What’s Worse: A Global Concert of Great Powers or War?

It was called the Concert of Europe—a 19^th century geopolitical arrangement that established a century of global peace and stability, though interrupted by revolutions and small wars, after the cataclysm of the wars of the French Revolution and empire. From 1792 until 1815, the European great powers waged incessant war resulting in casualties that exceeded 3 million combatants and more than a million civilians. It was in fact a world war, which spread to the high seas and to North America (the War of 1812). Representatives of the great powers met in Vienna from September 1814 to June 1815, as the wars were winding down, to restore peace to the continent. Henry Kissinger wrote about it in A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22. The success of the Concert of Europe, though temporary as are all things in international politics, provides insights on the maintenance of peace and stability that we ignore at our peril.

The statesmen at Vienna, and most of those that came after them in the 19^th century, were, Kissinger wrote, conservative realists. Austria’s Klemens von Metternich epitomized their outlook. He called himself a “man of prose and not of poetry,” and remarked that in international affairs “one must act cold-bloodedly based on observation and without hatred or prejudice.” One of his contemporaries said of Metternich: “Not a man of strong passions and of bold measures; not a genius but a great talent; cool, calm, imperturbable and calculator par excellence.” Kissinger describes him as “devious,” “flexible,” “aloof,” who “coldly pursu[ed] the art of statecraft.” Metternich’s diplomatic goal was the “restoration of equilibrium” in Europe so that another Napoleon could not engulf the world in another great war.

Metternich met his match in England’s Viscount Castlereagh, described by Kissinger as “solid, ponderous, pragmatic,” and “icy” and “reserved.” In Castlereagh’s view, Great Britain fought against Napoleon “on the basis of material considerations in which British interests were . . . involved, not because of vague enunciations of principle.” Castlereagh understood, like great British statesmen before and after him, that a continental hegemon was an existential threat to insular Britain and its empire. Trafalgar taught Castlereagh and later British statesmen that, in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words, it was those “far distant, storm-beaten ships” that stood between Napoleon and “the dominion of the world.”