Introduction

In investigating the course of world affairs since roughly 1500, special emphasis is placed here upon the struggle for power - by which is meant the use of organized force by sovereign states to impose their will upon each other, or upon their own citizens. The perpetual aggressiveness of both individuals and states underlies all history. It is the underlying theme of Thucydides (471-C.400 BC) who wrote about the Peloponnesian Wars, as it is of Herodotus (484-25 BC) who dealt with the Greek-Persian Wars. The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) in his Weltgeschichte1 viewed world history as the history of power. Power is essentially what Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Karl Marx (1818-83) are talking about - one in biology, the other in economics. Darwin spoke of the 'struggle for survival', Marx of 'class conflict'. The German philologist and philosopher Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844-1900) expressed the will to power in his Der Wille zur Macht.

It is not love, or morality, or international law that determines the outcome of world affairs, but the changing distribution of organized force. While love and trust make our personal worlds go round, we delude ourselves in thinking that the same is true of the relations between states. A cynical doctrine, but one that has all too often directed the conduct of nations. 'Justice is the advantage of the stronger,' says Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic. Weak states invite aggression. Despite the efforts of the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), who drew upon the work of Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), and who insisted that morality must always direct human action, power and expediency (one is tempted to add hypocrisy and state terrorism) have remained the language of international relations. Power dictates the course taken by any political institution. It is what politics is all about.

Anyone who undertakes to investigate the role of power politics in history must run the risk of being linked with the Florentine political theorist and statesman Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) whose principal work, Il Principe (The Prince), was published in 1513. Yet Machiavelli did not originate power politics. 'The lust for power', wrote the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 55-c.118), 'is the most flagrant of all the passions.' It is the only appetite that cannot be appeased. Every age has known the dangers accompanying its use. 'Power', said the nineteenth-century English historian, Lord Acton (1834-1902), 'tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' The American historian and philosopher Henry Adams (1838-1918) said that power was poison.

However condemned, power remains as valid a concept in international political life as it ever was. Power is to politics what energy is to the physical world. Far from being the malevolent force it is made out to be, power is an inherent feature of the relations between sovereign states. No society, national or international, is possible in which power and compulsion are absent. Without authority, anarchy reigns. 'Covenants without swords are but words,' wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678).

The struggle for power is not the only key to the course of world affairs - the past is also a story of the struggle for justice; it also is a story of sacrifice, love, interdependence and mutual aid - but power remains the master key. In the international sphere, material might continues to triumph over moral right. While the United Nations and the Hague Court proclaim what is right and proper - as they are doing about the 'ethnic cleansing' that took place in the 1990s in the Balkans and central Africa - the nations continue to enforce their will.

The greatest difficulty in stressing the role of power in helping to shape the modern world is the illusive nature of power itself. There is no clear-cut line which enables us to separate the power of the sword from the power of the purse, or those powers from the more intangible power of the word. On the evidence of the past, it is chiefly military force which has prevailed. 'War', said Heraclitus 500 years before Christ, 'is the father of all.' Certainly, war has been the midwife of the modern age.

However indefinite, the realities of power have, in fact, seeped into and controlled every institution devised to regulate international life. The declaration of principle has invariably been of secondary importance. This was true of the Holy League, founded in 1495 by Pope Alexander VI (c.1431-1503), of the Holy Alliance, founded by the tsar of Russia in 1815, of the League of Nations established after the First World War, and of the United Nations established after the Second. International forums organized for peacekeeping purposes and for rational discussion have invariably given way to a struggle for power. Too often the League of Nations and the United Nations have become forums of national rivalry rather than organizations of international cooperation. Until a code of international law evolves, and is enforced, power politics will continue to determine our lot. It was not a universal moral imperative but the awesome power of nuclear deterrence (force) that has ensured our security since 1945.

While arbitrary power and coercion continue to govern the relations between sovereign states, there are times when economic power is all important. 'Money to get power,' says the emblem of the sixteenth-century Florentine financiers, the Medicis, 'power to guard money.' Crucial to the prolonged European wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the creditworthiness of the combatants; the ability to raise funds is one of the reasons why the British and the Dutch were able to fight as long as they did. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 disrupted the world economy. More limited in effect were the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations against Vietnam, Rhodesia, South Africa, Libya, Cuba, North Korea and Iraq.

At other times, intangible power - intellectual, philosophical, spiritual and religious - has swayed world events. Christ, Mohammed, Luther and Marx led no armies, yet the power of their word proved mightier than the sword. 'In the beginning was the Word.. .' says the Gospel of St John. Rome conquered Europe first with the sword, but more thoroughly with the Christian Word. The 'soul force' of non-violence practised by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi2 (1869-1948) against British rule in South Africa, and later in India, and the role played by Pope John Paul II against Soviet power in Poland, are classic examples of the power of the spirit defeating the power of the sword.

One cannot commence an inquiry into the role of power in world affairs without taking a world view. There is hardly an important problem that we face today that is not of world dimension.3 The problems of nuclear arms, outer space, population, migration, pollution, AIDS, human rights, commerce, economic fluctuations, ecology and climate changes cannot be confined to the nationstate. Think of the world-wide activities of the international corporation or the manner in which finance has become globalized. The effect of the destruction of the rain forests reach far beyond Brazil or the countries of southeast Asia. Indeed, in the global age in which we live, some nations can no longer control their own physical or economic destinies. Governments all over the world are being subverted by the international drug trade and other forms of international crime.4 Thinking globally has become a necessity. 'Nur das Ganze spricht' (Only the whole has meaning) said the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt (1818-97). Yet we continue to think in tribal or national terms. 'We are global citizens with tribal souls,' said the Danish poet Piet Hein (b. 1905- ).

