THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  THE BALANCE OF POWER

  Because the Peace of Utrecht had enshrined the idea of a European equilibrium as the sine qua non of stability for the society of states, statesmen had for a century before Vienna repeatedly invoked this idea. It is open to doubt whether the Great Article of Utrecht in fact envisaged the same sort of distribution of power as was meant by the phrase “balance of power” in Europe a century later: for one thing, the indicia of power themselves had changed, with the sheer size of populations being of much greater importance than heretofore. There are other reasons for doubt: at Utrecht, the equilibrist idea seems to have meant achieving a mathematical, Newtonian “steady state” subject to minor fluctuations, an idea that was usefully augmented by the “barrier” concept used to define French borders.25

  At Vienna two new ideas were present that modified the concept: first, that the balance of power was a dynamic, developmental situation that must be maintained and adjusted by the Concert of Europe (whereas at Utrecht such minor adjustments in territory as reflected the waxing and waning of state power were left to limited wars, waged in an appropriately confined manner); and second, that the maintenance of a balance of power was a matter of collective legitimacy as much as collective security. Maintaining the balance of power would become the chief business of the great power directorate. One member's delegation to Vienna confirmed its government's intention of maintaining “that system of equilibrium which [is] placed henceforth under the protection of the powers of the first order and shielded from all preponderance.”26

  The centrality of the balance was evident in the statement of all the chief actors at Vienna. Castlereagh wrote to his prime minister that he regarded his duty “to make the establishment of a just equilibrium in Europe the first object of my attention and to consider the assertion of minor points of interest as subordinate to this great end.”27 Talleyrand, in his final report from the Congress, repeated that its purpose, as recorded in the precursor Treaty of Paris, was “such as to establish in Europe a real and permanent balance of power.”28 The Declaration of Frankfurt, drawn up by Metternich as a statement of allied policy distribution, stated that the “allied powers… want a state of peace that, through a wise distribution of forces, through a just equilibrium, will henceforth preserve their peoples from the numberless calamities that, for twenty years, have burdened Europe.”29 The Congress convened a statistical committee to establish credible estimates of the number of persons in the various territories to be distributed, in order to facilitate a carefully balanced population because such a distribution was thought crucial to the Congress's work. Yet these statesmen were not so naïve as to believe that Europe could be carefully parceled into so many compensating weights. As Talleyrand wrote,

  [a]djacent to large territories belonging to a single power, there are territories of similar or of smaller size, divided up among a greater or lesser number of states… Such a situation only admits of a very artificial and precarious equilibrium which can only last for as long as some large states continue to be animated by a spirit of moderation and justice that will preserve it.30

  What was required was not simply a careful division of resources, but also the will to maintain their division. That will could be animated by the state-nation's drive for legitimacy in the absence of those customs that had fortified the territorial state. Thus Talleyrand's insight links these two principles and lays the foundation for the ultimate resolution of the new difficulties posed by the post-Vienna world. By allocating the duty to maintain the equilibrium to the directorate of great powers, the new constitution for the society of European states would both legitimate their role and protect the peace from their disturbance of it.

  THE GENERAL INTEREST

  On the other hand, how was it to be determined precisely what distribution was a “just balance”? Only a just balance (as opposed to the infinitely many possible divisions of territory that might result in a theoretical “balance”) could deliver legitimacy to the settlement. The application of the principle of the balance of power could, in the context of legitimate dynastic states, direct the territorial augmentation (or diminution) of these states strictly on equilibrist lines. This was the Utrechtian answer. But in the absence of dynastic legitimacy, the principle could not determine what states were legally entitled to receive territory. Even if every slice of pie were made equal, how would one know how many slices there were to be? To say of the great powers that they must be of equal weight does not determine how heavy they are to be, or on what they are permitted to gorge themselves.

  As we shall see, four large questions preoccupied the peacemakers at Vienna—the German and Italian Questions (which were the result of Napoleon's erasure and redrawing of the German and Italian national maps) and the Polish and Saxon Questions (which became interlocked with each other). Of these four, the latter two became the most divisive and, at one juncture, even threatened to lead to fresh hostilities among the allies.

  By the end of the war, Russian forces had occupied Poland and Saxony. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw, carved out by Napoleon from Polish lands partitioned to other powers in the eighteenth century, had no legitimate status, and the Saxon king had forfeited his status by abandoning his imperial role and siding with Napoleon slightly but fatally longer than other powers had felt it necessary to do. The Russian tsar therefore proposed creating a new state of Poland, along state-nation colonial lines, with himself as hereditary monarch. In exchange for Prussian support for this project, and in compensation for Polish land hitherto granted to Prussia in the partitions and that would now be taken back, the tsar would see that Saxony was granted to Prussia.

