In pursuit of this ideology, all monarchies were by definition treated as enemies; because they would not give up power without resisting, the Revolution, to prevail, had to turn itself into a crusading international movement to achieve world peace by imposing its principles. The Revolution based itself on a proposition similar to that made by Islam a millennium before, and Communism in the twentieth century: the impossibility of permanent coexistence between countries of different religious or political conceptions of truth, and the transformation of international affairs into a global contest of ideologies to be fought by any available means and by mobilizing all elements of society.
The concept of an international order with prescribed limits of state action was overthrown in favor of a permanent revolution that knew only total victory or defeat. In November , the French National Assembly threw down the gauntlet to Europe with a pair of extraordinary decrees. It also declared war on Austria and invaded the Netherlands. In December , an even more radical decree was issued with an even more universal application.
To achieve such vast and universal objectives, the leaders of the French Revolution strove to cleanse their country of all possibility of domestic opposition. Two centuries later, comparable motivations underlay the Russian purges of the s and the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the s and s.
Eventually, order was restored, as it must be if a state is not to disintegrate. The essence of the Great Man was his refusal to acknowledge traditional limits and his insistence on reordering the world by his own authority. The Revolution no longer made the leader; the leader defined the Revolution. As he tamed the Revolution, Napoleon also made himself its guarantor. But he also saw himself—and not without reason—as the capstone of the Enlightenment.
He created the Napoleonic Code, on which the laws that still prevail in France and other European countries are based. He was tolerant of religious diversity and encouraged rationalism in government, with the end of improving the lot of the French people.
It was as the simultaneous incarnation of the Revolution and expression of the Enlightenment that Napoleon set about to achieve the domination and unification of Europe.
By , under his brilliant military leadership, his armies crushed all opposition in Western and Central Europe, enabling him to redraw the map of the Continent as a geopolitical design. He annexed key territories to France and established satellite republics in others, many of them governed by relatives or French marshals.
A uniform legal code was established throughout Europe. Thousands of instructions on matters economic and social were issued. Would Napoleon become the unifier of a continent divided since the fall of Rome? Two obstacles remained: England and Russia. As it would a century and a half later, England stood alone in Western Europe, aware that a peace with the conqueror would make it possible for a single power to organize the resources of the entire Continent and, sooner or later, overcome its rule of the oceans.
England waited behind the channel for Napoleon and a century and a half later, for Hitler to make a mistake that would enable it to reappear on the Continent militarily as a defender of the balance of power. Napoleon had grown up under the eighteenth-century dynastic system and, in a strange way, accepted its legitimacy. In it, as a Corsican of minor standing even in his hometown, he was illegitimate by definition, which meant that, at least in his own mind, the legitimacy of his rule depended on the permanence—and, indeed, the extent —of his conquests.
Whenever there remained a ruler independent of his will, Napoleon felt obliged to pursue him. Napoleon could not live in an international order; his ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for that his power fell just barely too short. Not until Napoleon succumbed to the temptation to enter territories where local resources were insufficient for the support of a huge army—Spain and Russia—would he face defeat, first by overreaching himself, above all in Russia in , and then as the rest of Europe united against him in a belated vindication of Westphalian principles.
The defeat in Russia was by attrition. After the Battle of the Nations, Napoleon refused settlements that would have enabled him to keep some of his conquests. He feared that any formal acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. The Napoleonic period marked the apotheosis of the Enlightenment. Inspired by the examples of Greece and Rome, its thinkers had equated enlightenment with the power of reason, which implied a diffusion of authority from the Church to secular elites.
Now these aspirations had been distilled further and concentrated on one leader as the expression of global power. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it. Its strength raised fundamental issues for the balance of power in Europe, and its aspirations threatened to make impossible a return to the prerevolutionary equilibrium.
The liberties of Europe and its concomitant system of order required the participation of an empire far larger than the rest of Europe together and autocratic to a degree without precedent in European history. Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully.
It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun. Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a beach.
From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent. Everything about Russia—its absolutism, its size, its globe-spanning ambitions and insecurities—stood as an implicit challenge to the traditional European concept of international order built on equilibrium and restraint. With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears.
The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty — and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era.
