For at least 200 years, men have sought to create a world order that would ensure stability and eliminate threats to peace. But it is only in the 20th century that this ideal has been brought to fruition, first in the ill-fated League of Nations, established in 1919, which expired, almost unnoticed, after the outbreak of war in 1939, and then in the United Nations.
Governing the World charts the history of the idea of international co-operation since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It is a penetrating and wide-ranging study, illuminating not just the history of internationalism but also the problems involved in realising it in the world of today.
The story begins in 1818, when there occurred a development which Metternich’s secretary, Friedrich von Gentz, saw as ‘a phenomenon without precedent in the history of the world’, the creation of the Concert of Europe, a system of regular summits amongst the powers, as an instrument to keep the peace.
But, as Mazower shows, the Concert was rapidly bedevilled by a confusion of aim. Metternich saw it as a grouping of conservative states united by the principle of legitimacy and dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. He believed that any threat to that principle from the forces of liberalism, because it jeopardised stability, was also a threat to peace.
The Tsar of Russia and the King of Prussia agreed. But Britain’s Foreign Secretary, George Canning, declared that the Concert should not be a union ‘for the superintendence of the internal affairs of other States’, ‘a European police’ designed to put down liberal revolutions throughout the Continent. Fundamentally the Concert failed because it could not accommodate change, the demand of the peoples of Europe for political rights.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in