Stealing Horses to Great Applause, page 35
All this applies mainly to the process by which the continental great powers gradually developed and worked out a collective mentality among themselves, a process in which Napoleon’s satellites and conquests also became involved. The British government came to a similar outlook by a different path. By 1812 Britain had fought France not just longer and more continuously than any other power, but also with greater success. Despite many individual failures and setbacks in battle and serious French challenges on various fronts, the British (aided of course by geography) never decisively lost any of their contests with France, nor except for brief threats of French invasion in 1798 and 1803–5 faced any grave danger of being conquered or compelled to accept French terms. By 1811 the British had gained decisive victories over France and its allies and satellites on the high seas, in Egypt, the Mediterranean, the Iberian Peninsula, the commercial struggle against Napoleon’s Continental System, India, and the West and East Indies, driving Napoleon into a Fortress Europe military stance and to the sideline in worldwide empire and control of all the world’s sea lanes.
These successes, however, did not lead the British government to conclude that it could or should simply hold out in its war with France until the continental powers rebelled against Napoleon’s domination and joined Britain for final victory. In fact, throughout the long struggle against France the British government never formally adopted a policy of uncompromising resistance as it did in 1940 against Germany. Napoleon’s intransigence forced them into it. Britain actually made peace with Napoleon in 1802 and would have kept it had Napoleon not persistently challenged and humiliated them in the aftermath. Even in early 1808, with Britain isolated and the continent alienated from Britain and at Napoleon’s feet, the British government, though still unbowed, was ready in principle to consider a peace on the basis of uti possedetis (each side keeping its conquests). Napoleon, incapable of making peace even on this basis, occupied himself at this time with reorganizing his Grand Army for more war and pursuing his takeover of his erstwhile ally Spain.
What British leaders instead primarily had learned by 1811 from experience was that victories like theirs, though enabling them to survive and sustain a remarkable war effort, could not bring real peace. Ending the heavy burdens of war and securing Britain’s future security and prosperity at home and abroad required not just military victory over France on the continent, but also a durable structure for peace in Europe as a whole, and that demanded serious attention to the needs and concerns of all Europe’s major powers and all its areas of conflict.
This represents a significant shift from the outlook toward Europe Britain had shown in its earlier great contests with France (1702–13, 1740–8, and 1756–63) and its policy during the approach of war from 1787 to 1793 and in the earlier war years up to 1805 or 1809. During that era, despite real differences in policy and attitudes between the “blue water” and “continental commitment” schools of thought in Britain, one can see in general that so long as the British government’s central strategic concerns in regard to Europe were met (the containment of France, security for the Low Countries and Hanover, some sort of balance of power, and British control of the Atlantic and of its imperial possessions and outposts), it was not particularly concerned how the rest of Europe was organized. There were particular British interests to be protected, of course—Hanover, trade interests, a European balance that did not over-commit Britain and that the British could manipulate from their favorable geographic position—but these were ancillary to its main aims and strategy. This British attitude informed its policy throughout the first and second coalition wars against France and persisted into the third despite some shifts in emphasis and tactics, only to change decisively after 1810.2 One can see the change clearly in the stances Britain took toward Russia in 1812, toward the rest of Europe, especially Prussia, Austria, and the rest of Germany, in 1813–14, and toward the USA in 1812–14. They show how British leaders, especially Castlereagh, Liverpool, and Wellington, also had their eyes opened by decades of war and possessed to an uncommon degree the rare kind of common sense sufficient to see what needed doing.
How this learning turned into action
This collective learning experience was behind the course pursued by the Allies in coalition-building, war, and negotiation from the end of 1812 to March 1814. Starting with the Russo-Prussian alliance in early 1813, the Allies at each step worked out between themselves what minimum concrete conditions and status in Europe each required for peace, agreed to fight together until these were achieved, and then fought on that basis and to that end. They recruited further members to the coalition from Napoleon’s allies and satellites by the same methods. At the same time, they pursued negotiations with France until very late in the game (though Napoleon remained in charge of France until the bitter end) in an attempt to persuade the French government to agree to terms as well. They offered France surprisingly generous terms, even after the decisive Allied victory at Leipzig in October 1813, and by no means limited their flexibility, realism and moderation to their dealings with France. Austria, after it suffered its fourth crushing defeat at Napoleon’s hands in 1809, tried seriously thereafter to come to terms with that defeat and find a respectable place and role in Europe as a junior partner at Napoleon’s side. It even reluctantly and within limits joined the French assault on Russia in 1812. The destruction of Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia made Austria cautiously back off and look for a safe and favorable position between the two sides, but the Austrian government refused to join Russia and Prussia to fight Napoleon in the spring 1813 campaign, in which the two allies suffered a narrow but decisive defeat that came close to driving them out of the war. Following this defeat, Russia and Prussia, though naturally suspicious of Austria and especially of its chancellor and foreign minister Prince Metternich, agreed to a truce with Napoleon mediated by Metternich and authorized him to negotiate with Napoleon on their behalf for a general continental peace in the summer of 1813. There is good ground to believe that Metternich really tried hard at that time to reach a compromise settlement in which Austria and much of Germany under Austrian hegemony would constitute a neutral bloc separating Russia and Prussia in the east from a Napoleonic France still in control of all of Western Europe and leaving Britain out in the cold. Once more Napoleon’s intransigence rendered Metternich’s efforts futile, leaving Austria no option but to go over to the side of Russia and Prussia. Knowing pretty well what had happened, they nonetheless welcomed Austria into the alliance essentially on Austria’s terms and put an Austrian general in charge of Allied military strategy.
