Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

PEACEgood breeding-stock for the royal houses of Europe, watched eachother within the German Confederation, though Austrian senioritywas not challenged. The main international function of the Confederationwas to keep the lesser states outside the French orbit intowhich they traditionally tended to gravitate. In spite of nationalistdisclaimers, they had been far from unhappy as Napoleonic satellites.The statesmen of 1815 were wise enough to know that no settlement,however carefully carpentered, would in the long run withstand thestrain of state rivalries and changing circumstance. Consequently theyset out to provide a mechanism for maintaining peace—i.e. settling alloutstanding problems as they arose—by means of regular congresses.It was of course understood that the crucial decisions in these wereplayed by the 'great powers' (the term itself is an invention of thisperiod). The 'concert of Europe'—another term which came into usethen—did not correspond to a United Nations, but rather to thepermanent members of the UN's Security Council. However, regularcongresses were only held for a few years—from 1818, when Francewas officially readmitted to the concert, to 1822.The congress system broke down, because it could not outlast theyears immediately following the Napoleonic wars, when the famineof 1816-17 and business depressions maintained a lively but unjustifiedfear of social revolution everywhere, including Britain. After the returnof economic stability about 1820 every disturbance of the 1815 settlementmerely revealed the divergences between the interests of thepowers. Faced with a first bout of unrest and insurrection in 1820-22only Austria stuck to the principle that all such movements must beimmediately and automatically put down in the interests of the socialorder (and of Austrian territorial integrity). Over Germany, Italy andSpain the three monarchies of the 'Holy Alliance' and France agreed,though the latter, exercising the job of international policeman withgusto in Spain (1823), was less interested in European stability than inwidening the scope of her diplomatic and military activities, particularlyin Spain, Belgium and Italy where the bulk of her foreign investmentslay. 4 Britain stood out. This was partly because—especially afterthe flexible Canning replaced the rigid reactionary Castlereagh (1822)—it was convinced that political reforms in absolutist Europe weresooner or later inevitable, and because British politicians had no sympathyfor absolutism, but also because the application of the policingprinciplewould merely have brought rival powers (notably France)into Latin America, which was, as we have seen, a British economiccolony and a very vital one at that. Hence the British supported theindependence of the Latin American states, as also did the USA in the103