The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy: Charles S. Maier

 America and the World—The Effects of the Trump Presidency

The Trump “Legacy” for American Foreign Policy

Essay by Charles S. Maier, Harvard University

Published on 22 September 2021 | issforum.org

Editor: Diane Labrosse  | Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

https://issforum.org/to/ps2021-52

We cannot calculate President Trump’s “legacy” for United States foreign policy simply by describing his diplomacy while he was in power.  Virtuous fathers can fritter away family wealth, and Mafiosi can leave ill-gotten gains to charity.  It is still too early to know what long-term consequences might emerge, and it is difficult to sort out what trends would have prevailed even with a less disruptive leader.  Happily, a one-term presidency is less likely to leave durable wreckage in terms of our international reputation than eight years would have done.  My own admittedly non-impartial view is that Trump’s domestic legacy was more damaging and dangerous than his international one.  With his wanton disregard for truth, his use of social media to spread vituperation and contempt, whether for opponents or supporters who fell out of favor, his winking at practitioners of political violence, he simply trashed the norms needed for a functioning democracy – and that is not to mention the continual challenges to the 2020 election results.  Still, H-Diplo has asked about the consequences for foreign policy, and those remain the focus here.   

The impulsiveness of Trump’s foreign policy, exemplified by the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Iranian nuclear framework along with the coarsening of rhetoric – yes, words matter – has damaged America’s stature as a reliable partner (or adversary) in foreign affairs.  By the end of the first term an impartial observer might plausibly have believed that the United States was a danger to global peace, not because the country intended a war – George W. Bush was far clearer about that goal in 2003 – but because its leader was brutally transactional, and like every American president possessed extraordinary constitutional power over foreign policy and military decisions.  To my mind, as a historian of Europe, American behavior sometimes recalled the Germany of Kaiser William II – a country, like the United States, that was given to revering its military forces and saddled with a mercurial ruler, unpredictable and heedless of the lamentable impression it was making abroad.  Fortunately, the American defense and state department bureaucracies were inertial or intelligent enough to resist some, though not all, of the White House whims.  And even the president managed to resist the potential for untethered policy making from advisers such as Michael Flynn or John Bolton.

Fortunately, much of the behavior that dismayed those who prize a collaborative relationship with allies and friends involved style more than substance, so can probably be repaired.  Nevertheless, as the Trump presidency fades into history – assuming that he will not successfully run again in 2024 or that his approach to U.S. international behavior will not be reproduced under a Republican successor – it is also evident that the considerable challenges now facing the Biden administration are not simply legacies from the Trump administration.  They are agonizing issues that transcend the question of which president is in power.  President Barack Obama could not resolve them, and it is hardly clear that President Biden can either.  To be sure, Trump denied their gravity and believed he could overcome them on the basis of vague threats or of personal bonding with one or another dictator.  Still, the issues involved would have vexed, and will vex even the wisest leadership.  And to judge from initiatives taken so far, the Biden administration has not figured out, or believed it appropriate to stake out positions, that are fundamentally different.  

This essay was largely written before President Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, but a final version must take account of that defeat.  One can argue that the Trump administration’s signing of a peace accord with the Taliban in 2020 foreclosed Biden’s options.  But enough maneuverability remained in terms of timing and residual force levels to leave the current president some freedom of action.  Biden, however, like Obama – with respect to Syria -- and perhaps like Trump, saw the alternative as a ‘forever war’ that could yield no decision.  I appreciate the reasoning that led to this disengagement, but fear that a generation of aspiring Afghan women and those citizens who wagered on presidential assurances will pay a heavy price for U.S. abandonment.  President Biden has claimed that the country will no longer be an al-Qaeda haven (just as President Trump declared that the danger of ISIS had ended), but that proclaimed goal has long been less compelling now that terrorist networks subsist in many different territories.  Indeed, the alleged removal of a terrorist threat from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan may prove a spurious achievement given the recent actions of the so-called ISIS-K network.  The greater consideration was perhaps that both the Trump and Biden administrations decided that if the Afghans could not finally defend themselves, they did not deserve to be forever defended by the United States.  This is a justification, however, that ignores the role of the allies of United States, and the sacrifices Afghans themselves have made.  Defenders of the sudden withdrawal have also stressed that the United States was unlikely to turn the country into a functioning democracy.  But acknowledging this limitation did not have to mean that the U.S. could not have helped to preserve a non-authoritarian and more tolerant regime at an acceptable cost.  

That admittedly less exalted mission has now been foreclosed, and the decision is in line with Trump’s policies even if Biden faced up to more honestly.  For better or worse, American policy in the Middle East and Central Asia has long been a messy bipartisan one.  It has occasionally been mendacious and disastrous such as in the case of the 2003-04 war in Iraq, which was also supported on both sides of the aisle.  More often it has been one of temporizing, what the British called cunctation – kicking the can down the road, which works until it doesn’t.  This approach has characterized the U.S. approach to the Saudi regime, and it has characterized the government’s unwillingness to pry Israel from its policies that are determined to forestall any viable Palestinian national structure.    

Cunctation may be the only realistic policy with respect to the other issues Biden must face.  In the long run the United States is unlikely to overcome the assertiveness of China in geopolitical and economic terms, the resistance of both China and the Soviet Union to human rights, and the global turn to authoritarianism more widely.  With respect to international economic and social issues, the major Western nations will all confront throngs of migrants fleeing collapsing or abusive state authority in Central America and the Middle East (the latter of which are more of a European concern); they have already had a hard time facing the global health issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic; and all them are struggling to institute the collective action needed to mitigate the massive impact of climate change.  The harsh truth is that every president inherits a heavily encumbered international situation and must judge what to accept and what to contest.  Biden has accepted Germany’s plan to move ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia as a “fait-accompli,” even though it threatens to further squeeze Ukraine, and will not reduce German dependence on hydrocarbons^[1]  Despite ritual denials, NATO partners in general have apparently accepted the Russian annexation of Crimea as a fait-accompli.  Swallowing the fait-accompli may become the leitmotif of U.S. decline even though acceptable political rhetoric will never allow it to be confessed openly. 

President Trump did nothing to reverse this melancholy prospect.  His massive over-confidence in his mastery of the art of the deal and his personal presence led him to believe that Kim Jong-un would succumb to his blandishments and renounce North Korea’s nuclear program.  He was foolish to think so and to have disregarded the unsettling impact it would have on the delicate triangle with South Korea and Japan.  Still, if it had been adequately prepared, I would not condemn the wager on a personal meeting as such.  The underlying problem is that Trump seemed to have little capacity to understand the ‘structural’ limits to personal cajolery.  So long as Kim Jong-un remains willing to disregard the economic costs to his population, his nuclear arsenal provides him with a power and status he has no reason to renounce.  The Chinese could change his calculus, but why should they bring Pyongyang to heel so long as it remains an irritant to the United States, South Korea, and Japan?  Beijing has no motive to make life easy for Washington. 

