CONGRESS OF VIENNA ESSAY
DID ONE COUNTRY OR GROUP AT THE CONGRESS HAVE A VISION THAT DOMINATED THE ARCHITECTURE OR MAKE UP OF THE NEW POLITICAL ORDER IN EUROPE? EXPLAIN.
ANDREW WEI, EUROPEAN HISTORY 12 AP (DR HUGHES)
The congress of Vienna marked the end of a series of wars and disturbances that wracked Europe for twenty-five years and ushered in a new system of European politics. Numerous modern-day scholars, such as Stella Ghervas, have asserted that the Congress system was successful in producing a pan-European “system of peace” for the century that followed. However, historical evidence and analysis of historical events have shown that the congress of Vienna was, despite the rhetoric of the great powers of the time, merely a manifestation
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One major tenant of the “system of peace” described by Stella Ghervas was the suppression of internal dissent and the maintenance of law and order from revolution in collaboration with all major European states. This idea is best expressed in the Troppau Protocol, which stated that “the powers bind themselves, by peaceful means, or if need be, by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.” However, despite attempts by the so-called “Congress system” to maintain the peace, in reality, these attempts always relied on the tactic approval of the British and must have fell within the scope of the preservation of the British-led balance of power. A prime example of this in action is the British reaction to the Latin American wars of independence. When the powers of the Holy Alliance sought to bring back the renegade Spanish colonies back under European control, the British refused to do so, with British foreign minister George Canning remarking that “Spanish America is free … and if we do not mismanage our affairs she is English”. Indeed, despite the Congress system’s lip service to the idea of a pan-European order, the system always depended on British