THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (93 page)
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Authors: Philip Bobbitt
The historian Webster in his study of the Congress of Vienna concluded that
[it] cannot be said that [public opinion] affected the decisions of the statesmen to any material degree. The Polish-Saxon question [the most divisive issue among the coalition partners] was settled purely on grounds of expediency; and the populations of Germany were transferred from one monarch to another with scarcely the slightest reference to their wishes.
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This conclusion is overstated as it stands, and in any case it mistakes the role of public opinion in the state-nation for that within the society of state-nations. For the former, it is not the opinion of distant publics but the opinion of the nation which the state-nation represents that is crucial; for the latter, it is the way in which international opinion can be deployed by powers within the executive directorate that proves decisive, and this was even true, as we shall see, with the Polish-Saxon question. Osiander renders a better judgment when he observes instead that “what made [the Congress of Vienna] different… from earlier ones was the self-conscious way that public opinion was monitored by the peacemakers. The serene self-awareness of the Utrecht system was replaced at Vienna by anxious self-consciousness.”
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Obviously modern state-nations, whose governments hold power by virtue of some version of popular consent, are acutely attuned to public opinion. What is interesting, as Osiander notes, is that the
society
of such states should give a crucial role to public opinion in nondomestic affairs, not confining itself to the opinion of persons “back home” but carefully monitoring (and manipulating) the opinion in the various states with whom that society had to deal (as, for example, the opinion of French society regarding the provisions of the Treaty of Paris) and deploying arguments within the executive directorate based on international public opinion. Metternich, who carefully guided the public accounts of the Congress through Gentz, his protégé, wrote that “public opinion is the most powerful of all means; like religion, it penetrates the most hidden recesses, where administrative measures have no influence,” and Gentz himself wrote that
in the whole course of the latest events, the sovereigns of the coalition to destroy the ascendancy of Napoleon have regarded public opinion as one of their main supports, and… far from neglecting this opinion, they have rather laid themselves open to the accusation… to have listened to it too much… The Tsar… attaches the utmost importance to
it; whatever his political or personal ambitions, I am sure that he would rather sacrifice them than to be seen in the eyes of the public as unjust, ungrateful, or a disturber of the general peace…
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Talleyrand argued that this sensitivity was part of the new Age. In a letter to the French king, he wrote:
Formerly, the secular power could derive support from the authority of religion; it can no longer do this, because religious indifference has penetrated all classes and become universal. The sovereign power, therefore, can only rely upon public opinion for support, and to obtain that it must seek to be at one with that opinion.
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Talleyrand was speaking of domestic opinion; Castlereagh extended this reliance to international public opinion. He wrote the tsar, regarding the Polish issue, that “if Your Imperial Majesty should leave public opinion behind you… I should despair of witnessing any just and stable order of things in Europe.”
All these leaders had witnessed the destruction of the public stature of the French autocracy by journalists; each one knew that Napoleon's power, depending as it did on enormous public faith, derived at bottom from his place in the French imagination, a place he carefully nurtured in the bulletins he wrote. If religious tradition had underwritten the ancien régime, linking it with the dynastic past and imbuing it with the prestige of the mystical, then public opinion must underwrite the kind of state that depended on mass endorsement for its power and legitimacy. Perhaps Webster has in mind the form of the nation-state when, finding little sensitivity among the great powers to the national feelings of the publics whose states were being redrawn, he sees instead only expediency in the acts of state-nations.
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The role of public opinion in the nation-state is to assess whether the welfare of the people is being attended to by the State, and it is true that there was little of this at Vienna. But the role of public opinion in the state-nation was to assess the character, fitness, and morality of the State as the apotheosis of, not the servant of, the nation. Thus, for example, one historian of the Congress has concluded that even the allocations of territories were not as important
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in themselves as is often supposed. For Metternich, more than anything, the outcome of the redistribution talks mattered as an indicator of how successful Austria was at asserting herself. Austria was anxious to confirm its role as a principal international player…. [To] lose face in the German Confederation [would have been fatal to Austria's leadership of the new league]. This is not simply a matter of expediency, and it was important, vitally important, to Austria what German and European opinion thought of it.
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Much the same case can be made even with respect to the autocratic tsar. The relation between a parliamentary leader like Castlereagh and the public opinion of his domestic constituency in a state-nation provides elements out of which the relation of a state-nation's leader to other peer leaders is created, and ultimately the relation of that state to other states. That relation too is compounded of prestige, reputation, and the stature that is conferred by being at one with public opinion, and therefore domestic and international public opinion are linked. The tsar wished to gain the respect of the European public in order to play a decisive role in the directorate, a body made up of leaders who themselves, in their domestic constituencies, had to be attentive to public opinion. The Vienna system could only successfully function if it were made sensitive to public opinion: the congresses and the directorate ensured this.
The most significant challenge facing the peacemakers, however, was neither instrumental nor political. This was the challenge posed by the loss of customary legitimacy by the ancien régime. In a previous work
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Calabresi and I have suggested that one way to look at the different cultural institutions that societies use to address social issues is in terms of four paradigmatic allocation methods: economic, political, customary, and blind. These four methods function in part to resolve and in part to hide the conflicts in values that arise from contested allocations of resources and from the difficult choices among values that are thus forced on societies. Lottery (or “blind”) systems share with customary systems the virtue of avoiding any overt consideration of the competing merits of different choices.
