The new monarchies who came to power, after the Revolution of 1830, Louis Philippe and Leopold I, sought the sanction of “the people” as king “of the French” and “of the Belgians,” rather than of France or Belgium. Even the reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, three years after crushing the Polish uprising of 1830 – 1831, proclaimed that his own authority was based on nationality (as well as autocracy and Orthodoxy)—and his word narodnost, also meaning “spirit of the people,” was copied from the Polish narodowosc.22
This model was very different from that of the nation-state, and Napoleon himself, as well as the architects of the Vienna state system that institutionalized his defeat, were careful not to nurture such states. For a time Napoleon enjoyed a reputation as a liberator, arising from his 1796 campaign in Italy, 23 in which, as a general of the Revolution, he prised Lombardy from the Austrians and established the Cisalpine Republic, whose capital was in Milan. But in the beginning of 1799, having annexed Tuscany and Piedmont, and having established republics in Rome and Naples, the Directory studiedly refused to assemble an Italian nation-state. Once Napoleon seized power he annexed Piedmont directly to France in 1802, and the Ligurian Republic, whose capital was Genoa, in 1805; in 1801 he had decreed a constitution for the Cisalpine Republic and was named president of what he agreed to call the Italian Republic. Belgium— the Austrian Netherlands—had been occupied in 1795 and formally annexed to France in 1797. The left bank of the Rhine had been annexed by France in 1797 and by 1803 all but three of the ecclesiastical princes had lost their sovereignty, as had all but six of the fifty-one imperial towns and cities. Several south German states were carved out or enlarged, but there was never any question of creating a new German state.
The kingdoms of Westphalia and Bavaria and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw were all French satellites. For a time Holland was made a kingdom under Napoleon's brother Louis, but when this monarch showed too much independence, the Dutch state was annexed directly to the French Empire. Joseph Bonaparte was first King of Naples, and was then replaced by the French marshal Murat when Joseph became king of Spain. In all of these states, important reforms were accomplished: serfdom was abolished (in varying practical degrees), French-style prefectures were set up in some of the German states, a civil code was introduced, and new written constitutions were promulgated. But at no time was there any contemplation of creating actual states whose legitimacy derived either from the fact that their institutions were expressions of national will or that they sought responsibility for the welfare of the nation. Napoleon's remark regarding the Polish Sejm (parliament) is instructive: “As for their deliberating assemblies, their liberum veto, their diets on horseback with drawn swords, I want nothing of that…. I want Poland only as a disciplined force, to furnish a battlefield.”24
Nor did the Peace Settlement of 1814 – 1815, following Napoleon's defeat, seek to create national states: quite the opposite. The claims of Hol-and were extended to include Belgium; Piedmont was enlarged to include Genoa and Nice, then handed over to the House of Savoy; Austria annexed Lombardy as well as Venice; Pius VII recovered the Papal States; and Poland was reorganized into little more than a province of Russia, three-quarters of the size of the Duchy of Warsaw, while most Poles lived elsewhere under Prussian, Austrian or Russian rule. The Federal Diet in Frankfurt was not to be a popularly elected parliament; on the contrary, it was to be a body of state representatives of thirty-nine different German governments, including Austria and Prussia, both of which lay partly outside the German Confederation. Sweden and Norway were joined in a forced marriage. And, interestingly for our study, England secured to herself the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Malta, and the Ionian Islands. Insofar as the wishes of the national peoples involved were contemplated at all, they were calculatedly frustrated.
Despite Napoleon's loss, however, the state-nation had triumphed and its imperatives were to govern not only the Peace Settlement but the peace itself. The myth that united strategy and law in every period became now a national myth, epitomized by the merging of the State into the personal and quasi-religious roles once occupied by princes.
National history was depicted by writers both of school textbooks and of popular works as the history of the Nation's military triumphs. Other Nations were defined by these authors in terms of military relations. Foreigners were people with whom one went to war and usually defeated, and if one had not done so the last time, one certainly would the next. [O]ne found personal fulfillment in making “the supreme sacrifice” so that the national cause might triumph…25
It is important to appreciate the characteristics of such a state in order to understand the nature of the international society composed of such states. Napoleon had forced every territorial state eventually to conform itself to the state-nation model if it was to compete militarily. Armies of conscripts, meritocratic and bourgeois ministries, broad-based taxation without exemptions for the nobility, all spread across Europe, just as mercenary and nonstate elements vanished from the forces of the great powers.26 Most importantly for our purposes, the triumph of the state-nation meant that the legitimacy of this constitutional form was recognized by the congress of states that wrote the peace. The creation of this congress we owe to one remarkable figure more than to any other, and it is perhaps only from the present perspective that we can truly appreciate his achievement.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign minister from 1812 to 1822, was born in 1769, the same year as Napoleon, his great adversary, and Wellington, his principal political and personal ally. This proud, uncharismatic* man understood the requirements of the new society of state-nations and labored selflessly to bring about its harmony. At the time, he was little understood and greatly vilified; both Byron27 and Shelley† wrote remarkably cruel lines to immortalize their hatred of him, and even today he has yet to find a diplomatic biographer sufficiently attentive to his conceptions for Europe. For the most part such biographers are either apt to be defensive in tone28 or they are mesmerized by the voluptuous characters of his cynical contemporaries, Talleyrand and Metternich.29 From our current perspective, however, one can see in Castlereagh's work an achievement of such magnitude that it becomes clear how, despite the incomprehension of his successors and the hostility to his designs of his continental collaborators, it survived to give Europe peace for forty years. To appreciate this, let us revisit the endgame of the epochal French War, and its resolution at Vienna.