The dilemma posed by the Iranian nuclear program is somewhat different since Tehran has not yet achieved a nuclear stockpile.  The question was (and remains) whether the JPCOA was really likely to forestall that eventuality in the long run.  The Biden administration has not rushed to rejoin it unconditionally.  Detractors of the agreement believe that its 15-year limit is dangerously brief.  Supporters are wagering that somehow Iran’s rulers will find it in their interest to extend it.  In both cases the wager is on the long-term nature of the Iranian regime.  Is it realistic for the United States to seek long-term cooperation from Iranian moderates?  Or should it accept their weakness in the current institutional structure and simply confront the hard-liners with ever-harsher sanctions (assuming that the U.S. and its Israeli allies forswear the option of a preemptive strike with all the incalculable consequences that would entail)?  Obviously, the division between hard-liners and moderates is far too crude and allows for no evolution of positions.  (The historian does well to recall the dilemmas posed by the Versailles treaty framework and its impact on German political institutions between 1919 and 1939.  Would earlier revision have forestalled the advent of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler?  Should it have been enforced integrally early on once he came to power?  These issues are still debated.) 

There is another alternative: simply accept that after fifteen years the Iranians may well acquire nuclear weapons, and that thereafter the Islamic Republic’s potential adversaries will have to rely on the balance of terror to keep them from being used.  This is, after all, the regime that India and Pakistan, China, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S. have relied on since 1945.  Before insisting that it remains unacceptable in the case of Iran or North Korea we have to ask what feasible and acceptable alternative promises greater stability.  

In any case, the non-proliferation regime that has been in theory a bipartisan commitment of U.S. foreign policy is always going to be vulnerable short of global nuclear disarmament.  It establishes a hierarchy of great powers that second-rank authoritarian powers will be tempted to challenge.  In practice it is a regime of slowed proliferation, in which one or two new nuclear powers have been allowed to emerge every couple of decades.  The major deterrent to acquisition aside from cost has been the quite rational conclusion that to possess atomic weapons is likely to make one a target for other nuclear powers.  Trump apparently asked his advisers why, if the United States has nuclear weapons, it doesn’t use them.  The question suggested that the rationality needed for a deterrence regime may not be foolproof.  The Soviets and Americans have preserved a mutual deterrence regime for some 70 years, but it can only be judged successful if it lasts forever.  Israel may ultimately have to live with such a Damoclean status quo.  The debate that Trump’s legacy should reopen is whether the U.S. should strive for universal nuclear disarmament including its own arsenal if it would keep countries such as Iran from acquiring atomic weapons.  A hierarchical system of limited access to weaponry is unlikely to provide stability forever.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JPCOA had, of course, wider implications in terms of regional Middle Eastern politics.  It further cemented an alignment with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli policies, a clear choice to write off any remaining tattered hopes for a two-state solution and to humiliate the Palestinians.  Trump’s turning over a highly complex set of questions to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was not unprecedented (Italian dictator Benito Mussolini also relied on his son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano as foreign minister… before he had him shot for supporting his ouster), but it revealed again how all complex issues were filtered through personal relationships.  

Nonetheless, an implicit strategy was emerging for the Middle East from Kushner’s bricolage.  The administration in effect was brokering an alignment of authoritarian Gulf rulers, the Saudis, and Netanyahu to tamp down the troublesome (and yes, sometimes terrorist) subaltern peoples of the region – whether Palestinians or the non-Arab proletariats of the Gulf.  Having an authoritarian regime in Egypt preoccupied with its own repressive agenda, a hapless Iraqi state, and an epic tragedy in Syria helped facilitate this combinazione.  Probably any international agreements involving Israel and the other Middle Eastern powers should be welcomed, but the so-called Abraham Accords were clearly a coalition of conservative elites against radical change, a latter-day Holy Alliance sanctimoniously named for the spiritual ancestor of the three monotheistic faiths.  None of its signatories apparently recalled how Hagar fit into that story as well.

                                                                                                                                                *

When it comes to foreign policy it seems to me that several fundamental choices currently face the United State, and they are often obfuscated by worn-out slogans.  Does it wish to retain its “global leadership”?  Is it in fact an “indispensable nation”?  Does it make sense for political leaders to insist that its “greatest days lie ahead”?  I am not sure what global leadership consists of these days.  If it involves military preponderance, the U.S. may still retain it, but an edge in hardware probably means less than it once did.  If North Korea managed to land nuclear missiles on any American city the result would be disastrous, no matter what vengeance the United States might choose to exact.  If Russian-protected cyber outlaws brought down urban transportation and medical systems, the consequences would be catastrophic.  It has been evident for over half a century that the United States could not maintain its post-World War II share of global production and wealth, and the real success of foreign economic policy would be a more universal economic development.  If moral “leadership” is at stake – which is where Trump failed most egregiously—then the United States has serious tasks ahead:  absorbing migrants, closing Guantánamo, and reforming its incarceration system (more the product of the Clinton years than Trump’s administration – indeed one area where Trump promised some meaningful reform), and reversing glaring inequalities of race, income, and wealth.  Rather than insisting on global leadership, the task of the U.S. should be to manage America’s relative decline in a multipolar system without military conflict.  Measure success by raising the health, education, and welfare levels of the world’s poorest, including America’s own.

And what about the constitutional provisions for setting American foreign policy?  After the Vietnam War Congress moved to reclaim more power over American military interventions abroad – a tendency that was reversed again after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.  Normally vigorous Congressional oversight should seem desirable.  But let us be candid, Congress supported the cold-war engagement that liberals called for during a period when Democrats still ruled a one-party South and segregationist senators chaired key committees concerned with foreign policy and defense.  Do supporters of a strong presidential role really want Congressional oversight when Trump’s legacy still seems so strong over a Southern white electorate?  

On the other hand, whether speaking as historian or citizen, I am not ready to endorse the calls for a withdrawal from international commitments to the degree that has now become fashionable among some in both conservative and progressive circles.  Andrew Bacevich and Stephen Wertheim have exposed some of the grandiose visions that have motivated American imperial pretensions since the outset of World War II, but perhaps because of my age (a child of the Marshall Plan, so to speak), I think that the military and diplomatic retrenchment they recommend would be unwise in today’s world.^[2]  Aside from the global upheavals that might follow, I do not believe that American politics would witness a succession of uncontested catastrophic outcomes, whether in the Middle East, or Taiwan, or elsewhere without descending into a series of domestic witch hunts or ultimately giving way to a sudden reversal of security policy from an objectively disadvantaged position (cf. Britain in 1938-40).  

