Concert of Europe

12 Key excerpts on "Concert of Europe"

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  Guide to International Relations and Diplomacy

  • Michael Graham Fry, Erik Goldstein, Richard Langhorne(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  PART II Crises and Meetings This page intentionally left blank THE CONGRESS AND Concert of Europe, 1814^1830 Concert of Europe The Concert of Europe was the first attempt by states to arrange a formal structure within which to conduct international relations. It is impossible to define it in any constitutional way, as can be done for its successors, the League of Nations and the United Nations, since its precise origins cannot be pinned down and throughout its existence it was subject to evolutionary development. The period of its operation is clear enough, however, and falls into identifiable phases. The establishment of the Concert of Europe dates from 1815. The stresses created by the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France had provided a powerful motive for trying to regulate international relations so as to avoid any repetition of warfare on such a scale. The form that such a regulation was to take was partly determined by contemporary beliefs about the causes of preceding wars, by the distribution of power among the greater states and by their perception of the Concert's stability. There was a clear view in 1815 that the war that had just ended had been caused by the spread of the ideology of the French Revolution, and its subsequent adaptation by Napoleon, rather than by France as such, and the new system was undoubtedly intended to provide a means of controlling any recrudescence of revolutionary activity. Such an ambition necessarily involved establishing cooperative procedures for coordinating international action -something never before attempted, let alone achieved, and likely to be difficult in a world of intensely sovereign states. The mitigating factors were the common agreement that the most likely threat to peace would come from revolution, and the fact that, even in the case of France, there had developed a rough equality among the great powers.

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  An Age of Neutrals

  Great Power Politics, 1815–1914

  • Maartje Abbenhuis(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Neutrality, neutralisation and the Concert of Europe The Concert of Europe evolved out of the ashes of the Napoleonic Wars. Over many months in 1814 and 1815, and interrupted only by the 100- days return of Napoleon, Europe’s ruling elite met in the Habsburg capital of Vienna. They brought the devastating Napoleonic Wars to an end and reorganised the continent in such a way as to advantage the pre- existing monarchies, France included. Amidst much strife and negotia- tion, the overarching goal of the Congress of Vienna was to find a way to protect the great powers from revolutionary forces at home and to settle their international relations so as to minimise future conflict between them. The conference’s key negotiators did not seek a punitive peace to cripple France (much) but rather a pragmatic settlement that would reorganise Europe into a stable entity. 1 In so doing, as Paul Schroeder’s magisterial tome on the subject shows, the great powers transformed the international system and set the tone for a century of limited war. 2 Within the atmosphere of what came to be known as the Restoration Period, a term that belies a complex environment, 3 the avoidance of con- flict between the great European states was deemed essential in order to protect the system from collapse and to prevent adverse risk that could endanger them all. The desire to keep great-power conflict limited made neutrality an essential element of European politics for the next 100 years. In fact, as the Russian jurist Fyodor de Martens explained in the 1880s, through the course of the nineteenth century neutrality became ‘ins´ eparable de la notion de la communaut´ e internationale’ (inseparable from the idea of 1 What Andreas Osiander refers to as a ‘system-wide consensus’ and ‘system- consciousness’ (The states system of Europe 1640–1990. Peacemaking and the conditions of international stability. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 173, 186).

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  The Ascendancy of Europe

  1815-1914

  • M.S. Anderson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In spite of what has been said in the preceding pages it would be highly inaccurate to think of the decades which followed Waterloo as an age of acute and self-conscious competition between states on the economic or even the political plane. By comparison with the period from the 1860s to 1914 they were in general remarkably lacking in feeling of this kind. Alexander ls dream of some kind of formalized international cooperation had faded beyond recall by the early 1820s; but the idea of the ‘Concert of Europe’ continued to influence statesmen and to blunt the edge of national and state selfishness, though with slowly declining effect, until the middle of the century. The effective cooperation of the great powers in the interests of international peace and stability continued to be an ideal to which something more than lip-service was paid. There was still a widespread feeling that, in particular, significant territorial changes in Europe should be made only with the agreement of these powers. The emergence of an independent Belgium in 1830–39, the product of very long and difficult negotiations, was a triumph for the ‘concert’ idea. So was the establishment, by the Straits Convention of June 1841, of a set of internationally agreed rules regarding the passage of ships of war through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles which were to last, in essentials, for over eighty years.

