Abstract
Reviewed by: Matthew Rendall, University of Nottingham, UK
This is the best book ever written about the Syrian crisis of 1840. That crisis arose when Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia agreed to drive Turkey’s vassal Mehemet Ali out of Syria, and France responded with threats against the rest of Europe. Based on sweeping research in a dozen countries’ archives, Šedivý’s book will become the standard account of the crisis. It also poses an important challenge to widespread views of the Vienna system.
Šedivý’s target is the claim that a marked shift occurred towards European cooperation after 1815, ‘based on consensus and backed by law’, as Paul Schroeder puts it, and enabled by conference diplomacy. As a historian, Šedivý trains his sights on Schroeder and Matthias Schulz, but he might also have taken aim at political scientists such Robert Jervis, Louise Richardson and Jennifer Mitzen. Šedivý emphasizes that much of Europe – its cynicism aroused by France’s 1832 occupation of Ancona and British intervention in China and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – already regarded the great powers’ actions with distrust. Strong-arm tactics during the 1840 crisis cemented the impression.
Šedivý gives judicious accounts of individual states’ policies in the crisis, not only those of the great powers, but also the policies of the German Confederation and of minor powers such as Belgium and Sweden, and the reaction of public opinion, particularly in Germany. The book is especially informative about Austria’s and France’s policies, less so about Russia’s, where Šedivý brings little new to the table and neglects some older published sources, notably Serge Goriainow’s Le Bosphore et les Dardanelles (1910), that could have proved relevant. Nevertheless, his reading of Russian policy is generally sound.
Paris was in any case the epicentre of the crisis. Šedivý offers an authoritative retelling of a well-known story: a belligerent public, a pacific king and a prime minister, Adolphe Thiers, trying to bluff. The puzzle is to explain why France would risk a major war over an Egyptian pasha’s expulsion from Syria. Here Šedivý’s suggestion (drawing on the work of the political scientist Richard Ned Lebow) that France’s belligerence was rooted in the importance attached to honour in this period is penetrating. It seems to explain not only much of French policy in the crisis but also Britain’s hard line, and both states’ subsequent willingness to go to the brink in petty quarrels over Tahiti, and, as late as 1898, Fashoda.
If the 1840 crisis did not end in war, this was due not to Concert norms or conference diplomacy. Rather it was in large part thanks to the restraint of individuals such as King Louis Philippe of France, Prince Metternich in Austria, and Prussia’s foreign minister Heinrich von Werther. Metternich emerges in Šedivý’s account as the most European of the major statesmen, with a concern for legality and stability that younger leaders such as Britain’s Lord Palmerston and Russia’s Nicholas I recklessly undermined. In his positive assessment of Austrian policy, and emphasis on how the Napoleonic Wars had shaped the older generation of statesmen, Šedivý comes closer to Paul Schroeder than he seems to recognize.
While Šedivý rightly notes the impotence of the Concert of Europe in the Eastern Question, that is arguably an unfair test, since the Ottoman empire had been excluded from the Vienna settlement, as he describes in detail. Nor was the crisis really ‘the most serious affair on the international scene from 1830 to 1848’ (xii). In the Belgian crisis of 1830–1832, key strategic interests were at stake, and the London ambassadors’ conference played a critical role in resolving the conflict. Syria was a sideshow in comparison.
Moreover, in another respect European international relations had changed after 1815: ‘never before nor after were the Great Powers so united in their wish to preserve [the Ottoman empire’s] existence’ (46). Some feared a popular explosion in France, but neither Louis Philippe nor Thiers wanted war, and Šedivý shows that European leaders knew it. ‘Purely destructive actions will not make anyone laugh except maniacs’, Metternich remarked, ‘and I do Mr Thiers the honour of not counting him as one of them’ (78). This same recognition that Thiers was blowing smoke bolstered Palmerston’s intransigence.
Nevertheless, European leaders’ good grasp of the situation in France surely reduced the potential for false fears and miscalculation. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, Russia was probably no more eager than the Great Powers to destroy the Ottoman empire, but Britain and France did not see this. ‘In the end’, as Šedivý notes, ‘Nicholas I was ultimately the man who suffered the most from the lack of transparency’ (30). That, along with the touchy sense of national honour that characterized the Russians and British as well as the French, does much to explain why the crisis that arrived a dozen years after 1840 did not end peacefully.