The trigger for the emancipation of the serfs in Prussia and Russia may have been defeat in war, but in practice, peasant revolts from below were bringing it about anyway. Civil liberties were crushed in Britain during the Napoleonic wars, not expanded. Simms declares that foreign policy and conflicts between states were the motor of democratisation and the extension of civil liberties, as states were obliged to summon and consult legislatures to get the money needed for war, but one can think of many counter-examples where moments of failure in war, real or perceived, boosted authoritarian rule, from Robespierre's reign of terror in 1793-4 to the triumph of Mussolini in 1922. Hitler did not come to power because of foreign issues, but because of the depression – indeed, reparations had been scaled down by the time the Nazi vote started to rise, and were ended altogether before Hitler was appointed chancellor. Louis XVI of France did not lose his throne "because of his alleged subservience to Austria". Englishmen did not in fact revolt against Charles I "because he failed to protect the Protestant German princes on whom their own liberties depended" – the primary issues were ones of domestic religious conflict. These take the form of obiter dicta no attempt is made to argue a case for any of them. His belief in what he calls "the primacy of foreign policy" leads Simms into some very strange assertions indeed. Far from remaining "remarkably constant over the centuries", the principal security issues facing Europeans today – global warming, immigration, economic stagnation, terrorism, civil and human rights and much more besides – bear almost no resemblance to the key issues of the 16th century, which were posed above all by the clash between Protestants and Catholics in a continent dominated and divided by faith. Simms seems blind to these lengthy periods of common action between states, just as he seems insensible to the enormous changes that have taken place in the nature of international relations within Europe over the period he covers. Or the concert of Europe, though which the great powers settled disputes on issues ranging from colonial rivalries to Russo-Turkish conflicts in the 1870s and 1880s, or the post-Locarno order in the 1920s, or the power-blocs of Nato and the Warsaw pact in the cold war years, or the supranational institutions of the European Union in the decades since Maastricht. Even on Simms's own account, there have been long periods when the "struggle for supremacy" gave way to various kinds of international co-operation, whether it was between European powers rallying behind the Habsburg empire to fight off the threat posed by the Ottomans who laid siege to Vienna in 1683, or the "holy alliance" and the congress system, making common cause under the leadership of Prince Metternich to suppress revolution in the decades after the battle of Waterloo. Yet few will be convinced by this one-sided picture. His book purports to demonstrate these points through a detailed chronological narrative from the fall of Constantinople to the present day.
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