The Great Powers and the European States System 1814-1914

Roy Bridge, Roger Bullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138837140
• eBook ISBN: 9781317867913
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book illuminates, in the form of a clear, well-paced and student-friendly analytical narrative, the functioning of the European states system in its heyday, the crucial century between the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 and the outbreak of the First World War just one hundred years later.

In this substantially revised and expanded version of the text, the author has included the results of the latest research, a body of additional information and a number of carefully designed maps that will make the subject even more accessible to readers.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The character of international relations, 1814–1914

In the century between the Congress of Vienna and the outbreak of the First World War international relations in Europe were largely dominated by five great powers: Austria (after 1867 Austria-Hungary), France, Great Britain, Prussia (after 1871 Germany) and Russia. There was always a clear distinction between what contemporaries called ‘first-rate powers’ and ‘secondary states’, and there was rarely any doubt into which category any state should be placed. The great powers jealously guarded their status and were at all times disinclined to admit new members into their ranks. After her unification in the 1860s Italy liked to be regarded as a great power, but it was only in the capacity of an ally of the Central Powers after 1882, and as a member of the Concert dealing with the affairs of the Ottoman Empire that she could claim anything like equality with the other five. The dominance of the five or six powers over such a long period gave an underlying stability to international relations, a stability not found in either the eighteenth or the twentieth centuries. During the former both Spain and Sweden clung tenaciously to great-power status long after they had ceased to possess its attributes, and both Prussia and Russia effectively transformed themselves from second-class states into great powers. In the twentieth century great powers have fought to destroy each other, and the status of a European great power has ceased to have the same importance as it had before the First World War. The nineteenth century witnessed no such dramatic changes. In the upheavals of 1848–49 Austria came close to the brink of disintegration, but Russia rallied to her defence and preserved the five-power system. The four great-power wars of the mid-century were not fought à l’outrance: the belligerents were concerned essentially with limited and localized objectives. Despite two defeats, in 1859 and 1866, Austria continued to be treated as a great power, and so did France after her military collapse in 1871. For the most part the great powers respected each other’s status: they were accustomed to a great-power system, and strove to maintain it. There was a constant and conscious fear that its demise would bring untold disasters to them all. This was perhaps the most permanent consequence of Napoleon’s bid for the mastery of Europe.

Throughout the nineteenth century the European great powers claimed for themselves special rights and responsibilities which they were unwilling to accord to other states. They usually consulted each other, although not the small states, on major issues. They regarded themselves as the guardians of the Peace of Europe, and they assumed responsibility for the maintenance of order within their neighbouring states. It was the strongest second-class states which resented the existence of this ‘exclusive club’ of great powers. Their resentment was particularly evident at the Congress of Vienna when the four victorious powers treated states such as Sweden, Spain and Holland as inferior supplicants rather than as equal allies. The very fact that at the congress the previously vexed question of the precedence of diplomatic envoys was settled by the simple rule of ‘length of service’ attests to the new confidence of the great powers in their status: they no longer thought it necessary to prove their importance by squabbles over precedence at ceremonial occasions. In the years after 1815 German states such as Bavaria, Saxony and Hanover often found Austro-Prussian domination of the Germanic Confederation irksome. Indeed, during the revolutionary years 1848–49 they even tried to shake it off; but they failed largely because neither the Austrians nor the Prussians were prepared to tolerate such pretensions. For the most part, however, all the small states of Europe accepted the pre-eminence of the great powers and were content to place themselves under the protection of one or more of them. Moreover, just as the great powers claimed special rights for themselves, so the small states claimed that the great had special responsibilities for their well-being: they expected protection from external aggression and military assistance to suppress revolution. In some cases the great powers were expected to provide, either directly or indirectly, financial assistance to stave off public bankruptcy in small states. Many of the weaker states of Europe thus willingly cast themselves in the role of client states, and came to regard it as advantageous to be dependent on their great-power patrons.

Occasionally one or more great powers would find it necessary to ‘discipline’ a recalcitrant small state. In 1832 the British and the French had to take military action to force the Dutch government to accept the decisions of the London Conference on the delimitation of the border after the separation of Belgium from Holland. In 1864 the Austrians and the Prussians were able to claim that their invasion of the two duchies of Schleswig and Holstein was intended to force the Danes to comply with the provisions of the Treaty of London of 1852. This was a stand which they knew the other powers would find it difficult to oppose. Similarly, in the later nineteenth century, Austria-Hungary and Russia – equally claiming to act in defence of the territorial settlement established by the Concert at the Congress of Berlin – frequently threatened military intervention of a punitive or restraining nature against small states in the Balkans. In return for the protection they afforded the small states, the great powers expected a degree of obedience from them. It was not always forthcoming; for Portuguese governments it was almost a matter of principle to defy British governments which, on three separate occasions between 1826 and 1847 had to intervene to protect the Portuguese monarchy against rebel factions. In eastern Europe the close involvement of several rival powers, and the growing tension in the second half of the century, made drastic intervention of this kind an increasingly dangerous proposition; but Russia was certainly considering the use of force to maintain a puppet regime in Bulgaria in 1886–87; and armed intervention to re-establish an Austrophile regime in Serbia was discussed often enough in Vienna even in the twentieth century.