Equally important is the need to take an historical view. Life demands a sense of continuity. We cannot see the present except through the past. Without some knowledge of the past the present is unintelligible, and much more hazardous than it need be. It is not only language that divides the human race, it is also history. 'The past is never dead', wrote William Faulkner (1897-1963), 'it's not even past.' People not only have a history, they are history. The alternative to experience and accumulated knowledge - which we call history - is a sickness called amnesia. We can no more shed the past than we can shed our shadows (except by blundering about in the dark). To wander out of history is to wander out of reality. Truly, those who ignore history will be forced to relive it. Yet history remains the ignored dimension in world affairs.

Not that history is the source of ready answers. Nor is it a science. It is too subjective a discipline to make such a claim. There is no objective reality independent of the writer; historians often find what they are looking for. An isolated fact explains nothing; it does not even exist until it is selected and interpreted. The role of chance, the way in which history is overtaken by events, and the difficulty of predicting human action, also invalidate any scientific claim. Unlike an experiment in science, which can be repeated, in human affairs nothing is constant; all is flux. The past cannot be explained with sequence of cause and effect, exact and clear. There are no ascertainable, inflexible laws that determine our destiny. As the collapse of communist power in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany in 1990 confirm, history is both evolutionary and cataclysmic. There is no way that we can anticipate the outcome of human behaviour, especially in times of war. The French astronomer and mathematician, Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), the father of present-day futurists, thought otherwise: 'Give me full knowledge and I will predict the future precisely,' he said. To see the past 'wie es eigentlich war' (as it actually was), as Leopold von Ranke advocated, will never be completely possible. We never know the past; we know only someone's story of the past. Meaning is always shaped by writer and context.

History is oblique. It does not reveal itself in a linear fashion, but dialectically, by comparison. 'God writes straight, with crooked lines,' says a Portuguese proverb. Crooked or straight, in providing us with an imaginative understanding of the origins and consequences of what we are doing, history provides us with perspective, with balance, with wisdom - not for the moment, or the day, but for the totality of our lives and the society in which we live.

Having stressed the role of power politics in world affairs, and the need to take both a world and an historical view, it remains to explain why I chose to begin this inquiry at 1500. I did so because it is about then that the West proceeded to effect changes on a world scale greater than those made by any previous civilization. It is about then that the European Middle Ages ended and the increasingly secular modern age began. An interrelatedness of continents existed before 1500, but it was a different interrelatedness - in scope, significance and speed of change - from that which followed.

I also chose the 1500s because it was then that the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from the Arabs by the Portuguese and the Spaniards had become a Christian crusade which carried them into the world, giving a tremendous impetus to discovery and colonization. Two years after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) set out in search of Asia, Pope Alexander VI (under the Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494) divided the world between Spain and Portugal5 (Map I). In 1498 the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (c.1460-1524) reached the Malabar coast of India. The capture by the Portuguese of Goa (1510) and the Strait of Ormuz (1515) made their control of the Indian Ocean possible. In 1519-22 the Spaniard Juan Sebastian del Cano, who had taken command after Ferdinand Magellan's (c.1480-1521) death in the Philippines, made the first circumnavigation of the globe. By the early 1600s English, Dutch, French and Danish trading companies had all reached

India, eager to exploit the riches of the East. Impelled by the desire to profit, to explore and to Christianize, the scales of fortune began to tip in Europe's favour. They would continue to do so for the next 500 years.

The period beginning at 1500 is also important because the sixteenth century witnessed the rise and spread of nationalism. National consciousness had scarcely existed in Europe's Middle Ages, which knew feudal particularism and Christian universalism. Under feudalism - which in time would be undermined not only by nationalism, but by war and a growing money economy - men's loyalties were concentrated on their immediate lord. Beyond that they were conscious of membership in the universal Christian Church. The power to form a nation is difficult to define. Athens lacked it; Rome and Castile possessed it. It has been described as 'a gift, like a talent for art or religion'. It has more to do with culture, language, customs and territory than crude force.

The newly emerging nations of Britain, France and Spain put an end to both feudalism and Christian universalism. The Congress of Mantua in Italy (1459-60) was the last international gathering presided over by the pope. By the time Henry VIII (1509-47) declared himself 'supreme head' of the Church of England in 1534, the prestige of papal authority had been shattered by the Protestant Reformation. By 1700 the European secular states had come to overshadow Christendom.6 What mattered henceforth was not the Church but the nation. It was the foundation of the modern state system that gave Europeans the vigour and the resources to go out and conquer the world.

Finally, this study begins at 1500 because the sixteenth century was an age of great scientific and technological achievement in the West. Although the idea of scientific progress is taken for granted in the West today, against the backcloth of time, it was an innovation of first importance. Before the sixteenth century, the West had depended upon the East for many developments in science and technology. Now the East became reliant upon the more dynamic West. Science and technology came to be used, not as they had always been - to ensure stability in society - but to stimulate change.

Of course, in 1500 no one foresaw these things. No one predicted that Europe would eventually control most of the world. In 1500 Asia, not Europe, was pre-eminent. In the sixteenth century all the major empires in Eurasia were Asian. Whatever aspect of power we consider, it is to Asia that we must first turn.