The Invention of International Order

Remaking Europe after Napoleon

Glenda Sluga

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691226798
• Thema: History
• Thema: European History

The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history.In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights.Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.

CHAPTER ONE

Diplomacy

By Diplomacy we mean the course followed by states towards other states, and the rules that govern their external policy.

—ADAM JERZY CZARTORYSKI, ESSAI SUR LA DIPLOMATIE, 1827

IN 1812, THE creation of a Europe-wide military coalition against French hegemony relied on diplomacy. This was nothing new. Over the previous decade, a combination of military and diplomatic methods had served the famously short Corsican Napoleon Bonaparte well, aiding his consolidation of French hegemony across Europe’s numerous sovereign states. The European governments that joined the coalition were each in some way entangled in this French-ruled web of relations, or order, not least its so-called Continental System. Designed with the intent of blocking British access to European markets and materials, from 1806 the French government enforced economic policies in territory directly under their military control or subject to their indirect influence. Bonaparte’s minister for interior gloated that England was left helpless, watching on as “her merchandise is repulsed from the whole of Europe, and her vessels laden with useless wealth wandering around the wide seas, where they claim to rule as sole masters, seeking in vain from the Sound to the Hellespont for a port to open and receive them.”¹

The tensions between the French and the other continental imperial powers were as complicated by the history of bilateral relationships and treaty arrangements. The Russian tsar Alexander, who instigated the coalition against France, had once contemplated the diplomatic strategy of marrying his sister Grand-Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna to Napoleon. In 1807, Alexander signed an agreement with Bonaparte allowing Russia to occupy Finland in exchange for support for the Continental System. Russia’s gain was Sweden’s loss, but the Swedish court too had its own history of courting Napoleon and fighting Russia, before eventually joining Russia in the coalition against France. By a curious twist of fate, the Swedish “Prince Royal” was in fact a French man, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, formerly Napoleon’s Army Marshal and married to Desirée Clary, Bonaparte’s own ex-fiancée.² Having established himself in Sweden as a rival of sorts to Napoleon, Bernadotte began to distance himself from French policy aims. In 1812, he committed Sweden to joining Russia in the formation of the “Sixth Coalition.”

Since 1792, over a period of twenty years, there were five attempts to create multilateral European coalitions against French political and economic expansionism. Each failure, and the retribution that followed, became a reason for not taking up arms next time. In the circumstances, not only was the Sixth Coalition’s success not inevitable, its timing and its makeup were constantly in contention. The Sixth Coalition’s eventual success can be attributed to both existing forms of diplomacy and their adaptation. It is a history that begins when Bonaparte fatefully decides to lead a pan-European army of conscripted soldiers eastward against Russia, dramatically raising the stakes of French continental dominance—this is the historical event famously narrated in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As the fate of Europe hangs in the balance of French ambition and Russian reaction, Tsar Alexander decides to seek out allies. He sets in train a military campaign that will eventually lead to the transformation of European politics and a new international order. For the coalition, diplomacy’s delicate task is the coordination of cooperation between themselves. This multilateral purposing has a relatively recent history, rooted in the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment cultivation of democracy as “the peaceful and continuous management of relations between states,” bringing states ever closer together.³ Even so, the diplomatic practices that might foster such coordination vary significantly from the norms that mark the modern era of international politics, still to come.

FIGURE 2. An Ambassador’s Audience with the Grand Vizier in his Yali on the Bosporus (Ambassador Cornelis Calkoen, 12 August 1727), eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 92.5 × 129.5 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

The European continent dominated by Napoleon’s France was a mix of the old and the new, as we might expect. When it came to political forms, republics existed alongside constitutional monarchies; tiny principalities were lodged between large absolutist empires. Concepts as foundational to the modern political era as the nation and state were in their mutually dependent relative infancy—as was the idea of politics, regardless of whether politics done within or across sovereign borders. As a result, many of the characteristics of diplomatic arrangements and diplomatic actors are unfamiliar to the modern eye. Not least, the ancien template of diplomacy acknowledged the agency of some women, particularly salonnières and ambassadrices. It also oriented the world of diplomacy in distinctive ways.

The modernization of diplomacy is the story of who could legitimately engage in diplomacy and this new idea of politics in the sense of not only men and women but also Europeans and non-Europeans. Since trade, colonial, and consular relations connected Europe’s courts and governments and populations with the world, the institutional and practical changes in the ways in which politics between states was conceived and conducted resonated beyond the continent’s physical borders. By the war’s end, the decisions taken among a small cohort of European men, representing an even smaller set of imperial courts, presumed to establish the rules and imperatives of a modern diplomacy and political engagement for Europe and the world engaged by Europeans. The limits, extent, and significance of the transformation of European politics—including how this transformation adds up to the invention of an “international order”—make more sense if we have a map of the existing landscape of diplomacy.

A European Diplomacy?