Having abandoned Russia, Napoleon was on the defensive in 1813. As he retreated from the Rhine late in that year, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees and successfully attacked Bayonne. Holland rose in revolt and expelled the French imperial civil and military officers. Early in November the Austrian foreign minister, Prince Metternich, made a peace overture that would have acknowledged French conquests through 1796, leaving Belgium, the German left bank, and Nice-Savoy under French rule. Napoleon rejected these terms. On December 21, the armies of the coalition crossed the Rhine, beginning the invasion of northern France. But in February, encouraged by recent victories in the field, the French emperor again rejected peace offers, this time confining France to the boundaries of 1792. Only at this juncture was Castlereagh able to secure an allied agreement, signed March 9 at Chaumont in Champagne, that the war should be fought out until a definitive victory had been won and, more importantly, that the alliance would continue after its victory. The language of the treaty is significant:
The present Treaty of Alliance having for its object the maintenance of a balance of Europe, to secure the repose and independence of the Powers, and to prevent the invasions which for so many years have devastated the world, the High Contracting Parties have agreed among themselves to extend its duration for twenty years from the date of signature.30
This treaty held the coalition together until the Peace of 1814 – 1815 was completed, providing the basis for the First and Second Treaties of Paris and for the Congress of Vienna. Chaumont is the source of “the first notable experim
ent in institutionalizing the principles of concert and balance in behalf of European peace,”31 where the key word is “institutionalize.” The Congress system took the wartime coalition of collective security and applied it to peacetime, in much the same way that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has operated in our own time, persisting beyond the Cold War to provide a framework for subsequent collective action in Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
It was Castlereagh's strategic innovation to use the wartime coalition to maintain the peace. To accomplish this, he undertook the following, highly difficult objectives: (i) he had to dismantle the Napoleonic superstate, while preserving the state-nation of France to such a degree that it would legitimate its new regime (rather than stigmatizing it as the collaborationist party that had sold out France to her enemies); (2) he had to persuade the allies that their cooperation in the face of tantalizing French offers and menacing French threats had ultimately been worthwhile, which meant that while British allies would receive substantial territorial gains, the British would not; (3) he had to institutionalize the directorate of the Congress so that it met regularly to continue multistate collaboration, and yet somehow keep it from turning into an instrument of internal repression when member-states felt threatened by revolutions in various European countries; (4) he had to win credible commitments of armed force of such overwhelming magnitude that no single power or coalition of two of the five great powers could be reasonably hopeful of success through war; (5) he had to do all these things while facing stiff opposition in his own party from George Canning, whose rhetorical gifts and skill at playing on public opinion he could not hope to match, and from Whigs who portrayed him as a mere henchman of the reactionary Metternich, and (6) he had to act in concert with Prussians who wanted a Carthaginian peace, Russians who were entertaining the idea of a continental hegemony at German expense, Austrians who felt threatened by the new development of the state-nation and its ability to exploit national sentiments, and the French, who saw England as their primary persecutor and the frustrator of their continental dreams.
Nor was the environment of the Congress suited to his virtues. Castlereagh was honorable and undevious; 32 Metternich and Talleyrand were notably, even ostentatiously, neither. Castlereagh was tolerant in religious matters (though an Anglo-Irish peer, he had long supported Catholic emancipation, and resigned from the government in 180133 when the king refused to sign the emancipation act) and modest in his deportment; by contrast, Tsar Alexander I, the most flamboyant and politically indispensable personage at the Congress, persuaded every single party attending to sign a declaration in behalf of a “decent Christian order” (except the Ottoman sultan, the Pope—who refused to sign along with Orthodox and Protestant monarchs—and Great Britain), kept spectacular mistresses, and was acknowledged even in this society as a narcissistic megalomaniac. Yet, despite all these obstacles, Castlereagh did to a very large degree succeed.
Castlereagh played, first, on the awareness of all parties that a few states, collectively, possessed preponderant armed force and second, on the fact that while any one of these states could mobilize an entire nation to inflict horrific damage on the others, any further international conflict was sure to arouse the will of nations to seize their states because the mobilization of entire national peoples produced a larger and more critical audience for public decisions. Between these two apprehensions, fear of military defeat and fear of domestic upheaval, Castlereagh strung his diplomatic strategy. As we will see, it really had very little to do with the “balance of power” as that term had been used in Europe since Utrecht, although labeling it as such gave it the status of precedent.