The same shrewd, realistic moderation and generosity characterized Allied diplomacy toward lesser powers as well. Longtime loyal Napoleonic satellite states such as Bavaria and Wuerttemberg and satrapies such as Joachim Murat’s Kingdom of Naples were brought into the Allied coalition, retaining the independence, constitutions, and territorial gains they had acquired in Napoleon’s camp. A renegade from Napoleon’s Grand Army, Marshal Bernadotte, was accepted as Crown Prince and later King of Sweden as a full ally, and was allowed to fight Sweden’s separate war against Denmark in his own self-centered way, using only the German troops fighting under Swedish command in the main theater of war. The same moderation and good sense was shown Spain. It had survived Napoleon’s bid for takeover by long, cruel regular and guerilla warfare and major British help, but once Spanish soil was cleared of the invader it was allowed to drop out of the war. The former British colonies in North America who had gained their independence in 1783 only with indispensable help from French and Spanish allies and had then conveniently ignored that debt in order to gain a favorable separate peace with Britain, and later exploited the opportunity offered by Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and Britain’s peril in mid-1812 to try to conquer British Canada, and who then failed miserably in this effort, suffered no punishment for all this after the British and Allies had defeated France in 1814.
As for their dealings with the main longtime foe, not only did the Allies after victory fully honor their wartime promises to France that if it would make peace, it would remain larger and stronger than it had ever been in the old regime. They also, before and during the military struggle, encouraged Frenchmen themselves—leaders of Napoleon’s Army and Senate including Napoleon’s former foreign minister Talleyrand—to make the actual decision for peace, to depose Napoleon when he refused to go along, and to draw up France’s new constitution preserving some of the most important national achievements of the early Revolution. They then proceeded almost immediately to bring France to the negotiating table at Vienna as a sovereign great power and equal, and to let it help decide on the general terms of European peace. By the late summer of 1814, Talleyrand (who had as always turned his coat in a shrewd self-interested direction but, as he claimed, in the best interests of France) became France’s leading negotiator and Britain’s chief partner in handling the problems emerging in the negotiations at Vienna. Even after the French ruined this remarkable success themselves by accepting Napoleon’s renewed takeover of power, thus provoking a new war ending in total defeat at Waterloo, the Allies in the second peace treaty imposed no serious long-range punishment on France either for its previous decades of conquest and imperialism or for its latest folly and betrayal of its treaty commitments. Within three years France was formally re-admitted to the general alliance and Concert of Powers. One must no doubt pay tribute to the way the Allies hung together militarily so as finally to win the war, but what was truly new and different is the way in which they worked together to construct and save the peace.
Balance-of-power politics? Yes, but of a different kind
All this, of course, can be accounted for as simply prudent balance-of-power politics, responses to its obvious demands and pressures, and often is so explained. The needs and pressures were clear enough: to reduce French power and domination without promoting its replacement with Russian or British hegemony; to prevent another eighteenth-century-style Austro-Prussian struggle for mastery in Germany, while at the same time balancing their respective influence and promoting their cooperation there; to realize that a quarter-century of war and revolution had made a number of irreversible changes in Europe (e.g., the end of absolute monarchy in France, the demise of the old Holy Roman Empire in Germany and many of its constituent units, the transformation of Italy, the awakening of some national movements, the creation of larger middle states with constitutions)—facts that had to be recognized and dealt with; the need to organize Europe’s vulnerable center from the Baltic to the Mediterranean into a loose defensive confederation separating the more powerful French and Russian flanks; and to make particular arrangements for security and stability in other trouble zones—Italy, Iberia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, Poland, the Baltic and Scandinavia. The worst trouble spot, the Balkans and Near East, was recognized as too difficult and risky for the Congress to handle and by tacit agreement reserved it for future handling by the great powers in concert—another prudent decision. As for another great area of potential conflict, the world beyond Europe, where according to some historians the great game between Britain and Russia in Asia had already begun, this was by common unspoken consent and implicit British veto declared off limits for the sake of European peace.
