Balance of power and the Concert of Europe

Through the many wars and peace congresses of the 18th century, European diplomacy strove to maintain a balance between five great powers: Britain, France, Austria, Russia, and Prussia. At the century's end, however, the French Revolution, France's efforts to export it, and the attempts of Napoleon I to conquer Europe first unbalanced and then overthrew the continent's state system. After Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna was convened in 1814–15 to set new boundaries, re-create the balance of power, and guard against future French hegemony. It also dealt with international problems internationally, taking up issues such as rivers, the slave trade, and the rules of diplomacy. The Final Act of Vienna of 1815, as amended at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) in 1818, established four classes of heads of diplomatic missions—precedence within each class being determined by the date of presentation of credentials—and a system for signing treaties in French alphabetical order by country name. Thus ended the battles over precedence. Unwritten rules also were established. At Vienna, for example, a distinction was made between great powers and “powers with limited interests.” Only great powers exchanged ambassadors. Until 1893 the United States had no ambassadors; like those of other lesser states, its envoys were only ministers.

More unwritten rules were soon developed. Napoleon's return and second defeat required a new peace treaty with France at Paris in November 1815. On that occasion the four great victors (Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia) formally signed the Quadruple Alliance, which called for periodic meetings of the signatories to consult on common interests, to ensure the “repose and prosperity of the Nations,” and to maintain the peace of Europe. This clause, which created a Concert of Europe, entailed cooperation and restraint as well as a tacit code: the great powers would make all important decisions; internal changes in any member of the Concert had to be sanctioned by the great powers; the great powers were not to challenge each other; and the Concert would decide all disputes. The Concert thus constituted a rudimentary system of international governance by a consortium of great powers.

Initially, meetings of the Concert were attended by rulers, chancellors, and foreign ministers. The first meeting, which was held at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, resulted in the admittance of France to the Concert and the secret renewal of the Quadruple Alliance against it. The meeting also refined diplomatic rules and tackled other international questions. Aix was the first international congress held in peacetime and the first to attract coverage by the press, relations with whom were conducted by the secretary-general of the congress. Thus was born the public relations aspect of diplomacy and the press communiqué.

Thereafter, congresses met in response to crises. Owing to disputes between the powers, after 1822 the meetings ceased, though the Concert of Europe itself continued unobtrusively. Beginning in 1816 an ambassadorial conference was established in Paris to address issues arising from the 1815 treaty with France. Other conferences of ambassadors followed—usually in London, Vienna, or Paris—to address specific international problems and to sanction change when it seemed advisable or unavoidable. Diplomats continued to adjust and amend the European system with conferences, ranging from the meeting held in London in 1830 that endorsed Belgian independence to the meeting in 1912–13, also held in London, to resolve the Balkan Wars. The Concert was stretched and then disregarded altogether between 1854 and 1870, during the Crimean War and the unifications of Italy and Germany. The century during which it existed (1815–1914) was generally peaceful, marred only by short, limited wars; the bloodshed of one of these wars, the second war of Italian independence, inspired the creation in the 1860s of the International Committee for the Relief of the Wounded (later the International Red Cross) as an international nongovernmental agency.

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