The only state which did not know its place in the hierarchy of power was the Ottoman Empire. Although it had extensive possessions in the Balkans and although the Treaty of Paris of 1856 formally admitted it to the Concert of Europe, it was never regarded as a European state. There was a general assumption that only Christian states could properly be regarded as members of the European community of nations. In 1897, for example, even Turkey’s friends in the Concert agreed that Christian territory once freed from Ottoman rule, could never be returned; and Turkey was not allowed to profit from her victory in her war with Greece. Ottoman governments oscillated between the most abject dependence on the great powers and defiance of them. In its relations with the European powers, the Ottoman empire faced two almost insuperable problems: it could not please all the powers all the time, and it did not always know which one to fear most. It was these problems that were at the root of the Near Eastern conflict which eventually degenerated into the Crimean War and which continued to preoccupy the diplomatists of Europe until 1918.

From the Treaty of Chaumont (1814) onwards, the dominance enjoyed by the great powers was given increasingly formal recognition. The Quadruple Alliance of November 1815 was specifically limited to the four great powers of the anti-French coalition. This was one reason why it was so much more important than the rival Russian-inspired Holy Alliance, which was signed by a motley collection of great and minor states. In 1818 France was formally rehabilitated as a great power, after defeat and occupation, by the creation of a new five-power concert. The clear notion behind both the Quadruple Alliance and the Concert was that there should be some formal and recognized procedure by which the great powers could maintain peace and the territorial status quo, which contemporary statesmen called ‘the public law of Europe’, and it usually took the form of conference diplomacy. Between 1822 and 1913 there were twenty-six conferences attended by representatives of all the great powers – the last of which, in London, lasted nearly eight months; and many more at which two or more great powers reached agreement. One of the principal assumptions of ‘concert diplomacy’, was that changes in the territorial order required the consent of the great powers. This doctrine was forcibly stated by Palmerston in 1846 when he wrote that it was impossible for any state to attempt to change the territorial order ‘in a manner inconsistent with the Treaty of Vienna without the concurrence of the other powers who were party to that Treaty’. In the fifteen years from the Crimean War to the treaty of Frankfort this view of the purpose of the Concert was all but abandoned and peace treaties between belligerent great powers replaced the Concert as the principal means of territorial revision. But the London Protocol of 1871 formally restated the principle that treaties could not be altered without the consent of all the signatory powers – an important issue in the crisis over the annexation of Bosnia nearly forty years later.

In practical terms the Concert of Europe could successfully allocate territory from one small or weak state to another. It could also provide the framework for the settlement of crises in which the powers were anxious to reach agreement. But it could not satisfy the territorial ambitions of great powers when these were in conflict with each other. Not one of the many suggestions for five-power discussion of territorial revision made between 1856 and 1871 was ever taken up and after 1871 the status of Alsace-Lorraine was an issue over which France and Germany differed so profoundly as to doom to failure any attempts at a compromise solution, let alone any general entente between the two powers. Equally, although in 1897 Russia and Austria-Hungary reached an agreement to co-exist in the Near East this was only possible on the basis of both powers renouncing any selfish territorial ambitions there. Much the same can be said of Austro-Italian agreements about the future of the Adriatic territories of the Ottoman Empire. In peacetime, powers were reluctant openly to avow their expansionist objectives; only victory on the battlefield would give both force and righteousness to their demands. The successful operation of the Concert depended in fact upon a self-denying ordinance from each of the great powers. When two or more powers sought either treaty revision or territorial expansion and were prepared to bargain with each other on this basis, the Concert could not control them. This did not mean that it ceased to exist, merely that it failed to operate in particular circumstances. It was quite frequently revived if the great powers were confronted by new issues on which they were disposed to compromise.

