the constellation of great powers required a corresponding move by the small state. Even then, it was the defeat of Germany on the distant western front that ultimately saved Romania. Nationalism, the rise of the large nation-state, and small state death

During the nineteenth century in particular, peoples became nations.175 With much force and speed, the dynastic state was transformed into “the people’s state, a national state, a fatherland,”176 which in turn “nationalized th[e Westphalian] state order.”177 The rise of nationalism

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in nineteenth-century Europe would lead to changes in territories,178 new boundaries, and carry continental implications.179 It developed into a force strong enough to challenge the processes, standards, and structure of the concert system. In combination with the norm of self-­ determination in particular, nationalism repeatedly overpowered the concert system with its goal of stability and the process of concerted action by great powers. As Hans Kohn explains, nationalism undermined the concert system: The Peace Congress of Vienna in 1814 tried to contain the revolutionary forces of nationalism. Yet throughout the following century these forces grew in intensity and expanded into ever new countries until the peace treaties of 1919 marked the complete breakdown of the system established at Vienna.180

By way of illustration: the Polish insurrection in 1863 failed when “the Poles were deceived and their hopes of Western assistance in their arising was crushed in 1864.”181 However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the concert states were forced to rubberstamp the creation of small nation-states. In 1905, Norway’s secession from Sweden had to be recognized182 and three years later the concert states had no choice but to approve Bulgarian independence retroactively, although the repudiation of Turkish suzerainty and the assumption of the title of Czar by Ferdinand of Bulgaria in 1908 was a fait accompli and a blow to the collectivism of the concert states.183 Nationalism could not only lead to secession and state creation, but also to consolidation and state integration. The nineteenth century saw both dynamics play out, but with hugely different quantitative results. With a general zeitgeist favoring the large and strong over the small and weak, many more small states were lost to, especially Italian and German, nationalism than were gained by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Nationalism has historically deep roots,184 but only in the wake of the French Revolution did it become a major political factor. It became connected to revolutionary goals and “[t]hereby the principle of nationalism was given a distinctly political turn. It became identified with democracy and radicalism. Europe’s monarchies feared it and kept it out of the international settlements of 1814–1815,”185 created the Holy Alliance, and soon began to suppress nationalist uprisings. After initial successes,186 the conservative monarchies’ ability to suppress nationalist sentiment began to erode. At mid century, Bismarck noted that from now on, all major maneuvers by Prussia had to take German nationalism into account.187

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While nationalism grew in overall strength, two features became critical. First, nationalism became not only a destructive and s­ tate-subverting force, but also an integrative and state-strengthening one.188 The former favored particularism, the latter led to territorial integration and thus threatened small state survival. In the case of Germany, nationalism worked as an integrative dynamic and supported national unification, which caused the loss of many small states. However, in the case of Austria-Hungary, nationalism worked destructively and strengthened particularistic demands that fed into the ultimate dissolution of the formerly unified state and the creation of small states in its stead.189 Second, nationalism changed its character significantly,190 from Liberalism to Conservatism. In Hans Kohn’s words: “Nationalism changed in the middle of the nineteenth century from liberal humanitarianism to aggressive exclusivism, from the emphasis on the dignity of the individual to that on the power of the nation, from limitation and distrust of government to its exaltation.”191 By mid century it had become clear that “nationalism did not lead … to a fraternal association of neighboring peoples and to international peace.”192 As this change played itself out, small states became threatened by a new form of aggression that was driven by nationalistic desires. Thus nationalism formed an ‘unholy alliance’ with traditional power politics, leading to strong desires for expansionism.193 In this way, coercion and military force became acceptable when employed for projects of national unification.194 As a consequence, small states were in danger of being swept away in a wave of popular nationalism and grandiose national designs. Italian and German national unifications illustrate this dynamic. Switzerland was a rare exception to the rule, and it remained safe from expansionist nationalism. Indeed Jacob Burckhardt, from his Swiss vantage point, dismissed the rhetoric of national unification, of uniting a fragmented people that belonged together culturally. For him, the real driver of contemporary unification was the desire to amass power.195 Regardless of his insights, as the nineteenth century progressed small states were swimming against a tide that strongly favored great powers. The latter were not only the key states in a concert system, but they were the wave of the future, too. Modern times, it seemed, favored and required large nation-states. Achievements of historic proportions could be reached only by large states. Progress and advancement were seen as the domain of modern great powers. Only they were consequential to History. What had emerged was an “ideology of largeness.”196 The evolution of large nation-states gained support from economics. And indeed, much of the economic dynamism of this period was driven by large and powerful states.197 In the mid to late nineteenth

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century, further growth was linked to growing markets, which in turn required larger territories. This argument featured prominently in rapidly ­industrializing European states. There in particular, the need for united markets became part of unification campaigns.198 For German economists in particular, achieving national unity had become critical.199 As largeness was celebrated, small states were treated with disrespect. In Germany especially, a derisive attitude towards small states gained wide popularity. It grew into a strong force undermining the small state’s right to exist. Indicative of the change was that the German term for particularism, “Kleinstaaterei,” now carried a particular negative connotation. In 1853, Ludwig August von Rochau argued that German territories could not claim a right to self-determination but must submit to a larger national cause.200 Just over a decade later, Heinrich von Treitschke mocked the German small state, arguing that it was incompatible with civilization.201 He described the termination of all small states in Germany as an “act of historical necessity” 202 and put national unification in the context of “great historic processes of nature.”203 Bismarck called their level of sovereignty “unnatural,”204 and his fellow statesman, Lord Salisbury, stated in matter-of-fact fashion: “The large states became ever larger, the small ones ever smaller – and fewer.”205 Such a reconstructed small state was a backward, narrow-minded, and reactionary place that resisted progress.206 As a consequence, the survival of small states became undesirable. And with “social Darwinism,” a concept “to justify the imposition of the strong upon the weak and to disregard moral laws”207 was readily available. Overall, a belief system had emerged that saw the erosion of the number of small states as a desirable and natural process. Despite its rich “tradition of particularism,”208 Italy’s small states succumbed quickly to the power of national unification. The Kingdom of Sardinia was the key driver and could count on strong nationalism throughout Italian lands. Unification was achieved through a combination of nationalism and coercion. In addition to the exploitation of a growing Italian national sentiment, Sardinia needed its military and French assistance to move Italy from particularism to unified nationhood.209 Italian small states were unable to resist the combined force of nationalism and military force and many were lost. On 17 March 1861, a united Kingdom of Italy emerged as a great power, created by largescale termination of small states. Five years later, Italian unification was completed with the integration of Venetia. Another five years later, Germany was united. It, too, was created through a mix of nationalist appeal and military campaigns.210 As had

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been the case in Italy, neither small states nor even regional middle powers such as Venetia or Bavaria were able to withstand the combined onslaught of nationalist fervor and realpolitik. Prussia coopted German nationalism and its motto “Germany calls”211 to support its own forceful unification of Germany.212 After the military defeat of France in 1870–71, the remaining South German states formally joined the new German Empire.213 For a short while, the build-up of Italian and German nationalism helped small states survive. When German small states along the river Rhine became targets of France, any possible move was effectively blocked by popular German nationalism.214 This protection was compounded by the two German great powers of Austria-Hungary and Prussia being locked in a fight over supremacy and willing to assume the role of protector of small states against threats from middle powers.215 Last but not least, the two German great powers’ stalemate provided the opportunity for small states to find relative safety in aligning themselves with either side. However, late nineteenth-century nationalism proved to be far too strong a force to be held back by monarchies or exploited by small states looking for security. In the end, nationalism overpowered the states system. It nullified the traditional process of maintaining stability  through concerted actions of great powers. Nationalism also neutralized any triggers for counter-balancing. Lombardy-Venetia became part of the Italian state with some delay. Until 1866, Austria-Hungary was defending it, but had to do so alone. Soon, Austria was defeated on the battlefield and by a plebiscite. No congress was called, no concerted action agreed upon by all great powers. Against Italian nationalism, the weak concert system was helpless. A few years later, the concert states were again only bystanders when Prussia integrated all German small states into a new German great power. The principles of the concert system and the logic of power balancing were easily outmaneuvered by Prussia’s leadership, which leaned heavily on German nationalism. Italian and German small states in particular suffered from an imploding concert system. In each case, developments overcame and overpowered the concert. Once major actors in Italy and Germany had coopted it, national unification became an irresistible force that overpowered the weakened concert system and left Italian and German small states practically defenseless.

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Imperialism and the suppression of small state creation

While the great power rivalries ran into each other on the European continent, the expansion of the Westphalian states system overseas216 implied the possibility of state creation abroad. Unfortunately, growing geographic reach did not generate growth in small state numbers. Instead, the expansion of the states system came in the form of European colonialism and imperialism,217 which largely negated the opportunity for small state creation overseas. Europe’s leading states involved themselves in the Congo when the Belgian colony came into conflict with neighboring Portuguese possessions. Lisbon claimed sovereignty over the entire mouth of the river Congo, but Belgium refused. It would have cut off Belgian Congo access to the open sea. However, when Portugal received the support of Great Britain for its position in the early 1880s, the conflict between the two smaller states threatened to destabilize the entire arrangement of European colonialism in Africa and by extension further undermine stability in Europe. A summit was held to settle the issue. The Congo conference was held in Berlin by an enlarged group of fourteen participants in 1884. One year later, the conference produced a treaty which created a new state, the Congo Free State, which was however placed under complete Belgian control. Allowing for self-determination by indigenous populations and granting independence to the disputed foreign territory were not considered, even though elements of European-type independence existed.218 The European claim that the area was to be considered noman’s land was absurd. However, the legal doctrine of terra nullius gave legal cover to European imperialism which in turn prevented the emergence of small African states. In contrast to the Congolese case, the Boers in Southern Africa ran independent small states, Natalia, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, for a number of decades. Regardless of earlier British approval, however, the Boer states were integrated into the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.219 Their existence had been tenuous and dependent on British colonial policy in Southern Africa. When London’s imperial policy shifted, the small states were doomed. The preservation of their sovereignty on principle was not considered, and the balance of power did not come into play in a geographic region where Britain’s dominance could not be challenged. The case of Liberia is the exception to the rule of suppression of state creation in Africa.220 The republic emerged during the nineteenth century from a project to repatriate former slaves from the US. These efforts had strong political support in Washington. Unfortunately, the

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establishment of Liberia required the occupation of African lands by the US in violation of the rights of the local population. Nevertheless, looked at strictly as a case of small state creation, it shows that the ­possibility for small state creation existed, but only if it had the support of a major power. In Asia, colonialism blocked possible small state creation as well. Since before the Peace of Westphalia, European colonialism had penetrated the ‘East Indies’ in order to reap economic benefits. In the process of ever wider colonial penetration of Asia, very few territories were able to resist European domination. As in Africa, European penetration into Asia did not lead to an expansion of the Westphalian states system and a proliferation of states, but to further growth of European empires at the “world-system’s core.”221 Three exceptions to the overall suppression of small state additions are noteworthy because they point towards imperial powers’ rivalries and their effect on non-European small states in the era of imperialism. Thailand survived by navigating between two major imperial powers: Great Britain and France. In the same way as many European small states had been saved from annexation by the competing jealousies of great powers, Thailand survived with much structural help from European great power rivalries. In Southeast Asia, France and Great Britain did not find a formula to split up the territories between them. This stalemate created a situation in which Thailand could protect its independence.222 In contrast to the Thai case, Tibet was unable to exploit the rivalries between imperial powers. Both Britain and Russia had their eyes on Tibet. However, when the British invaded Tibet in 1903, Russia did not counter the move. Put differently, the rivalry was not dynamic enough to keep British designs in check. Without the help of a balancer, Tibet lost the ensuing military campaign quickly. The third case is a remarkable outlier. Determined military resistance and a favorable terrain allowed Afghanistan to defend its autonomy against an imperial power without the assistance of a rival power to counter-balance. After defeating invading British military in battle in 1842, Afghanistan was able to maintain its independence. Imperial Britain withdrew its military forces and established diplomatic relations. Over the following decades, Britain steadily gained more influence in Afghanistan without, however, challenging Afghan sovereignty formally. Britain limited its interests mostly to geopolitics.223 Without a rival to counter British aggression but unwilling to submit, Afghanistan succeeded against all odds. Certainly, late nineteenth-century imperialism was not limited to Europeans invading Africa and Asia. The rapidly industrializing US was

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getting involved in Africa and Asia, too, but especially in Central and South America. The US–American Monroe Doctrine of 1823 – with its British backing – had protected nascent small states in South America from European re-colonization during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, a number of the new state creations remained internally weak, which opened a back-door for European imperial powers to reestablish themselves. In response, in 1902 and 1903 the US issued the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The US locked European powers out by assuming the role of regional policeman and hegemon. This may have saved the small states of the region from European intervention. However, it came at the price of US domination. While US regional dominance provided protection from extra-regional forces, it provided no security from American abuses of its regional hegemony. In such cases, small states had no recourse and no other great power to which to appeal. In 1903 Colombia lost today’s Panama when Washington’s designs for an isthmian canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans led it to force Panamanian secession. Independence came at the expense of American domination, from which it emerged only decades later, when the international states system’s coordinates had changed.224 In many ways, these developments followed the patterns set only five years earlier. After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US opposed European influence in the Americas, but maintained its own imperial desires. After defeating the Spanish, only Cuba was granted formal independence. The Philippines and Puerto Rico were absorbed into the emerging US Empire. Only shortly before, the US had annexed the independent small state of Hawai’i. Very much in line with European imperialism of the time, American designs in the Western Hemisphere and beyond offset the chances for small state proliferation. US hegemony was also left unchallenged by Europe’s great powers, and as a result small states in the Western Hemisphere were denied the potential security benefits of rivalries and balancers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan joined the club of colonial powers. In the Treaty of Ganghwa of 1876 it forced the opening of Korea to Japanese merchants, using the model of America’s coerced opening of Japan in 1853.225 Japanese involvement on the Korean Peninsula started a process towards annexation. In 1905 it colonized and in 1910 formally annexed it. As had happened many countless times before around the world, an imperial power negated the chance of small state creation. In the absence of a working balance of power in Northeast Asia, militarily weak Korea was subdued quickly by the newest great power. Other features of the states system were still far too weak to

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protect Korea from foreign aggression. Before it was formally annexed, Korea had sent a delegation to The Hague where an international convention negotiated a set of international treaties on war and warfare. Korea’s intention was to protest Japan’s imposition of a protectorate. However, the delegation was not even formally received.226 Much less was its agenda considered. At the turn of the century, imperialism was left nearly unrestrained. International Law and the norm of self-determination were no match for great powers building empires outside of Europe. In sum, European colonialism and great power imperialism undercut the chances of state creation outside Europe. As a result, and despite the rapid geographic expansion of the international states system, the number of small states continued to fall to historic lows. In this period of a decaying concert system and highly energetic imperialism, small state proliferation outside Europe stalled. But even when developments in Europe are brought in, the evolving international environment of the late nineteenth century turned out to be a “very unattractive political world” for small states.227 As a result, the number of small states reached its all-time low in 1904, when only thirty-five small states were left. Small states in a “dissolving”228 concert system In the last decade of the nineteenth century at the latest, the concert system was rapidly falling apart. The Agadir crisis of 1911229 clearly demonstrated that the great powers were unable to come up with a mutually agreeable way to return order and tranquility to the system. The crisis also showed that small states had lost almost all the protection that the balance of power traditionally used to generate. German– French hostilities did not provide room for Morocco to defend its remaining autonomy against France. The concert system disintegrated completely in the summer of 1914.230 The concert states allowed a regional conflict to grow out of proportion and trigger the First World War. The system would have required the European great powers to come together at a summit and solve the issue among them, thus stabilizing the system and keeping the peace. They failed to do so.231 As a result, a regional crisis in the Balkans quickly spiraled out of control and triggered an open conflict between Europe’s great powers. Soon, their empires were sucked into the war, and the European battlefield was abruptly expanded to Asia, Africa, and the High Seas. In 1917, the US formally joined the fighting. The Swedish and Swiss small states stayed neutral and survived the war. Their fellow small state Belgium, however, suffered massively when its territory was occupied by Germany for military reasons.232 Occupying an unfavorable geographic

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position but relying on neutrality turned out to be an insufficient security strategy. Respect for neutrality was still far too weak internationally. During the nineteenth century, the concert states managed international affairs and aimed at overall stability. This environment “afforded small states protection,”233 as John Herz claims. At the same time, Sheehan argues that “the balance was frequently maintained at the expense of the smaller states.”234 Both observations are correct but incomplete. They can be completed by the findings of this chapter. The first half of the concert system era had been rather supportive of small state survival. The period even witnessed some small state proliferation. However, the switch from the previous era’s pure balance of power to the “predominantly ‘arranged’ or ‘constructed’”235 concert system did not produce the full restoration of small state numbers to pre-Napoleonic levels. The modest recovery in the number of small states and the subsequent measured erosion are a reflection of the concert system’s core dynamics and its overall satisfactory operation. However, when “yet a different type of system arose”236 and the concert system lost much of its rigor and internal strength in the second half of the century, the dramatic decline in the number of small states was the result of an ever worsening position of the small state in the international states system. The integrative forces of Italian and German nationalism were far too strong for the concert system to contain them, and large numbers of small states disappeared. And overseas, imperialism effectively blocked small state creation. In sum, the nineteenth-century concert system proved to be a rather inhospitable environment for the small state. Notes 1 Sir James Mackintosh is quoted in Sheehan, The Balance of Power 125. 2 Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, xv. 3 Richard B. Elrod, “The Concert of Europe: A Fresh Look at an International System,” World Politics 28, no. 2 (1976): 164. 4 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 59, 70–71. 5 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 196. 6 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 70, 71. 7 Many different names have been applied to this particular system. It has been called the “European system,” the “Confederacy,” or the “Great Alliance.” Castlereagh called it the “union,” and his compatriot Salisbury the “inchoate federation of Europe,” while in Germany the term “die europäische Pentarchie,” referring to the five concert states, was generally preferred. See: Carsten Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: A Study in German and British International

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Theory, 1815–1914 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 5. However, all these terms are essentially synonyms, referring to a states system in which a small, elitist circle of the largest states manages the international system. 8 “Bund der dirigierenden Hauptmächte”; Arnold H. L. Heeren, Handbuch der Geschichte des europäischen Staatensystems und seiner Colonien, 2. Historische Werke, 4. (Göttingen: Röwer, 1822), 447. 9 Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 409.  10 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 197.  11 Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten‘ im Internationalen System,” 6–11.  12 Ian Clark, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131–132.  13 Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Die Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig: Europas Kampf gegen Napoleon (München: C. H. Beck, 2013), 36.  14 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 153–173.  15 Wright, Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, xviii. See also Robert Jervis, “From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation,” World Politics 38, no. 1, October (1985).  16 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 17.  17 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 112.  18 Mark Jarrett, The Congress of Vienna and its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon (London: I. B. Taurus, 2013), 309–352. The quote is part of the chapter title.  19 Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics. See also Amitav Acharya, “A Concert for Asia?” Survival 41, no. 3, Autumn (1999): 85.  20 Wolfram Pyta, Das europäische Mächtekonzert: Friedens- und Sicherheit­ spolitik vom Wiener Kongreß 1815 bis zum Krimkrieg 1853 (Köln: Böhlau, 2009).  21 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 126.  22 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 237.  23 Hans Kohn, Nationalism and Realism: 1852–1879 (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1968), 22.  24 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 126–44. Also Elrod, “The Concert of Europe,” 172–3; Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War, 407; Baumgart, Europäisches Konzert und nationale Bewegung: Internationale beziehungen 1830–1878 (Paderborn: Schönigh, 1999); Dehio, The Precarious Balance; Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace; René Albrecht-Carrié, The Concert of Europe (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968); René Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna, revised ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973).  25 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 226.  26 Ibid., 225; Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 1–2; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 242  27 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 133.  28 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 4.

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 29 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 240.  30 Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, passim, esp. pp. 362–368.  31 Reeve, “Balance of Power,” 122.  32 Moorhead Wright, “Introduction,” in Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914: Selected European Writings, ed. Moorhead Wright (London: Dent, 1975), xvi; Sir Edward Hertslet, The Map of Europe by Treaty: Showing the various political and territorial changes which have taken place since the general peace of 1814. With numerous maps and notes, vol. IV (1875 to 1891) (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1891).  33 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 3–4.  34 Ibid., 5; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 70.  35 Quoted in Wright, “Introduction,” xv.  36 Ibid.  37 Harold Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity 1812–1822 (London: Cassell, 1989), 39, 258.  38 Ibid., 154–155.  39 Ibid., 238–9; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 62.The sixth article of the Quadruple Alliance is reproduced in Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 1. It is also quoted in Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 118.  40 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 62. The quote is on p. 65.  41 Ibid., 39.  42 Wright, “Introduction,” xviii.  43 Johannes Paulmann, “Pomp und Politik: Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg,”(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000).  44 Benjamin Miller, “A ‘New World Order’: From Balancing to Hegemony, Concert or Collective Security,” International Interactions 18, no. 1 (1992): 10.  45 There is a debate about the essential nature of the concert system, which is recognized. See Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 48–51; Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics; Paul W. Schroeder, “Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power?” in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Europe, ed. Paul W. Schroeder (New York: Palgrave, 2004); Enno E. Kraehe, “A Bipolar Balance of Power,” American Historical Review 97, no. 3, June (1992); Wolf D. Gruner, “Was There a Reformed Balance of Power System or Cooperative Great Power Hegemony?” American Historical Review 97, no. 3, June (1992); Osiander, The States System of Europe (1994), 166–247.  46 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 306.  47 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 70.   48 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 240; Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 225.  49 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 240.  50 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 121.  51 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 225.  52 Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System,” 10.

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 53 W. N. Medlicott, Bismarck, Gladstone, and the Concert of Europe (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1956), 18.  54 “Friedensordnung” and “Friedenskultur”; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 4–20, 46–72.  55 Ibid., 48.  56 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 17.  57 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 221.  58 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 17.  59 Little, The Balance of Power in International Relations, 12.  60 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 304; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 70; Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 121; Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 238.  61 Benjamin Miller, “Explaining Great Power Cooperation in Conflict Manage­ ment,” World Politics 45, no. 1, October (1992).  62 Ibid.  63 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 68.  64 Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, Kleinstaat Keinstaat?, 87–88.  65 Rudolf Kjellén and Karl Haushofer, Die Großmächte vor und nach dem Weltkriege, 24th ed. of Großmächte Rudolf Kjelléns, 3th ed. of revised version ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933), 1–2.  66 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 1.  67 Richard Rosecrance and Peter Schott were, to my knowledge, the first to apply the term “club” (very accurately). The term is quoted in David Capie and Paul Evans, The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 76.  68 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 1. France later joined the circle of leading states as its fifth member. Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 113f. Such responsibility included the duty to intervene in other countries if necessary. See Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 201.  69 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 121–122.  70 Ibid., 125.  71 Ibid.  72 Halil Inalcik, “Turkey and Europe: A Historical Perspective,” Perceptions – Journal of International Affairs, 1997, www.mfa.gov.tr/grupa/percept/ll1/II1–8. html; Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 125. See also Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 2.  73 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 2.  74 August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik: Angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1972 (1853)), 176.  75 Ferrero and Jaeckel, The Reconstruction of Europe, 58.  76 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72.  77 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 253.  78 “[I]nnerhalb eines von prinzipiellen Grundsätzen festgesetzten Rahmens”; István Bibó, Die Misere der osteuropäischen Kleinstaaterei, trans. Béla Rásky (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1992), 108.

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 79 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 125–172; Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 499–676.  80 Stephen C. Neff, “A Positive Century (1815–1914),” in Justice Among Nations: A History of International Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).  81 Milos Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna to the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo  Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 673.  82 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 70; Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna,” 662–664.  83 Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna,” 672–673.  84 Ibid., 665.  85 Ibid., 671–3. The quote is on p. 671.  86 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte 224–227; Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna,” 663.  87 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 69; Seabury, Balance of Power, 55–56.  88 “Grosse Staaten bringen Kraft und Stärke in den Bund, die kleineren Liebe zur Gerechtigkeit und Constitutionsfähigkeit”; Johann Smidt was Senator of the Hanse City, Bremen. His remarks of 1815–16 are quoted in Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System” 25.  89 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 255.  90 Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna,” 659–660.  91 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 254.  92 Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna,” 672–673.  93 Ferrero and Jaeckel, The Reconstruction of Europe, 37–38.  94 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 230.  95 Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 616–37; Quincy Wright, A Study of War (Abridged), abridged by Louise Leonard Wright ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 138.  96 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 231.  97 Reeve, “Balance of Power,” 122.  98 Hans J. Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 172.  99 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 3. 100 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101–130. 101 Ibid., 169; William L. Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 1832–1852 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 239. 102 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 110. 103 Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 212. 104 Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe, 84. 105 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 245. 106 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen, 4th ed. (München: C. H. Beck, 2011), 13.

