Napoleon and Europe

"The End of the Old Order" is the first in a four volume series on Napoleon and Europe from military historian Frederick Kagan. He spoke about it recently with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C. This is an hour twenty minutes. Well, we can begin. Um. I'm Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and I'm moderating this large panel here, a very difficult job. And this panel consists actually of Frederick Kagan, giving some remarks on Napoleon based on his book, which I'll say a word about in a second, when I introduce him I'll make some brief comments on, not being a Napoleon expert, on sort of current, possible implications of the book. Fred will comment on my comments and we'll take comments and questions for you all and uh, be out of here within an hour and a half, or maybe even more quickly. Frederick Kagan is, let me get his title right, a resident scholar in Defense and Security Policy studies here at the American Enterprise Institute. More importantly he's a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard. He was Associate Professor of Military History at West Point for I think, the last ten, nine years, ten year? Ten years. Um, and has written widely in the field of the military history especially out in Russia, but also other areas, about military history over the last two or three centuries and uh, also on current issues of foreign and defense policy, for the Weekly Standard and also for a few other lesser publications, all other publications, I should say. So Fred's book, let me just say a word about the book, which is extremely, I haven't read every book, because I only got it four or five days ago and its 600 plus pages, but as a, first a very beautiful book unlike so many books today, very elegant and handsome book, goes unjust, 770 pages or so, um, its the first of a multi volume study on Napoleon in Europe and this first volume covers the years 1801-1805, "The End of the Old Order" and I would say having read chunks of it, it is, it seeks to be and is an integrated study of Napoleons political, diplomatic and military strategy and history, mitigated history of the Napoleonic Era and integrated diplomatic political and military history, which I think is very rare. And I would also say about the book, I was going to say this is my comment, but I'll say this an introduction instead, that um, its extremely readable and I am not an expert on Napoleon or the 19th century or military history and its a clear and enjoyable and very interesting and thought provoking read. In any case, Fred will talk for, what maybe twenty minutes or so, however long he wants and Napoleon and the end of that old order in, at the beginning of the 19th century and talk a little bit about implications perhaps for today and then I'll make a few comments and then we'll hear your comments. Bill, thank you very much. Um, I really appreciate your taking the time to come and participate in in this discussion. I thank you all for coming out on a hot July day to listen to some very old dusty history which I hope I'll make a little bit less dusty if I can't make it less old and try to make it interesting to you. I think before I start talking about Napoleon, its worthwhile in asking a question, why should we study history at all and why should I take your time this afternoon to present to you a view of 200 year old events. And I think its important to remember that history can provide us with a window into human nature which is unchanging and into the way that people and especially statesmen react to particular circumstances. I don't really think that history can teach us clear lessons. I don't think you can really mind history to find templates for behavior in parallel circumstances because circumstances are never fully parallel. But I do think that the more you study how people have behaved in the past, the better you can understand how they behave today and how they will behave tomorrow and the more likely you are to be able to come up with real intelligent prescriptions for your own actions that will actually have the desired effect. So I think studying history is very valuable for current policy makers and even just for those that are interested in contemporary events. Um, its also very important to understand that if you want to understand war, its extremely important to study military history. That's actually really the only way that you can do it. Uh, its the only laboratory that we have for seeing how different things have been tried and different things might have succeeded or failed and its the, reflects the fact that there is really nothing new under the sun. The truth is there is nothing in war or in human affairs at all that is so novel that there is no historical parallel at all. That there is nothing thats ever happened in the past that can inform our understanding of it. And that's particularly true in something that is as large and complex and as rooted in very fundamental aspects of human nature as war is. And so if you want to understand the war that we are in today, with all of its complexities, I think its very important to go back and look at military history and particularly operational military history, the history of battles and campaigns which has become rather unfashionable these days, but I really think that it is a key to our success in the future struggle on the war on terror. That we really do work to obtain a better and better understanding of these things by looking in the first instance of the past. Now, having defended the study of history and military history, in general, the question is: why should we study this particular period? And I think there are very good reasons why its worth looking at the Napoleonic period in order to gain some insights into the problems that we have today. This was a period also, of fundamental change in the international system and in the world order. The French