Congress of Vienna

In class, we learned about an important event that took place after the Napoleonic reign known as the Congress of Vienna.  We also discussed what people who are in power do when their power is threatened, and how they will try to retain their power. In class, we did an activator that represented the views of each country, and how they all are fighting for more power and land when splitting up the land Napoleon claimed for France.  This showed us that the power of each country was determined by the amount of territory that they had, and how each one of them wanted more than the others.  By having less land than others, they felt that their power was threatened, and that they needed to split it up evenly to prevent another Napoleonic reign.

After the downfall of Napoleon, each country had a different reaction.  These reactions included the Balance of Power, the Principle of Legitimacy, the Holy Alliance, and the Principle of Intervention.  Each one of these had different outcomes for certain situations, and were put in place to try to maintain peace between all of the countries and in all of them.  One of the principles that Metternich and other representatives used to eliminate threats to their power was the balancing of power.  The Balance of Power made sure that countries were able to defend themselves if something like the Napoleonic reign were to ever happen again, and it also prevented countries from becoming more powerful than the others.  This division of power made sure that one country, like France, could not become overwhelmingly powerful and take over the others like Napoleon tried to do.  The Congress of Vienna made it so that the land conquered by Napoleon was divided up equally between countries, and it made some smaller countries more powerful, while eliminating some city-states for this expansion.  This balance of power added control to the countries, and it granted many years of peace for everyone who was a part of this session.

I personally think that the major powers made the right choice by giving power to the lesser ones, making them major powers.  However, I feel that if they wanted to help more people they would have let Italy declare their independence, which would have prevented many revolutions there and allowed other countries to worry less about it.  I feel that the powerful should definitely be willing to sacrifice some of their power under certain circumstances because their sacrificing of power and land could mean peace for everybody.  If someone is to sacrifice land for the sake of another country due to a dispute between that country and another, it would bring a cease to the fighting going on between the two.  The country that was attacking another would get the land that they were fighting for, and the country that lost the land would be granted the land from another major country.  In order for there to be peace in the world, people need to make sacrifices. If major powers made these sacrifices for others, peace would spread across the world for everyone.