Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft

Essays in Honour of Erik Goldstein

T. G. Otte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032222899
• eBook ISBN: 9781000563771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

The chapters in this edited volume, individually and collectively, pay homage to Erik Goldstein's contribution to contemporary scholarship in the fields of international history, diplomatic studies and international security.

The book offers insights into the rich tapestry of past and present international relations with differing emphases on political, military and cultural aspects. While some of the chapters explore the twentieth-century British foreign policy apparatus and the different networks of people at work within it, others examine the deeper intellectual and other currents that shaped trans-Atlantic ties in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Geopolitics – in a historiographical perspective and with a focus on Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and East Asia – forms another important strand of this collection. All chapters explore periods of wider systemic change in international politics and thus offer reflections on the essential continuities and discontinuities in great power relations.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Diplomacy & Statecraft.

‘Transitions in Context: Making Peace in 1814 – 1815; 1918 – 1920; 1945 – 1955’

Richard Langhorne

ABSTRACT

Frequently, peace settlements mark moments of systemic change in international politics. The object of this article is to examine how far these three major European peace settlements of the modern period – 1814–15, 1918–20 and 1945-55 – represented the contemporary political and diplomatic responses to the urgent needs that the end of a general war inevitably brings. It argues that, with the exception of the Vienna settlement, often the urgency of the situation at the end of the war was itself the consequence of underlying conditions which were so profound as to be immutable at any particular moment and immune from any short-term political interventions. Too much should never be expected of formal peace settlements.

The ending of the 1914–1918 war and the following Paris Peace Conference has been from his early days of scholarship an abiding interest for Erik Goldstein and his contribution to its study has been an important one. By way of a salute to him and his work, this piece seeks to set the events of 1918 – 1920 together with the major transitions between general war and peace which occurred in and around 1815, 1919, and after 1945, and to provide an account of the broader context against which the makers of these settlements de jure and after 1945 de facto had to work.

Detailed descriptions of these events already exist in number and doubtless the characteristic curiosity of historians will continue the flow.¹ Here, however, the objective is a little different: how far do these three settlements merely represent the contemporary political and diplomatic responses to the urgent needs that the end of a general war inevitably brings. Maybe there is more to it in that the urgency of the situation was itself the consequence of underlying conditions which had developed at differing speeds over different lengths of time. The historical mix of long-term conditions so profound as to be immutable at any particular time and immune from any short-term political interventions, together with the necessary responses of those administering and refining the orders of those in power, presents an often acute difficulty. The problem lies in assessing the proportional influence of each. This is always difficult and can be well illustrated by comparing the output of two great historians when they both confronted the questions raised by the role of the 1919 settlement in the years following. A. J. P. Taylor was convinced that all rulers and politicians acted in an opportunistic way often on the spur of the moment, while F. H. Hinsley usually preferred to see them as beneficiaries or victims of a wider context.²

***

Past peace settlements will have been, and future ones will be, affected by four major conditions: first and profoundest, the distribution of power across international and global sources of authority, its stability and its contemporary basis: put another way, what delivers power at any given point, who can make the most use of it and is its distribution stable or fluid. Thus, secondly, although no peace treaty or treaties can be permanent, differences in relative success in fending off warfare do appear and the single most potent reason is the degree to which the makers have understood and followed the realities of the international/global situation. Trying to reverse or stand against them leads to a more rapid demise. So it is important to know to what degree contemporary understandings about the immediate post-war situation coincided with what history shows to have been the realities. Thirdly, what were contemporary views about the causes of the preceding conflict and the proposed remedies for them. Fourthly but probably less significant is to assess the role of diplomacy. Were the options available to contemporary diplomats and ministers adequate for their needs; did they create new methods if they were not?

