World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully. It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun. Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a landmass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise—only to return again, like a tide crossing a beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent.

Russia, the French traveler the Marquis de Custine claimed in 1843—from the perspective of a France restrained and a Europe reshaped by Russian power—was a hybrid bringing the vitality of the steppe to the heart of Europe: A monstrous compound of the petty refinements of Byzantium, and the ferocity of the desert horde, a struggle between the etiquette of the Lower [Byzantine] Empire, and the savage virtues of Asia, have produced the mighty state which Europe now beholds, and the influence of which she will probably feel hereafter, without being able to understand its operation.

With Vikings to its north, the expanding Arab empire to its south, and raiding Turkic tribes to its east, Russia was permanently in the grip of conflating temptations and fears. Too far to the east to have experienced the Roman Empire (though “czars” claimed the “Caesars” as their political and etymological forebears), Christian but looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent’s historical trends. The experience would leave Russia a uniquely “Eurasian” power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.

The most profound disjunction had come with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, which subdued a politically divided Russia and razed Kiev. Two and a half centuries of Mongol suzerainty (1237–1480) and the subsequent struggle to restore a coherent state based around the Duchy of Moscow imposed on Russia an eastward orientation just as Western Europe was charting the new technological and intellectual vistas that would create the modern era. During Europe’s era of seaborne discovery, Russia was laboring to reconstitute itself as an independent nation and shore up its borders against threats from all directions. As the Protestant Reformation impelled political and religious diversity in Europe, Russia translated the fall of its own religious lodestar, Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, to Muslim invaders in 1453 into an almost mystical conviction that Russia’s Czar was now (as the monk Filofei wrote to Ivan III around 1500) “the sole Emperor of all the Christians in the whole universe,” with a messianic calling to regain the fallen Byzantine capital for Christendom.

The Russian Victim mentality post-Mongol invasion looks very similar to the Chinese victim mentality post-Opium Wars

Russia affirmed its tie to Western culture but—even as it grew exponentially in size—came to see itself as a beleaguered outpost of civilization for which security could be found only through exerting its absolute will over its neighbors.

In the Westphalian concept of order, European statesmen came to identify security with a balance of power and with restraints on its exercise. In Russia’s experience of history, restraints on power spelled catastrophe: Russia’s failure to dominate its surroundings, in this view, had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into its nightmarish “Time of Troubles” (a fifteen-year dynastic interregnum before the founding of the Romanov Dynasty in 1613, in which invasions, civil wars, and famine claimed a third of Russia’s population). The Peace of Westphalia saw international order as an intricate balancing mechanism; the Russian view cast it as a perpetual contest of wills, with Russia extending its domain at each phase to the absolute limit of its material resources. Thus, when asked to define Russia’s foreign policy, the mid-seventeenth-century Czar Alexei’s minister Nashchokin offered a straightforward description: “expanding the state in every direction, and this is the business of the Department of Foreign Affairs.” This process developed into a national outlook and propelled the onetime Duchy of Moscow across the Eurasian landmass to become the world’s territorially largest empire, in a slow, seemingly irresistible expansionist urge that would remain unabated until 1917.

With no natural borders save the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Russia was in a position to gratify this impulse for several centuries—marching alternately into Central Asia, then the Caucasus, then the Balkans, then Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and the Chinese and Japanese frontiers (and for a time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across the Pacific into Alaskan and Californian settlements). It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states (on average, 100,000 square kilometers annually from 1552 to 1917).

At the same time, Russia’s awesome feats of expansion took place from a demographic and economic base that, by Western standards, was not advanced—with many regions thinly populated and seemingly untouched by modern culture and technology. Thus the world-conquering imperialism remained paired with a paradoxical sense of vulnerability—as if marching halfway across the world had generated more potential foes than additional security. From that perspective, the Czar’s empire can be said to have expanded because it proved easier to keep going than to stop.

In this context, a distinctive Russian concept of political legitimacy took hold. While Renaissance Europe rediscovered its classical humanist past and refined new concepts of individualism and freedom, Russia sought its resurgence in its undiluted faith and in the coherence of a single, divinely sanctioned authority overpowering all divisions—the Czar as “the living icon of God,” whose commands were irresistible and inherently just. A common Christian faith and a shared elite language (French) underscored a commonality of perspective with the West. Yet early European visitors to czarist Russia found themselves in a land of almost surreal extremes and thought they saw, beneath the veneer of a modern Western monarchy, a despotism modeled on Mongol and Tartar practices—“European discipline supporting the tyranny of Asia,” in the uncharitable phrase of the Marquis de Custine.

Russia had joined the modern European state system under Czar Peter the Great in a manner unlike any other society. On both sides, it proved a wary embrace. Peter had been born in 1672 into a still essentially medieval Russia. By then, Western Europe had evolved through the age of discovery, the Renaissance, and the Reformation; it stood at the threshold of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. A gigantic (at six feet eight inches), intensely energetic figure, th...

