Prctica 1 - Ejercicio

Se ofrecen a continuacin dos extractos que reflejan interpretaciones clsicas de

la poltica internacional en el siglo XIX. Friedrich von Gentz fue uno de los asesores ms
activos de Metternich, estuvo en el Congreso de Viena, y durante los aos siguientes
escribi diferentes informes acerca de la situacin en Europa. Por su parte, A. J. P. Taylor
public, a mediados de los cincuenta, el que es todava uno de los repasos ms completos
de la historia internacional europea desde 1848 a 1918. Su enfoque realista prim hasta
que Paul W. Schroeder comenz a repensar el largo siglo XIX, ofreciendo nuevas
perspectivas, como la del captulo que comentamos hoy. Tanto Taylor como Gentz hacen
referencia a asuntos el equilibrio de poder, el peso de las ideas, la relevancia de las
fuerzas sistmicas- que son centrales en la argumentacin de Schroeder. Por ello, cmo
respondera ste a los puntos de vista de von Gentz y Taylor?

Friedrich von Gentz, Considerations on the Political System Now Existing in

Europe, 1818

The political system existing in Europe since 1814 and 1815 is a phenomenon
without precedent in the world's history. In place of the principle of equilibrium, or more
accurately of counterweights formed by separate alliances, the principle that has governed
and too often has also troubled and bloodied Europe for three centuries, there has
succeeded a principle of general union, uniting all the states collectively with a federative
bond, under the guidance of the five principal Powers, four of which have equal shares in
that guidance, while the fifth at this time is still subject to a kind of tutelage, from which
it will soon emerge to place itself upon a par with its custodians. The states of the second,
third, and fourth rank submit tacitly, though nothing has ever been stipulated in this
regard, to the decisions made in common by the preponderant Powers; and so Europe
seems really to form a grand political family, united under the auspices of a high tribunal
of its own creation, whose members guarantee to themselves and to all parties concerned
the peaceful enjoyment of their respective rights.
This scheme of things has its inconveniences. But it is certain that, could it be
made durable, it would be after all the best possible combination to assure the prosperity
of peoples, and the maintenance of the peace, which is one of its first prerequisites. The
strongest objection to the present system is the obvious difficulty of preserving over a
long period of time the harmony among the heterogeneous elements that compose it. The
most divergent interests, the most conflicting tendencies, and the most contradictory
aspirations, views, and secret thoughts are pulled together and for the moment submerged
in the common action of a league, which more resembles a coalition created for a
particular purpose, than it does a true alliance based on clear and permanent interests. It
required unique circumstances to bring such a league into being; it would be contrary to
the nature of things and of men for it to replace for long that condition of opposition and
conflict which the diversity of positions, interests, and opinions will always impose upon
a group of independent Powers, each of which necessarily has its own characteristics and
its own system. This perspective is far from unimportant. For one cannot avoid the fact
that the collapse of a system now in effect, no matter what new system follows it, will
immediately give rise to a state of uncertainty, anxiety, and danger, and will open the way
to a new general conflagration with unpredictable results and duration.
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I am persuaded that the European federation-for that is the most accurate term for
the present system-is not threatened with immediate ruin. I should not answer for a half -
century; but I should not hesitate to answer for ten or even twenty years, a long enough
interval I think for everyone to think out the future, and to prepare in time the position
