Michael R. Auslin: Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2020.

 

China has emerged as the main geopolitical threat to the United States. An oligarchy, the Chinese regime opposes commercial republican regimes throughout the world, rightly regarding them as a threat to its own. As the world’s most powerful commercial republic, the United States thus stands as Chinese Communist Party’s principal rival, an ally of Asian commercial republics—regimes the oligarchs regard as nearby and very bad examples for their own at times restive people.

In this regime struggle, the Chinese have “steadily attempt[ed] to encroach throughout the Indo-Pacific, linking maritime and land trade routes under the umbrella of the One Belt One Road initiative, while expanding the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Navy and Air Force in waters and skies far from China’s shores.” This territory extends to Japan and Guam in the east and westward into and beyond the Indian Ocean. That is, the Chinese seek to extend their trade routes and their military simultaneously, even as the United States has done, but on the foundation of an oligarchic regime strategy rather than a commercial-republican regime strategy. Both countries encourage ‘regime change’ but the regimes they support are opposites.

Auslin finds a source for the geopolitical (as distinguished from the regime-change) strategies in the 1944 book by Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace. Whereas previous geopolitical thinkers pointed to the open seas (Mahan) and the central continental land masses (Mackinder) as the flashpoints of war in the twentieth century, Spykman saw “that it is in the rimlands”—the coastal areas on and near the Eurasian land mass—that “the real conflict had taken place,” especially during the Second World War. “According to Spykman, the most crucial waterways or global power were the North Sea and the Mediterranean in Europe, the Persian Gulf and littoral waters of the western Indian Ocean in the Middle East, and the East and South China Seas, along with the Yellow Sea, in Asia.” By the time Spykman’s book appeared, Mackinder himself had seen the same thing—as indeed statesmen had done.

Auslin recommends that the United States “acknowledge bluntly that China is contesting control not of the high seas, like Germany in World War I or Japan in World War II, but of the marginal seas and skies of Asia, even while the United States remains dominant on the high seas of the Pacific.” This will “clarif[y] our understanding of Chinese military activity in the region,” showing “the area under risk and the geopolitical pivot of the Indo-Pacific,” which might be described as “the Asian Mediterranean”—namely, “the integrated waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East and South China Seas.” The passageways between those waters and the Indian Ocean (e.g., the Strait of Malacca) see one-third of the world’s commercial traffic, forming “the hinge between maritime Eurasia and the entire Western Hemisphere.” Americans should teach themselves to see as Spykman saw: “control of the Asiatic Mediterranean means control of Asia.” They should then draw the necessary policy consequence for today: “to ensure that no aggressive power gains control” over it. Failing that, allies and partners will “consider either severing ties with the United States or declaring neutrality so as to preserve their own freedom of action.”

China seeks “to reshape the world to fit its interests, picking and choosing which Western norms it adopts and which it ignores”; it ignores many of them, being “actively antagonistic to many of the values that created the post-1945 world.” Unfortunately, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet empire, most American foreign policy experts ignored China’s fairly obvious intentions just as much as the Chinese Communist Party ignored American hopes and dreams. “A China that was increasingly treated as a near peer of the United States and pulled into the global system would eventually, if fitfully, begin to manifest liberal tendencies,” the Americans supposed, because “even authoritarian Chinese leaders would be forced to grant more power to their middle class, if only to keep it supportive, and to further open their society, since development ultimately depended on cultural changes that ensured a fertile field for further capitalist-style modes of organization.” As Auslin nicely puts it, “perhaps having been transfixed by their own beliefs, liberal nations are now disappointed and surprised that a China that has reached the heights of global power is increasingly refusing to play by the global script expected of it.”

Why such complacency? Auslin doesn’t venture a guess. Among American ‘experts,’ the problem had two dimensions. First, although Americans and Europeans were fully cognizant of the importance of political regimes, having finally overcome the Soviet oligarchy, they knew very little about the Chinese oligarchs. Even during Mao’s tyranny, Western analysts failed to see Mao’s affinities for Stalinism, right down to his use of mass murder as an instrument of socioeconomic transformation. And they grossly underestimated the competence and toughness of Mao’s successors, together with their intentions. Second, Western analysts were progressives, assuming that ‘History’ was ‘on our side,’ that the momentum of events that had toppled the Russian communists would deliver the same benign outcome in China. On the contrary, the Chinese communists learned from the Soviet collapse and got busy “smothering…domestic liberal trends and prevent[ing]…the further growth of civil society inside China, all to forestall any domestic liberalization, such as threatened the CCP in 1989,” when partisans of republican regime change demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. The consequences of liberal-democratic folly now lie exposed.

“The world may never fully know the degree to which American and other advanced nations unknowingly subsidized the growth of the Chinese economy” through providing university education to Chinese students and through failing to prevent the theft of trade secrets. “Beijing has found all-too-willing counterparts in both foreign businesses and governments, all of whom find it easier to buckle under increasingly outrageous Chinese demands than to risk losing their economic access by taking a critical stand.” More, China has begun to demand “that its foreign partners surrender Western values and openly espouse China’s worldview for continued access to its markets.” Among these partners stands the bland dolt now running the Apple corporation, Tim Cook, who has averred, “We believe in engaging with government even when we disagree.” Of course he does. 

Chinese technological and economic growth have in turned enabled the regime to develop advanced weaponry “designed to target the strengths of U.S. forces in Asia” and “to project Chinese power throughout the waters of the Indo-Pacific region.” Chinese policy “is traceable directly to the worldview and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party,” that is, to the way of life and purposes of the Chinese regime.

