Security As Experiment: Fighting Terror And Transforming Imperialism After Napoleon

>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, my name is Niall Ferguson. I'm the Milbanke family senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and I also chair the Hoover history working group. And today we've been very fortunate indeed to have heard a brilliant presentation by Beatrice de Graaf, distinguished professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and the author of the most fascinating book, Fighting terror after how Europe became secure after 1815.

Beatrice, welcome to the Hoover Institution. You are, I think, the very model of an applied historian, in my sense of the word. You do extraordinarily impressive scholarly work, in this case on the early 19th century, but you're also interested in the recent past, indeed, the contemporary world. And I want to begin with a very big question about this book.

What can we learn from this book about the kind of problems we face when it comes to making Europe secure today?

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Yes, thank you so much, Naill, for the invitation and the generous introduction, and also for the fact that here that you also combine the two types of history.

The thing is, with the current plight we in Europe, security wise, is that we have lost track. We have lost sight of the fact that collective security in Europe can only work if the big powers in Europe, the first rank powers, as they call them themselves, work together.

And if those first rank powers of Europe also give each other the credits of being first rank powers, they may not like each other. They may even hate each other. They need to give each other the credits. And what we're now in is the situation where the powers in Europe and beyond, with China and the United States as well, do not want to consider each other first rank powers anymore.

And one of those main tenets of the cemetery that was invented cemetery in peacetime, not just coming together as coalitions to fight Napoleon, but remaining there in conferences, talking to each other in cemetery situations, was invented at the Congress of Vienna, at the allied commission in Paris. And that we've sort of lost track, lost out of sight, that you need those first rank powers to keep working together.

>> Niall Ferguson: One of the points you make in fighting terror after Napoleon is that there was a very explicit hierarchy of powers at the Congress of Vienna. Talk a little bit about that, because clearly we don't have that kind of hierarchy in the international system today. In fact, we completely pretend there isn't a hierarchy, whether it's in the UN General assembly or at the European Union levels.

Talk about the hierarchy of powers in 1815.

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Let me state up front, and I just was expressing the notion of first rank powers. I sort of heard in my head, this is not what I think I would condone and I think, and this is a struggle that we have to face and perhaps have to discuss at the high level sessions, because we may think, and we may consider the ranking of nations all according to the same criteria, according on a par, as being reasonable and modern, etc.

But it doesn't work that way. I mean, the world still is being ruled by great powers. And at least back in 1815, up until 1918, up until the Congress of Versailles, the Treaty of Versailles, the powers at least had a way of reckoning with that hierarchy. And hierarchy was invented by Pitt the younger and Alexander I.

So the Russians and the Britons together, it was reinvigorated in 1815. There's four ranks. First rank is the great powers back then, Russia, Prussia, Austria and

>> Niall Ferguson: France. Well, France was in the losing side.

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: And Britain,

>> Niall Ferguson: yes,

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: and only in 1818, France was also invited back to the falls of five great powers.

The second rank powers is the powers that are the satellites that have to kind of pay attention to the first rank power, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Bavaria, countries like that. And then the third rank powers, the smaller Italian states, smaller German states, Scandinavian state. In the words of the diplomats back then, they should be glad that they would be granted independence at all.

And then there were also countries considered, which was, of course, very detrimental to the situation outside of the family of nations. So United States was not invited into China, Japan, neither were they, nor to speak of the Ottoman Empire.

>> Niall Ferguson: So in this hierarchical world, where there are the great powers, great mainly in terms of their military capability and their resources, and the resources that finance their military capability.

There's a sense that France has been the bad boy because of its revolution and then Napoleon's tyranny. And the point of the Congress and the subsequent meetings of the great powers is to put a stop to that. Tell me exactly what the design was. How do you solve a problem like revolutionary France?

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Yes. Well, first of all, just a paper treaty doesn't work. So Emmanuel Kant's World peace situation federation, even the Congress of Vienna paper treaty would not work, would not suffice to bring back the world and France to peaceful habits. And we saw that because Napoleon returned. So the fact that Napoleon returned put everything on a different footing.

So when he returned, the 7 March of 1815, a week later, a treaty was concluded. The treaty on mutual security could argue that it was the first treaty on collective security in peacetime. And it argued that the world needed to be brought back to, say, peaceful habits by means of a pledge of those countries together, not just in paper, but also in stone fortresses.

Needed to be built and also in teeth, in bayonets, men on the ground, boots on the ground. So what happened was that the allied powers together invaded France, didn't go home after the armistice was concluded, but stayed there, occupied France, and made sure that France was de bonapartized, demilitarized, stabilized, and that a kind of stable rule was implemented.

And the other point was that the revolution, the terror, also brought to a stop. And then when they managed to do so, in their own eyes, they felt that they could now spread this over the rest of Europe, and even beyond that. And the principles were, perhaps we could bring it boil down to one principle that was being mentioned all the time.

So the allied commission was a commission that only had a thin ideology. So the liberals, Britain, the second rank nations that were also quite liberal, like the Netherlands, and later on, after 1830, France was also part of this. Those countries worked together, but they did not want to impose their ideology too strongly on the other nations.

It was a thin ideology. It needed to be moderate, not extreme. So no extremism, neither reactionary extremism, nor to revolutionary extremisms. And this meant that war needed to be avoided and terror needed to be avoided,

>> Niall Ferguson: and reparations were imposed on the defeated French. Now, we tend to think of that as an instrument that went terribly wrong after the first world War, when it was part of the Versailles treaty that ended the war with Germany.

But reparations in this case seem to have worked out much better. Why was that?

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: That was the fourth principle, the DES do the reparations. Indeed. Well, that's also very interesting, because Ralph Blaufarp, in his book the great demarcation, has explained that after the French Revolution, after the Napoleonic wars, a new kind of system of property holders, a system of capitalism, emerged.

