1848

The Year of Revolutions

Peter H. Wilson, Peter H. Wilson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351963107
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia europea

Europe was swept by a wave of revolution in 1848 that had repercussions stretching well beyond the Continent. Governments fell in quick succession or conceded significant reforms, before being rolled back by conservative reaction. Though widely perceived as a failure, the revolution ended the vestiges of feudalism, broadened civil society and strengthened the state prior to the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This volume brings together essays from leading specialists on the international dimension, national experiences, political mobilisation, reaction and legacy.

Part I
International Dimension

[1]
A Balancing Act: Domestic Pressures and International Systemic Constraints in the Foreign Policies of the Great Powers, 1848–1851

Matthias Schulz (Vanderbilt University)

When the debate on the ‘primacy of foreign policy’¹ is stripped of its ideological dimension relating to the ‘interpretative hegemony’ of either political or social history, it may permit insights into the relative impact that different historical conditions and forces have on foreign policy. Among those factors there are, for example, the political system under which a government operates, economic pressure groups, public opinion, geopolitics, and international behavioural, procedural and legal norms. Hence, domestic and foreign policy are intertwined. For the purposes of the following analysis, I presume that state interests are defined with respect to both a state’s social and economic conditions, and its international environment. The latter implies that decision-makers are bound into a more or less rigid framework of obligations and duties towards other states, and that their opinions are shaped within a particular diplomatic and strategic culture which is a product of their country’s role and experience in a given states system. If we accept these hypotheses, the ‘primacy of foreign policy’—in general, the subordination of domestic arrangements to foreign policy considerations—can mean various things. It can describe a government’s preoccupation with the stabilization of a favourable international system, or the pursuit of amoral policies with a view to enhancing the state’s power. This definition allows for the possibility that a government considers it wise to sustain the international system even when this entails challenging or repressing domestic forces. On the other hand, the primacy of foreign policy breaks down most clearly when a weak government—for example during a revolutionary situation in which extraordinary pressure is exercised by the people—succumbs to the call of domestic forces for a self-defeating policy, which this might provoke an international disturbance with potentially negative consequences for the existence of the state.

This essay discusses the extraordinary domestic pressures exerted upon the foreign policies of the Prussian and Austrian governments during the 1848 revolutions in the German Confederation and their aftermath, which includes the subsequent dealings with the German question until 1851.² It tries to establish whether the foreign policies of the Great Powers in and outside of Germany were more determined by domestic forces—such as nationalism—and ideological considerations such as the preference to support a country with a parliamentary political system, or by the international system’s norms and pressures weighing on decision-makers. Given the breadth of this topic, we shall focus on a few crucial episodes and sketch out the chief political strategies developed to deal with the German question in the light of recent research, printed documents and archival sources.³ First, I shall reflect briefly on the primacy of foreign policy in the German Confederation, and on the tension between domestic pressures and the international system, which influenced foreign policy in the decades since the Vienna Congress of 1815. The main body of the essay discusses the foreign policies pursued by the Great Powers in the historical constellation of 1848–51, including the revolutions in the Confederation in 1848 and the Prussian Union policy, the Schleswig-Holstein question, and, perhaps most interestingly, the Austrian bid for power in 1850/1.

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The ‘primacy of foreign policy’, it has been argued, was the guiding principle in the policies pursued by German states from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.⁴ Simms suggests that the main reason for the primacy of foreign policy was the geopolitical ‘sandwich’ position of the German states between France and Russia, especially the precarious situation of the smaller German states bordering on France, which was considered the chief disturber of European peace in early-nineteenth-century Europe. During the Wars of Liberation, Germany’s re-establishment as a player in European politics depended on British, Russian and Austrian support.⁵ At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, it was decided that the geopolitical exposure of the German states required the creation of a German Confederation to provide for their security.⁶ The Confederation was supposed to restore the European ‘balance of power’ by tying both Prussian and Austrian power to the defence of Germany, however, without establishing a centralized government that would enable Germany to disturb the peace. Therefore the Confederation assumed the character of a loose association for purely defensive purposes. In addition, the juxtaposition of Austria and Prussia within the Confederation, and the existence of the so-called ‘Third Germany’ consisting of the smaller and middle-sized states, was designed to maintain a balance within Germany.⁷ Finally, while Austria sacrificed its western European possessions in the southern Netherlands in return for a strengthened influence over the Italian peninsula and the Balkans, Prussia was given the Rhine Province and Westphalia in order to strengthen Prussia’s Great Power status and make it the main defender of Germany against France. Taken together, these changes constituted what Simms describes as the ‘geopolitical revolution’ of the Vienna territorial settlement.⁸ In consequence, Prussia, a thoroughly eastern European power in the eighteenth century, had shifted its centre of gravity to the west, assumed essential military functions for the defence of the west and the east of Germany, and become the main exponent of the primacy of foreign (and security) policy.

