Spain’s Greatest CEO

The 400th anniversary of the death of Philip II of Spain in 1598 has, rather surprisingly, passed relatively unnoticed in the English-speaking world. Philip was, after all, not only master of the Armada, and, as consort of Bloody Mary between 1554 and 1558, king of England for four years until Mary’s death and the passage of power to Elizabeth but also the ruler of a world empire that stretched from Italy and Flanders to Florida, California and the Philippines. A substantial biography by Henry Kamen came out in the first half of 1997, and Geoffrey Parker’s “The Grand Strategy of Philip II” is the only major contribution to our knowledge of the reign to have appeared since.

It is not, of course, that there has been any shortage of writing in the past. There have been dozens of biographies demonizing, rehabilitating or simply normalizing Philip, to which Parker himself contributed a short, popular but scholarly life in 1978. The challenge has always been to say something different, and Parker’s “Grand Strategy” is certainly different. It is an attempt for the first time, as he says, to examine in detail the precise way in which Philip II ruled the first global empire in history and to discover the strategic priorities that underlay his international policies, the practices and prejudices that influenced his decision-making and the external factors that affected the achievement of his goals.

It is also different in setting its analysis of Philip II’s rule within the framework of modern strategic studies and current business-management theory. In his belief that the challenges of 20th century global empires probably resemble those in the 16th century, Parker is addressing a wider audience thanhistorians. Philip is conceived as “the chief executive officer of a complex ‘multinational’ enterprise,” and his management style and effectiveness are illuminated and evaluated by comparisons with other absolute rulers and world leaders from Akbar to Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson.

Though enriched by this comparative material, Parker’s work, as we have come to expect from his previous scholarship, is firmly rooted in a massive knowledge of the documentation of the reign--references come from 45 archives and libraries in a dozen countries--as well as in a process of consultation that even Philip II would have found impressive--scholarly acknowledgments are extended to more than 40 people.

The attempt to explain Philip’s strategic failures (his successes--in the Mediterranean and in Portugal--receive much less attention) in terms of modern management concepts--prospect theory, cognitive rigidity, zero-defects mentality, micromanagement--is ingenious and, within the limitations of 20/20 hindsight, illuminating. In a number of respects, Philip emerges from the examination remarkably well, and Parker is far from dismissive about how “remarkably close” he came to achieving his goals, concluding that “relatively small factors played a disproportionate part in frustrating a Grand Strategy that, on the face of it, stood an excellent chance of success.” His failure, it seems to be argued, stemmed from not recognizing in advance that he was going to fail and from an insistence on placing “ideological commitment above rational calculation.”

It is here that the analogy between a 16th century absolute monarch and a chief executive of a multinational enterprise is weakest. The chief executive’s job description is geared to the achievement of measurable economic gains for which he is responsible to his shareholders; that of the hereditary prince was directed toward the promotion of a moral and spiritual good for which he was responsible to God. To condemn Philip II for failing to put rational calculation, or reason of state, before ideological commitment is to commit the sin of Machiavelli--precisely the sin of which, judging him by his deeds rather than by his words, some of his bitterest critics among his own subjects accused him. In the same way, the irrationality of Philip II’s “constant and overt reliance on miracles” must surely be read contextually within a Christian discourse of service, striving and human inadequacy, rather than as a literal statement of strategic planning.

Parker is clearly aware that from the historical point of view, the very title of his book is contentious. Not all historians have thought Philip II had a “Grand Strategy,” and those who have are by no means agreed on what it was. Was it political or religious? Reactive or proactive? Conservative or hegemonic? Was its primary concern the Mediterranean or the Atlantic? France or the Netherlands? “Universal Monarchy” or “Messianic Imperialism”? It is the last that Parker adheres to, and he defines it as the belief in “a direct mandate to uphold the Catholic faith at almost all times and in almost all places,” though the other possibilities and historiographical positions might have been more fully argued before he presented this as his conclusion. The problem is that Philip II has left to posterity neither a coherent corporate plan nor any clearly articulated view of what kind of corporation he was running.

Ultimately, Philip II’s “Grand Strategy” has to be deduced from events. This Parker attempts to do through a series of “soundings”--of general principles in Part I and of particular applications of policymaking and execution in Parts II and III. However, building on his previous writings on the Dutch Revolt and the Spanish Armada, Parker concentrates his analysis almost entirely on Philip’s policies toward the Netherlands and England between 1555 and 1588. This means that key areas, including the Mediterranean and the Indies, the role of Islam, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the question of how Philip perceived the relationship between the components of his complex empire in political and economic terms--essential for the analysis of any global Grand Strategy (or indeed for any final judgment as to why Philip II was more successful in one area rather than another)--are not subjected to adequate scrutiny.

Indeed, sometimes the notion of a global Grand Strategy reduces explicitly, if surreptitiously, to a “Grand Strategy against England,” which is a very different thing. Even in this area, it is not at all clear what meaning can be attributed to the concept of “Messianic Imperialism” or in what way it provides a satisfactory explanation of Philip II’s actions. Would the Armada have been sent when it was, for example, but for Elizabeth’s intervention in the Netherlands and Drake’s attacks on Spain and the Indies?

Alongside his main theme, Parker provides us with the fullest and most densely illustrated account of the working practices of the king that we have. His chapters on communications, the courier service and the processes of information gathering, the uncovering of Philip II’s secret intentions by his enemies and, in particular, the reexamination of the thorny question of whether the duke of Parma’s troops were ready to join up with the Armada in August 1588 are masterly exercises in historical reconstruction and in the fluent exposition and control of material. However, these chapters deal with the bases for decisions and decision-making and with factors contributing to the failure of specific projects; they do not amount to an analysis of the decision-making process itself. That the king was ultimately responsible for decisions, and that his signature had to authenticate them, should not lead us to an overly personalized view of how decisions were arrived at or to put too much weight on the idiosyncrasies of Philip II himself. At every stage of his life Philip was advised by an inner circle of intimates whose individual abilities, policy preferences, attitudes and rivalries helped crystallize, or sometimes suspend, policy decisions and whose recommendations naturally influenced the king’s judgments.

That it is difficult always to identify the pull of those influences does not mean they can be ignored. The absolute duty of a Christian prince to take counsel and to heed it, which was a moral as well perhaps as a psychological necessity, inevitably clamped decisions into the framework of the prevailing “strategic culture.” This is a consideration particularly relevant to Parker’s thoughts on the general relationship between structure and agency in history and to his conclusion “that the idiosyncrasies of Philip II himself offer the best explanation of how history’s mice . . . could take on an elephant and win, thereby transforming the entire course of Western history.” In the end, one is left feeling that although each individual part of the book is in itself superbly crafted, challenging and informative, Parker’s “Grand Strategy,” rather like Philip II’s, does not quite add up to the sum of its parts.