Europe was coming to embrace its multipolarity as a mechanism tending toward balance, but Russia was learning its sense of geopolitics from the hard school of the steppe, where an array of nomadic hordes contended for resources on an open terrain with few fixed borders. There raids for plunder and the enslavement of foreign civilians were regular occurrences, for some a way of life; independence was coterminous with the territory a people could physically defend.
Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.
In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources.
Thus the American man of letters Henry Adams recorded the outlook of the Russian ambassador in Washington in by which point Russia had reached Korea : His political philosophy, like that of all Russians, seemed fixed on the single idea that Russia must roll —must, by her irresistible inertia, crush whatever stood in her way … When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, or wished to convert, into any Western equivalent.
With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements.
It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states on average, , square kilometers annually from to When it was strong, Russia conducted itself with the domineering certainty of a superior power and insisted on formal shows of deference to its status. When it was weak, it masked its vulnerability through brooding invocations of vast inner reserves of strength.
In either case, it was a special challenge for Western capitals used to dealing with a somewhat more genteel style. Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security. In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold.
A common Christian faith and a shared elite language French underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had been born in into a still essentially medieval Russia. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested modern techniques and professional disciplines personally.
Yet the suddenness of the transformation left Russia with the insecurities of a parvenu. This is clearly demonstrated by the following Observations. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them, however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking.
According to recent polls, Stalin too has acquired some of this recognition in contemporary Russian thinking.
It is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places. Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but would even have proved its entire Ruin. Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance. The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse.
Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. He favors the good and punishes the bad … [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity. Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit.
Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians! By the time the Congress of Vienna took place, Russia was arguably the most powerful country on the Continent. Its Czar Alexander, representing Russia personally at the Vienna peace conference, was unquestionably its most absolute ruler. A man of deep, if changing, convictions, he had recently renewed his religious faith with a course of intensive Bible readings and spiritual consultations.
For on behalf of its new vision of legitimacy, Russia brought a surfeit of power. Czar Alexander ended the Napoleonic Wars by marching to Paris at the head of his armies, and in celebration of victory he oversaw an unprecedented review of , Russian troops on the plains outside the French capital—a demonstration that could not fail to disquiet even allied nations.
In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned.
Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals.
He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events. The vanquished enemy would become an ally in the preservation of the European order in an alliance originally designed to contain it—a precedent followed at the end of World War II, when Germany was admitted to the Atlantic Alliance.
It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war. After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war.
The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes. But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I.
The statesmen who assembled in Vienna in were in a radically different situation from their predecessors who drafted the Peace of Westphalia. The application of Westphalian principles was then expected to produce a balance of power to prevent, or at least mitigate, conflict. Over the course of the next nearly century and a half, this system had managed to constrain challengers to the equilibrium through the more or less spontaneous alignment of countervailing coalitions.
The negotiators at the Congress of Vienna faced the wreckage of this order. The balance of power had not been able to arrest the military momentum of the Revolution or of Napoleon. A new balance of power had to be constructed from the wreckage of the state system and of the Holy Roman Empire—whose remnants Napoleon had dissolved in , bringing to a close a thousand years of institutional continuity—and amidst new currents of nationalism unleashed by the occupation of most of the Continent by French armies.
That balance had to be capable of preventing a recurrence of the French expansionism that had produced near hegemony for France in Europe, even as the advent of Russia had brought a similar danger from the east.
Hence the Central European balance also had to be reconstructed. These were large and polyglot roughly present-day Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Poland , and now of uncertain political cohesion. Several of the smaller German states whose opportunism had provided a certain elasticity to the diplomacy of the Westphalian system in the eighteenth century had been obliterated by the Napoleonic conquests. Their territory had to be redistributed in a manner compatible with a refound equilibrium.
The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real- time contact with their capitals. They receive minutely detailed instructions down to the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin so at least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance , three weeks for a message to reach Paris; London took a little longer.
Instructions therefore had to be drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the diplomats were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own.
And because one could never foresee which particular piece would be missing in any given instance, he was totally unpredictable. But they did not have congruent perceptions of what this would mean in practice. Their task was to achieve some reconciliation of perspectives shaped by substantially different historical experiences. Britain, safe from invasion behind the English Channel and with unique domestic institutions essentially impervious to developments on the Continent, defined order in terms of threats of hegemony on the Continent.
