World Order

by Henry Kissinger

and the Greek revolution and war of independ...

(ultimately supported by Britain, France...

Belgian revolution of 1830, which sought to separate today’s Belgium from the Netherlands.

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.

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.

The subtle equilibrium of the Congress of Vienna system began to fray in the middle of the nineteenth century under the impact of three events: the rise of nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, and the Crimean War.

multiple nationalities that had lived together for centuries began to treat their rulers as “foreign.”

chafing,

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.

the old order proved just strong enough to overcome the revolutionary challenge. But it never regained the self-confidence of the previous period.

the Crimean War of 1853–56 broke up the unity of the conservative states—Austria, Prussia, and Russia—which had been one of the two key pillars of the Vienna international order. This combination had defended the existing institutions in revolutions; it had isolated France, the previous disturber of the peace.

In the Crimean War, Napoleon saw the device to end his isolation by allying himself with Britain’s historic effort to prevent the Russian reach for Constantinople and access to the Mediterranean. The alignment indeed checked the Russ...

The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an Ottoman vassal in the eighteenth century—but over competing French and Russian claims to advance the rights of favored Christian communities in Jerusalem, then within Ottoman jurisdiction. During a dispute over which denomination, Catholic or Orthodox, would have principal access to holy sites, Czar Nicholas I demanded recognition of his right to act as “protector” of all Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire, a significant population stretching across strategic territories. The demand—which amounted to a right of intervention in the affairs of a foreign state—was couched in the terms of universal moral principles but cut to the heart of Ottoman sovereignty. Ottoman refusal prompted a Russian military advance in...

The effort to isolate Russia concluded by isolating Austria. Within two years, Napoleon invaded the Austrian possessions in Italy in support of Italian unification while Russia stood by. Within Germany, Prussia gained freedom of maneuver. Within a decade Otto von Bismarck started Germany on the road to unification, excluding Austria

Austria learned too late that in international affairs a reputation for reliability is a more important asset than demonstrations of tactical cleverness.

fulcrums

Once considered among the strongest and best-governed countries in Europe, Austria was now vulnerable because its central location meant that every European tremor made the earth move there. Its polyglot nature made it vulnerable to the emerging wave of nationalism—a

For Metternich, steadiness and reliability became the lodestar of his policy:

scion

Until he appeared on the scene, it had been taken for granted that German unity would come about—if at all—through a combination of nationalism and liberalism. Bismarck set about to demonstrate that these strands could be separated—that the principles of the Holy Alliance were not needed to preserve order, that a new order could be built by conservatives’ appealing to nationalism, and that a concept of European order could be based entirely on an assessment 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.

The European order as seen in the eighteenth century, as a great Newtonian clockwork of interlocking parts, had been replaced by the Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest.

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.

What emerged after the unification of Germany was a dominant country, strong enough to defeat each neighbor individually and perhaps all the continental countries together. The bond of legitimacy had disappeared. Everything now depended on calculations of power.

Bismarck understood that a potentially dominant power at the center of Europe faced the constant risk of inducing a coalition of all others,

All of Bismarck’s efforts thereafter would be devoted to an elaborate series of maneuvers to forestall this “cauchemar des coalitions” (nightmare of coalitions),

it was always better to be in the party of three.

a country whose security depends on producing a genius in each generation sets itself a task no society has ever met.

With large reserve forces on all sides, speed of mobilization became of the essence. German strategy, the famous Schlieffen Plan, was based on the assessment that Germany needed to defeat one of its neighbors before it could combine with others to attack from east and west.

Preemption

frivolity

World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics.

dilatory

maelstrom

In the ordeal, the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires perished entirely.

transmogrified

Of the five states that had constituted the European balance, the Austrian Empire had disappeared; Russia and Germany were excluded, or had excluded themselves; and Britain was beginning to return to its historic attitude of involving itself in European affairs primarily to resist an actual threat to the balance of power rather than to preempt a potential threat.

subtly balancing elements of power and of legitimacy.

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.

Powers with grievances or expansionist goals—Germany, imperial Japan, Mussolini’s Italy—soon learned that there were no serious consequences for violating the terms of membership of the League of Nations or for simply withdrawing.

In the end the Versailles order achieved neither legitimacy nor equilibrium.

In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve

the balance of power was largely being shaped outside the European continent. For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.

the Atlantic Alliance, while it combined the military forces of the allies in a common structure, was sustained largely by unilateral American military power—especially so with respect to America’s nuclear deterrent. So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.

denouement,

exultant

Given its history, how much diversity must Europe preserve to achieve a meaningful unity?

The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East. Europe, which had a near monopoly in the design of global order less than a century ago, is in danger of cutting itself off from the contemporary quest for world order by identifying its internal construction with its ultimate geopolitical purpose.

Europe thus finds itself suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined.