Nordic system

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Europe at the time of the Seven Years' War

The Nordic system is the concept of alliance that pursued Russian foreign policy in the first decade of Catherine II's government under the leadership of Nikita Ivanovich Panin .

History of origin

The Nordic system emerged as a program of Russian diplomacy in response to the political isolation that Russia had gotten into after leaving the anti-Prussian league of the Seven Years' War since 1762. As a counterweight to the continuing Habsburg-Bourbon alliance in southern Europe, Panin believed that a new independent alliance system should be created under Russia's leadership: a Nordic accord between Russia, England , Prussia and Denmark , which also included Sweden and Poland as passive partners.

Effects

The Nordic system only achieved a rudimentary political reality. It is true that Russia was able to supplement its alliance with Prussia of 1764 , which was to form the basis of the system, in 1765 with a friendship treaty with Denmark and in 1766 with a new trade agreement with England. But Panin's diplomacy did not succeed in elevating the informal cooperation between the potential allies, as it had developed especially in the Nordic politics of the 1760s - in the perception of common interests towards Sweden - to the level of a more formal alliance. This failed because of England's rejection of closer ties to Russian policy on Europe and the Orient and because of Prussia's reluctance to expand the Russo-Prussian Entente to other powers. In the long term, however, other foreign policy orientations also came to the fore for Russia itself. Both the Polish question and new perspectives in the politics of the Orient made it necessary to change the alliance concepts in the 1770s, which replaced the Nordic system.

literature

  • Aleksandrov, PA: Severnaja sistema , M 1914;
  • Rahbek-Schmidt, K., How did Panin's plan for a Nordic system come about? , in: Zeitschrift für Slawistik 2 (1957);
  • Griffiths, DM, The Rise and Fall of the Northern System: Court Politics and Foreign Policy in the First Half of Catherine's II Reign , in: Canadian Slavic Studies 4 (1970).
  • Hans-Joachim Torke: Lexicon of the History of Russia , CH Beck, Munich 1985, p. 260