The Legacy of the Wars for the International System

Abstract

In 1819, the disgruntled French archbishop Dominique de Pradt, who went into early retirement to continue a prolific career as expert and commentator on the affairs of the world, summarised the post-Napoleonic state of affairs in international relations as follows: ‘Two colossal powers have risen upon Europe, England and Russia … There existed, it is true, previously to the new order, preponderant powers, but not powers exclusively preponderant; whose force was so disproportional to that of others, as to reduce them to a state of absolute vassalage; unable to sustain them without a continual league’. The system of states of Europe could therefore no longer be considered a system propelled by the principle of the balance of power, since there was no longer any balance of multiple forces, only a hegemony of two ‘colossi’.1 This contemporary analysis precedes Paul Schroeder’s, one of the most incisive historians on the Congress System, by almost two centuries in interpreting the Vienna Settlement of 1815 as the hegemonic triumph of tsarist Russia and the British Empire.2 In recent years, most historians have followed Schroeder’s (and unwittingly also De Pradt’s) lead in subscribing to an analysis of the not-so-balanced treaty system after 1815.