  Such proposals were potentially highly damaging to the legitimacy of the new international constitutional system. If Saxony, an ancient state with a legitimate heir, could simply be absorbed by Prussia, then the right of conquest had entered the world of the state-nation with all that state's potential for ferocity and subjugation, a capacity unknown to the modest cessions of the territorial state. If Poland could be re-created only to become a colony of Russia, then the legitimate bases of state creation were made a farce. The principle of the balance of power was of little help here. If anything, it could be argued that a larger Prussia would be a useful counterweight to France and that a Polish enlargement of Russia would pull Russia into European affairs, with salutary effects on Russian temperance and on the availability of Russian assistance in maintaining the balance of power in Europe generally. For Russia the point was moot: she had defeated an enemy at great cost and now deserved a reward. She asked for no more than that which she already, by force of arms, possessed.

  Castlereagh wrote to the tsar of a “duty” owed by the great powers. The principle “of territorial compensation for expenses incurred in war, unless qualified in the strictest sense by its bearing upon the general system of Europe, cannot be too strongly condemned…. The peace of the world cannot coexist with such doctrines.”31 “Just” principles regarded the society of Europe as a whole. The great powers were given great responsibility, but it was not granted to them in order for them to embark on a “lawless scramble for power.”32

  The solution was to introduce a countervailing principle—the general welfare of the society of states, taken as a whole—and to comprehend within this principle the maintenance of the legitimacy of the new constitution. On the basis of this principle, Russia was persuaded to accept a further partition of Poland. Indeed, when the tsar ultimately agreed to this proposal, he told the Poles that he was unable to fulfill altogether their national hopes because the interest of Europe as a whole had to take precedence over their own.33 More importantly, the Prussian attempt to annex Saxony was rebuffed. Each of the allies had been brought around to a position originally held only by Talleyrand, on the grounds that to decide otherwise would damage the legitimacy of the new system and thus imperil the legitimacy of all its territorial and financial allocations. The basis for this change in view was the consciousness of a “general sys
tem of Europe,” and the “common interest of Europe as a whole” (l'intérêt général).

  THE STATE-NATION

  As we have seen, the Congress of Vienna was not the first such convention to define the legitimate constitutional form of government for member states, but it was by far the most intrusive. The state-nation—a constitutional entity based on the consent of the governed—was replacing the territorial states of the previous century, even though a coalition including territorial states had decisively defeated the most dynamic example of the new form. The third interlocking key to legitimacy lay in recognizing this development by specifying constitutional norms for individual states.

  This had begun with the Bourbon restoration. The allies were careful to provide that the recall of the Bourbon dynasty was not an acknowledgment of pre-existing rights (as Pitt's original program might have been taken to mean). Rather Louis XVIII was required to grant a representative constitution (the Charte) and was placed on the throne only after an offer was forthcoming from the French Senate, an institution created by Napoleon. The states that defeated Napoleon essentially shared, or came to share, the state-nation constitutional form of which he was the main European architect. Though he despised Napoleon, Talleyrand appreciated this point. He wrote that

  however legitimate a power may be, its exercise nevertheless must vary according to the objects to which it is applied, and according to time and place. Now, the spirit of the present Age in great civilized states demands that supreme authority shall not be exercised except with the concurrence of representatives chosen by the people subject to it…. These opinions are no longer peculiar to any one country; they are shared by almost all. Accordingly, we see that the cry for constitutions is universal; everywhere the establishment of a constitution adapted to the more or less advanced state of society has become a necessity, and everywhere preparations for this purpose are in progress.34

  The tsar had announced that he wished representative constitutions in all states, 35 and, as we shall see, the constitution for the German states, the Act of Confederation, included an obligation for all member states to enact constitutions providing for representative institutions. Some states resisted, of course, and some were unable to comply: Austria had no single nation from which it could forge a state-nation; indeed the nationality principle was lethal to its cohesion as a state. The most Austria could manage was to adopt the title favored by state-nations for the head of state; Francis had become “Emperor of Austria,” as Napoleon had been “Emperor of the French,” and as eventually Victoria of England was to become “Empress.” Although Prussian representatives at Vienna had been among those who insisted on the provision for German representative institutions, Prussia too was hesitant. It was but a fragment of the German nation. Prussia could not support the creation of a German state-nation from which she was absent, but Austria and Russia could scarcely support a new German state of which Prussia was a part.

  This concern for the domestic composition of constitutional regimes was tied to the issue of legitimacy and thence to stability. Wellington conceded that after the treaty France remained strong enough to overturn the rest of Europe—that, in other words, a balance had not been achieved—but rejected proposals to weaken her territorially through adverse cessions. Such cessions would delegitimate the French government. As Castlereagh put it, punitive reductions would leave “the [French] King no resource in the eyes of his own people but to disavow us; and once committed against us in sentiment, he will be obliged soon either to lead the nation into war himself, or possibly be set aside to make way for some more bold and enterprising competitor.”36 Wellington concurred:

  We must… if we [were to] take this large cession [crippling France's war-making power], consider the operations of the war as deferred till France shall find a suitable opportunity… to regain what she has lost… [W]e shall find [then] how little useful the cessions we have acquired will be against a national effort to regain them. Revolutionary France is more likely to distress the world than France, however strong her frontier, under a regular government; and that is the situation in which we ought to endeavor to place her.37

  Thus we see intertwined the three issues of the balance of power, the general welfare of Europe, and the constitutional makeup of individual states, all bearing on the crucial matter of legitimacy. Only a Europe composed of stable states, managed by a directorate of the most powerful of these states, with a mandate to act in the interest of the society of states as a whole, would prevent a new outbreak of such cataclysmic war as Europe had experienced for twenty years. Otherwise, the collapse of legitimacy in one great power would provoke a new war, as had happened in France. The stability of the system thus depended upon the internal stability of its major states, and this domestic security could be ensured by attention to the security of the society of states generally. The one reinforced the other. Metternich and his allies in Berlin and St. Petersburg later attempted to deploy this insight in order to use the Vienna directorate as an engine for domestic repression. Be that as it may, the focus on the domestic constitutional structure of the member states represents a crucial step in the development of a constitution for the society of states.