However, geopolitical and security considerations were not the only factors contributing to the primacy of foreign policy among the Great Powers in nineteenth-century European politics. Most importantly, the ‘Concert of Europe’ established at the Congress of Aachen⁹ in 1818 framed the diplomatic culture of the five Great Powers, and continued to shape their foreign policies during and after the revolutions of 1848. Following Aachen, the Concert of Europe operated as a kind of security council and developed behavioural, procedural and legal norms—such as restraint, moderation, cooperation through traditional and conference diplomacy, the maintenance of the status quo and the balance of power—that made their imprint on European diplomacy for the major part of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ It is against this background that the foreign policies of the Great Powers during the revolutions of 1848 must be regarded. The new element that came into play was the rise of popular nationalism. Obviously, the rising German nationalist movement exerted pressure on Prussian foreign policy, and revolutionary nationalism was also the chief problem of Austria, although in quite different ways. Thus, during the revolutionary era the two German Great Powers were forced into a balancing act between domestic forces and considerations, and international systemic pressures. Looking at the other three Great Powers, though, I hold the view that, contrary to the Schroeder thesis of the demise of the Concert of Europe beginning in 1848,¹¹ the Concert norm of restraint and Concert practices of conflict resolution prevailed throughout the revolutionary and immediate post-revolutionary crisis, as did the primacy of foreign policy. Ideological or other domestic considerations played only a secondary role.

* * *

The German Confederation of 1815 had given the German nation a loose, protective umbrella, and it initially commanded a wide degree of acceptance. But soon national liberal demands for constitutions in the German states, while heeded in some of the southern states, were stifled by Austria and Prussia, through the tightening of censorship and the reaffirmation of the ‘monarchical principle’. Tensions between popular sentiments and conservative governments increased. In 1834, Prussia responded to liberal demands for a nation-wide market by establishing the Zollverein, which sped up the economic integration and modernization of Germany, while Austria, which would not accede to the customs union, fell behind. Liberal and national ideas, which had made their first appearance during the Prussian Reform Era, now gained further ground among Prussian military and diplomatic élites. Foreign Minister Karl von Canitz, the Prussian ambassador in London Leopold von Bunsen, and King Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s adviser and friend Josef Maria von Radowitz, became advocates of a more dynamic, ‘German’ foreign policy with a view to strengthening the leadership of Prussia and the political, strategic and commercial ties, in particular railway connections, between the German states.¹² However, while German popular opinion broadly shifted towards liberal nationalism, the romantic, pietist, unmilitaristic Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV thought of kingship as a divine gift and rejected liberal constitutionalism.¹³ He regarded the preservation of peace as a Christian’s European duty. Influenced by his former teacher and his father’s Foreign Minister Friedrich Ancillon, he tried to maintain the traditional solidarity of the Great Powers, in particular between Berlin and Vienna, practised since the Vienna Congress.¹⁴ The national revolutionary movement put him in an awkward position.

The revolutions in the German Confederation combined demands for political participation and constitutional government with those for the national integration of the German states. Therefore they had not only a domestic emancipatory aspect, but also an inter-state dimehsion by putting into question the independence of the individual German states, threatening them with mediatization. Demands for national unification also implied competition for leadership in the unification process. Finally, the surge of nationalism had an international dimension, as the competing nationalisms of Germans, Danes, Italians, Poles and the Habsburg nationalities collided with the established territorial order, and potentially threatened the balance of power in central Europe. First, nationalism threatened the very existence of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Second, German nationalism threatened to oust the Habsburg monarchy from Germany. Third, many territorial conflicts loomed on the horizon: whether Dutch Luxemburg and Limburg, Czech Bohemia, German-Italian South Tyrol, Alsace, the Baltic provinces of Russia, or even the entire Habsburg Empire would become a part of united Germany or not was more or less controversial...