The Ascendancy of Europe

1815-1914

M.S. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317868514
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This new edition of the seminal and best selling history of Europe's century of global ascendancy includes a new introduction and bibliography. The carefully drawn discussions are pulled together and reinforced by a new afterword. Presented in a new textbook format and thoroughly revised throughout, the survey provides students with an invaluable guide to a notoriously complex period.

Lucidly written and constructed as a series of essays, the text covers the political and economic balance of power, the mechanics of government, economy and society, states, nations, europe and the world, Armed Forces and war and romanticism, evolution and consciousness.

Reviews of the previous editions`Anderson's book is one of the few that explains economic, social, military, intellectual and colonial developments in a clear, precise and engaging manner.'Teaching History `Packed with shrewdness, wisdom and well-directed erudition...invaluble to university students and teachers.' British Book News

I

The political and economic balance of power

THE CONCERT OF EUROPE, 1815–c. 1850

The peace settlement of 1814–15 attempted, with considerable success, to restore in Europe an effective balance of power and hence pave the way to a long period of international peace. In the west France, which during the previous two decades had destroyed the balance and threatened the continent with the spectre of ‘universal monarchy’, of dominance by a single state and a single ruler, was now effectively restrained. The kingdom of the Netherlands had been created; Prussia had been strengthened in the Rhineland; an international guarantee of Swiss neutrality had been given; the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia had been enlarged by the annexation of Genoa. Most fundamental of all, French expansionism had been checked, at least for the time being, by the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. In the east Russia, her frontier in Poland pushed further west than ever before, her military strength displayed with unprecedented effect in 1812–14 and her prestige therefore at its height, now seemed the most obvious threat to the balance. But the strengthening of central Europe by the enlargement of both Prussia and the Habsburg empire, by cooperation between them and by the formation of a German Confederation, appeared to offer a means of checking any further advance of Russian power. If such an advance were to take place it might now at least be deflected into the Balkans, an area about which as yet few European statesmen knew or cared much. ‘Placed equally between the great empires of East and West,’ wrote Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, to Hardenberg, the chief minister of Prussia, ‘Prussia and Austria are completing their systems of defence; united, the two monarchies form an unconquerable barrier against the enterprises of any conquering prince who might perhaps once again occupy the throne of France or that of Russia.’¹ The statesmen of Europe had accomplished the considerable feat of ending more than two decades of unprecedentedly large-scale war by a peace which left no major state, not even defeated France, nursing an irreconcilable grievance.

Yet it was a peace based, understandably, on fear. It had its roots in the capacity to destroy the established political order which the French Revolution had shown and in the threatened outbreak in the near future of another great cycle of international conflict. Even in 1815 the Hundred Days of Napoleon’s return to power in France, and the failure of the French people to support Louis XVIII against this new usurpation, seemed striking proofs of the fragility of the essentially conservative international system which was under construction. Friedrich von Gentz, secretary to the Vienna congress, predicted another major war within five years; and even Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, hardly expected peace to last for more than a decade. This widespread fear of revolution and war (the latter envisaged as the inevitable result of the former) was by no means confined to rulers and their ministers, and showed itself in various forms. In Alexander I of Russia it can be seen in a proposal in October 1815 that the four powers of the anti-French alliance – Great Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia – should jointly guarantee one another’s frontiers, as well as assuming a right of surveillance over the internal affairs of the other European states and of collective intervention in them to suppress revolution. Representatives of the four powers, he proposed, should meet periodically to organize this policy of intervention and suppression. Such a far-reaching innovation in international affairs was quite unacceptable to Castlereagh. He, in sharp contrast, was willing to guarantee only the existing boundaries of France, and to agree to collective intervention of the powers in the smaller states only in case of a revolution there which menaced the general peace of Europe. The result was that the Quadruple Alliance of November 1815 involved the signatories in a formal guarantee only of the French frontiers, though one of its clauses, which provided for their meeting in periodic congresses, meant that some general guarantee system might still emerge in course of time.