I believe it is appropriate to defend values as well as interests, although to what degree military force should be engaged has to be weighed case by case.  There is a case for speaking loudly as well as wielding a big stick.  Speaking truth to power is a more appealing way of putting it.  I would submit it is the best choice for dealing with China even while the United States reengages with regional Asian and European allies.  Human rights cannot be the only guideline for policy but neither can acceptance of the fait accompli.  Public opinion loves to find a suitable “doctrine” for foreign policy – the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, etc. – but case-by-case wisdom is probably more useful and will certainly be more necessary.  Ironically, the Trump presidency may have done one indirect public service through all its brutal disruptions if it compels a rethinking of what foreign policy the American imperial republic can and should defend.

 

Charles S. Maier received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1967 and is currently Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University.  His most recent book is Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

© Copyright 2021 The Authors

 

Notes

[1] John Hudson, “Amid internal disputes over Russia policy, Biden has chosen a mix of confrontation and cooperation,” The Washington Post, 15June 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/biden-putin-summit/2021/06/15/19657e2c-cd44-11eb-9b7e-e06f6cfdece8_story.html

[2] See among his other works, Andrew Bacevich, After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed (New York: Macmillan, 2021); The Age of Illusions (New York: Henry Holt, 2020); The Long Wars: A New History of U.S. National Security Policy since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: the Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

 

Online Global Research Tactics for the 21st Century: FRUS - Presentation on archival resources available

 A organizadora (Victoria Philips) do evento sobre a pesquisa nos arquivos diplomáticos americanos – especificamente a série US Foreign Relations, volumes dedicados a temas ou períodos – enviou o link para a mais recente apresentação. A próxima é sobre os arquivos britânicos.

Thank you very much for attending the seminar yesterday [23/10/2020]. Please find a recording of yesterday's session here and a link to the slides here. If you have any questions, you may reach out to Michael or Joe by emailing the Office's account, history@state.gov, with a note that I advised you to contact them in order to follow up on our presentation.

If anybody wishes to reference the previous seminar from June, they will find the recording at this link. Access Password: OnLineResearch2021!

[Era sobre os Arquivos Rockefeller e obras filantrópicas around the world, at: 

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/play/CLrt648RgiQBcdvvBaLGhToXn8STW-a0O9sfdTJ4qmuYlliPEQHeXCpsgXHHl4GOO5lRs5ZSlXbNBXs.ZNdnXer0SuGmecaw?continueMode=true&_x_zm_rtaid=ljUKN0nSTTyFYvLMXly5jg.1603596940390.72798fde1da7d87b072963176d926261&_x_zm_rhtaid=109 ]

A apresentação gravada necessita autorização: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_PTJliguWfkEpvyLtAa7W4Jo11LRjGJg/view?usp=sharing

Os slides estão aqui: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dFYOtv81JuNjAneDw5YEGFT3DeKNranlaXYCh8Dhn6o/edit#slide=id.p

Past presentation: 

The next seminar, Online Global Research Tactics for the Twenty-First Century: The National Archives, the UK Government Archive, will be held on the 13th November, 2 pm GMT. Please find an informational poster attached. If you have not yet RSVPed for the session and would like to attend, please respond to this email.

Thank you for your participation in this series, and we hope to see you again very soon!

The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 - Margaret MacMillan

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 

por Margaret MacMillan (Autor)

(Churchill e o Imperador do Reich alemão, na capa)

• Capa comum: 739 páginas
• Editora: Random House Trade; Edição: Reprint (29 de julho de 2014)
• Idioma: Inglês
• ISBN-10: 0812980662
• ISBN-13: 978-0812980660

https://www.amazon.com.br/War-That-Ended-Peace-Road/dp/0812980662

Chapter 1

Europe in 1900

On April 14, 1900, Emile Loubet, the President of France, talked approvingly about justice and human kindness as he opened the Paris Universal Exposition. There was little kindness to be found in the press comments at the time. The exhibitions were not ready; the site was a dusty mess of building works; and almost everyone hated the giant statue over the entrance of a woman modeled on the actress Sarah Bernhardt and dressed in a fashionable evening dress. Yet the Exposition went on to be a triumph, with over 50 million visitors.

In style and content the Exposition partly celebrated the glories of the past and each nation displayed its national treasures—whether paintings, sculptures, rare books or scrolls—and its national activities. So where the Canadian pavilion had piles of furs, the Finnish showed lots of wood, and the Portuguese decorated their pavilion with ornamental fish. Many of the European pavilions mimicked great Gothic or Renaissance buildings, although little Switzerland built a chalet. The Chinese copied a part of the Forbidden City in Beijing and Siam (today Thailand) put up a pagoda. The Ottoman Empire, that dwindling but still great state which stretched from the Balkans in southern Europe through Turkey to the Arab Middle East, chose a pavilion which was a jumble of styles, much like its own peoples who included Christians, Muslims and Jews and many different ethnicities. With colored tiles and bricks, arches, towers, Gothic windows, elements of mosques, of the Grand Bazaar from Constantinople (now Istanbul), it was fitting that the overall result still somehow resembled the Hagia Sophia, once a great Christian church that became a mosque after the Ottoman conquest.

Germany’s pavilion was surmounted by a statue of a herald blowing a trumpet, suitable, perhaps, for the newest of the great European powers. Inside was an exact reproduction of Frederick the Great’s library; tactfully the Germans did not focus on his military victories, many of them over France. The western facade hinted, though, at a new rivalry, the one which was developing between Germany and the world’s greatest naval power, Great Britain: a panel showed a stormy sea with sirens calling and had a motto rumored to be written by Germany’s ruler, Kaiser Wilhelm II, himself: “Fortune’s star invites the courageous man to pull up the anchor and throw himself into the conquest of the waves.” Elsewhere at the Exposition were reminders of the rapidly burgeoning power of a country that had only come into existence in 1871; the Palace of Electricity contained a giant crane from Germany which could lift 25,000 kilos.

