THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  Second, the mentality that arose with the state-nation could not passively accept an international system that seemed to depend upon etiquette for its operation. The state-nation was founded upon the claim (made notably by Hegel) that the State furnished the ideal vehicle for the realization of the nation; the nation could only be fulfilled through the self-conscious creation and enhancement of the State. During this period modern political parties came into being, as each offered to the nation a competing version of how best to fulfill the nation through the State. At Vienna, as at Augsburg, Osnabrück and Münster, and Utrecht, a program of international security was elaborated, but at Vienna, it had to be a program that was perceived to respond to the collective failure of the conventional, customary tradition that had hitherto provided an unquestioned context for events.

  Third, state-nations claimed to rule on the basis of the consent of the governed. If an instrument were to be designed to govern the security affairs of Europe, it would have to be defended on the grounds that it too reflected the will of the peoples of Europe. The tsar is reported to have remarked that Napoleon was overthrown not by cabinets but by peoples, and that an outlet must be found for a new spirit in Europe that was at once constitutional, warlike, and national—a pretty good summation of the state-nation mentality.8

  The multistate institution created by this legal instrument would have to be responsive to international opinion (in the way that the political institutions of the state-nation were responsive to domestic public opinion) in order to justify its decisions as ultimately based on consent; it would have to deter war rather than merely contain it; and finally it must be perceived by national publics as actually doing both these things. The solution arrived at was an ongoing international executive, composed of the five great powers, that would coordinate international security and summon periodic congresses, as necessary, to ratify the decisions taken by this directorate. This simply replicated in peacetime the pattern set up before Vienna: the Coalition allies had first agreed on a course of action, which was then presented for ratification to a congress of all states. In this way the Congress's apparent contradiction of the principle of consent—decisions by a few having been taken on behalf of the many—was resolved. The powers could rely on the common consensus for peace while asserting that only reliance on the few could keep the peace and thereby protect the many.

  We can see this tactic at work in the opening weeks of the Congress of Vienna, when the allied powers were unable to reach a final decision before the date set for the Congress to open. Castlereagh drafted a declaration explaining the delay; in it he is at pains to show that the great powers are taking international opinion into account precisely with respect to a decision that the powers alone are in fact making. As he wrote in the draft declaration:

  The courts parties to the Treaty of Paris by which the present Congress has been set up, hold themselves to be obliged to submit for its consideration and approval the project of settlement which they judge to be most in accordance with the principles recognized as the necessary basis for the general system of Europe.9

  The prototype for this arrangement is found in the First Treaty of Paris, Article I, which provides that “the high contracting parties shall make every effort to preserve, not only among themselves, but also as far as depends on them, among all the states of Europe, the good harmony and understanding that is so necessary for its repose,” and in Article XVI, 10 which provides for the ratification of the provisions of the treaty by the upcoming congress.

  By this means the directorate could claim broad-based consent for its decisions, relying on international opinion as well as deploying this opinion in dealings among themselves. This executive managed the Concert of Europe. Initially its members were confined to the parties to the Treaty of Chaumont; by 1818 France had been included in this executive and, as Kissinger has put it, “was admitted to the Congress system at periodic European congresses, which for half a century came close to constituting the government of Europe.” Indeed, of the 170 million inhabitants of Europe (excluding those under Turkish rule), more than two-thirds were residents of states that were parties to the Treaty of Paris. As Book I elaborated, in an earlier era it had been possible for relatively small states like the Venetian Republic or later the Dutch Republic to be powerful geopolitical actors because they could fund formidable professional armies. The mass conscription of the era of the state-nation ended that possibility, ushering in a new sort of warfare, marginalizing many states, and making some large state-nations indispensable to any peace settlement. Not every leader understood this. In a letter to Castlereagh, Lord Liverpool phlegmatically wrote that “[a] war sometime hence, though an evil, need not be different in its character and its effects from any of those wars which occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the commencement of the French Revolution.”11

  Castlereagh (and Wellington) knew better. The era of cabinet wars fought for limited objectives was over. In its place was a new age of national wars fought for national ideals—that is, massive armies deployed to pursue virtually continental, even global, goals. By comprising those states that were capable of fielding large armies, the system of collective security that the executive directorate administered made a virtue of what Kissinger identifies as the chief defect of such systems. Kissinger writes that “[t]he weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform and that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general system of collective security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction than on joint action.”12