  The Concert of Europe idea, like every aspiration towards order and stability, was at bottom conservative. Its most consistent supporter, Metternich, whose policy from 1822 until his fall in 1848 has been described as ‘a continuous chain of rearguard actions to delay, to cover, and to argue away the breakdown of the Concert of Europe and all it stood for’,19 was influenced above all by forebodings about the future of the Habsburg empire, which an effective concert of the powers would do much to safeguard. In particular his desire for cooperation with Russia in the 1830s and 1840s was based in part on his morbid fear of the forces of revolution in Europe. Also the concert had important practical limitations. It could not prevent Russia from independently imposing peace terms on the Turks in 1829; and there was never any suggestion that it should operate outside Europe. Even the French conquest of Algeria after 1830 lay outside its scope. Nevertheless, vague and restricted though it was, within its limits it was real, perhaps all the more so for being unspecific and therefore flexible.

  Moreover the ideal of giving the political unity of Europe some visible institutional form had never been completely abandoned. By the middle of the century it was assuming a new shape, as to the alleged threat to Europe from Russia in the east was added the new one apparently created by the phenomenally growing United States across the Atlantic. The American republic had not played a significant role in the calculations of any statesman during the peace settlement of 1814–15. Between the 1830s and 1850s, however, it was visited and studied by a number of the most important writers on politics of the period – de Tocqueville, List, Fröbel – and their books spread the idea that Europe’s leadership of the world was now threatened by the growth of these gigantic extra-European states in east and west and perhaps must inevitably be lost to them as their overwhelming power developed. There are only two peoples’, wrote the French critic Sainte-Beuve in 1847. ‘Russia is still barbarous, but she is great…. The other youthful people is America … the future of the world is there, between these two great worlds.’20 Almost simultaneously in Germany the radical Bruno Bauer was speculating gloomily on the imminent emergence of Russia and the United States as the only true world powers.21 Such forecasts tended to the conclusion that European union (most usually envisaged as some form of federation) was essential if the world centre of civilization and progress were to escape eclipse and even subjection. A series of writers – J. E. Jörg, Fröbel and Constantin Frantz in Germany, the historian Henri Martin in France – put forward in varying forms ideas of this kind around and just after the middle of the century.22

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  Why Politics Matters

  An Introduction to Political Science

  • Kevin Dooley, Joseph Patten, Kevin Dooley(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Concert of Europe: The name given to the European balance of power system of the nineteenth century. Although many scholars agree that the nineteenth century had several low-level wars (wars fought between some of the great powers), the system that was forged in Vienna proved strong enough to prevent war for almost one hundred years. WHY POLITICS MATTERS TO YOU! ISTOCK.COM/MANGOSTOCK WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE WITH FRANCE? I f you were attending the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and had been representing one of the countries that had been devastated by France, how would you have treated the new French delegation? Would you have invited its members to attend the Congress as equal participants in the proceedings? Or would you have wanted to punish them to the point where they would no longer be an international threat to the peace and security of Europe? This is an important set of questions because it allows us to see the great foresight of those diplomats who met in Vienna in 1815. The human impulse would be that of punishment, right? Here is France, the state that has consistently upset the balance of power and has conquered most of the continent. Why would you want to forgive its actions and let France back into the “great powers club”? You would want to cripple the country permanently, right? Well, the delegates who met in 1815 gave a resounding no! (Continued) Copyright 2021 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 304 This proactive mentality provided the nineteenth century with both its great- est strength and weakness.

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  The Balance Of Power

  History & Theory

  • Michael Sheehan(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One of the features of the concert system was that it was more explicitly a great power system than its eighteenth-century predecessor. The lesser states had few rights and were not treated as equal members of the system. The justification for this offered by von Gentz in 1818, that the five powers at the head of the federation were the only ones who could destroy the general system by changing their policies is a valid one. The ‘concert’ served as a mechanism for managing the rivalry between the great powers.

  Unlike the statesmen of 1713–14, those of 1815 believed that a means needed to be found to enable rapid consultation and cooperation of states in the event of a future threat to the European balance of power. It was the absence of such a mechanism, they felt, which had been one of the major weaknesses of the eighteenth century balance of power system. The method chosen was not to create an international organisation, but rather to make more or less permanent the wartime great power alliance and to hold periodic conferences at foreign minister level, in the words of the Quadruple Alliance (November 1815), ‘for the purpose of consulting upon their interests, or for the consideration of measures which…shall be considered the most salutary for the purpose and prosperity of Nations and the maintenance of the Peace of Europe’ (Craig and George, 1990:31). These conferences were to be more frequent than those which had followed the Utrecht settlement a century earlier. In all, the period 1822 to 1914 saw a total of 26 conferences in which all the great powers were represented. The permanence of the wartime alliance had been established by the Treaty of Chaumont, of March 1814, prior to the final defeat of Napoleon.

  Henry Kissinger has argued (1955:266) that there are in practice two potential forms of equilibrium. The first, analogous to the eighteenth-century system, acts as a deterrent to a state seeking hegemony. The second, a ‘special equilibrium’, is a ‘condition of smooth cooperation’. For Kissinger, the concert system was an example of the second form of equilibrium.

