The recent bicentenary of the 1815 Holy Alliance stimulated scholarly production on this treaty, the significance of which in international relations was negligible but which nevertheless became an important symbol of its time. Isaac Nakhimovsky’s new book is a further contribution to this topic.

The Holy Alliance was criticized from the time of its declaration for being of little practical value and, as time went on, for the antiliberal policies of its main signatories: Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Nakhimovsky focuses on a different and lesser-known aspect of the story: the positive reception of the Holy Alliance in Europe and the United States. For some contemporaries, the declaration was not a symbol of the autocratic powers’ retrograde policies but the dawn of a new and better era. They saw in its text a way to secure peace and freedom through the federalization of Europe and liberal constitutional regimes. Some even associated it with a means to abolish the slave trade.

Nakhimovsky’s text is not directly about the Holy Alliance itself but about how men and women projected their visions and aspirations onto it. This was a consequence of the very vague content of the declaration, both in its draft and its modified final version, which allowed for varying interpretations. Nakhimovsky explains this positive approach primarily by the broader context of contemporary thinking influenced by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the idea of Russia’s role as a future guarantor of peace. He continues his narrative deep into the second half of the twentieth century, revealing the continuity of this positive attitude toward the Holy Alliance within the context of the later experiences with the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War.

Nakhimovsky’s linguistic proficiency has allowed him to process a large body of scholarly literature and primary (almost exclusively printed) sources, and his conclusions are in many respects convincing and include many European regions and the United States. For all these positive features, the book under review could become an important contribution to the history of political and legal thought.

Whether this will happen is uncertain because the book’s potential is limited by the fact that the positive reception of the Holy Alliance was restricted to a very small number of people, and mainly in the very short period up to the early 1820s, although isolated positive responses did occur here and there in later decades. This view of the Holy Alliance was thus undoubtedly a marginal affair with hardly any noticeable role in the history of international relations and political ideas. The fact that this approach has long been disregarded can be considered proof of this.

The questionable significance of the Holy Alliance in international relations brings me to the main criticism of the book: at over 300 pages it seems unnecessarily long. It contains a great deal of information about the worldviews of the selected contemporaries, of whom there are not very many, but the reader is usually kept waiting before the author gets to the point of their relationship with the Holy Alliance. Sometimes this relationship appears shallow, so more relevant quotations could have been used as direct evidence of these contemporaries’ deliberations on federation and peace in their evaluation of the Holy Alliance. The point to note here is that the men and women introduced in the book had no direct influence on drafting the declaration, and this even includes people close to Tsar Alexander I, such as Frédéric-César de la Harpe and Adam Jerzy Czartoryski. The biographical information on these and others, therefore, could have been reduced.

This brings me back to the beginning of my review, namely to the attention historians have paid to the Holy Alliance over the last decade. Nakhimovsky’s work has not changed my mind about its excessiveness. On page 45 he “victoriously” negates Metternich’s statement that the Holy Alliance was never mentioned in diplomatic correspondence by citing some Russian diplomatic documents, especially those for 1818. While this is marginal information in the context of the whole book, it is symptomatic of recent research on the Holy Alliance: a few documents are the exception that prove the rule regarding its trivial significance in international relations. I have not found a single politically significant reference to this declaration in European (including Russian) and United States diplomatic archives from 1814 to the early 1860s. Then again, in the political texts of the mid-nineteenth century on European and world peace, justice, and supranational cooperation (including the extension of federation along the lines of the German Confederation to Italy or even all of Europe), the vast majority of Europeans did not pay much attention to the Holy Alliance, and if they did, their opinions were almost exclusively negative. This, however, changes nothing in the fact that Nakhimovsky’s book is an intellectually stimulating, if somewhat long-winded, contribution to the so-called Holy Alliance phenomenon.