姓 名: 白 玉 专 业：英 语 年级、班级：12级3班
学 号：12301057 作业日期：2013.12.07
章 节：Chapter 4 The Growing Power of Western Europe
作业要求：Write a summary of the Growing Power of Western Europe in about 800 -1000 words in English.
Summary（字体加黑）
The Growing Power of Western Europe
When you read a European map, you set a compass on the city of Paris, and draw a circle with a radius of 500 miles; a zone would be marked out of which much of modern “Western” civilization. But within it were England, southern Scotland, France, the Low Countries, Switzerland, western and central Germany, and northern Italy.
The western European influence grew steadily in the half-century following the Peace of Westphalia. The fading out of the Italian Renaissance, the subsiding of religious wars, the ruin of the Holy Roman Empire, and the decline of Spain all cleared the stage of which the Dutch, English, and French were to be the principal actors.
No one else in modern history has held so powerful a position for so long a time. Louis XIV was more than a figurehead. For over half a century, during his whole adult life, he has the actual and working head of the French government and he made France the strongest country in Europe. French architecture and landscape gardens, and French styles in clothes, cooking, and etiquette became the accepted standard for Europe. Louis XIV was called by his fascinated admirers Louis the Great, the Grand Monarque, and the Sun King. Internationally, the consuming political question of the last decades of the seventeenth century was the fate of the still vast possessions of the Spanish crown. Spain was what Turkey was later called, “the sick man of Europe.”
Louis XIV‘s expansionist policies followed two main lines. One was to push the French borders eastward to the Rhine, annexing the Spanish Netherlands and the Free County of Burgundy, a French-speaking region lying between ducal Burgundy and Switzerland. The other line of Louis XIV’s ambitions, increasingly clear as time went on, was his hope of obtaining the entire Spanish inheritance for himself. Were Louis XIV to succeed in his aims, he would create the “universal monarchy” dreaded by diplomats, that is to say, a political situation in which one state might subordinate all others to its will. The technique used against universal monarchy was the balance of power.
Louis, the most tireless of his enemies, and the one who did more than any other to checkmate him was the Dutchman William III. The Dutch required a nationality of their own in the long struggle against Spain and with it a pride in their own freedom and independence. They enjoyed a degree of comfort, and of intellectual, artistic, and commercial achievement unexcelled in Europe. Dutch paintings in this era showed certain characteristics of the wider 17th century artistic style that came to be known as Baroque. In 1609 the Dutch founded the Bank of Amsterdam. European money was a chaos; coins were minted not only by great monarchs but also by small states and cities in Germany and Italy, and even by private persons.
Since the real impact of France was yet to be felt, and the real bid of Louis XIV for universal monarchy was yet to be made, and since the English at this time were rapidly gaining in strength, the entrance of England was a decisive addition to the balance formed against French expansion.
After the defeat of Spanish Armada and recession of the Spanish threat the English were for a time less closely involved with the affairs of the Continent. For the English the 17th was an age of great achievement, during which they made their debut as one of the chief peoples of modern Europe. The English were enterprising and affluent, though in 1600 far outdistanced by the Dutch. They had a large and more productive country than the Dutch, and were therefore not as limited to purely mercantile and seafaring occupations.
In England, as elsewhere in the 17th century, the kings clashed with their old medieval representative institutions. In England the old institution, Parliament, won out against the king. Other classes drew less immediate advantage from the Restoration. Parliament excluded any Dissenting from the town “corporations”, governing bodies, forbade any dissenting clergymen to teach school or come within five miles of an incorporated town, and prohibited all religious meetings, called “conventicles,” ,not held according tot he forms and by the authority of the Church of England.
But it was not long after the Restoration that Parliament and king were again at odds. The main issue was again religion, Many Protestants throughout Europe at this time were returning voluntarily to Roman Catholicism, a tendency naturally dreaded by the Protestant churches. While these arrangements were unknown in detail in England, it was known that Charles2 was well disposed to the French and to Roman Catholicism. England went to war again with the Dutch.
The England contrariwise, had added reason to fight the French. A French victory would mean counterrevolution and royal absolutism in England. The whole Revolution of 1688 was at stake in the French wars. In 1707 the United Kingdom of Great Britain was created. The Scots retained their own legal system and established Presbyterian Church, but their government and parliament were merged with those of England.
The Irish emerge from the seventeenth century as most repressed people of Western Europe. The evens of 1688 came to be known to the England as the Glorious Revolution. But the landowning interest was the only class sufficiently wealthy, numerous, educated, and self-conscious stand on its own feet. The rule of the ‘gentlemen of England’ was within its strict limits a regime of political liberty.
Ultimately, the powers accepted each other as members of the European system; recognized each other as sovereign states connected only by free negotiation, war, and treaty; and adjusted their differences through rather facile exchanges of territory, made in the interests of a balance of power, and without regard to the nationality or presumed wishes of the peoples affected.
