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Serious Work for a New Europe: The Congress of Vienna after Two Hundred Years

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2015

Katherine B. Aaslestad
Katherine B. Aaslestad*
Affiliation:
West Virginia University
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Extract

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Central European History , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 225 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2015 

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References

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2 Several conferences took place in 2014 and 2015, including “The Congress of Vienna and Its Global Dimension,” University of Vienna, 2014; “Vienna 1815: The Making of a European Security Culture,” Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, 2014; “The Power of Peace: New Perspectives on the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815),” Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2014; and “The Congress of Vienna 1814–1815: Making Peace after Global War,” New York City, Columbia University, 2015. Some academic conferences held in 2015 have panels devoted to the Congress, including the annual conference of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era and the annual conference of the German Studies Association. UN Chronicle, the magazine of the United Nations, dedicated the Dec. 2014 volume Conference Diplomacy 1815–2015 to the bicentennial of the Congress of Vienna; see http://unchronicle.un.org/issue/conference-diplomacy/.

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