Disraeli's secret

QUEEN Victoria's favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1803-81), seems at first glance impossibly far removed from our experience. Novelist, wit, orator, arguably the founder of Britain's modern Conservative Party, Disraeli was an exotic to his contemporaries and remains an endless fascination to those who study his life. There were none like him in his time, and not in our time either.

Still, there is good reason to revisit Disraeli's career. He grappled with problems astonishingly similar to those facing the United States today, and in some of the same places, notably the Balkans. Among his legacies was a settlement that conferred peace for thirty years in that tortured region without the posting of a single British soldier. And Disraeli achieved that feat despite a highly popular agitation for a humanitarian intervention that offended his skepticism about moral crusades and that, in his view, would have seriously injured the national interest. This success he owed in no small part to a keenly held concept of that interest. He also possessed rare traits of statesmanship: he knew what he wanted to do, and he persisted in his purpose. To these qualities Disraeli joined a dramatic imagination. His instructive and entertaining career holds relevant lessons even for the dilemmas we face after September 11.

DISRAELI'S ascent to political power was highly improbable. In an age of religious controversy, he was a converted Jew who described himself to Queen Victoria as "the blank page between the Old and the New Testament." (1) To the burden of his origin he added fashionably bad habits. Disraeli bedded many women and borrowed much money; ultimately he was forced to find a respectable and wealthy lady of good standing simply to escape the scandals. His Mary Anne turned out to be not only his rescuer but the love of his life.

Then there was the Disraeli style. A man of medium height and a rather large head surmounted by carefully curled black hair, he dressed like a regency rake in his younger and middle years, sporting highly colored waistcoats and gold chains. Disraeli early exhibited a failing common to gifted men; he could never resist a witticism even if it made him unnecessary enemies. He offended intellectuals by, among other things, dismissing Darwin ("I am on the side of the angels"), and opposing "scientific government." Disraeli thought a large permanent bureaucracy would be dangerous and able men could be just as easily recruited through the spoils system.

Disraeli also made enemies in high society. His first successful novel, Vivian Grey, was a brilliant satire on the political and social life around him. Its characters were thinly disguised; some editions have "keys" at the back for the uninitiated, identifying the real protagonists. It haunted Disraeli's relationships for years. These were qualities that ordinarily took a man out of politics. "Dizzy", as he was universally known, was often his own worst enemy.

"A Spirited Foreign Policy"

DESPITE ALL, Disraeli made it to the top of the "greasy pole" twice. His first premiership in 1868 was brief but succeeded in passing a landmark expansion of the voting franchise. The second, lasting from 1874 to 1880, came near the end of his life but also marked his greatest achievement in foreign affairs.

Although his political program was primarily domestic, Disraeli saw a "spirited foreign policy" as the international dimension of his patriotism. He had entered public life in the 1830s and supported Britain's balance-of-power habit: no continental power or group of powers should become strong enough to threaten Britain or its "permanent" interests. In his view, a superior navy and alliance with at least one substantial land power could best safeguard these interests; sentiment in foreign policy, whether for personal reasons or past services, should be rigorously excluded.

Disraeli was not a professional student of foreign affairs and, notoriously untutored by the facts, imagined many things. European domestic politics, for example, appeared to him merely as a contest between overbearing moneymen and desperate revolutionaries that could be influenced best by Her Majesty's secret service. He thought Louis Napoleon, an old social acquaintance, was a great statesman. Disraeli believed that the aristocratic lords of the American South would win the Civil War. These flirtations with fantasy, however, do not seem to have affected his grasp of reality when it came his turn to conduct the affairs of state.

