How a Diplomat defeated Napoleon: A Lesson for Germany’s Foreign Policy
Like Austria at the beginning of the 19th century, Germany, as a continental central power, has the same goals today. German chancellors could learn a thing or two from Clemens von Metternich.
Geography influences the fate of every country. The Austrian Empire at the beginning of the 19th century was hardly any different from today's Germany. Both share a location in Central Europe and enjoy no protection from natural borders such as mountains or the sea. Their prosperity and influence depend on peace and the balance of power.
Clemens von Metternich mastered this art of statecraft like no other. Its essence is not evident at the Congress of Vienna, but rather at the moment when Metternich seized command of the coalition army in the last coalition war (March 1813 to May 1814). When Napoleon fled Moscow at the end of December 1812 and Russia allied itself with Prussia and Great Britain, Metternich feared that French hegemony could be replaced by Russian hegemony, similar to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after 1945.
Metternich remained neutral for months and offered peace negotiations to all sides, but to no avail. From December 1812 to May 1813, the military situation reached a stalemate. Now everyone needed Austria to decide the war. Since Napoleon was not prepared to relinquish his supremacy peacefully, Metternich joined the coalition, but only on condition that he be given supreme command of the coalition army, which he entrusted to Karl Philipp zu Schwarzenberg as his political extension on the battlefield. This gave him the power to conduct every battle in such a way that neither the coalition army nor Napoleon were existentially threatened.
Metternich thus deprived France of the opportunity to destroy Russia and Prussia, as this would have stabilized Napoleon's hegemony once again. At the same time, he deprived the Tsar of the prospect of breaking out of the coalition, defeating Napoleon, and ruling Europe. It was as if Metternich stood before an unstable scale, whose alignment he repeatedly shifted in one direction or the other depending on the outcome of a battle.
Ultimately, he controlled the movements of the Allies, their occupations, and finally the territorial division. Battle by battle, he dismantled French hegemony until, at the end of the entire campaign, a military balance had been achieved on the basis of which the territorial reorganization could be negotiated. This plan worked, as the Congress of Vienna showed.
In this way, Metternich saved the European balance from the hegemony of both East and West. At that time, Austria, like Germany today, was condemned by geography to a policy of balancing all sides. Berlin, on the other hand, failed to do so with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, even though it was attempting to achieve precisely this balance.
After 1970, German chancellors initially succeeded in maintaining the balance between East and West. However, this policy of balance changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Germany failed to work with Eastern Europe to create a new security architecture that would integrate and balance Russia.
Instead, it left it to the US to fill the vacuum that had been created in Eastern Europe. Protected by its geographical location between the oceans and without any powerful neighbors, the US naturally acted in a more risky manner than a continental central power such as Germany. With its disarmament, Berlin opened up the opportunity for Washington to bind Eastern Europe to itself and undermine Germany's position in the region. At the same time, it also opened the door for Moscow to expand in Eastern Europe without having to fear Germany.
This allowed both sides to provoke each other into conflict within Berlin's own sphere of influence without having to take Germany's weight in the balance into account, until the tipping point was reached at which Russia openly attacked the equilibrium.
Like Metternich before him, Berlin should have pursued a German Ostpolitik in the EU and NATO, which would have given it sole political control in this region. Only in this way could both sides have been tamed. Neither Gerhard Schröder nor Angela Merkel seriously considered this necessity and put all their eggs in one basket. Metternich, on the other hand, knew what was important in such cases when, at the age of 80, on the eve of the Crimean War, in which East and West once again faced each other, he wrote: "The state in the middle cannot allow itself to be taken in tow in either the eastern or western direction. Its unique geographical location would prevent this, if moral reasons did not come to its aid. We are called upon to tip the scales in the direction of establishing peace, i.e., bringing a definitive end to the hopeless situation, but under no circumstances should we allow ourselves to be misused as the vanguard of the East against the West or of the West against the East."