The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe After Napoleon
Glenda Sluga
Princeton University Press (December 2021)

“The Concert of Europe”…who knew?

Here’s how Glenda Sluga sets her table: “The intention of this book is to return to the early nineteenth century as the origin of the conception of international order that shaped modern international politics… My focus is on how ‘Europe’ and a handful of European imperial powers, assumed authority for the world, who got to ‘do politics’ and to be ‘political, what was understood as legitimate terrain of politics, and how that changed. In this book, the end of the Napoleonic wars is the origin of the modern international order, of transformations that occurred in the midst of (and inevitably contributing to) structural shifts in society in society, economics, and politics — whether changing methods of diplomacy wrapped in gender relations, moral and universal, sometimes liberal, principles, or the objective of permanent peace itself.”

Space limitations preclude a list of all the transformations and transitions on which Sluga focuses. Somehow, she explains HOW, in 1814, the representatives of Russia, Prussia, Britain, and Austria greed to “elevate cooperation between states in unprecedented ways. Their efforts annexed multilateralism to moral purpose, not least the idea of a permanent or durable peace; they deployed diplomacy, conferencing, and cross-border commerce, even free trade, as methods to secure that peace.”

These are among the other passages that caught my eye, also listed to suggest the thrust and flavor of Sluga’s compelling insights:

o International order (Pages xi-xii, 2-4, 8-10, 14-21, and 227-230)
o Germaine de Staël (27-32, 29-31, 32-35, 111-114, and 157-158)
o Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte: methods of negotiation (37-41)
o Humanitarianism/philanthropy (48-53 and 230-233)
o Klemens von Metternich (58, 65-70, and 77-80)

o Federalism (73-80 and 142-145)
o Immanuel Kant on cosmopolitanism (77-79)
o Chaumont (87-93, 98-102, and 175-180)
o Congress of Paris, 1814 (99-103 and 107-116)
o Liberties of public spheres (109-119)

o Commerce (129-134 and 154-174)
o Congress of Vienna: soft diplomacy (148-157)
o Class Politics (158-165)
o Nation-building (209-214)
o Congress of Paris, 1856 (247-252)

There are hundreds of other passages also worthy of note. Presumably this book’s table of Contents and Index will guide each reader to the material of greatest interest and value to them.

No one could have foreseen in 1814 the nature and extent of what Metternich characterizes as “the messiness of individual actions and ideas, caught up in the flow of time, floating between present and future.” Key questions were asked and answered then: “Who has authority? How do they get it? How do they keep it or lose it? What enables or threatens that authority, or is the result of it?”

In this context, I am again reminded of an incident that occurred years ago when one of Albert Einstein’s colleagues on the Princeton faculty playfully chided him for asking the same questions every year on his final examinations. “Quite true. Guilty as charged. Each year, the answers are different.”

The same can be said of global power and authority. “At the end of the Napoleonic wars, no one set out to invent an international order,” Sluga notes. “Even now, this abstract concept does not easily translate into a topic for policymaking.”

She concudes: “When we consider the unprecedented existential threats the world faces now — systemic collapse of societies under pressures of war, disease, and social and economic injustice, a planetary-level ecological crisis — some might argue that historical lessons have their limits. But even a two-hundred-year-long history still matters, for getting our bearings and navigating the future, for its confirmation that peacemaking can be the mother of invention.”

For the sake of my eleven grandchildren and the millions of others in their generations, I share Glenda Sluga’s hope that the horizon for their expectations will be far wider than ours. I also agree with an observation that Thomas Edison shared long ago: “Vision without execution is hallucination.”