Congress/Concert System was that it could, and did, tolerate warfare that served to adjust
relations among the great powers. An international order is not a static structure; it has
to be dynamic, able to accommodate changing contexts and the rise and fall of states. In
the sharpest of contrasts to the great power wars of the twentieth century, those of the
nineteenth, concentrated in the sixteen years between 1854 and 1870, did not escalate to
engulf the whole of Europe.
It is commonplace to argue that the Congress System died as early as the 1820s, while
its normative features in the form of the Concert System did not survive beyond mid-
century. There is some merit in that view, but overall it is too harsh. As reluctant chairman
of the Berlin Congress in 1878, Bismarck gave voice to a distinctly systemic view of the
purpose of the proceedings when he said, ‘We are not here to consider the happiness of
the Bulgarians [who, as Russia’s clients, had just been awarded huge territorial gains by
the soon to be annulled Treaty of San Stefano] but to secure the peace of Europe’ (quoted
in Bartlett, 1996: 105). Would that a similar congress could have been convened in July
- But high-level diplomacy is hostage to many factors, not least the competence of
the statesmen involved, and the measure of discretion they are allowed by their domestic
contexts.
Versailles, the League and collective security
In 1919 the victorious Allies and their associates tried a new approach to international
order: collective security through the agency of a League of Nations. Whereas the post-
1815 Congress of Europe had been an exclusive club of the recognized great powers, the
League was to embrace all states in good standing (e.g., Germany and the new Bolshevik
Republic in Russia were not invited to join at first), those who, in the language of the
time, ‘abided by the standards of civilization’ (Gong, 1984). The League did have a pre-
mier class in the form of a permanent council, so it bore more than a casual resemblance
in practice to the Congress System. However, the later institution’s founding fathers
intended that it should introduce a radical change in the way international relations
were conducted. Those founders were primarily American and British, with President
Woodrow Wilson well out in front as advocate. The French contributed to the extensive
planning for the League, but their political culture and their geostrategic concerns were
not as friendly to idealistic schemes for the wholesale reformation of international
politics as were those of the more liberal, optimistic and geostrategically disengaged
Americans and British.
To be fair to the statesmen of 1919, one must recall their historical context. More than
9 million men had just died in battle. The greatest war in history had terminated less than
a year previously. Moreover, unwisely but inevitably, the peace conference was convened,
bereft of participation by the defeated states, in and close by the capital of the principal
Allied power. France was the state that had suffered the most from German aggression,
so Paris was not a political environment especially conducive to the shaping of a post-
war order that would be generous towards the defeated. There was a certain euphoria in
the air at the time, and understandably so. Recent events had been so terrible that they
were held both to necessitate and to license a revolution in diplomatic and strategic
behaviour. The general publics in France and Britain simultaneously seemed ready to
believe that the League could deliver eternal peace, while demanding that the guilty
268 War, peace and international relations