that another order of things will require. My opinion is based not on the structure of -the
system, the extreme fragility of which I myself recognize, but on the situations of the
principal Powers that compose it, situations such that no one of these Powers can safely,
without risking imminent ruin, leave the circleof its present connections.
The five Powers at the head of the federation are the only ones who could destroy
the general system by changing their policies. Squabbles and changes among the others
could never have that effect.
Spain and Portugal in one corner, and Sweden and Denmark in the other, are much
too weak and much too far from the center of Europe for their actions to affect the
decisions of the great Powers.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands is inevitably bound by the conduct and the
relations among its great neighbors; being suspended among France, Britain, and
Germany, it can have no desire but peace, and no principle but to be on good terms with
everybody.
The states of Germany, now that there no longer are and no longer can be liaisons
between themselves and France, are no more than satellites of the two preponderant
bodies; and as long as Austria and Prussia work together, the other German courts can
only follow their direction.
The states of Italy are squeezed between Austria and France, and deprived of any
will of their own.
The Ottoman Porte would undoubtedly have the power to make war against
Russia, unimpeded by vague ties with the European federation. But if the Porte should
decide some day to attack Russia without provocation from that Power, the result
probably would be only a separate war that would not disturb the general system at all.
The case would be very different if Russia were the aggressor; in that case, to which I
shall return later, the present European system would move inevitably toward catastrophe.
Of the five Powers, which, according to this preliminary description, are the only
ones in position to cause decisive change, there are three-Austria, Prussia, and Britain-
who would regard such change as total disaster, and would do anything to prevent it. The
other two, France and Russia, could have, even in less than ten or twenty years, more or
less attractive reasons for leaving their present positions; but they are held there by more
important considerations, or by insurmountable hindrances. This I shall undertake to
prove.
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These reflections lead to a conclusion as remarkable as it is reassuring. What at
first glance seems the weakest part of the present system is precisely what gives it force.
France and Russia are today the only two Powers who could threaten Europe with a new
upheaval, and they are rendered incapable of harm as long as the middle line, formed by
Powers whose only interest and whose only desire is peace, is not broken. Austria,
Prussia, and England, each little disposed today and little prepared for a serious war,
comparatively and individually impotent, peaceful by necessity, but still strong enough
for joint resistance, are the true rampart of the common security of Europe; and the colossi
that occupy the two extremities, breaking against this central dike for as long as it lasts,
must for a long time to come seek their advantage and their glory in preserving an order
of things that they cannot hope to destroy. Add to these considerations the general
situation of the peoples, their horror of war, the attention that must be paid to them, the
penury of all the governments, the evident inclinations of the cabinets at London, Vienna,
and Berlin, and what the soundest data and the most reasonable calculations tell us of the
reigning principles in France and in Russia-I think that very great probabilities join in
pointing to the maintenance of the general peace, and of the political system, which, with
all its imperfections and all its faults, is today its foundation and its guarantee.

