European Politics 1815–1848

Frederick C. Schneid, Frederick C. Schneid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351938419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The three intervening decades between the Congress of Vienna and the Revolutions of 1848 are marked by enormous social, political, economic and cultural change. Liberalism, nationalism, romanticism and industrialism profoundly affected the course of Europe and compelled conservative monarchies to accept the principles of collective action and military force to curb political revolution. In the years immediately following 1815, the Quadruple and Holy Alliances served the dual purpose of preventing a restoration of Bonapartism and suppressing revolutions. By the 1820s these international associations dissipated, but the principles upon which they were founded informed the decisions of the respective governments through 1848. The classic articles and papers collected in this volume attempt to illustrate that despite the substantial changes to European society which occurred during these thirty years, European powers accepted common principles which influenced their state's domestic and foreign policies.

Part I
The Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe

[1]
AHR Forum
Did the Vienna Settlement Rest on a Balance of Power?

PAUL W. SCHROEDER

THE QUESTION POSED by the title of this essay must appear a bit unreal. However much historians have differed in interpreting various aspects of the Vienna settlement and the nineteenth-century international system founded upon it, they have never doubted that these included a balance of power as an essential ingredient.¹ Irrefutable evidence seems to come directly from the peacemakers at Vienna themselves; in everything from official treaties to private letters and diaries, they spoke of peace and stability in terms of a proper balance (“juste équilibre”) achieved by a redistribution of forces (“répartition des forces”), or in similar balance of power phrases.² Not only did their language seem to make the balance of power a vital goal and working principle of the settlement but so did their conduct and the outcome of their efforts. What else were the statesmen at Vienna doing if not restoring a balance of power in Europe by redistributing territories and peoples? What can account for international peace and stability after 1815 if not that the European balance of power was restored after a generation of French revolutionary expansion and Napoleonic imperialism, this time supported and strengthened through a system of alliances, treaty guarantees, and Concert diplomacy?

The balance of power interpretation of the Vienna settlement appears so obvious that a challenge to it is likely to be understood as merely a call to redefine or reclassify it, involving a taxonomic dispute of the sort familiar to historians. A scholar may deny, for example, that there was a Renaissance in the thirteenth century and mean by the denial only that conditions prevailing in the thirteenth century do not fit his or her definition and taxonomic requirements for a “genuine” Renaissance. This essay is not that kind of challenge to the balance of power interpretation of the Vienna settlement. It may seem so at times, simply because the case to be made here, necessarily a prima facie one, involves some definition and interpretation of balance language and ideas. It will always remain possible to argue that a different definition of balance of power would meet the objections to be raised in regard to 1815. Nonetheless, the thesis is not that the 1815 balance of power needs to be defined or understood differently, or that the settlement represented a particular, modified kind of balance of power,³ but rather that any balance of power interpretation of the Vienna settlement is misleading and wrong. Its essential power relations were hegemonic, not balanced, and a hegemonic distribution of power, along with other factors, made the system work. A move away from eighteenth-century balance of power politics to a different kind of politics was an essential element in the revolutionary transformation of European international politics achieved in 1813–1815.

LET US TURN FIRST TO WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED in 1813–1815—whether power was distributed in a “balanced” way and if balanced, in what sense, and whether the system operated and sustained itself by a recognizable balance of power mechanism.

These questions call for a definition of the balance of power—a notoriously slippery, vague, and protean term, repeatedly debated and variously defined. One political scientist has identified nine different meanings of the phrase in the literature, including one in which “balance of power” means hegemony. I have found eleven different meanings of the term, some contradictory to others, in the working language of nineteenth-century diplomacy.⁴ Moreover, even if the literal meaning or denotation of the phrase were clear, that would not end the difficulty. For what the term connotes and involves in the form of necessary conditions, component elements, and corollaries is also controversial. Balance of power analysts, for example, have long broken lances over whether or not a balance of power system presupposes or requires such things as an even distribution of power, the absence of dominant coalitions, the presence or permanent possibility of blocking coalitions, flexibility in alliances, a holder or manager of the balance, and the existence of independent smaller states.⁵

Yet the confusion and flexibility attending the term do not preclude stating a reasonable minimum definition of it, identifying certain features and conditions as sine qua non.⁶ A “balance of power system” must mean one in which the power possessed and exercised by states within the system is checked and balanced by the power of others. All the major actors in the system must be subject to this kind of restraint, at least potentially having to fear the countervailing power of a blocking coalition or other deterrent action by other states, should they upset the balance by aggression, threat, or an inordinate growth in capability. The requirements usually cited for a balance of power system—alliance flexibility, the existence of at least two or more actors of relatively equal power, the desire of all states to survive and maintain their independence, and the possibility of the use of force—are all corollaries of this basic requirement. The goals of balance of power, whether they be peace and stability or simply the preservation of the independence of the system’s member states, are supposedly reached by maintaining this kind of countervailing balance.

