242 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Great Powers at the Ottoman Empire's direct expense1 were the acquisi-
tion of the tiny Caucasian districts of Akhaltzik and Akhalkalaki after the
Russo-Turkish War of A.D. 1828-9 by Russia2 and the acquisition of
Qars-Ardahan-Batum, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Cyprus by Russia,
Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain respectively after the Russo-Turk-
ish War of A.D. 1877-8. All other territories lost by the Ottoman Empire
after A.D. 1815 went to the making of the national states of Greece,
Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The Hapsburg Monarchy did
not even reacquire a Northern Serbia and a Western Wallachia that it
had held from A.D. 1718 to A.D. 1739. By contrast, the territories per-
manently lost by the Ottoman Empire between A.D. 1683 and A.D. i8i53
had all been acquired by one or other of the two adjoining Great Powers
in the Western system. Between those two dates the Danubian Hapsburg
Monarchy had acquired the whole of the Ottoman portion of Hungary
and Croatia, together with the Bukovina, and Russia the whole northern
and north-eastern hinterland of the Black Sea, from the east bank of the
Pruth to the south bank of the Rion, that had formerly lain under Otto-
man sovereignty or suzerainty.

These clusters of newly created minor states on the American and the
Near Eastern fringes of the Western World were not, however, such
remarkable by-products of a latter-day Western Balance of Power as the
states of the same small calibre that emerged or survived nearer to the
centre of the system, where the political pressure was more severe. The
classic case here was the success with which, from A.D 1667 to A.D. 1945,
first France and then Germany had been prevented from acquiring the
Southern Netherlands by coalitions of Powers which had taken up arms
to preserve the sovereignty of Spain, Austria, and Belgium in turn over
this small but strategically important piece of territory. A corresponding
play of the Balance of Power had enabled Portugal in the seventeenth
century to anticipate the Spanish American countries' nineteenth-century
achievement of breaking away from Spain, and had enabled Spain her-
self, as well as the United Netherlands and Sweden, in the eighteenth
century to retain her independence after she had fallen out of the ranks
of the Great Powers. On the eve of a General War of A.D, 1914-18 which
was to open with Germany's unprovoked violation of the neutrality of
Belgium, the existence of nine small neutral states in Western Europe—
the three Low Countries, the three Scandinavian Countries, the two
Iberian Countries, and Switzerland—looked like an even better augury
for the future maintenance of a Western Balance of Power than the
existence of eight Great Powers in the World at large at the same
date.

Thus, at the time by when the Western Balance of Power had been 'a
going concern' for rather more than four hundred years, the international

* The North African territories which France and Great Britain respectively brought
under their control between A.D. 1830, the date of the beginning of the French conquest
of Algeria, and A.D. 1881-3, which witnessed the establishment of a French protectorate
over Tunisia and a British military occupation of Egypt, had already ceased to be
Ottoman de facto, though they were still Ottoman dejure.

* See IX. viii. 195$, n. i.

3 The Morea, -which was conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Venice in and after
A,D. 1684, had been reconquered in A.D. 1715,