Austria-Hungary, Germany’s closest friend in Europe, had two separate pavilions, one for each half of what had come to be known as the Dual Monarchy. The Austrian one was a triumph of Art Nouveau, the new style which had been catching on in Europe. Marble cherubs and dolphins played around its fountains, giant statues held up its staircases and every inch of its walls appeared to be covered by gold leaf, precious stones, happy or sad masks, or garlands. A grand reception room was set aside for members of the Habsburg family which had presided for centuries over the great empire stretching from the center of Europe down to the Alps and Adriatic, and the exhibits showed off the work of Poles, Czechs, and South Slavs from the Dalmatian coast, only some of the Dual Monarchy’s many peoples. Next to the Austrian pavilion and separating it from that of Hungary stood a smaller one, representing the little province of Bosnia, still technically part of the Ottoman Empire but administered since 1878 from Vienna. The Bosnian pavilion, with its lovely decorations by craftsmen from its capital of Sarajevo, looked, said the guide published by Hachette, like a young girl being brought out into the world for the first time by her parents.1 (And they were not particularly happy ones at that.)

The mood of the Hungarian pavilion was strongly nationalistic. (Austrian critics said sourly that the folk art on display was vulgar and its colors too bright.) The exhibits also included a reconstruction of the great citadel of Comorn (Komáron) in the north which stood in the way of the Ottomans in the sixteenth century as they stretched northwards into Europe. Much more recently, in 1848, it had been held by Hungarian nationalists in the revolt against the Habsburgs but had fallen to Austrian forces in 1849. Another room was dedicated to the Hussars, famous for their bravery in the wars against the Ottomans. The exhibits paid less attention though to the millions of non-Hungarian peoples, Croatians or Rumanians, for example, who lived within Hungary’s borders.

Italy, like Germany a new country and a great power more by courtesy than in reality, had built what looked like a vast, richly decorated cathedral. On its golden dome stood a giant eagle, its wings outstretched in triumph. Inside it was filled with art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but the glories of the past could weigh heavily on a poor young country. Britain, by contrast, chose to be low key even though it still dominated much of the world’s trade and manufacturing and had the world’s biggest navy and largest empire. Its exhibit was housed in a cozy country house designed by rising young architect Edwin Lutyens in the half-timbered Tudor style and consisted mainly of English paintings from the eighteenth century. Some private British owners had refused to lend their works because Britain’s relations with France, traditionally difficult, were particularly strained in 1900.2

Russia had pride of place at the Exposition as France’s favored ally. The Russian exhibits were huge and scattered in several different locations, ranging from a massive palace in the style of the Kremlin dedicated to Siberia to a richly decorated pavilion named in honor of the Tsar’s mother, Empress Marie. Visitors could admire, among much else, a map of France made in precious stones which the Tsar, Nicholas II, had sent as a present to the French and marvel at the sheer extent of the Romanovs’ possessions. The French themselves did not have their own pavilion; the whole Exposition was after all designed to be a monument to French civilization, French power, French industry and agriculture, and French colonies, and room after room in the different special exhibits was devoted to French achievements. The French section of the Palais des Beaux-Arts was, said the guide, naturally a model of good taste and luxury. The Exposition marked the reassertion by France that it was still a great power, even though only thirty years previously it had been utterly defeated as it had tried to prevent Germany coming into existence.

The Universal Exposition was nevertheless, the French declared, a “symbol of harmony and peace” for all of humanity. Although the more than forty countries exhibiting in Paris were mainly European, the United States, China, and several Latin American countries also had pavilions. As a reminder though of where power still lay, a large part of the Exposition was given over to colonies where the European powers showed off their possessions. The crowds could marvel at exotic plants and beasts, walk by replicas of African villages, watch craftsmen from French Indochina at their work, or shop in North African souks. “Supple dancing girls,” said an American observer severely, “perform the worst forms of bodily contortions known to the followers of Terpsichore.”3 Visitors came away with a comfortable assurance that their civilization was superior and that its benefits were being spread around the globe.

The Exposition seemed a suitable way to mark the end of a century which had started with revolutions and wars but which now stood for progress, peace and prosperity. Europe had not been entirely free of wars in the nineteenth century but they had been nothing to compare with the long struggles of the eighteenth century or the wars of the French Revolution and later those of Napoleon which had drawn in almost every European power. The wars of the nineteenth century had generally been short—like the one between Prussia and the Austrian Empire which had lasted for seven weeks—or colonial wars fought far from European soil. (The Europeans should have paid more attention to the American Civil War which not only lasted for four years but which gave an early warning that modern technology and the humble barbed wire and spades were shifting the advantage in war to the defense.) While the Crimean War in the middle of the century had involved four European powers, it was the exception. In the Austro-Prussian War, the Franco-Prussian, or the Russo-Turkish the other powers had wisely stayed out of the conflict and had done what they could to build peace again.

In certain circumstances war was still seen as a reasonable choice for nations if they could see no other way to obtain their goals. Prussia was not prepared to share control of the German states with Austria and Austria was determined not to concede. The war that followed settled the issue in Prussia’s favor. Resorting to war was costly but not excessively so. Wars were limited both in time and in their scope. Professional armies fought each other and damage to civilians and to property was minimal, certainly in light of what was to come. It was still possible to attack and win decisive victories. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, though, like the American Civil War, hinted that armed conflict was changing: with conscription, armies were bigger, and better and more accurate weapons and increased firepower meant that the forces of the Prussians and their German allies suffered large casualties in the opening attacks on the French. And the surrender of the French army at Sedan did not end the fighting. Instead the French people, or large sections of it, chose to fight on in a people’s war. Yet even that had finally ended. France and the new Germany had made peace and their relations had gradually mended. In 1900 the Berlin business community sent a message for the opening of the Exposition to the Paris Chamber of Commerce, wishing success to “this great undertaking, which is destined to bring the civilized nations of the world nearer to one another in the labours common to them all.”4 The large numbers of German visitors who were expected to go to Paris would, so many in Germany hoped, help to build better relations between the peoples of their two countries.

All the peoples of the earth have worked on the Exposition, said the special Hachette guide: “they have accumulated their marvels and their treasures for us to reveal unknown arts, overlooked discoveries and to compete with us in a peaceful way where Progress will not slacken in her conquests.” The themes of progress and the future ran throughout the Exposition, from the new moving pavements to the cinema in the round. At one of the pavilions, the Château d’Eau, with its cascading waterfalls, shooting fountains, and colored lights playing on the waters, the centerpiece in a giant basin was an allegorical group which represented Humanity led by Progress advancing towards the Future and overthrowing the rather odd couple of Routine and Hatred.

The Exposition was a showcase for individual countries but it was also a monument to the most recent extraordinary achievements of Western civilization, in industry, commerce, science, technology, and the arts. You could see the new X-ray machines or be overwhelmed, as Henry James was, by the Hall of Dynamos, but the most exciting discovery of all was electricity. The Italian Futurist artist Giacomo Balla later called his daughters Luce and Elettricità in memory of what he saw at the Paris Exposition. (A third daughter was Elica—Propellor—after the modern machinery he also admired.) Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a special cantata in praise of electricity for the Exposition: Le Feu céleste with orchestra, soloists and choir was performed at a free concert. The Palace of Electricity was ablaze with 5,000 light bulbs and high on the summit of its roof stood the Fairy of Electricity in her chariot drawn by a horse and dragon. And there were dozens more palaces and pavilions devoted to the important activities of modern society, among them machinery, mining and metallurgy, chemical industries, public transportation, hygiene, and agriculture.