  Although it was not without its critics, by and large the concert system served Europe well over the subsequent four decades. The great powers themselves demonstrated a notable restraint in the exercise of their dominance, which was clearly instrumental in commending it to the less powerful states in the system. The most powerful of the second rank states not surprisingly resented the existence of this ‘senior management group’ for the European state system, while the small states accepted the dominant position of the great powers and looked to them for protection. Many, indeed, found in a great power patron a guarantee both against external aggression and against internal revolution.

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  Promoting Peace with Information

  Transparency as a Tool of Security Regimes

  • Daniel Lindley, Dan Lindley(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Managing U.S.-Soviet Rivalry: Problems of Crisis Prevention (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983), 36.

  18 Balance of threat theory posits that states ally with each other to secure themselves from threats. For more, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

  19 Sir Charles Webster, The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 1815–1822: Britain and the European Alliance (London: G. Bell, 1947; first published in 1925), 56.

  20 Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 501. The Treaty was signed on March 9, 1814, and backdated to March 1. See also Frederick H. Hartmann, ed., Basic Documents of International Relations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1951), 1– 4.

  21 Webster, Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, 54.

  22 Hartmann, Basic Documents, 5.

  23 René Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 24; and Sir Charles Webster, The Congress of Vienna: 1814–1815 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969; originally published by the British Foreign Office in 1919), 163.

  24 Hartmann, Basic Documents, 6–8.

  25 Albrecht-Carrié, Diplomatic History of Europe, 19; Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822,

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  Securing Europe after Napoleon

  1815 and the New European Security Culture

  • Beatrice de Graaf, Ido de Haan, Brian Vick(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  England, die deutsche Frage und das Mächtesystem 1815–1856 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 41–56; Ibid., Die deutsche Frage und das europäische Staatensystem 1815–1871 (Munich: Olden- bourg, 2001), 81; Jarrett, Congress of Vienna, xiii. 44 Conceptualisations to take shape around 1822 and it even survived the revolutions of 1830. The Concert demonstrated its functionality in the Greek and the Belgian questions around 1830, but also during the so-called Oriental crisis after 1839. Changes within the European geopolitical status quo were possible, and they even had a stabilising effect, because and as long as these changes were decided upon multilaterally and consensually. There were no fixed rules as to how to treat international problems, but the Concert provided a frame for great power communication and, by this token, the precondition for joint measures instead of unilateral action. The basis of the Concert’s politics was still a common understanding, that the five powers together had a European function and responsibility. The ‘Big Five’ considered problems or conflicts like in Greece or the Netherlands as European problems or conflicts that had to be dealt with by ‘Europe’s areopagus’, as Friedrich von Gentz called it. 17 We can understand the development of the Vienna system and the Vienna order and conceptually grasp the transformation of the Vienna system with its relatively strong institutions into the Vienna order with its much weaker insti- tutions (including the erosion or even destruction of this order after 1848) as the transformation of a security regime. 18 But we can also regard these processes as the result of a changing European security culture: a security culture which between 1815 and 1914 did not remain static as a kind of unchangeable frame of security related policies and politics, but which – as a historical process – underwent dynamic changes during this century.

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  Great Power Multilateralism and the Prevention of War

  Debating a 21st Century Concert of Powers

  • Harald Muller, Carsten Rauch, Harald Muller, Carsten Rauch(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Membership. Membership of the Concert of Europe was self-selecting (Holsti 1992, 35–6), but informal hierarchies shaped its operation in important ways. For example, Schroeder argues that Russian and British hegemony was a key feature of the Vienna settlement: Far from being ordered by a group of equal great powers, it was a “pentarchy composed of two superpowers [Russia and Britain], one authentic but vulnerable great power [France], one highly marginal and even more vulnerable great power [Austria], and one power called great by courtesy only [Prussia]” (Schroeder 1992, 688). Moreover, these great powers were imperial states, though of differing kinds: Austria was an imperial European state, Russia was an imperial European and Asian state, Britain ruled a colonial empire and France also ruled a colonial empire (though it was substantially rebuilt only from the 1830s onward), while Prussia, though ruling a small German empire, only acquired significant overseas colonies as part of a united Germany in the 1880s. These features of Concert membership illustrate the extent to which any concert is likely to be characterized by historical particularity and contingency. They suggest that no direct inference should be drawn from the Concert of Europe about the required number of great powers for a concert to operate, about the kinds of states involved (including precisely where the line is drawn between great powers and the rest) or about the nature of the informal hierarchies that may or may not operate within a concert order.