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107 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power, 307. 108 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 155. 109 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 262. 110 Ibid., 157. 111 Watson, The Evolution of International Society, 130–31; Acharya, “A Concert for Asia?” 85. 112 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72. 113 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 222. 114 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 124. 115 Quoted in Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System,” 9–10. 116 Trygve Mathisen, The Functions of Small States in the Strategies of the Great Powers (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1971), 44. 117 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 237. 118 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 196. 119 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 47–48. 120 Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 234. 121 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 117. 122 Godfrey Baldacchino, “The Security Concerns of Designed Spaces: Size Matters,” in Small States and International Security: Europe and Beyond, ed. Clive Archer,  Alyson J. K. Bailes, and Anders Wivel (New York: Routledge, 2014), 242. 123 Thomas Jost, Wolfgang Maderthaner, and Helene Maimann, eds., Der Wiener Kongress: Die Erfindung Europas (Vienna: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 2014); Luard, Conflict and Peace, 171–2; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 222. 124 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 124–125. 125 Michael Hundt, Die Mindermächtigen Deutschen Staaten auf dem Wiener Kongress (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 6. 126 “Powers” and “the other European states”; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 68. 127 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 121–122. 128 Hundt, Die Mindermächtigen Deutschen Staaten, 6. 129 Harold Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (London: Constable & Co., 1953), 74. 130 Oppenheim, International Law, A Treatise. Vol. I: Peace, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905), 164–165. 131 Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 420–421. 132 Ibid. 133 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 47–48. 134 Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna (1989), 142–143, 57; Heinrich von Treitschke, Die Zukunft der norddeutschen Mittelstaaten (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1866), 17; Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, “Letter to Metternich,” in Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power, 1486–1914: Selected European Writings, ed. Moorhead Wright (London: Dent, 1975 (1814)), 102–104. 135 Wolf D. Gruner, Der Deutsche Bund, 1815–1866 (München: C. H. Beck, 2012);

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Wolf D. Gruner, Die deutsche Frage in Europa 1800–1990 (München: Piper, 1993); Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 51–53. 136 Denmark qualified through its possession, Holstein; The Netherlands through Luxembourg. 137 Bernd Lemke, Klaus Pirke, Jörg Rumpf et al., Der Grosse Ploetz: Atlas zur Weltgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau: Ploetz in der Herder GmbH / Komet Verlag GmbH Köln, 2008), 122–134. 138 Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System,” 11–25; Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 50–53; Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna (1989), 196–199; Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 40. 139 Schulz, Normen und Praxis, 51–52. 140 Gruner, “Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten’ im Internationalen System,” 50. 141 Ibid., 38. 142 Ibid., 21–22. 143 Knud Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Frankfurt am Main: Alfred Metzner Verlag, 1967), 374–377. 144 Clark, The Hierarchy of States; Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna (1989), 195. 145 “The Laws of War, Hague Conference of 1907,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, 1907, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/lawwar. asp. 146 Harold Temperley, The Foreign Policy of Canning, 1822–1827 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1925), 193. 147 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 222. 148 Amry Vandenbosch, Dutch Foreign Policy Since 1815: A Study in Small Power Politics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959). 149 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 283. 150 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 185. 151 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 283–285; Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 4- 5, 110–114. 152 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 126; Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 283–285. 153 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 179. 154 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 184. 155 Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 15 October 1815,” The National Archives, 1815, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/​03–​ 09–02–0068. 156 Nicolson, The Congress of Vienna (1989), 272–273. 157 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 116–117. For the quote see p. 117. 158 Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace, 250. 159 Rothstein argues that “[f]or one thing, the unification of Germany and the decisive defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War had a momentous impact on

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the balance of power system. In fact, that system, as it had operated before 1854, could not be reestablished.” See Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 204–206. 160 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 74–77; Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 179. The concert states also determined the regimes governing the Congo, Tangier, and Shanghai. See Luard, Conflict and Peace, 171–172. As in the case of (existing) small states, the concert states also felt at times obliged to arrange administrative structures for colonial possessions in order to ensure that these territories did not become issues of international contention. 161 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 109. 162 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 70. 163 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 5, 91. 164 Ibid., 110. See also Ross, The Great Powers, 1. 165 Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe, 133. 166 Ibid., 134–135. 167 Ibid., 135. 168 Medlicott, Bismarck, Gladstone, 18. 169 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 124. 170 Quoted in Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 210. 171 Walt, “Alliance Formation.” 172 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 215. 173 Ibid., 214. 174 Ibid. Also: Keohane, “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas,” 295. 175 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 238–282. 176 Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton, NJ: D. van Nostrand Company, 1965), 15. 177 John Breuilly, “Nationalism,” in The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, ed. John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 404. 178 Clark, Preußen, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 557–558. 179 Ibid., 572. 180 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 81. 181 Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe, 113. 182 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 91–94. 183 Ibid., 179. 184 Hans Kohn, Die Idee des Nationalismus, Ursprung und Geschichte bis zur Französischen Revolution, trans. Günther Nast-Kölb (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1962). 185 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 238. 186 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 38–53; Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 387–420, 501–512. 187 Wehler, Nationalismus, 74–75. 188 Breuilly, “Nationalism,” 404. 189 Clark, Preußen, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 558. 190 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Hobsbawm, Nations and

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Nationalism; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 191 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 54–64; the quote is on p. 50.See also Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 24. 192 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 46. 193 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 251–260; Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 65–73. 194 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 24. 195 Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Lob des Kleinstaates: Vom Sinn überschaubarer Lebensraume (München: Herder, 1979), 177. 196 Karl Schmid, Unbehagen im Kleinstaat: Untersuchungen über Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Jakob Schaffner, Max Frisch, Jacob Burckhardt (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1963), 233–243. 197 Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, Kleinstaat Keinstaat?, 102. 198 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 239; Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 54. 199 Braun-Wiesbaden, Bilder aus vier Jahrhunderten, 1, 88. 200 Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, 290–292. 201 Treitschke, Die Zukunft der norddeutschen Mittelstaaten. 202 Quoted in Gruner,“Die Rolle und Funktion von ‘Kleinstaaten ’ im Internationalen System,” 12. 203 “Akt der historischen Notwendigkeit”; Treitschke, Die Zukunft der norddeutschen Mittelstaaten, 24. 204 Otto von Bismarck, Gedanken und Erinnerungen: Autobiographie (Köln: Anaconda, 2015 (1898)), 250. 205 “Die großen Staaten warden immer größer, die kleinen immer kleiner – und weniger”; Rudolf Kjellén and Karl Haushofer, Die Großmächte vor und nach dem Weltkriege, 25th ed. of Großmächte Rudolf Kjelléns, 4th ed. of revised version (Leipzig: Teubner, 1935), 2. 206 Pfusterschmid-Hardtenstein, Kleinstaat Keinstaat?, 101–102. 207 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 14. Also: Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 73–80. 208 Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe, 94. 209 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 56–58; Gordon A. Craig, Geschichte Europas, 1815–1980: Vom Wiener Kongreß bis zur Gegenwart (München: C. H. Beck, 1983), 158–172. 210 Craig, Geschichte Europas, 173–86; Gordon A. Craig, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1945: Vom Norddeutschen Bund bis zum Ende des Dritten Reiches (München: C. H. Beck, 1980), 13–44. 211 “Deutschland ruft”; Clark, Preußen, Aufstieg und Niedergang, 557–569. 212 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 58–61. 213 Michael Stürmer, Das ruhelose Reich: Deutschland 1866–1918 (Berlin: Siedler, 1983), 143–192. It is recognized that Stürmer describes German unifcation as a process that lasted from 1866 to 1876. Nipperdey dates unification to 1871 and follows traditional scholarship in this regard: Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche

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Geschichte 1866–1918: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie, Vol. 2 (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1992), 11–75. 214 Wehler, Nationalismus, 73. 215 Langer, Political and Social Upheaval, 512. 216 Kohn, Nationalism and Realism, 61–69. 217 Ibid., 62–9; Wehler, Nationalismus, 91–93. 218 Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 117–119. 219 Leonard Monteath Thompson, History of South Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 70–153; Iris Berger, South Africa in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–84. 220 There can be no doubt that in Africa, as in other parts of the non-European world, societies had organized themselves well before European colonization. In Southern Africa, too, societies were organized in ways that equalled the Westphalian states model in many ways. However, the present study investigates only the Westphalian states system and the pre-colonial, indigenous states in Southern Africa, which did not become part of this particular states system. 221 Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 28–31. 222 Donald E. Nuechterlein, Thailand and the Struggle for Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965), 1–27. 223 Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe, 114. 224 Peter M. Sanchez, “Panama: A ‘Hegemonized’ Foreign Policy,” in Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, ed. Jeanne A. K. Hey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 65–71. 225 Rüdiger Frank, Nordkorea: Innenansichten eines totalen Staates (München: DVA, 2014), 31. 226 Ibid., 33. 227 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 220. 228 Holbraad, The Concert of Europe, 2. 229 Oron J. Hale, The Great Illusion, 1900–1914 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 267–275. 230 Seabury, Balance of Power, 205; Geiss, Geschichte im Überblick, 340. 231 Hale, The Great Illusion. 232 Ross, The Great Powers, 2. 233 Herz, International Politics, 73. 234 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 72. 235 Wright, “Introduction,” xv. 236 Luard, Conflict and Peace, 10.

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Twentieth-century systems, 1919–2016

Small state survival and proliferation in twentieth-century systems of collective security and global governance, 1919–2016

… to fight … for the rights of nations great and small…1(Woodrow Wilson, 1915)

In the twentieth century, a hybrid system of power politics, collective security, and growing global governance prevailed. How did the small state fare in this environment? Interestingly enough, small states did remarkably well and during the height of the Cold War small state proliferation actually doubled their total number. The twentieth century witnessed the reversal of the centuries-old downward trend in small state numbers. An environment developed that was increasingly supportive of small state survival, and the century’s second half in particular became not only highly conducive to small state survival but in fact strongly supportive of small state proliferation. As a result, the second half of the century saw an unprecedented increase in small state numbers. The early twentieth century witnessed the introduction of collective action and security and the beginnings of global governance. After the Second World War, the states system evolved further and the hardening of existing restraints and the inclusion of new limitations shaped it increasingly as global governance. The sudden end of the Cold War and rise of global terrorism forced changes on the system. The twentieth century saw the introduction of institutionalized systems of collective security and collective defense, which raised small state security significantly. Small states also found their security enhanced by the Cold War’s bipolarity. And when the legal norm of self-determination had hardened enough, the political environment was ripe for decolonization and large-scale small state creation. This highly accommodating environment remains in place today, and as a result new small states emerged during the post-Cold War and post-9/11 periods.

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Systems of collective security in twentieth-century world politics: from Wilsonianism to a “New World Order”2 and beyond Wilsonian Internationalism and the interwar years, 1919–39 As the First World War raged on, the US president Woodrow Wilson readied himself to challenge traditional international politics and European statesmen with his Liberal agenda. Shortly, he would propose to reorder international affairs, and his plan came to be known as Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism. Peace negotiations at Paris: Realist traditions vs. Liberal visions

Much like the Westphalian peace negotiations in the 1640s and the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, the peace negotiators in Paris in 1918–19 were charged not only with ending the recent war, but also with planning future peace. The horrific fighting of the war had left lasting impressions. Estimates are that more than fifteen million people had died and another twenty million were direct casualties of an ‘industrialized’ warfare that merged modern technologies and industrial production methods to push killing to previously unimaginable levels. Clearly, the concert system had failed in the worst way. Unfortunately, there was no consensus among the key actors in Paris about how to organize future world politics. Should a “peace without victory”3 mark the beginning, or should it be again ‘to the victor go the spoils?’ Should the traditional European balance of power be reinstated or should it go to the ‘junkyard of history?’ The victorious allies were split. On one side were the European victors, who continued to conceive of international politics as realpolitik and favored their familiar, traditional system of anti-hegemonic power balancing. In essence, they wanted to reinstate the previous states system. On the other side was the US. President Wilson personified an alternative vision. For him, it was not Germany but the shape and form of traditional European international politics that had caused the war.4 He felt called upon to replace “that unstable thing which we used to call the ‘balance of power.’”5 He championed a fundamental overhaul of international politics and “a new method of cooperation for mutual defence, not of limited alliances, but of all the nations.” His goals were no less than a “new order.”6 Needless to say, Wilson’s vision of “perpetual peace”7 had much appeal to small states, perpetually challenged by threats to their security. Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism: program and policy

When Wilson set out to develop his New World Order, he could build on a substantial tradition of Liberal thought.8 Building on Charles-Irénée

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Castel de Saint-Pierre’s program for “la paix perpetuelle en Europe,” which already featured an international organization,9 Immanuel Kant developed his own treatise on perpetual peace in the late eighteenth century.10 Kant argued that peaceful republics, brought together in an international federation, would provide the structure for man-made, ever-lasting peace. Kant’s contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, centered his “plan for a universal and perpetual peace” on decolonization and disarmament within a strong legal framework.11 In the early twentieth century, disarmament was seen as critical. Many argued that wars were caused by arms races, which in turn resulted from large, standing militaries. Also, wars seemed linked to secret and traditional European cabinet diplomacy. The answer was transparent, ‘open’ diplomacy. Norman Angell’s critique of war among modern trading states,12 and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s dead-end of capitalism13 were to be overcome by an integrative liberal economic order. The entire arrangement was supposed to be anchored on a major international organization, which would protect the largely disarmed states from aggression.14 Wilson had started his political career as a Governor during the Progressive Era, when governments and intellectual elites were convinced that societal ills could be fixed and a better society engineered.15 Wilson transferred this approach to international politics. Going to Paris for the peace talks, Wilson assumed that statesmen could engineer a better world society. His program of “progressive internationalism”16 was as utopian and naïve as it was pragmatic and progressive,17 but by 1919 Liberal Internationalism had the backing of a major power and its leader.18 Wilson desired above all else to overcome old-style European power politics and what he saw as an associated cycle of war. In this matter, he represented his country well, which “disdained” realpolitik.19 Right away, this disdain found its primary target in Europe’s traditional balance of power.20 His alternative “Vision of the Peace” rested on the strong belief that America had a moral obligation to serve humanity21 and rid the world of war. To be sure, such missionary thinking had deep roots in US foreign policy.22 With Wilson, it found a committed proponent who developed his ambitious program of world peace in public speeches in 1917 and 1918. On 22 January 1917, Wilson proclaimed in his so-called Peace Without Victory speech that a true and “lasting peace” had to be a “peace without victory.”23 Peace negotiations should be free of the “odor of Vienna”24 and break the cycle of defeat and revenge. Now, justice, law, and fairness had to be front and center, and this translated into the political goals of equality among states, International Law, and self-determination, undergirded by democracy and institutionalized collective security.25 However,

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although Wilson clearly despised the hostility between states implied in power balancing, he accepted the Westphalian system of sovereign states and states’ prioritization of power. Although he had convinced himself that reinstating the balance of power of old would prevent a lasting peace,26 he built his new order on the building blocks of the old system of sovereign states. The solution was to achieve peace collectively. Collective action would deter aggression and create peace. As the US president put it himself: “There must be, not a balance of power but a community of power; not organized rivalries but an organized, common peace.”27 Wilson further elaborated on his vision for world peace in his so-called Fourteen Points speech on 8 January 1918.28 He proposed a “permanent concert of power,”29 “a single overwhelming, powerful group of nations who shall be the trustee of the peace of the world.”30 The trustees would be the ultimate enforcers of the peace. If morality did not stop an aggressor, and if the combined power of the world community did not deter aggression, the trustees would defeat the aggressor.31 Taken together, this was Wilson’s “basic idea”32 for the new, peaceful world order. It offered security to “great and small states alike,”33 and promised an end to coercion of small states by great powers.34 Generally speaking, collective security is “the principle of collective guarantees of territorial integrity and political independence”35 of all members of a group. The collective security arrangement that emerged in 191936 was anchored on articles 10 and 16 of the Treaty of Versailles.37 Article 10 committed all signatories to “respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.” Article 16 made clear that any aggression would be treated as “an act of war against all other Members of the League.”38 It implied also the hope that potential aggressors would be deterred by the legal commitment of all treaty members to the principle of collective security. In fact, Wilson believed that deterrence would be so effective as to make collective action in defense a rarity.39 This was the core of Wilson’s vision for peace: the world community would stand together to end war and uphold justice, if necessary by collective force.40 The infrastructure needed for collective security action was to be provided by a new international organization, the League of Nations.41 In this fashion, the introduction of collective security in 1919 went hand in hand with the creation of a ‘harboring’ international organization.42 The major purpose of the League was to be the vehicle for implementation of collective security. Because it was collective security’s “institutional expression,”43 it became key to Wilson’s vision.44 However, Wilson faced considerable resistance to his program from his European war allies.45 He was prepared to offend these allies46 as

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well as compromise, except with respect to the international organization and embedded collective security. His determination is captured well in the statement of US Secretary of State Robert Lansing: “The whole world wants peace. The President wants his League. I think that the world will have to wait.”47 Wilson succeeded and the creation of the League of Nations was agreed upon in principle in April 1919.48 Wilsonian Internationalism now had “both shape and substance.”49 Unfortunately, it was handicapped from the start. Most critically, the US itself refused to join the organization, even though the president fought tooth and nail for US membership. The US was shifting towards at least partial isolationism.50 Moreover, the League of Nations did not aim at universal membership, and important international players such as Germany and the Soviet Union were initially denied membership. Despite its shortcomings, Wilsonian Internationalism held much promise for the small state. Unsurprisingly, small states were enthusiastic about the emerging new order. Of the thirty-seven founding members of the League of Nations, two-thirds were small states. And they amounted to nearly half of the entire number of small states at the time, worldwide.51 Small states were early adopters of the League and in particular its collective security provision. The League promised them protection from power politics.52 In principle, small members of the League of Nations were now as safe as all members of the group (or collective) together and thus nearly immune to aggression. Unfortunately, the League system was far too weak to stop “The Twenty Years’ Crisis”53 and prevent the slide towards a second worldwide war. The United Nations system during the Cold War era, 1945–91 With about sixty million people dead, the Holocaust, the dropping of two atomic weapons, and unprecedented horror, the Second World War came to an end in 1945. Again, a new international arrangement had to be found, one that reflected the new status quo and responded to the universal desire for a lasting peace. Once again, national leaders assumed the task of designing a post-war international order, and the statesmen “present at the creation”54 modeled the new system on the previous Wilsonian one. As before, efforts were made to rearrange international affairs at the structural level with the intention to secure order, stability, and global peace. To be sure, Wilson’s program from decades before was not reestablished.55 Too much had proved to be “utopian.” However, the spirit of Wilsonianism did influence the new order significantly. The continuity was captured well in the words of Robert Cecil, an early proponent and consistent supporter of the League, who stated during the organization’s last session in 1946: “The League is dead.

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Long live the United Nations.”56 In more ways than one, the League provided the model for the UN.57 First and foremost, a large and potentially universal international organization was reestablished and put at the center of international  diplomacy. Also as before, that organization would house the critical infrastructure for collective security. As its predecessor, it would become the “institutional shell, … [and] serve as the container of the principles of the system [of collective security].”58 Its Charter was signed in June 1945 and came into force on 24 October. With it came a renamed world court, again following the pattern set in 1919. Additional measures to enhance International Law were undertaken, in particular in the area of International Criminal Law. Once more, collective security was envisioned as a key feature. As had been the case in 1919, the UN, too, was tasked with providing the infrastructure and tools needed for collective security. It was embedded in the organization59 and enshrined in its Charter. The purpose of the new, revised collective security arrangement was to keep or restore peace. As US Senator Arthur Vandenberg, an enthusiastic supporter of the UN and US membership, put it: “We must have collective security to stop the next war, if possible before it starts; and we must have collective security to crush it swiftly if it starts; and we must have collective action to crush it swiftly if it starts in spite of our organized precautions.”60 The UN’s version of collective security develops throughout the Charter. Article 1.1. commits all member states “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace,” and article 2., subsections 3. to 5. state an obligation to peaceful dispute resolution, the prohibition of coercion and the actual use of force, and an obligation to support collective security efforts and not aid an aggressor. The legal stipulations of UN-based collective security are backed up by chapter 6 (peaceful dispute-settlement) and in particular chapter 7, which provides for non-military sanctions (article 41) and, as a last resort, for military force (article 42) in response to aggression. The UN Security Council is charged with deciding on chapter 7 collective security counter-measures. As was the case two-and-a-half decades before, small states were keenly interested in joining an organization that was meant to serve as the center of collective security. Despite the failure of the League of Nations, over half of the new UN’s founding members were small states. Much to the dismay of the small states, however, the UN also maintained its predecessor’s heavy favoritism towards great powers. In chapter 5 of the UN Charter, all matters relating to the Security Council

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are stated, including the veto power. Article 27.3. allows any of the five permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, Great Britain, Russia, USA) to block a decision, with the exception of purely procedural measures.61 There are two main reasons for this provision. First, the victorious allies were unwilling to join a security arrangement that could turn against them, and they were in a position to shape the rules accordingly.62 Second, while collective security actions against non-great powers can be conducted without fear of undoing the entire states system, massive military collective action against a core great power would ipso facto challenge the international states system’s crucial parameters. In other words, the veto power guaranteed the stability of the system. Overall, UN-centered collective security still appealed to small states. It promised to address many of their security needs. In return, many small states were willing to join collective efforts. In 1950, the coalition of states that responded to North Korea’s aggression by sending military forces in defense of South Korea consisted almost equally of major powers and small states. During the following decades, destructive nationalism, self-determination, and anti-colonialism re-shaped the international environment in such a way that small states proliferated at unprecedented levels, with a last spike at the very end of the Cold War. Shifting polarities of the post-Cold War era, 1991–today The post-Cold War era started with a large-scale effort of UN-sponsored collective defense. In 1990–91, the Iraqi occupation of the small state Kuwait was repelled by a US-led and UN-authorized global coalition of military forces. The show of superpower leadership and collective efforts in defense of a small state was striking. Against the background of the dramatic end of the Cold War and the stunning collective action in defense of a small state, US president George H. W. Bush proclaimed the project of a “New World Order”63 in which it would no longer be “possible” for “larger states [to] devour their smaller neighbors.” Although neither the US nor any other state was able to clearly articulate what the parameters of this New World Order would be, Bush had captured in a short phrase much of the hope and optimism for major advances in world politics. With the end of the Cold War, the superpowers’ stranglehold on collective security through their veto power, it was assumed, would end. Indeed the early 1990s suggested a revival of collective action. Now, collective security and collective action in support of broader concepts of peace and security seemed possible.64 The international environment of the Cold War, which had proven to be highly conducive to state ­creation

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and survival, seemed to be transitioning into an even safer climate for small state proliferation. However, terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 triggered a development in the opposite direction, away from a liberal and egalitarian New World Order. In response to the terrorist attacks, the US entered two wars, one against the small state of Afghanistan. In parallel, it began to fight a worldwide war against terrorism. This fight included military instruments and tactics that began to undermine the core principle of state sovereignty and thus pose a serious threat to small states in particular. From the late twentieth century, China was on the rise. In the twentyfirst century, China’s rise began to challenge the US position in East Asia and increasingly worldwide. This amounted to a structural shift in international politics. America’s “unipolar moment”65 passed and the international states system entered a transition. Whether the system will turn towards bipolarity or pluripolarity is unclear. The question of the longterm and systemic impact of global terrorism on global politics remains unanswered as well. Last but not least, whether the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism will have a lasting effect on international politics remains to be seen. In light of the above, the current security environment for most small states remains demanding. On the face of it, an increasingly unsettled international order and repeated challenges to the current alignment among the great powers suggest a deterioration of the international environment in which small states operate. However, no small state has disappeared. Instead, a few new small states have emerged and the desire to secede and create sovereign small states persists in some regions. The last two small state creations, Timor-Leste and South Sudan, quickly became UN members and thus came under the umbrella of the international organization’s collective security apparatus. In this respect at least, the current international environment appears supportive of small state creation and survival. Twentieth-century systems of collective security When it was implemented for the first time early in the twentieth century, collective security was a new approach geared towards the same, ­ centuries-old problem of how to restrain power politics and provide order.66 For centuries, states relied on their own power to protect themselves. Their own power, however, was a threat to their neighboring states. The security dilemma, when the military security of one state translates into insecurity of its neighbor, seemed unavoidable. In an anarchic self-help states system, only state power can provide security. However, because of the security dilemma states strive for ever

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more power. If state power were to be limited and the usage of power restrained, in the interest of peace and stability, security must be generated elsewhere. Collective security in fact offers an alternative: it collectivizes what has traditionally been the primary state interest – ensuring state survival.67 The “collective preponderance”68 of all states will deter or repel any aggressor. In principle, collective security is flawless and provides security for all against anyone. In reality, however, collective security can become severely hampered.69 Its proper functioning depends on a number of requirements. First, for collective security to work, all states of the system have to give it priority over their national interests. Instead of ensuring their survival through the accumulation of power, as traditional Realist thought suggests and diplomatic history illustrates, states must reconfigure their security strategy and place it within the context of the group’s security. By necessity, the effective performance of the system becomes a shared goal.70 This in turn implies that states are ready to participate in collective action without conditions and without concerns over their own national interest. As a result, states are required, second, to act in defense of the principle of collective security as well as in response to actual aggression.71 Put differently, a small state’s insecurity must be considered of critical importance to even a minor power in a distant geographic location. Third, states’ full commitment to the system of collective security is assumed. Such an “ideal security system”72 has in reality remained elusive. The League of Nations’s system of collective security broke down when collective action was not forthcoming despite clear and present aggression. The history of the UN shows many cases of member states being unwilling to join collective action, too. Fourth, collective security assumes that overwhelming strength can be brought to bear against any aggressor. Collective security requires a states system with a sufficient spread of power across states so that no single state could stand up to all others.73 And it must be feasible to amass this power. The 1982 conflict between Great Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands/ Malvinas illustrates the logistical problems even a strong naval power faces defending territory thousands of miles away. In addition, the general assumption is that an act of aggression is committed by a single state. If, however, a coalition of states were the aggressor, the requirement of overwhelming counter-force would multiply.74 Fifth, collective security posture and action rest on the optimistic assumption that a multitude of autonomous actors come to very similar decisions about action and reaction.75 Similarly, it is posited that acts of aggression are straightforward enough to be universally seen as such. However, an act of aggression may be hidden from detection or

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c­amouflaged diplomatically. Without clear enough evidence that an act of aggression has been committed, collective counter-action may be limited or not materialize at all. The events in eastern Ukraine in 2014 serve as an example of such ‘veiled’ aggression.76 Sixth, a sufficiently high number of states must come together under the umbrella of a collective security arrangement. While universal membership is desirable, ‘good enough’ levels of state membership still allow for effective arrangements of collective security. If sufficient numbers of states have come together, their collective counter-force may already be enough to deter aggression. Sufficient numbers of states and ‘good enough’ commitment to collective security may also allow military action to be successful. In sum: Collective security … relies upon the expectation that, in any given situation, most states – enough to constitute a preponderate force – will remain loyal to the system and will act upon the belief that their interests require them to join in suppressing a challenge to the order of the system.77

Thus, for collective security to work, a level of ‘good enough’ membership is sufficient. Only universal membership would create the “ideal security system.”78 The League of Nations and the UN fulfilled the ‘good enough’ standard, although to varying degrees. Against the backdrop of these requirements, the definitional characteristics of collective security come into clearer view. Wilson’s desire had been an arrangement that would “provide security for all states, by the action of all states, against all states which might challenge the existing order by the arbitrary unleashing of their power.”79 In the twentieth century such collective security systems were embedded in international organizations. This is captured well in Ernst Haas’s definition, that “collective security is the technique used by inter-governmental organizations to restrain the use of force among the members.”80 In fact, ideally force is not only “restrained” but also deterred. Fearing the “united front of all other states”81 of the system should, in principle, deter any potential aggressor from attacking any state in the system.82 With respect to the evolution of world politics, the ‘invisible hand’ of the classic balance-of-power era and the power oligopoly of the concert system were replaced with “communal commitments”83 to one for all and all for one, with the goal of creating effective deterrence and defense.84 To achieve its primary goal, collective security arrangements threaten to use “preponderate force” but would have available tools for measured responses, such as “concerted diplomatic, economic, and military action,”85 too.