The transitions under consideration happened during a period when the location of power had settled in states and states had succeeded in removing any rivals; and in a significant example excluded them from the diplomatic system: only states were legally allowed to use it. This was not true before the 17th century in Europe and it ceased to be true towards the end of the 20th century globally. Inside the fact that states were supreme and unchallenged lay a different question. How was power distributed across them and was that distribution stable; and inside that question lay another. To the extent that the distribution became fluid, what change in the nature of power was causing mutation as to who the beneficiary and loser states were.

States had been the beneficiaries of the decline of religion as an important political entity during and after the Reformation. They were forced by this to complete autonomous administrative structures and to find a stable source of political legitimacy. Doing so could be a struggle, as demonstrated in England in the mid-17th century. The efficiency with which they established these features became a source of power from which social and economic security and military assets flowed. A further factor was size: in an age of very poor communication combined with a rising importance attaching to efficiency in rulership, how quickly a regime could reach perimeters affected its efficiency and hence its power. To be the right size at the right moment was important. For example, France in the later 17th century most closely fitted the precondition and was the most successful at making these adaptations and benefitted thereby. Spain was less successful and administratively overstretched, and the 18th century distribution of power among states in Europe adjusted itself accordingly. Russia, for the first time seriously arriving in European politics, was unable to exercise power latent in its size because it was too big an area to be efficiently administered. It had also to adjust to the arrival both of faster sailing vessels, which accelerated the process of spreading European power across the globe and the industrial revolution which delivered striking financial and trading power to Great Britain. Had the technology of communications been more advanced, it is easy to see that Great Britain might have achieved an international primacy reminiscent of Louis XIV in France a century earlier. But for the time being, the consequential adjustment in the distribution of power was bringing a new kind of arrangement whereby in practical terms there was less differential between the greater states than they were used to. The rise and fall of a succession of single most powerful states was giving way to a rough and ready equality in which no single state could maintain a hegemony. The diplomatic system was beginning to demonstrate this situation particularly after the Peace of Paris in 1763 but then in 1789 the French Revolution broke out and interrupted the process.³ In its aftermath came Napoleon’s attempt to reverse the political developments characteristic of late 17th and 18th century Europe and replace them with an old-fashioned over-arching Empire. How this was possible and the effects of attempting it were the most powerful elements in the context of peace making in 1814/15.

It is in this context that the fate of the Napoleonic Imperium can best be understood. It certainly requires some explanation. The France of 1789 was no more than an equal among the other greater powers, perhaps even a little below par, and the defeated Napoleonic France of 1814 was in an even weaker position. How could it happen that in the course of a mere 25 years – less if just Napoleon’s years of dominance are counted – he was able to create a vast European empire, consciously adopting symbols derived from both the Romans and Charlemagne His own qualities, particularly military ones, were plainly important in all this but not an adequate explanation in themselves. To say that the innate power of France accounted for his successes is equally plainly not so. When Napoleon was forced to rely on the resources of France alone after the battle of Leipzig in the autumn of 1813, his military and political demise followed in a matter of months. Napoleon’s opponents can be accused of failure to cooperate effectively in the succession of coalitions raised against him as each one collapsed until the final push in 1814. Slow and unreliable contemporary communications made the organisation and management of grand coalitions stretched over immense distances practically impossible until Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, created a new device which placed the political supervision of the alliance in the hands of representatives and rulers who travelled with or near the campaign. They thus eliminated the often self-seeking confusions caused by sparring interests in the political offices in the capitals of the allies. The problem of collapsing coalitions had certainly had a role to play but the disadvantages it brought were not enough by themselves to explain the extraordinary flow of events. Thus, there has to have been a new kind of power available to Napoleon, intense but evanescent, something that both bolstered him and damaged his enemies. When the time came to make a settlement in 1814/15, it was going to matter greatly what that power had been and whether contemporaries understood it well enough to resist it or accommodate it in the future.