Revolution broke out in 1789. It destroyed the French Monarchy and swept in the era of the first ever, really, sort of democratic state on the European continent other than Switzerland. Um, and then plunged France first and then Europe into a period of extreme chaos and violence as the French Revolutionaries launched an aggressive war against Austria in 1792. That war rapidly expanded to include Britain and Prussia and ultimately even Russia as it raged on for the next decade. When it finally ended, in 1801, 1800 and 1801, the states of Europe were really tired of war and were extremely exhausted. In yet, even as it was ending, in 1799, an upstart general by the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, in a military coup, seized power in France, destroyed the last vestiges of the French Revolution and embarked on a career that would have the effect of changing the face of Europe. He posed a dramatic new threat to an order that, where people already tired of conflict, already tired of war, felt that some fundamental sea change was going on in the world because of the ideals that the French Revolution had brought and the threat that it had posed. Didn't really know how to react to it, but wanted to conserve critical elements of their states and their societies, in yet try to adapt. And at this moment, this new threat suddenly emerged and people had to deal with it. And I think there is a lot that a period like that can tell us, that is apposite to the sorts of challenges that we face today in a world that we see also as changing to which we have to adapt without losing sight of what we really are. The book itself picks up in 1801 with the signing of the peace treaties that ended the first period of revolutionary wars. And it looks at the unraveling of those treaties over the course of the next four years and the renewal of war first between France and Britain in 1803 and ultimately between France and a continent spanning coalition that included Austria, Russia, Sweden and ultimately even Prussia, which broke out in 1805. It then narrates the course of military operations leading to the battle of (unidentified) on December 2, 1805 and then the Peace Treaties um, that followed, that actually fundamentally changed the nature of Europe. It looks at this period from the perspective of all of the major players. And this is something that I think is terrifically important, because most histories of this period tend to focus on Napoleon, what he was doing, what his attitudes were and tend to explain events by reference simply to what he did. But the truth of the matter is that it was at least important in driving the events of the time that actually it was the allies who started the war. The war begins when the coalition of Austria, Russia and England attack Napoleon, not when Napoleon attacks anyone else. And that's because it actually was the allies who were the driving force here. The allies also didn't agree with each other about a lot of things. Now I'll talk about that more in a moment. So in the research of this book and the writing of it, I've been very careful to try to present the different perspectives of each individual state and show how they came into conflict in various different ways to generate the complexity and the reality of what actually occurred. In addition, as Bill pointed out, the book focuses very heavily on showing the interrelationship between politics and war. And this is another aspect in which I think its terrifically important that we look at this history with an eye towards our own problems today. Politics influences every aspect of war. It can not be divorced from any part of military operations at any time. Politics and diplomacy determines when states go to war. It determines who their allies will be. It determines what their objectives will be. Given those objectives, it places constraints on what the war plans can be and what sorts of forces can be used. It then places constraints or encourages action about the use of those forces in maneuver, in battle. Even on the battlefield, politics has its effect. As the war comes to an end, politics determines how states react to battlefield victories and defeats, how they negotiate peaces, how they actually sign them and what the nature of those peace treaties actually are. There is no point in war in which you can remove the military operations from their political contexts. It seems, it would seem to many of you, obvious to say this, but the amazing thing is that in the study of the Napoleonic period this is not the way most books are written. And you will find a great many explanations which attempt to focus purely on the military operations and focus exclusively on the fighting to explain the outcome of combats and battles and wars which were in fact determined much more heavily by political matters. My other work and my other role as contemporary student of war. I have written about problems that I see developing in American Defense transformation programs which also seem to me to be driving a wedge between politics and war, which I think would be very dangerous. So I think this is a very good period to look at to understand, to refresh ourselves on the importance of that. Now, in addition to those general points, there are two specific features of these wars that I think merit our attention today. One is the understanding that coalition problems are not new. The war of 1805 is commonly called the war of third coalition. Depending on how you count, there were actually six or seven coalitions that fought the French Revolution and Napoleon. All of them unsuccessful, except for the last. And their lack of success in previous wars and their ultimate success, highlights the enormous difficulty in bringing together coalitions of disparate states with disparate interests even to fight such an apparently overwhelming enemy as Napoleon. The study of how those coalitions came together, the