Throughout a decade in opposition, Disraeli castigated Gladstone's foreign policy for its cant and inactivity. He complained that Britain had sat out the Franco-Prussian War, allowed Russia to violate military restrictions on the Black Sea, and caved to the Union's claims over the Confederate raider Alabama. Worse, Gladstone had failed to keep up the navy while wasting millions on a useless army. Sustained by two bottles of white brandy, Disraeli collected these denunciations in a great three-hour speech on April 3, 1872, which also contained this delicious depiction of the Gladstone cabinet:

... their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very uncommon on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. (2)

Upon becoming Prime Minister with a solid majority in 1874, Disraeli set about to assert neglected British interests. He was already 71 years of age, prone to gout and bronchitis. Never inclined to activist government, he left much of the cabinet's work to his ministers and, Reagan-like, could sometimes be surprised to learn what they had done. But foreign affairs was different. "After rates and taxes and shipping bills, la haute politique is refreshing; worth living for", he confided to a lady friend. (3) He had mastered the parliamentary platform and England; now he would take a grander stage. But an obstacle stood before him: Disraeli's activism contrasted oddly with his first Foreign Secretary; Lord Derby. Derby had been Tory Party leader, a sometime rival but consistent friend of Disraeli. But Derby was a determined "Little Englander" who saw in most international issues snares for Britain best avoided. A singular tension thus ran through the cabinet on foreign affairs. Eventually, Disraeli's greatest fo reign policy triumph would cost him both Derby's friendship and political support.

The Prime Minister's primary target was the Dreikaiserbund. This league of what the British called the "Northern Courts" (St. Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna) supplanted a defeated France after 1871 as the major force in Europe. But the three Emperors were themselves not entirely agreed on every issue. In May 1874, the Russians suspected Bismarck of planning another strike against the embittered French and protested. Disraeli got Derby to associate Britain with the Russian move, all of which greatly irritated Bismarck. The Prime Minister espied an opening to divide Germany and Russia, but Derby was reluctant. "We have been lucky in our foreign policy", he wrote, the implication being that such luck should not be tested.

The Eastern Question and "Humanitarian Intervention"

DISRAELI SAW a fresh opportunity to loosen the Dreikaiserbund when in July 1875 the wild Ottoman Balkan province of Herzegovina revolted, raising the Eastern Question to the center of European diplomacy once more. This complex diplomatic, military and political query arose from an indisputable fact: the Ottoman Empire, once feared for its strength, was now feared for its weakness. A vast Muslim military dictatorship that stretched from the Danube to the Persian Gulf at its height and ruled many people, a quarter of whom were not Muslim, the "Grand Turk" had threatened Vienna as late as 1683. More recently, however, the empire had become, as a czar once put it, like a man suffering from a sickness.

Today we might call "the sick man" a "failing state", but in 1875 it was a very large state not yet finally failed, and not lacking diplomatic skill. The Ottomans played off the various Europeans encroaching on their territory, all the while seeking reforms to restore the empire's military strength. Constantinople became a favorite destination for 19th century political reformers, economists, financiers and military experts, few of whom made much impact. Meanwhile, the Eastern Question expanded: Could the Ottomans ever be reformed? How long would it take? If it could not be done, or not done in time, then who would benefit from the Sick Man's terminal illness?

Most British leaders, beginning with Lord Palmerston, greatly feared the death of the Sick Man. To protect India the Sultan must be upheld, even at the cost of war. A British fleet had ended Napoleon's march toward Anatolia at Acre in 1799 and thirty years later another such bombardment from the seas dissuaded the ambitious Egyptian ruler Muhammed Ali's attack up the coast. In 1854, Britain and France made war against Russia in the Crimea; though it halted the Russian advance, the campaign had been otherwise a disaster, symbolized by the charge of the Light Brigade down the wrong valley. "A just but unnecessary war" had been Disraeli's verdict.

The new Balkan revolt and the Sultan's impending bankruptcy (Britons held one third of the debt) inspired Disraeli on November 3, 1875 to write Lady Bradford, one of his lady friends (alas, sighed a French diplomat, they were all at that point grand-meres!):

I really believe the 'Eastern Question' that has haunted Europe for a century and which I thought the Crimean War had adjourned for half another will fall my lot to encounter--dare I say to settle. (4)

Barely three weeks after this letter, Disraeli arranged the secret purchase of Egyptian Khedive Ismail's shares in the Suez Canal. This sensational surprise was fully exploited by the Prime Minister, who added delicious if fanciful details. Britain now had a defensible interest in a vital waterway but, contrary to the views of Gladstone and others, this was not a prelude to the abandonment of Constantinople. Disraeli meant to defeat the Dreikaiserbund in Europe; Suez had been a lucky circumstance.

