Vienna vs. Versailles
Among the myriad peace settlements that various countries, even various great powers, have agreed upon throughout western history, two tend to stand head and shoulders above the rest: The Congress of Vienna in 1815, which ended the Napoleonic Wars—perhaps the first true “world war”; and the various Paris settlements which ended the first world war which is generally referred to as such in 1919, which I will call collectively the Versailles Treaty for convenience’s sake. Largely the same countries were the major players: France, Britain, and Russia took part in each settlement. Meanwhile, Germany and Austria, major players at Vienna, were excluded from the Versailles talks, as punishment for being the defeated and supposedly responsible party. Similarly, the United States was a major force in shaping the Versailles settlement, while a century before, it had stayed out of the Napoleonic conflict, and besides did not have enough power at that time to merit a major role at the table even if it had become involved.
Nonetheless, the inherent similarity remains; both the Vienna and Versailles treaties were attempts by the major western powers to realign and redraw large portions of the world map in order to create a lasting peace. Both treaties were concerned with statecraft, either consolidating old entities into new ones, or breaking apart empires ostensibly in the name of nationalism, on a scale which no other treaty has attempted before or since. All this was done, in both cases, to hopefully create a lasting peace, a stable order. The Vienna Settlement created nearly a century without major conflict in Europe, a feat completely unprecedented in that continent’s history. By contrast, Versailles’ settlement didn’t even last a full twenty years before the world was embroiled in a war even more disastrous than the one the diplomats who came to