Authors: Henry Kissinger
The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an Ottoman vassal in the eighteenth century—but over competing French and Russian claims to advance the rights of favored Christian communities in Jerusalem, then within Ottoman jurisdiction. During a dispute over which denomination, Catholic or Orthodox, would have principal access to holy sites, Czar Nicholas I demanded recognition of his right to act as “protector” of all Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire, a significant population stretching across strategic territories. The demand—which amounted to a right of intervention in the affairs of a foreign state—was couched in the terms of universal moral principles but cut to the heart of Ottoman sovereignty. Ottoman refusal prompted a Russian military advance into the Balkans and naval hostilities in the Black Sea. After six months Britain and France, fearing the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire and with it the European balance, entered the war on the Ottoman side.
The alliance systems of the Congress of Vienna were shattered as a consequence.
The war received its name
because a Franco-British force landed in the Crimea to seize the city of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet; Russian forces held out against a siege of eleven months before sinking their ships. Prussia stayed neutral. Austria foolishly decided to take advantage of Russia’s isolation to improve its position in the Balkans, mobilizing Austrian troops there. “
We will astonish the world by the magnitude of our ingratitude
,” commented Austria’s Minister-President and Foreign Minister Prince Schwarzenberg when presented with a Russian request for assistance. Instead, Austria’s diplomacy supported the British and French war effort diplomatically, with measures approaching the character of an ultimatum.
The effort to isolate Russia concluded by isolating Austria. Within two years, Napoleon invaded the Austrian possessions in Italy in support of Italian unification while Russia stood by. Within Germany, Prussia gained freedom of maneuver. Within a decade Otto von Bismarck started Germany on the road to unification, excluding Austria from what had been its historical role as the standard-bearer of German statehood—again with Russian acquiescence. Austria learned too late that in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.
Two statesmen served as the fulcrums of these vast shifts in Germany and in Europe: the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich and the Prussian Minister-President—later German Chancellor—Otto von Bismarck. The contrast between the legacies of the century’s two principal Central European statesmen illustrates the shift in emphasis of the European international order from legitimacy
to power in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both have been viewed as archetypal conservatives. Both have been recorded as master manipulators of the balance of power, which they were. But their fundamental concepts of international order were nearly opposite, and they manipulated the balance of power to vastly different ends and with significantly contrasting implications for the peace of Europe and the world.
Metternich’s very appointment had testified to the cosmopolitan nature of the eighteenth-century society. He was born in the Rhineland, near the border of France, educated in Strasbourg and Mainz. Metternich did not see Austria until his thirteenth year and did not live there until his seventeenth. He was appointed Foreign Minister in 1809 and Chancellor in 1821, serving until 1848. Fate had placed him in the top civilian position in an ancient empire at the beginning of its decline. Once considered among the strongest and best-governed countries in Europe, Austria was now vulnerable because its central location meant that every European tremor made the earth move there. Its polyglot nature made it vulnerable to the emerging wave of nationalism—a force practically unknown a generation earlier. For Metternich, steadiness and reliability became the lodestar of his policy:
Where everything is tottering
it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge.
A product of the Enlightenment, Metternich was shaped more by philosophers of the power of reason than by the proponents of the power of arms. Metternich rejected the restless search for presumed remedies to the immediate; he considered the search for truth the most important task of the statesman. In his view, the belief that whatever was imaginable was also achievable was an illusion. Truth had to reflect an underlying reality of human nature and of the structure of
society. Anything more sweeping in fact did violence to the ideals it claimed to fulfill. In this sense, “
invention is the enemy of history
, which knows only discoveries, and only that which exists can be discovered.”
For Metternich, the national interest of Austria
was a metaphor for the overall interest of Europe—how to hold together many races and peoples and languages in a structure at once respectful of diversity and of a common heritage, faith, and custom. In that perspective, Austria’s historical role was to vindicate the pluralism and, hence, the peace of Europe.
Bismarck, by comparison, was a scion of the provincial Prussian aristocracy, which was far poorer than its counterparts in the west of Germany and considerably less cosmopolitan. While Metternich tried to vindicate continuity and to restore a universal idea, that of a European society, Bismarck challenged all the established wisdom of his period. Until he appeared on the scene, it had been taken for granted that German unity would come about—if at all—through a combination of nationalism and liberalism. Bismarck set about to demonstrate that these strands could be separated—that the principles of the Holy Alliance were not needed to preserve order, that a new order could be built by conservatives’ appealing to nationalism, and that a concept of European order could be based entirely on an assessment of power.
The divergence in these two seminal figures’ views of the nature of international order is poignantly reflected in their definitions of the national interest. To Metternich, order arose not so much from the pursuit of national interest as from the ability to connect it with that of other states:
The great axioms of political science
derive from the recognition of the true interests of
all
states; it is in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the cultivation of which is considered
political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a secondary importance. Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium … and of the united efforts of states … to force a return to the common law.