Napoleon repeatedly said that his regime depended on his military successes and consequential reputation for invincibility. This certainty explains why, as the end drew in sight early in 1814, he refused to make proposals for a peace settlement. The allies believed equally firmly that doing so was the obvious indeed the only option left to him and prepared themselves to receive an approach from him as a united bloc. It never came; defeat did and, in May 1814, Napoleon left France to govern the island of Elba. At that moment, Napoleon was probably right that he could not have stayed in power in France after signing a victors’ peace. However, unsuspectingly, he had embarked on the most important road to his collapse a decade earlier. In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor amidst a mass of anachronistic ceremony. In doing so, he surrendered the most significant advantage he had by exchanging the political kudos available internationally from basing his campaigns and political predominance on the idea of representing the ideals of the revolution – something that the revolutionaries had been unable to do – for a mirage of imperial power derived from Charlemagne. This role required defence on grounds incompatible with doing so as the agent of the broadly popular tenets of the French revolution. This was why Beethoven removed Bonaparte’s name from the title page of his third symphony when he heard the news. As Emperor, Napoleon was merely a French ruler among the other monarchs, the preceding Bonaparte had held up the light of liberty, fraternity and equality and made it shine internationally, a cause in whose support there need be no submission to France. The battle had been for a set of ideals, not just to further the interests of a particular state or ruler. As an Emperor, Napoleon no longer fitted the bill. Moreover, the discomfort that the other rulers in Europe felt in the presence of ideas which undermined their position within their own domains began to be replaced by an opportunity to profit from a gradually growing resistance to Napoleon.

All this helps to explain both why the successive coalitions against Napoleon failed and why they continued to return each time: the realities of the more or less equal distribution of power across the greater states fuelled this persistent resistance to making a permanent settlement with Napoleon, while the advantages offered by supporting the ideals of the revolution fuelled his campaigns to the point where he could change track and become an Emperor. The rumbling against his imperial rule began in the Iberian Peninsula and Napoleon grasped that the coalitions were sustained by British money and observed that the military crisis in Portugal was even more directly led by Britain. In the belief that British wealth was a kind of fantasy because it was based on industrial and financial activity, rather than territory and its produce, he introduced the Continental System. This was an early example of economic sanctions being used as a weapon. The whole of the Napoleonic empire was forbidden to trade with Britain in the expectation that British bankruptcy would swiftly follow. It turned out that British trade was global rather than European and that the world needed what she produced more than Britain needed to trade with Napoleon’s domains. The cracking point came when Napoleon proved unable to make the Continental System water-tight and most significantly failed to persuade Russia to toe the line, despite his alliance with Tsar Alexander I. In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia to enforce obedience. The invasion collapsed in the face of distance and winter weather. The ignominious return of a bedraggled and reduced French army destroyed the halo of invincibility, confirmed by the allied victory at Leipzig in the autumn of 1813. The retreat to France then began in earnest and all the resources of France could not prevent the steady slide to defeat in May of 1814. At this point, it was clear that the realities of the distribution of power were more solid than the ideals of the Revolution or the possibility of reversing a thousand years of history to recreate a single European empire.

Two settlements followed: first, directly with France, where the monarchy was restored, a constitution installed and borders determined.⁴ It was already noticeable that while France was understandably feared lest she became the source of conflict once again, the arrangements were not particularly vengeful; and that remained the case even after Napoleon’s escape and brief resurrection in the following year. There was thus a separation between dealing with the former enemy and making a general settlement. The latter was intended to be a restoration of the status quo but not at the expense of reorganising the political map of Europe nor, as it turned out, one that would stand in the way of a new method of protecting the international system against future disturbance.

The idea that something other than purely French power was the cause of the long preceding war emerged slowly after 1805. The sense that it was to be feared more than either France or Napoleon personally became more obvious after May 1814 and it gave a thus far unique context to the proceedings at Vienna. This was the first treaty negotiation in which the parties concerned feared something other than another state. In short, they feared the ideas unleashed by the French Revolution more than they feared France and more than they feared one another. There was an additional and highly significant fear that was not so much the result of the Revolution as it was the child of the opposition that developed against Napoleon’s regime based on nationalism. The notion that was to become so important connected revolutionary freedoms for the people with their right to belong to their own national state. Where there was a people without a state, they should have one; where there was a state without a people, it was an anachronistic anomaly and weakened by that status.

