Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
Metternich spoke for the rationalist, territorial state when he complained that civil and political “rights” existed, if they existed at all, in the nature of things; they could not be guaranteed by the adoption of rules. “Things which ought to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements…”
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The new mentality was otherwise: human rights could be brought into being by political will—too many persons had seen it done to believe otherwise. Freedom could be expanded, or contracted, depending on the form of the regime. A novel political society that freed the classes had conquered Europe, and a secularized, comparatively meritocratic state that energized commerce and trade had just won the war. Representative institutions could claim a basis of legitimacy on account of their relation to the popular will. Law was the chosen instrument of fundamental change.
In this respect France was for other states a model of the new constitutional order, the state-nation. France was not the only model, however: both the United States (which had inspired France) and Great Britain, France's dogged opponent, presented to the world examples of this new
and dynamic constitutional form. These states also sought ways in which to bind the mass of people to the interests of the State, and ways to represent the State as the creation and object of veneration of the nation. The importance of the state-nation, however, also lies in the kind of society of states it called forth. As one historian has observed, as “a result of revolutionary change in society, one can detect during the era of the Napoleonic wars the emergence of a public opinion to gauge actions of warring governments by the principles recognized in the teachings of international law.”
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These principles awaited a constitutional convention to give them legal status. Thus, once again, war and constitutional change were followed by a peace settlement that took the form of a constitutional convention for the society of states, including even states that were not parties to the conflict. The new mentality—the mentality of the Congress of Vienna—brought issues to the fore that were quite distinct from those raised at Utrecht.
The state-nations that met at Vienna sought a special international arrangement that was not sought by the other states (of various constitutional forms) that came to the Congress, nor by the various constitutional entities that appeared at the Congress that were not themselves states.
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The European state-nation powers, Britain and France, sought an international system that would strengthen them at home not by re-enforcing domestic coercion, but by providing an external consensus that would give international politics the stability and prestige of law and would ameliorate the international conflicts that had so recently threatened to polarize their domestic polities. The other great powers were not so well placed to become state-nations. After its adoption of French military reforms, Prussia was able to forge a state-nation, but it remained frustrated by the fragmentation of the German nation; Habsburg Austria seems never to have made the transition successfully. Unlike Prussia, whose embrace of the German nation was cramped by an older, narrower state form, Austria's embrace was too broad, encompassing so many nations that it could not persuade them that their magnification lay in the service they might render the state. Russia, like her quixotic nineteenth century rulers, oscillated between a passionate intoxication with the state-nation ideal, for which its popular institutions were hopelessly ill-suited, and a reactionary rejection of the threatening modernity the new forms embodied.
The constitution of the new international system was the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, supplemented in time by various “amendments” ratified at subsequent congresses. The Congress was therefore the constitutional
convention of Europe, and it was seen as such by the state-nations that brought it into being. This constitution represents a response to three points of acute sensitivity to the state-nation: the self-consciousness of the new constitutional form, which could not depend merely upon custom for its legitimacy and must therefore earn its right to govern through the studied design and implementation of its institutions; the role of public opinion, which had become so influential in this new order that it demanded recognition by politicians; and the requirement that government policy be justifiable on the basis of articulated principles that themselves were taken as legitimate (thus requiring that the judgment of legitimacy go well beyond merely assessing the head of state). With regard to international affairs, these three points of importance played out in the following way, respectively: there was a demand for a particular legal instrument, consciously designed to prevent future wars in Europe; when public opinion became engaged by matters abroad, there had to be a way for politicians to replace diplomats as the effective actors; and inherited principles regarding the “general interest” of all states, and of the “balance of power”—set forth in earlier international constitutions and enjoying the prestige and legitimacy of tradition—had to achieve a new consensus among the powers in order for the behavior of these states to seem principled yet these principles had to be updated and modified in order for them to be practical.
The demand for an institution that was purposefully designed to deal with future conflicts arose in several ways. First, it was apparent that the Utrechtian system, which had succeeded in limiting war for a certain period, had been utterly unable to prevent a new sort of war, one that was so destructive that it had to be deterred in order to ensure the survival of states.
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There was a fatal vulnerability in the elaborate conventions of the territorial states that became manifest once the energies of a state-nation were deployed against those conventions. Territorial states could not quite ever combine in a sustained coalition because they could so easily be bought off with territorial concessions at each other's expense. Enduring coalitions had not been necessary to fight the brief, limited wars of the terr-ritorial state system—indeed, there was a distinct value to that system in maintaining highly fluid relationships but they were indispensable in the new era of conflict. Furthermore, the elites required to manage the elegant diplomacy of the ancien régimes had been replaced in some states by parties hostile to them. The Utrechtian system, however, as much as the territorial states that it comprised, depended upon an international elite. In any case, the prosecution of unlimited war took on a momentum owing to the national fervor that fueled it, regardless of who was in charge. Carefully calibrated restraint was scarcely possible in the face of popular passions.
Second, the mentality that arose with the state-nation could not passively accept an international system that seemed to depend upon etiquette for its operation. The state-nation was founded upon the claim (made notably by Hegel) that the State furnished the ideal vehicle for the realization of the nation; the nation could only be fulfilled through the self-conscious creation and enhancement of the State. During this period modern political parties came into being, as each offered to the nation a competing version of how best to fulfill the nation through the State. At Vienna, as at Augsburg, Osnabrück and Münster, and Utrecht, a program of international security was elaborated, but at Vienna, it had to be a program that was perceived to respond to the collective failure of the conventional, customary tradition that had hitherto provided an unquestioned context for events.