Or, as stated in an early policy statement issued by Premier Xi Jinping titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” China faces a “complicated, intense struggle” with the West generally and the United States in particular over “false ideological trends” such as “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” “civil society,” and “neoliberalism,” all of them contradictory to the principles of the Chinese regime, described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or, to use a somewhat more charged formula, national socialism. To counter these “trends,” the Chinese regime works through its overseas propaganda arm, the United Front Work Department, founded by Mao in 1939, nearly a decade before his Communist Party forces seized power on the Chinese mainland. Today, the United Front aims at influencing government officials, executives of commercial and media corporations, and academics worldwide with a combination of carrots and sticks. Payoffs include the refusal of Czech and Greek officials to support the European Union’s condemnation of human rights violations in China and of its depredations in the South China Sea. In addition, “Australian politics have been rocked in recent years by allegations of massive Chinese donations to politicians.” It is easy to predict that the United States will see similar scandals, at some point.

“Learning to live with a newly assertive Chinese military is the major security challenge facing Asian nations in the twenty-first century.” And not only Asia, and not only in exclusively military terms. “Chinese companies”—state-owned enterprises, all—have purchased port in several European countries while undertaking infrastructure and mining projects in Africa, Latin America, and even the Arctic. China offers loans to many countries, but the penalties for default run high; “Sri Lanka learned this the hard way in late 2017, when it was forced to hand over control of its largest port, Hambantota, to China after it could not pay off bills to Chinese firms,” thereby giving Beijing “a strategic outpost in the Indian Ocean.”  The military, political, and economic objectives of these enterprises are integrated, not separated, as one should expect. Americans in particular should see this—or would, if they remembered the Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical strategy.

Indeed, since the Chinese regime to some extent merely acts as any great power, including the United States, typically acts, what’s the problem. “Perhaps little of this would matter if China were evolving into a more liberal society, with an accountable government and more cooperative foreign policy.” It isn’t. Instead, the regime is doubling down on oppression at home while building its capabilities for continued power grabs abroad. The regime struggle between monarchic and oligarchic contempt for the natural rights of human beings did not end with the defeat of its two principal agents in the twentieth century, Germany and Russia. China has eagerly taken up that mantle.  

Given its sheer size, India might seem a credible counterweight to China. Auslin confines much of his analysis of India’s real weakness to criticisms of its failure to integrate its women into its political economy. The caste system, undergirded by the traditional practice of arranged marriages, has left too many Indian girls and women under-educated and under-employed. “In the country as a whole fewer than half of India’s women are literate”—a condition American women (for example) did not endure at any time in their nation’s history. India also suffers from excessive regionalism within its borders and worries about Pakistan, now a Chinese ally, on its border. 

That leaves Japan as the most viable ally of the United States in Asia. Feudalism there was modified by the seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa family raised itself to the status of first among equals. Feudalism itself collapsed in the late nineteenth century, as “lower-level ex-samurai deposed their feudal lords and took power, centralizing the state and forging Japan into a modern nation-state” capable of winning wars against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905. The regime of military oligarchy which had united the nation behind it would cause that nation, and the rest of the region, considerable agony by the time it was crushed, half a century later. In reaction to the severe punishments inflicted upon it for its imperial ambitions, Japan has remained somewhat ‘isolationist’ in its foreign policy, although hardly so in its economic policy. “Most Japanese appear to welcome the physical security brought about by Japan’s exclusionary nationalism, even as they choose how and when to integrate with the surrounding world.”

In terms of its regime, the Japanese oligarchy has been replaced by a mixed-regime type of commercial republic, wherein the emperor remains as the symbol of the nation, “the spiritual core of Japan,” and major corporate oligarchs wield considerable influence. The regime has succeeded “in providing a stable and secure life for its people, despite significant economic challenges and statistical stagnation” of its population, “maintaining cohesion at home and certain barriers against the world” without anything like the repression seen in China. Its educational system has proven especially effective, with Japanese students scoring at or near the top of standardized test scores, worldwide. 

In foreign policy, Japan is “likely to take a middle path” between isolationism and engagement with the world, “improving its high-end defensive capabilities and modernizing its forces while maintaining political limits on what those forces can do,” with the United States remaining “at the center of Japan’s security planning for the foreseeable future.” The Japanese might engage in joint military exercises with Australia and India while supplying arms to the smaller countries in Southeast Asia. “But Tokyo is unlikely to desire or sign any more mutual defense treaties, or to commit its forces to combat abroad,” even including naval operations in the South China Sea, which remains indispensable to its own commercial traffic.

In past centuries, China and Japan have confronted one another many times. Today, however, for the first time, both countries are “strong, united, global” powers, “well aware of the other’s strengths and their own weaknesses.” Neither country “has any real allies in Asia,” having preferred rather to dominate than to befriend the smaller powers, thereby “making it difficult to create bonds of trust,” as Auslin drily puts it. As China’s foreign minister put it during a meeting of representatives of Asian countries in 2010, “China is a big country and you are small countries.” Being the biggest of the big, and given big India’s relative disarray, China may well “secure its goals, at least in the short run, if not longer,” as the “smaller nations are under no illusion that they can successfully resist China’s encroachments.” Japan is reduced to the role of “a spoiler,” complicating China’s strategic calculations without being able to deter them. Overall, “ASEAN nations have focused more on the U.S.-China relationship, since it is the United States that has formal Southeast Asian allies and has inserted itself into the South China Sea dispute.” Japan nonetheless serves as an example to many Asian nations of how to win prosperity without despotism. 

What, then, can the United States do to counter Chinese ambitions, ambitions that aim at threatening American security and challenging the American regime? First, American strategists and American citizens generally need to understand the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. The American military already does, assigning responsibility for the area to its Indo-Pacific Command. The extraordinary diversity of geographic structures, languages, religions, and regimes featured in this region easily distracts analysts from understanding it as one thing, geopolitically. Accordingly, there has been “little in Washington’s policy that initially could be considered a comprehensive or consistent strategy, let alone a truly grand strategy”; the first attempt at framing such a strategy only occurred with the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, and it consisted of committing to a permanent military presence in the region, regime change in Japan, and containment of communism. Even then, “it was not until the Obama administration that a new, overarching [strategic] concept came to be articulated, the so-called pivot or rebalance to Asia.” This only spurred the Chinese rulers to accelerate their longstanding policies of military modernization, encroachments in the South China Sea, cyberattacks on American government and businesses, and “support for authoritarian regimes around the world.” 