This definition fits not only ordinary usage but also the way the Vienna system has been conceived. The allied statesmen, it is supposed, reduced France nearly to its ancient limits, restored Austria and Prussia to their size and status of 1805–1806, strengthened the states bordering France as a barrier against the renewal of French aggression, guaranteed the independence and integrity of all European states, especially the smaller ones, and united Germany in a defensive confederation, all in order to restore a balance of power that would deter any great power from endangering the integrity, essential interests, or independence of any other state, as France had done for a generation.⁷

The same power-balancing mechanism is also supposed to have worked after 1815 to ward off such threats to the balance as French revisionism, Russia’s potential menace to the Ottoman empire and its aspirations to world leadership, Prussian ambitions in Germany, or Austrian and Prussian rivalry. The blocking alignments naturally changed with changing conditions. After the original Quadruple Alliance against France became obsolete and the initial Anglo-Austrian combination to check France and Russia broke down in the early 1820s, a liberal-constitutional camp emerged in the West in the 1820s and 1830s to counterbalance the Eastern Holy Alliance. British statesmen such as George Canning and Lord Palmerston, manipulating the balance and exploiting various rivalries within and between the blocs, successfully managed crises (the Greek revolt in the 1820s, the Belgian problem of 1830–1839, and the Near Eastern crisis of 1839–1841) in ways that preserved peace, maintained the balance system, and promoted British interests.⁸

The balance of power interpretation of the 1815 settlement seems so obvious and coherent that certain basic factual questions are sometimes overlooked. Did the actual distribution of power in 1815 meet the minimal requirements for a working balance of power? Was power apportioned so that all the major actors and actual or potential power blocs were subject to countervailing power from others?

Here it is important to remember that power in international politics does not derive solely, or often mainly, from capability aggregation—growth in territory and population, resources, number of men under arms, industrial and technological development, fiscal and economic strength, and other factors affecting state power. Effective power is inextricably related to security, which in political terms is determined largely by the relationship between capabilities and vulnerability, the resources available to the state and the actual and potential demands on those resources in the international arena.⁹ Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century statesmen knew this, of course, and calculated power along precisely these lines. The factors they normally used to measure power and to calculate gains and losses were often fairly crude—population, revenues, size of armed forces, and size of territory; but their evaluations of their own power and security and that of other states regularly involved comparing capabilities against vulnerabilities or threats.¹⁰

Even on the basis of raw power, resources, and capabilities, one can hardly speak of a balance of power in 1815. Prussia, for example, never achieved more than marginal status as a great power under Frederick II in the eighteenth century and had to strain to maintain that nominal rank while hoping someday to become a truly great power by means of expansion.¹¹ Having barely survived in the Napoleonic period, Prussia emerged in 1815 as even less a real, independent great power than in 1789. Its fifteen million people and limited resources in no way compared with those of Russia, the British empire, or France. Austria was somewhat better off than Prussia but not decisively so.

Yet the imbalance in the great powers’ intrinsic capabilities in 1815 and after pales in comparison to the imbalance in terms of their capabilities versus their vulnerability.¹² The so-called balance of power included five great powers, two on the flanks and three in the center. Each of the two flanking powers commanded more intrinsic resources than any of the other three. Russia had by far the largest territory, the greatest population, and the largest standing army; Britain dominated the seas while leading the world in industry, commerce, colonies, and financial power (indeed, if one takes India into account, as Edward Ingram and others have taught us we must, even in respect to land forces Britain was a great power).¹³ At the same time, each of these flanking powers enjoyed virtual impregnability by virtue of geography, as Napoleon’s failure to bring either of them down had proved. Geography also presented the three central powers, France, Austria, and Prussia—each of them markedly weaker than either of the flanking powers—with permanent, unavoidable strategic threats from their various neighbors. Thus Britain and Russia were so powerful and invulnerable that even a (highly unlikely) alliance of the three other powers against them would not seriously threaten the basic security of either, while such a (hypothetical) alliance would likewise not give France, Austria, and Prussia security comparable to that which Britain or Russia enjoyed on their own.

The system was just as imbalanced in regard to alliance capability, for the same reasons. Britain and Russia, not dependent on alliances for their basic security, could always make them when they wished and, from 1815 to 1848, regularly did. France, Austria, and Prussia, which were dependent on alliances for security, never gained alliances that made them truly secure militarily. (This is not to say that they lived in constant insecurity. All three of the major central states enjoyed more security from external threats in 1815–1848 than they ever enjoyed before or since. It is only to deny that this security derived from military alliances or a balance of power.) France constantly sought military allies after 1815 (mainly Britain, sometimes Russia), but its quest always ended in frustration. Even Austria and Prussia, closely allied and usually linked with one of the flanking powers, could not always count on their help. Britain, for example, was not available to meet a possible French attack on Austria in Italy in 1830–1832, and even Russian help was doubtful at that time, given the Polish insurrection. In any case, the German powers would always have had to bear the main brunt of a French attack themselves, as the Near Eastern crisis of 1840 illustrates.¹⁴ Russia, to be sure, proved a loyal ally for both the German powers, especially after 1820, but this loyalty derived not from their military alliance or the balance of power but from their ideological solidarity in the Holy Alliance. Russia used its military alliances with Austria and Prussia under Catherine II (1762–1796) to keep both German powers insecure, dependent on Russia, and locked in rivalry with each other.¹⁵ This was a normal balance of power policy; had Russia played a balance of power game after 1815, it would have done the same thing again, as its diplomats sometimes advised.

The disparities in power and security among the five powers in 1815 and after are great enough to challenge the notion that the “Directory of Europe” or “Concert of Europe” derived from a European pentarchy of great powers. Certainly, the Concert existed, and it exercised a real, powerful influence on international politics;¹⁶ but the idea that it rested on any sort of comparable power status among the five members is very doubtful. The usual definition of a great power is a country that can rely primarily on its own resources for the defense of its interests and existence. Both flanking powers undoubtedly qualify under this definition; France probably does also, though less clearly. But Austria, although qualified in terms of size, population, and potential resources, suffered from so many external and internal weaknesses and vulnerabilities that it could not possibly meet the most likely external threats it faced (a war against France or a major revolution in Austria’s sphere of influence or within Austria itself) without getting immediate help from allies such as Russia, Prussia, and the German Confederation. A number of incidents illustrate the point—the revolutions of 1820–1821, the war scares of 1830–1832, the crisis of 1840–1841.¹⁷ These were not solel...