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Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War, by Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson Beyond the Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 559 pp., $110 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-107-03994-0Peter Jackson opens his new book with the juxtaposition of Theodore Ruyssen, the president of the Association de la paix par le droit and Edouard Herriot, Radical party politician, Third and Fourth Republic stalwart, and three times premier of France. The two men, speaking respectively in 1911 and 1924, echoed similar themes. Both stressed the need to construct an international order based on the rule of law. As Herriot put it, "arbitration, security, and disarmament" would ensure peaceable international relations and so constitute the best means to guarantee French security. Jackson argues such words were not idle, for Herriot's ministry of 1924-1925 embedded what he calls "juridical internationalism" at the heart of French security policy (5).Juridical internationalism insisted that France's security was best obtained through the exercise of international law and the adherence to accepted norms of international behaviour. Juridical internationalism was one of two principal ways of thinking about France's relations with the world. For the bulk of the period that Jackson analyzes, it was, as he admits, the lesser. The greater-what Jackson labels the traditional view-was bred in the bone of French policymakers. This was a preoccupation with the realities of power based on the French experience in the centuries before 1914. French security rested on a combination of alliances, military force, and economic might. What mattered was "strategic preponderance" (78). For traditionalists, the balance of power was at the core of French security policy.The central argument of Jackson's book is that scholars, fixated on the traditional view, have failed to appreciate the existence of internationalist thinking in France during the era of the First World War. For too long analysis has stopped at the acceptance of the notion of the balance of power as determinant. Consequently, historians have misunderstood not just the nature of French security policy but also the contributions of French thinking to evolving notions of internationalist thought globally. According to Jackson, appreciating the existence of both strands within French thinking recasts the scholarly narrative that has dominated assessments of French policy-making. France, having won the First World War, was a state that moved steadily toward an exposition of internationalist notions as the hope for international relations generally.How is this argument made? Jackson begins with a survey of the groups within France that made security policy, namely the political elites, the foreign policy fonctionnaires, and the military. Their collective adherence to the traditional view was, if not axiomatic, nearly so, at least before 1914. One of the virtues of this work lies in its demonstration that while the military remained faithful to the traditional view, the attitudes of political elites and foreign policy fonctionnaires shifted in favour of internationalist thinking. The latter's influence in France dated to the nineteenth century, as Jackson demonstrates in his second chapter, where he traces the influence of extra-parliamentary pressure movements, the growing links to likeminded associations abroad, and the key role of men such as parliamentarian Leon Bourgeois, described as "the most influential voice of French juridical internationalism" for nearly 30 years (65).Although Bourgeois was an apostle of internationalism, it was the grim reality of the First World War that prompted rethinking. Thus part II of the book considers the French state at war. In the wartime jockeying that existed among politicians, the foreign ministry, and the military, the conflict bestowed the loudest voice on the military. Yet, as Jackson observes, more far-sighted observers appreciated that the world was changing, a point driven home by 1917, when the Russian exit from the war, the coming to power of the Bolsheviks, and the entrance of the United States trumpeted an explicitly internationalist clarion. …