Dept. of History

The ghost of Waterloo

What emerged 200 years ago was the triumph of the nation-state, which, despite challenges, has held sway in Europe ever since.

Of all the military engagements that have been fought in Belgium (and there have been many) the most disturbing for the European Union is the Battle of Waterloo, whose 200^th anniversary falls this week.

It is an accident of historical geography that the Waterloo Battlefield is only 20 kilometers (12 miles) from where the headquarters of the European Commission and the European Council now stand. Had Napoleon Bonaparte engaged with the Duke of Wellington’s army further west, or with Marshal Blücher’s Prussian forces further east, making historical comparisons would be less inviting. And if the Paris Conference of 1958 had stuck to its declared goal of choosing one single home for all EU institutions, then the capital of Europe might have developed somewhere other than Brussels.

It is also an accident of history that the Battle of Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815. As luck would have it, the heads of the EU’s various national governments developed a tradition of meeting for a summit every six months, in June and December. In recent years the meetings have become more frequent, but it is still the case that the European Council meets on or about the fourth Thursday and Friday of June, dangerously close to the Waterloo anniversary. Such juxtapositions are too inviting for journalists to ignore, particularly given that Waterloo brought together the three powers (or their antecedents) that now vie for leadership of the EU: France, Germany and the UK. Here, for example, is how I succumbed to such temptation in 2005.

This year, on the 200^th anniversary of Waterloo, the prospect of a British referendum on leaving the EU gives new opportunities to journalists reworking old myths.

The Battle of Waterloo, fought inside a day, lends itself to reenactment and reimagination. The battlefield is, by modern standards, compact: Wellington arrayed his troops across a front of about 5,500 meters (3.4 miles). The site is accessible and has survived largely unscathed — much of it is farmland planted with cereals and beets. Key landmarks, like the Château d’Hougoumont and the farms of Papelotte and La Haye-Sainte, are easily identified. The topography, albeit altered in places, is still discernible, so battlefield guides can point out the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean that Wellington set out to defend, the plateau of La Belle-Alliance, where the French mustered, and the valley in between, across which the French infantry advanced.

 

In this sense, Waterloo bears many similarities to the Battle of Gettysburg, which was fought over the course of three days in 1863, on a site that has been well preserved and lies just a few hours away from the seat of federal government.

Both Gettysburg and Waterloo were decisive battles: Gettysburg is credited with turning the course of the American Civil War; Waterloo halted the comeback that Napoleon had launched in the spring of 1815 and brought an end to the Napoleonic wars.

Crucially, however, Gettysburg differs from Waterloo in that the outcome is regarded as a moral as well as military victory: The free states defeated the slave states and the Union was preserved. Or, as Abraham Lincoln put it at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, in words that are now carved into the national psyche as well as the Lincoln Memorial: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish.”

No such declaration rings down the ages about Waterloo. In British popular culture, the battle is remembered by way of the Duke of Wellington’s comment, “It has been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” Indeed, military historians find the Battle of Waterloo so fascinating precisely because it was so finely balanced, and raises interminable questions about what might have been had the French general Emmanuel de Grouchy not allowed the Prussians to escape after a French victory two days earlier at Ligny (near Tournai), had Blücher, with reinforcements, not arrived at Waterloo in the nick of time, or had the Chateau d’Hougoumont fallen earlier.

 

Beyond these short-term questions, there is the more esoteric question of what values emerged victorious from Waterloo. The answers are uncomfortable for the EU.

On the face of it, the values of the French Revolution, as mediated by Napoleon, had been defeated. Following Waterloo, the other European powers — Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain — could press ahead with the plan they agreed at the Congress of Vienna, to turn back the clock on the territorial gains that France had made since 1789. In Paris, the Bourbon dynasty was restored in the person of Louis XVIII, brother of the Louis XVI who had been executed in 1793.

But the Congress of Vienna could not turn back the clock completely. The French Revolution’s aspirations to export universal values across Europe had been thwarted, but not before the Revolution had destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, that strange agglomeration of states, principalities and bishoprics, which had persisted since medieval times and was dissolved in 1806 after Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz. The rise of Prussia was much helped by the relative decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy.

What emerged from the blood, dust and smoke of Waterloo was the triumph of the nation-state, which, despite certain notorious challenges, has held sway in Europe ever since. Rival supranational or confederate concepts  whether the French Revolutionary empire, the Habsburg empire, or the Holy Roman Empire were eclipsed.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the state, the abstract entity to which subjects owed allegiance, became identified with the nation, a trend that was reinforced and accelerated by an appeal to the will of the people or Volk. The historian Tim Blanning identifies the state, the nation and the Volk, as the three elements in “the troika that pulled the political chariot of the late eighteenth century.” The strength of that troika continued to grow — witness how the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, created in 1815 on France’s northern border, was itself subdivided in 1830 with the creation of Belgium. The Belgian nationalism that had been awakened during the French revolutionary wars could not be quenched. So although in 1820 a statue of a lion (symbol of the Dutch monarchy) was installed on the Waterloo battlefield at the spot where the Prince of Orange, the future Willem II, had been knocked from his horse, within ten years that lion was looking out over land that was now Belgian rather than Dutch.

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Two hundred years on, Waterloo poses a challenge to the international residents of Brussels. The EU can respond to such other Belgian conflicts as the sacking of Mechelen (1572), the sieges of Namur (1692 and 1695), the bombardment of Brussels (1695), the battle of Fontenoy (1745), and the battles of Ypres and Passchendaele (1914-18) with a simple declaration that it is a means of ending divisions in Europe. But Waterloo, which dates from the Enlightenment era when modern political thought took shape, is a reminder that the terms of contemporary political debate remain bound by that triangle of state, nation and people.

Nation-states derive their legitimacy from the idea that they embody the sovereignty of the people and that they are in some way a distillation of the people’s will. The EU’s legitimacy, on the other hand, is derived from and mediated by the nation-states, which may or may not choose to transfer their sovereignty. The ill-fated draft EU constitution of 2003 said that “the member states confer competences to attain objectives that they have in common.”

Post-1945 experiments in supranational organizations, like NATO and the EU, have never managed to free themselves from the idea that sovereignty is first conferred by the citizen upon the nation-state.

Successful challenges to the status quo seem more likely to come from below, from nationalist movements within member states that might upset the present alignments of state and nation, such as the campaigns for Scottish and Catalan independence. These might re-open discussion of sovereignty, though not necessarily to the benefit of the EU, which is already suffering from a widespread upsurge in anti-EU sovereigntist sentiment that demands a “repatriation” of powers from Brussels. Such movements as UKIP and France’s National Front make an appeal to sovereignty that, 200 years on from Waterloo, the EU’s defenders are struggling to counter.

Nowadays, however, the referendum is the means by which the EU seeks to resolve its problems of legitimacy. The impossibility of moving beyond Waterloo’s nation-states has resulted, ironically, in a Napoleonic response, though stripped of Napoleon’s draconian methods of ensuring that he obtained the result he wanted.

Tim King, the editor of European Voice from 2009 to 2015, is a contributing writer at POLITICO.