It could be argued that the Holy Alliance, signed in September 1815 by the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, involved at least an implied guarantee of the frontiers of these states; but this famous document was in effect a mere declaration of intent, more lacking in precision than any other international agreement of modern times. Moreover the alliance (which was aimed by Alexander at least in part against the Austro-British cooperation which had been a marked feature of the Vienna negotiations) was never liked by Metternich, or its signature regarded by him as more than a necessary sop to the tsar. In fact Alexander’s grandiose schemes for the forcible regulation of the affairs of Europe by the great conservative powers had been seriously checked in 1815. The same fate awaited his suggestion in October 1818 of a ‘general alliance’ which should be open to all states and become the basis of a system of collective guarantee of the status quo by the contracting powers. Castlereagh opposed the idea (the tsar seems to have envisaged the guarantee as extending to existing régimes as well as frontiers). Metternich, though his attitude was more favourable, feared that the proposal might mean that the smaller states became mere Russian satellites; and his reaction to the apparent dangers of the international position showed none of Alexander’s idealism and vision. Stripped of the verbiage and pretentious theorizing in which he liked to clothe it, it took the form of mere repression, of efforts to keep revolutionary tendencies within the European states, tendencies whose real strength Metternich grossly exaggerated, under strict surveillance and control. ‘You see in me’, he boasted in 1817, ‘the chief Minister of Police in Europe. I keep an eye on everything. My contacts are such that nothing escapes me.’² In July of the same year he proposed unsuccessfully that the conference of ambassadors of the allied powers which had been set up in Paris to supervise the detailed application of the peace settlement with France should collect and collate police reports from the governments concerned. Thus, he argued, revolutionary tendencies throughout the continent could be more effectively combated.

Nevertheless Alexander’s idealism, however impractical, struck a chord which reverberated widely in the Europe of the years after the Napoleonic catastrophe. The cosmopolitanism of the later eighteenth century had been based largely on speculation and a priori thinking, and had envisaged the whole of humanity as a unity, in some ultimate sense a single family. It had now been replaced by a narrower current of feeling, one which confined its attention largely to Europe and which was based on the harsh experience of the last quarter-century.³ In intellectual circles, perhaps even in ruling ones, agreement on the need to make Europe more united and endow it with some form of political organization, however rudimentary, was now for the first time a factor of some practical significance. In Germany the Catholic mystic Baader advocated a federation of the European states based on the Christianity which they all professed. In France Bergasse suggested the more limited expedient of a permanent alliance of sovereigns, while the Utopian socialist Saint-Simon sketched the plan of a great European society, democratic and parliamentary, of which the nucleus was to be formed by an alliance between France and Britain. Metternich himself had some sympathy with this type of feeling, arguing that

since no State is any longer isolated … we must never lose sight of the society of States which is an essential condition of the modern world…. One characteristic of the present world which distinguishes it fundamentally from the ancient is the tendency of nations to draw closer together and to set up a kind of corporate body resting on the same basis as the great human society which grew up at the heart of Christianity.⁴

The genuine though limited impulse of these years towards some institutionalized form of European unity found practical expression only in the form of the congresses of heads of state and foreign ministers which met periodically between 1818 and 1822 (at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818; at Troppau in 1820; at Laibach in 1820–21; and at Verona in 1822, with a last unimportant and unsuccessful effort to hold one in St Petersburg in 1824–25). This ‘Congress System’, a very tentative approach to international government, soon proved inefficient and short-lived. The congresses never attempted to establish any kind of international institution, or even to set up any kind of permanent secretariat, so that there was no continuity from one meeting to another. Neither the Prince Regent for Britain nor Louis XVIII for France ever appeared at any of them, and Frederick William III of Prussia did so only rarely; so that Alexander I and Francis II of Austria were the only heads of state to attend regularly. Above all, lasting cooperation of the powers was made impossible by the rivalries and disagreements between them. The British government (which in effect meant in this context Castlereagh) was quite unwilling to accept any unlimited right of interference by the great states in the affairs of the smaller ones to prevent or stamp out revolution. Yet this the three conservative eastern powers, Austria, Prussia and Russia, increasingly claimed; and such a right was enshrined in the ‘Troppau Protocol’ to which they agreed in November 1820.

To Castlereagh the wholesale intervention to which this seemed to open the door was dangerous to the stability of the continent. In his eyes only revolutionary outbreaks which clearly threatened the peace of Europe needed or deserved such treatment. The British government therefore rejected the Troppau Protocol, in the drawing-up of which it had refused to take any share. By the end of 1820 the breach between Britain and the more conservative powers of eastern and central Europe on this issue was wide and the unity of the alliance which defeated Napoleon had been broken. France, though her position was more ambiguous, was also not a reliable supporter of the conservative forces which by 1820 had come to control the congresses. At Aix-la-Chapelle she had been admitted to participation on equal terms in these gatherings. Unlike Britain, she sent representatives to the Troppau and Laibach meetings. But because of the danger of seriously offending liberal opinion within France the French government did not sign the Troppau Protocol; and when in 1823 Louis XVIII sent a French army into Spain to crush the liberal and military revolt which had broken out there three years earlier, he acted independently and made no mention of the mandate for intervention which the conservative powers had previously given him.