Almost immediately after the defeat of Napoleon, informed observers of international relations began to distinguish between two categories of European great power. There were firstly those with exclusively European territory and interests, for example Austria and Prussia. Then there were those, such as Great Britain and Russia, with extensive possessions, influence and interests outside Europe. The former owed her world power to her vast commercial interests in every continent, to her Indian empire and her overwhelming sea-power. Russia enjoyed the same status because of the vast and unknown size of her Asiatic possessions. It was, moreover, the growth of the French empire in North Africa after the occupation of Algiers in 1830 that placed France in the ranks of the world powers. In the 1870s the French reacted to their second defeat with a renewed emphasis on colonial expansion. Thus, as in the 1820s and 1830s, many Frenchmen believed that their empire overseas would help provide France with the strength she needed to recover lost status and territory in Europe. By the late nineteenth century it was clear that the fears entertained by many continental diplomats earlier in the century that England and Russia would divide the world between them had proved unfounded. Nevertheless the worldwide rivalry of these two powers was certainly a constant element shaping their European alignments. The welcome if somewhat uneasy end of this struggle in the early twentieth century was an important factor in the British decision to stand by Russia in 1914.

The distinction between the purely European powers and the world powers was perhaps rather less significant before 1870. In the early nineteenth century Europe itself offered ample commercial opportunities for expanding economies. Moreover, there was very little reliance on raw materials produced outside Europe, and from the 1840s onwards railway building absorbed most surplus capital. In the period before 1870 England was the only great power to have an export economy geared to worldwide trade. Moreover, as far as the four continental powers were concerned, the dominant problems of international relations were European. Until the 1850s the European ruling élite was determined to ensure its own survival and to contain or destroy the challenges it faced from liberalism and nationalism. In the late 1850s and the 1860s their preoccupations were different but still European: the great powers concentrated on territorial expansion in Europe itself. Until 1870 the French certainly attached more importance to Italy and the Rhineland than they did to expansion in North Africa; as late as the 1860s the Russians were more concerned about retaining the congress kingdom of Poland than expanding their possessions in central Asia.

The only non-European issues which significantly affected the relations of the great powers in the first half of the nineteenth century arose as a result of the collapse of the authority of the Ottoman Empire in its outlying provinces in central Asia and in North Africa. In central Asia the British feared that the Russians would fill the vacuum left by the Turks and eventually push southwards to threaten the British empire in India; in North Africa the British likewise believed that the French were intent upon expansion from Algiers to Egypt – all of which apprehensions marked British policy until the twentieth century. The effect of these British anxieties, however, was not to create new patterns of rivalry but to confirm and extend rivalries which already existed and which were European in origin. Neither the Prussian nor the Austrian government shared the alarm of the British over the extra-European expansion of France and Russia. In the Atlantic the French never really attempted to exploit Anglo-American rivalry nor the British dread of American expansion into Canada. Although British governments sometimes feared that they might, French governments in fact never managed to establish close relations with the United States. For most of the century after the end of the War of 1812 the Americans were rather more suspicious of the imperial ambitions of the French in Central and South America than they were of the British. By the turn of the century the British had decided that a war against the United States was the one war they must never fight. Atlantic rivalry, which had played such an important part in Anglo-French relations in the late eighteenth century, was a negligible factor after 1815.

With the defeat of the Second Empire territorial gains on the Rhine ceased to be a practical proposition for the French; and Russia, having no longer to fear Napoleon III or a Crimean Coalition, at last gained security in both Poland and the Near East. These were but two of the factors leading the great powers to concentrate more of their attention on expansion outside Europe. The 1870s saw the spread of both a worldwide depression and of fears on the part of some governments – particularly those of Great Britain and Germany – that large annexations of territory by commercial rivals might be accompanied by the closure of markets hitherto open to them under the system of ‘informal empire’. The 1880s and 1890s were marked by a spate of ‘imperialist’ activity – the partition of Africa and the intervention of the European Powers in China – all of which, however, was accomplished without serious danger of war, due largely to Great Britain’s and Germany’s willingness to co-operate in defence of the ‘open door’ to trade. It is true that relations between Great Britain on the one hand and France and Russia on the other took a turn for the worse: indeed, to a very large extent Great Britain was the real target of the Franco-Russian alliance of the 1890s. But the extra-European activities of the great powers had not fundamentally altered their priorities. Even those powers that were only semi-European never lost sight of their essentially European interests: the need to seek security in Europe by preventing any power or group of powers from establishing a Napoleonic domination of the continent. This continued to be the fundamental aim of their diplomacy.