His prestige soaring, Disraeli soon took Britain into a defense of the Ottoman Empire even as the Sultan conducted a bloody suppression of the spreading Balkan revolts. Matters began badly when in June 1876 news reached London of Turkish massacres in Bulgaria. Uninformed by a bungling Foreign Office, the old orator had dismissed the reports as "coffee house babble"; he doubted stories of Turkish torture because they "generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner." (5) Disraeli was therefore quite unprepared for Gladstone's famous pamphlet, "The Bulgarian Horror and the Question of the East", issued on September 6.

Gladstone clearly embodied British moral indignation; some 200,000 copies of this striking essay were sold by month's end. "Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible way", he concluded, "namely by carrying off themselves." Britain was now fiercely divided into "Bulgarians" versus "Turks." Partisanship was laced with anti-semitism and personal insult. Gladstone himself believed Disraeli a "crypto Jew" with a "race antipathy" toward the Eastern Christians. Disraeli, for his part, privately called his opponent an "unprincipled maniac ... never a gentleman!" He regarded the famous pamphlet as "ill-written. Indeed in that respect, of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest." (6)

Disraeli feared the worst. Gladstone's agitation might facilitate a Russian war to seize Constantinople in the guise of rescuing the Ottoman Empire's Christian population while Britain applauded, blinded by a moral rage against the Turks. The Crimean War had come about in part because the Russians did not believe Britain would fight for the Ottomans. Disraeli was determined not to repeat the earlier blunder.

Czar Alexander II, his Chancellor Prince Gortchakoff and his Ambassador Count Shuvalov all hastened to assure the British government that Russia had no such warlike intentions. But pan-Slavism influenced the Russian Court, and Russian actions often differed markedly from their proclaimed intent. (In 1873, for example, the Russians had annexed Khiva in Central Asia despite promises not to do so. A massacre of the Turcomans at least equal to the Bulgarian atrocity had followed.) For Disraeli, then, the Balkan uprisings meant not freedom for the oppressed but a contained rebellion likely to deliver the region to the Czar, with British interests the main casualty of a Turkish defeat. This would not do.

Meanwhile, to everyone's surprise, the Turks had beaten the Serbs badly after that nominally Ottoman but Christian province declared war on the Ottomans with open Russian sympathy (including a general to run the campaign). Sensing that the Czar would not allow Serbia's defeat, and momentarily deprived by the "humanitarians" of public support for aiding the Ottomans, Disraeli instructed Derby to arrange a Serb-Ottoman armistice. The Czar, however, demanded a full Turkish withdrawal. In Constantinople, Sultan Abdul Hamid accepted Derby's proposal for a conference of the six powers (Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Russia and the Ottomans) to decide the future. But even before the conference convened, in December 1877, the Russians were mobilizing. Disraeli prodded the War Office to prepare a defense of Constantinople while warning in a speech, "She [England] enters into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done."

Disraeli's conception of what was "right" differed not only from Gladstone's but also from that of many Tories. Propping up the "Sick Man" at the cost of Christian lives looked immoral. Doing so in an exaggerated belief that it would protect India from the Czar seemed a strategic error to many. Leading Conservatives, including Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India and Disraeli's hand-picked representative to the Conference, discounted any Russian drive overland either toward the Suez Canal or through the Persian Gulf. Disraeli had discovered, too, that the very religious Salisbury favored the Christian cause in the Balkans.

