Grand Alliance ( League of Augsburg ) The Grand Alliance was a European coalition , consisting ( at various times ) of Austria , Bavaria , Brandenburg , the Dutch Republic , England , the Holy Roman Empire , Ireland , the Palatinate of the Rhine , Portugal , Savoy , Saxony , Scotland , Spain and Sweden . The organization , which was founded in 1686 as the League of Augsburg , was known as the " Grand Alliance " after England and Scotland joined the League ( in 1689 ) . It was originally formed in an attempt to halt Louis XIV of France ' s expansions . Foundation . The League was officially formed by Emperor Leopold I , acting upon the advice of William III of Orange . The primary reason for the League ' s creation was to defend the Electorate of the Palatinate from France . This organization fought the War of the Grand Alliance against France from 1688 to 1697 . The Alliance was twice installed . Between 1689 and 1698 it fought the Nine Years War against France . After the Treaty of Den Haag was signed on September 7 , 1701 it went into a second phase as the Alliance of the War of Spanish Succession . The War ended following the Tory political victory in 1710 in Britain which led to the Peace of Utrecht — the peace with France which granted Spain ' s crown to the French candidate but divided Spain ' s external territories . In Spain the war continued until it was decided by the Siege of Barcelona , on September 11 , 1714 . The Grand Alliance gained cultural and political credibility as an example of a possible European union . It was supported by ( most of ) the German territories , Britain and the Netherlands , as well as by many French intellectuals who were disenchanted with the absolutist rule of Louis XIV , the eviction of the Huguenots in 1685 and the union of Catholicism and the French crown at home . End . The end of the Grand Alliance was due primarily to a growing dissatisfaction amongst the British populace having to finance the wars abroad . The balance of power doctrine eventually resulted , however , from the wars Britain proved able both to begin and to end on its own terms . The Grand Alliance ( and wars fought by the Alliance ) also contributed to a new sense of how wars would be fought in the future . The death toll of the most important battles and sieges was enormous , yet none of the three wars fought from 1689 - 1721 led to a repeat of the atrocities of the Thirty Years ' War fought in the early seventeenth century . Instead , the generals of the Grand Alliance became heroes of a Europe " civilized even when at war " - an ideal which would last , with some exceptions , to the early days of the First World War . Fashion . In cultural terms French fashions propagated by journals , newspapers and books published in the free Netherlands became the platform of the political movement which would attack France ' s politics rather than the nation and its people . French fashions could under this pretext be propagated all over Europe without the usual fear that one was favouring the culture of the enemy - one would favour the culture of a civilized nation , not the culture of the political opponent Louis XIV who fought a war against Europe and against the cultural elite of his own country . Between 1689 and 1721 - the end of the Great Northern War which had begun in 1700 - the notion a " European " fashion evolved , reflected by a mass of title pages in which Europe appeared as the central word .