Metternich and Austria: An Evaluation

Abstract

Does the academic world really need a new book on Metternich and Austria? Alan Sked thinks so, and this reviewer agrees. I would quibble, however, with the inflated self-confidence that leads Sked to dismiss the perspectives of an eminent American historian as ‘nonsense’(p. 58). As in his The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1919 (1989: rev. ante, cvii [1992], 1046–7), Sked attacks both his subject and its interpreters as he seeks ‘to destroy several of the myths associated with the “age of Metternich”’(p. ix). This time the focus of his scholarly attack is Paul Schroeder, the author of The Transformation of European Politics, 1783–1848 (1994; rev. ante, cxi [1996], 394–7). ‘Schroeder, I fear, gets almost everything wrong’, he says (p. 59). But Sked's assault is altogether unnecessary for his purpose of rehabilitating Metternich's historical image. He merely joins a number of other scholars, such as Enno Kraehe and Wolf D. Gruner, who have more respectfully dissented from Schroeder's thesis that a new ‘equilibrium’ emerged after 1815 which was characterised by a hegemonic balance between Britain and Russia. Historians deliberately stimulate each other by proposing such provocative theses, but Sked takes the opportunity for presumptuous dismissal. That said, however, this reviewer would agree with Sked, Kraehe and Gruner (as well as Schroeder, really) in believing that what kept Europe at peace between 1815 and 1848 was the co-operation of the Great Powers because they feared the renewal of revolutionary wars similar to those which had been provoked by the French Revolution.