Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (58 page)

It is clear that many loose ends remained when the last princes and plenipotentiaries left Vienna in June 1815. One community was left without a state for one hundred years. Tiny Moresnet, centered around a lucrative zinc mine four miles south of Aix-la-Chapelle, was claimed by both Prussia and the Netherlands, and no one had been able to broker a solution. A compromise was reached the following year, whereby the territory was split between the two kingdoms, with a third part, consisting of just over one square mile of land around the mine, declared “Neutral Moresnet,” which would remain in existence until World War I (when it was seized by Germany, and in 1919 granted to Belgium). Other omissions were more serious. Castlereagh would not be the only person regretting that the congress had not established a more satisfactory arrangement between Russia and Turkey over the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the East Mediterranean.

Not long after the congress, many of its decisions had already collapsed. In 1830, only five years after the end of Tsar Alexander’s reign, the Poles revolted, and the Russians squashed the uprising brutally. The Kingdom of Poland, or “Congress Poland,” was fully incorporated into the Russian empire, and it would not gain its independence again until the end of World War I. Also that year, France once again erupted in revolution, removing a Bourbon king from the throne for a third time. In 1831, Belgium broke away from the newfangled Kingdom of the Netherlands, and a young man at the congress, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, became Belgium’s first king. Greece, too, had become a nation-state, and a member of the tsar’s Vienna delegation, Iōannes Antōniou Kapodistrias, was named its first president.

Other decisions of the Vienna Congress would have a more lasting impact. With the exception of the Republic of Kraków, which was conquered by Russia in 1846, borders in eastern Europe remained largely as they were drawn in Vienna for one hundred years. In northern Europe too, the Scandinavian map was set, with a few exceptions, until the twentieth century. Sweden lost the Baltic island of Rügen and its piece of Pomerania in northern Germany, the last vestige of its former empire. “Swedish Pomerania” went to Prussia, which, in a triangular trade, then ceded the Principality of Lauenberg to Denmark, which in turn handed over Norway to Sweden, where it remained until its independence in 1905. Denmark, however, was not forced to surrender its former Norwegian colonies of Iceland, Greenland, and the Faroe Isles—or, for that matter, Holstein, which it had received from the Holy Roman Empire (and later lost, along with Schleswig, to Prussia in the 1860s). Iceland would gain its independence in 1944, Greenland home rule in 1979, and the autonomous Faroe Isles are still aligned with the Danish crown.

In central Europe, Germany was created as a loosely organized confederation of independent states that remained largely intact until 1866. Originally there were thirty-nine members, which gave the confederation more states, in fact, than the rest of Europe combined. The most powerful members were Austria and Prussia, followed by the former Napoleonic kingdoms of Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony. Hanover, which had been elevated to a kingdom in Vienna, also joined, along with several principalities; grand duchies; duchies; the four “free cities” of Lübeck, Frankfurt, Bremen, and Hamburg; and tiny Liechtenstein. Foreign states were designated as nonvoting participants on the basis of their holdings in the confederation: King of England (Hanover), King of Denmark (Holstein), and King of Netherlands (Luxembourg).

The German Confederation undoubtedly had many drawbacks, with no common army, currency, court system, or customs union. It did, however, have greater success internationally. As Henry Kissinger noted, the confederation came the closest to solving the fundamental “German problem” of modern European history; that is, it created a Germany that was neither too weak nor too strong, a Germany that would be neither a temptation for outside powers nor a threat to the security of its neighbors. After 1815, Germany would enjoy a period of relative peace, which was so desperately needed after the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars.

The biggest effect the congress had on central Europe was on Prussia. Even though members of its delegation were dissatisfied because they gained only a fraction of what they felt their country deserved, Prussia was granted valuable territory that laid the basis for its spectacular economic growth in the nineteenth century and its leadership role in the unification of Germany. As a result of the congress, Prussia now commanded the Rhine, in addition to the Oder, the Elbe, and the Vistula; it gained many historic cities like Cologne and Trier, not to mention the Saar, where Europe’s richest coal and iron deposits would soon be discovered. “A better defense has been provided for Germany than has existed at any period of our history,” Castlereagh said. As the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would show, Castlereagh and his fellow peacemakers in Vienna had succeeded on this point even more than they had realized.

