Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace, 1840–1848 by Barbora Pásztorová (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace, 1840–1848 by Barbora Pásztorová Tim Corbett Barbora Pásztorová, Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace, 1840–1848. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 184 pp. Prince Metternich, as the opening sentence of Barbora Pásztorová's brief monograph Metternich, the German Question and the Pursuit of Peace, 1840–1848 states, was "without question one of the greatest figures of the first half of the 19th century" (3). A key player in the 1814/15 Vienna Congress that redrew the political map of Europe and attempted to restore the old order of dynastic states, Metternich is remembered domestically in Austria as a draconian reactionary whose suppression of civil liberties and democratic reform ultimately failed to stem the rising tide of liberalism and emancipation in Central Europe. Although deposed during the 1848 revolutions, Metternich would later nevertheless come to be admired for his diplomatic achievements in maintaining the "Concert of Europe" from 1815 to 1848. It is to this latter aspect of Metternich's legacy that Pásztorová's new monograph is dedicated. It represents a revised English-language translation of her Czech-language PhD dissertation defended in 2019 at the University of West Bohemia in Plzeň. Readers will notice immediately the conspicuous brevity of this work: At only 180 pages (including the bibliography), it is considerably shorter than a standard historiographical dissertation. The primary materials consist predominantly of contemporary correspondence found in various Central European archives, augmented by a range of German-, English-, and Czech-language secondary literature. The book is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. [End Page 106] The first chapter opens with an overview of Metternich's role in international politics in the period between the Vienna Congress and the late 1830s, during which he promoted the German Confederation as a "counterrevolutionary" bloc and "a defensive bulwark of dynastic legitimacy" (27). The subsequent chapters focus on successive crises that challenged the peace in Europe during the 1840s and—so the author's claim—played a seminal role in what she calls the "German question," beginning with the Rhine Crisis of 1840 (Chapter 2) and the Schleswig-Holstein "question" (Chapter 3). Chapter 4, comprising only seven pages, briefly examines the economic relations between the nebulous entities here anachronistically called "Austria and Germany." This is essentially a prelude to Chapter 5, which covers the annexation of Cracow by the Habsburg Empire in 1846 and its negative economic impact on Prussian Silesia. Chapter 6 addresses the Sonderbund War in Switzerland in 1847, while Chapter 7 explores the "national and constitutional question in Germany," by which the author means the lands of the German Confederation, in the Vormärz. The title of this monograph is somewhat misleading. Metternich is not the central focus of this work, which essentially offers an overview of international relations and diplomatic history in Central Europe during this period, but is rather a recurring character who at crucial moments plays a key role in the above-listed contexts. The "German question," meanwhile, is never defined by the author, who appears to predicate unquestioningly the existence of a "German nation" before the establishment of a German state in 1870/71. This lack of clarity in focus is compounded by a lack of clear argumentation throughout the work, which—though lucidly written and offering a concise review of the secondary literature—often consists more of descriptive narrative than critical analysis. A two-and-a-half-page discussion of the concept "nationalism" in the introduction, in conjunction with the titular focus on a purported "German question," suggests that this book was intended as a contribution to the early stages of nascent German nationalism. While this topic is indeed addressed repeatedly throughout the work, this aspect remains particularly poorly developed. The author opens by somewhat naïvely dividing all theories of nationalism into "negative" and "neutral" approaches, by which she clearly means critical approaches (as indicated through her reference to "constructivist authors," 10) as opposed to what in sociological theory is called "primordialist" identity theory. The author implicitly propagates the latter, [End Page 107] conservative understanding of "national identity," which she problematically claims is a...