Stealing Horses to Great Applause, page 6
The Vienna system
The explanation of this remarkable record, and of its disastrous end, begins with the Vienna system, the network of treaties, institutions, and practices developed in 1813–15 during the last Napoleonic Wars and at the Congress of Vienna. There is wide agreement on some reasons for its unusual stability. It embodied a moderate, sensible territorial settlement that satisfied the main needs and requirements of the victors (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and their lesser allies) without despoiling or humiliating France. Tied into this were comprehensive negotiated settlements of many particular disputes arising out of the wars from 1787 to 1815. These settlements, combined in a network of mutually supporting treaties, gave all governments a stake in a new system of mutual interlocking rights and obligations. Backing this was a security alliance among the great powers to defend the settlement against violation or revolutionary aggression, especially by France. Finally, an old but little-used diplomatic principle was implemented, that of a European Concert, by which the five great powers became a governing council or directory for settling serious international questions, using Concert practices such as diplomatic conferences rather than bilateral or multilateral negotiations to achieve agreed solutions.
Another feature of the settlement was equally vital though less obvious: the creation of an independent, confederated, defensively oriented European center. Throughout the eighteenth century the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, the instability, weakness, and rivalries plaguing Central Europe (the German states, Switzerland, Austria, Poland) had spawned repeated crises and wars as internecine conflicts drew in the competing flank powers. The Vienna Congress took a series of measures to turn this critical area temporarily into a zone of peace (at the cost, to be sure, of some injustice, disappointed expectations, and future trouble). It established a German Confederation uniting the German states in a permanent defensive league under joint Austro-Prussian leadership; gave Austria leadership but not direct control of the various independent states of Italy; established and guaranteed a neutral Swiss Confederation; and maintained the eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Russia, Austria, and Prussia in a modified form. Even the Kingdoms of the Netherlands and Denmark were tied indirectly into this independent, defensive center.
If there is little disagreement among scholars about these sources of the system’s stability, there is some concerning its spirit and operating principles. For many, it worked because a balance of power inhibited new bids for hegemony and monarchs cooperated against war, liberalism, nationalism, and revolution. Once these factors declined, with the balance of power shifting and new ambitions emerging, the system no longer worked. This verdict, though it contains some truth, is inadequate and misleading. The reason governments supported the equilibrium of power, territory, rights, status, obligations, and security reached in 1815 was not that they were sated by expansion or simply exhausted by war and wanted peace. It was that they had learned that war and expansion could not provide peace and security. They accepted, often grudgingly, the painful, delicate compromises of the settlement in order to achieve security in a system of rights guaranteed by law. Even in France most ministries, if not opposition groups, came to accept and support the settlement on these grounds. And when governments did need to be restrained in this era, the normal method was not balancing, confronting their power with countervailing power, but “grouping”—using Concert means and group pressure to enforce norms and treaties. In the most important crises, balancing could not have worked, for two great powers, Britain and Russia, were more powerful and far less vulnerable than the other three, and when they worked together, as they did at major junctures in 1815–48, they settled matters. In terms of power, the system was characterized by dual hegemony, British in Western Europe, Russian in the east, a hegemony that was tolerable because it was usually latent, inactive, and allowed others lesser spheres of influence.
Just as political equilibrium did not derive from balancing power by countervailing power, so conservative solidarity did not rest simply on restoring and preserving the old regime. In international politics at least, the Vienna system was not a restoration. It preserved most of the territorial, social, and constitutional-political changes brought about in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and encouraged or permitted some new ones. Only later, from 1820 on, did policies of repression of dissent and simple maintenance of the status quo dominate in Russia, Austria, and Prussia and their spheres, leading to an ideological split between a liberal-constitutional West and an absolutist East. The solidarity among governments for peace created at Vienna, which transcended and outlived this split, arose from its overall success in satisfying existing demands and harmonizing conflicting claims, based on a general consensus on the practical requirements of peace and a recognition that certain limits had to govern international competition. Rivalries and conflicting aims persisted under the Vienna system as before—Anglo-French competition in Spain and the Mediterranean, Austro-French in Italy, Austro-Prussian in Germany, Austro-Russian in the Balkans, Anglo-Russian in the Middle East. But the stakes, rules, and goals were different. Now the competition was over spheres of interest and leading influence, not territorial aggrandizement, the elimination of the rival, or total control, and preserving general peace remained uppermost. The late eighteenth-century game of high-stakes poker, which the Revolution and Napoleon had turned into Russian roulette, gave way to contract bridge.
This made Concert rules and practices effective for decades after 1815 in dealing peacefully with international problems and crises, often by repressive means and never without friction and rivalry, but without great-power war or aggrandizement. The examples can only be summarized here.
Revolts in Spain, Naples, and Piedmont in 1820–1. Three great-power conferences in 1820–2 led to their suppression by Austria in Italy and by France in Spain.
The Greek revolt in 1821–5. This profound ethnic-religious revolt and war against Turkish rule repeatedly threatened to cause a Russo-Turkish war but self-restraint by Russia and Concert diplomacy led by Britain and Austria averted it.