In other words, as critics may argue and will, even if the statesmen in 1812–15 and the succeeding decades showed considerable skill, moderation, and common sense, this does not demonstrate a change in their basic goals and collective outlook or a breakthrough to a new concept of international order and security. The Vienna system in both its territorial and political arrangements and its institutional and legal features should be seen more simply and naturally as the product of classical balance-of-power politics. Each state was still aiming primarily to improve its own security in a prudent but self-interested fashion, balancing one power against another to ensure that no actor would become so powerful as to dominate all the others.
The short answer to this interpretation is that one can indeed make such a case and fit all the evidence into it, after a fashion, but that there are good reasons why this is not the best way to look at the Vienna system, or at history in general. Some of these I can only mention here, reserving discussion of them for the book. They include points such as this: (1) that this interpretation is unacceptably reductionist. It argues essentially that understanding human conduct reduces to determining what particular contingent circumstances and needs motivated it, what can be demonstrated or inferred from evidence as driving particular actions, decisions, or policy, whereas any real understanding includes determining what it all led to, how it changed things, and what it amounted to. (2) It ignores the fact, demonstrated by this case in particular, that what is considered normal prudence and common sense in international politics is precisely abnormal, uncommon, requires explanation, and makes a vital difference. (3) It assumes what is really in question, the nature of what actually drives conduct in international politics. It seems to suppose that the driving force for actors is necessity, and that all that is necessary in actors is sufficient nous to recognize necessity and draw the appropriate conclusion. Those who do so, it suggests, are not really different from or better than those who do not, only perhaps luckier or smarter. This also is too simple. Not only does it fail to recognize the power and influence of systemic rules and effects on actions, but it misunderstands what “being smarter” and “being better” mean in foreign policy and international politics. They are not opposites or even contraries, but two sides of the same coin. Being better requires and means being smarter in a particular way, and vice versa, and in combination they add up to being wiser. The central puzzle that needs to be addressed in so much of the history of international politics, including this era, is why recurrently actors who are individually not stupid or evil and are, or claim to be, bent on rational decisions and responsible policies do so many stupid, irresponsible things that lead to disastrous, evil consequences. The broad answer, I suggest, is collective institutionalized systemic irrationality and stupidity—and the practical response to it is the construction of an international system to counter this profound systemic tendency. Of this, the Vienna system stands as a rare example.
Fuller argument on these assertions must wait for the book. The narrower question, whether the Vienna system merely represents one version of normal balance-of-power politics, can be answered here a little more concretely. The answer is that this is true in a way and to some extent, but to the extent it is true, with the needed reservations, it supports my case rather than undermines it.
The key issue here is what constitutes so-called normal balance-of-power politics in theory and practice. Here I have to confess to another error or overstatement. In writing in my book and other publications that international politics could operate without a balance of power, or that the Vienna settlement did not rest on a balance of power, or that “political equilibrium” was a more accurate and standard term for the political conditions nineteenth-century statesmen envisioned and aimed for, I was then trying to make certain points and stating positions I would still defend. The language I used, however, was imprecise and sweeping enough to give the impression that I considered the balance-of-power principle of no practical or theoretical importance or value in international politics and the actual distribution of power within the system inconsequential.
Such a view is untenable. A balance of power of some kind is not merely necessary for a durable international system, but defines what an international system is: a system in which final decisive power is not held by one member—in other words, an international system, not an imperial one.3 In any case, regardless of formal definitions, achieving a sound balance in international relations is not merely one goal among others in international politics but a central requirement for a stable international system, and achieving it by balancing power with countervailing power is obviously a necessary part of that effort. These are truisms. But other equally important truisms are often denied, ignored, or slighted. To be a durable and stable or general peace, a system requires much more than just some putatively correct distribution of state power, and what is a correct distribution is highly debatable, controversial, and dependent on individual perceptions, motivations, and interests. Most definitions of “balance of power” as actually held and pursued by different governments, furthermore, turn out on concrete examination to be thinly disguised euphemisms for schemes of imbalance, domination, and hegemony—witness, for example, the grotesque oxymoron in which former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defined the Bush Doctrine with its unabashed assertion of America’s unilateral global military and political supremacy as “a balance of power that favors freedom.” Measuring power for purposes of balancing it, moreover, is far more complicated and inexact than just calculating the relative distribution of some elements of hard power (military, economic, and strategic-geographic ones), itself a delicate, uncertain undertaking. If one adds the elements of so-called soft power (a state’s influence, values, reputation, credibility, systemic functions, etc.) and the historical, legal, cultural, moral, and ideational elements related to state power (norms, shared practices, existing treaties and conventions, concerns about honor, reputation, and tradition, and the presence or absence of a shared sense of membership in an international community with common interests and responsibilities) to the calculation, the task becomes even harder. These are elements that can be considered tools of power only with difficulty or not at all, yet they are important restraints, limits, and tools in its exercise. Thus without first carefully analyzing the power-political aspects of a system and then determining how, whether, and to what extent they are themselves balanced and complemented by other systemic factors, one cannot even say what a real balance-of-power system is, let alone whether one exists in a particular situation, or of what kind, or what kind is needed to promote international stability.