Determined to explore the fruits of modernity and measure Russia’s achievements against them, Peter was a frequent visitor in the shops and factories of Moscow’s émigré German quarter. As a young ruler, he toured Western capitals, where he tested modern techniques and professional disciplines personally. Having found Russia backward compared with the West, Peter announced his aim: “to sever the people from their former Asiatic customs and instruct them how all Christian peoples in Europe comport themselves.” A series of ukases issued forth: Russia would adopt Western manners and hairstyles, seek out foreign technological expertise, build a modern army and navy, round out its borders with wars against nearly every neighboring state, break through to the Baltic Sea, and construct a new capital city of St. Petersburg. The last, Russia’s “window to the West,” was built by hand, by a casualty-wracked conscripted labor force, on a marshy wilderness chosen at Peter’s personal command, when he put h...

Russia’s reforms were invariably carried out by ruthless autocrats on a population docile in its desire to overcome its past rather than energized by confidence in its future. Nevertheless, like his successor reformers and revolutionaries, when his reign was over, his subjects and their descendants credited him for having driven them, however mercilessly, to achievements they had shown little evidence of seeking. (According to recent polls, Stalin too has acquired some of this recognition in contemporary Russian thinking.)

Catherine the Great, Russia’s autocratic reformist ruler from 1762 to 1796 and overseer of a historic period of cultural achievement and territorial expansion (including Russia’s conquest of the Khanate of Crimea and its laying low of the Zaporizhian Host, the onetime autonomous Cossack realm in what is today central Ukraine), justified Russia’s extreme autocracy as the only system of government that could hold together such a gigantic territory: The Extent of the Dominion requires an absolute Power to be vested in that Person who rules over it. It is expedient so to be that the quick Dispatch of Affairs, sent from distant Parts, might make ample Amends for the Delay occasioned by the great Distance of the Places. Every other Form of Government whatsoever would not only have been prejudicial to Russia, but would even have proved its entire Ruin. Thus what in the West was regarded as arbitrary authoritarianism was presented in Russia as an elemental necessity, the precondition for functioning governance.

Good Hypothesis of why countries with huge landmasses (China/Russia) require/develop Autocratic political systems

The Czar, like the Chinese Emperor, was an absolute ruler endowed by tradition with mystical powers and overseeing a territory of continental expanse. Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all sides. Thus while the emperors were lauded for their impartial, aloof benevolence, the nineteenth-century historian Nikolai Karamzin saw in a Czar’s harshness a sign that he was fulfilling his true calling: In Russia, the sovereign is the living law. He favors the good and punishes the bad . . . [A] soft heart in a monarch is counted as a virtue only when it is tempered with the sense of duty to use sensible severity.

Very interesting comparison of Russian autocracy vs. Chinese autocracy - Chinese: Gentle, Sophisticated, Set example - Russia: Might is right

Not unlike the United States in its own drive westward, Russia had imbued its conquests with the moral justification that it was spreading order and enlightenment into heathen lands (with a lucrative trade in furs and minerals an incidental benefit). Yet where the American vision inspired boundless optimism, the Russian experience ultimately based itself on stoic endurance. Stranded “at the interface of two vast and irreconcilable worlds,” Russia saw itself as endowed with a special mission to bridge them but exposed on all sides to threatening forces that failed to comprehend its calling. The great Russian novelist and passionate nationalist Fyodor Dostoevsky cited “this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth.” The exaltation over Russia’s world-spanning synthesis of civilizations evoked a corresponding despair over Russia’s status as (in the words of an influential nineteenth-century critique) an “orphan cut off from the human family . . . For people to notice us, we have had to stretch from the Bering Straits to the Oder.”

A conviction lingered in the expansive, brooding “Russian soul” (as Russian thinkers would come to call it) that someday all of Russia’s vast exertions and contradictions would come to fruition: its journey would be vindicated; its achievements would be lauded, and the disdain of the West would transform into awe and admiration; Russia would combine the power and vastness of the East with the refinements of the West and the moral force of true religion; and Moscow, the “Third Rome” inheriting fallen Byzantium’s mantle, with its Czar “the successor of the caesars of Eastern Rome, of the organizers of the church and o...

It was this Russia, in Europe but not quite of it, that had tempted Napoleon with its expanse and mystique; it was his ruin (just as it was Hitler’s a century and a half later) when Russia’s people, steeled to great feats of endurance, proved capable of weathering deeper privation than Napoleon’s Grande Armée (or Hitler’s legions). When Russians burned down four-fifths of Moscow to deny Napoleon the conquest and his troops’ sustenance, Napoleon, his epic strategy thus doomed, is said to have exclaimed, “What a people! They are Scythians! What resoluteness! The barbarians!” Now with Cossack horsem...