There was still more, much more. The second modern Olympic Games took place nearby in the Bois de Boulogne as part of the Exposition. Sports included fencing (where the French did very well), tennis (a British triumph), athletics (American dominated), cycling and croquet. At the Exposition Annexe in Vincennes you could examine the new motorcars and watch balloon races. Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, one of the earliest film directors, went up in his own balloon to film the Exposition from above. As the Hachette guide said, the Exposition was “the magnificent result, the extraordinary culmination of the whole century—the most fertile in discoveries, the most prodigious in sciences, which has revolutionized the economic order of the Universe.”

In light of what was to come in the twentieth century such boasting and such complacency seem pitiful to us, but in 1900 Europeans had good reason to feel pleased with the recent past and confident about the future. The thirty years since 1870 had brought an explosion in production and wealth and a transformation in society and the way people lived. Thanks to better and cheaper food, improvements in hygiene, and dramatic advances in medicine, Europeans were living longer and healthier lives. Although Europe’s population went up by perhaps as much as 100 million to a total of 400 million, it was able to absorb the growth thanks to increased output in its own industry and agriculture and imports from around the world. (And emigration acted as a safety valve to avoid an even more dramatic increase—some 25 million Europeans left in the last two decades of the century for new opportunities in the United States alone and millions more went to Australia or Canada or Argentina.)

Europe’s cities and towns grew as people moved from the countryside in increasing numbers in search of better opportunities in factories, shops and offices. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, Paris had some 600,000 inhabitants; by the time of the Exposition, 4 million. Budapest, the capital of Hungary, showed the most dramatic increase: in 1867 it had 280,000 inhabitants and by the time of the Great War, 933,000. As the numbers of Europeans making a living from agriculture went down, the industrial working classes and the middle classes grew. Workers organized themselves into unions, which were legal in most countries by the end of the century; in France the number of workers in unions went up fivefold in the fifteen years before 1900 and was to reach 1 million just before the Great War. In recognition of the increasing importance of the class, the Exposition had exhibits of model houses for workers and organizations for their moral and intellectual development.

Margaret MacMillan received her PhD from Oxford University and is now a professor of international history at Oxford, where she is also the warden of St. Antony’s College. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; a senior fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto; and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, University of Toronto, and of St Hilda’s College, Oxford University. She sits on the boards of the Mosaic Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and on the editorial boards of The International History Review and First World War Studies. She also sits on the advisory board of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and is a Trustee of the Rhodes Trust. Her previous books include Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India, and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

A review: 

"Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war..."

17 de outubro de 2013 - Publicada na Amazon.com

As a Brit, studying the First World War at school in the seventies, memories of the Second World War were still fresh and bitter enough amongst parents and teachers that there was never really a question that the Germans were the 'bad guys' in both wars while we (the Brits, primarily, though a little bit of credit was occasionally given to the Allies) were the knights in shining armour. Enough time has passed since both wars now for a more rational view to be taken and this book by Margaret MacMillan is a well balanced, thoughtful and detailed account of the decades leading up to 1914.

MacMillan begins by giving an overview of the involved nations as they were at the turn of the century - their political structure, alliances and enmities, their culture and economic status. She then takes us in considerable depth through the twenty years or so preceding the war, concentrating on each nation in turn, and going further back into history when required. She introduces us to the main players: political, military and leading thinkers. She explains how and why the two main alliances developed that divided Europe and shows the fears of each nation feeling threatened or surrounded by potential enemies. And she shows how this led to an arms race, which each nation initially thought would act as a deterrence to war. Throughout she draws parallels to more recent history and current events, sometimes with frightening clarity.

In the mid-section, MacMillan discusses public opinion and cultural shifts, highlighting the parallel and divisive growth of militarism and pacifism and how the heads of government had to try to reconcile these factions. She indicates that, although the peace movement was international, that at times of threat, the membership tended to split on national lines - an indication that the movement would falter in the event of war, as indeed it did.

Next MacMillan explains the development of military planning and how these plans gradually became fixed, allowing little room for movement when war began. She explains that the Schlieffen Plan assumed war on two fronts and that, when it came to it, the military insisted that it wasn't possible to change the plan at the last moment to limit the war to the Eastern front, with all the implications that had for ensuring that France and therefore Britain would become involved. MacMillan also shows how the plans of each nation assumed an offensive, rather than defensive, strategy, taking little account of how modern weaponry would change the nature of warfare. Thus, when the war did come, the leaders still expected it to be short and decisive rather than the long drawn out trench warfare it became.

In the final section, MacMillan walks us through the various crises in the Balkans and elsewhere in the years leading up to the war. She makes the point that not only did these crises tend to firm up the two alliances but also the fact that each was finally resolved without a full-scale war led to a level of complacency that ultimately no country would take the final plunge. And in the penultimate chapter, she takes us on a detailed journey from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand up to the outbreak of war, showing how each government gradually concluded it was left with no alternatives but to fight. In a short final chapter, she rather movingly summarises the massive losses endured by each nation over the next four years, and gives a brief picture of the changed Europe that emerged.

Overall, I found this a very readable account. MacMillan has a clear and accessible writing style, and juggles the huge cast of characters well. I found I was rarely flicking backwards and forwards to remind myself of previous chapters - for me, always the sign of a well-written factual book. As with any history, there were parts that I found more or less interesting. I found the character studies of the various leaders very enlightening, while I was less interested in the various military plans (though accepting completely MacMillan's argument of their importance to the eventual inevitability of war). I got bogged down in the Balkans (always a problem for me in European history) but in the end MacMillan achieved the well-nigh impossible task of enabling me to grasp who was on whose side and why. This is a thorough, detailed and by no means short account of the period, but at no point did I feel that it dragged or lost focus.

One of the problems with the way I was taught about WW1 was that we tended to talk about the nations rather than the people - 'Germany did this', 'France said that', 'America's position was'. MacMillan's approach gives much more insight, allowing us to get to know the political and military leaders as people and showing the lack of unanimity in most of the governments. This humanised the history for me and gradually changed my opinion from believing that WW1 was a war that should never have been fought to feeling that, factoring in the always-uncertain vagaries of human nature, it could never have been avoided. This isn't MacMillan's position - she states clearly her belief that there are always choices and that the leaders could have chosen differently, and of course that's true. However, it seemed that by 1914 most of them felt so threatened and boxed in that it would have taken extraordinary courage and perception for them to act differently than they did, and inaction may have meant their country's downfall anyway. A sobering account of how prestige, honour and national interest led to a devastating war that no-one wanted but that no-one could prevent. Highly recommended.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Random House.