An early modern historian or international scholar might insist that the most important innovation in the invention of an international order occurred when the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia laid the foundation of the European international system. At that time, at the end of decades of wars of religion that cost eight million lives, a handful of European monarchs met in the Westphalian towns of Osnabrück and Münster and agreed to the terms of a peace that would mutually recognize territorial sovereignty. This was the moment that conjured the concept of “Westphalian sovereignty.” In the modern era “Westphalia” has become the byword for the idea of the bounded sovereign state and the regulation of its legitimacy. Less noticed is that this same period saw innovations introduced in diplomatic practices. For the first time, diplomats sent to foreign courts actually took up residence in those foreign countries. The word “plenipotentiary” was newly introduced to describe diplomats who exercised full authority on behalf of monarchs and governments.⁴ That said, in these European settings, diplomacy was still accorded a more literal meaning, as the study of documents or diplomas. It was only at the turn of the eighteenth century that diplomacy began to be conceived more broadly as the work of facilitating commerce and trade across borders or negotiating for peace before, during, and after wars. This emphasis on negotiation of the politics between states was given substantial form in diplomatic manuals and handbooks such as François de Callières’s De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (1716).⁵

Was there a European diplomacy? Even in closely connected Enlightenment Europe, diplomatic practices and expectations varied as widely as did the political forms of European sovereignties.⁶ At the turn of the nineteenth century, men still resolved their personal disputes by dueling, ambassadors in Europe were neither professionally trained nor paid, and the official protocols of diplomatic reception and legitimation were limited—even more incentive for the publication of unofficial handbooks! Since plenipotentiaries were expected to bring a title and a private income to the position, they tended to belong to the ranks of the aristocracy.⁷ Once ensconced in an embassy post, a plenipotentiary might linger for up to thirty years, often with very little oversight from the governments he represented. Diplomacy focused on European courts and the politics of courtly life, to the extent that diplomatic postings were commonly identified with a royal court rather than a country: for example, the “Court of St. James’s” was the relevant site of diplomacy, not England, nor Britain. Similarly, national identity was a weak political concept in comparison with the political force of dynastic relationships. Characteristically, in the eighteenth century, not every government presumed that its diplomats or even foreign ministers were subjects or citizens, or even that they spoke its local language.

The overall picture of early nineteenth-century diplomacy exhibits the predominantly ancien characteristics of a “cosmopolitan brotherhood.”⁸ Cosmopolitan in this context describes the ancien world of aristocratic rule and dynastic networks, a transnational elite. Russian diplomats and foreign ministers were cosmopolitan aristocrats in the sense that they were not Russians, men born into diplomacy rather than Russian-ness. In the early nineteenth century, the tsar’s foreign ministers included Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, Corsican Catholic Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, and Corfu-born Greek Orthodox Ioannes Kapodistrias.⁹ Count Charles de Nesselrode was born at sea near Lisbon, Portugal, to a Baltic German Protestant family. His diplomatic career in service to the tsar followed in the footsteps of his father, a count of the Holy Roman Empire who had been Russian ambassador to Portugal and then Prussia. Father and son were multilingual and Protestant without hindrance to their careers representing a Christian Orthodox empire. Nesselrode began as a diplomat for Russia, became Russian state secretary in 1814, and then foreign minister in 1816; he reappeared as Russian chancellor as late as the 1840s, at a crucial period in a new phase of European relations.

Of all Tsar Alexander’s key foreign policy advisors, only Count Andrej Razumovsky was Russian by birth. Razumovsky could not write in Russian, was married to a German woman, and converted from the Russian Orthodox Church to Catholicism. In a period when many Russian-born aristocrats were equally limited in their capacity to speak, read, or write Russian, French would do. Tolstoy’s War and Peace captures how the “officers and officials who were fighting with the French speak French with their wives and daughters, Russian to their subordinates, and mix the languages when talking to their peers.”¹⁰ Even the Russian tsar fit this cosmopolitan model to some extent. This absolutist monarch’s mother and his wife were German princesses from the Holy Roman Empire; although Alexander was head of the Russian Orthodox Church, his tutor was a Protestant Swiss, French-speaking republican, Fréderic La Harpe. Like some of his forebears, Alexander was a Francophile and admirer of the Enlightenment. In this respect, too, Alexander mirrored the education of diplomats in this period. Reliant on French as a universal language, their correspondence is evidence that they read more popular authors in a variety of languages, including French Germaine de Staël, British Walter Scott, and German Goethe.¹¹

Tsar Alexander was also exceptional in that during the campaign, he regularly assumed a prominent role in diplomatic negotiations, whether they took place in military encampments or the private residences of modest European towns. Not all diplomats were at ease with this “tsar-diplomat,” not least for the embarrassment caused at finding themselves negotiating with an emperor rather than with his plenipotentiaries.¹² The tsar’s equivalent in this respect was Bonaparte himself, who, despite having able statesmen such as the prince Charles-Périgord Talleyrand at the ministerial helm, kept a tight rein on foreign policy. Prussia’s Frederick William III had at one time tried to make diplomatic negotiation his own domain, but in 1807, when Bonaparte humiliated Prussia in the negotiations at Tilsit, it was decided diplomatic work should be left to the actual Prussian foreign minister. At this crucial period, Prussia appointed Count Karl August von Hardenberg, born in Hanover, a British-linked, German-speaking, Holy Roman Empire principality-cum-electorate.

During the Napoleonic wars, Hanover aristocrats could be found in the more bureaucratized British diplomatic service, men such a...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Diplomacy
• Chapter 2. War and Peace
• Chapter 3. Politics
• Chapter 4. Public and Private
• Chapter 5. Europe
• Chapter 6. Multilateralism
• Chapter 7. Liberties
• Chapter 8. Science
• Chapter 9. Society
• Chapter 10. Credit and Commerce
• Chapter 11. Religion
• Chapter 12. Christianity
• Chapter 13. International Finance
• Chapter 14. Humanity
• Chapter 15. Realpolitik
• Chapter 16. History
• Epilogue: Paradoxes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index