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On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days

At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France

The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher

Their reigns were crucial for the solid establishment of the constitutional and political conventions and practices known as the Revolution Settlement after James II and VII’s replacement by William III in 1689. The legislation that made it up (which included the 1701 Act of Settlement enshrining the claim to the British throne of Sophia of Hanover, mother of the future George I was passed from 1689, but much of the political settlement was not solidified until after 1714

Although the consequences of this new polity were less dramatic than those stemming from the personal union of England and Scotland under James VI and I in 1603, this had been by no means clear when the new dynastic personal union was created

Both George I and George II sought to use British resources to help secure gains for Hanover. George I sought to win territories  from the partition of the Swedish empire and to place a westward limit on the expansion of Russian power under Peter the Great. George II pursued Hanoverian territorial interests in neighbouring principalities, especially in Mecklenburg, East Friesland and Osnabrück

In the seventeenth century, under a succession of outstandingly able soldier kings, Sweden had been a great power but after the death in 1718 of Karl XII, the last and most monomaniacal of the line, the country had become a by-word for weak government, corruption and impotence. Gustav III set himself the task of making Sweden great again. He was assassinated in March 1792 – the third Swedish monarch in 160 years to die of gunshot wounds

Under Karl XII’s successors, his central-German brother-in-law Fredrik I and his north-German second-cousin-once-removed Adolf Fredrik (Prince Bishop of Lubeck before the Swedish Riksdag chose him to be Fredrik’s heir) the country passed through the so-called Age of Liberty

When, shortly after his father’s death in February 1771, Gustav III met his uncle Frederick II of Prussia (Frederick the Great), the latter sneered, ‘If there were Swedes in Sweden they would soon agree to bury their differences; but foreign corruption has so perverted the national spirit that harmony was impossible’. Gustav’s new kingdom was then the second largest in Europe after Russia. It comprised present-day Finland as well as Sweden, and a toe-hold in Germany in northern Pomerania.

In the middle of the sixteenth century Poland was a wealthy country governed by the Jagiellon Kings, whose riches had been built upon a monopoly of the Baltic Sea trade around Gdansk. By the end of the eighteenth century, Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided the country between them and Poland was wiped off the map for 123 years.

The abolition of the hereditary monarchy placed the election of the king in the hands of the nobles. If no Polish heir to the throne was available, foreigners were eligible to stand.

After suffering several devastating defeats at the hands of the Swedes, including a period of five years, 1655-60, known as ‘the Deluge’, Poland was severely weakened and could offer little resistance to the combined power of Russia, Prussia and Austria

made it a major European power

Gustav was the eldest son of Charles IX and his second wife, Christina of Holstein.

Charles IX had usurped the throne, having ejected his nephew Sigismund III Vasa (who was also king of Poland) in 1599, and the resulting dynastic quarrel involved Sweden and Poland in a war that continued intermittently for 60 years.

A Polish uprising in Poznania led to a partial seizure of the province, but the fate of Prussian Poland lay in the hands of the peacemakers, who had also the last word about the territorial settlement.

The borders drawn under the Treaty of Versailles (June 1919) roughly corresponded to Polish-German frontiers before the partitions, except that Gdańsk became the free city of Danzig, and plebiscites were held in parts of East Prussia and Upper Silesia to determine which nation these regions wished to join. The East Prussian plebiscite of July 1920 (at the height of the Russo-Polish War) was won by Germany.

Final recognition of Polish sovereignty came only in 1923, the delay being due to the Russian situation.

Vladimir Putin is emulating Bismarck, who used three quickly decisive wars — against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870 — to create a unified modern Germany from what had been a loose confederation of states

By acquiring land, some German-speaking populations and an aura of national vitality, Bismarck’s wars of national creation stoked cohesion.

If Putin succeeds in reducing Ukraine to satellite status, and in inducing NATO to restrict its membership and operations to parameters he negotiates, he might, like Bismarck, consider other wars — actual, hybrid, cyber. The Baltic nations — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, all NATO nations — should worry.

similarities with the Holy Roman Empire — which at its greatest extent encompassed almost all of Central Europe — exist at many levels.

Today’s European Council, at which the union’s member states gather, reminds one of the old Reichstag, where the representatives of the German cities and principalities met to deliberate matters of mutual concern.

like the European project, which originated in a determination to banish war after 1945, the “modern” Holy Roman Empire, which was reformed by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, was intended to defuse the domestic German antagonisms that had culminated in the traumatic Thirty Years’ War.

However, the critical difference between Eastern and Western Europe has to do with waterways.  Western Europe has an abundance of navigable rivers, coastlines, and harbors along the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, North, and Baltic Seas.  In the High Middle Ages, these fostered the revival of trade and the rise of towns, a money economy, and a middle class opposed to the feudal structure dominated by the nobles and Church.