Moreover, Disraeli was accused then (and by later historians) of being totally blind to the new force of the age, namely nationalism. In fact, Disraeli's writings and speeches evince an interest in two nationalisms. The first was English (he hardly ever said British). Exotic and foreign though he may have seemed to his contemporaries, Disraeli had a good grasp of popular aspirations and beliefs, although he preferred aristocratic rule. To us he therefore appears simultaneously ahead of his times and behind them. The second nationalism that interested him was the Jewish sort. Disraeli's novels such as Tancred and Alroy offer a literary precursor to the secular Zionism that had just begun to develop near the end of his life. Disraeli was immensely proud of his origins and, in general, helpful to the struggle of British Jewry for equal rights. His novels advocate a return to Zion and the re-establishment of ancient glories, the latter infused by his peculiar reading of the Bible and convenient belief that Judais m and Christianity completed each other. He had once told Constance de Rothschild, "All is race, not religion, remember that." She observed, "he believed more in the compelling power of a common ancestry than in that of a common faith." (7)

It was not, then, that Disraeli missed the emergence of nationalisms but that, beyond the English (and the Jewish), he opposed them. Like every English politician, Disraeli knew the Irish problem. As for the continent, although Disraeli was a worshipper of Byron, the advocate of Greek independence, he was also part of a generation (which included Otto von Bismarck) that soured on the nascent nationalisms of the Balkans. He regarded these movements as sinister, their ambitions insatiable, and their grievances certainly not worth a war.

Disraeli wanted to keep the Russians out of Turkey and he thought this could best be done by mobilizing Britain for conflict while pressing the Sultan to promise yet another set of reforms that would allow the Powers to applaud and go home. But the Ottomans viewed Disraeli's maneuverings as a British pledge to stand behind them; besides, they had beaten the Serbs and were in no mood to take unsolicited advice. The Constantinople Conference thus failed on January 20, 1877, and a subsequent Anglo-Russian effort called the London Protocol was also rejected by the Sultan. Disraeli's only other hope of preventing war, an arrangement with Austria to deter the Russians, also came to naught; St. Petersburg had gotten to Vienna ahead of him, the two powers having reached a secret agreement fixing spheres of interest by mid-March 1877. (Notably, the very able Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Andrassy had insisted that Russia not set up a greater Bulgaria.)

Thus fortified, on April 24 Russia declared war against the Ottomans on the basis of the London Protocol. Derby replied with a note stressing British neutrality if the war did not jeopardize Britain's vital interests, which included the Persian Gulf, Egypt, the Suez Canal, Constantinople, and the Straits. Gladstone then overreached by supporting Russia to the hilt and, with the switch of focus from suffering Christians to the insufferable Russians, the humanitarian faction in British politics quickly lost ground. Public passion now switched dramatically into an anti-Russian fever that gave birth to a new expression, "jingoism." (The music halls rang with the refrain "we do not want to fight but, by Jingo if we do, we've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too." (8)) Disraeli's policy had outlasted popular indignation against the Turks.

Reassured of public support for protecting Turkey, Disraeli now faced a sudden political and personal crisis. Lord Derby opposed his policy to the point of conveying cabinet dissent to the Russian ambassador, apparently hoping to reassure the Czar that England would not fight. This was the final breach between the two old colleagues, ending a thirty-year relationship. Salisbury was poised to succeed him. Salisbury had been a forthright skeptic of defending the Sick Man but, unlike Derby, he was an internationalist. Meanwhile, though checked temporarily at Plevna in July, the Russians were on the verge of capturing Constantinople by year's end. This turned Salisbury around; he saw great danger to British interests, not so much in India but in the Mediterranean. When Disraeli gained secret cabinet agreement for military action to seize Cyprus or Alexandretta, Derby resigned and Salisbury took his place.

