The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (33 page)

Given the Liberal assumptions about interstate harmony and constantly increasing prosperity, these seemed idle fears; all that was required was for statesmen to act rationally and to avoid the ancient folly of quarreling with other peoples. And, indeed, the laissez-faire Liberals argued, the more British industry and commerce became integrated with, and dependent upon, the global economy, the greater would be the disincentive to pursue policies which might lead to conflict. In the same way, the growth of the financial sector was to be welcomed, since it was not only fueling the midcentury “boom,” but demonstrating how advanced and progressive Britain had become; even if other countries followed her lead and did industrialize, she could switch her efforts to servicing that development, and gaining even more profits thereby. In Bernard Porter’s words, she was the first frogspawn egg to grow legs, the first tadpole to change into a frog, the first frog to hop out of the pond. She was economically different from the others, but that was only because she was so far ahead of them.
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Given these auspicious circumstances, fears of strategical weakness appeared groundless; and most mid-Victorians preferred, like Kingsley as he cried tears of pride during the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, to believe that a cosmic destiny was at work:

Like all other civilizations at the top of the wheel of fortune, therefore, the British could believe that their position was both “natural” and destined to continue. And just like all those other civilizations, they were in for a rude shock. But that was still some way into the future, and in the age of Palmerston and Macaulay, it was British strengths rather than weaknesses which were mostly in evidence.

The impact of economic and technological change upon the relative position of the Great Powers of continental Europe was much less dramatic in the half-century or so following 1815, chiefly because the
industrialization which did occur started off from a much lower base than in Britain. The farther east one went, the more feudal and agricultural the local economy tended to be; but even in western Europe, which had been close to Britain in many aspects of commercial and technological development prior to 1790, two decades of war had left a heavy mark: population losses, changed customs barriers, higher taxes, the “pastoralization” of the Atlantic sector, the loss of overseas markets and raw materials, the difficulties of acquiring the latest British inventions, were all setbacks to general economic growth, even when (for special reasons) certain trades and regions had flourished during the Napoleonic wars.
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If the coming of peace meant a resumption of normal trade and also allowed continental entrepreneurs to see how far behind Great Britain they had fallen, it did not produce a sudden burst of modernization. There simply was not enough capital, or local demand, or official enthusiasm, to produce a transformation; and many a European merchant, craftsman, and handloom weaver would bitterly oppose the adoption of English techniques, seeing in them (quite correctly) a threat to their older way of life.
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In consequence, although the steam engine, the power loom, and the railway made some headway in continental Europe,

As
Table 7
above shows, the relative increases in per capita levels of industrialization for the century after 1750 were not very impressive; and only in the 1850s and 1860s did the picture begin to change.

The prevailing political and diplomatic conditions of “Restoration Europe” also combined to freeze the international status quo, or at least to permit only small-scale alterations in the existing order. Precisely because the French Revolution had been such a frightening challenge both to the internal social arrangements and to the traditional states system of Europe, Metternich and fellow conservatives now regarded any new developments with suspicion. An adventurist diplomacy, running the risk of a general war, was as much to be frowned upon as a campaign for national self-determination or for constitutional reform. On the whole, political leaders felt that they had enough on their hands simply dealing with domestic turbulences and the agitation of sectional interests, many of which were beginning to feel threatened by even the early appearances of new machinery, the growth of urbanization, and other incipient challenges to the guilds, the crafts, and the protective regulations of a preindustrial society. What one historian has described as an “endemic civil war that produced
the great outbreaks of insurrection in 1830, as well as a host of intermediate revolts,”
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meant that statesmen generally possessed neither the energies nor the desires to engage in foreign conflicts which might well weaken their own regimes.

