In the gadfly historian’s classic The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, diplomacy is less a stately art than a dangerous game of miscalculation and bluff. Seventy years on, the world it describes still feels disconcertingly familiar. “We seek nothing but the security which comes from the balance of power.” The words were attributed by Lord Acton to William III in Acton’s lecture on the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), as one of the English king’s last conversations spoken as Europe entered another war over the distribution of power William III of England (William of Orange) had spent much of his political life resisting the expansion of Louis XIV’s France. His great strategic problem was not simply England’s security in isolation, but the possibility that France might become so powerful that no other European state could effectively resist it. The response was the Grand Alliance with England, the Dutch Republic and Austria, with other states joining the coalition against France. The principle was security through equilibrium. If one power became too dominant, others would combine against it. The Balance of Power doctrine was supposed to prevent domination; in practice, however, the pursuit of security has repeatedly produced new rivalries, new alliances and new fears. Two centuries later after William’s reported remark, historian A.J.P. Taylor would turn this old problem into one of the most compelling narratives in modern diplomatic history in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918, published in 1954. When Clarendon Press released The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 as the inaugural volume of the Oxford History of Modern Europe, it was immediately clear that diplomatic history had lost its dust. Where previous generations of Oxford dons had treated statecraft as an unending series of beige dispatches passed between high-minded aristocrats, Taylor brought the breathless, fatalistic momentum of a high-stakes thriller. Quoting English philosopher and political theorist Thomas Hobbes, Taylor famously declared in the book’s opening movement that while individuals never truly existed in a state of nature where life (as Hobbes described) was “nasty, brutish, and short,” the Great Powers of Europe always had. This arresting opening immediately strips diplomacy of its ceremonial vocabulary. Taylor’s masterwork is an unsettling demonstration of how European diplomacy became a permanent game of advantage, counter-advantage, fear and miscalculation and how, after seventy years of manoeuvring for mastery, the players destroyed the board. Its 600-plus pages, detailing the last age when Europe was the centre of the world, sweep the reader through the revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War, Italian and German unification, Bismarck’s elaborate system of alliances, the Eastern Question, the Balkans, the Moroccan crises, the Anglo-German naval rivalry and, finally, the catastrophe of 1914. To read The Struggle for Mastery in Europe is to encounter a historian operating at the height of his powers. “Men have not always acquiesced in the perpetual quadrille of the Balance of Power,” Taylor wrote. They had sometimes wished that “the music would stop” and that they could sit out a dance without maintaining the ceaseless watch on one another. Each sovereign state acknowledged no superior and no moral code other than that which it voluntarily accepted. Yet Europe had known almost as much peace as war, and Taylor attributed those periods of peace to the Balance of Power. Genesis of a Masterwork The origins of The Struggle for Mastery reveal much about Taylor’s peculiar positioning within the British academy. In November 1942, writing for the weekly magazine Time and Tide, Taylor argued that the definitive story of European power politics had yet to be written: “German historians cannot do it, because to them the struggle... seems merely wrong-headed; American historians cannot do it, because they do not realize what was at stake. It would be a superb opportunity for an English historian, if one could be found with real standards of scholarship and understanding.” He spent a decade fulfilling his own boast. Between tutorial sessions at Magdalen College, Oxford, and journalism for the Manchester Guardian, Taylor ground through the archival record. He was uniquely equipped for the task: a natural polyglot fluent in French and German, competent in Italian, and self-taught in Russian specifically so he could digest the Czarist white papers without relying on partial translations. Taylor’s great powers are not the solemn creatures of traditional diplomatic history. They are gamblers at a table, studying one another’s faces, raising the stakes, bluffing, retreating and occasionally discovering that the hand they thought they were playing is not the hand on the table. Taylor’s intellectual lineage was forged in two distinct crucibles. The first was his early mentor, Alfred Francis