Diplomatic Negotiation

186 Diplomatic Negotiation
the main players; historically, because his story is deeply embedded in the developments
leading up to the Vienna Congress and the events thereafter; and geographically, as Rites
of Peace shows us the importance of understanding the geographic situation if we want
to understand the countries’ political interest.
Other important sources are the works by the father of modern French negotiation
research, the late Christophe Dupont. It is perhaps telling for the non-linkage between
historical and negotiation research that Dupont is not among the sources used by
Zamoyski. Dupont focuses on the negotiation process in Vienna in a chapter (Dupont
and Audebert-Lasrochas, 2005) and an article (Dupont, 2003) in publications from – or
related to – the work of the PIN program. In both papers, Dupont deals with the question
of coalition-building. In the book chapter, he tries to show the proximity and distance
between the main negotiators as far as the main negotiation problem of Vienna is
concerned: Poland/Saxony. In the journal article, he puts the Vienna Congress in the
context of modern approaches to coalition-building. He distinguishes three phases in the
negotiation process at Vienna. After a pre-negotiation process, the Russians, Austrians,
Prussians and British managed to establish the Vienna Congress through the First Peace
of Paris. In Vienna itself, the Great Powers – including France for a time – first move from
unity to less cohesiveness; they then stumble in disruption; but third, they reconstitute
themselves in order to determine the Final Act. In the post-negotiation process, after
Vienna, their cohesion starts to disintegrate, most notably when France is excluded from
the negotiations on the Second Treaty of Paris after the second downfall of Napoleon. As
such, Dupont distinguishes five phases if we take the treaties of Paris into account as well.
In Vienna itself, the flow from unity to loss of cohesion to reconstitution has to do with
the question of Saxony, which split the coalition into a camp of three and a camp of five:
Britain, France and Austria, against Prussia and Russia. This nearly led to war.
Another interesting analysis of the interrelationships of the Great Powers and their
perceptions of themselves and of the other four has been made by Charles Doran (Doran,
1971). Doran asks the question: if all the powers try to dominate the others, how do you
assimilate them into the circle? The answer: through trade-offs until a balance is reached
with which everyone can live.
The Vienna Congress is, of course, a subject widely studied by historians and political
scientists (Kissinger, 1957), but much less so by the ‘newcomers’ devoted to the research
of international negotiation processes (Dupont, 2003), who are trying to understand the
negotiation intricacies of the Vienna Congress, particularly as the classical diplomatic
negotiation historians, such as François de Callières, wrote their treatises before the
Vienna Congress took place.
In order to prevent too much repetition and description, this chapter attempts to take
the different constituent parts of the Vienna negotiations apart. First, it deals with the
question of choice and thereby of inclusion and exclusion: who will be in, and who will
be out of the actual decision-making, separating the participating powers into different
circles of influence? Then, the chapter will sketch the context of the negotiations and
the construction of the Vienna Congress: the procedural perspectives. The chapter next
turns to the main counterparts, the characteristics of the negotiators representing their
countries, followed by their process of interaction under the heading ‘Conversations’.
After this, the chapter deals with the process of convergence of positions and interests as