But the continental countries had a lower threshold for threats; their security could be impaired by territorial adjustments short of continental hegemony. Above all, unlike Britain, they felt vulnerable to domestic transformations in neighboring countries.
The Congress of Vienna found it relatively easy to agree on a definition of the overall balance. Already during the war—in —then British Prime Minister William Pitt had put forward a plan to rectify what he considered the weaknesses of the Westphalian settlement. The Westphalian treaties had kept Central Europe divided as a way to enhance French influence.
The obvious candidate to absorb these abolished principalities was Prussia, which originally preferred to annex contiguous Saxony but yielded to the entreaties of Austria and Britain to accept the Rhineland instead. This enlargement of Prussia placed a significant power on the border of France, creating a geostrategic reality that had not existed since the Peace of Westphalia. In that sense Germany has for much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe. The German Confederation was too divided to take offensive action yet cohesive enough to resist foreign invasions into its territory.
This arrangement provided an obstacle to the invasion of Central Europe without constituting a threat to the two major powers on its flanks, Russia to the east and France to the west. To protect the new overall territorial settlement, the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia was formed.
A territorial guarantee—which was what the Quadruple Alliance amounted to—did not have the same significance for each of the signatories. The level of urgency with which threats were perceived varied significantly. Britain, protected by its command of the seas, felt confident in withholding definite commitments to contingencies and preferred waiting until a major threat from Europe took specific shape. The continental countries had a narrower margin of safety, assessing that their survival might be at stake from actions far less dramatic than those causing Britain to take alarm.
This was particularly the case in the face of revolution—that is, when the threat involved the issue of legitimacy. The conservative states sought to build bulwarks against a new wave of revolution; they aimed to include mechanisms for the preservation of legitimate order—by which they meant monarchical rule.
His partners saw in the Holy Alliance—subtly redesigned—a way to curb Russian exuberance. The right of intervention was limited because, as the eventual terms stipulated, it could be exercised only in concert; in this manner, Austria and Prussia retained a veto over the more exalted schemes of the Czar. Three tiers of institutions buttressed the Vienna system: the Quadruple Alliance to defeat challenges to the territorial order; the Holy Alliance to overcome threats to domestic institutions; and a concert of powers institutionalized through periodic diplomatic conferences of the heads of government of the alliances to define their common purposes or to deal with emerging crises.
This concert mechanism functioned like a precursor of the United Nations Security Council. Its conferences acted on a series of crises, attempting to distill a common course: the revolutions in Naples in and in Spain in —23 quelled by the Holy Alliance and France, respectively and the Greek revolution and war of independence of —32 ultimately supported by Britain, France, and Russia.
The Concert of Powers did not guarantee a unanimity of outlook, yet in each case a potentially explosive crisis was resolved without a major-power war.
For most of the eighteenth century, armies had marched across that then-province of the Netherlands, in quest of the domination of Europe. For Britain, whose global strategy was based on control of the oceans, the Scheldt River estuary, at the mouth of which lay the port of Antwerp across the channel from England, needed to be in the hands of a friendly country and under no circumstances of a major European state. The new state agreed not to join military alliances or permit the stationing of foreign troops on its territory.
This pledge in turn was guaranteed by the major powers, which thereby undertook the obligation to resist violations of Belgian neutrality. The internationally guaranteed status lasted for nearly a century; it was the trigger that brought England into World War I, when German troops forced a passage to France through Belgian territory.
The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each. Neither aspect is intended to arrest change; rather, in combination they seek to ensure that it occurs as a matter of evolution, not a raw contest of wills.
If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity. Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established.
That balance was the signal achievement of the Congress of Vienna. The Quadruple Alliance deterred challenges to the territorial balance, and the memory of Napoleon kept France—suffering from revolutionary exhaustion—quiescent.
And Austria, Prussia, and Russia, which on the principles of the balance of power should have been rivals, were in fact pursuing common policies: Austria and Russia in effect postponed their looming geopolitical conflict in the name of their shared fears of domestic upheaval.
