ALLIANCE OF THE REPUBLICS, THE, the standing understanding between the Commonwealth and the United Provinces (q.v.) founded by the Treaty of the Hague in 1678, and the single most durable fixture of this Commonwealth's foreign policy across two and a quarter centuries of a Continent that has otherwise rearranged itself past any founder's recognition. Its origin lies in the Guelderland War (q.v.) of 1672 to 1678, in which the Commonwealth found the Dutch republic under a French invasion its own trading rivalry with the Dutch had, only eight years before, made this Commonwealth privately rather pleased to witness; that the Commonwealth chose, within a decade of its own Second Dutch War, to fight beside the very republic it had lately fought against is a reversal this contributor's colleagues in diplomatic history still cite as the clearest single instance of the principle upon which the whole Alliance has since rested: that two republics, whatever their trading quarrels, share an interest against any single continental power capable of mastering them both that no monarchy sharing a border with either has ever found it prudent to share with its neighbour.
The Treaty's original terms were narrow — mutual assistance against Louis the Fourteenth specifically, and nothing further stated — but its practice has proved a good deal broader than its letter: the Commonwealth and the United Provinces stood together through the War of the French Republic (q.v.) and the Buonapartist Wars that followed it, through the general European settlement after 1815, and through every naval building programme either republic has since undertaken, the standing principle in each case being the same one the Hague negotiators first put to paper: that no single continental fleet should be suffered to outbuild the combined strength of the two maritime republics without being met, by both together, with an answering programme. The Admiralty (q.v.) has invoked the principle by name against the French crown before 1789, against the French Republic and Buonaparte after it, and invokes it now, under the Two-Power Standard (q.v.), against the German Empire (q.v.) — a fourth rising power met by the same standing arithmetic that answered the previous three.
Whether the Alliance's long record of eventually out-building, out-waiting, or out-arguing every continental rival it has faced supplies this contributor with any warrant to predict the outcome of its present application is a question this contributor, who has watched the naval estimates debated at both Westminster and the Hague with equal attention for the better part of two decades, declines to answer with any confidence beyond the plain historical fact: two centuries of precedent are not nothing, whatever else they may or may not turn out to be worth against a rival neither this contributor nor his Dutch colleagues profess to understand as well as they understood the last three. (H. LeF.)