peaceful means, or if need be by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.”
This was, in effect, an attempt to apply the principle of the Carlsbad Decrees to all the world; and, had the attempt succeeded, all Europe would have been turned into a confederation on the model of that of Germany; for a political alliance, charged with the safeguarding of the territorial settlement defined by treaty, would have been substituted a central diet of the great powers, armed with undefined authority; and the sovereign independence of the nations would have been at an end. To any such principle, and therefore to the protocol in which it was embodied, Great Britain offered an uncompromising opposition. In vain Metternich urged upon Castlereagh that the protocol was but the logical conclusion drawn from premises to which he was already committed; for, if the alliance was to be effective in maintaining peace, it must interfere wherever and whenever peace should be threatened, and therefore to crush internal revolutions which could not but have an external result. The logic was perfect; the proposition that on which every “project of peace” must eventually break. Castlereagh’s reply was, in brief, that Great Britain could never admit a principle which she would not in any circumstances allow to be applied in her own case.
The absence of the signatures of Great Britain and France
from the Troppau protocol marked the first rift in the alliance,
a rift that was soon to develop into a breach. For the
First rift in
the alliance.
time, indeed, the crack was “papered over.” Castlereagh
was prepared to leave Austria a free hand to
deal with the risings in Naples and Piedmont, since
she had treaty rights in the former case and her interests, as an
Italian power, were threatened in both. Great Britain was even
represented at the congress which reassembled at Laibach in
January 1821, though Lord Stewart, the ambassador at Vienna,
was not armed with full powers. Castlereagh had
Congress of Laibach, 1821.
approved of the invitation sent to the king of Naples
to attend the congress, as implying “negotiation,” an
improvement on the dictatorial attitude of the protocol.
But everything in the conferences tended still further to shatter
the unstable foundations of the alliance. Capo d’Istria, as though
the debates of Aix-la-Chapelle had never been, raised once more
the spectre of the “Universal Union” which Castlereagh
believed he had laid for ever. Metternich, anxious to prove to
the Italian Liberals that the tsar was no longer their friend,
welcomed the demonstration, and Prussia followed obediently
in Austria’s wake. “It is clear,” wrote Lord Stewart, “that a
Triple Understanding has been created which binds the parties
to carry forward their own views in spite of any difference of
opinion which may exist between them and the two great
constitutional governments.” (See Troppau and Laibach.)
But the narrower “Holy Alliance” of the three autocratic
monarchies, as opposed to the two western constitutional
monarchies, was not in fact destined to take shape
till after the Paris revolution of 1830. Several factors
Effect of revolution in Spain.
delayed the process, notably the revolt of the Greeks
against the Ottoman rule, and the Spanish question,
which latter formed the main subject of discussion at the congress
of Verona in 1822. In the Eastern Question the interests
of Austria and Great Britain were identical; both desired to
maintain the integrity of Turkey; both saw that this integrity
was in the greatest peril owing to the possible intervention of the
Orthodox tsar in favour of his co-religionists in revolt; and both
agreed that the best means of preventing such intervention was
to bind the Russian emperor to the European concert by using
his devotion to the principles of the Holy Alliance. At Verona,
however, the Eastern question was entirely overshadowed
Congress of
Verona, 1822.
by that of Spain, and in this matter the views of Great
Britain were diametrically opposed to those of the
other powers of the alliance. She shared indeed with
France and Austria the strenuous objection to the
emperor Alexander’s proposal to march 150,000 Russians into
Piedmont in order to deal with Jacobinism whether in France or
Spain; but she protested equally strenuously against the counter-proposal
of France, which was ultimately adopted, that a French
army should march into Spain to liberate the king from his
constitutional fetters in the name of Europe. George Canning,
carrying on the tradition of Castlereagh, once more protested,
through Wellington, as British plenipotentiary at the congress,
against the whole principle of intervention; and when, in spite
of the British protest, the other powers persisted, the breach of
Great Britain with the continental alliance was proclaimed to
all the world. When, on the 7th of April 1823, the French army
under the duke of Angoulême crossed the Bidassoa, the great
experiment of governing Europe through a central committee
of the great powers was at an end. (See Verona, Congress of;
Alexander I.; Londonderry, Robert Stewart, 2nd marquess of;
Canning, George.)
Henceforth, though the treaties survived, and with them the
principle of the concert on which they were based, “Europe”
as a diplomatic conception tends to sink into the background
and to be replaced by the old international
End of the “Confederation
of Europe.”
anarchy of the 18th century. To Canning this development
seemed wholly welcome. He applied to the
rivalry of states the Liberal principle of free competition as the
sole condition of healthy growth. “Villèle is a minister of thirty
years ago,” he wrote to Bagot on the 3rd of January 1823, “no
revolutionary scoundrel: but constitutionally hating England, as
Choiseul and Vergennes used to hate us, and so things are
getting back to a wholesome state again. Every nation for itself,
and God for us all.” But the essential difference between the
rivalries of the 18th and 19th centuries was in the conception
of the “nation.” To Canning, as to the diplomatists of the
congress of Vienna, “nation” was synonymous with “state,”
and national boundaries were those defined by the treaties,
Principle of nationality.
which Canning was as bent on preserving as any of his
reactionary contemporaries. The conception of the
divine right of every nationality to readjust political
frontiers to suit its own ideals was as foreign to him
as to Metternich. Yet this principle of nationality, which was
destined during the 19th century to wreck the political structure
consecrated at Vienna, and to leave to the succeeding age a host of
unsolved and insoluble problems, found in Canning its earliest
champion in the higher councils of Europe. The recognition of
the independence of the South American republics and of the
belligerent rights of the Greek insurgents were both in the first
instance motived by the particular interests of Great Britain;
but they were none the less hailed as concessions to the principles
of nationality, to which they gave an impetus which was destined
to continue till the face of Europe had been transformed.
This in fact constitutes the main significance for Europe of the War of Greek Independence, which lasted from the first rising of the Greeks in the Morea in 1821 till the signature of the treaty of London on the 7th of May Europe and the revolt of Greece. 1832 (see Greek Independence, War of; Turkey: History). Its actual outcome, so far as the political structure of Europe was concerned, was but to add an insignificant kingdom to the European states system. But its moral effect was immense. The sacrosanctity of the status quo had been violated, and violated with the active aid of three of the powers of the continental alliance: Russia, France and Great Britain. Metternich was right when he said that, in principle, there was no difference between the Greek insurgents and any other “rebels against legitimate authority,” and the Liberals of all Europe, forced into inactivity by the Austrian police system, hailed in the Greeks the champions of their own cause. Philhellenism, beyond its proper enthusiasm, served as a convenient veil for agitations that had little concern with Greece. Other forces making for political change were simultaneously at work. The peace secured by the concert of the powers had given free Economic progress; rise of the middle classes. play to the mechanical and industrial innovations that heralded the marvellous economic revolution of the coming age; wealth increased rapidly, and with it the influence and the ambition of the middle classes. The revolution of July 1830, which established the bourgeois monarchy in France, marked their first triumph. In