  Objectives. The Concert of Europe emerged when the risk of further great power war was widely believed to be so damaging that the great powers would rather act in concert. Although its origins lay in an alliance against France, it quickly lost this ad hominem quality. Functionally, it operated in the security domain, and within that domain it provided order, in contrast to the more ideological agenda pursued by the Holy Alliance. These features of the Concert were all reflected in the commitment of the Quadruple (and later Quintuple) Alliance to maintaining the provisions of the Vienna treaty order and to employing great power conferences to resolve future threats to a stable international order (Lauren 1983, 35–6). However, the construction of particular issues, such as the Eastern question, as security problems was very much a feature of its time, reflecting both the imperial basis of the 19th century system and also the extent to which the very concept of security was, at that time, detachable from other goods such as self-determination and human rights. It is not obvious that a similar separation is either feasible or desirable today. I contend, therefore, that how the security domain is demarcated should be treated as specific to each putative concert.

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  Diplomacy

  • Henry Kissinger(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Simon & Schuster

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia

  W hile Napoleon was enduring his first exile, at Elba, the victors of the Napoleonic Wars assembled at Vienna in September 1814 to plan the postwar world. The Congress of Vienna continued to meet all during Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo. In the meantime, the need to rebuild the international order had become even more urgent.

  Prince von Metternich served as Austria’s negotiator, though, with the Congress meeting in Vienna, the Austrian Emperor was never far from the scene. The King of Prussia sent Prince von Hardenberg, and the newly restored Louis XVIII of France relied on Talleyrand, who thereby maintained his record of having served every French ruler since before the revolution. Tsar Alexander I, refusing to yield the Russian pride of place to anyone, came to speak for himself. The English Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, negotiated on Great Britain’s behalf.

  These five men achieved what they had set out to do. After the Congress of Vienna, Europe experienced the longest period of peace it had ever known. No war at all took place among the Great Powers for forty years, and after the Crimean War of 1854, no general war for another sixty. The Vienna settlement corresponded to the Pitt Plan so literally that, when Castlereagh submitted it to Parliament, he attached a draft of the original British design to show how closely it had been followed.

  Paradoxically, this international order, which was created more explicitly in the name of the balance of power than any other before or since, relied the least on power to maintain itself. This unique state of affairs occurred partly because the equilibrium was designed so well that it could only be overthrown by an effort of a magnitude too difficult to mount. But the most important reason was that the Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values. There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony. The balance of power reduces the opportunities for using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force. An international order which is not considered just will be challenged sooner or later. But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical foreign-policy issues. For that reason, compatibility between domestic institutions is a reinforcement for peace. Ironic as it may seem, Metternich presaged Wilson, in the sense that he believed that a shared concept of justice was a prerequisite for international order, however diametrically opposed his idea of justice was to what Wilson sought to institutionalize in the twentieth century.

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  European Politics 1815?1848

  • Frederick C. Schneid(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Part I The Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe Passage contains an image

  [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

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  Power and Conflict in the Age of Transparency

  • B. Finel, K. Lord, B. Finel, K. Lord(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  44 worth, and the concert and its norms took on a moral value, which in turn increased compliance and self-restraint. Mechanisms for controlling exploitation. Because of three proce- dural norms, states found it more difficult or less advantageous than usual to try to exploit others under the concert of 1815. The first was the provision for frequent meetings, which had the further func- tion of increasing transparency. The Quadruple Alliance, which was signed upon the defeat of Napoleon, called for periodic conferences of the states’ leaders “for the purpose of consulting upon their com- mon interests, and for the consideration of the measures which . . . shall be considered the most salutary for the repose and prosperity of Nations, and for the maintenance of the peace of Europe.” 21 Be- cause such conferences could be used to coerce some of the members and to provide the cover of legitimacy for narrowly national activi- ties, Britain often refused to participate. (Recall Canning’s famous quip: “Conferences are useless or dangerous; useless if we are in agreement, dangerous if we are not.” 22 ) But, even from the English perspective, the conferences were a symbolic affirmation of the im- portance of European interests and European unity, and constituted a barrier to defection. The fact that the states had pledged to discuss all major issues jointly made it harder for any one of them to seek outcomes that were unacceptable to others. Changes in the status quo were not considered legitimate unless and until the great pow- ers had assented to them, often by holding a conference. Form and substance are not unrelated: if states are committed to gaining wide- spread ratification for crucial actions, they must accept limits on the extent to which they can hope to make competitive gains. 23 Related to the system of conferences was the great powers’ habit of negotiating jointly with third parties (especially Turkey).

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  Systems, Stability, and Statecraft

  Essays on the International History of Modern Europe

  • P. Schroeder(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  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 suppos- edly 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 THE VIENNA SETTLEMENT 39 France nearly to its ancient limits, restored Austria and Prussia to their size and status of 1805-06, 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? 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 condi- tions. 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, suc- cessfully managed crises (the Greek revolt in the 1820s, the Belgian problem of 1830-39, and the Near Eastern crisis of 1839-41) in ways that preserved peace, maintained the balance system, and promoted British interests.

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