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While collective security systems are directed abstractly against all potential aggressors and not against any particular state,86 alliances are formed with a specific threat in mind. Allies come together because of shared security interests. They are motivated to assume formal obligations as allies as their best option to resist a concrete threat.87 Cooperative security describes a broad and multilateral arrangement, one that “lean[s] towards an accommodative rather than coercive model of internationalism.”88 Collective defense, on the other hand, integrates elements of alliances with collective security and offers a middle course. It turns full collective action against a specific threat and thus generates overwhelming force against a known enemy.89 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an example. For small states, membership in collective security or collective defense groups offers otherwise unobtainable levels of security. The downside for small states is that they become highly security dependent. They are betting on all other states’ full commitment, even when ‘only’ a small state is threatened. As in earlier times, large states could consider sacrificing a small state to avert a large-scale conflict. Plus, membership in a system of collective defense or security prevents small states from using traditional strategies, such as neutrality and bandwagoning. In other words, for small states and their efforts to survive, these collective arrangements are high risk–high reward. Collective security’s promises are matched by ambitious demands on its participants. The League of Nations system’s exactingness90 in a time of upheaval in particular raised the question of whether it suffered from poor implementation of a valid concept, or if the entire idea of collective security was based on false assumptions and was thus naïvely utopian. Much of the critique applies to the UN, too. Realist scholars in particular have criticized the Wilsonian arrangement especially as naïve and utopian.91 In essence, they argue that Wilsonian Internationalism specifically and Liberal Internationalism generally ignore the most fundamental realities of international politics and are thus doomed to fail. In other words, they charge that Liberals construct a world order as it should be without regard for what is actually feasible. Looking at the interwar efforts to reorder international affairs, George F. Kennan saw insurmountable problems all around.92 He called the League system “utopian in its expectations, legalistic in its concept of methodology, moralistic in the demands it seemed to place on others, and self-righteous in the degree of high-mindedness and rectitude it imputed to ourselves.”93 E. H. Carr was more pointed. For him, twenty years of crisis were the unavoidable result of illusionary propositions: “[T]he principles themselves were false and inapplicable.”94

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Morgenthau recognized that “[a]s an ideal, collective security is without flaws,”95 but saw far too many unrealistic assumptions and overoptimistic expectations for proper collective security to pass the test of real world politics.96 In the end and despite the prominence of the League and the innovation of collective security, the international states system remained a balance of power throughout the twentieth century.97 As had been the case for all variations of the states system since 1648,98 twentieth-century world affairs were again driven by balancing and equilibria. In light of the above, world affairs of the 1920s and 1930s emerge as a succession of “broken balances,”99 in which the League of Nations was an innovative way to “secure the European balance of power,”100 or the institutionalization of “the concert of the powers in a modified form.”101 From this perspective, the balance of power was not replaced by the League or its successor, the UN. In more ways than one they were creations of contemporary power politics.102 The twentieth-century system was at a minimum a substantially “revised version of the balance system.”103 With its predecessors, it “share[d] a fundamental preoccupation with the problem of power in international relations, and the basic purpose of providing a system within which that problem may be reduced to manageable proportions.”104 Much the same can be said about the most recent attempt, the UN-centered system of collective security and modern regional arrangements.105 Generally speaking, collective security works in favor of small state security. In the twentieth century, the problem was less the idea and its principles, than their implementation. To be sure, even imperfect arrangements of collective security provide the small state with a significant upgrade of its security and survivability as long as the system overall is ‘good enough.’ With its security guaranteed by a community of states, small state security reaches a level otherwise unobtainable. This picture-perfect vision of a world made safe for all states, large and small, and the revolutionary shift in small state security that collective security entails is captured by Claude: An important implication of this theory was that a collective security system would emancipate small and weak states from the precarious position which they occupied in a balance system. The old system was indicted as one in which small states were treated as pawns at the disposal of the players of the game, means to the end of the great powers. In the operation of that system, small states might be protected or they might be chopped to bits; their fate was dependent upon the convenience, the calculations of self-interest, of the major participants. In contrast, the collective security system was presented as a scheme for guaranteeing the fundamental rights and interests of the weak as well as the strong. Small states would

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be ­enveloped in a protective community, not caught in the machinations of great power rivalries.106

Global governance and collective security system modifiers While the evolution of systems of collective security and arrangements for collective action by states are the core pillars that anchor the extended twentieth century, a number of additional dynamics shaped world politics further. In addition to International Law generally, the hardening of self-determination into proper law and, when combined with nationalism, into a powerful international political force, heavily influenced small states’ chances of survival and proliferation. Expanding restrictions on aggressive war, too, added to an international environment that was becoming increasingly conducive to small state creation. Law, organizations, and courts

The rapid growth of International Law in the twentieth century, and in particular during its second half, is hard to measure, but the fact that between 1951 and 1995 alone, 3,666 new multilateral treaties were signed is a good, first indicator.107 During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, International Public Law has been expanding, and small states remain keen supporters of further advances. As long as legal rules respect sovereign equality, they are prime beneficiaries, because material differences in size and power are reduced and in part negated. As beneficial to the small state was a trend in the twentieth century’s International Law that put increasing restraints on aggressive war, from the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact outlawing war to the UN Charter limiting war to self-defense and properly authorized collective action. Equally important, major international governmental organizations have been an integral component of the growth of International Law. They, too, have been instrumental in restraining power politics through law. In this sense, the League of Nations was the first attempt to “formalize in law the organization of international order.”108 Implicit was the expectation that the institutional legal framework would be continuously advanced by an epistemic community.109 To this day, International Law and major international governmental organizations remain tightly interlinked. Throughout the twentieth century, IGOs grew, in size, number, and relevance.110 Many have been tied to the League or the UN, but others operate independently of those world governing bodies. Nevertheless, as anchors of collective security arrangements, and as incubators for broader internationalist agendas, the League and the UN

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played unique roles in twentieth-century world affairs,111 including supportive roles for small state survival and proliferation. First, there is strength in numbers for small states. Most small states today are classified as such, and at major international fora they constitute a numerical majority. Together, they gain ‘diplomatic power’ through IOs’ multilateral processes,112 and in particular through the equality-based voting used in most international organizations. Moreover, as “parliaments of men,”113 international organizations have been providing prominent diplomatic fora. With its own personnel, infrastructure, and good offices, the League of Nations and the UN have played key roles in dispute resolution. In addition, the existence of permanent missions of member states has opened up new opportunities for diplomacy. Although these advances are not exclusive to the small state, they benefit in particular and disproportionate ways. To begin with, negotiations conducted on a world stage enable them to expose coercion. Small states can name and shame coercive great powers ‘loudly’ and in front of large audiences and thus defend their interests. In addition, an international governmental organization’s own bureaucracy can assist small states, too. The UN in particular, with its large Secretariat-General and its accumulation of wide-ranging expertise, has a record of setting or advancing political agendas. Some of them, such as disarmament, use of force, or decolonization114 are of particular relevance to small state survival. Clive Archer points out that major international governmental organizations incentivize “non-self-governing territories to achieve their independence,”115 because full rights and full access to benefits at major IGOs is generally coupled to membership as sovereign states. Membership rules and participation processes of the League and the UN have also reinforced the principle of equality and contributed to small states’ emancipation.116 Already in 1917, Wilson proclaimed that there should be no “difference between big nations and small, between those that are powerful and those that are weak.”117 To begin with, League membership “gave a formal standing to the smaller states,”118 which countered some of the inequalities in world politics.119 With membership came the privileges of attending, observing, and possibly influencing great power politics. In fact, already in 1919, small states were admitted to the Council of the League of Nations. Admittedly, their emancipation there was incomplete because they were given only non-permanent seats and formed only a minority among great powers.120 The situation did not change much with the creation of the UN in 1945. In the General Assembly, all states, regardless of size, have one vote. Here, small states

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are fully equal. The Security Council, however, is dominated by the vetowielding great powers, and states that are elected to the Council temporarily have no legal mechanism available to veto or to overcome a veto. Here, states are unequal. Clearly, neither in the League nor in the UN have states been truly equal members. However, in comparison to the arrangements of earlier periods, the twentieth-century arrangements constitute a major upgrade in state equality. Small states benefit especially because they are no longer completely excluded and can participate fully in many policy areas. In this sense, small states gained much in terms of equality compared with previous centuries.121 It seems safe to assume that increased transparency and participation are further dynamics that shape the international environment in ways which help small states survive and even proliferate. The overall growth of International Law in the early twentieth century is also mirrored in the emergence of international courts. To the extent that disputes involving small states can be moved to courts, this development benefitted the small state. Disputes would be taken out of their immediate political context and moved to the legal sphere. Whereas in former eras, power and coercion may have shaped disputes, the evolving twentieth-century landscape of International Law began to change the dynamics significantly. Under the rule of law, neither size nor power matter. The PCA and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) reflect contemporary faith in law as part of a peaceful world order. The arbitrational court was created in 1899 and provided the infrastructure for the legal settlement of disputes among states through arbitration.122 In 1919, the intention was to build on the experience with the PCA and enhance the rule of law through a permanent world court.123 The PCIJ became a reality together with the League. The court was housed at The Hague and heard its first case in 1923. The more disputes were handled by courts and through the rule of law, the more legal equality among states became a reality. Better yet, the more disputes were handled by lawyers and judges, the less the dynamics of power and coercion shaped the outcome of disputes. Both dynamics worked in favor of small states in particular. After the Second World War, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) became the successor to the PCIJ. Treaty law grew and customary International Law evolved further. In 1998, the evolution of international criminal law led to the creation of a dedicated court, the International Criminal Court (ICC). International economic law received dedicated and elaborate legal dispute settlement mechanisms with the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in

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1995. In sum, international courts are venues where disputants are heard irrespective of their size and where judgments are made according to law that is built on the principle of legal equality of states. To this day, International Law generally and international adjudication specifically are severely lacking in enforcement. Without proper enforcement of rules, however, International Law is limited as a restraint on power politics. Courts have to rely on disputants’ self-motivation to abide by rulings and accept their obligations. Nevertheless, the world court’s rulings in particular matter. Disregard for the court and its judgments comes at a high political cost. Most certainly, a favorable ruling strengthens the position of a small state in a dispute with a middle or great power. The ICJ’s 1986 decision in “Nicaragua v. United States”124 in favor of the small state is a case in point. Similarly, the case brought by New Zealand against France over the latter’s nuclear testing in the South Pacific125 added to the political pressure France was already facing. In addition, law enforcement is becoming collectivized as the UN-based process requires all of its member states to assist in enforcement.126 If the UN Security Council finds a state to be in breach of International Law, the council may decide on sanctions or even military action. Enforcing International Law and court decisions remains the weakest link of modern International Public Law, but it does not nullify the relevance of international rules for small state safety. And with International Law gaining in reach and strength, small states are becoming increasingly empowered to defend their position against larger states in a dispute. Self-determination, nationalism, and extantism

During the twentieth century, self-determination, the norm that a people are entitled to their own state, evolved rapidly. At the beginning of the century, Wilson’s larger vision of a post-war order gave self-­determination a prominent place. It served two purposes. First, a universal right to selfdetermination was a moral issue. Worldwide, peoples had been dominated by European imperialism and demanded to be liberated. Second, Wilson saw self-determination as an instrument to create a just and lasting peace.127 Only satisfied and justly governed states would be peaceful states. By mid century, the norm was rapidly transitioning into proper law.128 Article 1 of the UN Charter refers to “equal rights and self-­determination of peoples.”129 Soon thereafter, the self-determination became ius cogens, that is, a peremptory legal standard.130 With the onset of massive decolonization in the 1950s, the hardened rule of self-­determination became the key legal argument of colonized peoples’ demand for i­ndependent

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s­tatehood. When it merged with disintegrative nationalism in particular, self-determination became a potent political force. In its essence, the term nationalism describes a deeply held loyalty and devotion of people towards a community that provides them with identification internally as well as externally and a strong sense of belonging.131 While nineteenth-century nationalism had been integrative or “state strengthening” in Europe but “aggressive”132 overseas, it developed into a powerful disintegrative or “state subverting” force in the twentieth century.133 The former had wiped out many small Italian and German states and blocked state creation overseas, whereas the latter became a major factor in small state creation. Statesmen struggled to square the norm of self-determination with nationalism concerning territories with heterogeneous populations. The problem came up immediately in 1919 when borders had to be drawn for new small states in Europe, but some national minorities ended up on the ‘wrong’ side of state borders.134 The problem of restive national minorities within the borders of an established state remains unresolved today.135 Similar problems arise when a right to self-determination clashes with the norm of territorial integrity of states, the principle of existing borders’ permanence, and the axiom of uti possidetis iuris, that is, the continuation of existing borders in cases of state creation. In other words, the road from a claim to self-determination to the establishment of a sovereign state is difficult to navigate and may stall or prevent small state creation. The interaction between self-determination and nationalism was further complicated between the world wars by Fascism and irredentism. In the 1920s and 1930s, the world witnessed the subversion of nationalism by Fascism.136 And repeatedly throughout the twentieth century and up to today, nationalism has developed links with irredentist movements and their territorial claims.137 Both developments undercut the legitimacy of many small states’ autonomous existence. As nationalism developed more and stronger links with the rapidly hardening rule of self-determination, the amalgamation of these two dynamics became a major factor in world politics. Peoples wanting to secede and establish a small state now had the “logic of national liberation”138 on their side. Additionally, once established, small states became beneficiaries of the evolving norm of “extantism,”139 which states that “political independence once granted tends to be persistent.”140 Extantism grew throughout the twentieth century. However, it is unclear whether this norm has now hardened into proper law or whether it remains so-called soft law,141 that is, a standard between normative aspiration and legal rule. In 1919, Wilson saw only a moral ­obligation

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to aid states in ensuring their existence.142 At most, non-military means should be used.143 Later, the formal termination of a state became extremely rare. Today, it has become exceedingly difficult to challenge a state’s right to exist legally.144 Even so-called failing states’ ‘right’ to exist remains unchallenged, adding a further protective layer to struggling small “quasi-states.”145 In sum, the evolution of self-determination, its marriage with particularizing nationalism, and the emergence of extantism have contributed to an international political-legal environment increasingly conducive to small state proliferation and reluctant to accept state death. War, peace, and neutrality

Rigorous limitations on war benefit the small state because it reduces its military weakness. Generally speaking, the more military coercion, aggression, and war are limited politically, legally, or normatively, the  more small state security grows. With the exception of strictly bilateral disputes between two equally small states, the military capabilities  of a small state are rarely sufficient to deter aggression or to self-defend. The law that regulates the conduct of war, ius in bello,146 grew rapidly during the twentieth century, as did ius ad bellum, International Law that regulates when it is legal to resort to arms.147 The 1929 Kellogg– Briand Pact outlawed war for its signatories and advanced the modern version of just war.148 The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials after the Second World War and the evolving international criminal law added significantly to the overall efforts by developing a legal standard for “crimes against the peace.”149 Today, International Law disallows war except for self-defense, collective self-defense, within the context of collective security arrangements, or as law enforcement authorized by the UN Security Council. Whether customary International Law allows for preemptive war remains controversial. The efforts to advance the law that governs warfare between states have been flanked by efforts of the world’s major international organizations. Both the League and the UN have been heavily involved in clarifying and enhancing the legal instruments that limit the legality of resorting to war and the conduct of warfare.150 The UN generally and its International Law Commission in particular have been fora to initiate new International Law. In parallel, the League and the UN with its associated organizations have been active in disarmament efforts.151 After the First World War, the issue of naval disarmament remained high on the agenda. The Cold War, too, saw efforts at arms reduction. Soon after the Second World War, an emerging nuclear arms race presented a new challenge. This resulted in

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one of the UN’s most prominent disarmament efforts: the International Atomic Energy Agency’s attempts to halt nuclear weapons proliferation beyond the nuclear powers recognized in the Non-proliferation Treaty of 1968. The end of the Cold War opened the door for renewed arms reduction efforts. American and Russian arsenals were reduced but two new nuclear weapons states emerged with India and Pakistan, and North Korea made itself into a “quasi-nuclear weapons state.”152 Unfortunately, the twentieth century’s track record of disarmament is not overly impressive. As a result, small state security did not grow much, if at all, through worldwide disarmament. The availability of weapons, from small arms to nuclear devices, has remained a prominent threat to small state survivability throughout the twentieth and well into the twenty-first century. Despite only limited success in global arms reduction, the world has been moving towards the “obsolescence of major war.”153 John Mueller argues that major war, understood as open violent conflict between organized state militaries, is becoming a thing of the past. This is not to say that the world is necessarily peaceful. Nevertheless, he believes a particular type of warfare, the traditional, all-out conflict, is quickly becoming obsolete.154 As Tanisha Fazal points out, the termination of states through conquest also became illegitimate during the later decades of the twentieth century.155 Both developments have been shaping international relations since the Cold War in ways that disqualify traditional war and ‘dis-incentivize’ aggression, and thus enhance small states’ chances of survival. A policy of neutrality has a long history in statecraft and from time to time, small states, too, have found it opportune to claim impartiality and stay out of disputes.156 With the introduction of collective security after the First World War, however, security through neutrality lost much of its attractiveness, not least for small states.157 Collective security seemed to be a much superior option. However, in order to enjoy the benefits of collective security, states had to abandon their policies of neutrality. A state in a system of collective security must commit itself to offering assistance to others, making it “obvious, then, that neutrality and collective security are mutually exclusive.”158 Such a need to choose forced a dilemma onto small states. Abandoning a policy of neutrality in order to join a collective security structure would leave small states particularly vulnerable to aggression if the arrangement failed.159 Therefore, some small states asked for permission to free ride, that is, to be allowed to remain neutral but also join the collective security umbrella of the League of Nations. The League and UN provide for such a ‘loophole’

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through “the non-automatic nature of enforcement measures.”160 It allows small states in particular to claim that their participation in enforcement measures would be minute and of little benefit to the overall endeavor.161 However, as a small state security strategy, neutrality has a mixed record. It depends on a potential aggressor’s readiness to accept the norm.162 Norway’s neutral status, for example, did not protect it from German aggression and occupation in 1940.163 In fact, neutrality’s modern appeal as a noble and promising policy may “lull” states into seeing neutrality as a proper security policy.164 In sum, un-armed neutrality still lacks normative strength and provides only weak protection against an aggressive neighbor, especially for already militarily weak small states. Overall, the twentieth century witnessed shifts and changes that reconfigured the states system in ways much more supportive of the small state. Variations on collective action re-shaped the context of small state security. The further development of International Law and the evolution of norms, custom, and soft law further added to the tolerance of the states system with regard to small state survival and even proliferation. The creation of major international governmental organizations added further layers of protection. As the states system evolved during the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, small states generally found themselves in an increasingly supportive political environment. While old dynamics of power and coercion and of great power domination and arbitrariness persisted, small states benefitted from an increasing number of restraints on power. Quantifying small state survival and proliferation: descriptive statistics Expectations On the basis of the previous explorations of collective security, ­twentieth-century limitations on power, and emerging global governance, it is reasonable to expect the centuries-old decline in small state numbers to have come to an end in the twentieth century. The principle of self-determination and the Cold War era of decolonization in particular lead to an expectation of additions to the total number of small states. Any such small state proliferation would have happened within the context of the twentieth century’s two variations of collective security and two distinct versions of global governance. As a consequence two corresponding and distinct trends in small state survival and proliferation can be expected. Indeed it seems reasonable to expect a mean-

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ingful recovery of small state numbers due to the fact that international affairs during the second half of the twentieth century were dominated by bipolarity, creating the overall stability of a “long peace.”165 Data presentation Figure 13 visualizes the rise of small state numbers in the twentieth century. The data start in 1918 because most of the territorial changes that resulted from the negotiations in Paris were already being implemented at this point. The data range ends in 2016, the most recent data available. After the Paris peace treaties were finally concluded, fifty-five small states and twenty-four larger states existed. The year before the Second World War broke out, fifty small states existed, twice as many as larger states. At the war’s end, the number of small states was the same, but soon afterwards an unprecedented climb began. Between 1945 and 1990, the numbers went from 50 small states to 130, an increase of 160 percent. Because the number of larger states also increased, due to the transformation of a states system geographically centered on Europe to a truly global system, the relationship between small and larger states rose slightly less than the absolute number of small states (the small states index in Figure 13). The 1950s saw a meaningful upswing in state creation of all sizes, but also the beginning of an unprecedented proliferation of small states. A huge jump in the last two years of the decade signaled the start of small state proliferation at a dramatic rate. This continued for fifteen years. In 1973, 106 small states existed. The ratio of small to larger states had recovered significantly as well, and stood at 2.5:1. The rise of the small state continued through the second half of the Cold War. The total number of small states kept rising, albeit at a more modest rate. Similarly, the share of small states in the system went up, approaching 3:1 at the end of the Cold War. As the Cold War became the post-Cold War, a noticeable jump in small state numbers occurred. This can be attributed to the structural and geopolitical changes that were triggered by the fall of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War era started out with 144 small states in 1991. Numbers kept rising slowly until the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade. Since then, the number of small states has stood at 150. During the postCold War period, the mix of small to larger states has remained fairly stable with about three small states for every non-small state.

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Descriptive statistics Figure 14 shows the changes in the number of small states per year. Two observations stand out. First are the three years in which over a dozen small states appeared: 1918, 1960, and 1991. The first instance was the dismembering of the defeated empires at the Paris peace talks. The second case was the pinnacle of decolonization during the Cold War, especially in Africa. The third instance was the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of mostly small states at the former empire’s periphery. Second, Figure 14 pictures the persistence of small state proliferation during the century and in particular the Cold War era. The time of strong and prolonged small state creation matches the Cold War period nicely. From this perspective, the Cold War era gains a further key characteristic and becomes a small state-spawning era. Although the most dramatic rise in small state numbers happened during the Cold War, the process started earlier and continued afterwards. Figures 13 and 14 highlight the increase in the number of small states during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Small state proliferation emerges as a process stretching over nearly three-quarters of a century, already starting in the early 1940s and extending well into the twenty-first century. Interestingly, the graph points towards the remarkable stability in the number of small states during the interwar years. Despite the charge that these years were marked by an extended twenty-year-long crisis,166 and by misguided Wilsonian Internationalism, the international environment appears to have been accommodating enough for small states to survive and for losses to be compensated elsewhere until the system collapsed and the Second World War broke out. In contrast to small state proliferation during the Cold War, the number of larger states grew only slightly, with a few additions happening over the following decades. Much of the rise of large and small states during the Cold War must be put in the context of the geographic expansion of the states system. Geographically speaking, all corners of the world had already been absorbed into the states system, but now decolonization created new states and thus new members of the system of states. By far the most new states were small states, and this phenomenon is readily detectable in Figure 13. In sum, a review of quantitative data on annual total numbers of small states during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries fully confirms the expectations derived from the previous examination of this era’s states system. Still, the magnitude of small state proliferation during the second half of the twentieth century far surpasses initial expectations. In

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short, statistical data strongly confirm the expectation of the twentiethcentury states system as highly conducive to small state creation and survival. The return of the small state: survival and proliferation of the small state in systems of collective security and emerging global governance, 1919–2016 Small states and “The Twenty Years’ Crisis:”167 small state survival at the Paris peace conference and during the interwar years For small state security, the road from the negotiations that ended the First World War to the dawn of the Second World War was marked by hope and anticipation early on but with increasing levels of disappointment and disillusionment over the following two decades. In January 1919, the war parties came together in Paris to formally end the First World War with a peace treaty. The victorious allies would also shape the post-war international political order. Small states played only a marginal role, but the changes and innovations introduced by the victorious great powers had major implications for small state creation and survival over the short and mid term. A good number of developments that were launched in 1919 also had long-term implications for small state proliferation during the century’s later stages. When Germany invaded the small state of Belgium in 1914, breaking  International Law and ignoring Belgian neutrality, British MP Herbert Asquith proclaimed: “We shall never sheathe the sword … until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation.”168 US president Wilson echoed this sentiment and referred repeatedly to “states large and small” when outlining his vision for a post-war world order. Indeed in speeches and proclamations about a post-war order the international community promised the small state new levels of protection. The German “rape of Belgium” seemed to have created an international commitment to small state security. In fact, already in early 1918, before the impending German collapse had become clear, the recovery of Belgium and Serbian independence was a prominent allied demand. Similarly, a revived Poland had to be a viable state and therefore must be given land access to the Baltic Sea.169 The US president’s ‘Wilsonian’ program promised not only restitutive justice, but also nourished hopes among small states in particular for a new, safer world order. Consequently, many small states put their faith in the new League of Nations. Of the organization’s forty-two founding members, twenty-seven were small states; twenty-eight if South Africa is

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included. The following year, another six small states joined, and three additional ones became League members in 1921. Initially, most of Latin America, with the notable exception of Mexico, joined the League. However, a good number of them dropped out during the following years,170 foreshadowing the later loss of faith in the League-centered international security arrangement. At least initially, however, “the small states were among the most fervent supporters of collective security.”171 Small states’ enthusiasm for a comprehensive peace program and for a major international organization as the center of gravity for a collective security is easy enough to understand. Looking back, their enthusiasm appears unjustified. Rothstein claims that, ultimately, League-based collective security’s “defects submerged its virtues.”172 He points out that many small states put much – in his eyes too much – faith in the promises of a radical shift in international affairs. Soon “The Slump in Idealism” set in.173 During the war, Wilson’s vision was rarely challenged. He occupied the moral high ground and America’s contributions to the war were crucial. However, as soon as the German challenge was beaten back, the opposition to Wilson’s program asserted itself. Wilson fought hard to get at least the core elements of his post-war peace plan accepted by his allies.174 However, there were limits. His allies’ “prevailing and dominant sentiment” turned to opposition to a supranational authority and an ambitious peace charter.175 Thus the reality of Wilsonianism would be far less than its promises. An early warning sign for small states was their continued exclusion from decision making. The world’s great powers again monopolized the role of reordering world affairs. As a century before, they asked themselves: “Should the small and weak nations be accorded equality of representation with the great empires and Powers?”176 And again, they answered in the negative. Great power domination was hidden behind superficial levels of small state participation during the Paris peace talks. To be sure, “[d] elegates from the smaller countries were free to address the more elite groups [of great and middle powers] about their various concerns.”177 Also, delegates from new states (e.g. Czechoslovakia) and from “the smaller or more distant states” (e.g. Siam) were received.178 However, representatives from places that wanted to use the occasion to draw the world’s attention to their blocked independence, such as Korea, were not included.179 For all practical purposes, small states’ demand to be an “equal part in making the peace”180 was ignored. Small states were excluded for three larger reasons. First, it was assumed that small states would not negotiate for the common good but would pursue narrow, mostly territorial interests. Second, small

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states were often seen as objects to be used for larger goals. Small state creation or survival remained subordinated to the strategic interests of great powers and systemic needs. Third, state size was still equated with importance. According to this logic, small states did not meet the standards of proper statehood, which in turn legitimized the denial of participation at the peace negotiations. In fact, this line of thinking extended to the refusal of membership in the League of Nations. Thus Liechtenstein and other ‘states of secondary importance’ were denied membership in the League.181 The third argument in particular harked back to previous centuries’ practice. As late as the 1920s and 1930s, many observers of international affairs were dissatisfied with the existence of very small units such as Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and the Free City of Danzig.182 Many Austrians t­hemselves believed that their small state was also too small to be viable over the long term.183 And despite its centuries-long history, the victorious allies considered Montenegro too small to make political and economic sense, even as a small state.184 Clearly, small states were not considered favorably by the dominant great powers, despite earlier rhetoric. Similarly ambivalent was the implementation of self-determination early in the twentieth century. At the end of the First World War, the principle of self-determination was implemented only partially. As a result, small state creation was limited. However, the application of self-­determination and the creation of small states were instrumental in facilitating the deliberate disassembly of defeated empires and the retreat of revolutionary Russia. The Ottoman Empire had been declining since the nineteenth century. In 1922 it was finally abolished and replaced one year later by the state of Turkey. During its decline, many small states emerged and filled the vacuum left behind by the retreating major power. Czarist Russia collapsed and became Communist during the late 1910s and early 1920s. While it looked inward, new small states emerged at its periphery, most notably the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Last but not least, the Austria-Hungarian Empire was disassembled at Paris. Its territories were taken over by small states, and even the Austrian heartland emerged as a small state. Overall, the reduction or break-up of great powers by a process of small state creation facilitated massive changes in the system, as major powers disappeared in ways that did not undermine the overall stability of the system. The creation of small states along the peripheries of former imperial great powers smoothed the way for the transition of the states system from its pre-First World War structure to the post-war alignment. In short, small state creation facilitated imperial

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decline. In this particular context, small states were indeed desirable new actors, worthy of support and even protection. However, the victorious allies felt no compulsion to give up their own empires. Quite the opposite: they were keenly interested in taking over German, Austrian-Hungarian, and Ottoman colonial territories. Their greed and their fear of system-wide instability triggered by renewed competition over liberated territories stalled universal decolonization after the war.185 Moreover, overseas colonies were not considered fit for statehood. They were to be administered by great power members of the League as “mandates”186 (and later as “trusteeships” by major UN members). The transfer of colonies from defeated imperial powers to the authorities of victorious great powers prevented the emergence of many more small states at this point in time. In sum, the immediate post-First World War period saw only a halfhearted implementation of self-determination. The result was small state creation but on a limited scale only. Thus the international environment in the late 1910s was only partially conducive to small state creation. However, even partial implementation of self-determination set a precedent for territories still under colonial or mandate control. Still, it would take decades until external pressures and internal uprisings created a force strong enough to overcome outright colonization. For two decades following the treaties of Paris, dynamics of the old balance of power and the new collective security arrangement played themselves out, and both shaped the story of small state survival during these twenty years. As in previous centuries, the dynamics of power politics and power balancing generated strong layers of protection for small states. Rivalries reasserted themselves quickly and, as in the past, small states could benefit. In this fashion, Germany presented itself as the champion of the small state immediately after the war in which it had lost all its own colonies. With nothing to lose it positioned itself as a strong supporter of colonies’ right to self-­determination.187 It lent its support to the establishment of new small states in the Baltic region,188 and made Lithuanian, Estonian, and Latvian “subsequent statehood … the ‘artificial result’ of Great Power geopolitics.”189 While power politics continued to shape international politics, the newly founded League of Nations and collective security grew quickly into major factors in global affairs, too. In this sense, the establishment of the international organization “was a victory for the smaller states,”190 because it put further constraints on power politics and thus upgraded their security.191 Wilson himself described the League’s purpose as “affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”192 And initially, the