The task of the negotiators at Vienna would be to transform Alexander’s messianic vision into something compatible with the continued independent existence of their states, to welcome Russia into the international order without being crushed by its embrace.

The statesmen who assembled in Vienna to discuss how to design a peaceful order had been through a whirlwind of upheavals overturning nearly every established structure of authority. In the space of twenty-five years, they had seen the rationality of the Enlightenment replaced by the passions of the Reign of Terror; the missionary spirit of the French Revolution transformed by the discipline of the conquering Bonapartist empire. French power had waxed and waned. It had spilled across France’s ancient frontiers to conquer almost all of the European continent, only to be nearly extinguished in the vastness of Russia.

The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor of the era’s seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (or Talleyrand, as he was known) was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon’s Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon to negotiate the restoration of the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII’s Foreign Minister. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting events.

The order established at the Congress of Vienna was the closest that Europe has come to universal governance since the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire. It produced a consensus that peaceful evolutions within the existing order were preferable to alternatives; that the preservation of the system was more important than any single dispute that might arise within it; that differences should be settled by consultation rather than by war. After World War I ended this vision, it became fashionable to attack the Congress of Vienna order as being excessively based on the balance of power, which by its inherent dynamic of cynical maneuvers drove the world into war. (The British delegation asked the diplomatic historian C. K. Webster, who had written on the Congress of Vienna, to produce a treatise on how to avoid its mistakes.) But that was true, if at all, only in the decade prior to World War I. The period between 1815 and the turn of the century was modern Europe’s most peaceful, and the decades immediately following the Congress of Vienna were characterized by an extraordinary balance between legitimacy and power.

The conduct of diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna was fundamentally different from twenty-first-century practice. Contemporary diplomats are in immediate real-time contact with their capitals. They receive minutely detailed instructions down to the texts of their presentations; their advice is sought on local conditions, much less frequently on matters of grand strategy. The diplomats at Vienna were weeks away from their capitals. It took four days for a message from Vienna to reach Berlin (so at least eight days to receive a reply to any request for guidance), three weeks for a message to reach Paris; London took a little longer. Instructions therefore had to be drafted in language general enough to cover changes in the situation, so the diplomats were instructed primarily on general concepts and long-term interests; with respect to day-to-day tactics, they were largely on their own.

The Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich,

Britain, safe from invasion behind the English Channel and with unique domestic institutions essentially impervious to developments on the Continent, defined order in terms of threats of hegemony on the Continent. But the continental countries had a lower threshold for threats; their security could be impaired by territorial adjustments short of continental hegemony. Above all, unlike Britain, they felt vulnerable to domestic transformations in neighboring countries.

Looks like Island countries (UK, US, Japan) with the ocean to protect them from any land invasion, end up benefitting from the struggles/wars of neighboring nations

The remaining thirty-seven German states were grouped in an entity called the German Confederation, which would provide an answer to Europe’s perennial German dilemma: when Germany was weak, it tempted foreign (mostly French) interventions; when unified, it became strong enough to defeat its neighbors single-handedly, tempting them to combine against the danger. In that sense Germany has for much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.

To protect the new overall territorial settlement, the Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia was formed.

The Czar’s proposed Holy Alliance provided a mechanism for protecting the domestic status quo throughout Europe. His partners saw in the Holy Alliance—subtly redesigned—a way to curb Russian exuberance.

the Quadruple Alliance

the Holy Alliance

concert of...

the revolutions in Naples in 1820

Spain in 1820–23

Greek revolution and war of independe...

A good example of the efficacy of the Vienna system was its reaction to the Belgian revolution of 1830, which sought to separate today’s Belgium from the Netherlands. For most of the eighteenth century, armies had marched across that then-Habsburg province—which since Napoleon's defeat had been united with the Netherlands—in quest of the domination of Europe. For Britain, whose global strategy was based on control of the oceans, the Scheldt River estuary, at the mouth of which lay the port of Antwerp across the channel from England, needed to be in the hands of a friendly country and under no circumstances of a major European state. In the event, a London conference of European powers developed a new approach, recognizing Belgian independence while declaring the new nation “neutral,” a heretofore-unknown concept in the relations of major powers, except as a unilateral declaration of intent. The new state agreed not to join military alliances or permit the stationing of foreign troops on its territory. This pledge in turn was guaranteed by the major powers, which thereby undertook the obligation to resist violations of Belgian neutrality. The internationally guaranteed status lasted for nearly a century; it was the trigger that brought England into World War I, when German troops forced a passage to France through Belgian territory.

The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each. Neither aspect is intended to arrest change; rather, in combination they seek to ensure that it occurs as a matter of evolution, not a raw contest of wills. If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity. Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established.

It was only after the element of legitimacy in this international order was shaken by the failed revolutions of 1848 that balance was interpreted less as an equilibrium subject to common adjustments and increasingly as a condition in which to prepare for a contest over preeminence.

