Paul Kennedy - The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Like all other civilizations at the top of the wheel of fortune, therefore, the British could believe that their position was both ‘natural’ and destined to continue. And just like all those other civilizations, they were in for a rude shock. But that was still some way into the future, and in the age of Palmerston and Macaulay, it was British strengths rather than weaknesses which were mostly in evidence.

The impact of economic and technological change upon the relative position of the Great Powers of continental Europe was much less dramatic in the half-century or so following 1815, chiefly because the industrialization which did occur started off from a much lower base than in Britain. The farther east one went, the more feudal and agricultural the local economy tended to be; but even in western Europe, which had been closed to Britain in many aspects of commercial and technological development prior to 1790, two decades of war had left a heavy mark: population losses, changed customs barriers, higher taxes, the ‘pastoralization’ of the Atlantic sector, the loss of overseas markets and raw materials, the difficulties of acquiring the latest British inventions, were all setbacks to general economic growth, even when (for special reasons) certain trades and regions had flourished during the Napoleonic wars. 34 If the coming of peace meant a resumption of normal trade and also allowed continental entrepreneurs to see how far behind Great Britain they had fallen, it did not produce a sudden burst of modernization. There simply was not enough capital, or local demand, or official enthusiasm, to produce a transformation; and many a European merchant, craftsman, and handloom weaver would bitterly oppose the adoption of English techniques, seeing in them (quite correctly) a threat to their older way of life. 35 In consequence, although the steam engine, the power loom, and the railway made some headway in continental Europe,

between 1815 and 1848 the traditional features of the economy remained preeminent: the superiority of agriculture over industrial production, the absence of cheap and rapid means of transport and the priority given to consumer goods over heavy industry. 36

As Table 7above shows, the relative increases in per capita levels of industrialization for the century after 1750 were not very impressive; and only in the 1850s and 1860s did the picture begin to change.

The prevailing political and diplomatic conditions of ‘Restoration Europe’ also combined to freeze the international status quo, or at least to permit only small-scale alterations in the existing order. Precisely because the French Revolution had been such a frightening challenge both to the internal social arrangements and to the traditional states system of Europe, Metternich and fellow conservatives now regarded any new developments with suspicion. An adventurist diplomacy, running the risk of a general war, was as much to be frowned upon as a campaign for national self-determination or for constitutional reform. On the whole, political leaders felt that they had enough on their hands simply dealing with domestic turbulences and the agitation of sectional interests, many of which were beginning to feel threatened by even the early appearances of new machinery, the growth of urbanization, and other incipient challenges to the guilds, the crafts, and the protective regulations of a preindustrial society. What one historian has described as an ‘endemic civil war that produced the great outbreaks of insurrection in 1830, as well as a host of intermediate revolts’, 37 meant that statesmen generally possessed neither the energies nor the desires to engage in foreign conflicts which might well weaken their own regimes.

In this connection, it is worth noting that many of the military actions which did occur were initiated precisely to defend the existing sociopolitical order from revolutionary threat – for example, the Austrian army’s crushing of resistance in Piedmont in 1823, the French military’s move into Spain in the same year to restore to King Ferdinand his former powers, and, the most notable cause of all, the use of Russian troops to suppress the Hungarian revolution of 1848. If these reactionary measures grew increasingly unpopular to British opinion, that country’s insularity meant that it would not intervene to rescue the liberal forces from suppression. As for territorial changes within Europe, they could occur only after the agreement of the ‘Concert’ of the Great Powers, some of which might need to be compensated in one way or another. Unlike either the age of Napoleon preceding it or the age of Bismarck following it, therefore, the period 1815–65 internationalized most of its tricky political problems (Belgium, Greece), and frowned upon unilateral actions. All this gave a basic, if precarious, stability to the existing states system.

The international position of Prussia in the decades after 1815 was clearly affected by these general political and social conditions. 38 Although greatly augmented territorially by the acquisition of the Rhineland, the Hohenzollern state now seemed much less impressive than it had been under Frederick the Great. It was, after all, only in the 1850s and 1860s that economic expansion took place on Prussian soil faster than virtually anywhere else in Europe. In the first half of the century, by contrast, the country seemed an industrial pigmy, its annual iron production of 50,000 tons being eclipsed by that not only of Britain, France, and Russia but also of the Habsburg Empire. Furthermore, the acquisition of the Rhineland not only split Prussia geographically but also exacerbated the political divisions between the state’s more ‘liberal’ western and more ‘feudal’ eastern provinces. For the greater part of this period, domestic tensions were at the forefront of politics; and while the forces of reaction usually prevailed, they were alarmed at the reformist tendencies of 1810–19, and quite panicked by the revolution of 1848–9. Even when the military reimposed a profoundly illiberal regime, fear of domestic unrest made the Prussian elite reluctant to contemplate foreign-policy adventures; on the contrary, conservatives felt, they needed to identify as closely as possible with the forces of stability elsewhere in Europe, especially Russia and even Austria.

Prussia’s internal-politics disputes were complicated still further by the debate about the ‘German question’, that is to say, about the possibility of an eventual union of the thirty-nine German states, and the means by which that goal could be secured. For not only did the issue predictably divide the liberal-nationalist bourgeoisie of Prussia from most of the conservatives, but it also involved delicate negotiations with the middle and south German states and – most important of all – revived the rivalry with the Habsburg Empire that had last been seen in the heated disputes over Saxony in 1814. Although Prussia was the undisputed leader of the increasingly important German Customs Union (Zollverein) which developed from the 1830s onward, and which the Austrians could not join because of the protectionist pressures of their own industrialists, the balance of political advantage generally lay in Vienna’s favour during these decades. In the first place, both Frederick William III (1797–1840) and Frederick William IV (1840–61) feared the results of a clash with the Habsburg Empire more than Metternich and his successor Schwarzenberg did with their northern neighbour. In addition, Austria presided over the German Federation’s meetings at Frankfurt; it had the sympathy of many of the smaller German states, not to mention the Prussian old conservatives; and it seemed indisputably a European power, whereas Prussia was little more than a German one. The most noticeable sign of Vienna’s greater weight came in the 1850 agreement at Oelmuetz, which temporarily ended their jockeying for advantage in the German question when Prussia agreed to demobilize its army and to abandon its own schemes for unification. A diplomatic humiliation, in Frederick William IV’s view, was preferable to a risky war so shortly after the 1848 revolution. And even those Prussian nationalists like Bismarck, smarting at such a retreat before Austrian demands, felt that little could be done elsewhere until ‘the struggle for mastery in Germany’ was finally settled.