Rites of Peace: Final Comment

I have posted twice before on Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna by Adam Zamoyski. (March 8 and March 6) Last night my book club discussed the book, and want to add one thought that came out of that discussion.

The book seems odd in the juxtaposition of materials.

• It describes the complexity of the issues faced by the Congress in terms of the redrawing of the boundaries of European nations,
• It draws the contrast between the clear purpose of the four great powers that combined and added lesser powers to their coalition to depose Napoleon versus the diversity and conflicts among the differing purposes of the leaders from the many states involved in the Congress, each of which had security concerns as well as economic, political and military interests to advance.
• It draws the contrast between the interests of the monarchs and aristocrats in maintaining the legitimacy of the system which legitimized their authority and the interests of the peoples in the regions that they ruled which might have been better served by the liberal ideas that emerged in revolutionary movements.
• It draws the distinction between "nations" in the sense of people with a common culture and language and "states" or political entities. (The Germans and the Italians of the time were divided into many states, with unification to come only later in the 19th century.)
• It emphasizes the complexities of the motivations of the individuals who were the principals in the negotiations, including their ideological positions, the interests of the states which the believed they were representing, the needs to accommodate interests of their constituencies, the financial interests which they were accommodating through what we would now consider the acceptance of bribes, and the ambition for personal honor and prestige and influence.
• It describes in great detail the complexity of sexual intrigue, with principals moving from affair to affair while managing wives and families, while participating in the most complex of social seasons with a multitude of events which combined pleasure and negotiation.
• The physical demands of the Congress and related meetings which went on for months, at times in the most difficult of physical surroundings, with people sometimes ill and often exhausted, and changes in the participants as minister would replace minister.

Zamoyski points out that those who seek to evaluate the historical impact of the Treaty of Vienna and related instruments disagree on the degree to which the Congress stabilized Europe and reduced the level of conflict, the impact it had on the speed of creation of "nation states", and the impact it had in the process of replacement of the ancient regime of aristocracies and monarchies by liberal regimes of democratically empowered middle classes.

When we think of a Congress making decisions on matters with such grave impacts, I suppose we are all tempted to suppose that the decisions are made rationally based on detailed analysis of options, costs and benefits. Zamoyski's exposition makes it clear that in the Congress of Vienna the decisions were in fact made by very human people in difficult circumstances, with quite limited rationality and quite limited information, who could not have foreseen the long term impacts of their actions and might indeed have been much more concerned with the impacts in the near future.

There is a famous article on "muddling through" (Lindblom, Charles E. 1959. The Science of "Muddling Through." Public Administration Review, 19, 79-88.) which comes to mind. The discussion made me realize that Zamoyski in the construction of his book made the process of muddling through in the Congress of Vienna very clear and intuitive. One of my friends said it was terrifying, thinking of similar exercises after World Wars I and II, as well as the current economic crisis and the conflicts in Asia and the Middle East.

On the other hand, I am somewhat reassured by the fact that while systems are larger and more complex today, we have two centuries more of accumulated knowledge and understanding with which to approach them, and much better education systems that have trained our decision makers. Indeed, I am glad that our political systems are more meritocratic and less likely to give power to the scion of a famous family, and indeed that we can replace our chief executive officers by a less painful process than the French Revolution. The Congress of Vienna could have been worse -- think if England had been ruled by Mad King George rather than his son the Regent.