problems that they had and how they ultimately overcame those problems, I think offers us a lot of insight for how we should be thinking about forming our alliances today and managing those that we have. In addition, and not I'm finally going to get to the point that I'm going to focus on today, rogue states are not new either. And I would like to spend awhile inviting you to consider Napoleonic France as a rogue state and see what lessons we can learn about that in general that might have some applicability to our current situation in dealing with a couple of rogue states that will come to mind. Um, in the first place, Napoleon had no plan of conquest. Napoleon never set out to conquer Europe, he did not have in mind aping this success is of Alexander the Great or Caesar or anyone else. Uh, the only clear objective Napoleon ever followed in his day was the destruction of great Britain, either militarily or economically or both. And there simply isn't evidence to support any other conclusion than that. Nevertheless, he was terrifically subversive of the international order and if he had not been stopped he would have destroyed the world order of his time completely and replaced it with something else. Why is that? Well, Britain was Napoleons principal enemy largely for historical reasons. The French had been taught to hate the British since at least the 15th century and if you watch French-British soccer matches, you can see that this persists. Um, and also for practical reasons. The British were getting in his way. Napoleon wanted to reestablish the French oversees empire that had been lost in the course of the 18th century. The royal navy was preventing that, Napoleon wanted a larger share of world trade, written with the dominant economic power in the world. For so both historical and practical reasons, Britain was the main enemy. At the time, Britain was something of a superpower. The Royal Navy really was unchallenged and almost unchallengeable. And the British really could do pretty much whatever they wanted at sea. And that meant also, outside of Europe. And therefore, the British undertook to define international law, especially economic law and the law of the sea, in a way that suited them very well. Didn't suit Napoleon well. And Napoleon therefore came to see, the idea, basically the idea of international law of his day, as being a ruse to support British imperialism. He therefore disregarded it and he took an approach in the world that really ignored international law and international norms and he relied on the enormous military power of France to underwrite this policy. But its important to understand that Napoleon was not simply cynical here. Its not that he thought he was behaving badly and he was doing it anyway because he thought he could get away with it, or because he thought there was no such thing as international norms and he simply didn't care. Its because he thought he was right. He thought his cause was just. He thought that the British were being despotic and imperialistic and bad. And he thought that his opposition to them was virtuous. This is an extremely important feature of his character. Among other things it meant that he constantly expected that the other states of Europe would come to his aid because he believed that Britain's despotic and unjust rule of the oceans, must be as harmful and galling to them as it was to him and therefore his opposition to Britain would surely rouse their support. He was therefore, in my view, very much more dangerous than a rogue state that is simply opportunistic or a rogue state that does not care about international norms. Because his conviction of justice and his belief that the international system would ultimately support him, lent incredible support and enthusiasm to his aggressiveness and made it very difficult for anyone to show him that he shouldn't be doing what it was that he was actually doing. In addition. Because he rejected international law and international norms of his day. It was impossible really for anyone to negotiate with him successfully. Because the negotiations and between 1801 and 1805, all of the continental states and Britain continually engage Napoleon in a series of negotiations. The negotiations were aimed at bringing him into the international system, getting him to agree to be bound by international norms of a certain variety. But he rejected those very norms and he rejected the validity of the demands that were being made on him. How can you negotiate with someone like that? Well, the answer is that you can't. And so Napoleon would negotiate , but was also continually using his military power to change the situation to his advantage, ultimately convincing his would be coalition partners that he was not in fact negotiable. In the end, Napoleon, really could only be dealt with by force. That was the only thing that was going to be effective with him. As long as he continued to feel that he was able to do things that he wanted to, he was going to continue to do them and talking to him was not going to resolve the problem. Its interesting to ask, why was Napoleon wrong about the degree of support that he was going to have in the international system, since it was in fact somewhat unjust. The British did do things rather arbitrarily and had created a system of international law that favored them and harmed others and Napoleon repeatedly commented on this. At one point in 1804 he said, "I find everywhere an unfortunate tendency to interpret badly everything that emanates from me that I never find when it comes to England. She oppresses everyone's commerce and everyone is silent. I occupy a village and everyone cries out. Its the cry of the rogue state. