Europe And The World In The Early 19th Century PDF

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century 1. While between the end of the 18th and the first decade of the 19th century, the Amer...

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century 1. While between the end of the 18th and the first decade of the 19th century, the American revolution (1765-84), the French revolution (1789-99), and the Napoleonic experience (First French Empire, 1804-14) played an essential role in shaping the contemporary world, the bulk of the transformations that led to present-day modernity dates back to the first half of the 19th century. In this period, new cultures emerged, the industrial revolution spread at the European level, nation-states imposed themselves as the ‘standard’ model of political organization, and European countries tightened their grip in the imperial realm, laying the foundation of what – in the second half of the century – would have been their global influence. Scientific and technological innovations made the world smaller, reducing travel time, making it easier and cheaper to transport goods and people, and speeding up the circulation of news and information. These transformations reverberated at the political, economic, and social levels and favoured the emergence of new political subjects. The bourgeoisie and the new intellectual elites, both of them a product of the undergoing transformation, were, at the same time, two forces that actively contributed to promoting it. These processes took time to develop and evolved amid ups and downs. Conservative (and, sometimes, openly reactionary) forces were strong, while at the periphery of Europe, pre-modern political, economic, and cultural elements and institutions survived well within the century. For example, Tzarist Russia abolished peasants’ serfdom only in 1861 under Alexander II, while Nicholas II granted the country a national legislature only in 1905. 2. At the political level, the European post-Napoleonic order was a product of the Congress of Vienna (Nov. 1814-June 1815). The Congress aimed to restore the ‘old’ European political landscape, re-installing the sovereigns that the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had deposed on their thrones. Another aim was to create a stable international system and mechanisms to avoid a possible new spreading of the ‘old’ ‘revolutionary’ ideas. While several hundred small states attended it, the Congress’s protagonists were a small number of ‘Great Powers’ (a concept codified on that occasion): Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia (the main allies of the last anti-Napoleonic coalition), and France itself, which, albeit defeated, Foreign Minister Talleyrand managed to insert into the diplomatic game fruitfully. Accordingly, the Congress’s most influential figures were the Austrian State Minister and Foreign Minister, the Prince of Metternich (1773-1859); the British Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh (1769-1822); the French Foreign Minister, the Prince of Talleyrand (1754-1838); and the Russian Tsar, Alexander I (1777-1825). The Russian Chancellor, Count Nesselrode (1780-1862) and the Prussian representatives, the Karl August von Hardenberg (1750-1822) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), had a lesser role. Austria and Britain were ‘satisfied powers’; they desired to maintain the status quo that emerged from the Congress and preserve the balance of power in Europe, together with the France of the restored Bourbon monarchy. On the other side, Prussia and Russia aimed to expand their territories and enhance their political role within the emerging international order. 3. The Congress’s decisions rested on three widely shared principles: - Balance of power – An updated version of Europe’s supreme regulatory criterion since the end of the Thirty Years’ War (Peace of Westphalia, 1648). 1 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century - Containment of France – Through the strengthening of the neighbouring countries (Kingdom of the Netherlands, Rhenish Prussia, Kingdom of Sardinia) and the establishment of the Austrian hegemony over the Italian peninsula. Legitimacy – The restoration of the legitimate sovereigns on their thrones. However, the most anachronistic entities (the Holy Roman Empire, the aristocratic republics of Venice, Genoa and Lucca, the papal fiefdoms in France, and the principality of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in Malta) were not restored. From a geopolitical perspective, the system that these principles supported had some inherent weaknesses. (1) It did not consider the Ottoman territories. The Ottoman Empire had already entered its declining phase, and growing tensions were plaguing its European portion, which would have exploded in the 1820s with the Great Powers’ support. (2) In did not consider the strength of the national sentiment in some parts of Europe. For instance, the former Habsburg Flanders (today’s Belgium) would have soon resented the Dutch dominance within the Kingdom of the Netherlands; in the same way, the socalled ‘Congress Poland’ would have quickly resented the Russian authority after having been allotted in personal union with the Russian crown to Alexander I. In both the former Habsburg Flanders and Poland, secessionist rebellion exploded in 1830, leading, on the one hand, to the establishment of the Kingdom of Belgium (21 July 1831), on the other, to Poland’s outright annexation to the Russian Empire. 