Word: nicolson
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Britain's ex-Diplomat Harold Nicolson is no rookie in the wars of peacemaking. Some of his best, best-known books (Portrait of a Diplomatist; Curzon: The Last Phase) are centered around World War I's Versailles Conference, to which Nicolson was a delegate. More recently, he has been giving British radio listeners a blow-by-blow account of 1946's Paris Peace Conference. Few readers of this timely, lucid study of post-Napoleonic peacemaking will be able to resist drawing analogies between then and now-which is just what Author Nicolson warns them not to overdo...
...Common Aim. ". . . At every international conference," says Nicolson bluntly, "it is the duty of a Minister, first o defend and further the interests of his jwn country, and secondly to adjust those nterests to the requirements of the community of nations." Alexander, Metternich, Castlereagh-the Big Three-were no more "cynical or selfish . . . than their successors of 1919 or 1946. Their common aim was to secure the stability, and herefore the peace, of Europe...
...Nuisances. Whatever the differences of the Big Three, says Nicolson, their peacemaking would have been easier if the major powers alone were involved. Inevitable "nuisances,and . . . eccentrics" were present at the Congress of Vienna. Prussian Delegate Prince Hardenburg was stone-deaf. Spanish Delegate Don Pedro Gomez Labrador spent his time mimicking French Delegate Talleyrand. Thirty-two minor German royalties attended-and brought their wives, mistresses and secretaries of state...
...Nerves. Author Nicolson does not introduce the comic-opera aspects of the Peace Congress for laughs, but to show the powerful accumulative effect of minor irritations on men who are tired and overburdened. Inevitably, he argues, in any great conference, personal characteristics exercise a growing influence. Delegates become filled with personal rancors, and follow their prejudices into side issues. And as the nerve-racking routine stretches into months of inconclusiveness, a weariness, an urge to be done and go home, settles over the conference table...
...Moral Principles. Nicolson believes that it is to England's credit that she did not exploit this power. The Congress of Vienna contains brilliant, mostly sympathetic pen-portraits of all the principal actors, but Britain's Lord Castlereagh is Nicolson's favorite. In his day, Castlereagh was the best-hated statesman in England. (Byron called him "the vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want," and "the intellectual eunuch"; Shelley wrote the famous lines: I met Murder on the way-He had a mask like Castlereagh.) Contemptuous of parliamentary and public opinion, antiliberal, cold-blooded Castlereagh desired the independence...