The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany.

Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War,...

Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (...

Palmerston saw it as a ‘good additional Security and Bond of Union’ against Russia, which he fully expected to re-emerge in due course as a major threat to the Continent. He wanted to expand the entente into an anti-Russian league of European states.

Both France and Russia were revisionist powers: where Russia wanted revisions to the treaty of 1856, France wanted to remove the remnants of the 1815 settlement. A deal between them could be made.

Instead, Gorchakov believed Russia should focus its diplomacy on its own national interests, and ally with other powers regardless of their ideology to further those interests. Here was a new type of diplomacy, the realpolitik later practised by Bismarck.

May 1856 they claimed ownership of a lighthouse on tiny Serpent Island, in Turkish waters near the mouth of the Danube delta, and landed seven men with an officer to take up residence in the lighthouse.