4. To preserve the European order (‘Vienna order’), the Congress envisaged two main diplomatic instruments: - - The Holy Alliance (26 Sept. 1815), proposed by Tsar Alexander I to restrain liberalism and secularism in Europe and signed by Russia, Austria, and Prussia, as well as all the other European States but Great Britain and the Papal States. Lacking a ‘casus foederis’, the treatise is a curious ideological-religious manifesto, primarily inspired by Alexander’s mysticism and the concept of the King’s divine right. The Quadruple Alliance (20 Nov. 1815), due mainly to the English Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, among Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Britain itself. The alliance’s purpose was to maintain the solidarity among the four powers against a possible resumption of France’s expansionism and revolutionary activism. To this end, art. 6 of the treaty provided for the new instrument of regular peacetime conferences to deal with the problems of preserving stability and order in Europe. Despite Metternich’s initial doubts, the two instruments proved one supportive of the other: the Holy Alliance provided the ideological framework, and the Quadruple Alliance the instrument (the so-called ‘diplomacy by conference’). In Metternich’s vision, there was a close link between domestic order and international stability. If there was disorder within a state (and liberalism was a source of the disorder), the ‘European concert’ had to intervene immediately to prevent it from spreading and disturbing the international order. For this reason, in 1820-22, upon request of the respective kings, the Quadruple Alliance intervened in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1820-21) and Spain (1822-23). It also threatened intervention in the Kingdom of Sardinia (1821), while Nicholas I (who had just acceded to the throne) crushed the Decembrist movement in Russia in 1825. However, in the 1820s, the ‘conservative solidarity’ was already in crisis. In May 1820, facing the revolutionary situation in Spain, the British government embraced the non-intervention principle, withdrawing from the Quadruple, provoking the crisis of the conference system, and delegitimizing the Holy Alliance’s policy. 2 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century 5. Liberalism and the national idea were the main forces challenging the Vienna order. They triggered several instability waves in the early 1820s, the early 1830s, and 1848-49, both in Europe and outside. In Europe, the conservative powers were able to preserve the existing order, at least until the Crimea War (1853-56). The most significant changes were Belgium’s independence in 1831 and the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1830. The restored dynasty was replaced first by a ‘bourgeoise’ monarchy (1830-48) under Louis Philippe d’Orleans (1773-1850), then by a Second French Republic (1848-52) under Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-73), nephew of Napoleon I. After having seized power in 1851, in 1853, ‘Lifetime President’ Louis Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor with the name of Napoleon III, establishing the Second French Empire (1853-70). The new French authorities increasingly converged on Britain’s liberal position, which strengthened after 1830, when Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) held the Ministry for Foreign Affairs for the first time. However, around the mid-1840s, the Franco-British convergence (which never materialized into a full-fledged alliance) entered into crisis. Napoleon III increasingly focused his attention on promoting France’s European paramountcy at Austria’s expense. Britain, in the same period, gradually shifted its attention to its growing extra European empire: this made London more and more involved in the Mediterranean affairs and in the future of the Ottoman Empire, which it supported against the Russian ambitions and its will to extend its control over the Turkish Straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. 