Pribram, an Austrian historian who instilled in Taylor a reverence for diplomatic mechanics and a lifelong scepticism of teleological history. As Taylor later wrote, Pribram taught him to reject hypothetical speculation. The second influence was that of Sir Lewis Namier. Though their relationship would eventually decay into bitter rivalry, Namier’s technique of stripping away the high-minded rhetorical pretences to reveal the raw, self-interested machinery underneath, profoundly shaped Taylor’s writing. Diplomatic history had long occupied an exalted place in European scholarship, and Leopold von Ranke had established the archive, the state and foreign policy as privileged objects of historical inquiry. The nineteenth-century tradition placed great weight on the conduct of states and statesmen and on the reconstruction of diplomacy from official records. After 1914, the enormous publication of documentary collections on the origins of the First World War only intensified that archival turn. But by Taylor’s time the old diplomatic history was already being challenged from within. William L. Langer in the United States and Pierre Renouvin in France were widening the study of international relations to include economic forces, social pressures and the deeper forces underlying diplomatic decisions. History as Paradox But Taylor, the great gadfly among historians, made diplomatic history read like literature without making it cease to be diplomatic history. What makes The Struggle for Mastery so endlessly re-readable is Taylor’s voice. With Puckish glee, he moves through his masterwork puncturing diplomatic vanity, deploying the arsenal of his iconic epigrams to ruthlessly expose the ironies and contradictions of European statecraft. Taylor wrote with a compressed, rhythmic vigour that owed more to Gibbon and Macaulay than to his academic contemporaries. He understood that diplomatic history, when stripped of its tedious protocol, is fundamentally about decision-making under conditions of extreme ambiguity and time pressure. The pleasure of reading Taylor comes with a frisson of anticipation of encountering ‘Taylorisms’ - his unforgettable and devastatingly witty epigrams that explained historical personages, epochs and moods with witty paradox. For instance, one his many takes on Napoleon III: “[He] was, what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history, and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.” Or his famous observation on inevitability (in his 1969 book War by Timetable) while explaining the outbreak of WW1 in 1914: “Inevitability” is a magic word with which to mesmerize the unwary. Only death is inevitable. Short of that, nothing is inevitable until it happens, and everything is inevitable once it has happened.” The Struggle for Mastery in Europe is a mesmerizing showcase of Taylor, the literary ironist who treated the Balance of Power not as an abstract philosophical ideal, but a dynamic, chaotic state of nature. Taylor’s Europe is not a chessboard in which omniscient statesmen move pieces according to a master plan. It is a world in which statesmen frequently do not know what the next move will produce. 'Balaclava' by Elizabeth Thompson (1876) The Crimean War (1853 -1856) is one of Taylor’s crucial turning points. Often dismissed as an absurd, ill-managed sideshow, it was in fact a watershed of nineteenth-century diplomacy. By pitting France and Britain against Russia, the war shattered the conservative solidarity (‘The Holy Alliance’) that had helped police Europe after Napoleon. Austria’s failure to support Russia destroyed the ideological solidarity of the Eastern autocracies, leaving Vienna isolated and vulnerable to the coming ambitions of Cavour and Bismarck. Taylor’s dazzling account of the road to the Crimean War shows why diplomacy can be most dangerous when every participant believes that he is merely making a limited move. As he says, “by the end of 1852, real trouble was approaching in the Near East. Louis Napoleon, in his endless search for prestige, had earlier hit on the idea of backing the claims of the Latin monks for control of the Holy Places; this had the additional advantage of pleasing his clerical supporters in France. The Tsar’s prestige was challenged: he was much more genuinely the head of the Greek Church than Louis Napoleon was the protector of the Latins. A period of political auction followed, each side bidding by threats.” “The Turks, in their usual manner, tried to cheat both sides,” notes Taylor with acid wit. Throughout 1851 they made concessions to the Latins and then secretly contradicted these to the Greeks. In April 1852, the French ambassador returned to Constantinople and insisted on its sailing through the Dardanelles; in July a French squadron threatened to bombard Tripoli. “The Turks,” Taylor goes on, “came to the conclusion that ‘a French fleet would beat a Russian fleet even united with a Turkish one’; they gave the practical decision over the Holy Places to the Latins, and