The Battle of Waterloo was an important military event to establish superpowers. But in this day and age, few nations will be willing to wear the crown of thorns
Thursday is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, and in the course of the day you are almost bound to hear or read somebody claiming that it “changed history”. It was a very big battle, after all, and it would be a century before Europe saw war on that scale again. But did the events of June 18, 1815, ‘change history’IJ Probably not.
The really decisive battle was fought a year and a half before that, near leipzig in Germany: The ‘Battle of the Nations'. Three times more men were involved in that battle than in the one fought at Waterloo. There were many more battles before the Russian, Austrian and Prussian armies entered Paris and Napoleon finally abdicated as Emperor of the French in the spring of 1814, but he never won another battle.
Napoleon was given a mini-kingdom on the island of Elba, off the Italian coast, to keep himself busy. The victors began to put Europe back together after 20 years of almost unbroken war, around three million combat deaths, and a comparable number of civilian casualties. And after only 10 months, Napoleon escaped from Elba and went back to France for another try.
Britain had already overtaken France as Europe's biggest economy (and in those days, that meant the world's biggest economy). The industrial revolution in Britain was already into its second generation, while France had barely entered the first. Even in sheer numbers of people, a low birth rate meant that France would fall behind Russia, then behind Germany, and eventually even behind Britain in population.
So, even if Napoleon could go on winning battles, he couldn't win the war. In the end he couldn't even win the battles. He was running out of soldiers, and his enemies had spent a generation at war learning (very expensively) to fight battles just as well as he did. Waterloo only confirmed what everybody with eyes could see already: France was finished as Europe's real superpower.
Then Britain got a century at the top (and after 500 years of Anglo-French wars, it never had to fight France again). The United States is now about 75 years into its term as the reigning superpower — and you are probably assuming that I am now going to speculate who gets the crown next. That’s wrong on two counts.
First of all, it's a thorny crown, and nobody in their right mind would want it. The relevant statistic (which hides in plain sight) is that the more powerful a country is, the more wars it fights and the more people it loses. More power doesn't give you greater security; it just gets you into more trouble.
Second, about half the time there is no undisputed top dog. That was the situation for the century 1600-1700, when Spain was in visible decline but France was not yet ready to assume the mantle of sole superpower. It was equally true in 1945-1990, when nuclear weapons (the great equaliser) meant that the United States and the Soviet Union were co-equal superpowers even though the US economy was far bigger than the Soviet one.
And now, with the American superpower allegedly in decline, there is obsessive speculation about when China will step in and take over the role — or might it turn out to be India insteadIJ As though it were still the early 19th century, when France was going down and Britain was taking over. It isn't.