The brilliant Finance Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, son of a provincial draper, was charged with unifying the tax administration and financing constant war. No amount of wealth or possessions would avail him then. That was one reason why he liked to give his ministers authority over the highest in the Land, even over the Princes of the Blood.
With a unified kingdom spared the ravages of internal war, possessing a skilled bureaucracy and a military surpassing that of any neighboring state, France was for a while in a position to seek dominance in Europe.
In the end, as was the case with all later aspirants to European hegemony, each new conquest galvanized an opposing coalition of nations. The opposition to Louis was not ideological or religious in nature: French remained the language of diplomacy and high culture through much of Europe, and the Catholic-Protestant divide ran through the allied camp.
Rather, it was inherent in the Westphalian system and indispensable to preserve the pluralism of the European order. Its character was defined in the name contemporary observers gave it: the Great Moderation. Louis sought what amounted to hegemony in the name of the glory of France. He was defeated by a Europe that sought its order in diversity.
Situated on the harsh North German plain and extending from the Vistula across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline and public service to substitute for the larger population and greater resources of better-endowed countries. Split into two noncontiguous pieces, it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and Polish spheres of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the discipline with which it marshaled its limited resources.
Its greatest assets were civic- mindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well-trained army. When Frederick II ascended the throne in , he seemed an unlikely contender for the greatness history has vouchsafed him.
Finding the dour discipline of the position of Crown Prince oppressive, he had attempted to flee to England accompanied by a friend, Hans Hermann von Katte.
They were apprehended. The King ordered von Katte decapitated in front of Frederick, whom he submitted to a court-martial headed by himself. He cross-examined his son with questions, which Frederick answered so deftly that he was reinstated.
Frederick concluded that great-power status required territorial contiguity for Prussia, hence expansion. There was no need for any other political or moral justification. In the process, Frederick brought war back to the European system, which had been at peace since when the Treaty of Utrecht had put an end to the ambitions of Louis XIV.
The price for being admitted as a new member to the European order turned out to be seven years of near-disastrous battle. Russia, remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European balance of power. At the edge of defeat, with Russian armies at the gates of Berlin, Frederick was saved by the sudden death of Catherine the Great.
The new Czar, a longtime admirer of Frederick, withdrew from the war. Hitler, besieged in encircled Berlin in April , waited for an event comparable to the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg and was told by Joseph Goebbels that it had happened when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt died. The Holy Roman Empire had become a facade; no rival European claimant to universal authority had arisen. Almost all rulers asserted that they ruled by divine right—a claim not challenged by any major power—but they accepted that God had similarly endowed many other monarchs. Wars were therefore fought for limited territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing governments and institutions, nor to impose a new system of relations between states.
Tradition prevented rulers from conscripting their subjects and severely constrained their ability to raise taxes. International orders that have been the most stable have had the advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals.
National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign minister could serve a monarch of another nationality every Russian foreign minister until was recruited abroad , or when a territory could change its national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance, a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent.
Power calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct. This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral convictions of a common European outlook. Europe was never more united or more spontaneous than during what came to be perceived as the age of enlightenment. New triumphs in science and philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of tradition and faith.
Spreading through nature in all directions like a river which has burst its dams, this fermentation has swept with a sort of violence everything along with it which stood in its way. The political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, applied the principles of the balance of power to domestic policy by describing a concept of checks and balances later institutionalized in the American Constitution. He went on from there into a philosophy of history and of the mechanisms of societal change.
Surveying the histories of various societies, Montesquieu concluded that events were never caused by accident. All [seeming] accidents are subject to these causes, and whenever an accidental battle, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state as a result of a single battle. In short, it is the general pace of things which draws all particular events along with it. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest philosopher of the Enlightenment period, took Montesquieu a step further by developing a concept for a permanent peaceful world order.
The answer, Kant held, was a voluntary federation of republics pledged to non- hostility and transparent domestic and international conduct. The Enlightenment philosophers ignored a key issue: Can governmental orders be invented from scratch by intelligent thinkers, or is the range of choice limited by underlying organic and cultural realities the Burkean view?
The Enlightenment philosophers on the Continent generally opted for the rationalist rather than the organic view of political evolution. In the process, they contributed— unintentionally, indeed contrary to their intention—to an upheaval that rent Europe for decades and whose aftereffects reach to this day. So it was with the French Revolution, which proclaimed a domestic and world order as different from the Westphalian system as it was possible to be.
It demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French Revolution.
Revolutions erupt when a variety of often different resentments merge to assault an unsuspecting regime. The broader the revolutionary coalition, the greater its ability to destroy existing patterns of authority. But the more sweeping the change, the more violence is needed to reconstruct authority, without which society will disintegrate.
Reigns of terror are not an accident; they are inherent in the scope of revolution. The French Revolution occurred in the richest country of Europe, even though its government was temporarily bankrupt. Its original impetus is traceable to leaders— mostly aristocrats and upper bourgeoisie—who sought to bring the governance of their country into conformity with the principles of the Enlightenment. It gained a momentum not foreseen by those who made the Revolution and inconceivable to the prevailing ruling elite.
