Abstract
The eighteenth century has often been described as a classic era of limited war. Martin Wight, for instance, comments on the degree of attention devoted to the concept of the balance of power. This was invoked for several purposes, and not simply to justify new alignments against over-mighty states. Some welcomed it as a means to promote orderly change and to provide a yardstick against which states could be ranked in relation to each other. In addition the period saw the standardisation of diplomatic practice and a growing interest in international law. Edmund Burke wrote of the existence of a ‘secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse’ which encouraged some degree of restraint among the powers.1 Indeed the scale of the conflicts fought in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, together with their large-scale consequences, led some to look back to what they believed had been a less violent and more rational world for ideas in the creation of a more orderly world.
…in a condition of Warre, wherein every man to every man, for want of a common Power to keep them all in awe, is an Enemy, there is no man can hope by his own strength, or wit, to defend himselfe from destruction, without the help of Confederates: …
(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Cambridge UP edition, 1904, p. 99)
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Notes and References
Alan James (ed.), The Bases of International Order (1973), pp. 26, 97; Trevor Taylor (ed.), Approaches and Theory in International Relations (1978), pp. 40 ff.
Jeremy Black, Eighteenth Century Europe, 1700–89 (1990), pp. 274–9, 303, 321–2, 326; see also his ‘Eighteenth-Century Warfare Reconsidered’, War in History, i, no. 2, 1994, pp. 215–32.
M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (1993), p. 233.
J. M. Sherwig, ‘Lord Grenville’s Plan for a Concert of Europe, 1797–9’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 34, no. 3, Sept. 1962, pp. 284–93.
Janet Mi Hartley, Alexander I (1994), p. 69.
Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England (1970), p. 197.
B. Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (1991), pp. 42–4.
A. J. Rieber, ‘The Historiography of Imperial Russian Foreign Policy’, in H. Ragsdale and V. N. Ponomarev (eds.), Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (1993), pp. 361–3.
J. Hartley, Alexander 7, p. 121; P. Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I (1969), pp. 32–4, 46.
W. H. Zawadski, ‘Russia and the Re-opening of the Polish Question, 1801–1814’, The International History Review, vii, no. 1, February 1985, pp. 19–44.
Cited in C. J. Bartlett, Castlereagh (1966), p. 126.
Franklin F. Ford, Europe 1780–1830 (1970), p. 256.
J. Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 130–3.
Roger Parkinson, Clausewitz (1970), pp. 35, 287–8.
G. A. Craig, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt as Diplomat’, in K. Bourne and D. C. Watt (eds.), Studies in International History (1967), pp. 81–102; Douglas Dakin, ‘The Congress of Vienna, 1814–15’, in Alan Sked (ed.), Europe’s Balance of Power (1979), pp. 26–7.
G. Mann, Secretary of Europe: the life of F. von Gentz (1970), pp. 276–7; Grigore Gafencu, Prelude to the Russian Campaign (1945), p. 16n.
E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (1962), pp. 127–9.
B. Jelavich, St Petersburg and Moscow: tsarist and Soviet foreign policy, 1814–1974 (1974), p. 35.
G. Mann, Gentz, pp. 210 ff.
M. S. Anderson, Modern Diplomacy, p. 179.
G. Mann, Gentz, pp. 209, 215.
Ibid, pp. 224–30, 261,264, 277–8.
Carlsten Holbraad, The Concert of Europe (1970), pp. 2–8.
F. R. Bridge, ‘Allied Diplomacy in Peacetime, 1815–23’, in A. Sked, Europe’s Balance, p. 53.
G. Mann, Gentz, pp. 209, 215.
C. C. F. Greville, The Greville Diaries (1938), i. 127–8.
C. Bartlett, Castlereagh, Chapter 7.
F. Bridge in A. Sked, Europe’s Balance, pp. 35–7; J. Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 139–41.
J. Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 144–5; F. Bridge in A. Sked, Europe’s Balance, pp. 37–8.
Alan W. Palmer, The Chancelleries of Europe (1970), p. 18. J. Hartley, Alexander I, pp. 142–8 argues that the tsar’s interest in disarmament stemmed in part from the need to decrease government spending. Russia’s army was also inflated by the huge area it had to defend. The Congress provided ample evidence of his idealism — some of it touch-ingly naive, and which also included some sympathy for moderate constitutions outside Russia.
C. J. Bartlett, ‘Britain and the European Balance’, in A. Sked, Europe’s Balance, pp. 202, 211,216.
See F. Bridge, in Ibid, pp. 41–6.
Ibid, pp. 48–52.
F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (1963), p. 197.
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© 1996 C. J. Bartlett
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Bartlett, C.J. (1996). The ‘Congress System’. In: Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814–1914. European History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24958-9_1
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