As the emphasis began to shift more and more to the power element of the equation, Britain’s role as a balancer became increasingly important. The hallmarks of Britain’s balancing role were its freedom of action and its proven determination to act. Britain’s Foreign Minister (later Prime Minister) Lord Palmerston offered a classic illustration when, in 1841, he learned of a message from the Czar seeking a definitive British commitment to resist “the contingency of an attack by France on the liberties of Europe.” Britain, Palmerston replied, regarded “an attempt of one Nation to seize and to appropriate to itself territory which belongs to another Nation” as a threat, because “such an attempt leads to a derangement of the existing Balance of Power, and by altering the relative strength of States, may tend to create danger to other Powers.” However, Palmerston’s Cabinet could enter no formal alliance against France because “it is not usual for England to enter into engagements with reference to cases which have not actually arisen, or which are not immediately in prospect.” In other words, neither Russia nor France could count on British support as a certainty against the other; neither could write off the possibility of British armed opposition if it carried matters to the point of threatening the European equilibrium.

This is a great lesson in using/managing power. Lesson is - Do not take sides when it is not necessary - Keep ppl guessing whose side you are on - Again. Don’t talk too much - Reveal your hands at the last minute - Put yourself in the position of tie breaker

the rise of nationalism,

revolutions of 1848,

Crimea...

Under the impact of Napoleon’s conquests, multiple nationalities that had lived together for centuries began to treat their rulers as “foreign.” The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder became an apostle of this trend and argued that each people, defined by language, motherland, and folk culture, had an original genius and was therefore entitled to self-government. The historian Jacques Barzun has described it another way: Underlying the theory was fact: the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies had redrawn the mental map of Europe. In place of the eighteenth cen...

The revolutions of 1848 were a Europe-wide conflagration affecting every major city. As a rising middle class sought to force recalcitrant governments to accept liberal reform, the old aristocratic order felt the power of accelerating nationalisms. At first, the uprisings swept all before them, stretching from Poland in the east as far west as Colombia and Brazil (an empire that had recently won its independence from Portugal, after serving as the seat of its exile government during the Napoleonic Wars). In France, history seemed to repeat itself when Napoleon’s nephew achieved power as Napoleon III, first as President on the basis of a plebiscite and then as Emperor.

Finally, the Crimean War of 1853–56

The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an Ottoman vassal

Two statesmen served as the fulcrums of these vast shifts in Germany and in Europe: the Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich and the Prussian Minister-President—later German Chancellor—Otto von Bismarck. The contrast between the legacies of the century’s two principal Central European statesmen illustrates the shift in emphasis of the European international order from legitimacy to power in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both have been viewed as archetypal conservatives. Both have been recorded as master manipulators of the balance of power, which they were. But their fundamental concepts of international order were nearly opposite, and they manipulated the balance of power to vastly different ends and with significantly contrasting implications for the peace of Europe and the world.

Metternich’s very appointment had testified to the cosmopolitan nature of the eighteenth-century society. He was born in the Rhineland, near the border of France, educated in Strasbourg and Mainz. Metternich did not see Austria until his thirteenth year and did not live there until his seventeenth. He was appointed Foreign Minister in 1809 and Chancellor in 1821, serving until 1848. Fate had placed him in the top civilian position in an ancient empire at the beginning of its decline.

Bismarck, by comparison, was a scion of the provincial Prussian aristocracy, which was far poorer than its counterparts in the west of Germany and considerably less cosmopolitan.

The divergence in these two seminal figures’ views of the nature of international order is poignantly reflected in their definitions of the national interest. To Metternich, order arose not so much from the pursuit of national interest as from the ability to connect it with that of other states: The great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a secondary importance. Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium . . . and of the united efforts of states . . . to force a return to the common law.

Bismarck rejected the proposition that power could be restrained by superior principle. His famous maxims gave voice to the conviction that security could be achieved only by the correct evaluation of the components of power: A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity . . . Every other government seeks the criteria for its actions solely in its interests, however it may cloak them with legal deductions . . . For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances in which the consciousness of having performed a good deed furnishes the sole reward for our sacrifice . . . The only healthy basis of policy for a great power . . . is egotism and not romanticism . . . Gratitude and confidence will not bring a single man into the field on our side; only fear will do that, if we use it cautiously and skillfully . . . Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.

With his appointment as Prussian Minister-President in 1862, Bismarck set about to implement his principles and to transform the European order. With the conservative monarchies of the East divided in the aftermath of the Crimean War, France isolated on the Continent because of the memories evoked by its ruler, and Austria wavering between its national and its European roles, Bismarck saw an opportunity to bring about a German national state for the first time in history. With a few daring strokes between 1862 and 1870, he placed Prussia at the head of a united Germany and Germany in the center of a new system of order.