5 - From the Balance of Power to a Balance of Diplomacy?

Summary

The European peace and security system established in the course of the Congress of Vienna is presented here as a more complex arrangement than conveyed in the traditional political model of the balance of power. The statesmen and diplomats who drafted the settlements of 1814-1815 genuinely and succesfully sought to ban war and to establish a lasting peace after the long and bloody wars against Napoleon, a peace which endured until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. Instead of a balance of power based on mutual military deterrence, they arrived at a balance of negotiation, a compromise based on active cooperation. As such, the order of Vienna, though imperfect, was a definite refinement compared to the traditional paradigm of the balance of power inherited from the Treaty of Utrecht. It created a Concert of Europe, which even beyond its impact throughout the nineteenth century still frames a European political ethos up to this day.