  In the case of the European executive, as with the domestic constitutional design of many of its members, inaction was exactly what was called for. All attempts by Metternich to convert the executive directorate into a roving commission to suppress democratic movements were frustrated, and no attempts were made by the great powers to assault one another until the Crimean War. It is not necessary that the interests of states be uniform for a system of collective security to function, only that these interests counsel the same course of action (or inaction). In the case of the directorate of the Concert of Europe, each member feared a new revolutionary upheaval and sought in foreign policy the prestige, legitimacy, and gravity that participation in the executive body conferred. When, in time, such upheavals came, they came not from a defecting state-nation member of the Concert but from states that had been excluded, Italy and Germany. The historian Bruun wrote that “[t]here is an element of historical irony in the fact that [Napoleon's] attempt to make France secure by extending French influence over Germany and Italy contributed to an opposite result.”13 How much more ironic that the attempt at Vienna to make the European society of states secure should ultimately founder on its failure to accord statehood to a great nation. It was a phenomenon, however, that state-nations encountered all over the globe, and it was perhaps inherent in this constitutional form. The very nationalism that energizes the armies and officials of the state-nation awakens the latent nationalism of their conquests and colonies. Though it is sometimes said that the Congress of Vienna ignored the matter of nationalism in its territorial settlements, this is only partly true: the Congress was extremely vigilant with regard to the national populations of the great powers. France was not dismembered, despite widespread sentiment to do so; German land earmarked for the English prince regent to be added to Hanover was instead given to Prussia, despite the fact that England was the chief architect of victory. Rather it was the national identities of those peoples without states that was sacrificed, and this says most about the state-nation itself and how it differs from the nation-state that is the source of our understanding of nationalism in state affairs today. The state-nation exalts the State and puts the nation at its service. The society of such states is therefore not concerned with promoting national identity per se, but rather with safeguarding the national identity of states. For this society, the Concert was an ideal institution.

  THE NEED FOR A NEW POLITICS

 
The historian Webster in his study of the Congress of Vienna concluded that

  [it] cannot be said that [public opinion] affected the decisions of the statesmen to any material degree. The Polish-Saxon question [the most divisive issue among the coalition partners] was settled purely on grounds of expediency; and the populations of Germany were transferred from one monarch to another with scarcely the slightest reference to their wishes.14

  This conclusion is overstated as it stands, and in any case it mistakes the role of public opinion in the state-nation for that within the society of state-nations. For the former, it is not the opinion of distant publics but the opinion of the nation which the state-nation represents that is crucial; for the latter, it is the way in which international opinion can be deployed by powers within the executive directorate that proves decisive, and this was even true, as we shall see, with the Polish-Saxon question. Osiander renders a better judgment when he observes instead that “what made [the Congress of Vienna] different… from earlier ones was the self-conscious way that public opinion was monitored by the peacemakers. The serene self-awareness of the Utrecht system was replaced at Vienna by anxious self-consciousness.”15 Obviously modern state-nations, whose governments hold power by virtue of some version of popular consent, are acutely attuned to public opinion. What is interesting, as Osiander notes, is that the society of such states should give a crucial role to public opinion in nondomestic affairs, not confining itself to the opinion of persons “back home” but carefully monitoring (and manipulating) the opinion in the various states with whom that society had to deal (as, for example, the opinion of French society regarding the provisions of the Treaty of Paris) and deploying arguments within the executive directorate based on international public opinion. Metternich, who carefully guided the public accounts of the Congress through Gentz, his protégé, wrote that “public opinion is the most powerful of all means; like religion, it penetrates the most hidden recesses, where administrative measures have no influence,” and Gentz himself wrote that

  in the whole course of the latest events, the sovereigns of the coalition to destroy the ascendancy of Napoleon have regarded public opinion as one of their main supports, and… far from neglecting this opinion, they have rather laid themselves open to the accusation… to have listened to it too much… The Tsar… attaches the utmost importance to it; whatever his political or personal ambitions, I am sure that he would rather sacrifice them than to be seen in the eyes of the public as unjust, ungrateful, or a disturber of the general peace… 16

  Talleyrand argued that this sensitivity was part of the new Age. In a letter to the French king, he wrote:

  Formerly, the secular power could derive support from the authority of religion; it can no longer do this, because religious indifference has penetrated all classes and become universal. The sovereign power, therefore, can only rely upon public opinion for support, and to obtain that it must seek to be at one with that opinion.17

  Talleyrand was speaking of domestic opinion; Castlereagh extended this reliance to international public opinion. He wrote the tsar, regarding the Polish issue, that “if Your Imperial Majesty should leave public opinion behind you… I should despair of witnessing any just and stable order of things in Europe.”