this was known all over the Near East by the end of 1852. The French success was not merely a challenge to the Tsar’s religious prestige; it threatened the basis of Russia’s policy towards Turkey.” Russia’s practical policy towards Turkey had not simply been one of immediate partition. The Ottoman Empire also served as a buffer securing the Black Sea. The essential condition was that Turkey should fear Russia more than any other power. This is Taylor at his best: a seemingly minor quarrel over religious custodianship snowballs into a test of strategy, prestige and the credibility of rival powers. The Crimean War, in Taylor’s hands, becomes much more than a military episode. It altered the diplomatic geometry of Europe with France returning as a major continental actor; Russia being temporarily checked while Austria alienating the power whose help had been crucial in suppressing the Hungarian revolution of 1849 with the result that the old Concert of Europe has been badly damaged. Taylor relished historical contradictions, as in his observation that the 1859 war between France and Austria “could be condemned as aggressive while also being celebrated as a war of Italian liberation,” thus forcing the reader to notice the instability of moral categories in international politics. Diplomacy of Postponement But Taylor differed from a purely structural historian in that he cared about systems, but he cared equally about personalities. Bismarck, Cavour, Napoleon III, Disraeli, Nesselrode, Gorchakov and others are not abstract units in a balance-of-power model. In his works, they come to life because they possess vanity, fear, ambition, impatience and tactical intelligence. Their character matters because diplomacy is conducted by human beings operating under pressure. The Bismarckian system that followed the German unification in 1871 was essentially an exercise in preventing Germany from becoming encircled. In this, as Taylor says, France had to remain isolated; Russia could not be allowed to drift permanently into French arms; Austria-Hungary had to remain close enough to Berlin; Britain had to be reassured rather than provoked. The great irony is that a system designed to prevent a European coalition against Germany became increasingly dependent on increasingly elaborate diplomatic arrangements. In The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, Taylor is particularly good at showing how diplomatic solutions can postpone a crisis without resolving it. The Balkans provide perhaps the clearest example. The problem brought together Russian ambitions, Austrian fears, British strategic interests, Ottoman weakness and, increasingly, the nationalism of the Balkan peoples themselves. While the Great Powers did not create the revolt, their attempts to contain it would transform its character. The Herzegovina uprising of 1875 against Ottoman rule helped trigger the diplomatic crisis that produced the Andrássy Note. The Andrássy Note of December 1875 is a classic Taylor episode. The rising in Bosnia and Herzegovina had created a crisis that none of the Great Powers wanted to see turn into a general European conflict. Austria-Hungary, Russia and Germany therefore sought a common programme of reform for the Ottoman provinces. The Note demanded improvements in taxation, administration and the treatment of Christian subjects. It was an attempt to preserve the Ottoman framework while making it less intolerable to its Christian inhabitants. Count Gyula Andrassy The contradiction was that each Power saw the Note differently. Russia could regard reform as a means of advancing the interests of the Balkan Slavs; Austria-Hungary saw reform as a way of preventing the crisis from spreading to its own Slav populations and from strengthening Serbia or Russia; Germany wanted to preserve the European balance; Britain feared the consequences of an uncontrolled Ottoman collapse. The same diplomatic formula therefore concealed very different objectives. The Ottoman government accepted the Note. The insurgents did not. They had heard promises of reform before and wanted guarantees that the reforms would actually be carried out. This was the fatal weakness of the arrangement. The Powers had succeeded in agreeing on what the Ottoman government should do, but not on what they would do if it failed. The attempted settlement therefore became another stage in the crisis. Instead of ending the Eastern Question, it raised the harder question of enforcement. The failure of the Andrássy settlement helped lead to the more coercive Berlin Memorandum of 1876, and the crisis subsequently widened into the Bulgarian rising and the Russo-Turkish War. As Taylor revealingly shows, diplomacy had not failed because the Powers were incapable of agreement. They had agreed precisely because the agreement allowed each of them to postpone the conflicts between their own interests. In Taylor’s Europe, that was often enough to keep the peace for a little while - and sometimes enough to make the eventual