Introduction

Abstract

Like so much in British history and historiography, the concept of the ‘primacy of foreign policy’ is a German import.¹ In its original prescriptive form, it was a demand for the strict subordination of all domestic matters to the external demands of the European state system.² The descriptive use of the term, on the other hand, notes rather than celebrates the salience of foreign policy concerns in the politics and internal development of the state.³ ‘The degree of independence’, the doyen of modern historiography Leopold von Ranke wrote, ‘determines a state’s position in the world, and requires that the state mobilize all its inner resources for the goal of self-preservation. This is its supreme law.’⁴ This approach was subsequently elaborated at some length by the constitutional and administrative historian Otto Hintze. ‘As a result of constant rivalry and competition between themselves’, he wrote, ‘individual states find themselves forced into a continuous intensivisation and rationalisation of their administrative apparatus’.⁵ The entire narrative of modern Prusso-German history from the state-building of the Great Elector and Frederick William I, the preventive wars of Frederick the Great, through the Prussian reform period and the era of unification to the origins of the First World War, was thus explained with reference to the extreme foreign-political exposure of a state sandwiched between more powerful predators in the centre of Europe.