Abstract
Is a ‘balance of power’ between contending alliances either unachievable or necessarily unstable? Isn’t its alternative, collective security, ultimately contingent on the willingness of its guarantors to live up to their pledges? Might the force of international law, backed by a supranational agency, be a better way to prevent interstate conflict? But what are the implications for a nation’s sovereignty and freedom of diplomatic manoeuvre once it pursues these latter choices? Fundamental questions such as these, as pressing to the Paris peacemakers in 1919 as they have become familiar to the historians who study them, did not emerge ex nihilo during and immediately after the Great War. Nor were they approached with the same degree of realist calculation by the statesmen of the victorious allies and their not-so-defeated opponents. Quite the reverse: as Peter Jackson demonstrates in this magisterial work, the political thinking about European security, and its juridical basis in enforceable treaties and legal regimens of international supervision that we have come to associate with the Paris Peace, was exercising decision-makers and diplomats long before August 1914, and nowhere more so than in France, the focus of this book.
Throughout the Third Republic’s troubled history, and especially as admission to administrative posts became increasingly professionalized from the 1890s, France’s political leadership and, even more so, its diplomatic corps were dominated by men well versed in the minutiae of international law. If the gender dynamics go largely unremarked, the political implications do not. These were individuals accustomed to viewing the insecurities of European power politics through a prism of legal obligations. These, they felt were, in practice, too easily subverted or ignored. France’s foreign-policy-making cadres – as highly trained as they were high bourgeois – were thus wrestling with the same paradox before the Great War and after it. How could the costs of plunging Europe’s leading nations into war be made so punitive that no government would risk incurring them? Jackson’s great achievement is to provide the most convincing explanations of the ways these security dilemmas were framed, contested, and understood.
One reason for the author’s success is that he eschews the conventional chronologies of pre-war, 1914–18, and post-war, opting instead to range across the first quarter of the twentieth century as a unified analytical field. It makes sense to do so. The French party politics that made and unmade the wartime Union sacrée and later produced the Cartel des gauches coalition of the mid-1920s took shape at the turn of the century. The intellectual formation of those involved was more of the fin de siècle than of the roaring twenties. What emerge are pronounced continuities in official thinking, in diplomatic practice, and in an emergent French civil society activism, all of which looked to international law and internationalist cooperation as the only sure route to lasting peace. What is so striking is that internationalist conceptions of order not only survived the devastating experience of total war but moved into the political mainstream in France and elsewhere. Alongside the attention paid to binding security guarantees and reparations went the investment in the League’s supranational authority, recourse to international arbitration, and even the panacea of disarmament. None were considered intrinsically out of reach. Rather, making them work implied that states, their governments, and their peoples had to be persuaded to surrender the degree of sovereignty necessary to make the enforcement of international law a reality. As depicted by Jackson, the Versailles ‘system’ of 1919, although certainly complex, was also ingeniously adaptable.
Strategic realism or, differently put, a core belief that the international system was at worst anarchic, at best competitive and prone to conflict, might have counselled alliance-making and ever-higher defence spending. But here we return to the questions posed earlier. Alliances provoked counter-alliances, arms build-ups became arms races. Any resultant balance of power could only be precarious. Moreover, as Jackson makes so clear, to judge the actions of Great War decision-makers, whether before, during, or after the conflict itself, on the basis of realist calculation alone is to miss the significance of the normative standards, the cultural presumptions, and specialist backgrounds that inclined them towards particular options. This more constructivist model of international politics, one in which actions and reactions are conditioned more by outlook than by any immutable rules of power, makes cultural difference a key marker of foreign policymaking.
Jackson’s approach is too carefully nuanced to suggest that continuities in this juridically based security thinking – what he tellingly calls ‘muscular internationalism’ – were all that mattered. He reminds us time and again how shattering were the war’s effects on French society. Its leaders were no less affected. That being said, the mistake made in too many histories of French foreign policymaking after 1918 is to read its origins back to the war itself rather than to longer-term currents of thinking about the interrelatedness of war, peace, and international law that had circulated within France and outside it for many years before. Anchoring French international politics after 1919 in its pre-war foundations, Jackson’s approach is more panoramic. By investigating the intellectual roots, and not just the immediate strategic options, that account for the opposing peacemaking prescriptions of Ferdinand Foch, Georges Clemenceau, Aristide Briand, and others, he has produced the clearest analysis of France’s national security policy in the Great War’s aftermath.