Revolutions in Spain’s and Portugal’s American colonies. All the rebellious colonies gained their independence without foreign intervention, partly because Britain with its navy deterred it, but mainly because the continental monarchies, despite their sympathy for Spain and fear of republican revolution, made no serious effort to intervene.
The Eastern Crisis in 1826–9. The intervention of Britain, Russia, and France to save the Greeks from being crushed by the Ottoman Sultan’s vassal Egypt, though intended initially to end the fighting by diplomacy and prevent any great power from aggrandizing itself or acting unilaterally, instead escalated into an allied naval battle that destroyed the Turco-Egyptian forces. This led to a Russo-Turkish war, a Russian victory, and the danger that the Ottoman Empire would collapse with Russia picking up the pieces—a likely eighteenth-century-style outcome. Instead, Russia signed a peace treaty that increased its influence at Constantinople but preserved the Sultan’s throne; the three allies negotiated the creation of an independent Greek kingdom; and this soon came under Anglo-French influence rather than Russian.
The 1830 revolutions. These revolutions, beginning in July in France and spreading to the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, and Poland, produced some violence, considerable political and constitutional change, and some international crises, deepening the East-West ideological divide. In international politics, however, the powers demonstrated restraint. They quickly recognized the new Orleanist monarchy to replace the ousted Bourbons in France, and managed Austro-French tension over Austrian interventions in the Papal State through conference diplomacy. They responded to a Belgian revolt overthrowing the United Netherlands, created in 1815 as a defence against France, by convening a London conference that, despite great obstacles raised mainly by the Dutch and Belgians, finally established and jointly guaranteed an independent Belgian kingdom, bringing peace until 1914 to an area for centuries the cockpit of Europe. Even Russia’s crushing of a Polish revolt for independence passed without foreign intervention, serious international crisis, or territorial change.
New Eastern Crises in 1832–41. This time the threat to the Ottoman Empire came from the Sultan’s ambitious vassal, the Pasha of Egypt, and his regime, twice defeated and facing overthrow, was rescued by European great powers, Russia in 1832–3 and four powers in 1839–40. The four powers’ decision in 1840 finally to act without France led to a crisis and threat of war in Europe, apparently reviving the traditional power-political competition in the Near East and Europe. But the crisis really had more to do with rules and leadership in the Concert than power politics. France always favored a Concert to defend the Sultan but wished to lead it in partnership with Britain against Russia, the permanent threat to Turkey. Instead Britain, suspicious of French aims, preferred working with Russia, and France reacted mainly out of wounded honor and lost prestige. French preparations for war, directed against Austria and Prussia, were largely a bluff, and, when the four-power concert held fast, France backed down, with the two German powers helping it do so with honour. The crisis illustrates both the Anglo-Russian dual-hegemonic structure of the system and the effectiveness of Concert grouping strategy.
Other troubles of the 1830s and 1840s. These were a mixed bag, including civil wars in Spain and Portugal between absolutists and pseudo-constitutionalists, rising discontent and tensions in Italy, especially at Rome and between Sardinia-Piedmont and Austria, another incipient Polish revolt crushed by the Eastern Powers in 1846 and followed by the annexation of the Free City of Cracow by Austria, and a small Protestant-Catholic civil war in Switzerland. All raised contentious issues between various powers; none came close to threatening international war.
Yet to claim that the system remained effective in preserving peace is not to argue that it was unaffected or unweakened by crisis and change. The 1830s and 1840s clearly show growing tensions and friction between the powers. The cause usually given for this, as for the 1848 revolutions and the ultimate downfall of the Vienna system, is the growing ideological, political, and economic gap between absolutist and moderate liberal-constitutionalist governments and groups, and the way in which absolutist regimes, increasingly weak and threatened, tried to meet demands for political, social, and economic change and the rise of nationalism by repression rather than reform.
Basically this is true, but it over-simplifies the connection between the absolutist-constitutionalist split in domestic affairs and international relations. Historians often equate the Vienna system (the treaties, rules, and practices for conducting international politics) with the Metternich system (the absolutist prescriptions for the internal governance of states). Since Austria’s chancellor Prince Metternich and his allies identified the two, using the Vienna treaties to legitimate their repressive internal and international practices, and since their liberal and radical opponents likewise tarred the two systems with the same brush, this is understandable. Nonetheless, the two were not identical or inseparable, and the actual effects of the ideological contest from 1815 to 1848 show it. Overall, the Vienna system won (peace and the treaties were preserved), while the Metternich system ultimately lost (conservative attempts to hold back constitutionalism, liberal ideas, and economic and social change lost ground throughout the 1830s and 1840s in France, the Low Countries, Germany, northern Italy, and even parts of Austria). Moreover, the ideological rifts produced heated argument but not serious international rivalries or crises between governments. All the important rivalries in Europe both antedated the ideological divide and crossed its boundaries. The ideological dispute between absolutists proclaiming a right of intervention to suppress revolutions and liberals proclaiming a doctrine of non-intervention made little difference in practice. Regardless of doctrine, states intervened in foreign revolutions within their respective spheres of influence, or did not, according to their particular interests. The ideological contest, in other words, did not directly affect the Vienna system’s capacity to manage immediate international problems, nor for the most part did it lead governments into dangerous or aggressive policies. The most reactionary great-power regime in 1815–48—Charles X’s in France (1824–30)—also had the most dangerously ambitious foreign policy aims.