Unluckily for even the Chinese, “the very size of the Indo-Pacific, with more than half of the world’s population, along with its complexity, political diversity, and numerous problems, means that no one power can dominate the region, as seems possible in a smaller, territorially contiguous realm like Europe.” Even hegemony is “difficult,” as Auslin expects the Chinese to learn. To hasten that learning curve, America should never ignore Chinese provocations, strengthen its alliances with India, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, and defend free trade throughout the region.

This notwithstanding, Auslin ends his book with a cautionary tale, “the Sino-American Littoral War of 2045.”  Having already taken effective military control of the South China Sea, “through which as much as 70 percent of global trade passed,” and having ignored a decision by The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration in favor of the Philippines against China in 2016 (why worry, since no one moved to enforce it?), and having noted the Obama administration’s hesitation to conduct military operations in the area many years earlier, China had continued its military buildup in the region. This eventually induced Taiwan to enter into a Hong Kong-like ‘one country-two systems’ agreement while persuading South Korea to end its alliance with the United States. Three blocs then emerged in the Indo-Pacific: U.S.-Japan-Australia; China/Taiwan-South Korea; the nonaligned ASEAN countries. India and Russia contented themselves with playing on the edges; Europeans withdrew from the region altogether.

One thing having led to others, the 2045 war was fought in the continental seas and littorals; the United States avoided the Chinese mainland while the Chinese refrained from attacking Japan. The denouement occurred when America’s Japanese-based forces were stopped and the Chinese proposed a ceasefire before the U.S. Navy could bring in reinforcements from Hawaii and San Diego. Having gained firm control over its adjacent seas and littorals, China “was willing to cease combat operations to consolidate its significant gains, while the United States accepted its strategic losses and did not want to widen the war, which could have resulted in further defeat,” thanks to the now-proven effectiveness of Chinese military technology. American statesmen reduced U.S. military presence in the region, regrouping their forces in Japan and Australia. Chinese advances more or less stopped there, however. “Beijing soon discovered that its unwilling allies required the investment of Chinese political, economic, and military capital, which restricted Beijing’s freedom of action postbellum.” For its part, America could only rest semi-content as “an offshore balancer,” its alliances in the region weakened.

“As the cold peace settled on the region, the Chinese and American blocs settled down into a prolonged contest for influence in Asia.”  

Winston S. Churchill: The River War An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan. James W. Muller, editor. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2020.

 

This review originally appeared in City Journal on April 30, 2021.

 

The Nile is the river in question. Without it, no war. “It is the cause of the war,” Churchill writes. “It is the means by which we fight, the end at which we aim.” On the Nile, the British could run their formidable gunboats into their enemy’s territory, upriver to its stronghold at Khartoum, itself located at the geostrategic chokepoint where the Blue and White Niles meet: “the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean Sea.” Just as the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, connected Europe to Asian ports beyond the ‘Mideast,’ so the Nile, originating in smaller rivers that flow into Lake Victoria far to the south of Egypt and Sudan, connects Europe with the heart of Africa. Americans will think of their great Mississippi River, which allows farmers in the Midwest to ship their produce to the Gulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of the world. Today, when it’s easy to imagine that we live in ‘cyberspace,’ Churchill reminds us that geography matters.

Since the Nile flows from the great lake north through the deserts of Sudan, “the Sudan is…naturally and geographically an integral part of Egypt,” and “Egypt is no less essential to the development of the Sudan.” In the 1890s, politics (especially religious politics) had sundered that geographical and economic union, with war as the consequence.

At the time of its conquest and annexation of Sudan in 1821, Egypt was itself part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by an Ottoman-appointed viceroy or “khedive,” Muhammad Ali, an Albanian who had served as an officer in the imperial army. But throughout the century the empire had weakened—almost proverbially, ‘the Turk’ was ‘the sick man of Europe’—and both Great Britain and France vied for influence there. In 1883, the Brits intervened in Egypt to suppress a nationalist revolt. “Shortly after,” Churchill recalls, Muslims in Sudan proclaimed an Islamic regime, captured Khartoum, killed a much-respected British envoy named Charles Gordon, and pushed the Egyptians out. Such jihadi movements in West Africa dated back to the eleventh century, so this was a perennial threat, one that persists to this day.

By the 1880s, the British regime itself had changed, gradually, from the mixed regime of Edmund Burke’s time to an increasingly democratic republic. Gordon’s murder spurred calls for revenge from the now-powerful general public, though Churchill never lets his reader lose sight of the geo-economic and geopolitical calculations motivating Parliament and Downing Street. In 1896, an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener began to move south along the Nile. Some two decades later, during the Great War, Kitchener would prove inadequate to high command in twentieth-century military conditions, but in 1890s Sudan, he understood exactly how to proceed—in a word, methodically. Kitchener’s “organizing talents” were unsurpassed in his time and place. “Much depended on forethought, much on machinery; little was left to chance.” The river supported gunboats, which the British had and jihadis had not. The flat land could support a railway, so Kitchener built one, taking care to install telegraph lines for instant communications. “Fighting the Dervish was primarily a matter of transport.” By the end of 1897, when the railroad was completed, “though the battle [for Khartoum] was not yet fought, the victory was won.”

In inaugurating the reign of modern, experimental science in England, Francis Bacon had called for “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Little need be left to chance, he contended, although much usually is. Kitchener was a Baconian through and through. Faced not only with jihadis but with epidemics and famine, but fortified with the world-mastering products of modern science for transport, communication, and warfare, he and his men soldiered on and overcame. “In nearly three years of war nothing of any consequence went wrong.” How many military commanders before or since can have that said of their campaigns?