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League seemed to live up to its promise. Its dispute resolution apparatus proved its value when the League involved itself in a number of cases and scored meaningful successes.193 And each success helped the larger cause to replace great power coercion with peaceful dispute settlement. In this fashion, the League’s involvement prevented great power domination of disputes and crises along the lines of the nineteenth-century concert system. To be sure, the League was no neutral arbitrator, but it was ‘more neutral’ than the past era’s oligarchy of great powers. Similarly, the League’s diplomats were not bound by strict rules, but neither were they at liberty to impose arbitrary settlements in the manner of nineteenth-century great power statesmen. Finally, the League’s purpose was to help ensure “political independence” of all states194 – a far cry from the concert states’ credo. Clearly, the introduction of the League of Nations into international politics and the role it took on were instrumental in re-shaping the political environment to the benefit of the small state. Before disputes could escalate, they were systematically channeled towards diplomatic negotiations. In 1921, the brewing conflict of the two small states Finland and Sweden over the Åland Islands was settled peacefully through diplomatic intervention of the League of Nations. After much wrangling, the League came out in favor of the status quo and the islands remained under Finnish control. The settlement may not have solved all problems regarding a Finnish island with a majority Swedish population, but it defused the immediate conflict and allowed the bilateral hostilities to ebb while the status quo took roots and gained acceptance.195 Admittedly, the conflict had been between two small states, and great power interests were not immediately involved, probably making success easier to achieve in this case. Nevertheless, small states in particular could take faith in the fact that the League of Nations system had worked well enough the first time it had been put in action. The League scored similar successes in the 1925 Greek–Bulgarian border dispute196 and the territorial disputes between Albania and Yugoslavia, between Poland and Germany over Upper Silesia, and between Colombia and Peru.197 In these cases, too, the League was reasonably successful in shaping acceptable settlements.198 It appears that when only small states were involved the organization’s dispute resolution instruments were adequate. Even if the League’s involvement did not guarantee a fair or just solution, small states had found a stage to present their case on the basis of equality. Unfortunately, the League’s dispute settlement mechanisms suffered from inconsistent usage and the strength of post-war collective security was affected. They were not applied rigorously, consistently, and against all offenders. Disputes that involved small states only were handled dif-

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ferently from those which involved major powers. This made it clear that the League’s collective security apparatus was not an equalizer of power differences. It did not compensate for small states’ weaknesses vis-à-vis major powers. In essence, concerns over great power balances overruled principled collective security efforts. The 1923 Corfu Crisis pitted the small state of Greece against the great power Italy. In retaliation for the assassination of an Italian diplomat, Rome ordered the invasion of Corfu.199 When Greece raised the issue formally at the League of Nations, it had many other small states behind it, all of which demanded and expected a strong reaction in opposition to Italy’s flagrant aggression.200 Here was a clear case where the League’s collective security should protect the territorial integrity of a small state from military coercion. However, instead of the entire collective backing the besieged small state, the demands of the balance of power were reasserted. France moved to support Italy because Paris prioritized keeping Italy aligned with the anti-German coalition. For France, the balance of power overruled the principle of collective security. Only when Great Britain decided to pressure Italy did Rome accept a revised League of Nations Council decision that ordered Italy to withdraw in return for financial compensation from Greece. In the end, the crisis was indeed resolved diplomatically.201 Despite its peaceful outcome, however, the Corfu Crisis produced rather mixed results with respect to small state security. On the one hand, the aggression of a major power against a small state was thwarted through League-centered diplomacy. On the other hand, however, article 16 did not generate a unified front of collective defenders. Greek sovereignty was restored but not in the unified fashion for which small states in particular had hoped. Finally, the small state was ordered to pay compensation to an aggressive great power. In the final analysis, the way the crisis unfolded and the way it was settled clearly showed the severe limitations of the League’s collective security arrangement. During the Polish–Lithuanian War, 1920–27, the League’s inability to counter aggression against a small state showed itself more than once. When a territorial conflict between the small state Lithuania and the middle power Poland over a stretch of land around the city of Vilnia remained unresolved despite League efforts, Poland took control of the area in 1920 and enforced its hold militarily.202 Even though Lithuania’s initial claim was not watertight by any stretch of the imagination, the League’s decision to accept the Polish position in 1922 created the impression of the international organization caving in. For many small states, the organization now appeared as unreliable and an insufficient protection against more powerful states. In this case, principled collec-

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tive protection was weighed against larger, overriding concerns by the League and especially its Council. A decision in favor of small Lithuania would have immediately raised the issue of enforcement against a larger state. In contrast, Poland was considered critical to containing Germany. The conflict lingered for years and created another crisis. Again, the League was able to prevent a further escalation but unable to settle the dispute. In other words, “although the League may have prevented war in 1927, it did not establish real peace.”203 Most problematic for the small state was the growing realization that the League was willing to look the other way, even in cases of coercion and the use of military force. The promise of collective security did not materialize. During the 1920s, it was becoming clear that League of Nationscentered collective security successfully protected small states in disputes with their equals. Here, order could be restored easily, especially when the great powers were in agreement.204 If, however, larger states were involved, the dynamics changed and collective security gave way to traditional power political dynamics. Overall, the League did not generate the level of protection for which small states had hoped, instead succumbing to traditional power political dynamics. However, the existence of small states was not challenged. Although their sovereignty was violated repeatedly and collective security turned out to be utterly unreliable, they survived, and thus the League was indeed instrumental in small state survival during the 1920s. For small states, the international environment had become safer, but certainly not to the extent they had hoped. Disillusioned by the League’s performance, small states started to backpedal and asked for exceptions. Sweden suggested that small states should be allowed to delay their participation in any sanctions regime. Others demanded that small states should be permitted to decide for themselves if breaches of International Law had occurred and if sanctions were warranted. Some claimed that smallness should allow for indifference. They argued that the size of small states made them ineffective in discharging their responsibility under the League’s system of collective security. In other words, military weakness canceled obligations and the responsibility to join collective efforts.205 Unfortunately, small states’ attempts to justify free riding were not only “schizophrenic,”206 but also undermined further an already highly stressed security system. In this sense, they contributed to the failure of a system in which that they initially put much faith. During the 1930s, the erosion of the League-centered security arrangement accelerated. As it stumbled towards its final collapse in the later 1930s, small state security now deteriorated rapidly. Whereas

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the League had scored successes in settling disputes during the 1920s, it failed in its role as peacekeeper in the 1930s. The League’s dwindling effectiveness came to the fore during the Chaco War. In 1928 a dispute between the two small states of Bolivia and Paraguay, over territories suspected of being oil rich, became hostile, escalating into the so-called Chaco War in 1932. The League of Nations resorted to a whole spectrum of dispute resolution instruments, but none paid off. Sanctions and embargoes failed, due to poor and uncommitted enforcement of the land-locked countries’ neighbors. League conciliation and mediation efforts failed because the warring parties did not submit to the organization’s authority. The fighting came to an end only when Paraguay secured victory on the battlefield in 1935. It took another three years for the conclusion of a truce, which was heavily tilted in Paraguay’s favor.207 The League of Nations had failed to halt the fighting and was unable to mediate a fair settlement. Not even in a case of two small states fighting each other far away from the main geopolitical centers of gravity of the time was the League able to interject itself effectively. For small states looking to enhance their security, the League was becoming irrelevant. Ethiopia’s fall to Italy starting in 1935 is the most vivid illustration of the utter failure of the League-centered collective security system.208 Critically, Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie painted Ethiopia’s plight as representative of all small states’ fate in a time of collapsing collective security. Stating his compelling case for collective security action against Italian aggression, he referred to Ethiopia twice as the “defender of the cause of small states.”209 In essence, Selassie made the defense of Ethiopia the litmus test for the international community and its willingness to implement collective security even when it collided with great powers’ national interests and their power politics calculations. He stated: It is collective security: it is the very existence of the League of Nations. It is the confidence that each State is to place in international treaties. It is the value of promises made to small States that their integrity and their independence shall be respected and ensured. It is the principle of the equality of States on the one hand, or otherwise the obligation laid upon small Powers to accept the bonds of vassalship. In a word, it is international morality that is at stake. Have the signatures appended to a Treaty value only in so far as the signatory Powers have a personal, direct and immediate interest involved?210

Initially, the League of Nations had decided on sanctions, but without true commitment they turned out to be an ineffective response to Italy’s full-blown military aggression.211 France and Britain would have

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been critical but refused to push back against Italy. Instead they began appeasing Italy and abandoning Ethiopia. French and British interests did not align with their obligations under the League’s collective security mechanism, and both Paris and London prioritized the national interest over collective security.212 It was becoming clear that League-based collective security was fundamentally undermined by the great powers’ lack of principled commitment. They still defined their national interest narrowly and not in the context of collective safety. In parallel, their thinking about national security remained fixed on national power and international balancing of power. Only if these priorities were satisfied would they tend to collective security obligations. After all, “[t]he League existed in a world that still worshiped national sovereignty,”213 and in this world, “[e]ach state was to remain the judge” of when or how to act “in the fulfillment of its obligations.”214 Without principled commitment of the major actors in the League, its collective security mechanism had to fail. What earlier cases of the 1920s and early 1930s had already intimated, now became fact: the League’s system of collective security collapsed. Selassie, and with him many true small states, “had placed all my hopes in the execution of these undertakings”215 of collective security for all states, large and small. For years, his “confidence in the League was absolute.”216 But Ethiopian and other small states’ willing dependence was shattered now and it exposed them again to the old dilemma of their inability to provide for their own security.217 In response to the League’s abandonment of Ethiopia, the small state of Guatemala left the League. The South American state was quick to see the complete failure of interwar collective security, and justified its withdrawal by stating that “events have demonstrated the impossibility of putting into practice the high ideals aimed at when the League was founded.”218 The League’s ultimate failure was followed by its abandonment. The promise of collective security for small states had indeed proven to be “utopian.”219 The League’s critical debilitation in security matters was showcased one final time in 1939, at the brink of the Second World War. That year, the League expelled the Soviet Union after its invasion of Finland. However, the Nordic small state was left to defend itself, without the League generating collective security action. Left to its own devices, Finland agreed to harsh peace terms in 1940.220 To be sure, the League had come together one last time in opposition to Soviet aggression, but collective action fell far short of actual collective security. The League’s promise of collective security for all states, large and small, was by now completely hollowed out. *  *  *

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When actually implemented and put to the test, interwar collective security proved to be little more than the sum of its parts.221 Without full commitment of all members to the principles of collective security and in light of the great powers’ resistance to go against their national interests, a united front to deter or counter aggression could not be guaranteed. The situation was not helped by the unwillingness of the League’s Secretary-General Eric Drummond to take on difficult issues, hoping to avoid the open display of the organization’s limitations.222 Only in cases where the interests of the League’s major powers aligned did collective security prove to be a meaningful protector of small state sovereignty. What little protection the League of Nations had offered had evaporated by the early 1930s. Now, small states were not only left disillusioned but again highly exposed to external security threats. Unsurprisingly, they were among the early victims of the League’s collapse. In 1937, the German take-over of small Austria – which had been explicitly ­prohibited by the Versailles Treaty of 1919 – was left unchallenged. A year later, Czechoslovakia’s territory and sovereignty were sacrificed in desperate efforts to appease Germany and prevent general war. Small states and the evolution of International Law into a limitation of power

The most visible advancement in International Law of this period was the creation of a world court. Building on the experience with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the new Permanent Court of International Justice was set up at The Hague, where it became active in 1922. Its judges were selected by the League of Nations. The election process included the Assembly and thus gave small states some say on the choice of justices.223 Overall, however, any major influence of small states was limited by the great powers. In article 14 of the League’s Charter, the court is authorized “to hear and determine any dispute of an international character which the parties thereto submit to it” and to give advisory opinions upon request.224 However, the proposal to give the court compulsory jurisdiction faced much opposition.225 The US and Great Britain in particular were vocal about their unwillingness to allow an international court to claim jurisdiction without the consent of all parties in a dispute.226 Great powers generally felt they had little to gain from a court that could severely limit the benefits of superior power. Their attitude showcased “the traditional relationship between the possession of power by a state and its reluctance to accept the processes of arbitral justice.”227 Much broader than the question of the world court’s jurisdiction was the issue of enforcement in International Law generally speaking. The lack of effective enforcement mechanisms was particularly relevant for small

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states, because in disputes they had to rely on the other side’s willingness to abide by legal rules. If a great power was party to the dispute, the small state could lose out even if it had the law on its side. This was particularly relevant with respect to the emerging legal restraints on the law governing entry into war. Ethiopia might have had the law on its side in 1935, but without a proper enforcement mechanism of International Law the African state could only appeal to other states to come to its aid. States did not feel legally responsible or morally obligated to step in on Ethiopia’s behalf. As a result, Italy’s breach of law remained unopposed and unpunished. In this area, International Law ‘decayed’ during the 1930s.228 At the same time, and despite the lack of enforcement, International Law did slowly grow into a meaningful “limitation of national power.”229 During the early twentieth century, it amassed breadth and depth at critical levels, and now went beyond law which only regulated state interaction. Even though it failed to halt Italian, Japanese, and German aggression starting in the 1930s, it framed state aggression as a breach of law and thus assisted in the assembly of an opposing alliance. Critically, the evolution in International Law here set the basis for the treatment of these states as aggressors and for the charge of its leaders under international criminal law later in the century. To be sure, these developments did not immediately translate into protection of small states and their sovereignty. In this sense, International Law remained too weak to be an effective restraint on power. However, the more the law grew, the more its standards hardened; and the more respect International Law gained, the more it grew into an actual restraint on power. And the legal developments of the interwar years at least established the foundation for further evolution. During the twentieth century, the resort to war became increasingly ­constrained. In fact, Wilson had justified US fighting in the First World War as a war “to end all wars.”230 In a number of countries, including the US, pacifist movements emerged. The horrors of industrial-age warfare experienced during the world war were still fresh in the memory. If these developments came to fruition, small states would be huge beneficiaries. War is the ultimate test of strength, and limitations and restraints on war would compensate much of small states’ military weaknesses. Although the resort to war was to be limited by League of Nations rules,231 starting and conducting a war did not yet amount to a breach of law. Only in 1928 was war finally made illegal. At least in the legal sphere did the so-called Kellogg–Briand Pact232 mark a milestone. The pact established a distinction between aggressive versus just war233 and was thus compatible with defensive arrangements and collective

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security. At first glance, collective security coupled with the illegality of aggressive war enhanced small state security. However, as mentioned above, International Law lacked strong enforcement mechanisms, and so did the legal prohibition of war. Neither the principle of collective security on its own, nor legal prescription alone would be enough to end war. Both needed committed enforcement. Without it, the legal prohibition had little practical value. In this sense, the treaty reflected a contemporary “tendency to exaggerate the significance of agreements and to ignore their substance.”234 In light of their experience with the League of Nations, small states were initially skeptical about another ambitious project. Of the initial fifteen signatories of the Kellogg–Briand Pact, only five were small states. However, for the small state there was little to lose but much to gain. Thus, when it entered into force the following year, thirty small states were party to a treaty that counted forty-six signatories in total. In the final analysis and despite small states warming up to the treaty, the legal prohibition of war did not enhance small state security in a noticeable fashion. During the 1920s and into the 1930s, small states were promised security at levels that turned out to be unrealistic. An alternative approach to a more peaceful world was disarmament treaties. Since the League provided security now, states could safely disarm, the reasoning went. In other words, if the security dilemma could be addressed by the League’s collective security system, disarmament would logically follow.235 At the very least, robust collective security should allow for large-scale disarmament across the globe. Any serious arms reduction of great and middle powers had the potential to upgrade small state security significantly because it would significantly reduce the threat of being overpowered militarily. The imposed large-scale disarmament of the defeated powers in the Paris peace treaties was balanced by a voluntary commitment of the victorious allies (with the exception of the US) to disarm. A disarmament conference was held from 1932 to 1934. However, it was dominated by traditional power concerns and threat perceptions. France feared the reemergence of a German threat and resisted meaningful disarmament. In response, Germany threatened to rearm beyond the limitations imposed in the Versailles Treaty. When Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, it also ended its participation in disarmament talks. The subsequent breakdown of the conference was further proof of the major powers’ inability or unwillingness to make progress in international disarmament.236 With the League, statesmen of the interwar era had the instruments at their disposal to make world

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affairs more peaceful. However, commitment to Wilson’s legacy ran only skin deep237 and national security concerns routinely beat out disarmament proposals. Moreover, each state reserved the right to interpret its obligations in the League system independently.238 Major powers were not ready to re-conceptualize their national security within the larger context of collective security. Instead, they looked at their armies and navies to provide security.239 In light of the lack of progress, small states became increasingly concerned. With diminishing faith in the League and its promise of collective security, many of them, especially in Europe, decided that substantial national armed forces were needed.240 Their choice appeared validated when Finland’s army was able to defend the country’s sovereignty against the Soviet Union in the Finnish War.241 Much to the dismay of small states, neither a treaty outlawing aggressive war nor the talk about disarmament amounted to much. Legal provisions on war and armaments did not enhance small states’ security environment in a noticeable way during the interwar years, so small states kept looking for alternatives. In principle, collective security is superior to neutrality as a security strategy for small states. Since together they are in many ways incompatible, small states had to choose. Many opted for collective security, allowing Quincy Wright, writing in the 1940s, to speak of an abatement in small states choosing neutrality.242 However, a closer look reveals that the actual development during the interwar era was much less clear-cut than an abstract argument would suggest, and was much less evident than Wright’s claim. While some small states such as Belgium indeed switched from neutrality to collective security, others, including Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, did not. Collective security was untested, whereas neutrality was a known quantity. The former had impressive potential to safeguard small states, to be sure, but only the latter had an actual track record. As a result, many small states hesitated while they kept evaluating which course to take. In fact, a good number of small states kept their neutrality but also joined the League, which they rationalized as necessary to accommodate their unique vulnerabilities and weaknesses. In this fashion, they hoped to slip under the umbrella of collective security and protect themselves further with neutrality. When the League began to fall apart, many small states revived their neutrality policies with a sense of urgency.243 In light of the apparent return of unbridled power politics, neutrality returned to the fore. With the writing on the wall, Finland declared itself neutral in 1935, Belgium

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reinstated its neutrality in 1936, and the Baltic States looked for safety as neutral small states in 1938–39. Unfortunately, the international political environment of the late 1930s was not conducive to neutrality as a survival strategy. The combination of neutrality and collective security did not add strength to small state security, evidenced by the fact that the neutral states that were lost during the Second World War had also been members of the League of Nations. Neither did Great Britain, France or the US show the capabilities or willingness to effectively deter Fascist aggression.244 And totalitarian regimes, whether Fascist or Communist, did not respect neutrality.245 On balance, neutrality does not seem to have made much of a difference to small state security. Switzerland escaped German expansion over the entire continent of Europe, but Belgium did not. In Scandinavia, Sweden managed to stay neutral and independent, but neutrality did not save Finland from Soviet aggression. Small state creation? Self-determination vs. League of Nations mandates

To all practical purposes, President Wilson’s promise of self-­determination applied first and foremost to potential small states.246 In his Fourteen Points speech of 1918, he spoke specifically about the need to “restore” Belgium, the necessary “evacuation” of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, the “erection” of a Polish state, and the “opportunity of autonomous development” of “nationalities which are now under Turkish rule” and of the “peoples of Austria-Hungary.”247 And truth be told, when the war ended a dozen small states emerged. They emerged out of the dismantled Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, czarist Russia, and imperial Germany.248 Unfortunately, the principled implementation of self-­determination was lacking. As a norm, self-determination is not in any way limited to falling empires and colonial possessions of defeated states. In principle, it applies equally to all, including the victors of 1918 and their colonies. The end of “the age of empire”249 then had the potential for state creation on a massive scale. Against this standard, however, small state creation after the First World War was underwhelming. A number of factors combined to severely constrain small state ­creation. First was the problem of complexity. At Paris, diplomats and numerous experts struggled to balance the principle of self-­determination with the economic and political needs of new states, territorial claims as ancient lands, ethnic identities, and often inconsistent borderlines and fiercely contested territories.250 Second, no consensus existed regarding how high the principle of self-determination should rank on a list of interests, norms, and ambitions. Worse still, self-determination did not imply equality. Wilson himself tempered self-determination with a paternalistic view of great power obligations.251 “He was more concerned

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always with the duties of the strong than with the rights of the weak.”252 This attitude was manifested in the League of Nations mandate system and the handling of the colonial question.253 To be sure, Wilson was not alone in this. In fact, his allies were much more ambitious and saw the mandate system as an instrument to advance their colonial ­ambitions,254 making the international organization in effect “an instrument of empire.”255 Consequently, the European allies Britain, France, and Italy initially intended to absorb German and Ottoman colonies into their own empires.256 Instead, a mandate system was created under the umbrella of the League. This prevented the straightforward transfer of colonies from the defeated to the victorious states, but gave the latter full administrative control.257 In this fashion, the transition of imperial territories to small states was effectively blocked. The treatment of colonies revealed the great powers’ ambivalence about self-determination and their persistence in seeing the world through traditional power lenses. Already during the First World War, several peoples had been promised statehood. But more often than not this was motivated by great powers thinking strategically and geopolitically, and not by principled commitment to self-determination. The 1917 Balfour Declaration and its promise of a “Jewish National Home” was mostly about checking an Ottoman–German threat to Egypt258 and securing the support of Jews in the US and Russia for the allied side.259 In a similar fashion, promises made and hopes raised among Arab groups about self-determination and statehood quickly fell victim to geopolitics, and the maneuvering and deal making of European great powers.260 All in all, the vast potential self-determination held for small state creation did not translate into actual numbers. Only a dozen small states emerged, and another four small states joined the states system during the following interwar years. From a regional perspective, selfdetermination had its most significant impact in eastern Europe, where the Hapsburgian, Russian, and Ottoman empires dissolved and small states emerged. Beyond this region, self-determination was held back by the persistence of competitive empires and the transfer of colonies into the League’s mandate system. During the first half of the twentieth century, self-determination was too weak and too strongly opposed for it to trigger small state creation on a truly large scale. At the end of the 1920s, the security environment for the small state deteriorated dramatically. The League and its collective security apparatus entered a steep decline.261 The arrangement’s “crumbling” became the “end of illusions”262 and with it, “The Twilight of Internationalism.”263

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The world of the late 1920s and the 1930s turned out to be the exact opposite of what Wilson had envisioned.264 Instead, Europe in particular witnessed hope turning to disillusionment, and soon, disaster.265 As developments of the 1920s showed, Wilsonianism was “a doctrine which was very easy to state and very difficult to apply.”266 The form in which it was actualized was a political compromise and in its short life span the League of Nations system “obviously failed to fulfill entirely the liberal peace program.”267 In hindsight, there can be little doubt that in 1919 Wilsonian Internationalism was too much, too soon. It was too revolutionary for the contemporary world and in particular for a Europe steeped in war, conflict, and the balance-of-power tradition.268 Great powers’ return to realpolitik269 went hand in hand with the rapid abandonment of the League as the central security mechanism.270 The international community failed to stop Japanese expansion onto the Asian mainland, Italian aggression in Africa, and German military occupation in central and eastern Europe. Although the League of Nations was formally dissolved only in April 1946, it had been comatose even before the outbreak of the Second World War. Small and weak states in particular suffered from these changes: “No period was as unattractive for Small Powers as the one which existed in the 1930s.”271 There can be no doubt of the time’s “unattractiveness,” especially for small states struggling to survive. However, small state death was limited. In fact, the recoveries and creations of small states immediately after the First World War were more significant, and the losses during the 1930s were less dramatic than the collapse of the Wilsonian project may suggest. For the small state, the interwar years were no doubt “unattractive,” but they did not turn out to be nearly as bad as previous periods in history. Small state proliferation during the Cold War era As the Second World War came to a close, the Cold War was already emerging. Its roots go back to the early 1940s and possibly even to the interwar years, but it hardened into a bilateral stalemate between the Soviet Union and the US during the late 1940s.272 The Cold War came to an end during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War era’s characteristic division into two blocs vanished. The era was bookended by two major actions of collective defense: the Korean War of 1950–53 and the Gulf War of 1990–91. These temporal markers will be used to frame the following investigation. Much of the states system of 1919 was recycled in the mid 1940s. The emerging post-Second World War order again featured a major inter-

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national organization and a collective security apparatus. Consistency also stems from continuation of deeply embedded power politics in international relations. Continuities and steady evolution kept the system conducive to small state survival. However, the development of the twentieth-century international states system reached critical mass at about mid century, creating a tipping point for small state creation. A system that had allowed modest increases in the number of small states now turned into a highly conducive environment that fostered small state proliferation at unprecedented levels. The creation of the United Nations and the persistent promise of collective security

In October 1945, the League of Nations was succeeded by the United Nations.273 The similarities of the two organizations are striking and range from their basic structures to their main institutions and the tasks entrusted to them. In this sense, the UN clearly follows in the tradition of the League.274 At the same time, the League’s failure had been so fundamental that its revitalization was neither practical nor advisable, especially since the stigma of failure would also be transferred. A fresh start and a new and different organization were needed.275 In the end, the creation of the UN represents a break with the League’s concrete inheritance and the acknowledgment of its conceptual legacy.276 With consensus in principle, the question became what to keep and what to change. Here, most critical for the small state was the balance to be struck between state equality and great power domination. This abstract debate found its concrete form in the fight over the distribution of decision-making power between the Security Council, permanently occupied by the great powers, and the General Assembly, where all states shared equal representation and rights regardless of size. The victorious four great powers, later joined by France, insisted on an organization which reflected the realities of power. Small states and middle powers desired the full implementation of equality.277 However, even “great pressure from the small nations to amend the voting procedure adopted at Yalta”278 by America, Soviet Russia, and Great Britain did not bear fruit. All attempts to restrict the veto power of the Security Council’s great powers failed. Only the five great powers of the time became permanent Security Council members and thus the only states entrusted with the veto right. Article 27 of the Charter allows them to block all non-procedural decisions of the Security Council. During the Cold War, well over 200 vetoes were issued,279 demonstrating that the permanent members made liberal use of their prerogative. In fact, the hard power was copied into the structure of the UN. As a result, emerging great powers, middle powers, and certainly small states found themselves in an organization

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that mirrored the distribution of power and weakness outside it. At the same time, the right to veto any action of the UN Security Council also meant that non-great powers allied with a veto-holding state could count on protection from collective action.280 Time and again, America vetoed anti-Israeli resolutions. Similarly, North Korea benefitted from China’s willingness to block strong Security Council resolutions in response to Pyongyang’s “military-diplomatic campaigns.”281 Despite their mixed experience with the League, small states flocked to the UN in large numbers. Fifty original members signed the UN Charter in 1945, with Poland added later but as an original signatory. Of the fifty-one states, twenty-eight are considered small states here, or 55 percent of all original members. And of fifty small states worldwide in 1947, only eighteen were not yet UN members. It seems that a large international non-governmental organization and the promise of embedded worldwide collective security still held significant appeal for many small states. With small states holding a majority at the UN, there was a new chance for their voice to become louder. The volume was amplified as more and more small states emerged and then joined the UN. In the late 1960s especially, waves of decolonization led to the proliferation of small states, which in turn impacted the organization’s membership mix and with it the character of the UN.282 With the UN, a collective security arrangement was re-created, too,283 and it was put to the test right away, when North Korea invaded the South in 1950. The US led a UN-authorized counter-force consisting of sixteen UN member states’ military forces. The fighting ended only in 1953.284 In the end, military aggression was stopped and the small state of South Korea was successfully defended by a UN-authorized collective security action. Admittedly, America’s response had little to do with the individual small state. After all, the US Secretary of State had failed to include the Korean Peninsula in the US “defense perimeter” in East Asia in a public speech only six months before the North Korean attack.285 In its pre-1950 state, South Korea was not critical to the defensive screen the US was setting up. However, the invasion by North Korea in June changed the dynamics. First, it was interpreted as another case of Communist expansionism, which forced the US hand. Second, it was an attack on the recent efforts to reestablish a world order. And again, the US felt forced to respond. Mindful of how the League had been abandoned during the 1930s, US president Harry S. Truman justified America’s role in the new United Nations collective action thus: “We can’t let the UN down.”286 The decisiveness of the response and its conformity with the UN collective security arrangement showcased how collective security

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could indeed bring in a superpower in defense of order and, by extension, small state sovereignty. Unfortunately, bipolarity and the veto right blocked UN-based collective security after the campaign in Korea until the end of the Cold War, when major structural shifts fundamentally changed the dynamics of international politics once more. Overall, the record of collective security during the Cold War is less impressive than the arrangement’s abstract promises would suggest, and in this sense it mirrors the interwar years. Neither then nor during the Cold War did institutionalized collective security overcome power politics, and individual state power remained the key variable.287 With power and power politics still dominant, collective security arrangements and their umbrella organizations were unable to liberate the small state from the traditional threat of unbridled power politics. For  the Cold War era, the collective action in defense of South Korea and the  liberation of Kuwait are exceptions to the rule. It is no coincidence that they also mark the beginning and the end of the Cold War and its bipolar paralysis of UN-centered collective security. During the Cold War, neither the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 nor America’s invasion of Panama a decade later triggered UN-led collective security counteractions. Thus it stands to reason that the small state proliferation that did happen during the Cold War was not the result of UN-sponsored collective security but other structural features of the Cold War, primarily bipolarity. Small state security in the Cold War environment: bipolarity, ideology, and nuclear weapons

The Cold War states system fundamentally re-shaped the external environment for small states. The system was characterized first and foremost by bipolarity. Soon after the fighting ended in Europe and Asia in 1945, the wartime alliance of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the US fell apart, and states began to realign themselves. A fundamental division among states worldwide emerged. It had two poles, the Soviet Union and the US, as unchallengeable superpowers. Around these two polar powers, most states were collected into either the Eastern or the Western camp.288 This Cold War bipolarity worked through power balancing, making it a bipolar equilibrium.289 In this way, the basic dynamics of balancing remained active. The Cold War’s bipolar system was at least as competitive as earlier systems, and, as before, great power competition could work to the advantage of small state security. The dramatic rise in small states during the Cold War demonstrates this very well. When decolonization triggered state creation on a large scale, small states found two superpowers competing for them and ready to protect them.

