The revolutionary movement of 1830 did not destroy the influence of Metternich in Europe. He was too able a man to be overthrown as leader of the legitimists merely because the people were in a ferment. To his party he was still the man to be trusted, and as legitimacy managed to beat down revolution in most of the areas in which commotion appeared, the scope of his power was wide, although it was evident that he could not use it with former impunity.
At the same time he gave up the pretense of making the Alliance of the Powers a federation. He was content to try to secure that concert of action that would enable the states that leaned to legitimacy to act together against incipient revolution; and for a time he was successful. In anticipation of the failure of the plan to permit France to interfere in the Spanish colonies, Canning exclaimed: “Things are getting back to a wholesome state again. Every nation for itself and God for us all!” But the cry of joy was premature. The time had not returned in which each crisis was to be met in its own way, without reference to a recognized concert of action, and the reason was the deep consciousness of the states that certain grave questions that ever hung over the horizon had in them the possibilities of general war. Let one of these questions loom large, and common action was taken to avert the threatened danger. In such way the Concert of Europe was kept alive, and remained something to be reckoned with as a part of the background of European policy. In spite of its temporary disuse, it was a thing to be brought forth again if the nations decided that it was needed to meet an emergency.
In fact, it reappeared many times in the course of the nineteenth century, notably in 1840, when the so-called Eastern question became prominent. At that time Mehemet Ali, who had made himself lord of Egypt and seized Syria, was threatening Constantinople, having the support of France. Russia became alarmed, made a close alliance with the sultan, and seemed about to get that secure foothold on the Bosphorus for which she had striven many years. Great Britain, Austria, and Prussia resented this prospect and took steps jointly to counteract it. Their object was to preserve Turkey from the dangers that threatened to divide her. Before such a combination Russia was not able to stand, and she gave up her pretensions in order to join the other three powers. France, however, held to her purpose, supporting the adventurer of Egypt. Thus it happened that the four Great Powers, reviving the Concert of Europe, but leaving out the government of Louis Philippe, had a conference in London to settle Eastern affairs. They decided to offer Mehemet Ali certain concessions and to make war on him if he refused to accept them. He spurned their counsel and was expelled from Syria but was saved from utter destruction by the interference of France, who secured a settlement by which he was left in firm possession of Egypt, as hereditary ruler under the nominal authority of Turkey. All the powers now united in an agreement by which Turkey was to exclude foreign warships from the Dardanelles. Thus, by an appeal to the principle of the Concert of Europe, a grave crisis was averted, and war between Great Britain and Russia was avoided.
In 1848, seven years after the conclusion of these negotiations, Europe was thrown into convulsions by the appearance of a new era of revolution. France became a republic, and Germany, Austria, and Hungary went through such violent upheavals that the existence of arbitrary government hung for a time in the balance. Out of the struggle emerged Napoleon III, of France, who thought some military achievement was necessary to stabilize his power. At that time Russia was asserting a protectorate over all Christians in Turkey, and it was generally believed that she was about to establish vital political control. Napoleon took up the sword against her and Great Britain came to help, the result being the Crimean War, 1854–1856.
In the beginning of this struggle the Concert of Europe seemed to be dead, but two years of heavy fighting and nearly futile losses brought it to life again. The war, which began in an outburst of international rivalry, ended in the Conference of Paris, 1856, in which all the Great Powers but Prussia undertook to settle the Eastern question by neutralizing the Euxine and the Danube and by making new allotments of territory which were supposed to adjust boundaries in such a manner that rivalries would disappear. The Conference went on to take up the work of a true European congress by agreeing upon the Declaration of Paris, in which were assembled a body of rules regulating neutral trade in time of war. England gave up her long defended pretension to seize enemy goods on neutral ships and neutral goods on enemy ships, and in return gained the recognition that privateering was unlawful. Thus the Crimean War, fought by Great Britain and France against Russia, and in support of Turkey—with Austria and Prussia as neutrals—was at last ended by an agreement between all the parties concerned. The nations undertook to settle the long Eastern dispute by pledging the sultan to reforms which it was not in his nature to carry out.
The next three wars were fought without respect to the Concert of Europe. They arose from local causes and were soon determined without the aid of the Great Powers. They were the war of Austria and France over the liberation of Italy, 1859; the war between Prussia and Austria, 1866, in which Prussia overthrew the Austrian predominancy in Germany; and the Franco-Prussian war in 1870–1871, in which Prussia crushed France and made herself the head of the German Empire. In the first of these struggles no state could gain enough power to become a menace to the other states, since Italy was to be the recipient of all territory gained. Had the contest gone so far as to promise the vast enlargement of the power of France by reason of an alliance with enlarged Italy, interference might have resulted. In fact, the German states began to suspect such a result, and the realization of it was one of Napoleon’s reasons for withdrawing very unceremoniously from the war. Here we see, therefore, that the principle of concert was not entirely dead. The second and third wars were fought by a brilliantly organized state, Prussia, with whose successful armies no nation cared to make a trial of strength.
In 1877 Russia made war on Turkey and proceeded with such energy that she soon forced the sultan to sign the treaty of San Stefano, altogether in favor of Russia. The particulars of the struggle belong to another chapter,[7] but here it is only necessary to point out that the Concert of Europe was now suddenly revived by the Great Powers, and Russia was forced to submit her well won victory to the Congress of Berlin, which scaled down the awards of San Stefano until Russia might well ask what was left of her victory. A similar thing happened in the Balkan War of 1912–1913. Here the parties concerned had fought their quarrel out to the end and had nearly expelled Turkey from Europe, dividing the spoils among themselves. Then in stepped the Great Powers, prescribing in a treaty at London the limits of gain to the successful contestants. They acted in the interest of peace; for Austria, watching the actions of Serbia and Greece, let it be known that she would not allow Serbia to have Albania, and the Powers interfered in order to prevent such action from kindling a great European war.
Thus in three notable wars, the Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Balkan War, the action of the Great Powers was not to prevent war, but to neutralize its gains. So far did this principle go that writers were known to suggest that war would no longer be profitable to nations, since in a Concert of Europe the Great Powers would ever nullify the gains of the contestants.
At this time concert had come to mean another thing than it meant in the decade after the fall of Napoleon. Then it was a fixed system of consultation and decision in anticipation of some issue that threatened war: now it was concerted action to keep a local war from going so far as to involve a general conflict. It was a last resort in the presence of dire danger. A more present means of preserving peace was the Balance of Power, which consisted in forming the states in groups one of which balanced another group and prevented the development of overwhelming strength. The principle was well known in the past history of Europe, but it was never so clearly defined in the remote past as in the last half century. For our purposes its modern phase begins after the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–1871.