  All these leaders had witnessed the destruction of the public stature of the French autocracy by journalists; each one knew that Napoleon's power, depending as it did on enormous public faith, derived at bottom from his place in the French imagination, a place he carefully nurtured in the bulletins he wrote. If religious tradition had underwritten the ancien régime, linking it with the dynastic past and imbuing it with the prestige of the mystical, then public opinion must underwrite the kind of state that depended on mass endorsement for its power and legitimacy. Perhaps Webster has in mind the form of the nation-state when, finding little sensitivity among the great powers to the national feelings of the publics whose states were being redrawn, he sees instead only expediency in the acts of state-nations.18 The role of public opinion in the nation-state is to assess whether the welfare of the people is being attended to by the State, and it is true that there was little of this at Vienna. But the role of public opinion in the state-nation was to assess the character, fitness, and morality of the State as the apotheosis of, not the servant of, the nation. Thus, for example, one historian of the Congress has concluded that even the allocations of territories were not as important19

  in themselves as is often supposed. For Metternich, more than anything, the outcome of the redistribution talks mattered as an indicator of how successful Austria was at asserting herself. Austria was anxious to confirm its role as a principal international player…. [To] lose face in the German Confederation [would have been fatal to Austria's leadership of the new league]. This is not simply a matter of expediency, and it was important, vitally important, to Austria what German and European opinion thought of it.20

  Much the same case can be made even with respect to the autocratic tsar. The relation between a parliamentary leader like Castlereagh and the public opinion of his domestic constituency in a state-nation provides elements out of which the relation of a state-nation's leader to other peer leaders is created, and ultimately the relation of that state to other states. That relation too is compounded of prestige, reputation, and the stature that is conferred by being at one with public opinion, and therefore domestic and international public opinion are linked. The tsar wished to gain the respect of the European public in order to play a decisive role in the directorate, a body made up of leaders who themselves, in their domestic constituencies, had to be attentive to public opinion. The Vienna system could only successfully function if it were made sensitive to public opinion: the congresses and the directorate ensured this.

  THE NEED FOR NEW PRINCIPLES

  The most significant challenge facing the peacemakers, however, was neither instrumental nor political. This was the challenge posed by the loss of customary legitimacy by the ancien régime. In a previous work21 Calabresi and I have suggested that one way to look at the different cultural institutions that societies use to address social issues is in terms of four paradigmatic allocation methods: economic, political, customary, and blind. These four methods function in part to resolve and in part to hide the conflicts in values that arise from contested allocations of resources and from the difficult choices among values that are thus forced on societies. Lottery (or “blind”) systems share with customary systems the virtue of avoiding any overt consideration of the competing merits of different choices.22 Dynastic legitimacy united these two paradigmatic methods, custom and chance, so that, unless the dynastic succession were unclear, societies did not have to expose the values they would have had to compromise in an open competition of preferences to choose a ruler. The civil wars that so often accompanied succession struggles are a testament to the divisions that are exposed when such a clash of values is brought into the open. Talley rand believed that “the usual and almost inevitable consequence of an uncertain right of succession is to cause domestic or foreign wars and often both simultaneously.”23

  Succession by dynastic descent is a blind allocation system, a choice by the society not to actually choose. Like men drawing straws to see who will go on a perilous mission, it leaves the selection to fate. There is much to be said for such systems: juries; the Dalai Lama, whose time of death determines the time of the birth of his successor; and the holders of entailed wealth are all chosen in this blind way. If this method, however, is stripped of its reliance on divine intervention—the claim that lot systems, by their very randomness, allow God's will to be done without adulteration—then the blind system can appear irrational and the very mindlessness that originally commended the system discredits it.

  What perpetuated the system of dynastic succession beyond the era of the kingly states and into the period of territorial states, which was dominated by rationalism, was the union of blind allocation with another archetypal allocative system, custom. Whe
ther or not monarchies—leadership by a lottery among royals—would be perpetuated into the period of state-nations depended upon whether they could call on resources of legitimacy that were sanctified by custom. Talleyrand here too saw absolutely clearly what was at stake:

  I speak of the legitimacy of governments in general, whatsoever be their form, and not only of those of kings, because it applies to all governments. A lawful government, be it monarchical or republican, hereditary or elective, aristocratic or democratic, is always one whose existence, form, and mode of action, have been consolidated and consecrated by a long succession of years, and I should say almost, by a secular prescription. The legitimacy of the sovereign power results from the ancient status of possession, just as, for private individuals, does the right of property.24

  Denied the union of custom and chance that aided the territorial states, the Congress of Vienna invoked three crucial interlocking norms in order to confer legitimacy upon its undertakings. These norms were the balance of power, the general interest of the society of European states, and the special interests of the prevailing constitutional archetype.