Disraeli and Salisbury made a very odd couple. Salisbury was formal, careful, cool and logical; he counted on skill, not luck. His family, the House of Cecil, had been at the center of government, or consulted by it, since the time of Elizabeth I. Disraeli, by contrast, was theatrical and imaginative; he moved comfortably between fact and fantasy, the way things were and the way he wished them to be. Disraeli knew his skill but he also counted on his star. Supremely self-confident, he considered himself superior to the English lords. He had once rejected an anti-Jewish gibe in the House of Commons by declaring that his ancestors had been offering "sacrifices to the Most High when London was a marsh." (Accused of being a sexual adventurer above his station on another occasion, he joked: "Me! Whose ancestors may have had personal relations with the Queen of Sheba!") As for Salisbury himself, Disraeli had already seduced an entire aristocracy; the Marquis, who had often been critical of Disraeli, was merely the last to succumb. Both shared a sarcastic wit. Disraeli's enthusiastic visions combined with Salisbury's cynical efficiency made them a formidable team. (9)

Then came disaster. Plevna did fall to the Russians and in desperation the Sultan sought a loose armistice, signed at Adrianople on January 31, 1878. In great alarm, Disraeli dispatched a fleet of six ironclads to Constantinople, which arrived on February 15. A war credit was voted by Parliament and an expeditionary force organized; reserves were mobilized on March 27. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, the Czar temporized over whether to seize Constantinople; the local commander, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas, also hesitated before the British mobilization. A month elapsed while the Czar changed commanders and, at this point, the Austrians, who also thought Russia had gone too far, declared their opposition to the seizure of the Ottoman capital. The Russians then imposed in March 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano on the Ottomans, a punitive peace, but one that saved Constantinople from Russian assault.

Organizing a Coalition

DISRAELI'S threat of war saved Constantinople. He had overcome both severe cabinet dissent and Gladstone's campaign, but the political atmosphere was poisoned and Derby was gone. Still, Disraeli had gotten the focus right: the apparent Russian intention to seize the Straits appeared an intolerable bid to alter the international balance of power, threatening vital British interests.

Buoyed by a united Britain, Disraeli then organized international opposition to the Treaty of San Stefano which, despite the Austrian-Russian agreement of March 1877, would have created a large Bulgaria athwart the Balkans, touching the Aegean to the south and Albania to the west. Other provisions extended Russian control in Asia Minor. Austria, among others, felt betrayed by San Stefano. Disraeli's diplomacy was therefore able to rally a broad coalition against such a drastic change to the Ottoman frontiers, which had been set by the Treaty of Paris in 1856. The Russians recognized that they needed international consent to impose the terms of the treaty; they hoped to get it at the Congress of Berlin, capital of their ally, the German Empire.

The Congress was a coming-out party for the young Reich, and Bismarck, chairman of the Congress, was determined to make it work. The German Chancellor had established Germany's bona fides with his famous expression of disinterest, saying on December 5, 1876, that "no German interest worth the bones of a Pomeranian musketeer" was at stake in the Balkans. (10) This meant that Germany saw no reason to go to war, but not that Germany lacked serious reason for diplomatic intervention. Its two allies, Russia and Austria, might collide; England and Russia might fight, putting Berlin on the spot. Nor was Bismarck under any illusions about the motivations of the participants. When the Russian Chancellor Gortchakoff wrote to him that the crisis was "European", Bismarck noted: "I have always found the word Europe on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name." (11)

The preliminary to Berlin was the Anglo-Russian Convention negotiated by Shuvalov with Disraeli and Salisbury. Allowed leeway by the irresolute Czar, the Russian diplomat focused on two objectives: Besserabia and the Black Sea towns of Batum and Kars. The British held no brief for Besserabia and they had in mind a counter for the extension of Russian influence: a base in the eastern Mediterranean. On May 26, in utmost secrecy, Disraeli offered the Sultan a defensive affiance with Britain; in return the Ottoman Empire ceded Cyprus. Not knowing this, Shuvalov was pleasantly surprised when the British gave way on Batum and Kars. Shuvalov then conceded that Bulgaria would be not "greater" but split, the north to be autonomous, the south under Turkish rule as modified by the Congress. The Austrians were then brought into a "gentlemen's agreement" that would constrain north Bulgaria against expansion. The question of Bosnia-Herzegovina was left open, although Bismarck urged the Austrians to occupy it quickly even b efore the powers met.