As we have observed, the eighteenth century armies fielded by territorial states were (compared to their successors) relatively small and highly professional. Prior to the 1790s a military treaty might call for the provision of a force of 18,000 or 24,000—reckoned in the Roman units of 6,000 soldiers associated with the legion. In a previous chapter, the increase in size brought about by Frederick the Great was noted; yet on only two or three occasions did he ever commit more than 50,000 men to a battle. The French levée en masse, a nationwide mobilization, transformed this scale. In 1808, on the eve of the campaign that ended at Wagram, Napoleon commanded some 300,000 troops in Spain, another 100,000 in France, some 200,000 in the Rhineland, and another 60,000 in Italy. One expert has calculated that between 1800 and 1815, the number of Frenchmen called up reached two million, of whom an estimated 400,000 died either in service or as a result of service in war.34 By the time of the Hundred Days, the Coalition was able to field quickly 750,000 men, of whom 225,000 converged on Waterloo. Such magnitudes transfixed the attention of every political leader in Europe. Armies of this size meant that a campaign prosecuted on a continental scale would risk destroying the state that waged it, as indeed the French state had been destroyed, but only if opposing forces of comparable size could be mustered.
This was the true balance in Castlereagh's calculations: a collective security force of such immense magnitude that it would deter any great power from aggression. As Ford has observed, Castlereagh's “position rested on the belief that genuine national interests, clearly recognized, could create in Europe an equilibrium of forces capable of rendering war unfeasible for any one power, or even for a coalition unless directed against a single aggressor.”35
To maintain such a coalition credibly required a commitment from all the major states. Even if the benefits to the common good justified a common effort, what was to prevent any single state from opting out of such an effort and still enjoying the fruits of general security? If the cost of a European conflict was so horrific, why wouldn't a state simply let the others fight—or not fight, for that matter? For if one state kept out, why would its rivals bleed themselves white in a conflict for the common good? If one state did keep out, why wouldn't the others do likewise, leaving the field to the most aggressive state? This problem required Castlereagh to exploit the second overwhelming impression of the wars that had just ended: wherever the war had been taken, large and hostile popular insurrections had been touched off. These occurred in Belgium in 1798, Naples in 1799 and 1806, Spain in 1808, and the Netherlands in 1811–1812. There is some dispute whether these were national uprisings or simply revolts of a familiar kind against the requisitioning by troops of foodstuffs, horses, and equipment. It is of no matter: in either case, war on an international scale meant unleashing popular national forces that the state could not control.
This was the problem of the state-nation, which, unlike the nation-state, had no broad-based elective assemblies to mediate strategic decisions and, speaking comparatively, little free press to articulate and educate public opinion. The state-nation, however, did have positive characteristics that Castlereagh understood perfectly. Its leadership was cosmopolitan, it could take decisions quickly and make commitments over the long term, and it possessed a mercantile and industrial tax base that could benefit from defense preparations and direct military expenditures. It was, in short, ideal for the innovation of the Congress, which Castlereagh introduced at Vienna, having insisted on provisions for this mechanism in the preceding treaties among the allies.
There had of course been other conferences and congresses before Vienna; two or three, the Westphalian conferences at Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, and that at Utrecht in 1713, have been discussed, and form the subject of Part II in Book II. Those congresses, however, met for the sole purpose of arranging peace settlements—where settlement was the objective, including parceling out the territorial spoils of war. The Congress of Vienna was something new.* Of this Congress Metternich wrote,
No great political insight is needed to see that this Congress could not be modeled on any which had taken place. Former assemblies which were called congresses met for the express purpose of settling a quarrel between two or more belligerent powers—the issue being a peace treaty. On this occasion peace had already been made and the parties meet as friends who, though di
ffering in their interests, wish to work together toward the conclusion and affirmation of the existing treaty.36
Relying on the Treaty of Chaumont, a secret article inserted in the first Treaty of Paris had reserved the determination of Europe's ordering to the great powers of the Coalition. Castlereagh now concluded the Quadruple Alliance of November 1815, which reiterated the key features of Chaumont but stipulated that the great powers would hold periodic conferences,
for the purpose of consulting upon their interests, or for the consideration of measures which… shall be considered the most salutary for the purpose and prosperity of Nations and the maintenance for the Peace of Europe.37
“Thus,” as Craig and George put it, “the new order was in a sense given both a constitution and a constitutional watchdog (as defined by the final act), and a concert of powers to watch over it.”38
At Vienna, diplomats of the great powers met repeatedly with each other and with parties as various as the Vatican emissary, the sultan of Turkey, rival Italian factions, thirty German princes, and representatives of the Jews of Frankfurt am Main. Meanwhile, ten special commissions dealt with specific questions ranging from the organization of Germany and Switzerland to topics such as population statistics, diplomatic rules, and the vexing matter of the slave trade. There was no plenary session of all the delegates until the signing of the final comprehensive treaty, called—as with the Helsinki Accords in our own day, which the Congress prefigured—the Final Act. The historian Jacques Droz has concluded,
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