Stealing Horses to Great Applause, page 34
The Vienna system’s record for managing and controlling competition, and what explains it
The record is one of unparalleled success. It preserved general peace and stability in Europe for an unprecedentedly long period, in an era characterized in general societal terms not by quiet tranquility but by widespread social, economic, and political unrest, upheaval, and change. Between 1815 and 1852 three waves of revolution swept over Europe (1820–3, 1830–2, and 1848–9), each broader and deeper than the previous one, each one sparking minor but dangerous international crises and conflicts that threatened to spread into wider conflagrations in all the traditional tinderboxes of the continent—the Low Countries, Iberia, Italy, Germany, the Rhineland, Poland, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and Levant, the Balkans and the Turkish Straits.1 The waves of revolution in the Vienna system era were accompanied and partly produced by international movements old and new, political, national, ethnic, and socio-economic in nature, all calling for change and capable of producing armed conflict. Not one of these led to a war between any of the great powers, or even came as close to causing a major war as similar crises and occasions for war had repeatedly done before and would do later.
This unprecedented record of success in crisis and conflict management has been noted but not always explained, and then often in inadequate and misleading ways. It was not in the main achieved simply by repressing conflict and preserving the status quo, but more by fashioning and following a systemic process for limiting, controlling and managing international competition and conflict as occasions arose—a process that simultaneously induced friends, neutrals, and rival powers to cooperate to the degree necessary to preserve overall peace and stability in the general community, while also helping in various ways to create and preserve the needed framework and structure for cooperation and mutual restraint. The book will briefly discuss various examples and instances of this, concentrating especially on the means and instruments of control, limitation, and management of conflict and competition involved. These include alliances designed and used for mutual restraint and management more than for capability aggregation; an expanded and strengthened Concert of Europe; various rules and conventions for the conduct of diplomacy and international politics; various elements of binding international law, coupled to different kinds of sanctions to impose for breaching them; ambassadors’ conferences and general congresses for working out agreements on knotty problems; arrangements for interlocking rights and guarantees with responsibilities, and more.
These institutionalized means and practices for controlling competition have all been discussed and are well known, or should be. A vital element enabling the system to survive and work, however, is more subtle, subterranean, and easily overlooked: a collective mentality shared among most European governments most of the time, a common disposition toward mutual restraint, a willingness not to raise or attempt to solve issues inherently insoluble by peaceable means or beyond the scope of the system’s capacity to handle and likely if pressed to break it down, a joint recognition that righting one wrong or correcting one imbalance can easily produce a greater wrong, imbalance, and danger—that in international politics, in other words, the road to hell is paved not merely or even mainly with good intentions, but above all with Utopian expectations and ambitions. The most important principle and rule of action derived from this collective understanding was that disputes which affected the vital interests of the whole community (meaning usually all the great powers) had to be settled in concert, not singly. I will cite examples in which that disposition proved critical.
Why the undeniable defects and abuses in the system do not negate its success
To defend the system in this way does not mean denying or minimizing its limitations, dangers, and vulnerability to abuse. I intend to discuss the usual complaints—denial or restriction of national wishes, especially on the Polish Question; repression of popular risings, reform movements, and liberal constitutionalism; the control exercised over smaller powers by greater ones, often necessary but sometimes excessive; the flat denial of many historic rights and claims while others were rigidly enforced, and the like. While these charges need weighing and qualification, I intend not to excuse or minimize them but to stress their significance. At their worst and to a considerable degree they led to a perversion of the Vienna system into something I term the Metternich System—a more or less deliberate and successful effort to convert an international system intended for the limitation and management of international competition and conflict into an instrument, in Prince Metternich’s words, for “the preservation of every legally existing thing,” to remake a design for maintaining general peace into an ideology and justification for resisting change and preserving the political and social status quo. This unquestionably succeeded to a considerable degree in major parts of Europe—the Habsburg Monarchy, parts of Germany and Italy, Iberia, and Russia—and had serious negative consequences for Europe’s domestic development and the system’s reputation then and since.
This fact, however, does not contradict or weaken the main point, that the system worked for its essential purposes of conflict management and general international peace as none has done before or since. Moreover, the same powers that can rightly be charged with distorting it into an ideological instrument for absolutist governance at home—Austria, Russia, to a lesser extent Prussia and at certain times France, along with a number of smaller states—were also frequently leaders in using it for its main purpose of international peace and stability. These two sides of the coin must both be recognized. The famous sexist remark by Dr. Samuel Johnson about dogs dancing and women preaching applies here to the Vienna system: the wonder is not that this task of preserving peace and international order was done well, but that it could be done at all. That may be a low bar, but it is a correct, necessary one for international politics in this era, and perhaps any.