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you discriminating against me? They're being bad, I'm being bad and you're only yelling at me." Well, part of the answer was provided explicitly by the, a Prussian foreign minister in 1806, Karl August von Hardenberg. He declared the English monopoly is an evil without doubt. But we must remember that English commerce gives birth to industry and favors culture. That it supports them rather than oppressing them. England resembles a great merchant in the midst of a large number of smaller ones and of workers to whom it gives work. Britain's despotism of the sea should be checked, but the complete destruction of England would be cruelly felt by contemporaries and even by the generations immediately succeeding them, if in its place, the despotism of iron, destructive of all truth and culture and of the well being of humanity, weighed upon the world." Its a pretty enlightened attitude, but it was something that was pretty obvious to most of the other crowned heads of Europe at the time and many of their peoples. The fact is that whatever the justice or injustice of the international order of the day, it suited the interests of states and their leaders rather well. It generated relative prosperity, it gave states the ability to compete economically on a reasonably level playing field. It maintained a certain kind of peace order and stability that was necessary for trade to flourish and so even if the British exercised their power and shaped the state in way that suited them better than others, the overall net result was to benefit the international community as a whole. Therefore, when Napoleon started focusing on the injustice of the system in the process of attempting to destroy it, the other states of Europe looked upon this hostilely and tended generally to rally to the side of the British even while condemning policies that the British pursued that they didn't like. The allied powers were quite right to decide that they had to impose Napoleon by force. The British obviously made the decision first since they were in the front rank of states that were threatened by Napoleon and there was a period from 1801 to 1803 when Napoleon and the British tried to negotiate the details of the peace settlement they'd worked out. Napoleon stuck carefully to the letter of the law of the treaties that he had signed, but he continued to violate their spirit. The British, for their part, stuck to the letter and spirit as much as they could, but when they became convinced that Napoleon really didn't intend actually to abide by the spirit, they broke the letter and they refused to evacuate the island of Malta which they had been obligated to do by treaty. When Napoleon made it clear that he was going to continue pushing on this issue. The British government declared war on him. They started it and the Royal Navy rather swiftly swept the French Navy from the seas and took back a bunch of colonies and scored rather an impressive victory. Because the British had, from Napoleons perspective, so clearly put themselves in the wrong by violating the treating and then declaring the war on him, he expected that there would be considerable continental support behind him. And he looked particularly to Czar Alexander of Russia who had taken power in 1801, to come to his aid. But Napoleon also reacted to the British declaration and attack by reoccupying territories in Italy and Germany that he had occupied prior to the signing of the treaty. And his argument in international law was simple: well, I gave them up because we signed a treaty, you just broke the treaty, therefore I can take them back. The problem was that in the course of the collapse of the peace treaty, Alexander had also been noticing the same things that the British had and had also been coming to the conclusion that Napoleon was a threat to the international order. And therefore, he tended to view these reoccupations of territory as aggressions and indications of Napoleon's ambition to occupy more territory and he therefore turned against Napoleon and began to try to think about ways of checking Napoleon. The problem was that although Britain and Russia were of a certain sense European super powers of the day, they did not have a border with France. The English Chanel separates Britain from France and above all since Britain doesn't have a large army, than or almost ever, there wasn't a lot they could do by themselves and Russia is far away from France. They needed to get either Austria or Prussia, states with proximate borders to France to join them in order for anything actually to happen. But you know, its one thing for a state far removed from a rogue state, to decide that military opposition and the risk of war is necessary. Its something very different for the neighbors of that rogue state to make that decision, because they have to worry about the possibility that they will receive the first blow from the rogue state when it realizes its going to be attacked . And then they have to worry about how long they'll have to sustain the fight all on their own. Will the allies who promise them help actually send it? Will it arrive in time? Will it be sufficient? If things go badly, will the distant allies stay the course or will they abandon these hapless neighbors to their fate? In addition, because of their geographical position, both Austria and Prussia had to be almost as worried about the possibility of Russian homogeneity as of French homogeneity. And they had to wonder: if we help the Russian's destroy France completely, will we not then be putting ourselves entirely in the hands of the Russians and at their mercy? All of this tends to complicate their thinking and tended to make it harder for them to come to the decision to risk war. They came to that decision because Napoleon continued to make a series of provocations that ended up persuading them that the risk of inaction was greater than the risk of action. fight a war on the continent in 1805. In 1805, he was preparing an army to invade Britain. But he conducted operations in Italy and in Germany which he regarded as his (unidentified) of influence, attempting to rationalize them and to create them in an image that suited him. He didn't think about what the effect of these actions would be on Austria or Prussia, because he didn't think it concerned them. That was his sphere of influence. What he didn't recognize was, demonstrating that that was his sphere of influence and that they had nothing to say about what was going on immediately on their borders, was actually a mortal threat to states that were already living in fear of Napoleon's possible aggressions. And so once again, Napoleon's inability to understand the perspective of the states he was dealing with, lead him to undertake actions without thinking about the consequences that actually drew him in a war that he did not mean to fight. Although its important to emphasize at all times that even though Napoleon didn't mean to fight a war on the continent, he was perfectly willing to do so if the Austrians and the Prussians and the Russians undertook steps that he regarded as unacceptable. Um, as it became clear to the Austrians and the Prussians that Napoleon really was tilting the balance of power against them, they decided that they needed to join with the Russians in opposing him. They did so late, the did so tentatively and they did so with tremendous mistrust. A result was an extremely weak coalition. Because it was very hard for anyone at the time to know just how big a military threat Napoleon actually was. Remember, he'd only been in power since 1799. He was known to be a very talented general, but he had never put himself at the head of France's armies and started the war and run it all by himself. No one really knew what he would do. And its important as we study in the Napoleonic period, not to read our knowledge of Napoleon back into 1805. Most of our understanding of him comes from after that period. He was an unknown. They can be forgiven for not understanding just how vast was the threat he really posed and for believing that their own internal problems, their own concerns with each other, their own worries about what other members of the alliance might do, or how they might take advantage of the situation. In a certain sense reasonable. But they did create very serious fractures within the coalition which actually had ripple effects all the way down to the tactical level. And it gets down to the point that where in certain battles, the actions of a few thousand soldiers on one side or the other are actually determined in part by these inter allied tensions and mistrust. An one of the classic examples of how you cannot divorce politics, even from the tactical level, of war. In part as a result of this and in part as a result of Napoleon's genius, the war goes very badly for the allies and in the course of a few months Napoleon destroys first Austria and then a combines Austrian-Russian army at Auschwitz. Now as I argue, when you look at the situation after the battle of Auschwitz, the truth is that allies were still at a pretty good spot. They outnumbered Napoleon over all and there were hundreds of thousands of allied troops converging on a bedraggled and exhausted French army even thought it was victorious on the battlefield. But the inter allied mistrust was so great that instead of hanging on and trying to retrieve the situation, the allies allow Napoleon to bully them into a series of separate pieces. Napoleon's diplomacy is as worthy as study as is his military operations and it hasn't received enough attention. In fact he approached the problem in very similar ways as I argue in the book. The same sort of conceptual techniques he uses in war, he also transposes into diplomacy. They're very effective techniques for forcing people to agree to treaties that he dictate. The problem is, that that is an international order that rests on the continued use of force. And because Napoleon didn't understand the perspectives of the other states he was dealing with, the treaties that he continually imposed on him were unacceptable to them. This is why you have continued warfare after 1805. Its not because of any Napoleonic plan for conquest. Its not because he's dissatisfied with the part of Europe he has and wants more. He always envisions every war that he's fighting as the last war and then he's done. The problem is that the treaties he impose are intolerable and require, over the long run, other states to attempt to revise them which they do. And this of course, in the end is why Napoleon looses, since he's never able to create a stable order that the rest of Europe finds tolerable, they keep fighting until they learn how to defeat him. And as I will argue in the other three volumes of this series, which will be coming out in a few years, um, in fact it is this political lesson that they learn about how to be good coalition partners, about the need to subordinate all of their disagreements and other interests to the overwhelming requirement to face this overwhelming threat that actually leads to Napoleon's ultimate defeat in 1814 and then again in 1850. Now before I turn it over to Bill, there are a couple of points that I would like to make about the general lessons that we can draw for today about dealing with rogue states. First of all there are different kinds of rogue states and its important to understand that. There are rouge states that are simply opportunistic predators who don't generally believe that the international order is bad, but do believe that they can break the law for awhile and get away with it and then go back to being normal members of the international community. Those kinds of guys cane be very dangerous, but its also a lot more easy to deal with them to bring them back into an international order that they don't reject. And then there are sort of anarchist states. States that just don't believe in any international order at all. Those states can be very problematic and very dangerous. But