Great powers routinely fund internal opposition parties in rival states to weaken them

Evidence

In the history of the so-called principle of nationality, foreign interventions in favour of national parties which trouble the internal order of enemy States are innumerable; so much so that when one speaks, for example, of Cavour’s “Eastern” policy, 198 one wonders if it was really a question of a “policy”, a permanent line of action, or not rather a stratagem of the moment to weaken Austria before 1859 and 1866. Similarly, in the Mazzinian movements of the early eighteen-seventies (the Barsanti affair, for instance) 199 one can discern the intervention of Bismarck, who with his eyes on the war with France and the danger of a Franco-Italian alliance thought to weaken Italy through internal conflict. Similarly, in the events of June 1914 200 some see the intervention of the Austrian General Staff with a view to the coming war. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 683

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures arguments later Islamophobia scholars and subaltern studies make about imperial powers manipulating internal political factions of colonized or rival states. — connects to: External great-power pressure forced Bahrain’s opposition to self-limit its demands — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 251