This lecture defines key concepts—such as power, reason of state, and balance of power—and introduces the debates that repeatedly resonate in international history, including the competing schools of Realism and Idealism and the question of who or what ultimately steers the foreign policy choices of states.
We set the historical stage of early modern Europe, including Europe's encounter with a wider world in the form of trade, diplomacy, and an expanding Ottoman Empire; the challenge to older authority represented by the "new monarchies"; and the emergence of an embryonic diplomacy.
The city-states of Renaissance Italy pioneer patterns of modern diplomacy that will be of lasting significance to this day, including representation by resident ambassadors. The balance of power among these states lasts from the 1454 Peace of Lodi until the invasion by outside powers in 1494, a year so important that some historians date the modern age from it.
From 1500 to 1618, the battle to rule the European continent begins to shape the modern European state system. We look at the intense rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty of Austria and Spain and the Valois royal family of France, as well as the challenge of the Protestant Reformation.
The Thirty Years' War rages across the center of Europe from 1618 to 1648, intertwining explosive elements of religion and politics and drawing in an ever-increasing number of major powers. The resulting exhaustion produces an epochal change in how international politics is understood and practiced.
The Thirty Years' War ends with the first of the great diplomatic peace conferences of modern times, creating the European system of sovereign states, setting the stage for the rise of France as a superpower, and establishing new concepts of international law.
France takes on the role of the strongest European power, and neighboring kingdoms seize on coalition diplomacy to contain it, asserting a European balance of power that would be ratified in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.
We survey the other great powers of the day from 1648 to 1740, focusing first on the evolving profession of the diplomat and then on the fortunes of the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Spain, tracing the distinctive styles and approaches of each of these states to the dangerous international scene.
From 1648 to the 1770s, political convulsions in northern and eastern Europe bring new dynamic players—Sweden, the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania, and Russia—into the European state system as additional factors in diplomatic calculation.
We explore how the paradoxes of the Age of Enlightenment affect international relations. On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers craft plans for a permanent peace based on reason, tolerance, and international law. At the same time, military and diplomatic competition achieve a new level of cynicism.
The era of the American and French Revolutions transforms the European continent. Nationalism and mass politics are unleashed, and the French Revolution of 1789 touches off a quarter-century of war in Europe that will reorder politics and redraw the diplomatic map.
This lecture follows the Emperor Napoleon's remarkable career to his ultimate defeat in 1815. Bestriding the European mainland, Napoleon establishes both his Grand Empire and a system of allied states linked in the Continental System, even as guerrilla war in Spain portends trouble.
The Congress gathers the powers that had triumphed over Napoleon (joined by the restored French kingdom) to construct a new order founded on conservative solidarity and the values of legitimacy and opposition to revolution. This new "Concert of Europe" will enjoy remarkable success for close to a century.
We focus on the operations of the Concert of Europe from 1815 to 1848, with special attention to the periodic international congresses convened under its auspices and their determined efforts to stamp out what they considered the dark and dangerous forces of Nationalism and Liberalism.
We examine the problems posed by events and dynamics at the margins of the European arena from 1815 to 1848, including the fate of the Ottoman Empire, U.S. resistance to an expansion of the balance of power system across the Atlantic, and the beginnings of renewed European Imperialism overseas.
We cover the period from 1848 to 1870 and examine two diplomatic surprises: the lack of widespread war caused by the revolutions of 1848—in contrast to the French Revolution—and the rise to power of a new Napoleon, an enigmatic figure who champions Nationalism and Liberalism while hatching diplomatic conspiracies to redraw Europe's map.
This lecture examines the waxing and waning of the British Empire over the course of the 19th century, including its industrial and economic might, its liberal advocacy of international free trade and the abolition of slavery, and its fateful dominion over India.
The Crimean War of 1853–1856 reflects even deeper tensions and diplomatic problems in the European order. We see how Russia's defeat batters the Concert of Europe and its vision of conservative solidarity and sets the stage for dramatic changes.
The 1858–1861 unification of Italy as a nation-state fulfills a long-standing dream. But the achievement also relies on changes on the international scene and assistance from France, skillfully engineered by Count Camillo di Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont.
The 1862–1871 unification of the German Empire—steered by the Prussian "Iron Chancellor" Otto von Bismarck—upsets political certainties. Will this new power at the center of the continent anchor peace or disrupt stability?
Bismarck's challenge is to reconcile the new empire's neighbors to the fact of the "German revolution" and to present Germany as a guarantor of stability. We follow the building, functioning, and eventual breakdown of the Bismarckian system of diplomacy from 1871 to 1894.
The European powers launch a scramble for empire, cruelly carving up entire continents. We examine the wave of High Imperialism from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the "Scramble for Africa" to 1898, with France and Britain on the brink of a colonial war.
New alignments emerge, with decisive changes in diplomatic patterns. Telling trends include popular movements for peace while Europe arms on land and sea, Japan's defeat of the Russian Empire, greater American presence in international venues, and increasing regional crises.
This lecture, covering the years 1900 to 1913, returns to the long-standing "Eastern Question" concerning the future of the Ottoman territories. With the Turkish realm perceived as being in terminal decline, the question has now reached a critical stage.
The outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 is the object of one of the biggest debates in modern history. How did European diplomats and statesmen bring the continent to the brink and then plunge it into an ever-widening war?
World War I, with its all-encompassing mobilization of mass armies, entire economies, domestic societies, and vitally needed allies, produces extraordinary changes, including the overturning of long-standing diplomatic patterns, the collapse of four empires, and the emergence of two future superpowers: the United States and Soviet Russia.
After four years of devastating war, the victors of World War I gather in Paris in 1919 to draft a comprehensive settlement and create a new international order, replacing that of the Congress of Vienna. The controversial results will alter the balance of the century.
At the dawn of the postwar decade, Europe has a new map, and great hopes have been vested in the League of Nations. Yet relations between France and Germany remain tense, the new states of eastern Europe are arguing over borders, and the United States has withdrawn from European politics.
The Great Depression of 1929 and the shift toward Authoritarianism and Fascism in European politics move the continent toward another disaster. We track the rise to power of Mussolini in Fascist Italy and Hitler in Nazi Germany and the calculations of Stalin in the Soviet Union.
We examine the diplomatic bombshell that paved the way to war—the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939; outline Hitler's ambitions and their culmination in his invasion of his Soviet ally; and discuss the complicated alliance among the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union
This lecture devotes special attention to the immediate aftermath of World War II, including the lack of a final, comprehensive settlement; the founding of the United Nations; the Potsdam Conference; Stalin's reimposition of harsh personal powers; and growing tensions among the victors.
In the key years from 1946 to 1949, the split between former allies—the United States and Great Britain on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other—widens, and the so-called "Cold War" begins, bringing with it a distinctive brand of crisis diplomacy.
We look at two key processes from 1949 to 1956. The first is decolonization, with Europe's powers losing most of their once-huge imperial holdings. The other is the increasing Cold War polarization of Europe, configured into the military alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
In response to a half-century of war and tension, Europe's leaders depart from the competitive politics of statehood inaugurated at the Treaty of Westphalia to take a new direction. The European project of unity from 1957 onward will culminate in today's European Union.
With unexpected rapidity, the Communist states of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself collapse near the end of the 20th century. This lecture, covering the years 1980–1991, discusses the deeper causes leading to this startling transformation.
This lecture covers the years from 1991 to the beginning of the present century, including the expansion of NATO and the European Union, renewed Balkan violence, and Russia's search for its new international role. We end by considering several questions—including whether Europe is now entering a fundamentally new era of statecraft, or if the historical dynamics of war, peace, and power still apply.