Yet absolutist policies did undermine the Vienna system and general peace both indirectly, adding to the pressures promoting revolution and discrediting and delegitimizing it by association with Metternichian repression, and directly, by deliberately stunting the Vienna system’s capacity to grow and adapt itself to new conditions. From 1819 on Metternich and his allies took the 1815 arrangements for the German Confederation, Italy, and Poland, originally capable of change and development, and reduced them to mere instruments for preserving the status quo, leaving the system still useful for crisis management but not problem-solving. On the other side, the Utopian schemes and reckless actions of nationalist and revolutionary ideologues threatened peace even more directly, while moderate reformers, especially in Britain, gave good advice without ever intending to back it with action or to take responsibility for the consequences. Britain’s Lord Palmerston, for example, was often right on the kinds of measures needed to avoid revolution in Germany and Italy; Metternich right about the dangers of urging others to apply them without considering how to manage the results. Thus its very success in preventing war and managing crises helped prepare the ground for the assault against the Vienna system.
The system undermined and overthrown, 1848–61
Unlike some revolutions, those that swept Western and Central Europe from France to the Romanian Principalities in 1848 arose primarily from internal political, social, and economic discontents and movements, not international conflicts. International politics, however, played a certain role in their origins and a bigger one in their course and outcome.
One important factor was nationalism, manifesting itself in two forms, both seeking liberation but from different bonds or restraints and for different ends. The first, voiced by peoples or leaders asserting a particular identity and chafing under foreign rule, called for national “rights” ranging from local autonomy and privileges through home rule to total independence. This kind of nationalist protest was widespread—Danes and Germans in Schleswig-Holstein, Italians in Austrian-ruled Lombardy-Venetia, Hungarians within Austria, Czechs in Bohemia-Moravia, Croats in Hungary, Poles under all three partitioning powers, Romanians under Turkish and Hungarian authority, Irish in the United Kingdom. Another kind of nationalism, voiced mainly by a rising commercial and professional middle class led or joined by free intellectuals and liberal nobles, demanded liberation from the obstacles placed in the path of the nation’s political freedom, social, economic, and cultural development, and power by small, weak, or unprogressive governments. This was present in France, but strongest in Germany and Italy.
In meaning different things by national liberation and unification, the two varieties targeted and threatened different foes. The former threatened multinational empires, Austria in particular; the latter particularly targeted small princely states. The former pointed toward decentralization and federation, the latter toward amalgamation. Thus, while they might cooperate at times, the likelihood, borne out by events, was that they would ultimately clash head on. Both kinds, moreover, aroused various divergent counter-revolutionary passions and programs—anti-Polish patriotism in Prussia and Russia, particularist loyalty in Bavaria and other German states, municipal loyalties in Italy, military, bureaucratic, and religious Habsburgtreue in Austria, German resistance to Czechs in Bohemia-Moravia or Danes in Schleswig, Croat and Slovak resistance to Hungarian domination, and the like. Hence the inevitable result of nationalist unity movements was increased disunity and conflict.
Nationalist movements affected international politics most directly, however, not by creating or deepening conflicts within countries or between peoples, but by providing the opportunity and means for ambitious leaders and governments to pursue expansionist aims, often old statist and dynastic ones, under new revolutionary slogans. Such “nationalist” programs and the responses of governments attacked or threatened by them mainly account for the international crises and conflicts of 1848–9. The Italian revolutions directly challenged both Austrian hegemony and the 1815 system, but only when Sardinia-Piedmont took the lead and attacked Austria was there an interstate war that threatened to pull in France and become general, and, when Austria crushed Sardinia-Piedmont in 1848 and 1849, the international crisis ended. The German and Danish national causes clashed in Schleswig-Holstein, but an international crisis arose only when Prussia temporarily supported the German cause with its army, and, when Britain and Russia forced Prussia to back down, the acute crisis was over. The German National Parliament at Frankfurt developed a dangerous Great German foreign policy in seeking to unite Germany, but the great international danger lay in the Austro-Prussian rivalry over who would run it. The Hungarian independence movement was a more formidable challenge to Austria than any other because early on the Hungarian movement gained legal recognition of its rights from Vienna, albeit later rescinded. It could then declare independence and fight to retain all the historic lands and peoples of the crown of St. Stephen as a government in command of the Hungarian half of the regular Austrian army. Finally, it was Tsar Nicholas I’s determination to keep revolution from his own lands and maintain Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe that ultimately doomed the Romanian risings and the Hungarian revolution, and helped prevent war in 1849–50 between Austria and Prussia over mastery in Germany.