These arrangements allowed Bismarck to schedule the Congress knowing that at least some business would be transacted. In this, the statesmen of the 19th century offer a great lesson to those of the 21st: Summits raise hopes, and the dashing of those hopes superheats an already overheated situation. World leaders should always bring with them edible fruit, ripened ahead of time. (This lesson seems to have been lost, for example, on those who prepared the abortive Camp David Summit in July 2000.)

Toward the end of the Congress of Berlin (June 13-July 13, 1878) Bismarck paid Disraeli a supreme accolade: "Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann" (the old Jew is the man!). Bismarck, who had expected to run it, realized that in fact Disraeli had done so. This testified to a simple yet surpassing quality that so few statesmen possess: a well-defined objective persistently pursued. Disraeli knew what he wanted; it was only a matter of which tactic to choose; and here the political novelist's imagination chose the final stroke. As Lord Redesdale, one of his appointees to the Foreign Office wrote, "He was a master of the stage effect!"

Matters did not go so well at first, however. On June 14 a needy foreign office clerk leaked the Anglo-Russian Convention to the British press. This threatened to make the Congress a farce and so Lord Salisbury simply lied about it to assuage the honor of the participants. In late June, another press leak--this time in Germany--revealed the Cyprus deal. This too was denied while, secretly, British diplomats hastened to secure the missing proclamation by the Sultan that would legally cinch the transaction (it took until July 7). But Cyprus excited Bismarck's admiration and respect. "This is progress!" he exclaimed, which prompted Disraeli to write the Queen: "Evidently his idea of progress was to seize something."

In truth, Disraeli and Bismarck had plenty in common: Byron worship; dislike of cant and cliche; a sharp eye for human foibles; love of witty cynicism. Neither Disraeli nor Bismarck had any use for Balkan nationalism and when the Greek delegation secured a half-hour at the Congress to argue for a larger Greece, it was observed that both statesman "slept the sleep of the just." (12) They were both supreme realists in politics and, while preferring aristocratic domination, knew a nobly defective brain when they saw one. Naturally, then, they both detested Gladstone. They soon impressed each other and Disraeli wrote the Queen about Bismarck's "piquant" conversations, which included many astonishing utterances, including the German's complaint about the Kaiser's conduct! Bismarck in a later conversation also expressed his appreciation of another Disraeli trait: "It was easy to transact business with him; in a quarter of an hour you knew exactly how you stood with him." Precise objectives and concise transactions, rare enough then, are qualities well worthy of imitation today.

There was a final note of drama in Berlin when the Russians sounded to Disraeli as if they were retreating from the arrangement on Bulgaria. Disraeli let it be known that he had ordered a special train, the better to hasten back to England to prepare for war should the Congress fail. In this he called the Czar's bluff, and with it Bismarck's bluff; Germany could no longer pose as honest broker but had to decide whether it was for or against a Russian effort to seize the Straits of Constantinople. Germany was against, and this re-inforced the Czar's hesitations, already evident to his representatives. (The Russian archives indicate that he had decided to compromise even before the train episode, but Disraeli did not know this and, in any event, the story is too good to dismiss.) As for the final piece of the puzzle, Bosnia-Herzegovina was to remain under Ottoman sovereignty but with Austrian administration, thereby giving Andrassy what he wanted: a strategic piece in the Balkans but without incorporating a Sla vic population that would upset the Hungarians in the Dual Monarchy.

Because Disraeli knew what he wanted, he turned the Congress into a triumph despite infirmities that would have disabled most men. Salisbury himself (and his nephew, Arthur James Balfour, who assisted his uncle at Berlin) noted that the chief was too deaf and too ignorant of French to follow much of the proceedings. Lord Odo Russell had evidently talked Disraeli out of addressing the Congress in French on the opening day by pointing out that he would thereby deprive the audience of the "greatest living master of English oratory." Dizzy smiled his sphinx smile; Russell was never sure whether he took the compliment or the hint. In the event he spoke English, which offended the Russians.