In this connection, it is worth noting that many of the military actions which did occur were initiated precisely to defend the existing sociopolitical order from revolutionary threat—for example, the Austrian army’s crushing of resistance in Piedmont in 1823, the French military’s move into Spain in the same year to restore to King Ferdinand his former powers, and, the most notable cause of all, the use of Russian troops to suppress the Hungarian revolution of 1848. If these reactionary measures grew increasingly unpopular to British opinion, that country’s insularity meant that it would not intervene to rescue the liberal forces from suppression. As for territorial changes within Europe, they could occur only after the agreement of the “Concert” of the Great Powers, some of which might need to be compensated in one way or another. Unlike either the age of Napoleon preceding it or the age of Bismarck following it, therefore, the period 1815–1865 internationalized most of its tricky political problems (Belgium, Greece), and frowned upon unilateral actions. All this gave a basic, if precarious, stability to the existing states system.

    The international position of Prussia in the decades after 1815 was clearly affected by these general political and social conditions.
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Although greatly augmented territorially by the acquisition of the Rhine-land, the Hohenzollern state now seemed much less impressive than it had been under Frederick the Great. It was, after all, only in the 1850s and 1860s that economic expansion took place on Prussian soil faster than virtually anywhere else in Europe. In the first half of the century, by contrast, the country seemed an industrial pigmy, its annual iron production of 50,000 tons being eclipsed by that not only of Britain, France, and Russia but also of the Habsburg Empire. Furthermore, the acquisition of the Rhineland not only split Prussia geographically but also exacerbated the political divisions between the state’s more “liberal” western and more “feudal” eastern provinces. For the greater part of this period, domestic tensions were at the forefront of politics; and while the forces of reaction usually prevailed, they were alarmed at the reformist tendencies of 1810–1819, and quite panicked by the revolution of 1848–1849. Even when the military reimposed a profoundly illiberal regime, fear of domestic unrest made the Prussian elite reluctant to contemplate foreign-policy adventures; on the contrary, conservatives felt, they needed to identify as closely as possible with the forces of stability elsewhere in Europe, especially Russia and even Austria.

Prussia’s internal-politics disputes were complicated still further by
the debate about the “German question,” that is to say, about the possibility of an eventual union of the thirty-nine German states, and the means by which that goal could be secured. For not only did the issue predictably divide the liberal-nationalist bourgeoisie of Prussia from most of the conservatives, but it also involved delicate negotiations with the middle- and south-German states and—most important of all—revived the rivalry with the Habsburg Empire that had last been seen in the heated disputes over Saxony in 1814. Although Prussia was the undisputed leader of the increasingly important German Customs Union (Zollverein) which developed from the 1830s onward, and which the Austrians could not join because of the protectionist pressures of their own industrialists, the balance of political advantage generally lay in Vienna’s favor during these decades. In the first place, both Frederick William III (1797–1840) and Frederick William IV (1840–1861) feared the results of a clash with the Habsburg Empire more than Metternich and his successor Schwarzenberg did with their northern neighbor. In addition, Austria presided over the German Federation’s meetings at Frankfurt; it had the sympathy of many of the smaller German states, not to mention the Prussian old conservatives; and it seemed indisputably a European power, whereas Prussia was little more than a German one. The most noticeable sign of Vienna’s greater weight came in the 1850 agreement at Oelmuetz, which temporarily ended their jockeying for advantage in the German question when Prussia agreed to demobilize its army and to abandon its own schemes for unification. A diplomatic humiliation, in Frederick William IV’s view, was preferable to a risky war so shortly after the 1848 revolution. And even those Prussian nationalists like Bismarck, smarting at such a retreat before Austrian demands, felt that little could be done elsewhere until “the struggle for mastery in Germany” was finally settled.