Nor was it all a matter of machines. Kitchener and his officers showed the qualities of mental and moral discipline to keep at it, not to outrun their technological capabilities, which would have exposed their soldiers unnecessarily to the counterattacks of what Churchill often praises as a courageous, resilient, and smart enemy. The “stony cheerfulness” of the British officers kept the few British, many Egyptians and many Sudanese soldiers steadily on the path to victory. Crucially, the officers respected their men. “There is one spirit which animates all the dealings of the British officers with the native soldier. It is not only seen in Egypt; it exists wherever Britain raises mercenary troops. The officer’s military honor is the honor of his men…. The British officer of native corps is never known—on duty or off duty, officially or in private, before or after dinner, by word or implication—to speak disparagingly of his men.” As a result, the men esteemed (and consequently obeyed) their officers.

Kitchener himself, admittedly more stony than cheerful, nonetheless encourage this spirit in his subordinates. “Few generals have the good fortune to know their subordinates. Of all the advantages enjoyed by Sir Herbert Kitchener in the campaigns on the Nile, this was the greatest. Such “mutual confidence” makes not only obedience but also “beneficial disobedience possible.” Churchill means that Kitchener’s officers could countermand the general’s orders if some new, unanticipated circumstance arose, deploying their own intelligence and daring to fit any occasion. Method, yes; roboticism, no.

Abdallah ibn Muhammad, ruler of the Sudanese caliphate, had 50,000 Dervish troops at Khartoum. To call their defense of the city against modern weaponry “mad fanaticism” is “a cruel injustice,” Churchill insists. “In a few seconds swift destruction would rush on these brave men,” but through no fault of theirs or that of their general, who had given them “a complex and ingenious” battle plan. The trouble was that he had based his plan “on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of modern weapons.” He simply had no way of knowing better. “Why should we regard as madness in the savage what would be sublime in civilized man?”

Not that Churchill wastes sentiment on the Dervishes. The war resulted in “the destruction of a state of society which had long become an anachronism—an insult as well a a danger to civilization,” depending as it did on slave trading, bound together by “mutual fear, not mutual trust,” and a religious ideology Churchill does not hesitate to denounce as veering from “frenzy” to “fatalistic apathy”—precisely the extremes that the English had learned to shun after their own vicious civil warfare in the seventeenth century. The war brought “the liberation of a great waterway” from the Khalif’s tyrannical regime, opening the possibility (a hope which would prove over-optimistic) of “the foundation of an African India” for Great Britain, and at any rate, and more soberly, “the settlement of a long dispute.”

Very well, we might ask, a century-and-a-quarter removed, “why should we care?” The British Empire has gone the way of the Ottomans—even if, fortunately, the Brits haven’t gone the way of the Turks.

Churchill, for starters. As early as his mid-twenties, when he wrote the book, he knew how to tell a story and paint a picture—especially one he played a role in, having arrived in Sudan in 1899, fresh from fighting the Pathans in the mountains of India. His description of the thrill of going into battle with the enemy will put to rest any questions of why men have always been drawn to war, even as he insists, against jingoes, that “war, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would undertake” without serious reason.

That sense of balance, of holding up contraries for dispassionate consideration, stands as witness against those (very much like his eventual ally, Franklin Roosevelt) who take Churchill to have been an unthinking imperialist, and against those who take him for a racist. On the latter point, he is far more critical of Islam than of Muslims, and he rates the black Sudanese soldiers above the Arabs in terms of their battle readiness under modern conditions. Under pre-modern conditions, when Muslims conquered their way into Africa, “the dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.” As for his white countrymen, he remarks their own occasional descent into savagery, especially in their abuse of helpless captives after some of the battles and in the mutilation of the Dervish commander’s corpse. He views both sides with some irony, reporting that Kitchener’s latest advance so “created a panic” in the capital of the caliphate that “all business” came to “a standstill,” so much so that “for several days there were no executions”; as for his fellow modern ‘whites,’ they must learn the military lessons of the Sudan campaign, lest “the science of human destruction…fall behind the general progress of the age.”

Churchill was indeed an imperialist, but his critics seldom meet his argument for imperialism. Throughout the modern West he sees young men who belong to “the only true aristocracy the world can now show”—the aristocracy of “brains and enthusiasm.” What will these young men do? In the United States, they go into commerce building great business corporations. In France and Germany, they go into the military. In England, they venture “to the farthest corners of our wide Empire, and infuse into the whole the energy and vigor of progress”—ending slavery in the Sudan, for example, building irrigation systems, railroads, and other infrastructure that will benefit men and women who might otherwise fall prey to squalor, disease, “war, slavery, and oppression.”

The ambitions of continental European ‘aristocrats’ would lead to two world wars; the ambitions of the young Brits and Americans would lead to prosperity and better government—albeit not without serious problems, of which Churchill is well aware. And this leaves out the ambitions of the young Arabs the imperialists fought and the young Russians who would soon set about imposing another form of empire.

Given the ambitions of the young—their will to rule and their ability to take rule—which of the available imperialisms do you prefer? If you say, ‘none at all,’ then you do not understand the intelligence and ambition of youth. And as for the ameliorating humanitarian sentiments which derive from Christianity real or ‘secularized,’ consider: “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” Without a strong arm, humanitarianism stands no chance against enemies who despise its softness.

Finally—and speaking of civilization—the production of this book itself upholds it. The publishers have given us two beautifully turned-out volumes, restoring the original maps and drawings omitted from the editions that followed the first. The volumes are a pleasure to read and to hold. For his part, the editor had scrupulously retrieved the original text severely truncated in the subsequent editions. He has also written a fine introduction that gives Churchill’s readers a helpful overview of his long and complex (if unfailingly lively) narrative and has inserted well-chosen, carefully researched footnotes explaining conditions familiar to Churchill’s first audience but lost to us. In these things, publisher and editor alike share a bit in an old British triumph, which is as instructive for us now as it was for Churchill’s countrymen then.