At its heart was a reordering on a scale that had not been seen in Europe since the end of the religious wars. For the revolutionaries, human order was the reflection of neither the divine plan of the medieval world, nor the intermeshing of grand dynastic interests of the eighteenth century.
The popular will, as conceived in that manner, was altogether distinct from the concept of majority rule prevalent in England or of checks and balances embedded in a written constitution as in the United States. These theories prefigured the modern totalitarian regime, in which the popular will ratifies decisions that have already been announced by means of staged mass demonstrations.
In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies; because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail, had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by imposing its principles. The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth, and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society.
The concept of an international order with prescribed limits of state action was overthrown in favor of a permanent revolution that knew only total victory or defeat. In November , the French National Assembly threw down the gauntlet to Europe with a pair of extraordinary decrees.
It also declared war on Austria and invaded the Netherlands. In December , an even more radical decree was issued with an even more universal application. To achieve such vast and universal objectives, the leaders of the French Revolution strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition.
Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of the s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the s and s. Eventually, order was restored, as it must be if a state is not to disintegrate.
The essence of the Great Man was his refusal to acknowledge traditional limits and his insistence on reordering the world by his own authority. The Revolution no longer made the leader; the leader defined the Revolution.
As he tamed the Revolution, Napoleon also made himself its guarantor. But he also saw himself—and not without reason—as the capstone of the Enlightenment. He created the Napoleonic Code, on which the laws that still prevail in France and other European countries are based. He was tolerant of religious diversity and encouraged rationalism in government, with the end of improving the lot of the French people. It was as the simultaneous incarnation of the Revolution and expression of the Enlightenment that Napoleon set about to achieve the domination and unification of Europe.
By , under his brilliant military leadership, his armies crushed all opposition in Western and Central Europe, enabling him to redraw the map of the Continent as a geopolitical design. He annexed key territories to France and established satellite republics in others, many of them governed by relatives or French marshals. A uniform legal code was established throughout Europe. Thousands of instructions on matters economic and social were issued.
Would Napoleon become the unifier of a continent divided since the fall of Rome? Two obstacles remained: England and Russia. As it would a century and a half later, England stood alone in Western Europe, aware that a peace with the conqueror would make it possible for a single power to organize the resources of the entire Continent and, sooner or later, overcome its rule of the oceans.
England waited behind the channel for Napoleon and a century and a half later, for Hitler to make a mistake that would enable it to reappear on the Continent militarily as a defender of the balance of power.
Napoleon had grown up under the eighteenth-century dynastic system and, in a strange way, accepted its legitimacy. In it, as a Corsican of minor standing even in his hometown, he was illegitimate by definition, which meant that, at least in his own mind, the legitimacy of his rule depended on the permanence—and, indeed, the extent —of his conquests.
Whenever there remained a ruler independent of his will, Napoleon felt obliged to pursue him. Napoleon could not live in an international order; his ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for that his power fell just barely too short. Not until Napoleon succumbed to the temptation to enter territories where local resources were insufficient for the support of a huge army—Spain and Russia—would he face defeat, first by overreaching himself, above all in Russia in , and then as the rest of Europe united against him in a belated vindication of Westphalian principles.
The defeat in Russia was by attrition. After the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon refused settlements that would have enabled him to keep some of his conquests. He feared that any formal acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. The Napoleonic period marked the apotheosis of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the examples of Greece and Rome, its thinkers had equated enlightenment with the power of reason, which implied a diffusion of authority from the Church to secular elites.
Now these aspirations had been distilled further and concentrated on one leader as the expression of global power.
It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. Its strength raised fundamental issues for the balance of power in Europe, and its aspirations threatened to make impossible a return to the prerevolutionary equilibrium.
The liberties of Europe and its concomitant system of order required the participation of an empire far larger than the rest of Europe together and autocratic to a degree without precedent in European history. Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully.
It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun. Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a beach.
From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent. Everything about Russia—its absolutism, its size, its globe-spanning ambitions and insecurities—stood as an implicit challenge to the traditional European concept of international order built on equilibrium and restraint.
With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears. The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty — and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era.
Europe was coming to embrace its multipolarity as a mechanism tending toward balance, but Russia was learning its sense of geopolitics from the hard school of the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed borders. There raids for plunder and the enslavement of foreign civilians were regular occurrences, for some a way of life; independence was coterminous with the territory a people could physically defend. Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.
In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise.
The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources. Thus the American man of letters Henry Adams recorded the outlook of the Russian ambassador in Washington in by which point Russia had reached Korea : His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed on the single idea that Russia must roll —must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way … When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent.
With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements. It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states on average, , square kilometers annually from to When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status.
When it was weak, it masked its vulnerability through brooding invocations of vast inner reserves of strength. In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to dealing with a somewhat more genteel style.
Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security. In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold.
A common Christian faith and a shared elite language French underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had been born in into a still essentially medieval Russia. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested modern techniques and professional disciplines personally.
Yet the suddenness of the transformation left Russia with the insecurities of a parvenu. This is clearly demonstrated by the following Observations. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them, however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking.
According to recent polls, Stalin too has acquired some of this recognition in contemporary Russian thinking. It is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places. Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but would even have proved its entire Ruin.
Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance. The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity.
Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit. Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance.
They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians! By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler. A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations.
For on behalf of its new vision of legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power. Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he oversaw an unprecedented review of , Russian troops on the plains outside the French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations.
In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist.
Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.
The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the Atlantic Alliance.
It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war. After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war.
The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes. But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in were in a radically different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia.
The application of Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent, or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions. The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution or of Napoleon.
A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in , bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by French armies.
That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.
Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. These were large and polyglot roughly present-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland , and now of uncertain political cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests.
Their territory had to be redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium. The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real- time contact with their capitals. If you can save files to your SD card, but you are still unable to download any files from WhatsApp to your device, you may need to delete WhatsApp data from your SD card.
One of the solutions above should be able to get you out of this persistent error. Just remember to restart the device after each solution until you find one that works.
With it, you can:. Product-related questions? Gabriel Hammond August 6, Updated: November 9, What is it? The following are just some of the most effective solutions to try; 1. Check the Internet Connection The first thing you should do when faced with this error is to check that you are connected to the internet. Check the Date and Time You may also experience this problem if the date and time on your device is not set correctly.
Step 3: Now open WhatsApp again to see if the error still persists. If it does, try our next solution. In this post, we will show you some useful and convenient Google Chrome tips and tricks with which you can do your work much faster. By default, Chrome is set to open a PDF document internally. To fix the issue, you can use another program like Adobe Reader to open PDF files by changing the settings. After that, Chrome will download all PDF files that you attempt to viewing rather than open them.
It is defined as a temporary endeavour with a defined beginning and end usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables , undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value Enterprise Therefore, a project is considered a failure when it has not delivered what was required, in line with expectations Project Smart If key stakeholders agreed that a project had to exceed its initial budget, the project may still be considered a success ibid.
Likewise, if a project delivered everything that was in the detailed project designs, it may still be considered a failure if it didn't include vital elements that the key stakeholders needed.
This doesn't seem fair, but project success and failure isn't just about the facts, nor is it simply about what was delivered. It's also, crucially, about how the project is perceived. Therefore, in order to succeed, a project must deliver to cost, to quality, and on time; and it must deliver the benefits presented in the business case. Therefore, in Zimbabwean context rural projects are associated with failures because of many reasons which include, lack of funding, poor project planning, poor governance, corruption, poor planning, climate changes, poor work force, lack of technology, lack of communication, lack of consultation to the project beneficiaries, inability to work in triple constraints, elite capture among others.
In addition I will highlight the recommendations to be done to avoid and minimise project failure. It may be of paramount importance to first highlight what is project failure, which is characterised by factors such as inability to meet deadline, inability to meet objectives, in ability to deliver services and inability to bring positive change. According to Mind tools project failure is opposite of project success which it is defined as that, the project which is delivered "in line with expectations ".
Therefore in Zimbabwe rural projects fail because of lack of funding and corruption. Projects implemented by Zimbabwean government often suffer financial constraints. For instance the Zambezi Water Project which was started in with an objective of being the permanent water source to Matabeleland province. This project lack funds so it is a failure because it is failed to meet specified objectives and time now is overdue. In rural areas irrigation schemes projects are failing because of lack of funding.
The main drawback is financial constraints. In addition road surfacing of Zvishavane-Rutenga road failed because of lack funding. For now the project is at stagnant position because of financial constraints. Although lack of financial resources to fund rural project is to blame, also the corruption is also responsible for failure of other rural projects which are said to have lack funds. Therefore, corruption and financial constraints also works hand in hand to cause project failures in rural areas in Zimbabwe.
Projects are funded by the government through the Constituency Development Fund CDF and the Members of Parliament divert the funds to fund their personal projects at the expense of community projects.
This causes project failures in rural areas because funds will be misused at the expense of the project. For example in Chikomba West constituency in Mashonaland East province people were in arms over the alleged abuse of constituency development funds provided to the parliamentarian who represents the district, charging that local lawmaker Michael Bimha has not put the cash to use to raise living standards in the community Chiripasi Therefore, the lack of funding may be necessitated by corruption and diversion of resources.
Corruption comes first reducing project funds, diverting funds, and then lack of funding to projects becomes an output. However, one can argue that lack of funds may be accompanied by corruption to cause project failure. Moreover, poor project planning is also a cause of failure in rural projects. All Africa. This means project managers tend to omit the important preliminary stages which enable project success. Therefore this is mainly done by government when government officials want to do problem analysis they do the so called rural tourism in rural areas and held the rapid rural appraisal.
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