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colonial agenda, unlike the United States, where President Theodore Roosevelt understood
how both global trade and global military force projection, on the one hand, and foreign
ports of call on the other, went hand in glove. But that would soon change.
COLONIES AS SYMBOLS OF MILITARY STATUS
The second reason why Africa was so coveted by the European colonial powers was ex-
ternal. It related to political and military rivalries that had begun to dramatically increase
around the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a century that had begun in war and the
threat of global (think European) domination, as France under the leadership of Napoleon
Bonaparte had sought to conquer the world under the guise of exporting the democratic
ideals of the French Revolution to the rest of the world. Napoleon had been stopped, barely,
by a coalition of European powers, and out of the ashes of the Napoleonic War came a new
commitment to global peace. In Vienna in 1815, the victorious powers, intent on finding
a suitable mechanism for ensuring world peace, had crafted a new solution. They would
tweak the current arrangement, what was known as the classical balance of power system,
whereby no single country was allowed to acquire a preponderance of power, defined as
more power than that of the rest of the major national powers combined. This tweaking
involved adding two new dimensions to the strategies then currently employed under the
balance of power. First, global peace would become the special responsibility of the lar-
ger national powers, in this case the Big Five of Great Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and
Austria-Hungary, rather than giving all nations, large and small, equal responsibility for
peace. And second, all national governments would engage in pro-active, formalized and
regularized diplomacy so as to forestall any emerging international problem from evolving
into a fully blown crisis and even military hostilities (think both the underlying and imme-
diate set of events that resulted in World War I).
This reconfigured and revitalized balance of power system worked fairly well for al-
most half a century. But by mid-nineteenth century, a new political surge swept across
Europe. It was the wave of democratic change, influenced by the two great movements of
the late eighteenth century, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Now the
great monarchs of Europe were under attack from within, domestic revolutionaries bent on
overthrowing the monarchical system and replacing it with something more akin to major-
ity or at least more democratic rule. The result was a withdrawal of focus on the pro-active
cooperative diplomatic ventures designed to prevent international conflict that had charac-
terized the early post-Napoleonic era, replaced by a new emphasis on combating domestic
turmoil.
This, in turn, was accompanied by another phenomenon. The Industrial Revolution
was beginning to find its way into the military sector of society. And this had a dramatic
effect on the comparative power rankings of European countries. No longer was a nation
restricted to increasing its military power by adding more local foot soldiers or by finding
new military allies and adding their foot soldiers to the mix. Now a country could quickly
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