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 system of Europe,” and the “common interest of Europe as a whole” (l'intérêt général).