Accompanying and underlying these differences of outlook and attitude was a widespread uneasiness inspired by the apparently menacing strength of Russia, and by the highly personal and increasingly erratic policies of Alexander I. In 1820 Metternich, by playing on the tsar’s more and more paranoiac fears of revolution, had won his support for an Austrian and highly conservative attitude in international affairs. But this position was slowly altered by the outbreak of revolt in Greece against Turkish rule in the spring of 1821. Alexander was at first willing, under Metternich’s influence, to see events there as merely another manifestation of the revolutionary threat to the entire European order. But this attitude was soon eroded by territorial and commercial disputes between Russia and the Ottoman empire, and by the powerful religious sympathies for the Greeks which Orthodox Russia could hardly avoid feeling and which were strengthened by the massacres which punctuated the ferocious war for Greek independence. Before his death at the end of 1825 the tsar had already set in motion the chain of events which culminated in the Russo-Turkish war of April 1828: the British ambassador in St Petersburg reported in November 1825 that Alexander ‘was now perfectly habituated to the Idea of War as the only means of compelling Turkey to enter into an arrangement respecting Greece’.⁵ Such an attitude meant the likelihood of a break with Austria and the possibility of serious friction with her in the Balkans. Both came to pass under Alexander’s successor, his brother Nicholas I.

This growing estrangement dealt a death-blow to any lingering hope of maintaining some system of regular international meetings of the sort which had existed for a few years after 1818. After 1822 the ‘Congress System’ survived only in the much whittled-down form of conferences of ambassadors to discuss and settle specific international problems. Some of these did very important constructive work. In particular that which sat in London from 1830 onwards settled, after much labour and long delays, the problems created by the Belgian revolution of that year. But a workmanlike ad hoc body of this kind, engrossed largely in practical details, was a poor substitute for the gatherings of heads of state, united by religious belief and ties of personal friendship and regulating with Olympian detachment the affairs of Europe, of which some idealists had earlier dreamed.

The way in which the Congress System broke down strengthened a very important assumption which had for the past generation been rooting itself in the mind of Europe. This was the concept of much of the west of the continent (France, from the 1830s the new state of Belgium, above all Great Britain) as standing for liberty, political, personal and intellectual, while its eastern half, and most of all Russia, represented by contrast the forces of autocracy, militarism and oppression.⁶ In the 1790s the revolution in France, and even more the final destruction of Polish independence, had been decisive events in the consolidation of this attitude. For a century or more it was to provide a large part of the intellectual and emotional background to the relations of the European states. Much more than any other factor it explains the mingled fear and contempt with which so many west Europeans throughout the century which followed Waterloo regarded the peasant society and military autocracy of Russia.

In the years immediately after 1815 this fear was very understandable. The destruction of Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812, the advance of Russian armies across Poland and Germany in 1813 culminating in their triumphal entry into Paris with the forces of the other allies in April 1814, seemed to mark Russia as a power whose military strength, and therefore whose political potentialities, were of a different order of magnitude from those of the other states of Europe. ‘This monster of an empire … the most enormous empire, in extent, that ever spread over the face of the earth’,⁷ now appeared to many observers to threaten the liberties, even the civilization, of Europe.

These fears were grossly exaggerated. The policies of Alexander I helped to ensure that his empire would remain for another century socially, economically and administratively weak by comparison with most of the other great European states. During the first decade of his reign progressive and constructive change in Russia was probably more practicable than at any time until at least the 1860s. Yet from 1811–12 onwards the real interests and needs of the empire – social change, administrative reform and economic development – were consistently sacrificed to the tsar’s grandiose and often erratic idealism. By the time of Alexander’s death the social and economic gap between Russia and much of western Europe was wider than ever before. Moreover the tsar, in spite of the suspicions of many contemporaries, was little interested in territorial expansion. Even in Poland in 1814–15 he was inspired not by a desire for territory but by a genuine wish to re-establish some form of Polish state. Another aspect of his idealism is seen in his real interest in the creation of moderate constitutional régimes in many parts of Europe (in the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809, in France and Poland in 1815).

More important than the personal attitude of Alexander and his successors was the fact that Russia’s industrial and technological resources were, until well into the second half of the century, gros...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The political and economic balance of power
• 2. The mechanics of government: freedom and authority
• 3. Economy and society: the new and the old
• 4. States and nations
• 5. Europe and the world
• 6. Armed forces and war
• 7. Romanticism, evolution, consciousness: the movement of ideas
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index