The Political System
The classic era of the state system in Europe also bore witness to the emergence of democratic self-rule as the prevalent form of government. Despite the restoration of the French monarch following Napoleon's defeat and exile, the American and French revolutions' liberal force of republicanism still hurled a future challenge to European monarchies. Monarchies held on for years, but by the mid-nineteenth century, European parliaments were beginning to wrest power from kings. Also accompanying parliamentary ascendance was voting reforms and the emergence of mass political parties. In Europe, only Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia retained powerful monarchies by the time of the First World War. The defeat of these three states in this war appeared to confirm that imperial autocracies were less adaptable and capable than the democracies of Britain, France, and the United States that won the war. Although many governments became more democratic, they also developed bureaucracies with higher capacities to regulate, tax, and mobilize people in the service of state policy.
In addition to the internal development of popular self-rule, a European international society emerged during the classical state system. These states interacted with some regularity because they shared common rules and institutions. A growing body of international law governed diplomacy, the prosecution of war, and many other aspects of states' relationships. Less formally, norms concerning the role and importance of the balance of power system guided policymakers as they protected the independence of European states. Another norm held leadership in the most powerful states responsible for preserving an acceptable European order, as major states did at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The institution of conference diplomacy became well established in the nineteenth century, leading to the important Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 and setting the stage for the creation of the League of Nations in 1919.
By the First World War, the European society of states was regularly interacting with some states from other continents. Non-European states as diverse as China, Japan, Mexico, Persia (Iran), Siam (Thailand), and the United States attended the Conference of 1899, while the Conference of 1907 also included 16 Latin American states. Still, the global society before the First World War was clearly Eurocentric in the sense that the Europeans played a dominating role and non-Europeans accepted European rules of order. Weaker states sometimes chafed under the European order and wanted secure national integrity for themselves and reform of the European-dominated order.
At minimum, the non-European states wanted independence and equality that came with sovereignty and the protection of international law, all of which developed with European international society. The weaker, non-Western states came to realize, however, that sharing an international society does not necessarily mean participation in a just international order. The European states, possessing military superiority and perceiving themselves as culturally superior, often wanted privileges within the widening international society. The Europeans frequently exploited other states in trade, imposed unequal treaties, denied racial equality to non-Europeans, and applied their legal justice to their own citizens on the territories of some of the weaker states.
To summarize, the classical state system began by establishing sovereignty through the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. This period of history allowed kings to go to war as they saw fit, and yet the balance of power system and diplomacy restricted a reliance on war. Economically, early in the history of the state system, mercantilism was the policy of choice, but after the Industrial Revolution, states began to contemplate the free trade ideas of Adam Smith. Politically, many European states were making significant strides toward democratic government in the nineteenth century, and their colonizing of other continents prepared the way for spreading their state system to the rest of the world.