Bismarck rejected the proposition that power could be restrained by superior principle. His famous maxims gave voice to the conviction that security could be achieved only by the correct evaluation of the components of power:
A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity
… Every other government seeks the criteria for its actions solely in its interests, however it may cloak them with legal deductions …
For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances
in which the consciousness of having performed a good deed furnishes the sole reward for our sacrifice …
The only healthy basis of policy
for a great power … is egotism and not romanticism …
Gratitude and confidence will not bring
a single man into the field on our side; only fear will do that, if we use it cautiously and skillfully …
Policy is the art of the possible
, the science of the relative.
Ultimate decisions would depend strictly on considerations of utility. The European order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest.
With his appointment as Prussian Minister-President in 1862, Bismarck set about to implement his principles and to transform the
European order. With the conservative monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring about a German national state for the first time in history. With a few daring strokes between 1862 and 1870, he placed Prussia at the head of a united Germany and Germany in the center of a new system of order.
Disraeli called the unification of Germany in 1871 “
a greater political event than the French Revolution
” and concluded that “the balance of power has been entirely destroyed.” The Westphalian and the Vienna European orders had been based on a divided Central Europe whose competing pressures—between the plethora of German states in the Westphalian settlement, and Austria and Prussia in the Vienna outcome—would balance each other out. What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power.
The greatest triumph of Bismarck’s career had also made more difficult—perhaps impossible—the operation of a flexible balance of power. The crushing defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which Bismarck had adroitly provoked France into declaring, was attended by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, a retributive indemnity, and the tactless proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles in 1871. Europe’s new order was reduced to five major powers, two of which (France and Germany) were irrevocably estranged from each other.
Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others, much like the coalition against Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and Napoleon in the early nineteenth. Only the most restrained
conduct could avoid incurring the collective antagonism of its neighbors. All of Bismarck’s efforts thereafter would be devoted to an elaborate series of maneuvers to forestall this “cauchemar des coalitions” (nightmare of coalitions), as he called it, using the French phrase. In a world of five, Bismarck counseled, it was always better to be in the party of three. This involved a dizzying series of partly overlapping, partly conflicting alliances (for example, an alliance with Austria and a Reinsurance Treaty with Russia) with the aim of giving the other great powers—except the irreconcilable France—a greater interest to work with Germany than to coalesce against it.
The genius of the Westphalian system as adapted by the Congress of Vienna had been its fluidity and its pragmatism; ecumenical in its calculations, it was theoretically expandable to any region and could incorporate any combination of states. With Germany unified and France a fixed adversary, the system lost its flexibility. It took a genius like Bismarck to sustain the web of counterbalancing commitments keeping the equilibrium in place by a virtuoso performance that forestalled general conflict during his tenure. But a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.
After Bismarck’s forced departure in 1890 (after a clash with the new Kaiser Wilhelm II over the scope of his authority), his system of overlapping alliances was maintained only tenuously. Leo von Caprivi, the next Chancellor, complained that while Bismarck had been able to keep five balls in the air simultaneously, he had difficulty controlling two. The Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was not renewed in 1891 on the ground that it was partly incompatible with the Austrian alliance—which, in Bismarck’s view, had been precisely its utility. Almost inevitably, France and Russia began exploring an alliance. Such realignments had happened several times before in the European kaleidoscope of shifting orders. The novelty now was its institutionalized permanence. Diplomacy had lost its resilience; it had become a
matter of life and death rather than incremental adjustment. Because a switch in alliances might spell national disaster for the abandoned side, each ally was able to extort support from its partner regardless of its best convictions, thereby escalating all crises and linking them to each other. Diplomacy became an effort to tighten the internal bonds of each camp, leading to the perpetuation and reinforcement of all grievances.
The last element of flexibility was lost when Britain abandoned its “splendid isolation” and joined the Entente Cordiale of France and Russia after 1904. It did so not formally but de facto via staff talks, creating a moral obligation to fight at the side of the counterpart countries. Britain set aside its settled policy of acting as balancer—partly because of a German diplomacy that, in a series of crises over Morocco and Bosnia, had sought to break up the Franco-Russian alliance by humiliating each of its members in turn (France over Morocco in 1905 and 1911, Russia over Bosnia in 1908) in the hopes of impressing on the other its ally’s unreliability. Finally, the German military programs introduced a large and growing navy challenging Britain’s command of the seas.
Military planning compounded the rigidity. Since the Congress of Vienna, there had been only one general European war—the Crimean War. (The Franco-Prussian War was confined to the two adversaries.) It had been conducted about a specific issue and served limited aims. By the turn of the twentieth century, military planners—drawing on what they took to be the lessons of mechanization and new methods of mobilization—began to aim for total victory in all-out war. A system of railways permitted the rapid movement of military forces. With large reserve forces on all sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence.
German strategy
, the famous Schlieffen Plan, was based on the assessment that Germany needed to defeat one of its neighbors before it could combine with others to attack from east and west. Preemption was thereby built into its military planning. Germany’s
neighbors were under the converse imperative; they had to accelerate their mobilization and concerted action to reduce the impact of possible German preemption. Mobilization schedules dominated diplomacy; if political leaders wanted to control military considerations, it should have been the other way around.