TAYLOR, A. J. P.: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (1954).

Introduction (Extracts)
In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined, violence was the only law, and life
was nasty, brutish and short. Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the
Great Powers of Europe have always done so. Sovereign states have distinguished
European civilization, at any rate since the end of the fifteenth century. Each individual
state in Europe acknowledged no superior and recognized no moral code other than that
voluntarily accepted by its own conscience. In theory each state could justify itself only
by being able to resist with force the forcible encroachments of others; and, if Hobbes
saw true, the history of Europe should be one of uninterrupted war. In fact, Europe has
known almost as much peace as war; and it has owed these periods of peace to the Balance
of Power. No one state has ever been strong enough to eat up all the rest; and the mutual
jealousy of the Great Powers has preserved even the small states, which could not have
preserved themselves. The relations of the Great Powers have determined the history of
Europe. This book deals with them in the last age when Europe was the centre of the
world.
Men have not always acquiesced in the perpetual quadrille of the Balance of
Power. They have often wished that the music would stop and that they could sit out a
dance without maintaining the ceaseless watch on each other. They have sought for some
universal authority which would overshadow the individual states and deprive them of
sovereignty. The simplest solution for anarchy, as Hobbes held, is that one Power should
subdue all the rest. This solution has proposed itself in Europe again and again. Philip II
of Spain and Louis XIV perhaps grasped at the hegemony of Europe; the great Napoleon
certainly did so. In 1848, when this book opens, Napoleons bid for mastery lay only
thirty years behind; and it was generally supposed that France would renew the attempt.
The establishment of the Second Empire seemed to justify this fear; but in fact Napoleon
III had nothing imperial except the name, and the Balance of Power survived his
challenge almost unscathed. The French bid ended in 1870. A new Balance followed; and
only after thirty years of peace did it begin to appear that Germany had stepped into
France's place, as the potential conqueror of Europe. The First World war was, on the part
of Germanys enemies, a war to preserve or to restore the Balance of Power; but, though
Germany was defeated, the European Balance was not restored. If the war had been
confined to Europe, Germany would have won; she was defeated only by the entry into
the war of the United States. This book ends logically when Europe ceased to be sufficient
unto herself and when her destinies came to depend on forces in the outer world. It would,
however, be wrong to represent international history as simply the record of the Balance
of Power, interrupted by challenges from a single conqueror. Men have tried to supersede
the sovereign state as much by a universal moral law as by an overwhelming armed force.
They have sought an ideology to substitute for the worship of Leviathan. In the sixteenth
century it was the Roman Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation; at the end of the
eighteenth century the ideas of the French revolution and the Rights of Man. Those who
resisted Napoleon did not merely preach the sovereignty of states; they answered the
Rights of Man with a conservatism of tradition and respect. 'Monarchical solidarity' was
as much a creed as radicalism; and in 1848 men did not expect new manoeuvres of the
Balance of Power. They looked forward to a greater war of religion, with the Holy
Alliance on one side and the revolution on the other. This did not happen. Ideologies were
a minor theme in the seventy years between 1848 and 1918; and the Balance of Power
worked with calculation almost as pure as in the days before the French revolution. It
seemed to be the political equivalent of the laws of economics, both self-operating. If
every man followed his own interest, all would be prosperous; and if every state followed
its own interest, all would be peaceful and secure. Only those who rejected laissez faire
rejected the Balance of Power religious idealists at one extreme, international socialists
at the other.
The First World war discredited the laws both of economics and of politics. The
self-operating laws had failed to operate. The international socialist meetings
at Zimmerwald and Kienthal announced a new morality, in which sovereign states would
cease to exist; and when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, this morality took on
practical form. But even liberals ceased to respect the laws on which the liberal order in
Europe had been built. Just as they tempered the rigour of their economic system by
measures of social security and the welfare state, so they hoped to temper sovereignty by
some international authority, based on consent not on conquest or on a universal ideology.
Europeans ceased to believe in an anarchy where everyone would behave well out of
sheer good nature; and they dreamt instead of a painless revolution, in which men would
surrender their independence and sovereignty without noticing that they had done so.
Lenin and Wilson were the symbols of these new outlooks. The communist
International and the League of Nations both announced the end of the Balance of Power;
the only question was whether it would be violently overthrown by revolution or would
fade away imperceptibly. Here too there is a logical end for this book the moment in 1918
when the Bolsheviks appealed for a revolutionary peace over the heads of the established
governments and when Wilson proclaimed his Fourteen Points. The European Balance
of Power is the theme; and the book ends when this theme is dwarfed.
The European Balance worked untrammelled in the seventy years between the fall
of Metternich and its several repudiations by Lenin and Wilson. Yet Europe did not owe
its peace solely to the Balance of Power. Though Europe overshadowed the world and
possessed the only creative civilization, many Europeans looked outside it. Even Spain
and France had been distracted by overseas ambitions in their days of European conquest.
In the nineteenth century both Great Britain and Russia would have preferred to turn their
backs on Europe and often did so. The prizes for Great Britain were in India and Africa
and in the trade of all the world; for Russia in central Asia, and later, in the Far East.
France looked to North Africa; and Italy later imitated her. Germany owed her victories
in the middle of the century partly to her freedom from these distractions; she had no
interest even in the fate of the Turkish empire. But, as she grew greater, she too aspired
to world power; and her pursuit of this interfered with, perhaps thwarted, her conquest
of Europe. Only the Austrian empire had no concerns outside Europe; this was a sign of
weakness, not a source of strength. The relations of Europe with the outer world are not
in themselves the matter of this book. They intrude only when they affect the relations of
the Great Powers with each other and temper the workings of their Balance.
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