The Congress of Vienna refused to acknowledge the force of nationalism in its territorial redistributions and thus made it certain that demands for change would come sooner rather than later, as the revolutions of 1848 clearly demonstrated. Similarly, and expectably, the Congress wanted to restrain any tendency to further revolutionary activity as it had become generally accepted that the wars had been caused by the revolution. Although the Tsar of Russia had moments of eccentricity in his proposals for achieving this via a Holy Alliance, privately described by an unimpressed Castlereagh, as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’, in November 1815 the great powers did agree to have a collective response to issues involving international security, of which the most likely was the outbreak of a revolution, to be achieved by a Concert of Europe. This idea was the result of the experience gained in the early months of 1814 when the allied powers informally created a kind of rolling conference which followed the campaign as it ended because they expected to negotiate with Napoleon and no one wanted to be hundreds of miles away when that happened. The same grouping assembled at Vienna and took control of the proceedings, and later albeit reluctantly allowed France to join as an equal. In retrospect it is easy to see how this experience would suggest simply continuing what had worked well into the future and use it to control any descent into revolution. It was nonetheless a striking addition to the diplomatic methods available and over time, while its opposition to revolutionary change and nationalist ambitions failed to prevent either, the idea of holding conferences as at least a first almost compulsory stage in any crisis, survived and became a foundation of international politics in the 19th century. It collapsed in July 1914 in the face of a new assemblage of overwhelming pressures but then formed the basis of the League of Nations and the United Nations and many another internationally cooperative institution. It was this development that gives the Vienna Settlement an aura of success. Its precise provisions were modified almost from the start. It got the causes of the wars more or less right, but the remedies for them wrong; though by introducing the Concert of Europe however it accurately represented the realities of the distribution of power institutionally and thus created something in a form flexible enough to be modified over time and therefore long lasting. This was made easier because of the decision to separate dealing with France in 1814 from the making of a general settlement. In negotiating the latter France was gradually allowed to participate and therefore to guarantee it equally with the other great powers.

***

The Paris Peace Conference of 1919/20 and the many treaties that issued from it have not enjoyed any aura of success.⁵ The French regarded the settlement with Germany with contempt, Bolshevik Russia was not represented at Paris and the United States walked away from both the settlement and the League of Nations, the chief institution it created. The Germans were not invited to any discussions and despite having just managed to gain an armistice rather than a surrender in 1918, and having changed their regime, were none the less treated as vanquished and more or less starved into accepting this situation. The Treaty of Versailles which resulted from these conditions only survived until 1925 and war broke out again in Asia in 1931 and again in 1937; and in Europe in 1939, both being extended in scope in 1941.

The causes of the first world war and the conditions that existed at its end were the result of two shifts in the distribution of power across states. The distribution of power across t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Transitions in Context: Making Peace in 1814 – 1815; 1918 – 1920; 1945 – 1955’
• 2 ‘Museums and the display of international friendship: diplomatic interests, American philanthropy, and preserving Thomas Carlyle’s London House, c. 1894.’
• 3 ‘Sir Arthur Hirtzel and the Pax Britannica in the Middle East’
• 4 Catholicism and Foreign Policy: Esme Howard and British Policy towards Poland, 1919
• 5 David Lloyd George and the American Naval Challenge: Great Britain and the Washington Conference
• 6 ‘Royal diplomacy: British preparations for the State Visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States, June 1939.’
• 7 “The System of Odd and Even Numbers”: Lewis Namier the Diplomatic Historian
• 8 ‘Was the Cold War Avoidable? Did the West Seek to Win It?: A Contribution to the Debate’
• 9 ‘China’s Emergence as a Power in the Mediterranean: Port Diplomacy and Active Engagement’
• Index