Kings also opposed the nobles and the Church, so the middle class townsmen provided them with valuable allies and money.  With this money, kings could buy two things.  First of all, they could raise mercenary armies armed with guns to limit the power of the nobles.  Secondly, they could form professional bureaucracies staffed largely by their middle class allies who were both more efficient since they were literate and more loyal since they were the king's natural allies and dependant on him for their positions.  As a result, kings in Western Europe were able to build strong centralized nation-states by the 1600's.

Eastern Europe, in stark contrast to Western Europe, provided practically a mirror image of its historical development before 1600. Being further inland compared to Western Europe hurt Eastern Europe's trade, since the sea and river waterways vital to trade did not exist there in such abundance as they did in Western Europe. Factors limiting trade also limited the growth of a strong middle class in Eastern Europe.  This meant that kings had little in the way of money or allies to help them against the nobles.  That in turn meant that peasants had few towns where they could escape the oppression of the nobles.  Therefore, strong nobilities plus weak, and oftentimes elective, monarchies were the rule in Eastern Europe before 1600.  At the same time, the nobles ruled over peasants whose status actually was sliding deeper into serfdom rather than emerging from it.

t the beginning of the 18th century, Poland was one of the largest states in Europe, a sovereign, multi-ethnic republic. By the end of the century it had vanished from the map, absorbed by the expanding empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

Poland was brought down not by invading armies, but by the weaknesses of its political system, which could be paralyzed by a single noble’s veto and thus easily compromised by outside powers offering bribes.

In short, the Kremlin appears to have directly interfered with an American election in order to boost a presidential candidate with a Russia-friendly foreign policy.

with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

“the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.”

a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity

The reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II as King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany from 1888 to 1918 saw the meteoric rise of Germany as an economic and military power.

Utterly convinced of his right to rule, Wilhelm always overestimated his capacity for wise political judgment.

Wilhelm was the last German emperor (kaiser) and king of Prussia, whose bellicose policies helped to bring about World War One.

the current attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation by President Trump and the Republican Party raise the question of whether it’s possible to maintain an effective, and legitimate, intelligence establishment, while the elected leaders who are supposed to control it engage in open-ended, winner-take-all, partisan conflict.

Bipartisan consensus has played a crucial but underappreciated role in the history of U.S. intelligence.

The United States developed no real national intelligence agency in the 19th century, while European states such as France, Russia and Prussia did. Partly this was due to small-government constitutional norms on this side of the Atlantic; but mistrust between American political factions was another inhibiting factor.

royal German family

of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century

The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg

Nicholas’ power as an Autocrat was indeed so absolute that any command, even as extreme as the one to march on France, was fully within his power should he choose to exercise it

Throughout his reign, Nicholas jealously guarded the recognized prerogatives of the ruler in all aspects of government and he exercised a more personal control in state affairs than any other ruler since Peter the Great

Only a strong Emperor could bear the crushing burden of such a system of personal government and, as events after 1848 made clear, even Russia’s iron-willed Emperor himself could not bear such a burden in the face of serious crises.

Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 

The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 

Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 

there is one man who stands out from the general level of mediocrity, a King who tried with some success to arrest the decadence—Charles III, King of Spain, 1759-1788

This zeal for the general welfare of his people brought him into rough conflict with the two main powers in the land; the nobility and the clergy

Philip had to withdraw his abdication; but the bouts of insanity continued, and Isabella Farnese became de facto ruler of the country

In July 1830, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in France ousted Charles X and the Second Bourbon Restoration, and a new era in Anglo-French relations ensued. The terms set down at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 following Napoleon’s defeat were now considered academic. Britain, as victor against France, had been obliged to uphold the articles of the various treaties, designed, as one of them stated, for the purpose of ‘maintaining the order of things re-established in France’. The quasi-constitutional Orleans monarchy of Charles X’s successor Louis-Philippe was therefore recognised by Britain

In a diplomatic dispatch of 1832, Lord Granville, British ambassador in Paris, noted that Perier, then president of the Council, believed that ‘the welfare of France and England and the peace of Europe depended upon an intimate alliance and concert between the two governments’

By 1848, once more heading foreign affairs (June 1846 to December 1851), the ‘Jupiter Anglicanus of the Foreign Office’ allowed Anglo-French relations to sink to a level not witnessed since 1814. He had orchestrated the creation of Belgium in 1831, a supposedly neutral country but one which would naturally  be pro-British and often anti-French

August 8th, 1918 was ‘the black day of the German Army’. On that day the British Fourth Army and the French First Army, both under command of Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, launched a highly successful attack south of the River Somme: the Battle of Amiens

German losses amounted to nearly 27,000; the British alone captured over 300 guns

Nevertheless, by August 11th, the German High Command, assessing the damage done, recognized that the war had taken a decisive turn. At a conference at Advanced General Headquarters that day, the Kaiser said: ‘I see that we must strike a balance. We have nearly reached the limit of our powers of resistance. The war must be ended