If the Vienna system was so successful, why did it fall?
Another good question. The answer to it and the process involved will have to be oversimplified brutally in the book. Here I will say only that if the question asks whether ultimately the main cause was neglect, or lack of reform and development, or misuse, or a failure to meet changed conditions and new needs, or deliberate repudiation and overthrow, my short answer would be “All of the above, but especially the last—deliberate repudiation and overthrow.” Behind them all, moreover, lies a still broader cause and answer, a factor as important in history as growth and change—entropy. It seems often to be assumed that human beings by nature prefer peace and abhor war, so that peace should be seen as natural and war artificial and contrived. No assumption is more simplistic and distorting in international politics than this one. In certain real, profound senses, war in international politics is natural; peace is artificial, the product of effort, reason, and artifice. Making a system like this work and endure is always an uphill task requiring shared commitment, prudence, and responsibility. These qualities and dispositions ran out or failed or were defeated in the decades after 1848. That assertion also of course needs a fuller though still compressed discussion in the book.
How did the system emerge, and why?
This question is more important and relevant to my case, and more difficult to answer, requiring more explanation: how did this system emerge and develop out of a very different eighteenth-century one? Again I offer here only an oversimplified answer. If, as argued earlier, the European powers walked or stumbled into both Great Wars with their eyes wide shut, in the course of the first in 1787–1812 the great powers in particular had their eyes forced wide open by events and outcomes, making it possible, though not easy or natural, for them to adopt a different outlook, approach and collective will needed to do things differently in 1812–15.
Traditionally the story of how peace was achieved in 1814–15 unfolds along two lines, overlapping and intertwined but substantively distinct. The most important component in this narrative is the essentially military account of how the Allies finally defeated Napoleon’s army and ended his rule. It begins in Russia in 1812 and ends at Paris in March 1814, with military victory then having to be confirmed at Waterloo in June 1815. The second subordinate strand is the political story—how the Allies negotiated the terms of peace among themselves and with France under the restored Bourbon monarchy, chiefly at the Congress of Vienna between September 1814 and June 1815. This view thus sees military victory as being first and foremost, establishing the conditions essential for the subsequent peace settlement.
It is a natural, plausible view, but seriously misleading. The whole process of building peace was always primarily political; the Allies’ focus was always on a durable peace, not a final decisive victory to be followed by peace. Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means applies here in a special sense. Of course the Allies understood from 1812 on that a measure of military success against France was essential, though they frequently disagreed on how much victory was needed and how it should be attained. At the same time they consistently viewed military victory not as the goal in itself but as one necessary means to achieve a durable peace, and never considered a final military victory so decisive as to compel the common enemy to surrender and accept whatever terms the Allies wanted. From early on, even while differing on emphases, priorities, and details, they pursued the same central target and goal: to construct a European state system within which all essential actors, above all the great powers including France, along with many lesser powers, would be able jointly to enjoy stable peace, order, legitimacy and security through recognizing and respecting everyone’s legitimate rights, accepting limits and obligations, following rules, and assuming shared responsibilities.
Naturally many self-interested and conflicting individual aims were involved in this, so that the whole peace process frequently threatened to break down. Nonetheless, this collective focus on the pursuit and construction of peace constituted a different approach and marked a significant change in international politics. It was not simply the product of anti-revolutionary monarchical conservatism, war-weariness, and the desire to return to normalcy, though these motives were naturally present and important. It added up to something new: a collective will to form and sustain an international security community.
Another even more important point: this new collective mindset was not mainly a product of idealism or moral principle, but of necessity and practical learning. What led the continental allies, above all the great powers but also eventually some smaller ones, to fight for general durable peace more than for victory was precisely the hard lessons they learned in twenty-five years of wars waged both against France and among themselves from 1787 to 1812.
To see this, one has to recognize some important differences between this long general war and earlier eighteenth-century ones. All the other major wars (1689–1713, 1702–21, 1740–8, 1756–63, 1775–83), though fought in various theaters and often in distinct phases in which some participants entered the war late or dropped out early, still can be seen as representing one central contest between particular leading powers ending with definite winners and losers. In this respect they resembled World War I, and like it they also ended, at least in Europe and adjacent areas, at particular times with major peace treaties ostensibly designed to produce lasting peace under a new settlement. All these eighteenth-century peace settlements, except to a degree the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, failed in this, breaking down after a few years and leading to new war, but they did provide at least an interval of relative peace—another way in which they resembled World War I.
The Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars were different on both counts in important respects. They included seven distinct continental wars from 1787 to 1812, the earliest of which, in the Balkans and Poland, did not even involve France directly. After 1792, however, general conflict quickly spread over most of the continent and well beyond, becoming especially concentrated in a series of distinct wars conventionally (in some cases misleadingly) termed coalition wars against France. There were important conflicts above all in Western and Central Europe, but also in the Balkans, Egypt and the Mediterranean, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal, southern Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic, the West Indies, India, and the global high seas. In two of these France did not even take part militarily, though it was always a main political player. Some wars were launched or provoked by France on its own against neutral powers and even against an ally, Spain, and in several of them the French-led coalition was larger and more coherent than the opposing one. This was true especially for the biggest and most important war of all, in which in June 1812 Napoleon invaded a virtually isolated Russia at the head of a massive imperial army gathered from most of the continent.
Thus the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars should be seen as a series of separate wars, so closely connected in time and impact, however, as to be experienced and seen as an era of almost continuous war and threat of war, and to drive home the same main lesson. All the continental ones before 1812 except three—the two in which France was not directly involved, plus the Peninsular War launched by Napoleon’s attempted takeover in Spain—led to decisive military victory for France and ended with treaties that were accepted by the defeated powers in the expectation or hope of gaining at least a tolerable peace. Each one of these treaty settlements broke down, however, even more quickly than their earlier counterparts had in the eighteenth century, and all for the same basic reason. In every instance the major states which had lost militarily and made peace in the hope of escaping more war in order to survive discovered instead that even if they tried to come to terms and live with France, the French government, especially after Napoleon took control, exploited the treaties and peace settlements in so humiliating and dangerous a fashion as to lead one or more of them to decide that war was better than such a peace, and either to accept a new war or actually launch it.
This differs from the widely held perception of these conflicts as one long struggle by the opponents of France to overthrow French hegemony and restore a balance of power in Europe. Some historical interpretations, especially those that view the war primarily from the perspective of Anglo-French conflict, the final chapter in their so-called Second Hundred Years’ War of 1688–1815, as well as a major version of international relations theory (neo-realism or structural realism) see this almost as a truism, something reflecting the essential nature and structure of international politics. The other major powers in Europe, especially Great Britain, could not accept and live with France’s military superiority and political hegemony; it represented an existential challenge to their great-power status and autonomy and led them repeatedly to form new coalitions to overthrow it and restore a balance of power. This constitutes another major example of repeated European reactions to bids for hegemony throughout modern history, like those of Charles I/V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Wilhelm II, Hitler, and Stalin.
Leaving aside the question of whether this line of explanation is satisfactory in these earlier instances (I do not think it is), it does not work for this Revolutionary-Napoleonic one. Here, rather than say that new war repeatedly broke out because France’s opponents could not tolerate French hegemony and resorted to war to restore a balance of power, one needs in general to say that the reason war was reignited was that France’s opponents discovered that their efforts to attain real peace with France even by accepting French hegemony and attempting to live with it or to join it and benefit from it repeatedly failed, proved futile and counterproductive. One by one they learned that neither their military efforts, alone or in coalition, or various other political strategies they tried—negotiation, accommodation, appeasement, neutrality, hiding, bandwagoning, even joining the French Empire as a satrapy or satellite—enabled them to reach durable peace with France. The attempts all ended instead in more threats, humiliation, destruction, and subjugation. Napoleon’s insatiable pursuit of power, conquest, and glory led them gradually, unevenly and by different paths at different times to the conviction that peace had to be attained by a different route. Part of the answer of course had to be military—France had to be reduced in power and brought to agree to terms—but this did not require eliminating the French threat through destroying it as a great power or even necessarily displacing it as the leading power in Western Europe, provided they could fashion adequate safeguards against France’s abuse of its power. More important still, they came gradually to see that they themselves could not make the kind of persistent, united military effort necessary to gain even this more limited goal unless that military effort was based from the outset on prior agreement among themselves on just what they were fighting for—a concrete political definition of peace reached before forming the coalition and maintained while fighting France. That required negotiating and reaching consensus on specific conditions needed to constitute peace in the whole European system, and then fighting essentially only for that goal, and only until they could bring France itself, under whatever regime or ruler it had, also to accept, belong to, and help maintain this kind of peace settlement. In other words, they had to conceive and create an international security community and then act as members of it.
