Introduction
Looking back in 1915 over the causes of the Great War (which had broken out the previous year) Sir Sidney Low blamed not the nationalism of small states but Europe’s meddlesome political elite. Wrapped up in their own concerns, jealous of their own privileges, and wise in their own conceit, the Powers had imposed an artificial order that they could maintain only by rising violence.
THE Europe which sought to rearrange its affairs after the revolutionary and Napoleonic era* was seething with the ferment of democracy and nationality. Unhappily the soldiers and diplomatists who reconstructed the map* in haste at the Congress of Vienna* thought more of the rights of kings than of the rights of peoples; they feared democracy much more than despotism; they looked upon a nation as the result of treaties and royal marriages rather than the product of natural and spiritual forces; they endeavoured to restore the highly artificial system, based on “scraps of paper,” themselves often the result of successful force, dynastic intrigue, and historical accident, which was the legacy of the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. They refused to repair the misdeeds of the past, or to provide for the evolutionary growth of the future, considering — no doubt honestly enough — that a mechanical external order was more likely to secure the welfare of the various communities than the satisfaction of those perilous aspirations which so often lead to turmoil and unrest. So they left the larger part of Europe a chaos of divided peoples, imperfect states, and subject nationalities. [...]
Précis
Sir Sidney Low laid the blame for the outbreak of the Great War on the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. He argued that the military and diplomatic figures who had sought to restore order to Europe after the Napoleonic Wars had consulted their own self-interest rather than public sentiment, leaving the Continent resentful and still divided.
(56 / 60 words)
Sir Sidney Low laid the blame for the outbreak of the Great War on the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. He argued that the military and diplomatic figures who had sought to restore order to Europe after the Napoleonic Wars had consulted their own self-interest rather than public sentiment, leaving the Continent resentful and still divided.
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