Criticism of Vienna Settlement ( CSS British History )

Criticism of Vienna Settlement ( CSS British History )

The view of Prof. Fyffe is that “Standing on the boundary line between two ages, the legislation of Vienna forms a landmark in history.” It cannot be denied that the Vienna Settlement of 1815 was not so bad as the Paris settlement of 1919-20.

On account of the influence of Castlereagh, the settlement of 1815 was not one of revenue. He rightly told the statesmen present at Vienna that they had assembled not to distribute the trophies of war but to make such a settlement as would give peace to the people of Europe.

The principle of compromise was applied wherever possible and consequently there was no thrashing or flogging of France. In 1919, Germany was held responsible for all the acts of omission and commission of William II and was deprived of her territories, colonies, investments, etc., and was made to pay a huge war indemnity amounting to billions of dollars which was not within her competence to pay.

It cannot be denied that Napoleon was responsible for acts of wanton aggression and had disturbed Europe in a very bad way, but France was not held guilty for all his misdeeds. Even when Napoleon was defeated for the second time in 1815 at Waterloo, a very mild treaty was imposed on France. Her frontiers were restricted to those of 1791 and not even those of 1789 when the French Revolution actually started.

France was required to restore her treasures of arts which Napoleon had plundered from other countries. She was merely asked to pay a war-indemnity of 700,000,000 francs. The period of Allied occupation was cut short in 1818 when France paid off the war indemnity. The result of this kind treatment to France was that there was no general conflagration in Europe for 99 years (1815-1914).

Seaman says, “Nevertheless the Vienna Settlement must not be regarded as having of itself prevented European war for a century. It is possible to say instead that it contained in none of its provisions the seeds of a future war between the great powers, and must thus be rated a better peace than either Utrecht or Versailles. Utrecht rankled in the hearts of the Hapsburgs, and its colonial and commercial clauses were an encouragement to the British to embark in due course on new wars against France and Spain.

Versailles humiliated, or appeared to humiliate the Germans; created new democratic States whose democracy had no roots and whose independent sovereignty was illusory; abolished old minority problems only to create new ones; disappointed the Italians and inflated the French; and by appealing to the irrational forces of the mass mind bred a chaos contrasting tragically with the orderliness that Vienna achieved by ignoring the masses altogether. For the disregard of Liberalism and Nationalism at Vienna (in so far as they were disregarded) did not cause war.

They were right in thinking in 1815 that before revolutions can make wars there must first be the wars that encourage the revolutions. They saw that the issues of peace and war are decided by the great powers and by them alone. Hence, the simple fact that the Vienna Settlement contained no clause that offered any of the great powers a pretext for war is its complete and sufficient justification.”

About the Congress of Vienna, Gentz, its Secretary, wrote, “The fine phrases about the ‘reconstruction of the social order’, ‘the regeneration of the political system of Europe”, and an enduring peace founded on ‘a just redistribution of forces’, etc., were intended only to tranquilize the people and give to the solemn reunion an air of dignity and grandeur; the real object of the Congress was to divide among the conquerors the spoils of the conquered.” However, Ketelbey does not agree with this view.

According to him, it was inevitable that the victorious powers should seek to protect their own interests, but their treatment of the defeated enemy was marked by reasonableness and even generosity. It is true that the victorious powers got their profit, but not so much at the cost of France but as that of other countries such as Poland. It is true that the victorious powers talked of the “rights, freedom, and independence of all nations”, they did not mean to draw political frontiers round every group of articulate nationalists.

They were determined to prevent another European war and provide safeguards against the same. They had seen the destruction caused even by the people’s war and hence, they repudiated the influence and example of revolutionary French democracy in the same way as the United Nations repudiated German Nazism or Italian Fascism after the World War 11. It must not be forgotten that the victorious powers had already made peace with France before the Congress of Vienna and they had allowed the representatives of France to go to Vienna on equal terms.

What the Congress embodied in its Final Act had already been agreed upon among the powers. The fates of Finland, Norway and Belgium and the states bordering France had already been settled. The major work left to the Congress was to settle the political pattern of the German, Swiss and Italian states and the Polish-Saxon question.

The Congress of Vienna restored wherever restoration was possible. It tried to protect Europe against a revival of French imperialism. It provided a guarantee order and initiated a policy for settling future disputes. It built broadly on the principle of a balanced European society of five major powers.

The result was that there was no major war for about forty years. Russia gained immensely out of the arrangements made at the Congress of Vienna and it started taking an active part in the affairs of Western Europe and continued to do so till her defeat in the Crimean War.

