Authors: Henry Kissinger
The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all sides. Thus while the emperors were lauded for their impartial, aloof
benevolence, the nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Karamzin saw in a Czar’s harshness a sign that he was fulfilling his true calling:
In Russia, the sovereign is the living law
. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity.
Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands (with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit). Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. Stranded “
at the interface of two vast and irreconcilable worlds
,” Russia saw itself as endowed with a special mission to bridge them but exposed on all sides to threatening forces that failed to comprehend its calling. The great Russian novelist and passionate nationalist Fyodor Dostoevsky cited “
this ceaseless longing
, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth.” The exaltation over Russia’s world-spanning synthesis of civilizations evoked a corresponding despair over Russia’s status as (in the words of an influential nineteenth-century critique) an “
orphan cut off from the human family
… For people to notice us, we have had to stretch from the Bering Straits to the Oder.”
A conviction lingered in the expansive, brooding “Russian soul” (as Russian thinkers would come to call it) that someday all of Russia’s vast exertions and contradictions would come to fruition: its journey would be vindicated; its achievements would be lauded, and the disdain of the West would transform into awe and admiration; Russia would combine the power and vastness of the East with the refinements of the West and the moral force of true religion; and Moscow, the “
Third Rome
” inheriting fallen Byzantium’s mantle, with its Czar
“the successor of the caesars of Eastern Rome, of the organizers of the church and of its councils which established the very creed of the Christian faith,” would play the decisive role in ushering in a new era of global justice and fraternity.
It was this Russia, in Europe but not quite of it, that had tempted Napoleon with its expanse and mystique; it was his ruin (just as it was Hitler’s a century and a half later) when Russia’s people, steeled to great feats of endurance, proved capable of weathering deeper privation than Napoleon’s Grande Armée (or Hitler’s legions). When Russians burned down four-fifths of Moscow to deny Napoleon the conquest and his troops’ sustenance, Napoleon, his epic strategy thus doomed, is said to have exclaimed, “
What a people! They are Scythians!
What resoluteness! The barbarians!” Now with Cossack horsemen drinking champagne in Paris, this massive autocratic entity loomed over a Europe that struggled to comprehend its ambitions and its method of operation.
By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler. A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations. He was convinced, as he wrote to a confidante in 1812, that triumph over Napoleon would usher in a new and harmonious world based on religious principles, and he pledged: “
It is to the cause of hastening the true reign
of Jesus Christ that I devote all my earthly glory.” Conceiving of himself as an instrument of divine will, the Czar arrived in Vienna in 1814 with a design for a new world order in some ways even more radical than Napoleon’s in its universality: a “Holy Alliance” of princes sublimating their national interests into a common search for peace and justice, forswearing the balance of power for Christian principles of brotherhood. As Alexander told Chateaubriand, the French royalist
intellectual and diplomat, “
There no longer exists an English policy
, a French, Russian, Prussian, or Austrian policy; there is now only one common policy, which, for the welfare of all, ought to be adopted in common by all states and all peoples.” It was a forerunner of the American Wilsonian conception of the nature of world order, albeit on behalf of principles dramatically the opposite of the Wilsonian vision.
Needless to say, such a design, advanced by a victorious military power whose divisions now bestrode the Continent, posed a challenge to Europe’s concept of a Westphalian equilibrium of sovereign states. For on behalf of its new vision of legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power. Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he oversaw an unprecedented review of 160,000 Russian troops on the plains outside the French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations. After consultation with his spiritual advisor, Alexander proposed a draft joint declaration in which the victorious sovereigns would proclaim their agreement that “
the course, formerly adopted by the powers
in their mutual relations, had to be fundamentally changed and that it was urgent to replace it with an order of things based on the exalted truths of the eternal religion of our Savior.”
The task of the negotiators at Vienna would be to transform Alexander’s messianic vision into something compatible with the continued independent existence of their states, to welcome Russia into the international order without being crushed by its embrace.
The statesmen who assembled in Vienna to discuss how to design a peaceful order had been through a whirlwind of upheavals overturning nearly every established structure of authority. In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment
replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned. It had spilled across France’s ancient frontiers to conquer almost all of the European continent, only to be nearly extinguished in the vastness of Russia.
The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor of the era’s seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (or Talleyrand, as he was known) was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon to negotiate the restoration of the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII’s Foreign Minister. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.
At Vienna, Talleyrand’s contribution was to achieve for France a peace that preserved the “ancient frontiers,” which existed when it had started its foreign adventures. And within less than three years—in 1818—he managed France’s entry into the Quadruple Alliance.
The vanquished enemy would become
an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the Atlantic Alliance.
The order established at the Congress of Vienna was the closest that Europe has come to universal governance since the collapse of
Charlemagne’s empire. It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war.
After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war. (The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. K. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes.) But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The period between 1815 and the turn of the century was modern Europe’s most peaceful, and the decades immediately following the Congress of Vienna were characterized by an extraordinary balance between legitimacy and power.
The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in 1814 were in a radically different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia. A century and a half earlier, a series of settlements of the various wars that made up the Thirty Years’ War was conjoined with a set of principles for the general conduct of foreign policy. The European order that emerged took as its point of departure the political entities that existed, now separated from their religious impetus. The application of Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent, or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions.
The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution or of Napoleon. The dynastic
legitimacy of government had been overwhelmed by Napoleon’s revolutionary élan and skilled generalship.
A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in 1806, bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by French armies. That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.
Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. The Habsburgs, once the Continent’s dominant dynasty, were now ruling only in their ancestral territories from Vienna. These were large and polyglot (roughly present-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland), and now of uncertain political cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests. Their territory had to be redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium.
The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real-time contact with their capitals. They receive minutely detailed instructions down to the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin (so at least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance), three weeks for a message to reach Paris; London took a little longer. Instructions therefore had to be drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the
diplomats were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own. Czar Alexander I was two months from his capital, but he needed no instructions; his whims were Russia’s commands, and he kept the Congress of Vienna occupied with the fertility of his imagination. The Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich, perhaps the shrewdest and most experienced statesman at Vienna, said of Alexander that he was “
too weak for true ambition
, but too strong for pure vanity.” Napoleon said of Alexander that he had great abilities but that “something” was always missing in whatever he did. And because one could never foresee which particular piece would be missing in any given instance, he was totally unpredictable. Talleyrand was more blunt: “He was not for nothing the son of [the mad] Czar Paul.”
The other participants at the Congress of Vienna agreed on the general principles of international order and on the imperative of bringing Europe back into some form of equilibrium. But they did not have congruent perceptions of what this would mean in practice. Their task was to achieve some reconciliation of perspectives shaped by substantially different historical experiences.
Britain, safe from invasion behind the English Channel and with unique domestic institutions essentially impervious to developments on the Continent, defined order in terms of threats of hegemony on the Continent. But the continental countries had a lower threshold for threats; their security could be impaired by territorial adjustments short of continental hegemony. Above all, unlike Britain, they felt vulnerable to domestic transformations in neighboring countries.