 

 

Alexis de Tocqueville: “My Musings about English History.”

 

In October 1828, while staying “at Tocqueville, my old family ruin,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend—Gustave de Beaumont or possibly Louis de Kergolay—who had asked for his thoughts on English history. The Napoleonic Wars had concluded only in the last decade; the French and the English had hated one another for centuries, and only the rise of a newly united Germany would bring them into alliance, decades later. The two young men evidently intended to collaborate on an analysis of France’s old enemy: “I will write haphazard what I think for you to put in order if you can or will.”

This was more than a matter of knowing their enemy, however. Just as, a decade later, Tocqueville would study America not so much to know America as to understand democracy, which America then exemplified better than any other country, so he considers England for a broader purpose. “There is hardly anywhere better than England for studying the underlying factors and the details of the armed emigrations which overturned the Roman Empire, because there were more of them there and they lasted into a time when the barbarians in the rest of of Europe were already refinding civilization.” What is more, England in its early times put the much-touted revolutionary spirit that swept Europe in the nineteenth century very much ‘into perspective.’ In England, “revolution after revolution” wracked the country; by comparison, the revolutions “of our own time are trifles.” The Scots defeated the “British tribes”; the Saxons invaded and conquered both; the Danes followed, “a third race of conquerors.” It was only “until the Normans…endowed both with the impetuous energy of the Danes and with a higher civilization than the Saxons, united them all under one yoke.” The Tocqueville family estate was only a short distance from Barfleur, whence William the Conqueror embarked. “I am surrounded by Normans whose names figure in the lists of the conquerors.”

“One thinks with horror of the inconceivable sufferings of humanity at that time.” Yet it was also a time and place where one might find evidence of the origins of feudalism. France is not that place. Feudalism didn’t begin there. It originated more or less simultaneously in France, the Germanies, Poland, Spain, and Italy—in Europe north to south, west to east. “Clearly the feudal system of the twelfth century is but the result of an underlying cause,” just as democracy would be, centuries later. “If you want to understand the first underlying principles of the feudal system, and you need to understand them to see how the wheels work in the finished machine, you cannot do better than study the time before the Norman conquest, because…we know of no people nearer to their primitive state than the Saxons and the Danes. Nor other people show a clearer record of their institutions, and I am sure that deep research into those times would enable us to explain many things which cannot now be explained in the history of other peoples, as for instance certain maxims of legal procedure which have become laws throughout Europe, but of which we can neither trace the origin, nor account for the reason why people are so obstinately attached to them.” Far removed from the Romans, the Saxons “are precious as a type of the peoples from whom we all, such as we are, are sprung.” They alone are reason enough to study English history.

The problem is that neither Tocqueville nor his friend had engaged in such deep research. What he can discuss is “the history of England after the conquest.” William’s conquest was easy. The three “races” on the the British Isles were still at odds with one another; the capital city was small and the provinces unfortified; the Normans enjoyed “vast intellectual superiority” over the natives. But easy conquests don’t necessarily last. This one did because William introduced “the fully developed feudal system,” as distinguished from the haphazard collection of its elements that already existed there. William made feudalism in England “a more coherent whole than in any other country, because one head had thought out all the machinery and so each wheel fitted better.” If William wasn’t the founder of feudalism in England, he was its organizer, and his achievement prompts Tocqueville to consider the difficulties of that kind of effort. “There are two great drawbacks to avoid in organizing a country. Either the whole strength of social organization is centered on one point, or it is spread over the country.” If centralized, and the center does not hold (as in Paris in the 1790s), “everything falls apart and there is no nation left.” If spread out, “action is clearly hindered”—no “one head” can make an authoritative decision and coordinate the actions needed to implement it. “But there is strength everywhere,” and this may contribute to a nation’s longevity in the longer term. The loss of the capital city won’t ruin the country because capable and well-organized bodies of men pervade it, from border to border. A centralized people “will do greater things and have a more active life” than a decentralized people, “but its life will be poorer,” as the nation’s resources will flow to the capital, draining the provinces. 

“I don’t know if a mean between these extremes can be found, but it would seem that William did find it.” He granted land and power of government “in return for a money rent and, more important, the obligation to provide an armed force for a stated time.” That is, he established an aristocracy which owed revenue and soldiers to the monarch in exchange for rule over local lands and the people living on them. Crucially, if a foreign army invaded and “extraordinary levies” of men and good were needed, the king needed the consent of the aristocrats, having “no other armies but those of his barons, and no revenue but that from his domains.” Understanding this, William, “master of all as conqueror of all, gave lavishly but kept still more. Power was so divided among the ruling class that a handful of Normans could hold down an unwilling country for a century; at the same time, the royal power was so strong that it could crush any individual baron who would have wished to break away from the king’s general supervision”; only “a general combination against him” could depose the king of feudal England. Had William’s successors to the throne proved capable, “his work would surely have lasted as he had conceived it, and in spite of the revolutions that followed,” thanks to tyranny of his line. And even despite the follies and other vices of his successors, “his version of the feudal system is nevertheless by and large the one which caused the least harm and left the smallest legacy of hatred.” For comparison, one need only consult Tocqueville’s treatment of French feudalism, The Old Regime and the Revolution. 

But to the tyrants. “There have been few worse rulers and, especially few rulers more inclined to abuse their powers than the Norman kings and the first Plantagenets.” “William Rufus was like a wild beast”; Henry I and Stephen were little better. The first Plantagenet, Henry II, was less just or prudent than fortunate, marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine and thereby acquiring “the whole Atlantic coast…without a sword being drawn.” A “hard, autocratic ruler as were all the rest of his family,” Henry II was succeeded by Richard, “a wild madman, one of those brilliant beings who burn but give no light,” exhausting his people by exorbitant taxes. Tocqueville re-emphasizes: “If William’s work did not produce the results we might have expected, the bad behavior of his successors is alone to blame.”

