"The invention of an international order: Lessons from 1814" Topic

"In 1814, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. Drawing on a new book, Glenda Sluga explains how this coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its centre.

These days, memories of the international past, like talk of a foundering international order, tend to stop around the end of the Second World War in 1945, when the US state and US dollar were globally ascendant. Yet, what is actually at stake is at least two centuries of thinking and practicing multilateralism.

The moment I have in mind is the peacemaking process beginning in 1814 that marked the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and launched a modern era of international relations. Even at the time, the Europeans involved understood they had invented something new in the methods of diplomacy and in the constitution of politics they employed with the aim of averting war. In doing so, they set the terms for a new international order. What was distinctive about this new order is the extent of the politics that were regarded as legitimate for the purpose of diplomacy, and the range of people who invested their own futures in its possibilities…"

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Armand

The future is scary.

Depressingly, the following 200 years have been typified by anything but "multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights".

Cheers,
John

the lessons of 1814 just lasted a year, to be replaced by those of 1815 which were totally different, is this a joke about 1814? Does the author mean the lessons of 1815?

Did the Congress of Vienna and the following 100 years not lead to the catastrophe of the summer of 1914?

Ah, the old "after it, therefore because of it" argument.

what has the congress of vienna to do with that after Boney destroyed the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations?

Thanks

Armand