Which centuries interest you the most?

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Long 19th Century (1789-1914) has always been my favorite.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Every century since at least the 9th has seen Europe embroiled in an intricate diplomatic chess game with a myriad actors, ever-shifting alliances, and shocking twists of fate. And yes, it's all fascinating. The difference is that, until the 19th century, this was a game by and large only played by a small elite. The 19th century sees the rise of the masses as a political player - a player freer than it had ever been before (when the masses were too downtrodden to do anything about it) or after (when the rulers started to truly figure out how the masses work and exploit that to their advantage). It was a century where the most carefully laid-out plans frequently crumbled in the face of public sentiment. Of course, it also had Great Men (at least as much as any other centuries, arguably more than most) and the interplay between Great Men and the masses was what made that time so unique.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Right, but it took many centuries for diplomacy to fully hit its stride. It wasn't until the 16th century that the resident ambassador became a commonality, and it took another hundred years for the principle of diplomatic immunity to be fully established. As a result, the state system of the Middle Ages was far less mobile and more stagnant than what came later. Whatever the enmities between the princes of Europe, Christendom was bound together by the Pope and the Catholic faith, and had a common enemy in the infidel. Even when permanent envoys arrived with the coming of the Renaissance, the religious hatreds of the Reformation saw Catholics generally ally with Catholics, Protestants with Protestants (France of course being the exception). It wasn't until after 1648 that all the conditions had been set down for the coming of the stately quadrille.

I strongly disagree with the idea that the Medieval geopolitical order was "far less mobile and more stagnant". That's a genuinely baffling view to me, because the more I learn about this period the more I realize that it was a time of extreme political complexity, far greater than the post-Westphalia order. The fact that modern "states" weren't yet firmly established, but did exist in an embryonic forms, coupled with the complex web of feudal relationships, all of them subject to the whim of dynastic inheritances, and an equally complex dynamic between church and secular authorities, all these factors created a situation where you had a myriad political actors of all shapes and sizes continually appearing onto the scene and exiting it. Just look at the absolute weirdness of Franco-English relations from 1066 to 1453 (the Hundred Years' War is really only the tip of the iceberg, there's so much more to dig up). Or at the patchwork of Northern Italian city-states and the complex web of alliances and enmities they forged and promptly broke along with the Pope and foreign powers. Or the sheer ridiculousness of Charles V's empire. If anything, it is the Peace of Westphalia that introduced stability and stagnancy into the whole systems. Sure, there were plenty of wars after 1648, and some territories changed hands. But by and large, the set of political actors that mattered was more or less closed after that point, as was the space they would occupy (okay, there's a big outlier in the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but my point stands otherwise). The balance of power was exactly that, balance. Sure, it still took war to preserve it, but the main point of it still was status quo at the end of the day. Now, things might have been different if France had won the War of Spanish Succession, or the Ottomans had successfully captured Vienna, but tbh even then I doubt that things would have changed all that dramatically. Europe by that point had consolidated modern states that couldn't be just wiped off the map (again, Poland excepted), or split off, or conquer so much that their fundamental identity would change. That just wasn't a possibility anymore, and wouldn't be for centuries.

Sure, 19th century people still talked about the balance of power, but the Pax Brittanica prevented the state system from warring like it used to, while in the previous century war had driven it along.

I mean, if your point was that there was less warring in the 19th century than in the 17th and 18th, I can't argue with that. I mean, if you ignore 1792-1815, which arguably had enough war in 23 years to fill a century under the previous paradigm. But regardless, I guess I just don't find war in and of itself particularly interesting. Historical wars can be interesting, don't get me wrong, but for me, there has to be more to it than just states vying for slightly more power or slight territorial changes. I need a compelling personal or collective "narrative" to attach to it (see the Wars of Italian Independence, which are compelling because they represented the sudden culminations of the aspirations of an idealistic generation).

Simultaneously, national rivalries became more entrenched due to the rise of nationalism, making the side-switching of the past far less common.

Uh, no? It seems you're thinking of a very specific piece of the 19th century (basically 1815-1848) and ignoring everything else. The post-Vienna order had a loose but stable alliance of basically all the major powers against the vague concept of liberal revolution, but that paradigm fell apart in the second half of the century. Then, you had: England's rapprochement with France (a diplomatic 180 after 7 centuries of rivalry); Prussia fighting a war against Denmark with Austria, then a war against Austria with Italy (who had just been created with aid from France), and finally locking down an alliance with Austria and Italy after a war with France; Russia fighting a war against France and England while being in good terms with Germany then breaking with Germany to ally with France; a myriad shenanigans in the Balkans that would take me a whole essay to detail. Does this sound boring to you? I'm genuinely baffled you'd say so.

I've gotten a bit carried away, but you do raise a good point with the empowerment of the masses that occurred in the 19th century. If you feel that the input of the masses on the political world made things more interesting, fine⁴. It's simply a matter of personal preference: to me the era of high diplomacy and the Kabinettskriege is more interesting, to you it isn’t.

⁴While I disagree that it made diplomacy and warfare more interesting, I of course find fascinating the elections and political parties brought about by the empowerment of the masses; otherwise I wouldn't have spent so many threads arguing about 19th century American politics.

Not just elections, my friend! Are we seriously not going to talk about all the revolutions? C'mon, man! France changed regimes about 10 times, depending on how you count, between 1789 and 1871. Whats not to love? And the whole madness that was 1848? Even if most of those revolutions failed, they represent such a fascinating moment in time. But yes, electoral politics is also fascinating, obviously, and I feel like 19th century European elections deserve to be studied more.