World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

by Henry Kissinger

Stunned by the carnage, Europe’s statesmen tried to forge a postwar period that would be as different as possible from the crisis that they thought had produced the Great War, as it was then called. They blotted from their minds nearly every lesson of previous attempts to forge an international order, especially of the Congress of Vienna. It was not a happy decision. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 refused to accept Germany back into the European order as the Congress of Vienna had included acceptance of a defeated France. The new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist government of the Soviet Union declared itself not bound by the concepts or restraints of an international order whose overthrow it prophesied; participating at the fringes of European diplomacy, it was recognized only slowly and reluctantly by the Western powers. 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.