Another review: 

J. Lindner

5,0 de 5 estrelasThe War that Ended Peace

6 de março de 2014 - Publicada na Amazon.com

Compra verificada

As we approach the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of World War One we should pause to reflect on the terrible loss that conflict brought. In terms of western culture, 1914 was truly a watershed year that ended one way of life and introduced another. Margaret MacMillan followed up her epic study of the Versailles Treaty with this equally impressive work. She attempts to show how the war came about primarily because too many people either wanted war or did not do enough to prevent it from happening. The result is perhaps the most thorough analysis of the pre-1914 world available to the modern reader.

MacMillan begins her book with an account of the major players (France, Germany, Russia, Britain, and Austria-Hungary) to illustrate their national hopes and dreams pitted against their fears and suspicions andn introduces the reader to the primary individuals who helped shape national policy. She then looks at the psychology of war and the peace efforts and compares them to the militarism that each nation experienced. She describes how the new concept of public opinion helped drive the leaders towards certain decisions. Next she looks at the series of run ups to the Great War's outbreak, Morocco, Bosnia, the Balkan Wars, and even the assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife. None of these events meant that war was ultimiately inevitable. So long as there were at least some key players willing to negotiate and work through differences, war could be avoided.

MacMillan concludes that war came about because the forces that sought it outnumbered and outmanourvered those who did not. But she also works to debunk myths that have evolved over the years. Germany and the Kaiser were not solely responsible for war in 1914. Germany had repeated backed down in the face of international pressure during the Morocco crises of 1905 and 1911. The Kaiser, while having the personality that modern day people would call a "jerk" (or worse), had a way of standing down at the last minute. Granted, he was fascinated with all things military, he was the inheritor of the Prussian military tradition, but he did not set out to bring war upon the world as he has often been blamed for doing. She also critiques the Anglo-French entente that developed after 1904. Britain and France were not a unified front as British leaders continually looked for ways to be non-committal in backing France on international affairs. She also looks at the relationship between France and Russia, and considers the challenges facing Austria-Hungary and the upstart Serbia. All of these have had myths develop around them and MacMillan works through the hyperbole to understand the root causes of national decisions. In fact, MacMillan ultimately blames no one and everyone for the war. The Great War, and she uses this term throughout the book, was the sum total of government's unwillingness to resort to diplomacy when the world needed eiplomacy the most.

MacMillan is not only a fine historian but is also an excellent writer. Thoughout the book she interjects modern analogies to compare with her subject matter to help illustrate her points. One key such analogy appears near the end of the book when she states how John F. Kennedy employed diplomacy against the advice of his advisors in part because he had recently read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August. Kennedy gave diplomacy a chance, the players of 1914 did not.

MacMillan's writing style is crisp and lively. Truly, there is never a dull moment in this book. College history courses should utilize this book. The leaders of today should read this book. The average citizen who thinks that guns and war solve problems should read this book. There are lessons to be learned from MacMillan that need to be understood and appreciated. This book has all the makings of a Pulitzer Prize and as such cannot be discounted by anyone who is in the position of decision-making in international affairs. And on a large scale, that really means all of us, as public opinion is now counted for much by politicians and pollsters. This book should remain the standard for a long time to come, much like her work in Paris 1919 remains the standard for understanding our modern world as it resulted from the Paris peace conference.

A eterna luta entre o comerciante e o burocrata - Guglielmo Palombini (Mises Institute)

The Eternal Struggle Between the Merchant and the Bureaucrat

• 

Guglielmo Piombini 

Translated from the Italian by Bernardo Ferrero

[This article has been translated from Piombini's Italian original by Bernardo Ferrero.]
https://mises.org/blog/eternal-struggle-between-merchant-and-bureaucrat

Before the State

For a very extended period of time primitive men lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers at a time in which there was no state. The modus vivendi of these clans was such that after having exhausted all nature-given resources in a particular area, they would move elsewhere in search of other available food supplies. This system of nomadic life could endure as long as the human race was limited and the vast majority of land remained uninhabited. Yet, this lifestyle was not sustainable, and within a short period of time the intensification of these hunting activities provoked an ecological crisis that spread across Europe, the Middle East and America, causing the extinction of 32 animal species [that had been an important food source].
The disappearance of the megafauna inaugurated, around the year 10,000 B.C. the transition to a mode of production based on agriculture. The Neolithic revolution could in fact be described as the pragmatic response to the exhaustion of resources that resulted from the intensified exploitation of the system based on hunting and gathering. Even though the lives of the farmers were admittedly harder than those of the hunters, requiring long and heavy hours of labor in the fields, the sedentary life of the village made it possible for a far greater number of mouths to be fed: thanks to appropriations and to the cultivation of land, the human population increased considerably, giving birth to the first civilizations.

The Violent Origins of the State

According to historian William Durant:

Agriculture teaches men pacific ways, inures them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as but another form of chase, and hardly more perilous, when the woods cease to give them abundant game, or flocks decrease through a thinning pasture, they look with envy upon the ripe fields of the village, they invent with modern ease some plausible reason for attack, they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.

The first states emerged when these nomadic tribes of hunters and herders understood that the systematic exploitation of agricultural villages through taxation constituted a far more efficient and lucrative system than the old one of plunder and extermination. That the state was born in a brutal fashion is confirmed by every historical and anthropological research. On this matter, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

a race of conquerors which, aggressive, powerful and organized, pounces with its most horrid claws on an unsuspecting population, one which in numbers may be tremendously superior, but is still undisciplined and nomadic. Such is the origin of the ‘"state."

According to Sociologist Lester Ward,

The state as distinct from tribal organization begins with the conquest of one race by another.

Similarly, wrote the Austrian general and sociologist Gustav Ratzenhofer,

Violence is the agent which has created the state.

and as Franz Oppenheimer observed,

Everywhere we find some warlike tribe breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility, and founding its state.

The concept of State above mentioned is meant in a sociological, rather than in a political sense. In the field of political science one intends the state to be a particular type of political organization that emerged in Europe at the end of the middle ages. According to the more generic definition used in sociology, instead, one talks about the existence of a state whenever society is divided in two distinct classes: a productive majority who gets by through the employment of economic means (production and exchange) and a ruling elite who gets by through the employment of political means (taxation and expropriation). The typical order of a state and the inevitable division in social classes which defines it emerge simultaneously, according to sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, in that very crucial historical instant in which for the first time the conqueror decides to save the conquered from immediate annihilation in order to exploit him permanently in the years to come.

The Struggle between Merchants and Bureaucrats Begins

From that moment onwards, writes the anthropologist Marvin Harris, producers have precipitated in a dramatic condition of servitude from which they have never really escaped:

For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grove, kneel and kowtow. In many ways, the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

The birth of the state was then accompanied by a real class struggle between producers and bureaucrats, a struggle which to a great extent remains alive to this day: while the first group desires to keep the fruits of its own labor, the second aspires to come into possession of those fruits through force and inaugurate a system of rule and exploitation. The eternal conflict throughout history is therefore that between men of freedom and men of administration, between social power on the one hand and state power on the other. As will be illustrated in the examples that follow, the progress or decadence of civilization are determined by the trend of this struggle.

Societies of Bureaucrats

1. The Ancient Empires
Since the early days of recorded History, the great majority of people lived miserably under the most tyrannical empires (the Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Persian, Indian, Late-Roman, Arab, ottoman, Incas, Aztec) which extended themselves across large areas. In these ancient empires progress was so slow as to go unnoticed and the reasons for such stagnation were the following: Political power in those empires did not have any need to innovate, rather innovation was fought due to the fear that new discoveries would disrupt the established system; the bureaucratic and military elite that ruled used to come into possession, through force, of every surplus of production repressing every small sign of resistance; every autonomous social force was nipped in the bud and nothing escaped the control of the despot who was the absolute owner of all goods of the reign and of all its inhabitants; finally the people were submitted not only to a confiscatory level of taxation but to forced labor for the construction of grandiose public works such as canals, city walls, pyramids and buildings.
These ancient empires were agglomerates of illiterate peasants who toiled from the morning to the night just to be able to provide for themselves vegetables without protein. Not surprisingly, they were not in a much better condition than their oxen, and at the same time they were completely subjugated to the commands of their superiors who could read and who were the only ones possessing the right of manufacturing and using war like instruments. The fact that these societies have lasted thousands of years sounds like a severe warning: there is no intrinsic force to human activities that can assure material and moral progress.
2. A Perfect Example: the Chinese Empire
The millenary empire of China can serve as a typical example of a closed society, that was completely dominated by a cast of intellectuals and bureaucrats. As the greatest historian of ancient China, Etienne Balasz, has explained, the Confucian state was decisively totalitarian. No private initiative was allowed and no expression of the public life could escape official regulation: clothing, private and public constructions, music, parties, and even the colors that one was allowed to wear were subject to the rigid control of the state. In addition, there were prescriptions of birth and death and the state surveilled with terrifying attention every step of its subjects, from the cradle to the grave.
China in the days of the mandarins was an environment of changeless patterns, routines, characterized by traditionalism and immobility and therefore suspicious towards any possible kind of innovation and initiative, let alone free research and entrepreneurship. The ingenious and inventive spirit that was not foreign to the Chinese would have doubtlessly enriched the country, but it was the state that impeded the country to embark upon an age of technical progress and economic development, by crushing every kind of private initiative just because it was thought to collide with the interests of the bureaucratic cast.
It is not surprising that throughout Chinese history technical and economic progress have coincided only with those phases of relative weakness of the central power, like in the period of the warring states (453-221 B.C), probably the richest and most brilliant of all Chinese history, or the period of the three reigns (220-280 A.D.). Even after 907 A.D. when the Tang dynasty collapsed and the period of endless wars for supremacy began, during the so-called period of the five dynasties and the five reigns, the country experimented a striking explosion of inventions and prosperity due to the lack of centralization.
3. A Modern Case: The Soviet Union
In our epoch, communist regimes have brought back, albeit in a bloodier form, the totalitarian control that was so characteristic of the ancient oriental despotisms. Marxist ideology with its radical hostility towards property, commerce and free enterprise, revealed itself to be the most suitable paradigm in satisfying the will to power of the parasitic classes. In every country where the political and bureaucratic classes have sought to destroy the productive sector, they have found it useful to uphold Marxist ideology as their mantra.
The extreme exploitation perpetrated by the communist bureaucracies against the productive classes, which in the case of the kulaks reached the stage of physical extermination, was denounced by Lev Trotzkij, Ante Ciliga, Milovan Gilas, Mihail Voslensky. Yet the most penetrating and most insightful analysis of the bureaucratic exploitation that took place under communism has come to us from the works of Bruno Rizzi, an ingenious, self-taught Italian scholar. Rizzi was arguably the first to comprehend that a parasitic class of bureaucrats had taken power in 1917, composed as he wrote of “state officials, policeman, writers, union mandarins and all the communist party in block” that kept plundering the workers in the most ferocious way ever to be seen.
The post-1917 Soviet State, Rizzi noted, had been drastically inflated. The bureaucrats with their respective families constituted a mass of 15 million people who had stuck to the upper levels of the administrative throne with the only job of sucking a great portion of the national product. In the Kolchoz, the state owned agricultural enterprises, only 37% of production remained in the hands of the workers, while the remaining went to the state who then turned it over to the bureaucracy. State functionaries, in addition, continuously made deals at the expense of ordinary citizens by fixing wages and prices for various products and by treating the “workers” as its “forced clients”, obliging them to acquire products in state owned stores with a markup that at times reached 120%.
Officials of the state in addition, obtained notable advantages by being able to destine many of the accumulated capital funds, set aside for the construction of public works, in projects that went to the exclusive benefit of their own class, a lucid example being the headquarters of the bureaucracy, the sumptuous 360 meter’s tall house of the soviets (the workers, meanwhile, had to cope with a home that was 5 meters squared on average). By having total control of the economic levers, guaranteed by an extremely invasive police state in the USSR, the bureaucracy was really omnipotent and every action on her part was aimed at maintaining its political hegemony and its well-established economic privileges.

