International Relations in Political Thought Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War

HEINRICH VON TREITSCHKE (1834–96) was the leading historian and political scientist of Imperial Germany in the late nineteenth century. An apologist for force and an ardent anti-Semite, he is the supreme exponent of “power politics” and (unlike Hegel) can reasonably be seen as a forerunner of German militarism and National Socialism in the twentieth century. The following extracts are taken from his Politics, which was translated in Britain in the middle of the First World War in order to elucidate the roots of German “frightfulness.”

From Politics

International law and international intercourse

When we ask, does an international law exist at all? we are met by two extreme and contradictory conceptions, both alike untenable, of the international life of States. The first, the naturalistic, whose chief champion we already know to be Machiavelli, starts from the principle that the State is absolute power, and may do anything which serves its ends, consequently it can bind itself by no law in its relations with other States, which are determined by purely mechanical considerations of proportionate strength. This is an idea which can only be disproved by its own arguments. We must admit that the State is absolute physical power, but if it insists upon being that, and nothing else, unrestrained by conscience or reason, it will no longer be able to maintain itself in a position of security.