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The Cold War’s bipolar balance created a remarkable period of stability. Until the very end, the basic formula of the East–West cold conflict stayed in place. Waltz argues that bipolarity and stability in fact go hand in hand.290 Raymond Aron is skeptical about the rigidness in Waltz’s assertion but concedes that Cold War bipolarity led to the prevention of open superpower war.291 The price for this, however, was an abundance of proxy wars. Cold War stability did not translate into a stable and universal peace, creating a challenging environment for small states in regions not tightly integrated into either superpower’s sphere of influence. Small states, from the Caribbean to Africa, and from the Middle and Far East, were heavily involved in wars fueled and often directed by the superpowers. Many of the conflicts were not typical inter-state wars, but internal and civil wars, which were immensely destabilizing for small states in particular. In numerous cases, both sides in a conflict, be it internal or external, had access to massive amounts of military supplies and to modern weaponry by tapping into the resources of the competing superpowers. The struggle between the Sandinistas and the Contras over control of Nicaragua during the 1980s is a prominent example from the Western Hemisphere in which the former benefitted from support of the Eastern bloc and the latter was funded largely by the US. Similarly, the resources the Afghan Mujahedeen received from the US is a central Asian example of superpower involvement in small states’ internal affairs for supposedly geostrategic and ideological purposes. Despite an abundance of altruistic rhetoric on both sides, superpower support was not motivated by moral concerns but by the logic of power politics, geostrategic interests, and ideological concerns. At the same time, it was primarily these dynamics that offered small states vast resources to enhance their security against external aggression. Thus Greece received large amounts of American aid in the early years of the Cold War when its civil war opened the door for the extension of the Soviet sphere. Under the so-called Truman Doctrine of 1947, the US aided the pro-Western Greek government to hold the line in the superpowers’ global competition.292 US thinking was global and strategic, but the superpowers’ rivalry created space for the small state of Greece to access aid which helped it re-stabilize and protect its independence. These supportive dynamics did not apply, however, to small states in the immediate zones of interest of the superpowers, where competitive interference by the other superpower carried the danger of massively undermining system stability. Thus the Western side did not intervene in the Hungarian uprising in 1956 or in the Czechoslovakian revolt of the so-called Prague Spring in 1968 – both in Eastern Europe and thus the Soviet sphere.

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The Soviet Union’s leadership publicized the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of 1968 which stated that (small) Communist states, especially in Eastern Europe, were not allowed to defect and must not turn to Western states for support. The superpower’s geostrategic concerns and its ideological commitment meant that the defection of even a small state was unacceptable. Small state sovereignty came second, after the logic of Cold War bipolarity. By the same token, the US would not allow Soviet interference in the areas it considered critical, first and foremost the Western Hemisphere and the west of Europe. When the Soviet Union mounted a challenge by arming Cuba with missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in 1962, a major crisis erupted. The confrontation came to a close only when the Soviet Union withdrew its rockets. Under new leadership, Moscow would refrain from openly challenging its rival superpower in the Western Hemisphere. When the US invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, for example, Moscow did not directly challenge Washington. The case of Grenada is important in another way as well. The rigor of Cold War bipolarity prevented the challenge of a superpower from within its own bloc. Despite Grenada’s membership in The Commonwealth, British concerns were ignored in Washington, with London’s reservations tempered by broader, world-political concerns. Then-prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, lamented that the invasion of Grenada “will be seen as intervention by a western country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation, however unattractive its regime.”293 However, her real concern was not with the blatant violation of an aligned small state’s sovereignty but with the effect of the American action on domestic politics in Great Britain. At the time, a new round in the nuclear arms race was in full swing and she was facing stiff opposition to increased deployment of US weapons to Great Britain.294 The larger dynamics of Cold War politics easily overrode concerns over small state sovereignty. In the end, neither the opposing superpower nor the former colonizer would protect the small state from the US. While the Cold War’s bipolarity undermined small state sovereignty and independence on more than one occasion, it also opened up pathways for small states to apply leverage and extract superpower protection. In essence, small states could play one side off against the other. This was particularly true when the small state’s geographic location made it particularly attractive to either superpower. Iceland, located at a key military-strategic location for NATO, became a member without a military to contribute. Similarly, Cuba was backed by the Soviet Union because of the island state’s location in close proximity to the American mainland. Overall, the bipolar nature of the Cold War played an important role in small state survival. And during the Cold War’s third and

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fourth decades, bipolarity-driven protection of small states would grow into a catalyst for small state proliferation.295 In parallel to the UN-centered global collective security system, the US and the Soviet Union sponsored the creation of collective defense arrangements with significant small state membership. As members, ­ small states enjoyed the protection of their collective against aggression coming from any member of the opposing group. In the key European battleground of the Cold War in particular, small states enjoyed a high degree of protection from membership in either NATO or the Warsaw Pact. In 1949 NATO was created as a US-led transatlantic collective defense system. Under article 5 of the NATO treaty the signatories consider an outside attack on any of them as an aggression against all.296 Strictly speaking, a great power would consider an attack on a small member state as an attack on itself. For example, military aggression against Iceland would have equaled an attack on the US homeland. Whether all NATO members, including the US, would have responded to an aggression immediately and with full force was not tested during the Cold War. The strategic debates over “Massive Retaliation,” “Mutually Assured Destruction,” and “Flexible Response” illustrate the difficulties involved. Nevertheless, collective defense also has a deterrence dimension, and it appears that the US and NATO deterred aggression, as did the Soviet pact. Six years after NATO had been created, the “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance Between the People’s Republic of Albania, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, the Rumanian People’s Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Czechoslovak Republic” (Warsaw Pact) created an opposing Soviet-led system of collective defense. In the Warsaw Pact, article  4 bound all parties to “come to the assistance of the state or states attacked with all such means as it deems necessary, including armed force.”297 Similarly to NATO, all members of the Warsaw Pact were committed to treat an attack on, for example, small Czechoslovakia, as the equivalent to an attack on any other or all other members. The survival of small states organized in either of these collective defense organizations was quasi guaranteed. Comparatively minor provocations, such as violations of national airspace or territorial waters, and military espionage, had to be tolerated. But open military aggression against even the smallest member of NATO (Luxembourg) or the Warsaw Pact (Albania) would most certainly have triggered all-out collective defense. *  *  *

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The Cold War was further shaped by the ideological conflict between Liberalism and Communism. In the context of bipolarity, the similar ideological identity of states in each bloc helped control defection.298 At the same time, since the domestic political order implied belonging to and aligning with the respective ideological camp, major changes in the domestic order of states were hugely problematic. The Truman Doctrine was issued in response to a perceived threat of the small state Greece (and larger Turkey) switching to the Communist bloc. Around the same time, polling in the small North Atlantic island state of Iceland caused much concern in the US because of its strong Socialist party. The Soviet Union was at least equally concerned with ideology, and it imposed Communism in Eastern Europe, leaving little if any room for national variations. Attempts at breaking free from Moscow’s control in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were violently suppressed by Soviet military forces. In geostrategically important areas in particular, small state sovereignty was severely constrained by the Cold War’s ideological dynamic, without, however, undermining states’ security. In this international environment, where ideology was deeply intertwined with international politics, small states that were in a position to be flexible and were willing to consider shifting their allegiance could trade their choice of political-economic ideology for protection and support. In this ideologically charged global competition of two superpower blocs, small states mattered disproportionally because their desertion from one side, whether through defection or coercion, amounted to a gain for the other side.299 The logic of an ideological zero-sum game meant that small states gained leverage.300 In the aftermath of the Second World War, Austria was able to use the fear that it might move towards the Communist bloc as leverage to gain concessions from the Western allies.301 In the early 1970s, the small Mediterranean island state of Malta was able to receive significant concessions from the UK in particular as it positioned itself between the two major blocs, their associated military alliances, and the NonAlignment Movement during the years following its formal independence in 1964.302 Similarly, the small state Iceland managed to become a founding member of NATO without an indigenous army and only token air and naval assets. The Cold War was also characterized by the rapid build-up of vast arsenals of nuclear weapons. Although nuclear weapons were not exclusive to the two superpowers, only they had weapons in numbers large enough to contemplate challenging each other. The proliferation of nuclear weapons beyond members of the UN Security Council was curbed by

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treaty (the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty) and the superpowers’ extension of their nuclear umbrella over the territories of their allies. For small states, the nuclear armament of super- and great powers did not change their particular security concerns significantly because the larger states already possessed overwhelming power, including c­ onventional military power. However, the appearance of nuclear armed small states had the potential to create new dynamics. The appeal of nuclear weapons to small states’ defense forces is obvious: they would multiply the indigenous defensive capabilities and establish an independent deterrent. Israel is assumed to have acquired nuclear capabilities during the 1960s, which allowed a small state in a hostile region to use nuclear deterrence to enhance its security significantly. However, given Jewish history and the Holocaust, Middle Eastern geopolitics, and its particular relationship with the US, Israel must be considered an exceptional case. The same is true for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. North Korea laid the groundwork for its own nuclear forces during the Cold War. However, its leaders have committed the state to a unique blend of militarization and isolation, which has created unique security challenges in return. With respect to the vast majority of small states, however, acquiring native nuclear capabilities was not a viable option for financial, technological, and political reasons. The growth of International Law and small state security

Despite the egregious war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Second World War, the post-war international order did not elevate International Law to a truly prominent role in international affairs. Political considerations still trumped the law in major disputes.303 The authority reserved for the Security Council was a reflection of the lack of ambition.304 The international order would not be a truly legal order. In situations of critical importance, superpowers and great powers would not be restrained by legal standards. While International Law did not leap forward by any stretch of the imagination, it progressed nonetheless. After all, the breaches of the law during the 1930s had been so blatant and the expansion of stateorganized crime and brutality so radical that “[i]n 1945, international law had to be re-established.”305 There was much urgency to critically reconsider the proper place and necessary strength of International Law after fifty million people were killed in the war and six million murdered in the Holocaust. The result was a hardening of existing rules and the establishment of new norms. The UN itself became heavily involved in the task of continuously advancing international legal standards such as “refining principles against the use of force; delegitimizing Western colo-

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nialism … [and] … urging disarmament.”306 Many resolutions of the General Assembly expressed legal ambitions and emerging law, so-called soft law.307 Most prominent were “[t]he fundamental concepts of human rights and self-determination of peoples” that would soon “transform” International Law308 and international affairs. The slow but steady widening and deepening of International Law during the Cold War was beneficial to small state survival and proliferation because much of it worked as a restraint on power politics. In this fashion, international laws became critical elements of an international environment that became highly conducive to small state proliferation during the Cold War. Emerging new states “discovered additional protection against the strong in norms, International Law, and international institutions.”309 In this fashion, International Law co-shaped an increasingly accommodating environment for small state creation. Generally speaking, progress in International Law tends to benefit the small state because International Law is based on the assumption of the sovereign equality of states. In many ways, modern International Law provides rules that defend states’ sovereign equality from international politics. The norm of state equality negates size differences in the legal realm. The underlying question of whether statehood requires a certain minimum size remains unanswered; an initiative in the 1970s to develop a legal distinction between small states and “‘normal’” states did not succeed.310 In light of the large and still growing number of small states overall, the failure of these efforts is not surprising. Because International Law does not make a distinction between states based on their size, small states can challenge great powers successfully even in situations when diplomatically, politically, and militarily the deck is stacked against them. In the legal sphere, states are neither small nor large. In 1984–86 the small Central American state of Nicaragua received a favorable judgment when it brought a case against the US to the International Court of Justice. Nicaragua claimed that the US was involved in military efforts to topple its government. The ruling found the US guilty of a breach of International Law and obligated the superpower to pay small Nicaragua 2.4 billion dollars.311 The decision highlighted the role the court could play in international affairs and the unchanged need for a strong world court in the twentieth century. In recognition of this, the court had been firmly integrated into the UN Charter. Article 92 makes the court the organization’s “principal judicial organ; “the following article makes all UN members “ipso facto  parties to the Statute of the International Court of Justice; “the statute is annexed and “forms an integral part of the present Charter.”312

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The establishment of a strong judicial institution benefitted the small state in its struggle to protect itself from coercion and aggression. With the help of the court, breaches of the law can be addressed, but problems remain. Most critically, if the parties to a dispute refuse to accept the court’s judgment, implementation is immediately compromised. The enforcement of judgments is highly problematic. The court has no and the international community few instruments at its disposal to enforce the court’s verdict. However, even if judgments are difficult to enforce, a ruling by a respectable court in favor of a small state puts pressure on the opposite party and in this way may facilitate dispute resolution before it can escalate. In fact, the mere existence of a court and the possibility of a case being brought may deter states from maneuvers that could very well have serious legal consequences. Such ‘legal deterrence’ adds a layer of protection and in this way contributed to a legal environment that grew more supportive of small state security and survival as the Cold War progressed. Small states have been involved in cases judged by the world court from the beginning. The small state Albania was party to a dispute with the United Kingdom in the so-called Corfu Channel case in 1947. Over the following decades, many disputes involved only small states, and many disputes were over border issues, the latest ending with a 2014 ruling over maritime delimitation between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. In contrast, cases heard by the ICJ that involve great or middle powers are comparatively rare. Notable exceptions are the case the small state New Zealand brought against France over nuclear testing in the Pacific (1973–74) and the case of Nicaragua v. the United States of America mentioned above. In these cases, a small state was able to challenge a great power’s policy, receive a favorable ruling, and counter the application of power. To be sure, in these two cases at least International Law and the possibility of a case brought against them did not deter either of the major powers. However, it strengthened the position of the small state parties against future aggression and forced the major powers to reset their policies. However, two major problems remain unresolved. The issue of weak  enforcement mechanisms in International Law has already been discussed. A second problem relates to both parties in a dispute accepting the court’s jurisdiction. A case cannot be forced upon a state ­unwilling to have it decided by the ICJ.313 Thus no state can be forced to submit to the ICJ, unless the state has accepted compulsory jurisdiction in advance. Clearly, this cuts deeply into the legal support small states can gain from the world court. Yugoslavia’s case against the United States over US bombing raids during the Kosovo War of 1998–99 was rejected. The

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court could not establish jurisdiction314 because the US had withdrawn from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986. With an increasing number of states opting out of compulsory jurisdiction, the international court has become increasingly limited in restraining the use of force. This is of particular concern to the small state because they lack leverage to force larger states to agree to a judicial settlement. On balance, the world court has been a meaningful instrument for the resolution of disputes between like-minded parties, large and small. But as a restraint on power politics, the record is uneven. On the one hand, small states have won some favorable judgments and also benefitted from increased reluctance of larger states to initiate actions that may be challenged in an international court. On the other hand, the ICJ lost a good deal of its prominence during the Cold War, and the court’s cases were limited to disputes that did not fundamentally threaten small state survival. Thus the court’s relevance for small state survival and ­proliferation has been largely indirect and worked through a general hardening of the rule of law in international affairs. The UN’s legal framework and the obligations of its collective security arrangement did not prohibit neutrality,315 which remained a viable security strategy for a good number of small states during the Cold War. Its attractiveness was, however, challenged by particular features of the Cold War. The superpowers’ hostilities, their nuclear forces, and the likelihood of a superpower confrontation turning into a global conflict challenged the concept of securing a state and protecting its society by refusing to take sides. In this sense, the Cold War “accentuated” the traditional problems of neutrality.316 As a consequence, the number of neutral small states post-1945 is significantly smaller than their numbers before the Second World War. The problem of neutrality’s effectiveness in case of an actual superpower conflict aside, neutrality provided an option to side-step the political conflict between East and West. Nuclear deterrence was global and thus universal, which allowed states to adopt neutrality and feel secure by free riding on nuclear deterrence. This then provided room for diplomatic maneuvers and for securing concessions from either of the two opposing blocs.317 The appeal of neutrality in a world system which offered opportunities for security free riding incentivized the adoption of neutrality.318 It also encouraged a general permissibility in law and practice to accommodate neutral states. Thus neutrality and UN-based collective security were considered compatible, and as a consequence neutrality of UN member states was accepted during the Korean War. UN membership

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was kept open to neutral states, and when Austria joined in 1955 it was not requested to abandon its neutral status.319 In response to the particular circumstances, small states developed different variations of neutrality-centered national security strategies. Costa Rica dissolved its military force in 1949 and based national security on the norm of neutrality and its geographic location in the US-dominated Western Hemisphere. Swiss and Swedish neutrality during the Cold War was paired with national militaries that were designed solely for territorial self-defense. The Vatican City’s territorial sovereignty is secured by an informal understanding with Italy. Neutrality did not guarantee safety from aggression, though. During the Vietnam War, the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos did not prevent outside interference and military aggression. Starting in 1969, Cambodia was heavily bombed by the US fighting against North Vietnamese forces. However, in both Southeast Asian cases, the nature of their neutrality must be questioned. Although Laos claimed to be neutral, North Vietnam was heavily involved in Laotian political affairs and had a significant military presence on the ground. Cambodia, too was sucked into the Vietnam conflict, allowing the US National Security Advisor at the time, Henry Kissinger, to claim that Cambodian neutrality ended when the small state failed to resist the control of large tracts of Cambodian land by North Vietnamese forces.320 In both cases, outside military forces chose to ignore claims of neutrality. North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was critical to supply Communist forces in the South, went through Laos and Cambodia. Because it was so important to the North Vietnamese war effort, the US felt justified in bombing Laotian and Cambodian territory in its struggle to defeat North Vietnam militarily. Clearly, with major military actors locked in a major conflict, the claim to neutrality alone did not protect the Laotian and Cambodian small states from interference and aggression. Neither small state was able or willing to protect its territory from outside forces. During the Cold War, neutrality kept its allure, especially for the small state, but it never became a reliable security strategy for small states unless it was aligned with additional protective features. The Cold War kept the peace between the two superpowers and their associated Western and Eastern blocs. In this sense, the Cold War was indeed a “long peace,”321 and its particular peacefulness was a substantial factor in small state survival, especially in Europe. In fact, war between democracies seemed to disappear, a phenomenon captured well by modern Liberal Democratic Peace Theory.322 To be sure, a democratic form of government does not guarantee a small state its survival. Even if

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a democratic small state is fairly safe from other democracies, it remains unprotected from aggression by non-democratic states. Along similar lines, it has been claimed that war became out of bounds for all those states that considered themselves to be part of a community of states.323This is not to say that the world became truly peaceful. However, military conflict, directly between major actors, ceased to be a viable option soon after the Second World War. A robust description and explanation is provided by Mueller.324 Similarly, Gelb detects a “declining utility of military power” during the Cold War caused largely by the changes in the nature of state power that followed the build-up of vast nuclear arsenals.325 However, Mueller is not without his critics.326 Hendrik Spruyt does support the observation, but provides an alternative explanation, when he claims that growth in the strength of norms lies behind a diminishment of open war between states.327 Whether major inter-state war will remain unlikely and “obsolete” is debatable since world history has seen similar trends before, only to witness their unfortunate reversal later.328 Still, as a description of Cold War affairs, the “waning of major war” is accurate. The phenomenon, whatever its exact causes, contributed its share to an international environment that was increasingly supportive of small state survival and more and more conducive to small state proliferation. Decolonization and small state proliferation

In the aftermath of the Second World War, self-determination allied with  nationalism and fueled demands for statehood of communities worldwide. In the vast majority of cases, the Cold War era’s type of nationalism came in the form of state-subverting, disintegrative nationalism.329 After more than a decade of resistance against Belgian authorities and guerrilla fighting against Belgian military forces, Mozambique finally won its independence in 1975. Here, as well as in many other cases, “[n]ationalism had made the weak better able to resist the strong.”330 With few exceptions, nationalism reinforced particularistic demands and translated quickly into small state creation as a key goal of decolonization. The result was an unprecedented wave of small state creation during the Cold War. Between 1945 and 1990, eighty small states were added to the international states system. This stunning proliferation took place in a states system that featured a matured tolerance of selfdetermined small states. A set of circumstances had been growing since the interwar years but did not develop its full strength until well into the Cold War era. Self-determination was a hardening norm and statesubverting nationalism a political factor rapidly growing in relevance. Both dynamics extended the developments of the previous half-century.

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Together with the unsustainability of European colonial empires, these factors led to an avalanche of small state creation that started in the second decade of the Cold War. These dynamics gained further strength from superpower rivalry and each side’s interpretation of Cold War politics as a zero-sum game. From the superpower perspective, a gain for one side meant a loss for the other side. Such thinking further energized anti-colonialism as both superpowers were trying to undermine the position and strength of the other by supporting opposing independence movements. The goal was to weaken the other bloc. The tactic was the creation of states modeled on their own political system.331 This policy of “competitive decolonization,”332 it has been argued, was still being pursued in the late 1980s, when the signs of an impending break-up of the Soviet Empire were becoming clearer and more frequent.333 Thus the proliferation of small states became fueled in large part by the competition between the two superpowers and their desire to fortify or enlarge their geostrategic positions. In the process of decolonization, the UN often assumed the role of a midwife. The organization was the global stage for anti-colonial demands, a catalyst for decolonization efforts in many ways, and in many cases a vehicle to fuel and drive the struggle for decolonization, as well as a foster home for newly created states. This dynamic then fed on itself. The more former colonies joined the UN as states, mostly small states, the more the make-up and with it the spirit of the UN, especially at the General Assembly, progressed.334 It is hardly surprising that former colonies would support colonies’ right to self-determination and statehood. The UN had inherited the mandate system from its predecessor, the League of Nations, and continued the program, re-labeled as the “International Trusteeship System.”335 As before, economically advanced Western states and Japan were put in charge of the “progressive development towards self-government or independence”336 of formerly dependent territories and ex-colonies. A good number of small states emerged, but only after decades of foreign oversight, the last one being Palau, which gained independence in 1994. However, the UN-sponsored trusteeship system suffered from its overly idealistic vision of statementorship and the reality that many trustees harbored persistent colonial attitudes. South Africa’s apartheid regime, for example, treated Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) as a colony. Small Namibia gained independence in 1990 only after decades of anti-colonial guerrilla fighting. Worse still, many colonized territories remained fully outside the UN trusteeship arrangement. With the trusteeship system following

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in the footsteps of the mandate system, the territories entrusted to it remained limited to those colonized by the states defeated in 1918 and 1945. The colonies of Belgium, France, The Netherlands, the US, and the United Kingdom remained outside the trusteeship system. Without at least flanking support through the UN, these colonies were disadvantaged in their efforts to gain independence. Nevertheless, the UN played an important role in the global drive towards decolonization outside the boundaries of the trusteeship system as well. General Assembly debates, votes, and resolutions helped to delegitimize the ‘ownership’ of remaining colonial possessions and put pressure on the colonizers. More generally, the UN provided a stage for raising issues openly and shaming colonial powers publicly, but also for closed-door diplomacy. The large meetings at the UN and its General Assembly sessions could also be used to garner support for independence movements and form anti-colonial alliances.337 The UN was equally instrumental in offering face-saving exits for colonial powers that had tired of their efforts to hold on to their colonial possessions. To be sure, Indonesia has never been a small state, but its case is exemplary here. Indonesia’s emergence from Dutch colonial  rule in the late 1940s was facilitated in good measure by the role the UN played. It allowed The Netherlands to keep the impression of responding to pleas from the world community and not to US demands, and thus to withdraw with its self-image intact.338 Similarly, the UN was able to provide at least minimal structure to the otherwise  often unruly and violent process of state creation. In 1947 Great Britain returned the Palestine mandate it had accepted from the League in 1922 to the UN. The creation of a unified Arab-Jewish state was failing.339 Only an Israeli small state emerged, and the creation of a post-Palestine mandate Arab state failed. The resulting conflict remains unresolved, but UN involvement at least at times ameliorated the hostile stand-off. Unfortunately for the small state, on more than one occasion the UN would ignore self-determination and fail to support state creation. The case of the conflicting Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir, for example, was taken on by the UN with much hesitation and caution. In essence, most statesmen at the UN viewed the conflict as a bilateral border conflict and not as a case of self-determination.340 To this day, the territorial dispute remains unresolved and calls for Kashmiri statehood are ignored.341 The majority of ex-colonies had to fight for their independence. Their struggles were often painfully long, highly violent, and in most cases deeply ideological. They were, however, flanked by an increasingly sym-

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pathetic “world public opinion.”342 National independence movements gained strength from a shifting international viewpoint and the belief that more room has to be made “in the community of nations for entities like Dominica or the Maldives or Andorra.”343 Small state proliferation thus took place at a time when the denial of their statehood was fundamentally challenged by moral convictions, too. Once a new small state had been established, extantism increased its chances of survival. After the creation of a new state, the international community did not challenge its borders. Re-drawing of a new small state’s borders was not expected, and created a situation quite dissimilar from 1919 and the victorious allies’ one-sided sponsorship of decolonization and their readiness to re-draw territorial boundaries liberally. During the Cold War’s era of decolonization, a norm of permanently fixed borders took root and extended to new states. A former colony’s boundaries were accepted as newly created small state boundaries. This added a major degree of security to the small state during a difficult time of transition into full-fledged statehood.344 However, not all trends associated with decolonization and small state proliferation worked in favor of small state creation. World opinion and the early Cold War zeitgeist were not uniformly in favor of small state proliferation. Prominent thinkers and political leaders voiced their skepticism. For Morgenthau, the recovery of small states during the 1950s had already gone too far and the “logic of national liberation must stop at some point.”345 The contemporary perception of small states as “irritants in international relations”346 and their undesirability are reflected in such remarks. UN Secretary-General U Thant, who led the organization during the heyday of decolonization, expressed his skepticism about the newly emerging small states’ capability of meeting their obligations as UN members.347 During his tenure, the application for UN membership by The Gambia and the Maldives rekindled an earlier debate about whether membership should be denied to particularly small states.348 Both states were admitted to the UN without significant opposition on 21 September 1965,349 but the episode illustrates the persistent skepticism regarding small states as actors in world affairs even as they proliferated across the globe. For many statesmen at the time, small state proliferation amounted to “Balkanization,”350 which they associated with instability and petty disputes undermining regional arrangements and potentially international order. When Biafra seceded from Nigeria in 1967, it triggered fears of further fragmentation and thus regional destabilization.351 Consequently, large states from both blocs and both superpowers lent their support to Nigeria, making sure that the secession was nullified

