scholarly journals The Two Wars

2021 ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Alternative Assessment ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Death Toll ◽  
The World ◽  
Peace In Europe ◽  
Concert Of Europe

The first inter-imperial war amongst the Great Powers since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Crimean War (1853–1856) shook the world and devastated peoples, economies, and finances. Some historians argue that it symbolized the destruction of the Concert of Europe. This chapter offers an alternative assessment. It shows that the Concert continued to exist after 1856 even though the peace established on the heels of the Crimean War was delicate and repeatedly tested peace in Europe and the Levant. Like the aftershocks of a disastrous earthquake, its aftermath witnessed further Great Power wars, civil strifes, and rebellions. The precarious climate that emerged at the time dovetailed with the existing and newly emerging tensions in Mount Lebanon. These snowballed into further fighting in the mountain during the summer of 1860—a much more devastating conflict, with a death toll around three to five times greater than the civil wars of 1841 and 1845 combined.

scholarly journals The Holy Alliance: Prerequisites, Creation and Plans for Establishing International Law

1970 ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Valeriia Ostashova ◽  
Yevheniia Lypii ◽  
Artem Pyvovar
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Security Institution ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Peace In Europe ◽  
Vague Statement

The article describes the prerequisites, the creation and the plans of the Holy Alliance to establish international law and order. The end of the Napoleonic wars was marked by the Congress of Vienna. Its participants sought to restore the rule of the nobility in the conquered states of Napoleon. Based on the so-called principle of legitimacy, Congress supported the restoration on the thrones of former dynasties and noble orders in many countries. In the first place, each of the participating countries sought to meet their invasive goals, to profit from the redistribution of Europe and the colonies. In order to consolidate the conquests of, Alexander I initiated the formation of a permanent organization – the Holy Alliance. It was a kind of ideological and military-political superstructure over the “Viennese system” of diplomatic relations, founded under the guise of Christianity. The text of the union treaty in its form and content was atypical, unlike other international agreements. This has led many international law professionals to treat it as a declaration. The organization had existed until the mid-19th century before the Crimean War, although contradictions in the alliance have been around since the 1920s. The treaty of the Holy Alliance was concluded in Paris on September 14 (26) 1815 by the governments of Russia, Austria and Prussia. It was a rather vague statement about the mutual assistance and cooperation of all Christian states. Under the terms of the treaty, everyone who recognized him could join the alliance. After approval, almost all European rulers, except the Pope, the head of the Christian world who considered his signature superfluous, and the Turkish Sultan who professed Islam, joined him. England also did not join the alliance, though proposals from the founders were. It should be said that in England, the treaty was treated with the greatest caution. The absence of the Holy See’s signature in England did not prevent her from being an active participant in all its congresses. The original task of the Holy Alliance was to fulfill the role of a communication platform in which the leading powers of the world would coordinate their actions to ensure peace in Europe, preventing aggression that could harm the security of international law and order on the continent. With varying success, but in the first years of existence of the alliance these goals were achieved. The Holy Alliance was the first collective security institution in the world after the Napoleonic wars.

The Social Construction of Great Power Management, 1815–1822

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-82
Author(s):  
Mark Raymond
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Power Management ◽  
International System ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rule Making ◽  
Concert Of Europe

This chapter shows that secondary rules help to explain the emergence of active practices of great power management of the international system after the Napoleonic Wars. Actors were aware of themselves as joint participants in a practice of rule-making and interpretation. They presented proposals according to the rules of that practice, both criticizing and justifying proposals on procedural grounds. The chapter covers the initial creation of great power management in the Congress of Vienna, and its development in the initial conferences of the Concert of Europe at Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, Laibach, and Verona. Actors who more skillfully employed secondary rules were more successful in obtaining their goals. Talleyrand secured France’s readmission to the ranks of the great powers, and Metternich and Castlereagh consistently employed procedural rules to achieve their objectives. Procedural rules also help explain the failure of the Tsar’s proposed Holy Alliance in contrast to the substantively similar Quadruple Alliance.

Anglo-American Post-War Coöperation and the Interests of Europe

1942 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 656-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Wolfers
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Post War ◽  
Essential Prerequisite ◽  
Peace In Europe

Often it has been asserted that if the United States had stood by her allies after 1918 and joined the League of Nations, peace in Europe would have been secure. While this overstresses the point, it is certainly true that the lack of unity among the victors, both at Versailles and afterwards, deprived the world of anything like a center of coördination and leadership. Even the Concert of Europe of bygone days could claim greater authority than a League from which five out of seven great powers were either permanently or temporarily absent, and in which the two remaining powers, Britain and France, were rarely in agreement.In view of this experience, it makes sense to regard continued coöperation between at least some of the important allies of this war, assuming the defeat of Hitler and his partners, as being an essential prerequisite for a more durable peace. If at least the two great English-speaking powers could form between themselves a solid partnership, so it is argued, would not their combined strength and their supremacy of the seas quite naturally attract other nations into their orbit and thus enable them to preserve the order and peace of the world? Their rôle is envisaged as a kind of enlarged replica of that which the British Empire fulfilled with no little success throughout most of the nineteenth century.

China as great power: from red menace to green giant?

