What is Metternich system? Assess its impact on Europe.

Answer:

The Metternich system was the conservative order established in Europe after 1815 under the guidance of the Austrian Chancellor Prince Metternich. Resting on legitimacy, the balance of power and the suppression of revolution, it dominated the continent for a generation.

Its principles

• Legitimacy restored the dynasties displaced by the French Revolution and Napoleon.
• The balance of power prevented any single state from dominating Europe.
• The Concert of Europe provided for congresses to settle disputes collectively.
• Intervention was justified to suppress revolution wherever it appeared.
• Censorship and secret police, as under the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, enforced conformity.

Its operation

• Congresses at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach and Verona coordinated policy.
• Austrian troops suppressed risings in Naples and Piedmont in 1821.
• France intervened in Spain in 1823 with the system's approval.
• Britain gradually withdrew, objecting to intervention in others' internal affairs.

Its impact and collapse

• It preserved general peace in Europe for nearly forty years.
• It suppressed liberal and national aspirations, storing up future conflict.
• The Greek war of independence broke its principle of legitimacy.
• The revolutions of 1848 swept it away and forced Metternich himself to flee Vienna.

Assessment

• It was fundamentally reactionary, resting on the denial of change.
• Multi-national Austria could not concede nationality without dissolving itself.
• The system nonetheless gave Europe its longest peace since the seventeenth century.
• Its collapse released the nationalism that reshaped the continent by 1871.

The Metternich system therefore succeeded in preserving peace and monarchy for a generation, but only by damming forces it could not extinguish. As historians observe, its very rigidity ensured that when the dam broke in 1848, liberalism and nationalism returned with a force that reshaped the continent.