“If I try to find some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.”
These are the opening words written by Stefan Zweig in his memoirs, The World of Yesterday. He wrote them from a little white house on the hill overlooking suburban Rio de Janeiro as palm trees swayed in the breeze of the evening beyond his blue-shuttered windows. In his love letter to Habsburg Vienna, he recalls the security of his youth, the progressive and cosmopolitan culture he grew up in, and the international order that allowed it to flourish. As he wrote from this little white house at the height of the Second World War, millions of his books across Central Europe were either hidden or burned because they were written by a Jewish author.
He admitted painfully in retrospect that, “Now that a great storm has long since destroyed it, we know at last that our world of security was a castle in the air. Yet my parents lived in it as if it were a solid stone house. Not once did a storm or a cold draught invade their warm, comfortable existence.” His castle in the air was the post-Napoleonic international order.
Almost exactly one century before the outbreak of the First World War, the Great Powers gathered in Zweig’s beloved Vienna to settle the rupture to stability caused by the French Revolution, and the 23 years of continental war that followed. After Napoleon’s defeat, the European powers saw fit to construct an international order based on diplomacy, enforced by the dual hegemony of Britain and Russia. The settlement of the Congress of Vienna succeeded in preventing any major wars between the European powers. It provided a stability that remained until the continent found itself sleepwalking into the catastrophe of 1914.
But what do we mean by “stability”? The Vienna settlement established a framework of diplomacy for the Great Powers to manage their disputes – one that struck a balance between conservatism and flexibility. The Greek Revolution illustrates this. Nationalism was a threat to the multi-ethnic empires, yet the persistence of the Greek revolutionaries and the involvement of British finance led the Great Powers to carry out the first overseas intervention of a kind that we would recognise today. The Greeks were granted a state, but with a German king on the new throne. The resolution was tolerable to the Great Powers and avoided a major war in Europe.
Yet in the absence of war on the continent, Europe turned its eyes to the periphery and to its colonies. The Great Powers expanded through military conquest as empires grew to their greatest extent in all of human history, replacing the global economy with European monopolies as they went. The British Governor General of India wrote in 1834 that “the bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India”. Once the world’s leading producer of textiles, India was deindustrialised by Britain to create a market for fabrics woven by children and the working poor in cities like Manchester.
Of Manchester itself, Engels wrote that the “working-people are crowded into the worst-built parts of the town… in damp, filthy cellars, in dark, unventilated courts, where all conditions of life are combined which undermine health and destroy the human being.” In this era of “stability” then, the logic of political economists of the time was that the poor must endure these conditions so as not to overpopulate.
So by stability we cannot mean peace, and we cannot mean justice. What made the framework stable was that it endured. The Great Powers benefited while others did not. Both Zweig and Engels describe two sides of the same coin in a post-Vienna international order.
The words of Zweig may resonate with those lamenting the death of an ‘international rules based order’ today. They say that the post-1945 world was one where laws governed international relations; where international courts restrained state power; and in which individuals could navigate predictable lives in the comfort of security and the peace of stability. They find good company with Zweig in their nostalgia of a Golden Age of Security.
Yet this narrative sits uneasily against the backdrop of the Palestinians under occupation and genocide; the Cubans behind decades of embargo; the Cambodians lost to Kissinger’s secret war; the Iraqis invaded on fabricated grounds; and the unquantifiable loss to the orthodoxy of austerity and ‘structural adjustment’.
At Davos, Mark Carney spoke of the ‘rupture’ of this order. It was a rare moment in which a beneficiary of the old world stability acknowledged a facade. One that those who have suffered under it have never had the luxury of missing: that which had passed for an order based on universal rules was, at least in part, a facade.
None of this is to deny the gains of an age of decolonisation and generally rising living standards. But this is not a fall from grace. It is the end of a form of stability in a way we have seen before. Like the Vienna settlement, the international order that we appear to be leaving behind was neither just nor peaceful, but a stable global system of power and inequality that for a time endured.
So, what next? Perhaps a new Congress of Vienna – but who would be invited, and by whom? Like the post-Vienna and post-1945 worlds, will it be an uneven framework of those within the world of security and those outside it, or a more equitable distribution of power?
Whatever follows, it is clear that we cannot build our politics on nostalgia of a Golden Age of Security that never existed. Perhaps one day we will recall how the images from Gaza that we saw on our phones expressed to us in the simplest of terms that the rules based international order in which we lived was our very own castle in the air.
