The Fog of Peace: The Military Dimensions of the Concert of Europe

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The 99 years separating the final defeat of Napoleon from the outbreak of the First World War were by a considerable margin the most peaceful of any comparably long period in European history. Although Europe was by no means free of war, wars were less frequent than at any time since the Middle Ages. They were also less destructive and less deadly to the combatants than the wars of previous centuries. Europeans at the time were inclined to regard both of these trends-toward peace and toward less deadly and destructive combat-as natural. Economic growth, more integrated international markets, and a general increase in cultural interaction brought about by cheaper travel and popular literacy-all these were thought to weigh heavily against war by raising the stakes to the point where even a victory would begin to look like a bad bargain. The same rising tide of social progress was also shifting the political balance within European states in favor of middle-class and working-class groups that were presumed to be less bellicose than the aristocratic elites they were gradually displacing. And while believers in a utopian future free of war were probably no more common then than they are now, many imagined that technological advance and a more professional approach to military operations would make wars themselves more precise and discriminating instruments of policy. These ideas retain considerable saliency to this day. Anyone who has read the National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement will be aware of the degree to which U.S. hopes for peace are rooted in long-term, nonmilitary processes like the expansion of markets and the spread of democracy. In 1914, however, the Great Powers of Europe firmly supported by the most literate and politically informed societies that had yet existed all went to war against their best customers-a disillusioning moment, but also one that invites a less fatalistic appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of the international order the war the Concert of Europe. The Concert was neither a multinational institution like the League of Nations nor a formal alliance like NATO. Although it arose out of the war-time coalition that defeated Napoleon, its members always looked to the Final Act of the Vienna Congress as a kind of charter. The 11th Edition of the Britannica, the last to appear before the outbreak of the First World War, described the Concert as "a vague consensus" and a "habit of acting together" on the part of the Great Powers, which is about right. The name was less a legal definition than a metaphor for a certain relatively harmonious way of thinking and acting internationally. Whether the years of the Concert were "lean" is hard to say. Given that its history spans a century, a strict answer would obviously have to be "sometimes yes, sometimes no." The economic dislocations and enormous national debts accumulated during the Napoleonic Wars were important incentives to keep the peace during the Concert's early decades when military spending was quite low by historical standards. Later on, however, military budgets rose and fell in familiar patterns, going up in response to perceived threats and demands for modernization and falling again when these sorts of pressures eased, usually in the aftermath of wars.