Vattel, Britain and Peace in Europe

Abstract

Th is paper underlines Vattel's commitment to maintaining the sovereignty of Europe's small states by enunciating the duties he deemed incumbent upon all political communities. Vattel took seriously the threat to Europe from a renascent France, willing to foster an equally aggressive Catholic imperialism justifi ed by the need for religious unity. Preventing a French version of universal monarchy, Vattel recognised, entailed more than speculating about a Europe imagined as a single republic. Rather, Vattel believed that Britain had to be relied upon to prevent excessive French ambition, and to underwrite the independence of the continent's smaller sovereignties. Against those who saw Britain as another candidate for the domination of Europe, Vattel argued that Britain's commercial interests explained why it was a diff erent kind of state to the great empires of the past. Th e paper goes on to consider the reception of Vattel's ideas after the Seven Years War. Although further research is required into readings of Vattel, especially in the smaller states of Europe in the later eighteenth century, the paper concludes that by the 1790s Vattel was being used to justify war to defeat the gargantuan imperialist projects of newly republican France, in order to maintain Europe itself, and the smaller states within it. KeywordsVattel; small states; international relations in the eighteenth century; Anglo-French antagonism; French Revolution; universal monarchy; rise of Britain 2 Vattel, Le droit des gens; ou, Principes de la loi naturelle appliqués à la conduite et aux aff aires des nations et des souverains (Londres [=Neuchâtel: Abraham Droz], 1758), I.15.188 (=Book 1, Ch. 15, §188). 3 Vattel, Droit des gens , Preliminaries, §18. Translations are from

Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Regular War: Wolff and Vattel’s Enlightenment Critique of Just War

“…The successive hegemonic threats of the Spanish and French monarchies against small states, in particular Vattel's own Neuchatel, could not be effectively contained with perpetual peace proposals. 16 The sovereign right of judgment, together with the mechanism of power balancing, were better suited to avert the moral and political evils of political encroachment, domination, and "servitude and enslavement" that would result from a raising hegemon's "injustice, rapacity, pride, ambition, or imperious thirst of rule" (III.44). 17 To avoid this moral and political bad, nations, particularly small ones, must have the legal power to decide where to seek protection and how to incline the international balance of power (III.49-50).…”