By the time of King John’s reign, not only had the monarchy caused restiveness among the aristocrats but a new class “was beginning to emerge” in England and throughout Europe. This was the mercantile class, the “third estate,” a class “which the kings of France took trouble to encourage in their domains.” Prudently so, for when the French king undertook the reconquest of occupied English provinces, he “met hardly any resistance.” 

“John’s tyranny grew no less through the loss of those provinces, for it is a law of all dominions past, present and future, to make greater demands in proportion as power decreases.” By 1214 the aristocrats had had enough, realizing “that, if they united, they would be stronger than the king though each by himself was still weaker than he.” John signed the Magna Carta in the following year. The old principle of government by the consent of the governed was formalized.

Tocqueville refuses to magnify the importance of the Charter. “Many people treat the words ‘Magna Carta’ as magic. They see the whole English Constitution in it; the two Houses [of Parliament]; ministerial responsibility; taxation by vote and a thousand other things that are no more there than in the Bible.” On the contrary, “Magna Carta served no national purpose, but was devised to serve the private interests of the nobles and to redress some intolerable abuses which harmed them. the few stipulations that affected the common people amount to so little that it is not worth talking about them.” Still, Magna Carta did cause “great things”: “it was decisive; it gave a clear shape to the opposition.” It proved that the aristocrats could organize themselves effectively against a monarchy that had veered into tyranny.

John’s successor, Henry III, was “a nonentity who let the revolution slide on.” It was his successor, Edward I, who took the steps necessary to prevent the balance from tipping too far against the monarchy. “He was a skillful ruler who knew that one has to tack in a storm,” taking “the measures which are almost always successful after a revolution, when there are a great many private disasters and the first need is for personal safety.” He established and enforced “good civil laws which, as you know, often make people forget good political laws.” Tocqueville is thinking of Napoleon, whose civil legal code stabilized French civil society without returning the regime to republicanism. Edward organized English legal procedure, encouraged trade, and generally “soothe[d] popular passion and succeeded pretty well”—a “bad man” but an “able” one. 

Where did this lead the Third Estate in England? “They were composed of all the hard-working people of independent spirit who were put upon in every sort of way by the tyranny of barons and king.” Resisting, they organized what Tocqueville would later call civil associations in every town. “As time went on this class became, for that age, very enlightened and rich, as all commerce had gradually fallen into its hands. It gained what the others lost, for it was nearer than the others to the natural state of mankind.” If man is by nature a social animal, then he who animates civil society by exercising the capacity to organize it will prevail over his rivals in the long run—a point parallel to Tocqueville’s commendation of decentralization.

How did the Third Estate proceed? How did it exploit its natural advantage, which was by no means evident to anyone, including its own members? The monarch ruled in the capital city, but “the capital was of little importance in feudal days, so it was possible that, at same time as a baron, safe in his corner, struck money, held court and made war with his serfs and his liegemen, a bowshot away there might be a town, appointing its magistrates, managing its finances, and having its armed band under its own flag, in a word a real republic.” “An odd mixture of oppression and liberty, one can see no unity in [feudalism’s] variegated confusion, but everywhere centers of active life.” Republicanism or popular self-government by elected representatives fosters not only the commercial virtues of prudent bargaining and mutual trust among those tested for their reliability; it can also encourage sterner virtues. “In such republics there were often heroes worthy to have lived in Rome or Sparta,” men capable of standing up to monarchs and aristocrats alike.

And what if the gentler virtues of commerce and the tougher virtues of civic and even martial courage combine? “Suppose that two men have been engaged in a long and determined fight although one of them is a little weaker than the other. A third man comes up, weaker than either of the two but who, whichever side he took, would be sure to tilt the balance that way. But who will think of asking him for help, who will urge his claim for help most strongly? It is sure to be he who feels himself weakest.” Thus did aristocrats, monarchs, and merchant-citizens find themselves in a struggle in which the merchant-citizens, still the weakest, nonetheless held the balance. Just as William the Conqueror found the Aristotelian mean between the extremes of governmental centralization and decentralization, so the Third Estate acted as the Aristotelian balance-wheel, not between the few who are rich and the many who are poor (as in Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’) but between ‘the few’ aristocrats and ‘the one’ monarch. “There, my dear friend, is the whole history of France and of England in the story of those three men.” Typically, the king, “the weaker of the first pair,” would “call the Commons to his aid, and join forces with them and lead them, to use their help to destroy the feudal system,” as Philip the Fair did in France. “In the end” the monarchy itself “would be swallowed up” by the commoners “when the two were left face to face in 1789.” But in England, beginning with Lord Leicester in the early seventeenth century, it was the aristocracy that was the weaker; the feudal nobles took the initiative to bring the third estate into Parliament, “year by year to put forward claims in its interest as if they were their own, to build up its strength, promote and sustain it every time.” By 1640, the commons “threw over the nobility” and “established the republic.” True, “that revolution was not final.” In general, however, “in every case the weakest becomes the strongest, and the ally gets his master down.” This shows “that after all rational equality is the only state natural to man, since nations get there from such various starting points and following such different roads.” Rational equality is the natural equality revived under feudal aristocracy and monarchy by the Third Estate as it established republicanism under the noses of its rulers and then extended what began as civil-social associations to the political sphere. The fact that Tocqueville wrote from the old family ruin must have brought this point home; he lived in symbolic surroundings. 

“The third estate had to be called in to the management of affairs as soon as anything was to be feared or hoped from it. That’s the natural way for the world to go,” as Tocqueville would argue, famously, in Democracy in America. He had his thesis in hand a decade earlier.

Once Edward I took command in 1272, he saw an advantage in reorganizing and recalling the House of Commons, so long as “he chose who should represent them and united them under his control.” It was simple: he “needed money” and “the Commons were rich.” He elevated commoners to parity with the lords in Parliament, thus making it easier for him to raise taxes. Aristocrats nonetheless retained their ancient rights and privileges; England was not yet a modern, fully democratized civil society with a centralized administrative state. One still “needed the consent of all that lot of people to do a heap of things,” including “the imposition of all extraordinary taxes.” 