Britain had also been successful at strengthening its own position. Many strategic islands, scooped up in the Napoleonic Wars, were retained, including Malta, the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Mauritius, and the Ionian isles. The British Royal Navy now had vital bases in the Mediterranean, south Atlantic, and Indian Ocean, securing the route to India, which would soon be the unrivaled “jewel in the crown” of the British empire. Castlereagh had also built a ring around France, with a stronger Netherlands and Piedmont-Sardinia, and a neutral Switzerland, and had helped create a more powerful Prussia to balance the Continent. Castlereagh’s emphasis on establishing a “just equilibrium” was very much in line with British interests—that is, keeping the Continent locked in a rough balance of power while the Royal Navy was busy elsewhere, creating the largest empire the world had ever seen.

The Congress of Vienna would have many other indirect and unexpected results. In the early 1820s, as several countries in South America revolted from Spanish rule, the Great Powers refused to recognize the new revolutionary governments and threatened to send a military expedition across the Atlantic to restore Spanish authority. This was highly unlikely, though Tsar Alexander seemed eager to intervene, as did some influential factions in Bourbon France. On December 2, 1823, President James Monroe announced that he would view any attempt to interfere in South America as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” This announcement from the young republic was bold, to say the least—Metternich thought it was as revolutionary as the Declaration of Independence.

The United States could not, of course, have made such a challenge to the Great Powers, at this point, without the help of Britain (which had its own commercial designs on the region and wanted to block the ambitions of rival European powers). Still, the “Monroe Doctrine” was a major step in the long process whereby isolationist America would gradually take a more active role in international affairs. Over time, this doctrine would come to define American foreign policy as the union expanded westward to the Pacific and extended its influence in the western hemisphere.

Until Napoleon’s escape, the Congress of Vienna might have been seen as a model for its generous treatment of the vanquished. France was not shunned by the international community or even severely punished for its repeated invasions. Such vindictiveness, Castlereagh had warned, would only lead to more bloodshed and warfare, an insight that was unfortunately forgotten in Paris in the autumn of 1815. The much harsher terms succeeded mainly in isolating France from international affairs, to the detriment of everyone. In 1818, when France paid off the bulk of its indemnity, Allied occupation troops were evacuated and France joined the Quadruple Alliance, which was later renamed the Quintuple Alliance.

But despite all the scandals, controversies, and mistakes of this swirling vanity fair, the Congress of Vienna did achieve some surprising successes. The delegates fixed borders, ranging from the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to the reorganization of Switzerland as a confederation of cantons with a written constitution and a formal guarantee of its “perpetual neutrality.” The papacy regained its territories, the Legations and the Marches, though Avignon was lost forever. Significantly, too, Article LXXIII of the Final Act, concerning Belgium, contained the world’s first complete and unqualified guarantee of religious toleration.

Among many other things, the Vienna Congress was the first international peace conference to discuss humanitarian issues. The leaders affirmed the civil rights of Jews, condemned the slave trade, combated literary piracy, and created many diplomatic procedures that have persisted until the present day. The four grades of representatives—ambassadors and papal legates, ministers plenipotentiary, ministers resident, and
chargés d’affaires
—have their origins with the congress, along with the tradition of determining precedence by rank and length of service, rather than by the prestige of the state. To reduce economic conflict, rivers that crossed national borders were placed under international control and the right of navigation was proclaimed. There was also a massive restoration of stolen art—one of the greatest in history.

Finally, and most important, the congress established peace—a genuine peace that lasted much longer than any of the delegates would have imagined. Indeed, despite the many tensions and hatreds that would long simmer in the age of nationalism and would result in numerous riots, rebellions, and civil wars, it is significant that no conflict would actually explode and drag all the Great Powers to war for a full one hundred years. The next major conflict was the Crimean War, followed by the Italian and German unifications, but none of these flared up on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars or World War I.

But even if the Vienna Congress was not the only factor in this success, it certainly played an indispensable role. Its peacemakers had established a system of collective security, a development rightly heralded by Castlereagh as the “great machine of European safety.” They had also created a forum where leaders came together for periodic meetings to work out their differences—the first time, in fact, that leaders of the world would meet, in a time of peace, for the purpose of maintaining peace. And when the regular meetings ended in 1822, occasional meetings continued, and consultation at a congress would remain the preferred means of conflict resolution for almost a century. The Congress of Vienna would, indeed, foster a spirit of cooperation that, in some ways, has still not been surpassed. No other peace conference in history can claim such success.

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