Third, state-nations claimed to rule on the basis of the consent of the governed. If an instrument were to be designed to govern the security affairs of Europe, it would have to be defended on the grounds that it too reflected the will of the peoples of Europe. The tsar is reported to have remarked that Napoleon was overthrown not by cabinets but by peoples, and that an outlet must be found for a new spirit in Europe that was at once constitutional, warlike, and national—a pretty good summation of the state-nation mentality.
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The multistate institution created by this legal instrument would have to be responsive to international opinion (in the way that the political institutions of the state-nation were responsive to domestic public opinion) in order to justify its decisions as ultimately based on consent; it would have to deter war rather than merely contain it; and finally it must be perceived by national publics as actually doing both these things. The solution arrived at was an ongoing international executive, composed of the five great powers, that would coordinate international security and summon periodic congresses, as necessary, to ratify the decisions taken by this directorate. This simply replicated in peacetime the pattern set up before Vienna: the Coalition allies had first agreed on a course of action, which was then presented for ratification to a congress of all states. In this way the Congress's apparent contradiction of the principle of consent—decisions by a few having been taken on behalf of the many—was resolved. The powers could rely on the common consensus for peace while asserting that only reliance on the few could keep the peace and thereby protect the many.
We can see this tactic at work in the opening weeks of the Congress of Vienna, when the allied powers were unable to reach a final decision before the date set for the Congress to open. Castlereagh drafted a declaration explaining the delay; in it he is at pains to show that the great powers are taking international opinion into account precisely with respect to a
decision that the powers alone are in fact making. As he wrote in the draft declaration:
The courts parties to the Treaty of Paris by which the present Congress has been set up, hold themselves to be obliged to submit for its consideration and approval the project of settlement which they judge to be most in accordance with the
principles
recognized as the necessary basis for the general system of Europe.
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The prototype for this arrangement is found in the First Treaty of Paris, Article I, which provides that “the high contracting parties shall make every effort to preserve, not only among themselves, but also as far as depends on them, among all the states of Europe, the good harmony and understanding that is so necessary for its repose,” and in Article XVI,
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which provides for the ratification of the provisions of the treaty by the upcoming congress.
By this means the directorate could claim broad-based consent for its decisions, relying on international opinion as well as deploying this opinion in dealings among themselves. This executive managed the Concert of Europe. Initially its members were confined to the parties to the Treaty of Chaumont; by 1818 France had been included in this executive and, as Kissinger has put it, “was admitted to the Congress system at periodic European congresses, which for half a century came close to constituting the government of Europe.” Indeed, of the 170 million inhabitants of Europe (excluding those under Turkish rule), more than two-thirds were residents of states that were parties to the Treaty of Paris. As Book I elaborated, in an earlier era it had been possible for relatively small states like the Venetian Republic or later the Dutch Republic to be powerful geopolitical actors because they could fund formidable professional armies. The mass conscription of the era of the state-nation ended that possibility, ushering in a new sort of warfare, marginalizing many states, and making some large state-nations indispensable to any peace settlement. Not every leader understood this. In a letter to Castlereagh, Lord Liverpool phlegmatically wrote that “[a] war sometime hence, though an evil, need not be different in its character and its effects from any of those wars which occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the commencement of the French Revolution.”
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Castlereagh (and Wellington) knew better. The era of cabinet wars fought for limited objectives was over. In its place was a new age of national wars fought for national ideals—that is, massive armies deployed to pursue virtually continental, even global, goals. By comprising those states that were capable of fielding large armies, the system of collective
security that the executive directorate administered made a virtue of what Kissinger identifies as the chief defect of such systems. Kissinger writes that “[t]he weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform and that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general system of collective security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction than on joint action.”
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In the case of the European executive, as with the domestic constitutional design of many of its members, inaction was exactly what was called for. All attempts by Metternich to convert the executive directorate into a roving commission to suppress democratic movements were frustrated, and no attempts were made by the great powers to assault one another until the Crimean War. It is not necessary that the interests of states be uniform for a system of collective security to function, only that these interests counsel the same course of action (or inaction). In the case of the directorate of the Concert of Europe, each member feared a new revolutionary upheaval and sought in foreign policy the prestige, legitimacy, and gravity that participation in the executive body conferred. When, in time, such upheavals came, they came not from a defecting state-nation member of the Concert but from states that had been excluded, Italy and Germany. The historian Bruun wrote that “[t]here is an element of historical irony in the fact that [Napoleon's] attempt to make France secure by extending French influence over Germany and Italy contributed to an opposite result.”
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How much more ironic that the attempt at Vienna to make the European society of states secure should ultimately founder on its failure to accord statehood to a great nation. It was a phenomenon, however, that state-nations encountered all over the globe, and it was perhaps inherent in this constitutional form. The very nationalism that energizes the armies and officials of the state-nation awakens the latent nationalism of their conquests and colonies. Though it is sometimes said that the Congress of Vienna ignored the matter of nationalism in its territorial settlements, this is only partly true: the Congress was extremely vigilant with regard to the national populations of the great powers. France was not dismembered, despite widespread sentiment to do so; German land earmarked for the English prince regent to be added to Hanover was instead given to Prussia, despite the fact that England was the chief architect of victory. Rather it was the national identities of those peoples without states that was sacrificed, and this says most about the state-nation itself and how it differs from the nation-state that is the source of our understanding of nationalism in state affairs today. The state-nation exalts the State and puts the nation at its service. The society of such states is therefore not concerned with promoting national identity per se, but rather with safeguarding the national identity of states. For this society, the Concert was an ideal institution.