The historian Jacques Barzun has described it another way: Underlying the theory was fact: the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map of Europe. In place of the eighteenth century horizontal world of dynasties and cosmopolite upper classes, the West now consisted of vertical unities—nations, not wholly separate but unlike. Linguistic nationalisms made traditional empires—especially the Austro-Hungarian Empire—vulnerable to internal pressure as well as to the resentments of neighbors claiming national links with subjects of the empire.
The competition of the two great German powers in Central Europe for the allegiance of some thirty-five smaller states of the German Confederation was originally held in check by the need to defend Central Europe. Also, tradition generated a certain deference to the country whose ruler had been Holy Roman Emperor for half a millennium.
The Assembly of the German Confederation the combined ambassadors to the confederation of its thirty-seven members met in the Austrian Embassy in Frankfurt, and the Austrian ambassador acted as chairman.
At the same time, Prussia was developing its own claim to eminence. With the passage of decades, the relative subordination of Prussian to Austrian policy became too chafing, and Prussia began to pursue a more confrontational course.
The revolutions of were a Europe-wide conflagration affecting every major city. As a rising middle class sought to force recalcitrant governments to accept liberal reform, the old aristocratic order felt the power of accelerating nationalisms. At first, the uprisings swept all before them, stretching from Poland in the east as far west as Colombia and Brazil an empire that had recently won its independence from Portugal, after serving as the seat of its exile government during the Napoleonic Wars.
The Holy Alliance had been designed to deal precisely with upheavals such as these. For the rest, the old order proved just strong enough to overcome the revolutionary challenge. But it never regained the self-confidence of the previous period. Finally, the Crimean War of —56 broke up the unity of the conservative states —Austria, Prussia, and Russia—which had been one of the two key pillars of the Vienna international order.
This combination had defended the existing institutions in revolutions; it had isolated France, the previous disturber of the peace. Now another Napoleon was probing for opportunities to assert himself in multiple directions. The alignment indeed checked the Russian advance, but at the cost of increasingly brittle diplomacy. The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an Ottoman vassal in the eighteenth century—but over competing French and Russian claims to advance the rights of favored Christian communities in Jerusalem, then within Ottoman jurisdiction.
Now, in an attempt to understand the arc of American diplomatic influence in the Middle East, he returns to the origins of American-led peace efforts and to the man who created the Middle East peace process—Henry Kissinger. Based on newly available documents from American and Israeli archives, extensive interviews with Kissinger, and Indyk's own interactions with some of the main players, the author takes readers inside the negotiations.
Indyk's account is both that of a historian poring over the records of these events, as well as an inside player seeking to glean lessons for Middle East peacemaking. He makes clear that understanding Kissinger's design for Middle East peacemaking is key to comprehending how to—and how not to—make peace.
Henry Kissinger arrived in the U. The consulting firm he founded has advised every U. In this book, Abraham R. Wagner reveals how Kissinger used his knowledge of history and international relations to advocate a realpolitik approach to U. Through seven selected primary source documents, Wagner tracks how Kissinger became an iconic figure in international relations that polarized opinion during to , a critical and controversial period of American history.
Europe uniquely allowed different regions within the whole to rule themselves. Leaders felt this would allow their people to celebrate and balance their own interests.
The fall of the Roman Empire shattered the rules that Roman citizens had always lived by. Romans began to focus on Christianity, which was governed by the government and the church. Charlemagne, Roman emperor in , vowed to defend the church at all cost. The Empire disintegrated under his rule due to several civil wars. The emperor of Rome was elected by princes in unfair elections, and there was a constant struggle for power between the Pope and the emperor, making the concept of order seem completely out of reach.
Charles focused on protecting and exalting the Roman Catholic Church. He was unable to do so when Protestantism swept across the region. By the fifteenth century, European explorers began traveling in search of wealth and fame.
Soon, an increased focus on the individual and reason rather than the Church spread through Europe. Richelieu wanted to use the balance of power to help structure foreign policy. He believed that the divisions withi. Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure.
Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. For this reason, many today on both the right and left dismiss him as a latter-day Machiavelli, ignoring the breadth and complexity of his thought. It analyzes his contentious policies in Vietnam and Chile, guided by a fresh understanding of his definition of Realism, the belief that world politics is based on an inevitable, tragic competition for power.
This inaugurated a new phase not just in US-China relations but in contemporary history. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in World Order may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to politics, history lovers.
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