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Final Analysis ◽  
Environmental Stresses ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The World ◽  
The University

China's standing in the world—whether it is, or is seen to be, a great power—is a question of signal importance because of what great powers are capable of doing, what effects their actions and words have on others, and what is expected of them. By most conventional measures, China is at least on the verge of being a great power. Yet the country also occupies a pivotal global position in terms of its present and expected future impact on the environment. In the final analysis, because greatness is so much a function of a willingness to shoulder responsibility and demonstrate leadership, China's standing as a great power may well be determined by the country's response to the acute environmental stresses it faces. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Regents of the University of California.

scholarly journals Proxy Wars: Implications of Great-Power Rivalry for the Onset and Duration of Civil War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra de Soysa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Multilevel Models ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Time Inconsistency ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Cold War

Theories of civil war focus largely on factors internal to countries, generally ignoring the systemic effects of superpower rivalry during the Cold War, or great power politics associated with regional rivalries and ambitions. The question of the importance of proxiness of civil wars potentially challenges notions of commitment and time-inconsistency problems associated with explanations of why rational agents fail to find less costly bargains compared with fighting costly wars. Great powers often influence the politics of lesser powers by supporting sides in contentious politics as a means to achieve foreign policy objectives relatively cheaply. Models of civil war that focus exclusively on in-country ills, thus, would have very limited predictive power. It is argued here that great powers influence the politics of other nations without bearing the costs of direct involvement by supplying the logistics that allow the feasibility of rebellions. Examining these issues is all the more critical today because the multipolar world emerging out of the Cold War era promises to generate proxy struggles in many strategic places. While the study of civil war moves in the direction of disaggregating in order to understand micro processes associated with rebellion, it might be prudent to examine the interplay of factors between the micro and macro processes in multilevel models because the feasibility of fighting over not fighting is likely to be decided at higher rather than lower levels of aggregation. How to cauterize great-power machinations in civil war must in turn become a primary focus of international institutions, such as the United Nations, for strengthening instruments that would curtail external influences that propagate civil wars.

scholarly journals From Yeltsin to Putin

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Wonhee Lee
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
World Order ◽  
National Interest ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Crisis

Russia has developed multipolar paradigm in its effort to reobtain the position of the Great Power since it realized that it could not exert influence strong enough to stake its claim in the world politics. The advocacy of a multipolar world order, referred to as the “Primakov Doctrine,” shifted Moscow’s attitude toward the two Koreas as well. In its pursuit of multipolarity in East Asia, Russia has designed its strategy toward Korea’s nuclear crisis and unification to best suit its national interest. Considering the competition among the Great Powers in East Asia, Russia’s Korea policy can better be understood under such a multilateral framework.

Order in the European Concert Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-131
Author(s):  
Kyle M. Lascurettes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
The Third ◽  
Order Change ◽  
Concert Of Europe

Chapter 5 (“Order in the European Concert Era”) examines three moments of order change opportunity in the nineteenth century centered around the Concert of Europe. The first section assesses the scholarly debate over what the Concert actually was, making the case that it constituted a decisive departure from the brand of balance-of-power politics that had previously dominated Europe. And yet accepting what the Concert was says nothing about how it came to be, an argument developed in the second section that examines the strategic and exclusionary impulses behind its origins after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The third section assesses two more cases of opportunity where the dominant actors elected not to seek major changes to the Concert order: the aftermath of the liberal revolutionary wave of 1848 and the negotiations that ended the Crimean War in 1856.

Thoughts on Power Transitions, Past and Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-154
Author(s):  
Manjari Chatterjee Miller
Keyword(s):  
Essential Elements ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Rising Powers ◽  
Active Behavior ◽  
China And India ◽  
The World ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
Material Power ◽  
The Rise Of China

This chapter reviews the patterns found in the book and draws conclusions about the rise of China and India today. It argues that economic power, military power, and narratives about becoming a great power are all essential elements that rising powers which became great powers possessed, and in order to actively rise, these countries recognized the current norms of great power and initially played by the rules of the international order. Those that did not possess all those elements stayed reticent. Particularly, the absence of narratives about how to become a great power stymied these countries from active behavior on the world stage even when they possessed important elements of material power. This difference between active and reticent powers helps us understand why some nations rise to become great powers, as well as the differences between China and India today.

European Great Power Politics, 1790–1854

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale C. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Selection Bias ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Economic Interdependence ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Complete Survey ◽  
Great Power Politics

This chapter explores the relative importance of economic interdependence and trade expectations on the policies of the European great powers from 1790 to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853–54. Since there are many cases where commerce had little or nothing to do with the outbreak of crisis or war, this chapter covers such cases briefly, highlighting their basic causes only to provide a complete survey of the origins of modern conflict and avoid charges of selection bias. Yet as the chapter shows, economic interdependence and trade expectations played a far more significant role in the dynamics of nineteenth-century geopolitics than has been previously recognized.

Great Power Politics in the Age of Imperial Expansion, 1856–99

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale C. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Great Power ◽  
Economic Interdependence ◽  
Crimean War ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Great Power Politics

This chapter explores the forty-five-year period after the Crimean War when great powers of all stripes fell into an intense competition for formal political control over third-party territories. The competition greatly increased the level of tension in the system, even if most of the struggles stopped short of a direct great power war. Most significantly, of course, France, Britain, and Germany dove into a scramble for colonial territory after 1880 that drew most of Africa and large parts of Asia into the European orbit. On two particular occasions—the Austro-Prussian “Seven Weeks' War” of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—large-scale war between two great powers did break out. The purpose of the chapter is to uncover to what extent and in what manner economic interdependence shaped the struggles and wars of this almost-half-century period.

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