This book is a historiographical manifesto because Miroslav Šedivý, a professor of history at the Czech University of Pardubice, presents a new fundamental paradigm for interpreting the first half of the nineteenth century: the concept of “security policy.” As the preeminent expert on the history of international relations in post-Napoleonic Europe between 1815 and 1848, he provides a new perspective on categories typical of the period, such as “restoration,” “nationalism,” colonialism, “pre-March,” and revolution, or rather, he reframes and integrates them into a higher-level interpretative concept.
The system of international law established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 is generally regarded as the foundation of a continuous era of peace until 1848. Thanks to extensive research in thirty-six archives in thirteen states (Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, England, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States), the author discovered a previously unknown decade-long crisis in the 1840s. This is also confirmed by his analysis of seventy-two contemporary newspapers and journals because the censorship that spread after 1815 surprisingly did not extend to reporting on international affairs in the 1840s.
Reinhart Koselleck has called the epochal turning point between ca. 1770 and 1830, which formed the Western modern era, a “saddle time”; comparably, one could say that Ṣ̌edivý has identified a second “saddle period” within the epoch of the Viennese system after 1815: the years between 1839 and 1853, during which this system was systematically deconstructed by the policies of the great powers. The focus here is on the 1840s.
The starting point is the intertwined double crisis of the Ottoman Empire in Egypt and the “Rhine Crisis” (1839/40). The following crisis areas are covered: Russia and the Danube region, as well as the Ottoman Empire; the Rhine Crisis; the Schleswig-Holstein question and the associated Danish Scandinavianism; Great Britain’s imperial actions ̶in the “sulfur war” against Sicily and in the opium war against China; the idea of an Italian maritime empire; the global expansion of the USA; and German plans for an imperial Central Europe. He systematically reveals the constellations of threat, all of which exposed the weakness of the international system established in 1815. The thesis is that the attractiveness of nationalism and the call for the national power state arose from the threat.
The perception or feeling of threat provoked a new approach to security policy in the affected countries—not only the German Confederation—among the acting politicians and diplomats but also among the broad social public. In an amazing way, the author manages to make it plausible how seemingly irreconcilable demands for a strong national state and a peace-securing international order could be represented by one and the same person.
Conservative diplomats, liberal and democratic publicists, future 1848 deputies of the Paulskirche, Republicans, and even revolutionaries like Friedrich Hecker and Gustav Struve saw themselves united in the demand for a politically strong and, for its own security, territorially expansive Germany in the middle of Europe. In view of the perceived threat, this had already been identified as “realpolitik” in the 1840s before the revolution; it had already been done by the inventor of this word, Ludwig August von Rochau, so that the talk of turning to “realpolitik” was by no means a reaction to the failed revolution, but should rather be seen as an earlier result of an internationally induced crisis of political security.
The author often speaks of “the Germans,” but he does not make any generalizations without reflection: his meticulous source material reveals that he includes all levels of society—right down to the police reports on public opinion in the Habsburg monarchy, which reach particularly far down the social ladder.
The dualism between Prussia and Austria, which was to dominate the period after the revolution of 1848/49, was not yet a significant factor in the 1840s. In view of the external threat from France, the common interest was still the strengthening of the military power of the German Confederation. All the more surprising are the demands of many publicists and politicians that the German Confederation should expand into southern and western Europe through alliances. Such an expansion would have been in the sense of a Germanic Central Europe, which would not have excluded Austria and would have included Alsace, Lorraine, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Danube region. American readers will be interested to see how the United States’ own turn toward global expansion during the 1840s was closely noted and debated in Europe and linked to the security issue.
The author contributes an interesting new explanation to the revolutions of 1848 without ignoring constitutional, social, or economic impulses. He treats 1848 as an episode, not as a milestone, because the construct of “encirclement” by powers hostile to “the Germans” had already been formulated in the 1840s, including by politicians and publicists who later became members of the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848/49. Well-known phenomena such as the demand for German unity and the sovereign power state, friendship with Poland, and the vision of an international brotherhood are put to the test and appear in a new light. In a public discussion of a density and breadth never seen before, it becomes clear what dramatic significance the power-political actions of the great powers had when they broke the principles of international law of 1815 and when trust in the peaceful order gave way to a lively urge for national power states. This study can be seen as a pioneering work that will be followed by further inspiring research.