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Dynastic legitimacy united these two paradigmatic methods, custom and chance, so that, unless the dynastic succession were unclear, societies did not have to expose the values they would have had to compromise in an open competition of preferences to choose a ruler. The civil wars that so often accompanied succession struggles are a testament to the divisions that are exposed when such a clash of values is brought into the open. Talley rand believed that “the usual and almost inevitable consequence of an uncertain right of succession is to cause domestic or foreign wars and often both simultaneously.”
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Succession by dynastic descent is a blind allocation system, a choice by the society not to actually choose. Like men drawing straws to see who will go on a perilous mission, it leaves the selection to fate. There is much to be said for such systems: juries; the Dalai Lama, whose time of death determines the time of the birth of his successor; and the holders of
entailed wealth are all chosen in this blind way. If this method, however, is stripped of its reliance on divine intervention—the claim that lot systems, by their very randomness, allow God's will to be done without adulteration—then the blind system can appear irrational and the very mindlessness that originally commended the system discredits it.
What perpetuated the system of dynastic succession beyond the era of the kingly states and into the period of territorial states, which was dominated by rationalism, was the union of blind allocation with another archetypal allocative system, custom. Whether or not monarchies—leadership by a lottery among royals—would be perpetuated into the period of state-nations depended upon whether they could call on resources of legitimacy that were sanctified by custom. Talleyrand here too saw absolutely clearly what was at stake:
I speak of the legitimacy of governments in general, whatsoever be their form, and not only of those of kings, because it applies to all governments. A lawful government, be it monarchical or republican, hereditary or elective, aristocratic or democratic, is always one whose existence, form, and mode of action, have been consolidated and consecrated by a long succession of years, and I should say almost, by a secular prescription. The legitimacy of the sovereign power results from the ancient status of possession, just as, for private individuals, does the right of property.
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Denied the union of custom and chance that aided the territorial states, the Congress of Vienna invoked three crucial interlocking norms in order to confer legitimacy upon its undertakings. These norms were the balance of power, the general interest of the society of European states, and the special interests of the prevailing constitutional archetype.
Because the Peace of Utrecht had enshrined the idea of a European equilibrium as the sine qua non of stability for the society of states, statesmen had for a century before Vienna repeatedly invoked this idea. It is open to doubt whether the Great Article of Utrecht in fact envisaged the same sort of distribution of power as was meant by the phrase “balance of power” in Europe a century later: for one thing, the indicia of power themselves had changed, with the sheer size of populations being of much greater importance than heretofore. There are other reasons for doubt: at Utrecht, the equilibrist idea seems to have meant achieving a mathematical, Newtonian “steady state” subject to minor fluctuations, an idea that was usefully augmented by the “barrier” concept used to define French borders.
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At Vienna two new ideas were present that modified the concept: first,
that the balance of power was a dynamic, developmental situation that must be maintained and adjusted by the Concert of Europe (whereas at Utrecht such minor adjustments in territory as reflected the waxing and waning of state power were left to limited wars, waged in an appropriately confined manner); and second, that the maintenance of a balance of power was a matter of collective legitimacy as much as collective security. Maintaining the balance of power would become the chief business of the great power directorate. One member's delegation to Vienna confirmed its government's intention of maintaining “that system of equilibrium which [is] placed henceforth under the protection of the powers of the first order and shielded from all preponderance.”
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The centrality of the balance was evident in the statement of all the chief actors at Vienna. Castlereagh wrote to his prime minister that he regarded his duty “to make the establishment of a just equilibrium in Europe the first object of my attention and to consider the assertion of minor points of interest as subordinate to this great end.”
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Talleyrand, in his final report from the Congress, repeated that its purpose, as recorded in the precursor Treaty of Paris, was “such as to establish in Europe a real and permanent balance of power.”
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The Declaration of Frankfurt, drawn up by Metternich as a statement of allied policy distribution, stated that the “allied powers… want a state of peace that, through a wise distribution of forces, through a just equilibrium, will henceforth preserve their peoples from the numberless calamities that, for twenty years, have burdened Europe.”
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The Congress convened a statistical committee to establish credible estimates of the number of persons in the various territories to be distributed, in order to facilitate a carefully balanced population because such a distribution was thought crucial to the Congress's work. Yet these statesmen were not so naïve as to believe that Europe could be carefully parceled into so many compensating weights. As Talleyrand wrote,
[a]djacent to large territories belonging to a single power, there are territories of similar or of smaller size, divided up among a greater or lesser number of states… Such a situation only admits of a very artificial and precarious equilibrium which can only last for as long as some large states continue to be animated by a spirit of moderation and justice that will preserve it.
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What was required was not simply a careful division of resources, but also the will to maintain their division. That will could be animated by the state-nation's drive for legitimacy in the absence of those customs that had fortified the territorial state. Thus Talleyrand's insight links these two principles and lays the foundation for the ultimate resolution of the new difficulties posed by the post-Vienna world. By allocating the duty to
maintain the equilibrium to the directorate of great powers, the new constitution for the society of European states would both legitimate their role and protect the peace from their disturbance of it.
