THE NEED FOR A NEW INSTRUMENT

 

The demand for an institution that was purposefully designed to deal with future conflicts arose in several ways. First, it was apparent that the Utrechtian system, which had succeeded in limiting war for a certain period, had been utterly unable to prevent a new sort of war, one that was so destructive that it had to be deterred in order to ensure the survival of states.7 There was a fatal vulnerability in the elaborate conventions of the territorial states that became manifest once the energies of a state-nation were deployed against those conventions. Territorial states could not quite ever combine in a sustained coalition because they could so easily be bought off with territorial concessions at each other's expense. Enduring coalitions had not been necessary to fight the brief, limited wars of the terr-ritorial state system—indeed, there was a distinct value to that system in maintaining highly fluid relationships but they were indispensable in the new era of conflict. Furthermore, the elites required to manage the elegant diplomacy of the ancien régimes had been replaced in some states by parties hostile to them. The Utrechtian system, however, as much as the territorial states that it comprised, depended upon an international elite. In any case, the prosecution of unlimited war took on a momentum owing to the national fervor that fueled it, regardless of who was in charge. Carefully calibrated restraint was scarcely possible in the face of popular passions.

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.