6. In this context, the issue of Greece’s independence triggered the first major international crisis after the Congress of Vienna. The young Greek national movement (‘Filiki Eteria’, the most important among the Greek nationalist secret societies, had been founded in Odessa only in 1814) aroused the sympathy of the admirers of the ancient Greek civilization in Britain and France, while Orthodox Christian Greece found natural support in Tzarist Russia. Therefore, the Greek problem disrupted the camps: Russia (probably the most reactionary among the conservative powers) had a political interest in sympathizing with the Greek revolutionary ambitions, while Britain had to abandon its traditional pro-Ottoman policy due to the pressure of the public opinion. Britain and France had a difficult relationship, sometimes siding against the Ottomans (such as in the maritime battle of Navarino; 20 Oct. 1827), sometimes clashing over their respective influence in the Mediterranean while, after the beginning of the armed insurgency, to crush the Greeks movement, the Ottoman sultan, Mahmud II (r.: 1808-39), engaged the support of Mehmet Ali, the (Ottoman) governor (pasha) of Egypt who, in the following years, would have tried twice (1831-33 and 1839-41) to depose the sultan itself. The war lasted between 1820 and 1829, when the parties agreed to the Peace of Adrianople (Sept. 14). Greece became an independent constitutional monarchy, while Otto of Bavaria (r. 183262) was chosen as the first King. Although an Orthodox country, Greece would have been more under British than Russian influence, a link that would have lasted – albeit ups and downs – until the end of World War II. 7. In the same years, equally complex events led to the independence of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America. Influenced by US independence and French revolutionary ideas and taking advantage of Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America rebelled against Spain and Portugal for political and economic reasons. Spain could have prevailed in the struggle if it were not for the liberal revolution of 1820, which prevented King Ferdinand VII (r.: 1813-33) from sending troops overseas. The Quadruple Alliance authorized a French intervention to support the King of Spain, but 3 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 02 – Europe and the world in the early 19th century Britain opposed intervention in Latin America. The new British Foreign Minister, George Canning (in office: 1822-27), also called for a joint Anglo-American statement. Britain would have liked the newly independent Latin American states to be ruled as monarchies and the US entry into the international system to balance the weight of the conservative powers in Europe. However, the US assumed a more independent position by proclaiming the Monroe Doctrine (2 Dec. 1823), emphasizing the US ‘diversity’ from Europe. In the international arena, this ‘diversity’ took the form of two principles: (1) the US disinterest in European issues, as long as they did not affect the American ‘rights’; (2) the noncolonization of the Western hemisphere by the European powers. All the Spanish colonies became, over time, independent republics. Brazil was established as a constitutional monarchy in 1822 under Pedro I of Braganza, the eldest son of the King João VI of Portugal, who assumed the title of Empire of Brazil until 1889 when a coup d’état led to the establishment of the new Republic of Brazil. 8. The Greek independence and the events in the former Spanish colonies in Latin America gave a strong blow to the Vienna order that, by the end of the 1820s, was showing deep signs of weakness. In the struggle between liberal and conservative principles, the 1830s was a decade of transition, which laid the foundations of the revolution of 1848. Britain was actively engaged in promoting liberal reforms to channel revolutionary tension towards moderate outcomes. Austria, in its turn, was ready to preserve the Vienna order by military means if needed. In the Italian peninsula and the German territories, liberalism also connected with the issue of national unification, although both countries were able to reach national unity only in the second half of the century. Another critical area was the Mediterranean. Greece’s independence emphasized the Ottoman weakness and this, in its turn, encouraged Russia’s efforts to extend its control over the Turkish Straits. In the 1830s, French troops occupied Algeria, formally an Ottoman possession, while in 1831-33 and 1838-41, Muhammad Ali tried twice to extend Egypt’s control over the neighbouring Ottoman territories. Even if Muhammad Ali’s efforts failed (due also to the intervention of the European power), they confirmed the image of the Ottoman fragility (‘the sick man of Europe’). On the other hand, these challenges opened a reformist period in Ottoman policy (Tanzimat) that lasted until the late 1870s. However, the effort to modernize the state’s machinery along Western lines did not affect its structural limits, nor was it able to limit Western interference or introduce a proper constitutional system, even if a constitution was adopted in 1876. 4