![]() ![]() The “crisis in Spain,” Jarrett notes, served to drive the wartime allies apart (p. ![]() As a result, the reaction of the allies to the 1820 Spanish Revolution laid bare the divergence of opinion among the wartime allies regarding the purpose of the Congress system. ![]() In response, Tsar Alexander I, and his archconservative interlocutor Prince Klemens von Metternich, came to see the preservation of the existing social hierarchy as the raison d’être of the emerging Congress System, and the only cure for the revolutionary contagion spreading across the face of Europe. Tumult cast a foreboding shadow upon post-Napoleonic Europe, witnessing unrest in Germany, Britain, and France, as well as revolution in Latin America, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Piedmont, Greece, and Romania. In the years after Vienna, Jarrett acknowledges that the principal goal of European diplomats shifted from orderly compromise to combating the threat of social revolution. Building upon the older work of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, for instance, Immanuel Kant wrote a celebrated 1784 essay entitled On Perpetual Peace that argued that given the growing incidence of destructive wars, states should enter into constitutions or contracts to form larger “federation(s) of peoples” (p. Discussions of creating mechanisms to maintain European peace and stability, Jarrett counters, were “scarcely new” (p. 365).Īccording to Jarrett, this great gathering was only in part a “victor’s summit” akin to previous postwar congresses at Munster, Osnabrück, Nijmegen, Ryswick, and Utrecht. Congress diplomats, Jarrett argues, were on the “verge” of establishing an institutional framework, including periodic conferences and adoption of a set of general principles, “but then pulled back” (p. In September 1814, well-meaning European leaders descended upon Vienna to “develop … an ambitious set of new safeguards and institutions … to cope with international problems” (p. At first glance, there seems an element of truth in Jarrett’s assessment. After decades of revolution and war, the challenge of the postwar period, according to Jarrett, “was to come to terms with these new forces while restoring the rudiments of order and stability lost in the years of revolution and strife” (p. Jarrett questions the traditional notion that Congress diplomats were reactionaries committed to maintaining social order at the expense of emergent nationalism and liberal social progress. “Europe was ready,” Jarrett argues, “to accept an unprecedented degree of international cooperation in response to the French Revolution” (p. In a sweeping reinterpretation, Jarrett argues that the Congress System was “a type of international conflict management,” marking the first genuine attempt to forge an “international order” based upon consensus rather than conflict (p. In The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon, diplomatic historian Mark Jarrett challenges this view, reenvisioning the Congress of Vienna and the emergence of the postwar Congress System as nothing less than the “the true beginning of our modern era” (p. The acerbic British social theorist Harriet Martineau saw the Congress System of the 1820s as a repressive “alliance of kings against people,” and Congress diplomats “as ogres fighting against the tide of history” (pp. The Congress of Vienna and Its Legacy: War and Great Power Diplomacy after Napoleon. ![]()
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