crisis worse. The Congress of Berlin (1878) The Congress of Berlin in 1878 is another Taylorian set-piece. Bismarck presented himself as the “honest broker” while the great powers bargained over territories and influence. While the settlement prevented a larger war, it left grievances everywhere. Russia emerged dissatisfied, Austria-Hungary gained the right to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, Britain strengthened its position in the eastern Mediterranean, and the Ottoman Empire paid heavily for the rearrangement. As Taylor shows, Europe had again postponed the problem rather than solved it. The brilliance of The Struggle for Mastery lies partly in the way Taylor makes this repetition seem almost theatrical. The diplomatic cast changes with each crisis but the underlying predicament does not. After Bismarck’s departure, the machinery became progressively harder to control as France escaped isolation; Russia moved towards France, and Britain, in another historical irony, drew closer to its traditional foe – France as Germany’s naval ambitions unsettled Britain. Taylor shows how the hardening of the alliance system made it all the more difficult for governments to manoeuvre without alarming their partners. And then comes the storm of 1914 when the book’s narrative reaches its crescendo. Rejecting the view that Germany possessed a long-premeditated blueprint for world conquest in 1914, Taylor saw the July Crisis through the interaction of German calculation, Austrian weakness, Russian mobilisation, French commitments and Britain’s uncertain intentions. In a typically provocative Taylorian conclusion, Germany did not simply wake up one morning and decide upon world war. He saw Germany and Austria-Hungary arriving at war from different motives - and the combination producing general war. The Great Gamblers Taylor’s subjects are statesmen making choices under pressure, believing that if they gave way at one moment, they might be forced to give way forever. In effect, Taylor’s great powers are gamblers at a table because diplomacy itself has become a gamble: each player must calculate what the others will do, while knowing that his own calculation may alter their behaviour. And yet the great paradox of the book is that Europe’s rulers were not necessarily trying to destroy Europe.They were, as per Taylor, merley trying to preserve their own security, prestige and room for manoeuvre. After seventy years (1848-1918) of struggling for mastery, Europe did not produce a master. Instead, it produced a catastrophe. Taylor distrusted solemnity and distrusted official explanations. And he distrusted historians who seemed too comfortable with the wisdom of hindsight. His sentences often arrive with the snap of a verdict, but beneath the wit is an insistence that history should remain morally and intellectually uncomfortable. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe contains the seeds for the later storm over Taylor’s provocative classic The Origins of the Second World War, which virtually set the academic forest on fire when it came out in 1961. Taylor’s instinct was always to ask whether the accepted explanation had become accepted merely because it was familiar. In Origins, Taylor applied the same analytical framework he had used for Bismarck to Adolf Hitler. He argued against viewing the Second World War simply as the product of a premeditated German master plan and treated Hitler essentially as a political opportunist exploiting diplomatic openings. Critics like Hugh Trevor-Roper accused him of being too lenient towards Hitler and ignoring the virulent dynamism of the Nazi movement and the controversy became one of the defining episodes in post-war British historiography. The Europe Taylor described in The Struggle for Mastery has long gone. International history today is much more attentive to nationalism, popular politics, economics, ideology and race. Taylor’s account is also overwhelmingly European at a moment when we understand that European diplomacy cannot be isolated from the wider imperial and global system. But these limitations do not make his book obsolete. What remains remarkably durable is Taylor’s central question: how do states seeking security create the conditions for insecurity? How does an alliance intended to preserve equilibrium become a mechanism for escalation? How do temporary diplomatic settlements leave behind grievances that return in altered form? Those questions are as relevant today as they were then. They remain recognisable whenever great powers compete for influence, worry about strategic encirclement, seek buffers, test red lines or assume that a crisis can be controlled one step further. The Struggle for Mastery in Europe remains a masterpiece because it captures the sheer, terrifying contingency of human history. It reminds us that behind every grand treaty lies a room full of tired, misinformed officials trying desperately to survive the week.
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