  THE CONSTITUTION: THE FINAL ACT AT VIENNA

  Before Napoleon's fall, Metternich had persuaded the British ambassador to Vienna, Aberdeen, to join him in a peace overture that proposed terms that confined France to the Pyrenees, the Rhine, and the Alps. When learning of this, Castlereagh was horrified: the proposal violated the long-standing English principle of denying to any great power the Low Countries' approach to the English Channel. Thus appalled, he drew up his famous Instructions in his own hand and had them approved by the British cabinet. These he determined to take to the continent personally in an effort to hold the Coalition together for a peace of constitutional dimensions.

  The Instructions envisioned the re-establishment of Holland (to include the former Habsburg Netherlands), Spain, Portugal, and Italy (“in security and independence”), Prussia brought west to the Rhine, the Bourbons restored in France to prewar borders—provided this dynasty could be shown to be acceptable to the French people—and above all, a consolidating and persisting international alliance. This alliance was “not to terminate with the war” but to remain as a deterrent to “an attack by France on the European dominions of any one of the contracting parties.” Castlereagh then traveled to allied military headquarters in eastern France along with the advance. From there a “congress” convened at the village of Chatillon-sur-Seine in early February 1814. In an atmosphere of great tension owing to recent French victories in the field, acrimonious personal relations between Castlereagh and Metternich (and between Metternich and the tsar), Castlereagh persuaded the other powers to accept his plan for an alliance that would serve as the basis for a constitutional arrangement among the states of Europe to be worked out at a subsequent congress. This plan was adopted as the Treaty of Chaumont, signed March 9, 1814, and represents an historic moment in diplomacy. The treaty set precise conditions for the conduct of the coalition, provided for 150,000 troops to be contributed by each of the four powers, and required Britain to provide a subsidy of five million pounds to pursue the war. In Articles 5 – 16, the powers committed themselves to defend each other against any future French attack by contributing 60,000 men each to an international force to be commanded by the party requesting aid.

  The Congress of Chatillon disbanded on March 19, and the allies took the bold decision to leave Napoleon in their rear and march directly on Paris. Paris fell on March 30, 1814. Talleyrand assumed leadership of the provisional government, convening the Senate on April 1 to approve guarantees of civil and political rights. These guarantees also gave assurances to officers, bondholders, and property owners who had profited during the Revolution and its aftermath. The government removed the requirement of loyalty to Napoleon and replaced it with a draft constitution which limited royal power and ratified both the revolution's seizure of émigré
properties and the restraints it had placed on the Church. On April 6 the Senate summoned the Bourbon heir. Napoleon abdicated one week later and was conveyed to Elba, where he was given a minuscule island kingdom and an annuity of two million francs.

  Thus the way was cleared for a treaty with a new regime in France. The result was the First Peace of Paris (so named because Napoleon's breakout in 1815 led to a second agreement between the powers and France), which has been rightly taken as a model for treaties of peace. It returned France, generally speaking, to the frontiers of 1792, when the epochal war had begun. It provided for no further occupation, no indemnifications, no confessions of wrongdoing—nothing that would humiliate the new king, Louis, in the eyes of his people, or give to future French leaders a means to incite popular indignation against foreign states. The treaty even permitted France to retain the looted works of art stolen from a number of continental capitals. Significantly, the treaty justified this extraordinary leniency by distinguishing the revolutionary regime of France from its people, thus emphasizing that the war that had just been waged was a war against Napoleon's government, not against the French people.

  The Treaty settled matters between France and her adversaries, but it did nothing to sort out affairs for the rest of Europe. Vast territories were without government and the borders of many states were unsettled. Napoleon had swept away the old map and his defeat had now erased the new one as well. Armies of occupation roamed across vanished frontiers; rulers set on their thrones by Napoleon had fled (with the exception of Murat, who still reigned in Naples), but representatives of the old regimes Napoleon had replaced could not exercise authority without the mandate of the victorious coalition that had defeated him. Article 32 of the Peace provided for a new congress to be assembled in Vienna, to which invitations would be issued to all the powers engaged on either side of the conflict. Now Europe waited: its state system had been shattered—even the location and boundaries of most of its states lay undetermined—its commercial system had collapsed, the Holy Roman Empire had disappeared, and a new constitutional system for Germany had not been put in its place. All parties with interests in these events came to Vienna in September 1814. More than two hundred representatives of various entities arrived to press their claims for recognition and to advance their ideas for the new European order.