In the last resort, great-power status was a reflection of economic, military and naval strength. The great powers were the largest, richest and most populous states. The ability to wage war on a massive scale was the ultimate test of great-power status. This was the simple and brutal reality underlying the complex edifice of international relations. In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars each of the five great powers had put its status to the test. The fact that Austria and Prussia narrowly escaped destruction at the hands of the French, combined with the belief that they had been saved by the financial resources of the British and the military strength of the Russians, cast a long shadow over great-power relations until the Crimean War. It established the hierarchy of power which existed within the ranks of the great powers. In the years after the Congress of Vienna British financial and naval strength, and the military power at the disposal of the Russian emperor, were the decisive underlying factors in European diplomacy. It was these resources that the French knew they would have to match before they could contemplate an all-out attack on the Vienna settlement. The fact that it had taken the combined efforts of four powers to defeat France had given her a unique status within the new order, as the power least satisfied with the arrangements made in 1815, and the power with the greatest potential for disruption. In the decades after 1871 France was, of course, still a highly dissatisfied power. But in view of her continuing diplomatic isolation and of the steady growth of German demographic, industrial and military preponderance, she was in no position to challenge the 1871 settlement. Even so, this settlement lacked the moral validity of the treaties of 1815. After 1871 peace was maintained, not by the moral consensus of a conservative coalition comprising at least three and sometimes four great powers, but simply by the brutal fact of German military superiority over France, and it would last only so long as that superiority was maintained.

In the first half of the nineteenth century none of the great powers made regular and precise estimates of each other’s military and naval strength. For the most part they had very hazy notions of the military and naval resources at each other’s disposal. There was, moreover, hardly any detailed forward planning by military leaders for future wars. None of the political leaders who took the decisions to go to war in the years from 1854 to 1870 attached decisive importance to the opinions of their military advisers. In the early nineteenth century the task of the military was to win wars after they had been declared. Before 1848 it was generally assumed that the next war would be a repetition of the last, a four-power coalition against France fought, like the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, in the west. In fact this war never materialized. When the great powers did fight in Europe in the late 1850s and 1860s it was with new weapons, a new technology, a new speed and smaller armies. Contemporary opinion was by no means certain in advance of the outcome of these wars; in 1866 and 1870 many military experts were convinced that the belligerents were evenly matched and that the wars would be long and inconclusive.

The speedy and catastrophic defeats of Austria and France seemed to portend a revolution in the role of the military in the formation of state policy. Prussia’s victories had clearly demonstrated the importance of the efficient organization of manpower resources, their armament, and their speedy and effective deployment on the battlefield. After the wars of 1866 and 1870, efficiency and speed seemed more important than ever; and in succeeding years all the continental powers made frantic efforts to improve their war-making capacity. Conscription became the rule; general staffs were created to devise war plans and supervise other reforms on the Prussian model. The concentration on the building of strategic railways testified to the importance generally accorded to speed of mobilization. After 1871 military planning came into its own, and elaborate schemes were drawn up to cater for even the most improbable contingencies. The significance of this change should not be exaggerated. State policy still remained in the hands of monarchs and statesmen. Bismarck steadily and successfully set his face against a veritable stream of advice from Prussian and Austrian military planners in favour of a preventive war against Russia in the late 1880s; and in 1911 the emperor of Austria dismissed his chief of staff for persistently advocating war with Italy against the wishes of his foreign minister. But on occasions, when political and military leaders took the same view, the military could become more than the mere servants of the civilian authorities, and the emphasis placed by the military on the importance of detailed contingency plans could influence the course of events. The Franco-Russian military convention of 1892 formed the basis of the alliance of 1894 and blind faith in military advice as illustrated by the German government’s decision to treat Russian mobilization as a casus belli had even more momentous consequences in July 1914.

In the exercise of their dominance over the European state system the great powers showed remarkable restraint, particularly in the decades from 1815 to 1856. They rarely acted arbitrarily or capriciously. It was not until the 1850s that any of the four victorious allies actually provoked a major diplomatic crisis. Most of the important problems of the pre-Crimean period were either provoked by small states or by dissident elements within small states. The great powers merely reacted to these crises, and attempted to prevent them from disturbing the peace of Europe. Nor was there any inclination among the four powers to exploit a local crisis produced by or within small states to embark upon an ambitious and forward policy which seriously and adversely affected the interests of other powers. The French were the exception to this rule: in Spain in 1823, in Belgium in 1830, and in Italy in 1848 they were intent upon securing important advantages for themselves. Until 1856, however, France was the only revisionist great power; her conduct was necessarily different from that of her satiated rivals. Moreover, French governments themselves provoked two major crises: in 1840 Thiers transformed a local Near Eastern conflict into a question of peace and war on the Rhine; and in 1852 Napoleon III successfully broke ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of maps
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The character of international relations 1814–1914
• 2 The reconstruction of Europe and the Alliance, 1812–23
• 3 ‘Every nation for itself’, 1823–30
• 4 From revolution to war, 1830–56
• 5 The destruction of the Vienna Settlement in Italy and Germany, 1856–71
• 6 The testing of the new order, 1871–79
• 7 The conservative powers dominate the states system, 1879–95
• 8 Unstable equilibrium, 1895–1911
• 9 Polarization and war, 1911–1914
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index of persons
• General Index