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two years later. In addition, newly created small states also faced persistent skepticism regarding their viability. The perception of the decolonization era’s new small states was one of economically, governmentally, and militarily unviable statelets.352 These concerns easily translated into policy. When in 1964 Tanganyika negotiated a merger with Zanzibar, which had gained independence only one year earlier, Zanzibar’s longterm viability as a small island state off the coast of eastern Africa figured prominently.353 Even friendly overtures from Communist bloc states did not overcome the Communist government’s own concerns about their own small state’s prospects for survival and prosperity. Safety and economic development seemed unlikely as a small African island state. Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew had similar fears when the city was expelled from Malaysia in 1965. As an independent city-state, Singapore faced massive economic challenges, domestic instability and ethnic unrest, and, not least, the dangers of forceful reintegration into Malaysia or military aggression from Indonesia. A sovereign state of Singapore seemed an unworkable proposition given its hostile environment and its socio-economic challenges. Lee would end up as one of Singapore’s key ‘founding fathers’ and the city-state’s unquestioned pace-setter over the following decades. But back in 1965 he expressed his pessimism about Singapore’s future after its expulsion when he stated: “For me it is a moment of anguish because all my life … I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories.”354 Against the background of many new small states’ colonial histories, their support for the establishment of a New International Economic Order does not surprise. And for a while, the demand further shaped the process of decolonization.355 In the emerging ‘Third World’ of underdeveloped states in particular, small states were created as sovereign units but with weak post-colonial economies. And before long, poorly developed national economics added to small states’ vulnerabilities. As it turned out, small states were particularly vulnerable to external economic shocks to their narrow domestic economic bases.356 Many colonies could call on the norm of self-determination and achieve national independence but had to struggle to overcome economic dependency.357 Despite its many remaining challenges, however, decolonization during the Cold War was the key variable of the period’s large-scale proliferation of small states. By finally breaking the chains of European colonialism, small state creation on a large scale could happen, and it played out in a highly accommodating international environment. *  *  *

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In sum, the Cold War system with its frozen bipolar structure underlying a reformed collective security system, together with decolonization and the “waning of major war” formed a systemic framework in which small states could proliferate at unprecedented rates. Never before had the world witnessed small state births on this scale and over such a long time. In fact, the Cold War era reversed a centuries-old trend of small state disappearance. Small state proliferation occurred throughout the entire Cold War era and can be attributed to a particularly accommodating states system. The small state in the post-Cold War order Soon after taking over as leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on a major reform program. Glasnost and perestroika were intended to reform the Communist system and make it competitive with the West’s Liberalism. However, his efforts triggered the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. The Soviet Union’s official termination on 25 December 1991 serves as a convenient marker for the end of the Cold War, recognizing that in reality the end of the Cold War was a process that had already begun in the 1980s. During this process, many small states emerged or were re-created. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and The Ukraine were (re-)established. Of these thirteen states, only Kazakhstan and The Ukraine are not small states. As had been the case at the beginning of the twentieth century and during the decolonization period of the Cold War, the termination of empires proceeded through small state creation. Without the imposed stability of the Cold War, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia disintegrated into Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. Starting in 1991, strong national identities reasserted themselves and small nation-states were established, unfortunately at the cost of extended warfare and largescale crimes against humanity. In both cases, large multi-ethnic states broke apart, largely along historical borderlines. Old nationalities and identities reasserted themselves. In this sense, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Socialist Yugoslavia marked the beginning of a new era even more than the end of the Cold War. With the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the international environment, which had been conducive to small state proliferation, changed overnight as well. The UN and its system of related organizations kept their role, and self-determination remained a strong international norm. On the one hand the two states’ deaths led to the creation of a number of small states. On the other hand,

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the shifts from bipolarity to unipolarity and then to pluripolarity suggested new security challenges to the small state. Small states in shifting post-Cold War states systems

When the Cold War came to its surprisingly sudden end, the states system began a process of transition from bipolarity to unipolarity and onto the uneven pluripolar system of the early twenty-first century. As in the past, great powers lay claim to particular prerogatives in maintaining order, although the acceptance of great power leadership ­continues to be challenged and undermined.358 In any case, the structural shift from superpower bipolarity during the Cold War to the postCold War system with a sole remaining superpower showed again how the states system’s structure is shaped first and foremost by great- and superpowers. The historic nature of the end of the Cold War has been famously captured by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis.359 Michael Mandelbaum makes the same argument as a historian.360 Both interpret the fall of the Soviet Union as the ultimate defeat of Communism by Liberalism, but Mandelbaum explores the links to Wilsonian Internationalism more deeply. For him, the end of the Cold War is “Wilson Victorious,”361 which underscores the twentieth century’s political-philosophical continuity. When the Soviet Union suddenly dropped out of the superpower conflict, the US itself proclaimed the beginning of a New World Order along Wilsonian Internationalist lines.362 Structurally, however, the critical shift was from bipolarity to unipolarity, even if only for a world-­historical moment,363 before the dynamic of “imperial overstretch”364 led the US to overreach. In response to terrorist attacks in 2001, the US started two wars but failed to win them decisively. The war efforts put an enormous burden on US finances. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a shift back to multi- or plurilateralism was evident,365 with a rapidly rising China and an increasingly assertive Russia. The changes in polarity impacted the small states’ position in world politics and their security. During the Cold War, the deeply antagonistic nature of superpower relations had given small states the opportunity to use their allegiance as leverage to extract concessions and in particular security assurances. Now, in the post-Cold War unipolar system, that particular lever was lost. For some small states, their superpower protector had vanished; for others, the sole remaining superpower no longer depended on keeping a cohesive bloc together. In this fashion, many Caribbean small states, for example, had to accept a sudden “loss of leverage as Cold War allies of the US.”366

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Without Soviet protection, Cuba had to reconfigure its security stance. Against this background, Cuba’s willingness to reengage with the US and the ensuing US–Cuban rapprochement of the early 2010s emerges as the result of repositioning of the small state of Cuba in light of the fundamental structural changes of the post-Cold War states system. In the absence of an alternative, Cuba is carefully exploring a bandwagoning strategy. To be sure, such strategies caused by the unipolar system have not been limited to Caribbean small states. The post-Cold War policies of Jordan are a similar example of a small state recognizing and reacting to the absence of a balancing great power through which security could otherwise be obtained.367 It has been pointed out above how instrumental the UN system broadly understood was in small state creation and survival during the decolonization period. At the end of the Cold War and with respect to the demise of the Soviet system in particular, the US assumed a similar role but for quite different reasons. In an extension of Cold War thinking of US relations as a bipolar conflict, the US favored the weakening of its opponent through territorial losses. It supported the creation of small states because it would be the tail end of the fall of the Soviet Empire. When in 1991 the American administration was faced with the possibility of secessions from the Russian Federation, Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney favored an aggressive approach. He favored the implementation of Deputy National Security Advisor Robert M. Gates’s idea to establish US consulates in these new territories as quickly as possible, and thus encourage and support the process of the break-up of the Soviet Empire. For the Secretary, the advantage would be clear: US influence and power would multiply if the Soviet Empire dissolved and small states emerged in its stead. As President George H.W. Bush remembers the situation: [Brent] Scowcroft observed that Cheney’s premise was that we would be dealing with fifteen or sixteen independent countries. “The voluntary breakup of the Soviet Union is in our interest,” argued Cheney. “If it’s voluntary association, it will happen. If democracy fails, we’re better off if they’re small.”368

Even though US consulates were not established immediately, the episode showcases how even at the Cold War’s very end, small state creation could benefit from highly competitive powers in a bipolar system. The US was not in favor of small state proliferation per se, but it was highly sensitive to opportunities to weaken its opposing superpower. The dynamics of a zero-sum game imply that small state creation at the expense of the opposing side is highly desirable. Indeed the creation of small states to fill the vacuum left behind by a retreating or defeated

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empire had been a time-tested method to manage the associated changes at the structural level of international politics. The UN and its system of collective security remained untouched and transitioned into the post-Cold War. In fact, the post-Cold War began with a massive collective security effort in defense of a small state. In 1990 Iraq used oil drilling by its southern neighbor Kuwait to incite a dispute, which Baghdad then used to justify the military invasion and occupation of small Kuwait. The absorption of a small state by a larger one did not pose a fundamental challenge to any of the structural political features of the international states system. However, Iraqi access to additional oil income would have significant implications on the regional order. The occupation posed an even bigger threat to a world economy hugely dependent on the steady flow of oil and gas from the Middle East. Equally problematic was the standard the invasion would set. Iraq’s aggression ran afoul of all the moral and legal principles that were supposed to shape the new, post-Cold War international order. And as the sole remaining superpower, the US felt called upon to tackle these challenges. To be sure, the US had major geostrategic interests in the region and had been deeply involved in regional power balancing. To this day, the US has major interests in liberal access to oil for itself and the world economy at large. However, with the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the US found itself as primus inter pares. Now, the US had the opportunity to change the framework of international politics according to its preferences. And the way to do so was to trigger the UN’s collective security mechanism and lead a massive counter-strike against Iraq’s occupation forces in and around Kuwait. In fact, it was precisely by choosing to frame the response to Iraq’s invasion in the context of collective security that an unprecedented mix of states came together to cooperate in war. The revival of collective security at the end of the Cold War resurrected the promises to small states made by Wilson many decades before. When justifying the defense of Kuwait, American president George H. W. Bush went beyond collective security and spoke specifically about “the world community’s” obligation towards small states: “In recent days, the world community has acted decisively in defense of a principle, that small states shall not become souvenirs of conquest.”369 The particular attention to small states and their unique security challenges was remarkable. In this case, it was actually followed up with a military effort, and suggested a highly upgraded security environment for small states – for the moment at least. For this unprecedented effort in defense of a small state to happen,

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the Security Council had to act in unison, and the end of the Cold War allowed for this. Whereas two superpowers had blocked each other’s initiatives at the Security Council throughout the entire Cold War, in 1990–91 the Soviet Union chose not to veto US efforts to counter Iraq’s invasion. With Security Council Resolution 678 of November 1990, the UN authorized a massive military alliance under US leadership to liberate Kuwait. This was achieved by early 1991, and a small state had survived military aggression of a powerful neighbor through a major effort of collective security. Despite the devastation that Kuwait suffered during the short Iraqi military occupation, the liberation of the small state was in many ways a textbook case of what the UN’s system of collective security had to offer to small states in particular.370 The return of collective security together with the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union and its empire were clear signs that change was taking place. Bipolarity was transitioning out and a Liberal-Wilsonian world order seemed possible after all. President Bush suggested that the “New World Order” would be “a new partnership of nations freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, more secure in the quest for peace.”371 Much of Bush’s contemporary rhetoric at this time was reminiscent of Wilson’s seven decades earlier. Although the vision lacked a concrete program, this New World Order promised to provide strong protection for small states, as the Kuwaiti case suggested, and also opportunities for small state proliferation, as the post-Soviet wave of small state creation seemed to indicate. Critically, the new international order would feature a stronger UN with an active Security Council, if the recent collective action was any indication. Furthermore, in light of the rhetoric used in response to Iraq’s aggression, International Law, too, seemed to be gaining a more prominent role. All these developments promised small state protection at unprecedented levels because the application of power by strong and aggressive states would be heavily restrained by layers of, in Morgenthau’s terms, “limitations on national power.”372 Any initial efforts to develop a larger vision for a New World Order petered out soon, however. US leadership in such a project was countered by popular calls for a “peace dividend,” reaping the benefits of winning the Cold War and re-focusing on domestic issues. Small states had to reorient themselves in this shifting environment. The small states that emerged with the end of the Cold War were located in Eastern Europe and its periphery, and in central Asia. Due to their location, they had a number of options to secure their survival. First, all of them joined the UN and became part of its larger collective security structure. Second, they also looked for additional layers of secu-

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rity. In Europe, membership in the European Communities and its 1994 successor the European Union was an option, as was full membership in the collective defense organization NATO. Alternatives were an association with NATO through its Partnership for Peace program, and the traditional policy of neutrality. After about a decade, bandwagoning with an emerging China or with a rebounding Russia became possible as well. The small island state Malta, for example, had maintained the status of neutrality, but looked at associating itself with NATO soon after the end of the Cold War. It joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1995 only to leave it a year later, but then returned to it in 2008. In addition, Malta joined the EU in 2004. The EU does not provide traditional security at a meaningful level, to be sure. However, membership adds a layer of safety, not least in economic terms. While Malta reached out to NATO and the European Community, it maintained its status of neutrality and, of course, its UN membership. Malta is one of many cases of small states combining different security strategies. Often commitments to collective security are made in parallel to neutrality. Other than Malta, Austria, Finland, and Sweden combine neutrality with the Partnership for Peace program. They also joined the EU and remain UN members. The small states Moldova, Serbia, Turkmenistan, and Switzerland have associated themselves with NATO through the partnership program while retaining neutrality. In sum, in response to the changed post-Cold War security environment, small states broadened their security strategy and added layers of protection on top of UN membership. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the states system was challenged again. First, NATO intervened militarily in Yugoslavia in 1999. It justified an air bombing campaign with alleged human rights abuses during a civil war over Kosovo’s treatment, status, and future. However, NATO did not secure proper UN authorization. The military intervention was motivated by a rapidly growing norm that allowed military intervention in cases of gross violations of human rights and acute humanitarian disasters. Leaving the normative aspect to one side and speaking strictly about small state security in traditional terms, NATO intervention set a dangerous precedent of major powers downgrading sovereignty. An even stronger challenge came as a result of the terrorist attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. In response, the US and the United Kingdom invaded the small state Afghanistan the same year and recruited additional allies afterwards. The US claimed the right to selfdefense and conducted its war in Afghanistan without UN Security Council authorization. Again without UN authorization, the US led an alliance into Iraq in 2003. It advanced at least two different legal

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rationales. It was presented as another case of self-defense, but also as enforcement of previous UN Security Council resolutions. Both arguments gave the US only minimal legal cover. Today, a general consensus prevails which considers the invasion and ensuing occupation of Iraq illegal aggressive war. Without judging the extra-legal causes behind US aggression, the blatant breach of International Law by a superpower and helplessness of the system’s other major actors to prevent or correct it critically undermined the role of International Law as a meaningful restraint on power. With respect to small state security, the developments after 1999 posed major challenges. In particular the 1999 and 2003 cases of use of military force were highly problematic. In both cases, the states system’s single superpower went beyond the limits of contemporary International Law. Taken together, the two cases strongly suggest the unchanged readiness of great powers to use military force in pursuit of national interests. In sum, the early post-Cold War period required small states to reconsider their security arrangements and reposition themselves in a unipolar environment. However, for the most part they could count on the single superpower’s benevolence and Wilsonian tradition. The UN and its collective security arrangement, together with collective defense through NATO, offered additional layers of security to the small state. Taken together, these dynamics created an international environment that was conducive to small state creation and supportive of small state survival. While small state survival was helped, it was not guaranteed. As evidenced by America’s war in Afghanistan and especially the US invasion of Iraq, preventing “‘warmaking’ by a determined Great Power”373 proved impossible. The UN was pushed aside and neither Iraq nor the small state of Afghanistan had balancing or bandwagoning options. However, in both cases it was clear from the beginning that state death would be temporary, and both states soon reemerged but under different regimes. The shifts and changes in the post-war period thus challenged small states but overall their existence remained uncontested. Unipolarity did not translate into permanent losses of small states. Contemporary International Law and small state protection

The recent legal challenges to the prohibition of aggressive war have been balanced somewhat by the law’s expansion. First, the canon of traditional positive law has been both supplemented and challenged constructively by the rapid evolution of international criminal law.374 Its institutionalized form – the International Criminal Court – has not become universally supported, but the existence of a criminal branch

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of International Law has become widely accepted. Second, new agenda items have emerged and reflect the expectation that law will catch up with the rapidly changing international political environment. From the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, to so-called ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to piracy off the coast of eastern Africa, to religiously motivated terrorism, to drone warfare; International Law has been tasked to adapt its scope to cover new areas. The states system and its state actors remain keenly interested in updated and relevant law. Third, International Law’s role in dispute settlement has been revived. A legal ruling by a respected international court may not necessarily produce the desired outcome for any of the parties to a dispute, but the legal route adds to the status of International Law and a ruling by the world court provides a solution that is easier to defend domestically. Not least, International Law has been tasked with reaching beyond state-to-state affairs and integrating human rights and groups’ rights into its body of law. These legal efforts have roots that reach back into the twentieth century or, in a broader sense, much earlier centuries. Last but not least, International Law remains under pressure to provide normative standards in order to assist in generating true progress in world affairs.375 As all states have become affected by challenges that reach far beyond the scope of single nation-states – from climate change to ­migration and terrorism – International Law has started to provide new rules for new challenges. Small states stand to be primary beneficiaries of the further evolution of International Law because it largely negates the influence of power in the settlement of disputes. In 2008, the ICJ ruled in a territorial dispute between the small state Singapore and its middle power neighbor Malaysia. The ruling was largely in favor of Singapore,376 which secured an outcome in a dispute it could hardly have secured outside of International Law. Soon after the end of the Cold War, the UN accepted an expansion of its traditional role. Going far beyond traditional peacekeeping efforts, the UN became deeply involved in state creation. And in most cases, small states emerged. In the case of Namibia, the UN assisted the transition of South Africa’s quasi-colony to a young small state. From 1989 to 1990, the UN Transition Assistance Group was deployed to oversee the armistice, ensure a fair election, and guide Namibia towards formal independence. In 1992 and 1993, the UN had a Transitional Force in Cambodia to keep the peace and administer the state until a proper election could put a democratic government in charge. In 1992, the UN began its long involvement in the former Yugoslavia with the UN Protection Force and its various successors.377 In Timor Leste in 1999, the UN became heavily

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involved in state creation and administration.378 In sum, “the UN was consciously expanding its peacemaking and peacebuilding activities to promote and consolidate democracy, and provide more equitable and effective governance by strengthening civil society.” 379 In all four cases, the UN’s missions were instrumental in state creation and state survival. The UN amplified the claims of Namibia and East Timor to self-determination. It assisted the various successor states to the old Yugoslavian federation in the tumultuous times of secession. It was instrumental in Cambodia’s struggle with its recent totalitarian past and its domestic reorganization. However flawed the process and the outcome may have been, the UN took on a critical role in small state proliferation. In the twentieth century, the world witnessed a remarkable reversal in small state survival. For the first time since 1648 small state proliferation was sustained and the centuries-old general trend of decline reversed. Small states increased in large numbers and over a considerable period of time. For the first time in history, “proliferation” seemed the proper term to describe the changes in the number of small states. This chapter offers an explanation of this phenomenon. And the overall causality behind small state survival and proliferation in the twentieth and into the twenty-first century is consistent with earlier periods’ accounts of small state survival. Larger downward as well as upward trends in the number of small states are due first and foremost to the states system, its key structural dynamics, and its limitations on the exercise of power by large states. In the twentieth century, small states proliferated because of the particularly accommodating environment into which they were born and in which they were able to survive in rapidly growing numbers. In this regard, the persistent restraint on power through balancing, a major international organization to help negotiate issues and settle disputes, collective security, self-­determination, and the growth of International Law were key to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ story of small state proliferation. Notes 1 Quoted in Arthur S. Link and William M. Leary, Jr., eds., The Diplomacy of World Power: The United States, 1889–1920 (New York: Edward Arnold, 1970), 145. 2 George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit, 1990-09-11,” George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, http://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/​p​u​b​

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l​i​c​-​papers/2217. 3 Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power, 135. 4 Charles Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the World War: A Chronicle of Our Own Times (New York: Yale University Press, 1921), 283. 5 Quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy, 226. 6 Quoted in Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement (Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1960 (1922)), 193. 7 Charles Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, Projet pour rendre la paix ­perpétuelle en Europe (Paris: Fayard, 1713 (1986)); Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jun., 1984). 8 Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power, 148–153; Arthur Stanley Link, Wilson the Diplomatist: A Look at his Major Foreign Policies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), 92; Claude, Power and International Relations, 152; Edward Henry Buehrig, “Woodrow Wilson and Collective Security,” in Wilson’s Foreign Policy in Perspective, ed. Edward Henry Buehrig (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1957), 34–38. 9 “The perpetual in Europe”; Castel de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe.  10 Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden.  11 Jeremy Bentham, Oskar Kraus, and Camill Klatscher, Grundsätze für ein künftiges Völkerrecht und einen dauernden Frieden: Mit e. Einl. über Bentham, Kant und Wundt hrsg (Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer, 1915).  12 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London: William Heinemann, 1933).  13 Lenin, Imperialism.  14 Link, Wilson the Diplomatist, 92–93.  15 Lewis L. Gould, ed., The Progressive Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974); Lewis L. Gould, Reform and Regulation: American Politics from Roosevelt to Wilson, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).  16 Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).  17 Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1979), 72–75; Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919 (New York: Brace, 1939), 36, 38–42.  18 Nicolson, Peacemaking, 191–192.  19 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 221.  20 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 148–149; Buchan quotes Wilson’s speech at Guildhall, London, 28 December 1918; Buchan, Power and Equlibrium in the 1970s.  21 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 1–22.  22 Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the

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Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).  23 Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power, 135.  24 Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 553.  25 Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace, 72–103; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 246–265.  26 Woodrow Wilson, ed., “A League for Peace” 2nd Session, 64 Congress, Washington, DC, 1917.  27 Ibid.  28 Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power, 148–153.  29 Ibid., 157.  30 Wilson is cited in Claude, Power and International Relations, 97.  31 David Hunter Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, Vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 562.  32 Claude, Power and International Relations, 97, footnote 7.  33 Woodrow Wilson, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, The Avalon Project, http://avalon.law. yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp, accessed 21 October 2008.  34 Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the World Wars, 282–283.  35 Bruce Stockton Williams, State Security and the League of Nations (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 229.  36 Seymour, Woodrow Wilson and the World War, 281–309; Claude, Power and International Relations, 110–115; John Gerard Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue: Interests, Identity, and American Foreign Policy,” International Security 21, no. 4, Spring (1997): 95. To be sure, Wilson’s ideas about collective security were not the only ones discussed at this time. For an introduction to other contemporary concepts of collective security, see Martin David Dubin, “Toward the Concept of Collective Security: The Bryce Group’s ‘Proposals for the Avoidance of War,’” International Organization 24, no. 2, Spring (1970): 288–318.  37 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 158–159.  38 “The Covenant of the League of Nations (Including Amendments adopted to December, 1924),” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, http:// avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/leagcov.asp, accessed 26 November 2014.  39 Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and his Legacy in American Foreign Relations, 1st ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 51–52.  40 Luard, Conflict and Peace, 174; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 52, 222.  41 Claude, Power and International Relations, 155–172; Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace, 98–99; Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 320–326; Clive Archer, International Organizations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1992).  42 Mark W. Zacher, International Conflicts and Collective Security, 1946–77: The United Nations, Organization of American States, Organization of African Unity, and Arab League (New York: Praeger, 1979), 1.  43 Claude, Power and International Relations, 152.  44 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 235–249, 295–313.

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 45 Ludwig Dehio, Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie: Betrachtungen über ein Grundproblem der neueren Staatengeschichte (Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1996), 339. Ross, The Great Powers, 38, 109–12; Simms, Europe, 318.  46 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 250–275.  47 Quoted in Nicolson, Peacemaking, 53.  48 Ross, The Great Powers, 40.   49 Gary B. Ostrower, The League of Nations from 1919 to 1929 (Garden City Park, NY: Avery, 1996), 113.  50 John Milton Cooper, The Vanity of Power: American Isolationism and the First World War, 1914–1917 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969).  51 Small States Database at www.smallstateinfor.org; Lemke et al., Der Grosse Ploetz, 183.  52 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 14.  53 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939).  54 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton & Comp. Inc., 1969).  55 Knock, To End All Wars, 272–275.  56 Quoted in George Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations (London: Hutchinson, 1973).  57 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 160.  58 Claude, Power and International Relations, 155.  59 Ibid., 151–5; Gary Wilson, The United Nations and Collective Security (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2014).  60 Quoted in Kenneth W. Thompson, “Isolationism and Collective Security: The Uses and Limits of Two Theories of International Relations,” in Isolationism and Security, ed. Alexander DeConde (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1957), 172.  61 UN Charter, United Nations, 1945, www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/ index.html, accessed 22 March 2017.  62 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 291–298.  63 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress.”  64 Alan K. Henrikson, Defining a New World Order: Toward a Practical Vision of Collective Action for International Peace and Security: A Discussion Paper (Medford, MA: Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, 1991).  65 Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1991).  66 Claude, Power and International Relations, 123–133.  67 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 1–21.  68 Claude, Power and International Relations, 113.  69 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 398.  70 Charles A. Kupchan and Clifford A. Kupchan, “European Security, Past and Future: Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe,” International Security 16, no. 1, Summer (1991): 124.  71 Abramo F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1967), 373–84; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 398; Ross, The Great Powers, 112–113.  72 Claude, Power and International Relations, 110.

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 73 Kupchan and Kupchan, “European Security,” 124.  74 Organski, World Politics (1967), 373–384; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 398; Ross, The Great Powers, 112–113.  75 Robert Jervis, “Security Regimes,” International Organization 36, no. 2, Spring (1982); Howard C. Johnson and Gerhart Niemeyer, “Collective Security: The  Validity of an Ideal,” International Organization 8, no. 1, February (1954). See also Kupchan and Kupchan, “European Security,” 124; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 235.  76 Organski, World Politics (1967), 373–384; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 398; Ross, The Great Powers, 112–113.  77 Inis L. Claude, “Comment on ‘An Autopsy of Collective Security,’” Political Science Quarterly 90, no. 4, Winter (1975–76): 716.  78 Kupchan and Kupchan, “European Security,” 120–123; Capie and Evans, The Asia-Pacific Security Lexicon, 55.  79 Claude, Power and International Relations, 110.  80 Ernst B. Haas, Collective Security and the Future International System (Denver, CO: University of Denver, 1968), 33.  81 David Armstrong, Lorna Lloyd, and John Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 3rd ed. (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2004), 18.  82 Andreas Vierecke, Bernd Mayerhofer, and Franz Kohout, dtv – Atlas Politik (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011), 205.  83 Evans and Newnham, The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations, 77.  84 Kupchan and Kupchan, “European Security,” 118–125; Vierecke, Mayerhofer, and Kohout, dtv – Atlas Politik, 205.  85 Zacher, International Conflicts and Collective Security, 3.  86 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 247–248; Vierecke, Mayerhofer, and Kohout, dtv – Atlas Politik, 205.  87 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 247–248.  88 Peter Lawler, “The Core Assumptions and Presumptions of Cooperative Security,” in The New Agenda for Global Security: ”Cooperating for Peace” and Beyond, ed. Stephanie Lawson (St. Leonard’s, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 47.  89 On the differences between collective security and collective defense, see Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 153; and the entries “Collective Defense” (pp. 48–51) and “Collective Security” (pp. 53–6) in Capie and Evans, The AsiaPacific Security Lexicon. Inis L. Claude, Swords Into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York: Random House, 1956); Claude, Power and International Relations, 115–123; Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), 185.  90 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 233–238.  91 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 398; Simms, Europe, 307–380; Knock, To End All Wars, 272; Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 39.  92 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), 55–103; George Frost Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), 61–89.

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 93 Kennan, Memoirs, 71.  94 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 40.  95 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 285.  96 Ibid., 285–94, 397–407.  97 Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics (New York: Harcourt, 1942); Claude, Power and International Relations.  98 Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power.  99 Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Steven E. Lobell, The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance Between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 100 Simms, Europe, 320–321; 21. 101 Ross, The Great Powers, 8. 102 Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); David L. Bosco, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 103 Claude, Power and International Relations, 132. 104 Ibid., 123. 105 Zacher, International Conflicts and Collective Security, 5. 106 Claude, Power and International Relations, 113. 107 Margaret P. Karns and Karen A. Mingst, eds., International Organizations: The Politics and Process of Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004), 5. 108 René Albrecht-Carrié, The Unity of Europe: An Historical Survey (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966). 109 Guillaume Sacriste and Antoine Vauchez, “The Force of International Law: Lawyers’ Diplomacy on the International Scene in the 1920s,” Law and Social Inquiry 32, no. 1, Winter (2007). 110 Anne Peters and Simone Peter, “International Organizations: Between Technocracy and Democracy,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 111 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 111. 112 Keohane, “Lilliputians’ Dilemmas,” 296. 113 Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York: Vintage Books, 2006). 114 Harold Karan Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence: International Organizations and the Global Political System, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1979); Archer, International Organizations. 115 Archer, International Organizations, 166. 116 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 150; Claude, Power and International Relations, 113. 117 Quoted in Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power, 136. 118 Ross, The Great Powers, 8. 119 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 151.