Peace with Honor

AFTER SIGNING the Treaty of Berlin on July 13, Disraeli returned in triumph to England. He proclaimed "peace with honour" from his office at Downing Street, a phrase that still echoed sixty years later when Chamberlain brought neither peace nor honor from Munich. But then there was Gladstone thundering against yet another deal with the "unspeakable Turk." Disraeli delivered a glorious counter-stroke, calling Gladstone "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity." (13) In the peals of laughter attending that phrase, Gladstone's pieties had no chance.

It is easy enough to be critical of the Congress of Berlin. Much of it merely ratified decisions already made. Imperial interests overrode the local peoples. There was a surfeit of vanity, arrogance and ignorance. It did not solve the Eastern Question, but only delayed its reckoning. Many have read back the blunders of 1914 into the settlement of 1878, while forgetting that blunders are made by blunderers. Those who stumbled into the Great War were a very different cast from those who avoided a great war at Berlin. When all was said and done, the handiwork of the Congress put off such a conflict for more than thirty years.

Disraeli had managed his part without committing a single English musketeer. Ennobled as Lord Beaconsfield, he closed the chapter in August 1878 with a notable description of the Balkans to the House of Lords:

No language can describe adequately the condition of that portion of the Balkan Peninsula--Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina. No words can describe the political intrigue, the constant rivalries, a total absence of all public spirit, a hatred of all races, animosities of rival religions, absence of any controlling power. Nothing short of 50,000 of Europe's best troops would produce anything like order in those parts. (14)

How strikingly similar to the Balkans of the 1990s, right down to the number of soldiers deployed by NATO. But Washington has not been so fortunate or skillful as that London of so long ago. American troops are in the region, and some of them, at least, will be there for a long time.

There was a final and curious footnote to the Bismarck-Disraeli relationship, one that bore directly on Disraeli's aim to sink the Dreikaiserbund. It took a year to accomplish the always difficult task of keeping the Russians to their word, but by August 1879 they were out of the Balkans. A month later the German Ambassador, Count Munster, came to Disraeli's country home (Hughenden) for dinner. There, on September 26, they discussed what Disraeli described later as Bismarck's proposal for an Anglo-German-Austrian alliance. Historians differ over whether this was a German proposal, or, as the Count reported to Bismarck, a British one. (15) Munster apparently asked Disraeli what England would do if Germany and Russia went to war over the Balkan settlement, and Disraeli answered, "We will in that case keep France quiet." To which Bismarck said to Munster: "Is that all?" (In 1914, of course, that would have been more than enough!)

This conversation may simply have been an adjunct to Bismarck's negotiations with Austria-Hungary, which resulted in a military alliance announced on October 7. Bismarck understood that Disraeli's policy at the Congress of Berlin had indeed splintered the Dreikaiserbund, and Bismarck's recreation of a Zweikaiserbund was a form of protection against the Czar, who had been complaining ominously about the German propensity to side with the British on the international commissions set up to carry out the Congress of Berlin's "peace with honor." Going to London might have been part of Bismarck's tactic to bring the always reluctant Viennese to a conclusion. In any event, it seems highly unlikely that Disraeli would have fallen in with a permanent plan to isolate the French.

This story, of course, had another significance. It reflects the fact that England and Disraeli in particular were being taken seriously in Europe. But Disraeli's satisfaction with his achievements was short-lived. Britain was soon involved in distant wars to punish Afghanistan and subdue the Zulus, both campaigns begun by imperial officials disinclined to inform London of their plans. A sour economy completed Disraeli's undoing. In the general election of 1880, the Tories were badly defeated by Gladstone's Liberals, and Gladstone lost no time in repudiating his predecessor's politics. Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield) watched helplessly from the House of Lords where, as he put it, "I am dead; dead but in the Elyssian fields." (16)

Before long, the Russians, sensing Britain's retirement from continental engagement, browbeat the Sultan into forbidding the passage of warships into the Black Sea. The Sultan, in turn, never carried out the reforms promised to the Western powers. It was Gladstone, the anti-imperialist and little Englander, who occupied Egypt in 1882. In Europe, freed of Disraeli, Bismarck went back to his imperial knitting. The Dreikaiserbund never entirely recovered, but England ceased to matter much in continental calculations until Lord Salisbury reasserted British power in the 1890s. Disraeli himself was spared all of this, dying peacefully at home on April 19, 1881, already a legend.

