CHAPTER X - THE SYSTEM OF ALLIANCES AND THE BALANCE OF POWER

Summary

The result of the revolutions of 1830 was to divide Europe into two opposing diplomatic combinations and, in most European questions in the years immediately following the risings of 1830, the eastern powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—were to be found ranged against Great Britain and France. This separation, as Palmerston noted in 1836, was ‘not one of words but of things, not the effect of caprice or of will, but produced by the force of circumstances. The three and the two think differently and therefore they act differently.’

The differences were largely matters of political principle and method. The eastern courts were bound together by a common belief in autocratic government and a common fear of a resurgence of the revolutionary principles of 1789 and 1793. They took a completely static view of the organisation of Europe and believed that changes in the political and social structure of the Continent, or of its member states, must be resisted lest the whole edifice fall in ruins. In addition, since they regarded all movements for constitutional reform, or—in the case of subject nationalities—for national self-determination, as ‘revolutionary’, they claimed for themselves the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the smaller states of Europe in order to extirpate these heresies before they spread. The western powers, on the other hand, stood for liberal and constitutional government, rejected the theory of intervention advanced by the reactionary governments of eastern Europe and, whenever it was within their power to do so, encouraged and protected other constitutional regimes.