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120 Ross, The Great Powers; Herbert W. Briggs, “Power Politics and International Organization,” American Journal of International Law 39, no. 4, October (1945): 670; Ostrower, The League of Nations, 17; Nicolson, Peacemaking, 113–117. 121 Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: The Politics of Power in Europe 1494–1945 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963), 87; Acharya, “A Concert for Asia?” 88. 122 Cornelis G. Roelofsen, “International Arbitration and Courts,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 123 In 1899, the “Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes,” concluded during the first Hague Peace Conference, established the Permanent Court of Arbitration. 124 Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1986 14 (1986). 125 Nuclear Tests Case (New Zealand v. France), I.C.J. Reports 1974 457 (1974). 126 Attila Tanzi, “Problems of Enforcement of Decisions of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the United Nations,” European Journal of International Law (1995); Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 1–21. 127 Vec, “From the Congress of Vienna”; Link and Leary, The Diplomacy of World Power. 128 Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 7th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 579–582. 129 “UN Charter,” United Nations, www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.html. 130 Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 510–512. 131 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 9–11. 132 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 222. 133 Breuilly, “Nationalism,” 404. 134 Ross, The Great Powers, 8–9; Roland Vogt, Wayne Cristaudo, and Andreas Leutzsch, eds., European National Identities: Elements, Transitions, Conflicts (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014). 135 Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, 80–91. 136 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 221–224. 137 Ibid., 212–214. 138 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 173. 139 John Barry Bartmann, “Meeting the Needs of Microstate Security,” The Round Table 91, no. 365 (2002). 140 Bernard Schaffer, “The Politics of Development,” in Development Policy in Small Countries, ed. Percy Selwyn (Oxford: Routledge, 2011). 141 Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel, and Jan Wouters, eds., Informal International Lawmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Christian J. Tams and James Sloan, eds., The Development of International Law by the International Court of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 142 Williams, “State security and the League of Nations,” 63–119. See especially pp. 85–87.

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143 Ambrosius, Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and his legacy in American foreign relations, 54. 144 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 43–62. 145 Jackson, Quasi-States. 146 Angelika Nußberger, Das Völkerrecht (Bonn: C. H. Beck, 2010), 62–64. 147 Ibid., 65–67. 148 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 174–5; Nußberger, Das Völkerrecht, 57–61. 149 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 174–175. 150 Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence. 151 Ibid. 152 Matthias Maass, “North Korea as a ‘Quasi-Nuclear Weapons State,’” Korea Observer 41, no. 1, Spring (2010). 153 John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolesence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); John Mueller, “Is War Still Becoming Obsolete?” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 1991); John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); John Mueller, “Accounting for the Waning of Major War,” in The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (London: Routledge, 2006). 154 John Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday: The Obsolesence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 155 Fazal, State Death, 153–228. 156 Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin, 374–427; Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 138. 157 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 138. 158 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 188–192. The quote is on p. 192. 159 Ibid., 196. 160 Ibid., 192–196. The quote is on p. 192. 161 Patrick M. Morgan, “Multilateralism and Security: Prospects in Europe,” in Multilateralism Matters: The Theory and Praxis of an Institutional Form, ed. John Gerard Ruggie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 19–20; Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 196–197. 162 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 136. 163 Karsh, Neutrality and Small States, 98–107. 164 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 137. 165 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 166 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis. 167 Ibid. 168 Asquith is quoted in Handel, Weak States in the International System, p. 210, footnote 20. 169 Ross, The Great Powers, 34–36. 170 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 91. 171 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 196.

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172 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 44–45. 173 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 82–94. 174 Ibid. 175 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 230–234. The quote is on p. 230. 176 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 174–178. The quote is on p. 174; Nicolson, Peacemaking, 113–117. 177 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 232. Also: Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 178. 178 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 107–108. 179 Ibid., 105–108, 178. 180 Ibid., 179. 181 Patricia Wohlgemuth Blair, The Ministate Dilemma. Occasional Papers, Vol. 6 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1968), 49. 182 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 32. 183 Ibid. 184 Nicolson, Peacemaking, 148–152. 185 Simms, Europe, 321–322. 186 Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace, 92. 187 Simms, Europe, 322. 188 Karen Ballentine, “The Making of Nations and the Un-making of the Soviet Union,” The Harriman Review (1995): 19. 189 Ibid. 190 Briggs, “Power Politics and International Organization,” 669. 191 Ibid. 192 Wilson, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” 193 B. J. C. McKercher, “The League of Nations and the Problem of Collective Security 1919–1939,” in The League of Nations 1920–1946: Organization and Accomplishments: A Retrospective of the First Organization for the Establishment of World Peace, ed. League of Nations Archives and Historical Collections (Genf) (New York: United Nations, 1996), 70. Ostrower, The League of Nations, 38–42. 194 Wilson, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” 195 McKercher, “The League of Nations,” 70; Ostrower, The League of Nations, 38–42. 196 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 25; Ostrower, The League of Nations, 51–54. 197 Archer, International Organizations, 21. 198 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 38–42. 199 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 24–25. 200 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 48. 201 Ibid., 45–51; McKercher, “The League of Nations,” 70. 202 Alfred Erich Senn, The Great Powers, Lithuania and the Vilna Question, 1920–1928 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 83–103. 203 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 38–39, 90–91. The quote is on p. 91;

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McKercher, “The League of Nations,” 70; Senn, The Great Powers, 179– 197; Maria A. Mankevich, “The Vilnius Issue in International Relations: The Historiography of the Problem,” Baltic Region 2 (2012); “Poland and Lithuania,” The Spectator, 3 December 1927. 204 Ross, The Great Powers, 116–117. 205 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 233. 206 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 115. 207 Luis Verón, La Guerra del Chaco, 1932–1935 (Asunción: El Lector, 2010). 208 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 27–30. 209 Haile Selassie, “Appeal to the League of Nations,” 1936, www.mtholyoke.edu/ acad/intrel/selassie.htm, accessed 18 November 2002. 210 Ibid. 211 George W. Baer, Test Case: Italy, Ethiopia, and the League of Nations (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1976); Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 289–291. 212 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 403–404. 213 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 117. 214 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 230–234. The quote is on p. 230. 215 Selassie, “Appeal to the League of Nations.” 216 Ibid. 217 Baer, Test Case. 218 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 29. 219 Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1939), 22–62. 220 Archer, International Organizations, 25. 221 James Barros, The League of Nations and the Great Powers: The GreekBulgarian Incident, 1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). 222 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 33–38. 223 Ibid., 110. 224 “The Covenant of the League of Nations.” 225 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 238–239. 226 Ibid., 240. 227 Ibid. 228 Peter Krüger, “From the Paris Peace Treaties to the End of the Second World War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law, ed. Bardo Fassbender and Anne Peters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 691–694. 229 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 263–298. 230 Knock, To End All Wars. 231 Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918– 1933, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 232 “Treaty between the United States and other Powers providing for the renun-

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ciation of war as an instrument of national policy” (United States Statutes at Large, vol. 46, part 2, 1928); Ross, The Great Powers, 68–69; Ostrower, The League of Nations, 84–87. 233 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 174–175. 234 Ross, The Great Powers, 69. 235 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 375–376. 236 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 255–256. 237 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 343–392. 238 Williams, “State Security and the League of Nations,” 63–234. The quote is on p. 230. 239 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 392. 240 Ibid., 406. 241 Yohanan Cohen, Small Nations in Times of Crisis and Confrontation, trans. Naftali Greenwood (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 237–344. 242 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 138. 243 Ibid.; Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 197. 244 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 198. 245 Ibid., 199. 246 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 395–396. 247 Wilson, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.” 248 Clark, The Hierarchy of States, 146–147; Cruttwell, A History of Peaceful Change, 143. 249 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987). 250 Bibó, Die Misere der osteuropäischen Kleinstaaterei, 92–95; Kissinger, Diplomacy, 240–241. 251 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 259–65. The quote is on p. 265. 252 Ibid., 396. 253 Ibid., 250–275. 254 Ross, The Great Powers, 41–43. 255 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 194–195. 256 Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, 250–259. 257 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 79–82. 258 Simms, Europe, 312–313. 259 Ross, The Great Powers, 33. 260 Nicolson, Peacemaking, 141–144. 261 Ross, The Great Powers, 71–108; Scott, The Rise and Fall of the League of Nations, passim. 262 Marks, The Illusion of Peace, 116–160. 263 Ostrower, The League of Nations, 113–115. 264 Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 24.

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265 Konrad H. Jarausch, Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 266 Nicolson, Peacemaking, 191. 267 Link, Wilson the Diplomatist, 121. 268 Nicolson, Peacemaking, 191–193. 269 McKercher, “The League of Nations,” 73. 270 Ibid. 271 Resumé of Rothstein on his sixth chapter, in which he deals with the time period 1919 to 1939: Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 234. 272 John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, 8th ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts “Long Telegrams” of 1946 (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1991); Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War 1945–1990, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002); Melvyn P. Leffler and David S. Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History (London: Routledge, 1994); John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). 273 Sheehan, The Balance of Power, 160. 274 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 37–42; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 15–16. 275 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 16. 276 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 37. 277 Kennedy, The Parliament of Man, 51–76. 278 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman: Years of Decisions, 2 vols., Vol. 1 (New York: Signet, 1965), 317. 279 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 241. 280 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 291–298. 281 Narushige Michishita, North Korea’s Military-Diplomatic Campaigns, 1966–2008 (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2009). 282 Status and Problems of Very Small States and Territories, UNITAR Series No. 3 (New York: United Nations, Institute for Training and Research, 1969). 283 J. David Armstrong, The Rise of the International Organisation: A Short History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), 49. For a summary of “The United Nations in World Politics” see ibid., 49–74. See also Armstrong’s updated account in J. D. Armstrong, Lorna Lloyd, and John Redmond, From Versailles to Maastricht: International Organisation in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 63–137; Kennedy, The Parliament of Man, 51–112. 284 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 404–407; Gaddis, The Cold War, 40–46; Claude, Power and International Relations, 155–172. 285 Dean Acheson, “Remarks by Secretary of State Dean Acheson before the National Press Club, 12 January 1950,” Department of State Bulletin 23

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January (1950). The quote is on p. 116. 286 Quoted in Gaddis, The Cold War, 43. 287 Gelb, Power Rules, 5. 288 Wilfried Loth, Die Teilung der Welt: Geschichte des Kalten Krieges 1941–1955, 7th ed. (München: dtv, 1989); Simms, Europe, 381–457. 289 Aron, Peace and War, 136–149; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 338–347. 290 Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus, 93, no. 2, Spring (1964). 291 Aron, Peace and War, 136–140. 292 Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (February 21–June 5, 1947) (New York: The Viking Press, 1955); Howard Jones, “A New Kind of War”: America’s Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 293 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 331. 294 Ibid., 326–335. 295 Rothstein, Alliances and Small Powers, 263. 296 “The North Atlantic Treaty,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 1949, www. nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm#Art05. 297 “Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance Between the People’s Republic of Albania, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the Hungarian People’s Republic, the German Democratic Republic, the Polish People’s Republic, the Rumanian People’s Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Czechoslovak Republic, May 14, 1955,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/warsaw.asp. 298 Aron, Peace and War, 139–140. 299 Ibid. 300 Robert O. Keohane, “The Big Influence of Small Allies,” Foreign Policy 2, Spring (1971). 301 Günter Bischof, Austria in the First Cold War, 1945–55 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 302 Baldacchino, “Thucydides or Kissinger?” 27; Julia Neumeyer, Malta and the European Union: A Small Island State and Its Way into a Powerful Community (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2007), 43–47. 303 Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 777–782. 304 Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 16. 305 Krüger, “From the Paris Peace Treaties,” 697. 306 Archer summarizes Jacobson. See Archer, International Organizations; and Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence. 307 Carsten Stehn and Henning Melber, eds., Peace Diplomacy, Global Justice and International Agency: Rethinking Human Security and Ethics in the Spirit of Dag Hammarskjöld (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, 774–776. 308 Eyal Benvenisti, The International Law of Occupation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University Press, 1992), x. 309 Gelb, Power Rules, 20–21. 310 Erhard Busek and Waldemar Hummer, eds., Der Kleinstaat als Akteur in den Internationalen Beziehungen (Schaan: Verlag der Liechtensteinischen Adademischen Gesellschaft, 2004), preface (no page numbers). 311 Nußberger, Das Völkerrecht, 79. 312 “UN Charter”; “Statute of the International Court of Justice,” International Court of Justice, 1945, www.icj-cij.org/documents/index.php?p1=4&p2=2&p3=0, accessed 27 April 2015. 313 Case Concerning Legality of Use of Force (Yugoslavia v. United States of America), Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures, Order of 2 June, 1999 ICJ Reports (1999). 314 Ibid. 315 Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin, 411–416. 316 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 199–200. 317 Ibid., 202–204. 318 Wright, A Study of War (abridged), 135–140; Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin, 418–419. 319 Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin, 417–419. 320 Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Controversial Statesman (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2015), 63. 321 Gaddis, The Long Peace. 322 Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 323 Mueller, Retreat From Doomsday. 324 Ibid.; Mueller, “Is War Still Becoming Obsolete?”; Mueller, The Remnants of War; Mueller, “Accounting for the Waning of Major War.” 325 Gelb, Power Rules, 4–5. 326 Raimo Väyrynen, ed., The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates (London: Routledge, 2006); Peter Wallensteen, “Trends in Major War: Too Early for Waning?” in The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (London: Routledge, 2006). 327 Hendrik Spruyt, “Normative Transformations in International Relations and the Waning of Major War,” in The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (London: Routledge, 2006). 328 Marie T. Henehan and John Vasquez, “The Changing Probability of Interstate War, 1816–1992,” in The Waning of Major War: Theories and Debates, ed. Raimo Väyrynen (London: Routledge, 2006). 329 Breuilly, “Nationalism,” 404. 330 Gelb, Power Rules, 20. 331 William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Wehler, Nationalismus, 93. 332 Robert P. Hager Jr. and David A. Lake, “Balancing Empires: Competitive Decolonization in International Politics,” Security Studies 9, no. 3 (2000).

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333 Ibid., 108–148. 334 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 54–56. 335 “Trusteeship Council,” United Nations, www.un.org/en/sections/about-un/trus​ teeship-council/index.html. 336 Ibid. 337 Archer, International Organizations, 165; Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence. 338 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 44. 339 Ibid., 44–45. The quote is on p. 45. 340 Ibid., 45. 341 Fozia Nazir Lone, “Restoration of Historical Title and the Kashmir Question: An International Legal Appraisal” (Doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2008). 342 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 250–260. 343 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 32. 344 Bartmann, “Meeting the Needs of Microstate Security”; Clarke and Payne, Politics, Security and Development, xiii. 345 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 173. 346 Lewis, “Foreword,” vii. 347 Blair, The Ministate Dilemma, 6, 25–27. 348 Status and Problems of Very Small States and Territories. 349 Even solutions short of exclusion from membership, such as a system of weighted voting in the General Assembly of the United Nations, did not bear any fruit. See ibid. 350 Lewis, “Foreword” x. 351 Ibid. 352 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 179; Lewis, “Foreword,” ix. 353 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 179; Lewis, “Foreword,” ix. 354 “In quotes: Lee Kuan Yew,” 2015, BBC, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-​3​1​5​8​2​ 842. 355 Sanchez, “Panama” 65–71. 356 Lino Briguglio, “Small Island Developing States and their Economic Vulnera­ bilities,” World Development 23, no. 9 (1995); Chris Easter, Small States and Development: A Composite Index of Vulnerability (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1998); Eliawony J. Kisanga and Lino Briguglio, Economic Vulnera­ bility and Resilience of Small States (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 2004). 357 Benjamin J. Cohen, The Question of Imperialism: The Political Economy of Dominance and Dependence (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 358 Nick Bisley, Great Powers in the Changing International Order (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2012). 359 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16, Summer (1989); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 360 Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World. 361 Ibid., 18–44, passim. 362 Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress.”

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363 Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment.” 364 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana Press, 1988); William C. Wohlforth, “The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neorealism,” Review of International Studies 27 (2001). 365 Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 366 Braveboy-Wagner, “The English-Speaking Caribbean States,” 51. 367 Curtis R. Ryan, “Jordan: The Politics of Alliance and Foreign Policy,” in Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, ed. Jeanne A. K. Hey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003). 368 George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 541. 369 George H. W. Bush, “Address by President Bush to the United Nations World Summit for Children, UNICEF, The United Nations, NY,” Federal Information Systems Corporations, Federal News Service, 30 September 1990. 370 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 82–84. 371 Bush, “Address by President Bush.” 372 Morgenthau, Dilemmas of Politics, 159. 373 Kennedy, The Parliament of Man, 51–112. The quote is on p. 111. 374 Renaut, Histoire du droit international public, 174–175. 375 Detlev Wolter, A United Nations for the 21st Century: From Reaction to Prevention: Towards an Effective and Efficient International Regime for Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2007). 376 Sovereignty over Pedra branca/Pulau Batu Puteh, Middle Rocks and South Ledge (Malaysia/Singapore), ICJ Reports 12 (2008). 377 Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 95–96. 378 Ibid., 91–95. 379 Ibid., 96–97.

6 The story of small state survival: past, present, and future

Over more than three-and-a-half centuries, the fate of small states has depended primarily on the states system. Since the Peace of Westphalia, the starting point for this study, the survival rate of small states has been shaped largely by the international political environment of the time. Small state survival, understood as the net outcome of state creation and state existence minus state termination, is historically determined to a large extent by the overall systemic structure. In short, small state survival and proliferation are largely system-dependent phenomena. The underlying reason for the particular security vulnerability of small states to the international systemic environment is their structural irrelevance in the system. Individually at least, small states do not matter to the overall power-determined structure of the international system of states. Therefore, small state creation, survival, and termination can happen relatively freely and without triggering an adjustment of the system by its major, structure-setting actors. Herein lies the particular small state security conundrum. On the one hand, small states are units that do not matter much to the system. On the other hand, small state survival is to a good degree predetermined by the particular system in which they exist, but which they cannot shape. An exploration of existing small state scholarship on definitional matters showed that most scholarship falls into one of two larger groups. Each group features a distinct perspective on what makes states small. First is the understanding of the small state as poorly endowed with material resources. Today, the most prominent and widely recognized criterion is population size, which works well with the behaviorists’ translation of rigorous scholarship into quantifiable data that can be investigated further by statistical and mathematical models. To be sure, this approach to the study of the

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small state has sharpened the debate concerning state size, and opened the door to the entire spectrum of quantitative research on the small state. Additionally, understanding state size as first and foremost determined by internal factors has provided the basis for valuable scholarship on the particular vulnerabilities of small states in modern global affairs. Alternatively, the small state has been described as a unit of the system that is ‘little’ in the sense of negligible and inconsequential. Of particular interest for this study is the scholarship that looks at the small state’s power and describes small states as weak states. According to this perspective, lack of power is the key characteristic of the small state. Building on this approach and linking it with Structural Realism, a definition of the small state as a unit that is structurally and systemically negligible was developed. The small state is structurally irrelevant and system-ineffectual. Individually, it is a negligible unit as far as the structure and operation of the states system is concerned. Since the present study was tasked with capturing small state survival since the inception of the contemporary states system in the mid seventeenth century, the definition used for this project needed to work across time. Robust and reliable data on small states’ populations, for example, were not available for the earlier time periods. This and related issues regarding the availability, robustness, and usage of quantifiable data were side-stepped here by basing the study on a definition of the small state as little and irrelevant to the overall structure of the states system. Next, this definition was operationalized in order to build a small states database. The data set includes all states between 1648 and today, and codes them either as small or larger than small. The data set was used to demonstrate how the theoretically and historically developed claims about small state survival and proliferation are detectable in the accumulated numbers of small state death, survival, and proliferation over more than three-and-a-half centuries. Small state survival, understood as the larger trend of the annual total numbers of small states, correlates with different levels of support and protection generated by large historical eras and their unique states system. The changes from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century laissez-faire balance of power to the nineteenth-century concert system and to the twentieth-century hybrid system of power politics and collective action in particular are well reflected in the raw data on small state survival. Similarly, the different eras’ systems and their particular set-ups created quite different levels of support and protection for small states, and this, too, is reflected in the data, where different periods show distinct trend lines in small state survival and proliferation. The data and the interpretative claims are visualized and summarized in Figure 15.

0 1648

50

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Small states totals 1648-1791 Trendline 1814-1913

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Trendline 1648-1791

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Figure 15  Number of small and larger states, 1648–2016

Number of states

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1898

Trendline 1919-2016

Small states totals 1814-1913

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1998 2016 Small states totals 1919-2016

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The data provide the statistical background of the study. They both capture and, when presented in the form of graphs, visualize the phenomenon of small state survival and proliferation over time. The data also support the claim that the scale of small state survival and proliferation is too big, the amplitudes too large and irregular, and the overall trends too distinct to be attributed simply to the accumulation of individual failure of small state governance. Rather, the data strongly suggest that small state survival and proliferation are linked to the system in which they struggle to exist. Supportive but not protective: the permissiveness of the balance-of-power system Overall, a remarkably large number of small states survived during the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century era of the laissez-faire balance of power. In its fairly ideal-type incarnation of this historical era, the  balance of power provided a remarkably supportive environment  for small states. The era’s balance of power shielded the small state quite effectively from the territorial desires of larger states and especially ambitious great powers. As a result, small states survived in unprecedented and never-again-reached numbers, although they suffered from a slow, steady, and uninterrupted erosion of their total number. The particular form and shape of the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury balance of power operated in a comparatively unencumbered fashion. A rough equilibrium among the major powers of the system organized international power politics among them, and was the first and most important limitation on the unrestrained execution of powerbased, coercive policies by great powers. The balance-of-power system was further modified by rapidly evolving International Law, efforts to contain the resort to war, and the further hardening of the diplomatic method to manage bilateral and multilateral disputes. However, these modifiers were rather weak and at an early stage of evolution. None came in the form of a robustly established organization. Most critically for small state survival, neither did any make special provisions for small states. State sovereignty, equality among states, legal norms such as ius ad bellum, and the diplomatic procedures and processes, for example, were all created and developed without paying particular attention to the plight of small states. To be sure, small states benefitted from them, but small state protection was not the goal of these and other “limitations” on power, as Morgenthau called them.1 What is more, small states gained only a very limited degree of e­ quality

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in the new states system. The attribution of equality to all states that was implied in the organization of international politics through sovereign states did not reach much beyond the legal and religious realms. Under International Law, states had the same rights and obligations regardless of their size, although the enforcement of rules and judgments was problematic from the very start. With respect to the religious realm, the experience of the Thirty Years’ War had led the diplomats at Münster and Osnabrück to agree on the secularization of international politics and equality of states regardless of their adoption of either Catholicism or Protestantism. The notion of equality did not at all imply the negation of physical, material, or power differences. In sum, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century states system featured only modest restraints on the use of power beyond the dynamics of the equilibrium of powers. However, the balance of power was a meaningful restraint and was fueled by a high level of mistrust, competition, and jealousy among the great and middle powers. As long as the larger powers remained ready to counter each other’s attempts at aggrandizement, small states enjoyed the benefits of a powerful restraint on power politics. As long as states could paint a threat to them as a threat to the equilibrium, they had a good chance of bringing in an opposing great power in defense of the balance and themselves. In sum, the largely unmodified balance of power of the post-Westphalian era, although clearly not designed to protect small states, relied on a balancing mechanism that improved significantly small states’ chances of survival. In fact, the statistics of small state survival during this epoch confirm the claim that competitive power balancing provided a fairly protective environment for small states. To be sure, the number of small states does not even partially recover the loss of small states before and during the Thirty Years’ War. Neither do small state numbers increase. Instead, the total number of small states and their share in the states system continued to erode slowly and steadily through the entire era. Nevertheless, the loss of small states was limited. It proceeded steadily but at an undramatic pace. And this took place at a time in history when small states survived in historically unprecedented high numbers. Never again would that many small states be part of the states system. The statistics support a view of the balance of power as fairly conducive to small state survival but ineffective in promoting small state proliferation. By the same token, the rapid disintegration of equilibrium of power that started in the 1790s corresponds with an unprecedented and dramatically sharp drop in the number of small states. Napoleon’s almost successful challenge to the very foundation of international order, a balance among the major powers, corresponds strongly with small state death on a scale

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never seen again. Without the protective layer of power balancing, small states nearly vanished. The diplomatic record reinforces the argument that small state survival and protective features and dynamics of the power-balancing states system not only correlate, but are in fact causally connected. Throughout the entire era, jealousies between great powers check territorial expansion at the expense of small states. Without great powers’ mutual suspicion, their jealousies, and their competition, small states quickly fall victim to great power aggrandizement. Actual great power cooperation in particular presented massive security problems, as evidenced by the repeated divisions of Poland and its ultimate termination in this era. The history of international relations has seen many examples when small states have presented an external threat to them as a general challenge to the equilibrium, thus triggering balancing action by great powers against the aggressor. The need to maintain a power equilibrium more often than not helped small states to survive. However, small state protection in this fashion had not been intentionally integrated into the  balance-of-power system. In fact, small state survival took place despite the disrespect major powers had for the small state. In light of the above, the balance-of-power system in its actualized form of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is judged fairly effective in supporting small state survival. Overall and despite meaningful losses, small states survived in this era in large quantities. The era’s laissez-faire balance-of-power system had few meaningful limitations on power and certainly no customized provisions to protect the small state. However, the urgent need of great powers to balance served as a critical mechanism that allowed hundreds of small states to survive. In light of this, the balance of power proved to be a quite accommodating international environment with respect to small state survival. It was not truly supportive in the sense that it did not generate small state proliferation, but it was not detrimental to small state survival – the decline in numbers was measured and not only attributable to great power coercion. Tolerant but not supportive: the concert system’s poor defense of the small state During the nineteenth century, the number of small states continued to decline. In fact, small states were lost at an accelerated rate compared with the previous era. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the count of small states was at a historic low. Compared with the seventeenth- and

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eighteenth-century laissez-faire balance of power, the nineteenth-century concert system was a less hospitable environment. At that time, great powers began to cultivate policy coordination, and even institutionalized it in the form of summit-style international conferences. Great power cooperation often came at the expense of small states and their chances of survival. And the protection the concert system did offer was easily overcome by the integrative forces of mid to late nineteenthcentury nationalism. In many ways, the nineteenth-century concert system was geared towards the great powers. It was a states system that continued to build on post-Westphalian power politics of sovereign states as autonomous units in a system structured by the power relationships of its major states. However, instead of letting equilibrium of powers play itself out, the great powers assumed the role of stewards. In fact, they captained international politics with the understanding that their collective interests equaled the system’s needs. These needs did not include the security of the small state. The concert system also revitalized the hierarchical ordering of states. Small states were judged meaningless with regard to containing France early in the nineteenth century, and during the century’s second half were viewed as anachronisms in a modern world that highly prized large units. In addition, small states remained objects for great power balancing maneuvers throughout the entire era. The states system was designed to serve the great powers’ collective interests, and as such presented a hostile environment to small states struggling to survive. However, the threatening features were balanced to some extent by the concert states’ preference for stability. Although conflict was unavoidable, stability was desired and maintained for as long as feasible. A preference for the status quo offered a degree of protection to small states. In addition, norms and restraints on power politics continued to evolve during the nineteenth century, with International Law and the diplomatic method in particular helping to constrain unbridled power politics. On balance, however, the concert system created a truly challenging environment for the small state. When great powers worked together towards a consensus goal, threatened small states were unable to incite jealousies and trigger balancing maneuvers. The more the concert states coordinated their political objectives and synchronized their policies, the fewer were the opportunities presented to threatened small states. In light of these dynamics, the small state of the nineteenth century had to fight an uphill battle in trying to ensure its survival. The statistics of small state survival during the nineteenth century confirm the overall pessimistic expectations. The total number of small

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states did not return to previous heights. In fact, the concert system saw the historic low point of small state total numbers. However, while the overall trend was negative, the data show moments of recovery and general stability. Early on, when the concert system worked at its best, the number of small states rose, and towards the era’s end the number of small states bounced back from its all-time low. The nineteenth century witnessed small state losses at an accelerated rate compared with the previous era, but the rout did not lead to full annihilation. The historical record confirms the description of the concert system as inhospitable to the small state and the statistical observation of an accelerated decline in the number of small states during the nineteenth century. A new equilibrium was created at the expense of the small state. Few of the states that Napoleon had terminated were reestablished. The great powers were looking for sizable states instead, to help contain France. Over the following decades, though, new small states emerged, a good number of them overseas where some European colonial powers had lost their grip on foreign territories. The development was not sustained beyond mid century, however, when the concert system lost much of its restraining forces and great power competition deteriorated into hostility. The Crimean War at mid century was the first major marker of a trend that culminated in the outbreak of the First World War, which started with the invasion of the small state Belgium by the great power Germany. During the second half of the century, two additional factors were responsible for further losses of small states. In Europe, integrative nationalism paved the way for Italian and German unification. Overseas, European, American, and Japanese imperialism prevented the emergence of new small states. Making matters worse, many surviving small states were faced with increasing antipathy. Small states besieged on many sides struggled mightily to survive or even emerge from colonial status. Overall, the nineteenth-century concert system was less conducive to small state survival than the pure balance of power before, but neither was it detrimental to it. In this sense, the concert system was only mildly conducive. It was certainly too weak to shield small states from integrative nationalism and the imperial ambitions of great powers. The concert system was not an environment that could support a reversal of the trend of declining numbers of small states. However, the concert system did not lead to the abolishment of all small states, either. It had few supportive features that helped small states to survive, but it was not geared towards the complete destruction of small statehood.

