The Congress of Vienna

Whether the outcome of the peace congress of Vienna in 1815 was a success or not is a much debated topic and Historians give arguments for both sides and it is much debated. This essay will evaluate key points of both arguments and reach a conclusion to close.

First of all the Congress of Vienna could be seen as a failure because we could say the congress didn't achieve one of the main goals the main negotiators at Vienna longed for, to create a lasting peace. Some 15 years after the congress in 1830, there was a failed uprising in Poland from the unsettled business of the congress. There was also riots in Belgium in Brussels in 2830 when riots started to break out all over the country because of high levels of unemployment in the state, which could be blamed on the congress as its decision to keep Belgium in the Kingdom of the united Netherlands was always bound to cause trouble, in hindsight it would also prove to be unneeded as the main argument for keeping things in this way was the fact that if Belgium was to be made independent it would not be strong enough to prevent France from conquering it, in the principle of 'buffer states', but in hindsight we see that France did have no intentions of conquering Belgium at all. Also French Historians blame the Vienna settlement for provoking the 1830 and 1848 revolutions in France and denounced the congress unfair as they felt Louis XVIII was unfairly punished for Napoleons crimes.

The Congress of Vienna could also be called a failure because it could be described as by historians as a backwards congress. Firstly, all principal negotiators from the countries ignored both principles of Liberalism and Nationalism which later proved to be important and very useful practices later in the 19th century. The fact the congress 'turned the clock back' led it to be confusing and hectic and anyone could see that it had been designed to prevent change when it needed change, the handover of many states between the victors of the negotiations and the enthroning of the 'legitimate rulers' who were mostly despotic. It is argued that the congress was a lot more than conservative of change, it really did go back in time.

There was very little attempt of reform in the Congress and only the abolition of slavery and navigation of rivers were the only sort of reform attempted. There was no attempts at making Europe better, which leads to the next point that the terms were destined to be consistently revised and altered, we can see the terms and things that changed during the congress were much short lived such as the Kingdom of Holland was broken up, the bourbon restoration had halted and the German confederation was dissolved.

However, there are some arguments for the success of the Congress. The terms turned out that every main negotiator got a part of what they wanted but not all of it so as to make them too powerful, for example Poland got 2/5ths