One quite vital factor in Frederick William’s submission at Oelmuetz had been the knowledge that the Russian czar supported Austria’s case in the “German question.” Throughout the entire period from 1812 until 1871, in fact, Berlin took pains to avoid provoking the military colossus to the east. Ideological and dynastic reasons certainly helped to justify such obsequiousness, but they did not fully conceal Prussia’s continued sense of inferiority, which the Russian acquisition of most of Congress Poland in 1814 had simply accentuated. Expressions of disapproval by St. Petersburg over any moves toward liberalization in Prussia, Czar Nicholas I’s well-known conviction that German unification was Utopian nonsense (especially if it was to come about, as was attempted in 1848, by a radical Frankfurt assembly offering an emperor’s crown to the Prussian king!), and Russia’s support of Austria before Oelmuetz were all manifestations of this overshadowing foreign influence. It was scarcely surprising, therefore, that
the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 found the Prussian government desperately eager to stay neutral, fearing the consequences of going to war against Russia even while it worried at losing the respect of Austria and the western powers. Given its circumstances, Prussia’s position was logical, but, because the British and Austrians disliked Berlin’s “wavering” policy, Prussian diplomats were not allowed to join the other delegates at the Congress of Paris (1856) until some way into the proceedings. Symbolically, then, it was still being treated as a marginal participant.

In other areas, too—although less persistently—Prussia found itself constrained by foreign powers. Palmerston’s denunciations of the Prussian army’s move into Schleswig-Holstein in 1848 was the least worrying. Much more disturbing was the potential French threat to the Rhineland, in 1830, again in 1840, and finally in the 1860s. All those periods of tension merely confirmed what the quarrels with Vienna and occasional growls from St. Petersburg already suggested: that Prussia in the first half of the nineteenth century was the least of the Great Powers, disadvantaged by geography, overshadowed by powerful neighbors, distracted by internal and inner-German problems, and quite incapable of playing a larger role in international affairs. This seems, perhaps, too harsh a judgment in the light of Prussia’s various strengths: its educational system, from the parish schools to the universities, was second to none in Europe; its administrative system was reasonably efficient; and its army and its formidable general staff were early in studying reforms in both tactics and strategy, especially in the military implications of “railways and rifles.”
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But the point was that this potential could not be utilized until the internal-political crisis between liberals and conservatives was overcome, until there was firm leadership at the top, in place of Frederick William IV’s vacillations, and until Prussia’s industrial base had been developed. Only after 1860, therefore, could the Hohenzollern state emerge from its near-second-class status.

    Yet, as with many other things in life, strategical weakness is relative; and, compared with the Habsburg Empire to the south, Prussia’s problems were perhaps not so daunting. If the period 1648–1815 had seen the empire “rising” and “asserting itself,”
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that expansion had not eliminated the difficulties under which Vienna labored as it strove to carry out a Great Power role. On the contrary, the settlement of 1815 compounded these difficulties, at least in the longer term. For example, the very fact that the Austrians had fought so frequently against Napoleon and emerged on the winning side meant that they required “compensations” in the general shuffling of boundaries which occurred during the negotiations of 1814–1815; and although the Habsburgs wisely agreed to withdraw from the southern Netherlands, southwestern
Germany (the Vorlande), and parts of Poland, this was balanced by their large-scale expansion in Italy and by the assertion of their leading role in the newly created German Federation.

Given the general theory of the European equilibrium and especially those versions preferred by British commentators as well as by Metternich himself—this reestablishment of Austrian power was commendable. The Habsburg Empire, sprawled across Europe from the northern-Italian plain to Galicia, would act as the central fulcrum to the balance, checking French ambitions in western Europe and in Italy, preserving the status quo in Germany against both the “greater-German” nationalists and the Prussian expansionists, and posing a barrier to Russian penetration of the Balkans. It was true that each of these tasks was supported by one or more of the other Great Powers, depending upon the context; but the Habsburg Empire was vital to the functioning of this complex five-sided checkmate, if only because it seemed to have the greatest interest of all in freezing the 1815 settlement—whereas France, Prussia, and Russia, sooner or later, wanted some changes, while the British, seeing fewer and fewer strategical and ideological reasons to support Metternich after the 1820s, were consequently less willing to aid Austria’s efforts to maintain all aspects of the existing order. In the view of certain historians, indeed, the general peace which prevailed in Europe for decades after 1815 was due chiefly to the position and functions of the Habsburg Empire. When, therefore, it could gain no military support from the other powers to preserve the status quo in Italy and Germany in the 1860s, it was driven out of those two theaters; and when, after 1900, its own survival was in doubt, a great war of succession—with fateful implications for the European balance—was inevitable.
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