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Inducing proliferation: collective security systems’ support for the small state The twentieth-century systems of collective security were game changers for the small states’ struggle to survive. Not only was the traditional, centuries-long negative trend halted, but it was reversed and led to an unprecedented, massive proliferation of small states soon after mid century. Since then, the total and relative numbers of small states appear to have plateaued at, historically speaking, mid range levels. It would be misleading to describe the twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century states system simply as collective security systems. They were hybrid systems and, like previous international states systems, were constructed on the basis of the politics of power along a core Realist paradigm. However, compared with the previous states systems, the League of Nations system and the current UN system were radically modified by mechanisms of collective action and thus amount to a distinct type of states system. To be sure, the twentieth-century systems only partially incorporated collective security. So the enormous gains in security for small states have remained tempered by the persistence of the dynamics of power politics.2 Nevertheless, the collective security framework provided the backdrop of a dramatic rise in the states system. The League and UN systems proved to be the most hospitable and supportive environments for the small state. It is easy to see that the ideal-type system of collective security provides the highest level of security to the small state. All states, including the great powers, commit themselves to defend even the smallest state with all their might when necessary. The commitment is absolute and quasi-automatic, and thus provides the ultimate level of deterrence. Needless to say, the League and UN systems were a far cry from the ideal type, and generated much lower levels of protection for the small state. The League of Nations system suffered from limited membership and lack of commitment in particular. The US could not convince itself to join its own president’s creation, defeated Germany was initially excluded, and Soviet Russia was treated as an outcast. Many small states were rejected, too. Soon, the remaining great powers’ lack of commitment to the League-based collective security arrangement showed, and the system broke down less than two decades after its creation. Nevertheless, the interwar years had seen the League bringing to bear its collective clout to peacefully settle international disputes, including conflicts that included small states. Collective security under the League, however limited, upgraded small state security.

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Much the same can be said about the UN-based system of collective security that emerged after the Second World War. Again, collective security was limited but far from “irrelevant,” as has been claimed.3 Admittedly, the UN’s system of collective security was a mixed bag conceptually with an equally mixed record. Nevertheless, Cold War history is rich in examples of small states, such as Austria, “not hav[ing] to worry about [their] physical survival, as during the interwar period,”4 and others emerging from colonization at a time when their external security was not fundamentally at risk. This was in part due to a fairly accommodating security environment during the Cold War in which UN-centered collective security was an important factor. When the Cold War ended, the UN’s collective security infrastructure remained in place, but was freed from the severe limitations imposed by bipolarity. Collective security passed through unipolarity and is now transitioning back to a plurilateral system of states. For the last quartercentury, UN-centered collective security has continued to protect small states and assist in small state creation, albeit on a small scale. The UN’s collective security system has remained hampered by the veto power of the five permanent members of the Security Council. With respect to small state security, UN-based collective security remains hugely important, to be sure, but limited. Collective security, even if implemented in only limited fashion as following the two world wars, increases small state security, and one would expect to see this reflected in a higher rate of survival or even ­proliferation of small states. The hardening of the norm of self-­ determination and the shift from integrative to disintegrative nationalism during the twentieth century in particular strengthen the expectation of small state proliferation. The data indeed show a reversal in the numbers of small states. A good number of new small states entered the states system in 1918, when the First World War ended. The number of small states remained constant until the outbreak of the Second World War, suggesting that the traditional downward trend in the number of small states had come to an end. The introduction of the League-centered system of collective security, together with the modifier self-determination, thus correlates with the end of a century-long erosion in the number of small states. Even more impressive was the recovery of small state numbers that set in with the end of the Second World War, and then accelerated during the 1950s into an era of dramatic small state proliferation. To be sure, the number of larger states increased, too, but not nearly as dramatically as the number of small states. The benefits of collective security and the additional modifiers of the second half of the twentieth century were

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not exclusive to the small state, and the addition of larger states to the system at a time of small state proliferation is not surprising. In fact, it reflects the geographic expansion of the states system during this time. In sum, statistical data are consistent with the claim that collective security arrangements are beneficial to small state survival or even proliferation. An examination of the history of twentieth-century international affairs further strengthens the claim that systems of collective security create international environments conducive to small state survival and proliferation. The era was sub-divided into two periods: the interwar era of the League of Nations, and the Cold War and post-Cold War era of the UN. The League did not fully embrace the small state, despite the lofty references of its founding father, President Wilson, to “great and small states.”5 Similar to Westphalia and Vienna, small states were not brought into the negotiations about the post-war order. However, they benefitted significantly from the increase in security the League of Nations set out to provide. More concretely, small states benefitted when the norm of self-determination was added to the agenda and enforced even against the will of great powers. Admittedly, the League’s collective security arrangement was incomplete at best. Critically, despite all the president’s efforts he failed in fully integrating the US into the League-centered world order for which he had fought in Paris. Thus the League was compromised by its limited membership overall and the refusal of the US to join it in particular. And despite Wilson’s efforts, self-determination was rejected by the European great powers when it came to their own possessions. However, notwithstanding these and many other shortcomings, the world order that emerged in Paris in 1918–19 and lasted until the Second World War had a number of features, from collective security and self-determination to an advancing International Law and efforts to rein in aggressive war, which shaped the political environment and made it conducive to small state survival. In sum, the interwar era featured a states system that was fairly supportive of small state survival. The UN-centered system of the Cold War and post-Cold War was even more hospitable to the small state. In the harsh environment of Cold War competition, small states proliferated. Small states were ‘born’ into a states system that hinged on a bipolar balance of power, but also featured a growing network of institutions and regimes that assisted small states, and energized further efforts at decolonization and small state creation. The robust bipolarity of the Cold War severely limited small states from triggering balancing maneuvers in the way previous eras had allowed. Nevertheless, small states were repeatedly able to use the highly competitive and ideologically charged bipolarity of the Cold War

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to their advantage. Malta and Iceland used it to gain concessions from the West and to free ride on the US-sponsored security network. North Korea used its position as a Communist front-line state to receive special consideration from the Eastern bloc. A small state that was fully committed and integrated into either the US or the Soviet camp could count on ‘its’ superpower to protect it in most scenarios, and keep it under a nuclear umbrella. However, superpower protection of small states often came at the price of severely limited autonomy. Whereas in past centuries, small states had been able to invoke the dynamics of the balance of power and bring in a great power to neutralize the threat of another great power, during the Cold War small states’ options were often severely limited. European small states on either side of the “Iron Curtain”6 that split the continent in two halves could not receive support from the other side, as the cases of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 demonstrated. And in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba could not count on unlimited Soviet backing, as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 showed. The Cold War witnessed the further hardening of the norm of selfdetermination, the shift of nationalism from integrative to highly disintegrative, and the full force of decolonization. The combination of these factors further shaped the Cold War era and generated the creation of over eighty small states. The period’s states system was very supportive of small states and continues to be supportive to this day. The end of the Cold War triggered another wave of small state creation when empires fell and multi-ethnic states disintegrated. Since then, small state proliferation has ebbed, but the modern states system appears to protect the existing number of small states. The post-Cold War system can be described as highly conducive to and fairly protective of small states. In sum, larger downward as well as upward trends in the number of small states are due first and foremost to the states system, its key structural dynamics, and its limitations on the exercise of power by large states. Close examination of the various states systems has i­ndicated ways and means in which the systems have created more or less supportive environments for small state survival. These dynamics, it has been suggested, should lead to corresponding changes in the survival rate of small states. This claim is strongly supported by numerical data. Major changes at the system level correlated with larger changes in the number of small states. The historical record also supports this claim. Most importantly, international political history illustrates and verifies the existence of a causal link between the various protective features of different types of states systems and the survival rates of small states.

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In conclusion, the small state’s chances of survival are ultimately determined at the system level. Support for this argument comes from statistical data. Further confirmation can be found in the historical record, with which the causal link between a states system’s core features and small states’ chances of survival can be demonstrated. Small state survival and proliferation in the future This research project concludes with the reaffirmation of the initial assumption, that small state survival is strongly linked to the critical features of its states system. The argument rests on an examination of nearly 370 years of international political history. On this basis, a cautious prediction on the future of the small state is permissible. It seems reasonable to assume that this dynamic will continue for the foreseeable future and that small state survival and proliferation will remain causally linked to the core features of the states system. To be sure, the particular type of states system is not a complete or exhaustive explanation of small state survival or proliferation, but it has been demonstrated to be the dominant cause and the key explanatory variable behind the rise and fall in the numbers of small states and their centuries-long struggle to survive. The finding that the states system is the key variable in small states’ struggle to survive has policy implications. Stateswomen and -men must recognize the prime importance of the system and its particular shape to small state security. Whereas great powers can protect themselves against most, if not all, threats, small states are uniquely vulnerable and must accept that their survival will continue to depend on system-level constellations. Small states’ leaders in particular must keep their focus on changes at the system level and look for ways to funnel them in directions that favor their interests. Leaning on this theoretically framed and historically informed study of small state survival, the key lesson is that in most cases small state security comes from the outside. Internally generated power at a sufficient level is the exception to the rule. However, sources to augment their security have been available to small states throughout history. Where available, small states can find high degrees of safety in collective defense or collective security arrangements. Where no such regime is available, rivalries and jealousies among great and middle powers can provide opportunities to stir up countering maneuvers that protect the small state. As International Law grew and hardened, it evolved into a meaningful tool, too. In contrast, small state alliances have a mixed record as security provider, and the same must be said about neutrality.

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The states systems of all three major eras were similar in that their core features predetermined small states’ chances of survival. Their respective levels of small state permissiveness, supportiveness, or protectiveness, however, differed significantly. The concert system had the lowest level of support for the small state when measured by the losses of small states that accumulated during the nineteenth century. The laissez-faire balance-of-power system was less hostile to the small state, although the number of small states declined as well. By far the most hospitable states system was the twentieth century’s system, which featured collective security. In particular, the post-Second World War system with its still evolving structures of global governance has created a highly supportive environment and today’s small states enjoy unprecedented levels of traditional security. In more ways than one, small states are the prime beneficiaries of today’s system and its safety mechanisms. One indicator of this high level of accommodation is the stability of small states numbers and the occasional addition to the total count. One may reasonably assume that the continuation of this system further into the twenty-first century will lead to either stable or possibly increasing numbers of small states. This may indeed be good news if one accepts Morgenthau’s argument that the historical “drastic numerical reduction” of small states then leads to a “concentration of power” which, in his analysis, “create[s] one precondition for total war.”7 In this context at least, the continuation of small state proliferation in the future would be a desirable development. Assuming that the basic set-up of world politics which emerged nearly a century ago will continue to structure global politics in the twenty-first century, and in light of the increase in the numbers of small states that occurred one-half century ago, it is not unreasonable to be optimistic about small state survival and even further small state creation. It appears that today’s states system can maintain a high level of accommodation, and in fact improve a still growing infrastructure that can assist in small state creation. The recent case of Timor Leste is an example. In addition, the fundamentally liberal global economic structure plays into the hands of small states that have positioned themselves as ‘boutique states’ – small states that specialize in certain economic niches and provide specific services. Comparable to boutique companies, boutique states such as the Cayman Islands, which offer particular financial services and attractive tourism opportunities, derive a measure of security through their roles in a highly interdependent world economy. Also, there seems to be no reduction in extantism. Even though failing states

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may create problems for neighbors or become hotspots of international terrorism, they are not terminated. Economic aid and financial assistance have become commonplace in international affairs and provide a further safety net for small states struggling to succeed in the global economy. The contemporary states system certainly favors small state survival and even small state proliferation. Over the longer term, the world may indeed witness a slow return to particularism and a more atomized world. Nine ‘small states in waiting’ were identified a decade ago.8 They are Abkhazia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Montenegro, Republica Srpska, Transnistria, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, and Bougainville. The continuation of an “international politics of fragmentation,”9 it was claimed, might very well lead to secessions from Indonesia, Nigeria, Canada, Spain, and the UK. Since then, Kosovo and Montenegro have entered statehood, and Guam,10 West Papua, and arguably New Caledonia and Tahiti have joined the list of candidates. The case of Bougainville highlights two associated dynamics. First, the UN remains a key player in small state creation. In the dispute over Bougainville’s secession from Papua New Guinea, the organization has involved itself. Recently, the UN offered help with a referendum.11 Such involvement goes hand in hand with concerns over human rights and environmental threats in the South Pacific,12 and its previous involvement in state building in Timor Leste. In short, the UN remains an important player in state creation. Second, Bougainville’s secessionist efforts highlight the temptation to secede for economic reasons. Bougainville is rich in natural resources, specifically copper. A similar case was the break-off of the oil-rich southern part of Sudan and its emergence as the small state of South Sudan. Economically successful Catalonia has been advancing the economic argument as well, claiming that it has constantly been subsidizing poorer regions of Spain. In response to the United Kingdom’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union, Scotland revisited the issue of secession and state creation. This case is particularly interesting because it highlights the  high level of permissiveness in the system. Scotland would find a new ‘home’ in the EU almost immediately; NATO membership would not pose a problem either, and neither would, one assumes, membership in the UN. The small state Scotland would find itself as safe and secure after its secession as before. Oddly enough, the situation for the Kurdish people is almost the reverse. To begin with, their desire for a sovereign Kurdish state continues to be blocked by regional interests of great and middle powers. The territorial integrity of Turkey and Iraq is seen as more important. More generally speaking, “the principle of the

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t­ erritorial integrity of states has tended to take precedence over the right of self-determination.”13 The Scottish and Kurdish cases seem to cancel each other out, leaving the future of small state creation shrouded. However, it seems feasible to predict, ceteris paribus, not only a high rate of survival but also occasional, modest increases in the number of small states. As in the past, small state proliferation will depend heavily on the states system’s core features. The overall security environment in which the small state finds itself has been and will remain critical to small state death, survival, and creation. The story of small state survival will continue to be shaped first and foremost by the international system of states, its core features, and the limitations it places on power politics. Notes  1 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 159.  2 Osiander, The States System of Europe (1994), 248–315.  3 Claude’s chapter is titled “The Irrelevance of Collective Security.” Claude, Power and International Relations, 190–204; Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 397–407.  4 Paul Luif, “Austria: The Burdens of History,” in Small States in World Politics: Explaining Foreign Policy Behavior, ed. Jeanne A. K. Hey (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 111.  5 Wilson, “President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.”  6 Winston Churchill, The Sinews of Peace: Post-war Speeches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).  7 Morgenthau, “International Relations,” 229.  8 Tozun Bahcheli, Barry Bartmann, and Henry Srebrnik, eds., De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty (New York: Routledge, 2004).  9 Ibid., 9. 10 Robert Q. Tupaz, “No Plebiscite On Guam Self-determination Planned During November Elections,” East–West Center, 2016, www.pireport.org/artic​l​e​s​/​2​0​1​6​/​ 08/18/no-plebiscite-guam-self-determination-planned-during-november-elect​i​o​n​s​.​ 11 “UN Helping Bougainville Prepare For Independence Referendum,” East–West Center, 2016, www.pireport.org/articles/2016/09/01/un-helping-bougainville-p​r​e​ pare-independence-referendum. 12 “Tuvalu, Nauru Join Pacific Coalition on West Papua,” East–West Center, 2016, www.pireport.org/articles/2016/09/04/tuvalu-nauru-join-pacific-coalition-westpapua. Lanuola Tusani Tupufia, “Samoa PM Says Climate Change Priority For Forum Leaders,” East–West Center, 2016, . www.pireport.org/artic​l​e​s​/​2​0​1​6​/​0​9​/​ 04/samoa-pm-says-climate-change-priority-forum-leaders. 13 James Ker-Lindsay, The Foreign Policy of Counter Secession: Preventing the Recognition of Contested States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Index

Afghanistan 126, 146, 181, 201, 202 Afghan Mujahedeen 182 Aix-la-Chapele 74, 96 Albania 118, 167, 184, 188 Alsace 67 Andorra 194 Angell, Norman 141 Armenia 196 Anti-colonialism 145, 192 see also decolonization Athens 30 Augsburg Alliance 68 Austria 3, 23, 53, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 91–92, 108, 112, 115, 118, 165, 172, 185, 190, 201, 229 see also Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary 78, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 165, 166, 176 see also Austria Azerbaijan 196 balance of power 1, 3, 4, 8, 13, 27, 46, 47–51, 52–57, 59, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76–78, 79–80, 91, 92, 94–95, 110, 114, 116, 119–120, 125, 127, 140, 142, 150, 166, 168, 223–225, 230 see also balancing balancing 3, 10, 47–48, 49–50, 51, 52, 53, 54–55, 55–56, 58, 61, 67–70, 72–80, 91, 97, 101, 111, 114–115, 124, 150, 166, 171, 181, 202, 204, 224–225, 226, 230 see also balance of power

Balfour Declaration 177 Balkanization see particularism Baltic States 75, 79, 163, 166 Baltic States 5, 165, 176 see also Estonia see also Latvia see also Lithuania bandwagoning 54–55, 67, 68–70, 72, 79, 80, 118, 120, 149, 198, 201, 202 Bavaria 67, 68, 73, 74, 76, 79, 124 Bavarian Succession 73 Belarus 196 Belgium 95, 99, 110, 113, 114, 125, 128, 163, 175, 176, 193, 227 Bentham, Jeremy 141 Biafra 194 Bolivia 116, 170 see also Chaco War Bosnia 119, 196 Brandenburg 24, 49, 53 Elector of 60, 69 Brezhnev Doctrine 182, 183 Brunswick 68 Bulgaria 117, 121 , 184 see also Greek-Bulgarian border dispute Bush, George H. W. 145, 198, 199 Cambodia 190, 203, 204 Carr, E. H. 149 Castel de Saint-Pierre, Charles-Irénée 60, 140–141

260 Cayman Islands 233 Cecil, Robert 143 Chaco War 169, 170 Cold War 34, 139, 143–145, 156, 159, 161, 178–186 as long peace 190 Cologne Franz von Fürstenberg of 69 collective action 71, 139, 142, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 158, 171, 180, 181, 200, 221, 228 collective defense 139, 145, 149, 178, 184, 201, 202, 232 collective security 9, 12, 36, 46, 60, 71, 96, 139, 141–145, 145–146, 146–151, 151–152, 164, 166, 167–169, 170–172, 176, 177, 179–181, 196, 199–200, 202, 228–230 colonialism 75, 101, 116, 125, 126, 128, 195 see also anti-colonialism; decolonization; imperialism Colombia 167 concert system 1, 3, 13, 27, 90, 91, 92–97, 101–102 107–112, 113–115, 116, 117, 119, 128–129, 140, 221, 225–227, 233 Congress of Vienna 11, 27, 45, 90–92, 108–111, 121 Costa Rica 32, 190 Croatia 196 Cuba 127, 183, 198, 231 Cyprus 119, 234 Czechoslovakia 164, 172, 184 and Prague Spring 182, 185, 231 Danzig, Free City of 165 decolonization 116, 139, 141, 152, 154, 166, 180, 181, 191–194, 196, 230, 231, see also anti-colonialism Denmark 58, 68, 112 Danish fleet 79 diplomatic revolution 72–73 disarmament 141, 152, 156–157, 174–175, 187 Dominica 194 Drummond, Eric 172 Dutch Republic 30, 70, 72 see also Netherlands, The

Index Estonia 165, 166, 196 see also Baltic States Ethiopia 116, 170–171, 173 extantism 108, 155–156, 194, 233 Fiji 28 Finland 167, 171, 175, 176, 201 Florence 28, 30 Frankfurt Alliance 68 free riding 54, 55, 67, 72, 73, 169, 189 Fürstenbund 76 Gambia, The 194 Genoa 74 Georgia 196 Germany 99, 100, 112, 113, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128, 140, 143, 163, 166, 167, 169, 172, 174, 176, 227, 228 unification of 3, 34, 90, 101, 122, 123, 124, 227 Western 22 German Confederation 96, 112 Greece 168, 182, 185 Greek–Bulgarian border dispute 167 Grenada 183 Guatemala 171 Gulf War 145, 178 Haile Selassie 170 Haiti 101 Hamburg 68 Herzegovina 119, 196 Holy Roman Empire (of the German Nation) 23, 46, 53, 68, 70–72, 73, 79–80, 112 Honduras 101 Honduran independence 101 Hungary and 1956 uprising 182, 185, 231 ICC 153 Iceland 183, 184, 185, 231 ICJ 153, 187–189 and Corfu Channel Case 188 and Costa Rica v. Nicaragua 188 and New Zealand v. France 154, 188 and Nicaragua v. United States 154, 187, 188 and Singapore v Malaysia (“Pedra Branca Dispure”) 203

Index imperialism 101, 125–128, 129, 154, 165–166, 227 independence 8, 22–3, 24, 48, 53, 54, 75–76, 110, 112, 118, 125, 142, 152, 155, 166–167, 170, 183, 192, 193, 195 and Afghanistan 126 and Belgium 95, 110, 163 and Bulgaria 121 and Cuba 127 and Greece 182 and Honduras 101 and Krakow 115 and Luxembourg 118 and Malta 185 and Mozambique 191 and Namibia 192, 203 and Palau 192 and Panama 127 and Serbia 163 and Thailand 126 and United States of America 115 and Venice 108 influence, sphere of 23, 128 internationalism liberal 149 Wilsonian 140–143, 149, 178, 197 isolationism 143 Israel 186, 193 and US 180, 186 Jordan 198 Kant, Immanuel 60, 141 Kazakhstan 196 Kellog-Briand Pact 151, 156, 173, 174 Kennan, George F. 149 Kiribati 19 Korea 127–128, 164 North Korea 157, 186, 231 North Korean Aggression/Korean War 145, 178, 180–181 South Korea 180–181 Kuwait 145, 181, 199–200 see also Gulf War Kyrgyzstan 196 Laos 190 Latvia 165, 166, 196 law 2, 4, 10, 21–22, 46, 57–59, 71, 80, 98–99, 111, 113, 128, 141, 144, 151–154, 158, 172–174, 186–189,

261 200, 202–203, 204, 223, 224, 226, 230, 232 Laxenburg Alliance 68 League of Nations 142, 143, 144, 150, 151, 152, 157, 163, 165, 178, 228, 230 and dispute resolution 167–170, 172 and mandate system 176–177, 192 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 141 Liechtenstein 165, 175 limitation on power balance of power 52–57 international law 57, 98 normative 49 see also restraint on power Lithuania 165, 166, 168–169, 196 see also Poland, Polish–Lithuanian War London, Treaty of 75 Lombardy-Venetia 124 Lucca 108 Luxembourg 118, 165, 175, 184 neutralization of 96, 113 Machiavelli, Niccolò 2, 28 Maldives 194 Malta 185, 201, 231 Melos 28, 56 Metternich, Prince Klemens von 94, 112 Moldova 196, 201 Montenegro 117, 118, 165, 176, 196, 234 Montevideo, Convention of 21–22 Monroe Doctrine 23, 116, 127 Mozambique 191 Namibia 192, 203, 204 nationalism 98, 100–101, 108, 120–124, 129, 149, 151, 155, 156, 191, 226, 227, 229, 231 disintegrative 101, 151, 191, 229, 231 integrative 101, 122, 129, 155, 226, 227, 229, 231 NATO 149, 183, 184, 185, 201, 202, 234 and Yugoslavia 201 Netherlands, The 68, 95, 110, 112, 114, 118, 193 Dutch Republic 30, 70, 72

262 neutrality 24, 56–57, 79, 98, 99, 112–113, 118, 129, 157–158, 175–176, 189–190, 201, 232 Nicaragua 182 see also under ICJ Nice 119 Norway 121, 158 Nuremberg Trials 156 Palau 192 Paraguay 170 Parma-Piacenza 23 particularism 27, 70–72, 100, 122, 123, 194–195, 234 PCA 99, 153, 172 PCIJ 153, 172 Peace of Teschen 73 Peru 116, 167 Piedmont 80 see also Savoy–Piedmont Poland 58, 77–78, 92, 163, 167 Polish–Lithuanian War 168–169, 180, 225 post-Cold War 5, 139, 145–146, 196–202 pre-emption 58, 76, 156 Prussia 3, 53, 68, 73, 76, 77–78, 80, 91–92, 110, 111, 112, 115, 118, 121, 124 realism 5, 10, 31–32, 221 and small states 31–32 restraint on power 204, 224 absence of 79 law as 57–59, 98, 154, 173, 187, 189, 202 see also limitation on power Romania 117, 120, 176 Salzburg 74 Sardinia 74, 75, 119 Kingdom of 123 Savoy 70, 75, 119 Savoy-Piedmont 71, 74 Victor Amadeus of 75 Saxony 4, 110, 111–112 Saxe-Gotha 19 self-defense 151, 156, 190, 202 self-determination 101, 114, 121, 123, 125, 128, 139, 141, 145, 151, 154–155, 156, 165, 166, 176–177, 187, 191–196, 204, 229, 230, 235

Small states in world politics Serbia 117, 118, 163, 176, 196, 201 Sicily 75 Singapore 1, 2, 4, 5, 195, 203 Slovenia 196 small states and bandwagoning 54–55, 67, 68–69, 72, 74, 79, 108, 118, 120, 198, 201, 202 and neutrality 23–24, 56–57, 79, 112–113, 118, 129, 157, 158, 163, 175–176, 189, 193, 201, 232 sovereignty 22–23, 45–46 states system Westphalian 10–12, 34, 45–52, 125–126, 142 Strasburg 68 Sweden and neutrality 128, 176, 190, 201 as small state 121, 167, 169, 176, 201 Switzerland 20, 113, 122, 175, 176, 201 and neutrality 112–113, 128, 190 Talleyrand-Périgord, Maurice de 111 Tajikistan 196 Tanganyika 195 terrorism 139, 203, 234 terrorist attacks 146, 197, 201 Timor Leste 146, 203, 204, 233, 234 Tokyo Trials 156 Treaty of Campo 78 Truman Doctrine 182, 185 Turkmenistan 196, 201 United Kingdom of the Netherlands see Netherlands, The United Nations 2, 143–145, 152, 179–180 and trusteeship system 166, 192–193 Utrecht Peace of 47, 48 Treaty of 72 Vandenberg, Arthur 144 Vatican City 190 Venice 30, 70, 78, 108 Venetia 123, 124 see also Lombardy-Venetia; Treaty of Campo war 99, 156–157 ICJ lacking jurisdiction 188–189

263

Index illegality of 173 permissibility of 60–61 waning of 191 Westphalia, Peace of 22, 36, 45–46 Wilson, Woodrow 140 and Fourteen Points speech 142, 176

and Peace Without Victory speech 141, 142 Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism 140–143 WTO 153 Zanzibar 195