Wolfram Siemann Metternich: Strategist and Visionary
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702020976609 |
| Author | Jack Cunningham |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Canada and, with it, the CAF. The reader leaves this volume pondering how the
vision of SSE will evolve in the coming years.
Wolfram Siemann
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2019
Translated from the German by Daniel Steuer, 928 pp., $52.20 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-0-674-74392-2
Reviewed by: Jack Cunningham (stewartjohncunningham@hotmail.com), University of Toronto,
Ontario, Canada
Clemens, Prince of Metternich, Austrian foreign minister from 1809 and chancel-
lor from 1821 to 1848, is traditionally understood as an effete reactionary and a
bitter enemy of the national principle. This is due to previous biographers’ reliance
on Heinrich Srbik’s immense biography Metternich: The Statesman and the Human
Being (1925), which portrayed the Prince as something of a dilettante, and an
upholder (though, in Srbik’s eyes, a deplorably uneven one) of German racial
interests. Particularly in the English-speaking world, we have more recently fol-
lowed the picture painted in Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored: Metternich,
Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (1957), which stresses
Metternich’s efforts to reconstruct the old order at the Congress of Vienna
(1814–1815) after Napoleon’s successive attempts to establish French hegemony
in Europe. Kissinger’s portrait is of a statesman from whom we might still learn, a
devotee of Realpolitik, whose quest to re-establish a legitimate order against a
revolutionary challenge, on a basis of equilibrium, is still relevant. More recently,
Paul Schroeder’s magisterial The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848
(1994) reinterprets Metternich’s achievement at Vienna as a reconstruction rather
than a restoration, which put European politics on a new footing, breaking with
eighteenth-century, balance-of-power politics in favour of a new equilibrium
rooted in international law and a balance of rights and obligations.
Wolfram Siemann’s Metternich: Strategist and Visionary refutes traditional
legends about Metternich and forces major revisions on Kissinger and even
Schroeder. Where his predecessors have relied overmuch on Srbik’s account and
the eight volumes of reminisces and memoranda compiled by Metternich’s son
Richard in the 1880s (which are incomplete and often misleading, particularly in
their English version), Siemann is the first biographer to mine Metternich’s family
archive in Prague, including his occasional autobiographical musings and his illu-
minating memoranda to Emperor Franz Joseph I. Siemann’s account, published in
German in 2016 and now available in translation, compels us to rethink virtually
every aspect of Metternich’s career.
Siemann locates the origins of Metternich’s diplomacy in his early years, begin-
ning with the benign influence of his father, the Rhenish aristocrat and Habsburg
diplomat Franz Georg von Metternich. Young Clemens accompanied his father on
680 International Journal 75(4)
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