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  The task of the negotiators at Vienna would be to transform Alexander’s messianic vision into something compatible with the continued independent existence of their states, to welcome Russia into the international order without being crushed by its embrace.

  THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA

  The statesmen who assembled in Vienna to discuss how to design a peaceful order had been through a whirlwind of upheavals overturning nearly every established structure of authority. In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned. It had spilled across France’s ancient frontiers to conquer almost all of the European continent, only to be nearly extinguished in the vastness of Russia.

  The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor of the era’s seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (or Talleyrand, as he was known) was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon to negotiate the restoration of the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII’s Foreign Minister. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.

  At Vienna, Talleyrand’s contribution was to achieve for France a peace that preserved the “ancient frontiers,” which existed when it had started its foreign adventures. And within less than three years—in 1818—he managed France’s entry into the Quadruple Alliance. The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the Atlantic Alliance.

  The order established at the Congress of Vienna was the closest that Europe has come to universal governance since the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire. It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war.

  After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war. (The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. K. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes.) But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The period between 1815 and the turn of the century was modern Europe’s most peaceful, and the decades immediately following the Congress of Vienna were characterized by an extraordinary balance between legitimacy and power.

  The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in 1814 were in a radically different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia. A century and a half earlier, a series of settlements of the various wars that made up the Thirty Years’ War was conjoined with a set of principles for the general conduct of foreign policy. The European order that emerged took as its point of departure the political entities that existed, now separated from their religious impetus. The application of Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent, or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions.

  The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution or of Napoleon. The dynastic legitimacy of government had been overwhelmed by Napoleon’s revolutionary élan and skilled generalship.

  A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in 1806, bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by French armies. That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.

  Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. The Habsburgs, once the Continent’s dominant dynasty, were now ruling only in their ancestral territories from Vienna. These were large and polyglot (roughly present-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland), and now of uncertain political cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests. Their territory had to be redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium.

  The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real-time contact with their capitals. They receive minutely detailed instructions down to the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin (so at least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance), three weeks for a message to reach Paris; London took a little longer. Instructions therefore had to be drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the diplomats were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own. Czar Alexander I was two months from his capital, but he needed no instructions; his whims were Russia’s commands, and he kept the Congress of Vienna occupied with the fertility of his imagination. The Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, perhaps the shrewdest and most experienced statesman at Vienna, said of Alexander that he was “too weak for true ambition, but too strong for pure vanity.” Napoleon said of Alexander that he had great abilities but that “something” was always missing in whatever he did. And because one could never foresee which particular piece would be missing in any given instance, he was totally unpredictable. Talleyrand was more blunt: “He was not for nothing the son of [the mad] Czar Paul.”

  The other participants at the Congress of Vienna agreed on the general principles of international order and on the imperative of bringing Europe back into some form of equilibrium. But they did not have congruent perceptions of what this would mean in practice. Their task was to achieve some reconciliation of perspectives shaped by substantially different historical experiences.

  Britain, safe from invasion behind the English Channel and with unique domestic institutions essentially impervious to developments on the Continent, defined order in terms of threats of hegemony on the Continent. But the continental countries had a lower threshold for threats; their security could be impaired by territorial adjustments short of continental hegemony. Above all, unlike Britain, they felt vulnerable to domestic transformations in neighboring countries.

  The Congress of Vienna found it relatively easy to agree on a definition of the overall balance. Already during the war—in 1804—then British Prime Minister William Pitt had put forward a plan to rectify what he considered the weaknesses of the Westphalian settlement. The Westphalian treaties had kept Central Europe divided as a way to enhance French influence. T
o foreclose temptations, Pitt reasoned, “great masses” had to be created in Central Europe to consolidate the region by merging some of its smaller states. (“Consolidation” was a relative term, as it still left thirty-seven states in the area covered by today’s Germany.) The obvious candidate to absorb these abolished principalities was Prussia, which originally preferred to annex contiguous Saxony but yielded to the entreaties of Austria and Britain to accept the Rhineland instead. This enlargement of Prussia placed a significant power on the border of France, creating a geostrategic reality that had not existed since the Peace of Westphalia.

  The remaining thirty-seven German states were grouped in an entity called the German Confederation, which would provide an answer to Europe’s perennial German dilemma: when Germany was weak, it tempted foreign (mostly French) interventions; when unified, it became strong enough to defeat its neighbors single-handedly, tempting them to combine against the danger. In that sense Germany has for much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.

  The German Confederation was too divided to take offensive action yet cohesive enough to resist foreign invasions into its territory. This arrangement provided an obstacle to the invasion of Central Europe without constituting a threat to the two major powers on its flanks, Russia to the east and France to the west.

  To protect the new overall territorial settlement, the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia was formed. A territorial guarantee—which was what the Quadruple Alliance amounted to—did not have the same significance for each of the signatories. The level of urgency with which threats were perceived varied significantly. Britain, protected by its command of the seas, felt confident in withholding definite commitments to contingencies and preferred waiting until a major threat from Europe took specific shape. The continental countries had a narrower margin of safety, assessing that their survival might be at stake from actions far less dramatic than those causing Britain to take alarm.