Initially, long before Edward’s reign, Parliament was composed of the leaders of the higher aristocracy, the lords, and representatives of the lower aristocracy or gentry class. Eventually, the Lords became dominant. “It was then that the Commons became strong enough and rich enough for others to have an interest in summoning them to Parliament,” as Edward did. After that, the same ‘triangulation’ strategy seen in the relations of aristocrats and monarchs to the commoners now began to occur in Parliament itself. Initially distrusted by both lords and gentry, restricted to voting on taxes and barred from the exercise of other governmental powers, eventually the landed gentry and the commoners in the towns joined to form the English House of Commons. Hence the English electoral system: each county elects two members from the lower nobility and every town or “borough” can send one or more members to Parliament, “choos[ing] them as it likes, that is its affair.” In addition, English clergymen, with their own revenues in the form of tithes and their own property, “took their places as of right in Parliament.” Parliament as a whole then consisted of “turbulent Lords and weak and timid Commons, themselves surprised at the part they [had] been called to play.” With the power of the purse, they enjoyed a powerful check on the monarchy, being “careful only to vote taxes for a short period.” Keeping an eye on the rival executive branch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons usually have collaborated—”two orders of men who, in the rest of Europe, have been irreconcilable enemies.”

The Commons gained the upper hand over the aristocrats and the clergy by declaring that only taxes approved by the Commons could be levied. Aristocrats and clergymen agreed in this, thinking of it as a guard against monarchic exactions. This enabled the Commons to establish the right to petition the king for address of grievances—essentially a formalized process of bargaining. Eventually, “several times the Commons bluntly declared that they would not vote a tax until their wrongs had been righted, and it was done.” “One must admit that there is much to admire in the English people at that time. Their constitution was famous already and was thought to be different from that of other countries. Nowhere else in Europe as yet was there a better organized system of free government,” and “no other country had profited so much from feudal organization.”

In 1307 Edward II succeeded his father. He made the mistake of marrying Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair; “few human beings have ever brought so much ill to the human race.” Isabella eventually “threw England into confusion” by siding with one of the barons against her husband and “had her husband assassinated” after he was captured by the insurgent forces. These acts eventuated in war with France. In 1328 Charles IV of France died without a male heir, ending the Capetian dynasty. Because Isabella’s young son was the late king’s closest male relative, the ambitious queen put in his claim to the French throne. Wanting no English king, the French nobility installed Philip, Count of Valois. Isabella waged war.

After a brief interregnum by Isabella and her lover and co-conspirator, Lord Mortimer, Edward III took the English throne, becoming “one of the greatest of England’s kings,” sitting “on his father’s throne much as Alexander after the death of Philip.” Unfortunately, he exercised his greatness in the war with France—the “most heroic, the most brilliant and the most unhappy time in our history,” wherein French “valor was always crushed by superior [English] discipline.” “Thence derives that often unreflecting instinct of hate which rouses me against the English.” In France, Edward “waged a war of devastation,” his forces defeating the French at Crécy and then at Poitiers. “Almost the whole of the French nobility fell into the power of the English in those two days,” and “the French commons and serfs who had nursed an implacable hatred” against the aristocrats “took this chance to seize power,” bringing on “a most terrible civil war” in addition to the war against the English.

What accounted for England’s superior discipline in the Hundred Years’ War? “This is it: Geographical position and freedom had already made England the richest country in Europe.”

That point is worth lingering over. Tocqueville fully acknowledges the hard fact of geography. The word ‘geopolitics’ has yet to be invented but he knows what it is, and if there’s such a word as ‘geo-economics,’ he knows what that is, too. But he never loses sight of the importance of political freedom. When it comes to understanding causation in politics, he knows that civil societies and political regimes count, too.

Parliament readily put English wealth “at the king’s disposal,” enabling him to pay his army, “that is to say an army of men who had to obey all his orders, which he could keep in being as long as he wanted and use as he wanted.” The French king was hobbled by the older practice of the feudal system, whereby the barons were bound to his service only forty days at a time. “Chance alone decided which men they assembled, so that they were but an impetuous ill-disciplined mass.” Only after “bitter sufferings had taught the nobility to obey” and “the people had been toughened by all manner of affliction,” and “above all when the money provided by the States General had enabled Charles V to buy the courage of plenty of brave and disciplined adventurers,” did the French muster the strength needed to throw the invaders out of the country in 1378—the English “leaving nothing but their bones behind,” as the young patriot writes, grimly satisfied. Thus, after the English victories under Edward III and the French victories under Charles V, Edward’s successor, his grandson Richard II, found himself embroiled in domestic controversies spurred by “the turbulence of the Commons” and “the insolence of the Lords.” 

Richard would “try to destroy that dangerous constitution, as yet ill defined, which made the strength of skillful princes, but which threw the unskillful from the throne.” Calling Parliament to assemble, he “made it choose from its body commissioners to represent it when it was not assembled”—representatives of the representatives, so to speak. Except the new body was too small and weak to resist monarchic dominance and “national representative was then only a name,” as “Richard ruled without control.” This spread seeming calm over England. But when Richard imposed a tax not enacted by the full Parliament, that “proved the drop of water which makes a glass overflow.” Henry of Lancaster rallied a one hundred thousand-man army in revolt, capturing the king “without a fight.” and installing himself as Henry IV, with popular support. “As I think about all this…and about the fearful consequences of these events. I feel that the history of this time should be written in huge letters in all public places and in the palaces of all kings. Perhaps the peoples would realize what it costs to sacrifice the principle of legitimacy, and doubtless their rulers too would learn that one cannot make sport of the rights of nations unpunished, and that triumphs of that sort do not always last long.” Henry V succeeded “the usurper.” Although “the English regard [him] as a hero of their history,” Tocqueville, being French, does not. Henry “made use of the best means of distracting the restless energy of a people still shaken by the after-effects of a revolution; he decided to break the truce with France and profit from the internal disturbances which were again rending our unhappy country.” Landing in Normandy, winning “the decisive battle of Agincourt,” he “had himself crowned king of France.” But upon his death the French struck back, with Joan of Arc leading them. Hers is an “incredible story,” which “one cannot understand but can still less question.” The English “began to retreat and for the second and last time France was saved.” England soon descended back into civil war, with the houses of Lancaster and York fighting “for the throne through fifty years of unparalleled bitterness” in the War of the Roses. “Each party triumphed in turn more than ten times, and each time the vanquished suffered all manner of punishments and confiscations.” The war burnt itself out; “the whole tyrannical and cruel race of the Plantagenets vanished from this world”; the peace of exhaustion was solemnized when a Lancastrian man married a Yorkist woman.

