Metternich, Bismarck, and the Myth of the "Long Peace," 1815-1914

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.”