Constancy of Purpose

HISTORICAL comparison between our time and Disraeli's requires a leap of the imagination. The differences are stark: Disraeli's world was Eurocentric, ours arguably centered on America. The United States is far more powerful relative to other powers than was Britain at its imperial zenith. And instead of having to manage a shifting balance of power, America counts on NATO and Japan as the linchpins of stable alliances west and east.

Still, let us take a leap. Might not Russia and China form a kind of Zweikaiserbund, their objective to diminish American influence in their respective spheres? If and when the United States decides to act against Iraq or, better yet, Iran, could we find our European allies, Bismarck-like, proposing an international conference to avoid a conflict? One smiles, of course, to imagine Bush as Disraeli, Putin and Jiang Zemin as the Czar and Franz Josef, and Javier Solana (or Blair or Chirac or Schroder) as (gasp) Bismarck, not to speak of Saddam or Ayatollah Khamenei as the Sultan Abdul Hamid. Yet, as Marx observed, history may repeat itself as farce.

Even if it doesn't, Disraeli's story still offers obvious and immediate lessons for American statesmen grappling with the aftermath of September 11. Our public opinion, no less than Victorian England's, is volatile and morally aroused; we sympathize with the oppressed, and we suspect foreign autocracies. Americans expect their leaders nonetheless to heed the national interest, to avoid dead ends, and nor to spill blood, especially American blood, without good cause. We like to lead coalitions but not to be bound by them. And when the crisis abroad subsides, we want our president to deal with fires at home.

At the dawn of the democratic age, Disraeli dealt successfully with all of these challenges save the last. He advised others that "the secret of success is constancy of purpose", and this was his secret, too. His purpose was to disrupt the Dreikaiserbund before it harmed England's security, and he used the Eastern Question to do so despite a ferocious demand for a wrong-headed humanitarian intervention. And he was willing to pay the price, losing a vital political ally in the process. Peace in the Balkans for thirty years was a humane by-product of his single-minded pursuit of Britain's national interest.

For Disraeli, power was either applied to purpose or it was not power at all. He knew how to create an international coalition around a common objective, and how not to lose his way in the warmth of its company. The summits of Disraeli's day, no less than his private conversations, were meals well cooked before they were served. Last and surely not least, Disraeli understood with a novelist's imagination how dreams and color could be used to arrest public attention and train it upon essential issues.

Since September 11, Washington has rediscovered some of these virtues. When George W Bush proclaimed that "we have found our mission", he and his administration had also found a Disraelian purpose. But will the President be constant? Can he work without as well as with the floating coalition fighting the war against terrorism? Can he keep the American people -- and the Congress -- attentive to his objectives? Across the divide of history, we can imagine Disraeli's thin smile fixed upon us. He would have understood.

(1.) Robert Blake, Disraeli (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966), p. 504.

(2.) Blake, p. 523.

(3.) Sarah Bradford, Disraeli (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), p. 335.

(4.) Blake, p. 575.

(5.) Bradford, p. 336.

(6.) Ibid., pp. 336-7.

(7.) Bradford, p. 186.

(8.) Bradford, p. 345.

(9.) For an account of their relationship see Andrew Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), Pp. 37-8, 198-9.

(10.) Quoted in Erich Eyck, Bismarck and the German Empire (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 246.

(11.) Eyck, p. 246.

(12.) Misha Glenny, The Balkans (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 142.

(13.) Blake, p. 650.

(14.) Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series, Vol. 24, August 1878, pp. 1759-60.

(15.) Blake, pp. 676-9. Compare Eyck, pp. 2 65-7, and Roberts, pp. 233-5.

(16.) Bradford, p. 384.

RELATED ARTICLE

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men.

Benjamin Disraeli

Harvey Sicherman is president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He advised Secretaries of State Haig, Shultz and Baker.

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