It is impossible not to see that Tocqueville’s account of this period of English history tracks more recent French history, with the Plantagenets standing in for the state-centralizing Bourbons, the Lancastrian rebellion standing in for the French Revolution, Henry V for Napoleon. Although France in the eighteenth century suffered nothing like the War of the Roses in the fifteenth, some of the combustibles for such a civil war were there, and French politics remained embittered by struggles over the regime for more than a century. Tocqueville hoped that the Orléanist line would restore legitimacy, reigning over a mixed regime with a strong republican element. But France had nothing like the English constitution.

Neither did the English, at least not in that constitution’s well-established condition. “There are many people, both among those who have studied English history and those who have not, who suppose that the English constitution has passed through various regular, successive stages until it has reached the point it now is. According to them it is a fruit which every age has helped to ripen. That is not my view.” On the contrary, England’s “forward movement” toward constitutionalism has suffered from numerous interruptions and even times of “a most marked retrogression.” This is what happened after the Plantagenet dynasty disintegrated. The Tudor Dynasty which replaced it saw “something like a general agreement by all orders in the state to throw themselves into servitude.” What British constitution, then? The aristocrats “seemed reduced almost to nothing,” with “all the descendants of the Normans…dead or ruined.” “New unstable families without roots in the nation had risen in their place.” Without the support of the Lords, the Commons “lost all that republic energy which had marked their fathers,” hoping “that what they lost in freedom, they had gained in security.” England was far from the only country so afflicted. “A similar movement was taking place all over Europe,” as “all monarchies were tending to become absolute,” replacing “the oligarchic liberty which had been enjoyed for two centuries.” The statist monarchs crushed the feudal aristocrats and removed many of “the vices of the feudal system,” but at the price of the liberty aristocrats had taken for themselves and, acting in their own interests, advanced among the commoners, at the same time.

This clearly shows (it should be noted, in passing) that Tocqueville is no more a historical determinist than he is a geographical determinist. Causation isn’t that simple. He always leaves room for statecraft and for human freedom, generally. This makes it possible for him to offer lessons to statesman, as he does in his next remark.

The movement toward state-centralizing or ‘absolute’ monarchy “was more marked in England than anywhere else” because in England it took on the veneer of legality. “Note that well; nothing gives more food for thought. When a despot forces his way to sovereignty, his power, however great, will have limits, be they only those imposed by fear. But a sovereign clothed in power to do everything in the name of law is far more to be feared and fears nothing.” “I know no more complete tyrant in history than Henry VIII.” (Tocqueville is thinking also of Napoleon and his legal code.) If a Plantagenet imposed a tax, it had no support of the full Parliament; “when one of the Tudors asked the people for an exorbitant tax, it was the people themselves who granted it, for Parliament had voted for it,” and “when the blood of the highest fell on the scaffold,” the monarch could again rest on the appearance of legality, as the Lords had signed off on the execution. “Thus [liberty’s] own instrument,” the rule of law, “was turned against liberty.” The Tudor regime established the device of Bills of Attainder, “a diabolical invention which even the Tribunal of the [French] Revolution never revived,” whereby a legislator may impose the death penalty without the defendant being afforded the benefit of trial. 

Although Thomas Hobbes saw the possibility of a peaceful religious settlement under new regime, no such thing happened. “When I see the English people change their religion four times to please their masters, and when I think that almost in our own day we have seen the French clergy nearly in mass prefer exile, poverty and death to the mere appearance of a schism, when I see that, I am prouder to be born on this side of the channel than I should be to claim that the blood of Plantagenets and Tudors ran in my veins.” Religious instability breeds political strife. “Men need authority in questions of religion.” “They go astray when they lose a sure basis and appeal to their reason alone.” 

How, then, to explain the Revolution of 1688, which reinstated a better balanced, constitutional regime in England? “What was able to raise the English people from that state of degradation” they had reached under the Tudors? “The same thing as had thrown them down”: “The spirit of the constitution had been broken, but the forms remained: it was like the corpse of a free government,” but a corpse that did not rot. “When spirits stupefied by the disasters of the civil wars began little by little to revive, when numbed hearts beat again, when the passage of time had given the Commons the strength they lacked or thought they lacked, in a word, when the nation awoke, it found the tools for regeneration to hand, and with the spirit of its ancestors all the means to be like them.” By 1688, “the spirit of argument introduced by the Reformation began to bear fruit: the Commons already began proudly to take thought of their power and their wealth,” and the monarchy, “which had lost its foundations in the hearts of Englishmen,” collapsed.

Tocqueville ends his letter with that. What began as an inquiry into the origins of feudalism, and therewith of the aristocracy which was now declining, quickly turned to a discussion of the origins of the modern state and of the democratic civil-social conditions that undermined aristocracy, whose works were literally crumbling around Tocqueville as he wrote. For the rest of his life, he would plan the architecture of a new home for aristocracy, a home in but not entirely of modern political conditions.