How 1860s Mexico offered an alternative vision for a liberal international order

By Tom Long, Professor of International Relations, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Carsten-Andreas Schulz, Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge

In 1867, the world’s most powerful statesmen, including Austria’s Emperor Franz Josef, France’s Napoleon III and US secretary of state, William H. Seward, petitioned the Mexican government to spare the life of a condemned man.

Mexico’s ragtag army and militias had just humbled France, then Europe’s preeminent land power. The costly six-year campaign drained the French treasury and eroded Napoleon III’s domestic support. Napoleon’s ambition to transform Mexico into a client empire under a Vienna-born, Habsburg archduke, crowned Maximilian I, ended in spectacular failure.

After…

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