  This was particularly the case in the face of revolution—that is, when the threat involved the issue of legitimacy. The conservative states sought to build bulwarks against a new wave of revolution; they aimed to include mechanisms for the preservation of legitimate order—by which they meant monarchical rule. The Czar’s proposed Holy Alliance provided a mechanism for protecting the domestic status quo throughout Europe. His partners saw in the Holy Alliance—subtly redesigned—a way to curb Russian exuberance. The right of intervention was limited because, as the eventual terms stipulated, it could be exercised only in concert; in this manner, Austria and Prussia retained a veto over the more exalted schemes of the Czar.

  Three tiers of institutions buttressed the Vienna system: the Quadruple Alliance to defeat challenges to the territorial order; the Holy Alliance to overcome threats to domestic institutions; and a concert of powers institutionalized through periodic diplomatic conferences of the heads of government of the alliances to define their common purposes or to deal with emerging crises. This concert mechanism functioned like a precursor of the United Nations Security Council. Its conferences acted on a series of crises, attempting to distill a common course: the revolutions in Naples in 1820 and in Spain in 1820–23 (quelled by the Holy Alliance and France, respectively) and the Greek revolution and war of independence of 1821–32 (ultimately supported by Britain, France, and Russia). The Concert of Powers did not guarantee a unanimity of outlook, yet in each case a potentially explosive crisis was resolved without a major-power war.

  A good example of the efficacy of the Vienna system was its reaction to the Belgian revolution of 1830, which sought to separate today’s Belgium from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. For most of the eighteenth century, armies had marched across that then-province of the Netherlands, in quest of the domination of Europe. For Britain, whose global strategy was based on control of the oceans, the Scheldt River estuary, at the mouth of which lay the port of Antwerp across the channel from England, needed to be in the hands of a friendly country and under no circumstances of a major European state. In the event, a London conference of European powers developed a new approach, recognizing Belgian independence while declaring the new nation “neutral,” a heretofore-unknown concept in the relations of major powers, except as a unilateral declaration of intent. The new state agreed not to join military alliances or permit the stationing of foreign troops on its territory. This pledge in turn was guaranteed by the major powers, which thereby undertook the obligation to resist violations of Belgian neutrality. The internationally guaranteed status lasted for nearly a century; it was the trigger that brought England into World War I, when German troops forced a passage to France through Belgian territory.

  The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each. Neither aspect is intended to arrest change; rather, in combination they seek to ensure that it occurs as a matter of evolution, not a raw contest of wills. If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity. Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established.

  That balance was the signal achievement of the Congress of Vienna. The Quadruple Alliance deterred challenges to the territorial balance, and the memory of Napoleon kept France—suffering from revolutionary exhaustion—quiescent. At the same time, a judicious attitude toward the peace led to France’s swift reincorporation into the concert of powers originally formed to thwart its ambitions. And Austria, Prussia, and Russia, which on the principles of the balance of power should have been rivals, were in fact pursuing common policies: Austria and Russia in effect postponed their looming geopolitical conflict in the name of their shared fears of domestic upheaval. It was only after the element of legitimacy in this international order was shaken by the failed revolutions of 1848 that balance was interpreted less as an equilibrium subject to common adjustments and increasingly as a condition in which to prepare for a contest over preeminence.

  As the emphasis began to shift more and more to the power element of the equation, Britain’s role as a balancer became increasingly important. The hallmarks of Britain’s balancing role were its freedom of action and its proven determination to act. Britain’s Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister) Lord Palmerston offered a classic illustration when, in 1841, he learned of a message from the Czar seeking a definitive British commitment to resist “the contingency of an attack by France on the liberties of Europe.” Britain, Palmerston replied, regarded “an attempt of one Nation to seize and to appropriate to itself territory which belongs to another Nation” as a threat, because “such an attempt leads to a derangement of the existing Balance of Power, and by altering the relative strength of States, may tend to create danger to other Powers.” However, Palmerston’s Cabinet could enter no formal alliance against France because “it is not usual for England to enter into engagements with reference to cases which have not actually arisen, or which are not immediately in prospect.” In other words, neither Russia nor France could count on British support as a certainty against the other; neither could write off the possibility of British armed opposition if it carried matters to the point of threatening the European equilibrium.

  THE PREMISES OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER

  The subtle equilibrium of the Congress of Vienna system began to fray in the middle of the nineteenth century under the impact of three events: the rise of nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, and the Crimean War.

  Under the impact of Napoleon’s conquests, multiple nationalities that had lived together for centuries began to treat their rulers as “foreign.” The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder became an apostle
of this trend and argued that each people, defined by language, motherland, and folk culture, had an original genius and was therefore entitled to self-government. The historian Jacques Barzun has described it another way:

  Underlying the theory was fact: the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map of Europe. In place of the eighteenth century horizontal world of dynasties and cosmopolite upper classes, the West now consisted of vertical unities—nations, not wholly separate but unlike.

  Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires—especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire—vulnerable to internal pressure as well as to the resentments of neighbors claiming national links with subjects of the empire.

  The emergence of nationalism also subtly affected the relationship between Prussia and Austria after the creation of the “great masses” of the Congress of Vienna. The competition of the two great German powers in Central Europe for the allegiance of some thirty-five smaller states of the German Confederation was originally held in check by the need to defend Central Europe. Also, tradition generated a certain deference to the country whose ruler had been Holy Roman Emperor for half a millennium. The Assembly of the German Confederation (the combined ambassadors to the confederation of its thirty-seven members) met in the Austrian Embassy in Frankfurt, and the Austrian ambassador acted as chairman.