It was already, of course, in the Neschte version present, but there was quite strict separation between what the government owned and what the citizens owned. And those hybrid versions of clerical, of governmental lands were now solved, which also meant that there was a new elite of bankers, of investors, of property holders, that also sort of wanted to have a share in the peace and at least wanted to prevent another revolution.

Upturning the landed interests were very big after 1815. They wanted to prevent another revolution from happening. So they wanted to make sure that France would pay dearly for its sins and that it would not resort to another revolution in order out of fear to pay more reparations. So it was a new system resting on capitalist securities, financial securities.

And when France had to pay all these reputation and defaulted it could not just pay the money because the coffers were empty. The bankers of Europe were invited to the table, the road shields about them, but also the Barings, the Lafittes, the German bankers, everyone who wanted to play with them.

They were invited to the table in Paris, chaired by the Duke of Wellington, and they were told that there would now be invented a system of european bonds, and everyone could buy a share in the peace of France with the allied army as a kind of safeguard. So it was a very good way to invest your money in.

And actually it was a quite successful scheme. So successful that within three, four years, all the payments were being made. So one can only imagine if after 1918, all the bankers of Europe would have come together and helped Germany with these bonds.

>> Niall Ferguson: This was, of course, discussed, but did not happen.

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Why not?

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, this is one of the questions I remember working on very early in my career. It's a long story. John Maynard Keynes plays an interesting part. Let me try to sum this up. In many ways, the world of 200 plus years ago is not so different.

You have a european commission which is trying to work out european order. You have a bond market which is there to finance the operations of the various governments, and you have the specter of terror. And that's where I want to end this conversation. There's been a debate about whether you're using the term terror in an anachronistic way.

Is that a fair criticism?

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: No, not at all. Because if you look closely at the references and the way I go to the sources, terror was the buzzword. So I just mentioned moderation. Before. It was actually a pair. It was the opposite pair, the juxtaposed pair, the vectors that put this whole system in motion.

So on the one hand, you had the moderation. It was the thing that the peoples of Europe craved for after all those years of trauma, devastation, destruction, 5 million people dead. And the origins of that mayhem were a terror. And terror was a kind of a two headed monster.

Bicephalus monster. On the one hand, it was the terror of the revolutionaries against the non state agents, but on the other hand, it was the terror when those revolutionaries took over, the terror in the hands of the state itself, it was Napoleon, it was the armed jacobinism. So the terror was both something that could happen through revolution and then in the hands of state armies, for example, would be unleashed against the rest of the world.

Terror. And in a similar way, we still use that phrase now. And it was born not just out of the revolutionary terry of Robespierre, but also of the terror of Napoleon's armies in Europe.

>> Niall Ferguson: And does that mean that in that period, immediately after the battle of Waterloo, the statesmen and the property elites of Europe are worried about terrorists?

Or is that something different?

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: No, that's true, because terrorists formerly were the ones that voted in the convention for the beheading of King Louis. But after 1850, it was also used for people who tried to shoot. Wellington, for example, tried to commit attacks on Friedrich Wilhelm. And the heads of states also corresponded with each other on terrorism.

So it was an early way of dealing with terrorism, similar to we do it today. Of course, you need to follow the trajectory genealogy. It wasn't considered a specific tactic, as we consider it today. But, for example, hellish machines were already mentioned. Not the dynamite, that came only later, but still.

And what's also, I think, very important, and we tend to forget about it. Terror was already en vogue as a noma around 1800, but it had always been something. It was considered a kind of a benign instrument in the hands of a righteous ruler. So you, as an obedient citizen, could be grateful if you had a ruler who would instill fear in the hearts of his enemies.

So terror was the Timor Dei, the terror day. The king, as the divine agent, the kind of translation of the godly power, was able to wield terror against his enemies, quite biblical.

>> Niall Ferguson: Ivan the terrible wasn't really a critical monarch

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: against his enemies.

>> Niall Ferguson: Exactly

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: so.

And then came the French Revolution, and terror became secularized. And now it was not just the instrument in the hands of a legitimate divine king, it was an instrument in the hands of the masses. And now it was something to be terrified. For. Metternich himself, his family had lost all their property in the rhenish lands because of the terror.

So for them, terror was not just people killing each other. It was perhaps they were even more afraid of the upending of all values. To speak with Nietzsche. And revolutionizing meant taking away all the property of the people. That was the real terror.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, nothing illustrates better the relevance of early 19th century history to our own times than your book and the presentation that you just gave us.

I know that you're working on a separate project on contemporary terrorism. That's a very different kind of project. Maybe say a few words about how you're approaching that and what you hope to find out.

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Yeah, I have these two tracks. A more hermeneutical history and the history for today, and a project that I've been working on.

During the times of the pandemic, when the archives were closed, the prisons were not. So I was able, strangely enough, to visit prisons in the Netherlands and go to Indonesia and interview the terrorists themselves and try to engage them in a conversation. What they believed, what were their extreme beliefs and how did they formulate and opin them?

And that's a book with an historical perspective, because they tell historical stories as well. The Indonesian terrorists did, the dutch terrorists did, the Syrian ones, and that will come out, hopefully somewhere next year to Oxford University press as radical redemption.

>> Niall Ferguson: Well, radical redemption sounds like an equally exciting book, albeit a completely different one methodologically.

And we hope that you come back to the Hoover institution and talk about that book when it's published by Oxford. It's been a huge pleasure to have Beatrice Graf here with us. I hope, as I said, that she'll come back at some point and present her new book.

That's all we have time for now. As I said, the Hoover history working group has been very fortunate to hear her talk about fighting terror after Napoleon, how Europe became secure after 1815. Beatrice, thanks very much.

>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf: Thank you, Niall.