Citation

Anderson S. Peace Change 2007; 32(3): 301-328.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Peace History Society; Peace and Justice Studies Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1468-0130.2007.00443.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Many Western scholars and foreign-policy makers have lauded the Congress of Vienna, Metternich's “Concert of Europe,” and Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck's alliance system for keeping a “long peace” from 1815 to 1914. The superiority of nineteenth-century statecraft is a myth. Europe was busy at war between 1815 and 1914, if not in conflicts on the scale of the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. Furthermore, the chancelleries of nineteenth-century Europe not only quelled national uprisings, but suppressed peoples’ political rights and waged imperial wars throughout Africa and Asia. From the perspective of a Pole, a disenfranchised European, or an Indian, the century was not a “long peace” but a “long war.”