The Time Has Come for a New Congress of Vienna

OPINION — The multiplication of wars and the return of imperial logic require us to think through a new international balance, argues the former minister, for whom it is urgent to organize a major conference between powers in order to avoid a general conflagration.

An ill wind has been blowing over the world for at least three decades.

It is the wind of war, and perhaps even of world war, which is why we refuse to put into perspective the unfortunately all too numerous warning signs which, like black stones, mark humanity’s path toward a possible general conflagration.

The hopes of the early 1990s for a new world, freed from the East-West conflict, from dictatorship and war, turned toward prosperity and peace—those hopes have long since evaporated.

The century began on September 11, 2001, with the eruption of global Islamist terrorism, which a quarter-century of wars, above all American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, only perpetuated, France experiencing the same misadventure after ten years of war in the Sahel. The disintegration of the Soviet empire in 1991, miraculously peaceful at the outset, turned ten years later into a new cycle of confrontations and wars: Georgia in 2008, Ukraine since 2014, bringing high-intensity war back to the heart of Europe.

In the Middle East, the hopes born of the Arab Springs in the early 2010s quickly gave way to a litany of massacres in Libya, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, not to mention those committed by Daesh, while the American war in Iraq in 2003 left Iran in the position of dominant power in the region, facing Israel and the Gulf monarchies, as rich as they are vulnerable.

All this against a backdrop dominated, on the one hand, by unprecedented migratory flows toward Europe, and to a lesser extent toward North America, and, on the other, by the systematic destruction of production capacities and jobs in Western democracies, the direct result of China’s strategy of industrial and commercial predation after entering the WTO in 2001. To the confused anxiety of the coming war, from 2030 onward according to our military chiefs, is added the anguish of unemployment in a Europe that is growing poorer and discovering itself defenseless as its protector turns away from it… There again, other well-known black stones will lead to the same misfortunes…

The gravity of the international situation makes it essential to take a fresh look at the great challenges of the hour. The deadlock at the UN calls for a new approach. For the “elders” of my generation, born in the early 1950s, even as the Korean War was beginning, followed by the wars of decolonization in Asia, Africa and the Maghreb, war always remained distant. We had the good fortune to experience a unique period, that of an entire comfortable lifetime sheltered from the horror of war.

Stefan Zweig had also enjoyed peace, that of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, then that of Versailles a century later, before everything collapsed, twice over… And his words resonate today with a strange and frightening relevance. Here is what he wrote in the preface to The World of Yesterday in 1941, in exile, when he had decided to end his life: “I had to be the witness, defenseless and powerless, of this unimaginable relapse of humanity into a state of barbarism that had long been believed forgotten, with its anti-humanist dogma consciously raised into a program of action. It was reserved for us to see again, after centuries, wars without declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass spoliations and the bombing of defenseless cities, all acts of bestiality that the previous fifty generations had no longer known and that future generations, let us hope, will no longer suffer.”

There is in this text, at once tragic and painful, an error that the great writer, no doubt carried away by his despair, made without intending to.

The “fifty generations” of which he speaks, those that preceded 1914 and still more 1939, had not been spared the sufferings of war.

They had in fact known countless conflicts. It was precisely in order to put an end to them, in the aftermath of the wars born of the French Revolution and the Empire, that the principle of a “European Concert” was invented in 1814-1815. At a time when Napoleon was returning from the island of Elba, the aim was to put an end to twenty-two years of war. It was an exercise masterfully conducted by Metternich, whom Kissinger never ceased to admire from the time of his doctoral thesis onward, and which aimed to establish as stable a balance as possible among the victors, the great powers of the time: England, Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary, while taking care to organize France’s reintegration.

The 121 articles and 17 annexes of the Treaty, drafted in French (!), succeeded in bringing six new states into the European Concert without upheaval — Belgium, Italy, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia — and above all managed to prevent a general conflagration for a century (!), despite the three conflicts that occurred before 1914: the Crimean War, 1853-1856; the Austro-Prussian War of 1866; and the 1870 war between France and Germany.

We now face an entirely different “chessboard,” as Brzezinski would say, far broader than yesterday’s European Concert. But with the same imperative necessity: how can a global security system be built among the three empires that now dominate the planet — the United States, Russia and China — while respecting each one’s security interests? How can the emergence of the powers of the South that aspire to join this circle be framed, beginning with Iran, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil…? How can we prevent the great powers of yesterday, the Europeans and Japan, from being swept away by the great shift now under way toward a post-Western world?

The urgent task is to work toward a lasting resolution of the conflicts under way in Europe and in the Gulf. One thing is clear: the conflict in Ukraine must not turn into a frozen, permanent conflict at the heart of Europe. The four parties involved — Ukraine, the Europe that supports it, the United States and Russia — can and must bring it to an end quickly, through a territorial compromise coupled with the definition of a new security system on the scale of the continent, which will provide for a comprehensive agreement limiting armaments on both sides.

At the same time, the other major conflict, in the Gulf, must be settled while absolutely preventing the Islamic Republic from emerging from this war with two atomic bombs: the one it has been secretly preparing for forty years, with today ten tonnes of enriched uranium, and that weapon of blackmail against the entire planet which its control over the Strait of Hormuz would give it. Equipped with these two atomic bombs, Iran would inevitably emerge as the fourth superpower on the planet, at the head of one and a half billion Muslims…

Despite their differences, the imperial triad, Europe, Japan and the emerging powers of the South all have an interest in settling the ongoing conflicts and preventing them from degenerating and metastasizing into other regions. All also have an interest in seeing the planet’s energy situation stabilized and, consequently, its economic growth. The time therefore seems to me to have come for a major international conference where everything would be put on the table and where the weight of the main powers could be combined to block the most harmful developments. I recall that the so-called JCPOA agreement of 2015 on the Iranian nuclear issue could only be obtained, after thirteen years of negotiations, because the Europeans who had initiated it were able to bring together, facing Iran and around the same table, the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans.

The gravity of the international situation makes it essential to take a fresh look at the great challenges of the hour. The deadlock at the UN calls for a new approach. My old master, Henry Kissinger, would also have judged it necessary, and it is toward Metternich that he would no doubt have turned… A European trio composed of France, the United Kingdom and Germany should take the initiative.