Societies of Merchants

1. The Phoenicians and the Greeks
Around the year 1200 B.C. the empires of the bronze age (the Egyptian, Minoan, Mycenaean, Hittite and Assyrian empires) succumbed into a period of stagnation caused by the progressive suffocation of productive and mercantile activities. The crisis of the central powers gave freedom of action to certain commercial people in the Middle East coming mainly from modern Lebanon, who, with their ships, began to sail the sea transporting goods and products of any kind. For the first time in history one saw the development, in the Mediterranean basin, of a catallactic system based on an integrated division of labor where markets and ports began to grow up to the point of becoming established cities. Commerce soon became the fly wheel of innovation: The Philistines invented iron; the Canaanites the alphabet; the Phoenicians discovered glass and at the same time improved boats, navigational knowledge and accounting systems.
“In truth, writes Matt Ridley, was there ever a more admirable people than the Phoenicians?” Those ancient merchants connected not only the entire Mediterranean, but also the accessible coasts of the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the overland routes of Asia, and yet they never had an emperor and never participated in a memorable battle. In order to prosper the Phoenician cities of Tyre, Byblos, Sidon, Carthage and Gadir did not feel the need of uniting into a single political entity, and therefore never went beyond a very modest federation.
In the words of Matt Ridley:

The Phoenician diaspora is one of the great untold stories of history- untold because Tyre and its books were so utterly destroyed by thugs like Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus and Alexander, and Carthage by the Scipios, so the story comes to us only through snippets from snobbish and envious neighbors.

Even the Greek miracle confirms the important lesson, first formulated by David Hume, that political fragmentation, by putting a break on the extension of political power, is the real ally of economic progress. The extraordinary dissemination of prosperity and of Greek culture between the years 600 B.C. and 300 B.C presents us with a development similar to that of the Phoenician cities: Miletus, Athens and the other hundred independent cities of Magna Grecia, enriched themselves through the extension of commercial relationships without being part of a single empire. Furthermore, the circulation of ideas that the increased trade made possible, gave birth to the grandiose discoveries of the time. The lesson of the Greek miracle is the following: It is always the merchant who opens the door to the philosopher, not the other way around, by enriching the city and opening it, through foreign trade, to new ideas. Unfortunately, this period of Greek enlightenment died out as soon as new empires began to ascend: first the Athenian, then the Macedonian, and ultimately the Roman.
2. The Communes of Medieval Europe
The fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. represented the luckiest event in the history of the old continent. Thanks to circumstances that one could describe as miraculous, Europe never returned to being a unified political entity, after the repeated failures of Charlemagne and the Germanic emperors. The lack of political unity enabled a widespread social experimentation that unleashed into a creative competition between thousands of independent political units of which the byproduct was rapid economic, social and cultural progress. The weakness of the central authority favored the cities which became the leaders in the 11^th century of a political and commercial revolution that would mark the European institutional setting for centuries to come. In fights that lasted even hundreds of years, the inhabitants of the cities escaped the dominion of emperors and feudal lords, rebuilding society through self-government from the bottom up. The inhabitants of these communes oriented themselves toward the economy and not toward politics because, unlike those of the ancient cities they lacked a great mass of slaves at their disposal: they found themselves forced to abandon predation (which had been the common means of increasing one’s own well-being up to those days) and engage in manufacturing activities and commerce. In this manner, the medieval bourgeois extended the market economy beyond the limits of the feudal world and by the year 1200 A.D. Europe was a region inundated by working men, farmers, entrepreneurs, artisans and merchants who exchanged the fruits of their own labor at the many annual fairs: this was a very different scenario from the one that prevailed in other areas of the civilized world, where the masses continued to be subjugated by omnipotent imperial bureaucracies.
3. 3 Modern Cases: Holland, England, and the United States
In the 17^th century the incredible success of the little country of Holland and the disastrous ruin of the Spanish empire, stands to confirm, in the eyes of contemporary historians, the superiority of the commercial society over the bureaucratic one. In Spain, during those years, a new anti-bourgeois ideology had developed among its elite, an ideology that saw with great scorn and contempt the accumulation of wealth through value enhancing work. The Spanish bureaucratic state as a consequence began to be directed by men who were completely foreign to the world of economics and business and who pushed the country into adopting economic policies that played out to be a disaster for commerce and industry.
In the United Provinces at the time, matters were different. Laissez-faire was a consolidated and fully legitimized praxis, and the success that Holland derived from the adoption of free trade caused a mix of admiration, amazement, and envy all around Europe. In 1670, the Dutch were by far the biggest players in the international trade arena to the point that their merchant navy was bigger and mightier than those of France, Scotland, Germany, Spain and Portugal put together. Holland, in the 1600s was a laboratory in which one could observe and study the capitalistic and bourgeois society in its purest form. Its example showed the path toward self-propelled development: ignoring the Dutch reality meant condemning oneself to continued stagnation.
The English were the first to understand how the prosperity of Holland was closely connected to the liberty that individuals and economic agents enjoyed over there, and it was by imitating the Dutch, that they began to build the basis of their world supremacy. In the 19^th century then, England adopted unilaterally a series of measures that opened its harbors to the rest of the globe and such a drastic and unprecedented move provoked a reduction of custom tariffs in all major countries, via a competitive process. Finally, humanity was able to experience the birth of a free and authentic market economy that operated internationally: a Phoenician experiment on a planetary scale. Each country that participated in this international division of labor benefited, and this is shown by the fact that the world economy throughout this period grew by 3 times. But It was in the two most free-market countries, namely England and the United States, where economic growth surpassed by far that of the rest of the world: from 1820 to 1913 the gross domestic product of England increased six-fold, while the American one grew by 41 times.
Decisive for the success of Victorian England and the young United States, according to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, was the consolidation at the social level in those years of a bourgeois mentality that praised and honored the common man who created his fortune through work, commitment, creativity and ingenuity. Nothing probably better symbolizes the cultural victory of the productive classes of society than the statue placed in Westminster abbey in 1825 in honor of James Watt, inventor of the steam engine.

For a Libertarian Historiography

One can therefore see how the great intellectual and material creations that have elevated human civilization through the ages have not been the product of bureaucrats, but of producers, merchants, entrepreneurs, some of whom have been obscured, exploited, mistreated and others who have simply been forgotten. The protagonists of human development are not the emperors, kings, presidents, ministers or generals who most often appear in our conventional history books, but the farmers, artisans, entrepreneurs and merchants who improved the many arts, techniques and professions. The bravest among these have defended freedom and civilization arms in hand, refusing to be subjugated by the powers of their day.
The common thread in human history is the endless conflict between tax payers and tax consumers which brings us to the following conclusion: Libertarian scholars should narrate historical events through the lenses of those men who represented the ideas of freedom, not those of power. Civilization, ought to be remembered, has been edified by those men who have resisted power, not by those who have exercised it.

Guglielmo Piombini is an Italian journalist who has collaborated in various magazines and newspapers including Liberal, il Domenicale, and Elite.  His articles have also appeared at Ludwig von Mises Italia. Piombini is also the founder of Tramedoro: the online platform that provides a detailed overview of every major classic of the social sciences. Specializing in medieval institutions he is the author of the book “Prima dello Stato, il medioevo della liberta” (“Before the State: The Middle Ages Of Liberty”).