The victors of 1815 acknowledged the disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire, the withdrawal of Sweden into a comparative Scandinavian isolation and the abandonment of her trans-Baltic ambitions. The number of the states in Germany was reduced and that helped the cause of German unification.

The newly strengthened kingdoms of Russia and Sardinia were to help the unification of Germany and Italy. It is true that the Congress of Vienna failed to satisfy the aspirations of Poland and it ignored the population of Belgium and yoked Norway to Denmark, but it showed both moderation and political wisdom. It provided a real foundation on which later Europe was to build and it preserved international stability for forty years.

(1) However, it cannot be maintained that the Vienna Settlement was an ideal one and many drawbacks of it can be pointed out. According to Prof Hayes, “In all these territorial readjustments, there was little that was permanent and much that was temporary.

The union of Holland and Belgium lasted but 15 years. The Italian and German settlement survived but 50 years and the Polish barely a century.” Napoleon had annexed Holland in 1811 on account of the refusal of Louis to enforce strictly the Continental System.

However, there was no justification to group Belgium with Holland. Holland was democratic, Protestant and Teutonic. Belgium was conservative, Catholic and the majority of her people spoke the French language. The people of Belgium did not like the headship of Holland and no wonder they revolted in 1830 and won their independence.

It may be noted that England was responsible for, this unnatural union. Her fear was that without Holland, Belgium alone would not be able to resist French pressure and consequently it was necessary to unite her with Holland so that France might not be able to gobble up Belgium in one mouthful.

The union of Russia and Finland was dissolved in 1917 and that of Sweden and Norway in 1905. The German Confederation with all its paraphernalia was destroyed by Bismarck. The settlement of Italy was completely upset by Cavour.

(2) Another defect of the settlement was that it ignored altogether the nationalist movement that had stirred the Poles, the Spaniards, the Italians, and the Germans. The Polish nationalist leader Czartorysky attached himself to Czar Alexander I with a view to securing independence for his country but he failed in his efforts. Poland was put under the control of Russia and it was to be ruled as a separate territory.

The Poles had to exert themselves throughout the 19th century to achieve their independence and suffered terribly while doing so. They were crushed under the tyrannical regime of Russia. Likewise, the dream of Stein to create a unified German State was not realised. A loose German confederation was created. Austria is blamed for not giving out many, unity and constitutional government.

However, it is pointed out that even one hegemony of Britain was considered undesirable. The Congress of Vienna did not overlook Germanic constitutionalism, but the trouble arose on account of the reactionary policies followed afterwards by Metternich in Germany. As regards Italy, it was pointed out that a timely devolution of government from Vienna might have given Italy good government by Italians.

The Vienna Congress had no authority to force Austria to give Italy Home Rule. The Congress united the kingdom of Savoy and Piedmont with republics of Genoa and Nice. The union appeared to be temporary and there was a lot of bitterness in Genoa and Nice.

In spite of this, the union of these small Italian States led indirectly to the unification of Italy. Mazzini, the apostle of Italian liberation, was a native of Genoa. Garibaldi, the sword-arm of Italy, was born in Nice. It was from Genoa that the famous “Thousand” Red Shirts sailed in 1860 under the leadership of Garibaldi to liberate Sicily. In 1859, Cavour bought the help of Napoleon III to turn out the Austrians from Venetia and Lombardy by giving him Nice and Savoy.

(3) The hopes of the liberals were frustrated. Rulers who were restored by the Vienna Settlement set up reactionary regimes in their countries and there was repression everywhere. This was particularly so in Spain and Naples where the Bourbons were restored. Metternich himself tried to police Europe.

Wherever liberalism raised its head, it was crushed. Liberal ideas were regarded as daggers. The Protocol of Troppau helped the European States to interfere in the internal affairs of other States. Metternich’s own view was that “what the European people want is not liberty but peace.”

(4) According to Prof Hayes, the Vienna Settlement was defective in so far as the people were regarded as so many pawns in the game of dynastic aggrandizement.

(5) According to Cruttwell, “It was mean and hypocritical not to extend the doctrine of legitimacy of Republics. Both Venice and Genoa had a longer and more glorious life of independence than many monarchs, but both were extinguished without a murmur in the supposed interests of securing North Italy against France.”

(6) According to Grant and Temperley, “It has been customary to denounce the peace-makers of Vienna as reactionary and illiberal in the extreme. It is indeed true that they represented the old regime and were, to a large extent, untouched by the new ideas. But they represented the best and not the worst of the old regime, and their settlement averted any major war in Europe for forty years. According to their lights the settlement was a fair one.

France was treated with leniency, and the adjustments of the Balance of Power and territory were carried out with the scrupulous nicety of a grocer weighing out his wares, or of a banker balancing his accounts. Russia alone gained more than her fair share, and this was because she had an undue proportion of armed forces.

