Decaying states today are as dangerous as Napoleon's armies were 200 years ago.

The Lessons of 1814

By WILLIAM S. LIND

A recent issue of the German historical magazine Geo Epoche interviewed Christopher Clark, author of the definitive diplomatic history of the events leading to World War I, The Sleepwalkers. In the interview, Dr. Clark said, “The world in which we now live is becoming ever more like that of 1914.”

Well, no and yes. We do not have two unequal power blocks—the Entente had three Great Powers; the Central Powers only one, Germany, plus a has-been and a wannabe, Austria-Hungary and ever-treacherous Italy—eyeing each other with apprehension. We do not live in a world where, thanks to the advantage conveyed by early mobilization, everyone’s military has a hair trigger. We do not have a major player whose strategic objective requires a war among the Great Powers, as France’s objective of retaking Alsace and Lorraine did then.

Yet there are parallels, too. We do see, in many countries including our own, foreign-policy establishments detached from reality and infected with hubris. We have tense situations similar to the one in the Balkans in 1914, including China’s claim to Japan’s Senkaku islands and, if Washington and the European Union are completely stupid in their reactions, Russia’s recovery of parts of Ukraine.

The greatest and most worrying parallel is that today as in 1914 key policy-making elites are thinking and acting within an outdated paradigm. Then, the obsolete paradigm was dynastic competition, especially that between the Houses of Hapsburg and Romanov; the new paradigm was set by the mortal threat posed to all Christian, conservative monarchies by the notion of popular sovereignty and Jacobinical definitions of human rights. By fighting each other instead of uniting against the left, three dynasties doomed themselves and possibly us as well. Western culture’s last chance of survival may have been a victory by the Central Powers in World War I.

Today, the obsolete paradigm is competition between states. It is for such competition that our foreign policies and armed services, and those of almost all other countries, are shaped. The new paradigm is the contest between the state system and the non-state forces of Fourth Generation war, forces that (often with America’s short-sighted help) are destroying one state after another and thriving in the resulting stateless chaos. Just as Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs did themselves in by clinging to an outdated paradigm, so the state system is doing now.

But there is another ’14 parallel, and it is one that offers conservatives hope. The parallel is to 1814, when conservatism won and, for a century, partially maintained a victory over the poisons unleashed by the French Revolution.

In 1814, the Sixth Coalition, whose core was Russia, Prussia, and Austria, militarily defeated Napoleon, forced him to abdicate, and restored legitimate government to France in the form of Louis XVIII. It then gathered for the Congress of Vienna, which authored not a brutal, punitive diktat like the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, but a peace that welcomed a restored France back into the Concert of Europe.

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