The settlement disregarded national claims, forced unnatural unions on Norway and Sweden, and Belgium and Holland. But in each case the ally and the stronger partner (Sweden and Holland) demanded it, and the Allies did not see their way to resist the demand.

A more serious criticism, was the disrespect paid to the views of smaller Powers. Though the settlement was supposed to be in favour of the older and existing rights, the smaller States were ruthlessly sacrificed for the benefit of the larger. For this side of the activities of the peace-makers there is little excuse, and it is the gravest criticism of their actions.”

(7) Critics point out that the Congress of Vienna did not provide a satisfactory solution of the Eastern question. However, it was impossible for the Vienna Congress to tackle that question successfully. That question was not solved in spite of the efforts made by the European statesmen throughout the 19th century. “The sick man of Europe” was a great puzzle. All the European Powers wanted to have Constantinople and it was impossible to arrive at any settlement. Moreover, Russian treaties with Turkey, particularly that of Bucharest of 1812, added to the difficulties of the problem.

According to Hazen, “The Congress of Vienna was a Congress of aristocrats, to whom the ideas of nationality and democracy as proclaimed by the French Revolution were incomprehensible or loathsome. The rulers rearranged Europe according to their desires, disposing of it as if it were their own personal property, ignoring the sentiment of nationality, which had lately been so wonderfully aroused, indifferent to the wishes of the people.

There could be no ‘sentiment’ because they ignored the factors that alone would make the settlement permanent. The history of Europe after 1815 was destined to witness repeated, and often successful, attempts to rectify this cardinal error of the Congress of Vienna.”

According to H.A. Kissinger, “The statesmen at Vienna were not interested in transforming humanity, because in their eyes this effort had led to the tragedy of a quarter-century of struggle. To transform humanity by an act of will, to transcend French nationalism in the name of that of Germany, would have seemed to them to make peace by revolution, to seek stability in the unknown, to admit that a myth once shattered cannot be regained. The issue at Vienna, then, was not reform against reaction—that is the interpretation of posterity. Instead, the problem was to create an order in which change could be brought about through a sense of obligation, instead of through an assertion of power.”

Again, “Whatever one may think of the moral content of their solution, it excluded no major power from the European continent and therefore testified to the absence of unbridgeable schisms. The settlement did not rest on mere good faith, which would have put too great a strain on self-limitation; nor on the efficacy of a pure evolution of power, which would have made calculation too indeterminate. Rather, there was created a structure in which the forces were sufficiently balanced, so that self-restraint could appear as something more than self-abnegation, but which took account of the historical claims of its components, so that its existence could be translated into acceptance.

There existed within, the new international order no power so dissatisfied that it did not prefer to seek its remedy without the framework of the Vienna Settlement rather than in overturning it. Since the political order did not contain a ‘Revolutionary’ power, its relations became increasingly spontaneous, based on the growing certainty that a catastrophic upheaval was unlikely.

“That the Vienna Settlement came to be so generally accepted was not a fortunate accident. Throughout the war Castlereagh and Metternich had insisted that theirs was an effort for stability, not revenge, justified, not by crushing the enemy, but by his recognition of limits. If we compare the outline of the Vienna Settlement with the Pitt plan and its legitimization with that of the instructions to Schwarzenberg, we find that luck, in politics as in other activities, is but the residue of design. This is not to say that the settlement revealed a prescience that made all events conform to a certain vision. Castlereagh, in giving up his conviction of the mechanical equilibrium for that of an historical balance, maintained through confidential intercourse among its members, increasingly separated himself from the spirit of his own country. Metternich, by attempting to maintain predominance in both Italy and Germany, was forced into a policy beyond his resources. His increasingly inflexible struggle for legitimacy revealed a growing consciousness of the insufficiency of Austria’s material base for the European task he had set for her. If a policy for pure power is suicidal for an Empire located in the centre of a continent, reliance on unsupported legitimacy is demoralizing and leads to stagnation. Finesse can substitute for strength when the goals are determinate, but it is no substitute for conception when the challenges have become internal. And Prussia, with misgivings and hesitations, with a feeling of national humiliation and grudging surrender, was forced into a German mission in spite of itself. Extending now from the Vistuala to the Rhine, it symbolized the quest for German unity. Scattered in enclaves across Central Europe, its need for security, if not its conception of a national mission, forced it into becoming, albeit reluctantly, the agent of a German policy. Situated athwart the major waterways and land routes, Prussia came to dominate Germany economically before it unified it physically. The defeat in Saxony, so bitterly resented, became the instrument of Prussia’s final victory over Austria”.