The Reytag – The Congress Dances

Two hundred and twelve years ago, the search for a new European order began in Vienna—a sense of purpose lacking in today’s fragmented times.

A celebration that wasn't one

Let us picture the scene: Vienna, mid-September 1814. The candles in the halls of the Hofburg have not yet all been lit, but the antechambers are already filling with uniforms, sashes of orders, and the scent of perfume intended to mask the rigors of travel from across Europe. A tsar has arrived, as has the King of Prussia; an emperor is already in residence in his own home; and there are princes, envoys, valets, spies, and courtesans—more people, it was estimated, than the city itself had inhabitants. And yet, this 18th of September sees the start of nothing heralded by pomp. No fanfares, no ceremonial opening, no signed document. It involves merely a few gentlemen from the four great powers—Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain—gathering for initial, entirely informal discussions, while the official opening of the Congress is not set to take place until November 1st. A meeting without protocol, without formal resolutions, almost casual in nature—and yet the very moment of origin for the event that would go down in history as the Congress of Vienna.

I admit that it is precisely this casual quality that appeals to me. Anyone whose work involves committees and boards—even if only in the modest form of university meetings regarding server capacities and network budgets—knows the phenomenon: the real decisions are rarely made in the plenary session itself, but rather beforehand, over coffee or in hallway conversations. What began on September 18, 1814, was exactly that: not a congress in the sense of a formal assembly, but a network of conversations that only took shape in retrospect. High politics, as this day teaches us, often begins more quietly than its monuments would later suggest.

Corridors Instead of Lecterns

The Belgian Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne—that witty conversationalist who entertained Vienna’s ballrooms with his humor—is said to have remarked of the gathering that it danced but did not move forward. The phrase became a catchphrase—“the dancing Congress”—and it indeed touches a raw nerve. For while diplomats officially worked on reorganizing a continent that had endured two decades of revolutionary and coalition wars, much of the time was spent on balls, hunts, theatrical performances, and courtly rituals. This was no mere sideshow; it was a deliberate method: the real negotiations took place in salons, not at the conference table. Who danced with whom, who visited which theater box, who sat next to whom at dinner—all of this constituted diplomatic capital.

Metternich, who pulled the strings, had it recorded in his own publication, the *Österreichischer Beobachter*, that the Congress had formed of its own accord “without any formal introduction”—a phrasing as precise as it was self-satisfied. For, of course, nothing here had formed by itself. It was the result of a carefully orchestrated balance of power among four—and soon five—great powers seeking a new equilibrium following the collapse of Napoleonic hegemony. They did so not out of principle, but out of the realization that no single power was strong enough to dictate its own order. The dream of an all-dominating empire had failed with Napoleon; in its place came the arduous, often cynical art of compromise.

And therein lies the quiet modernity of this seemingly anachronistic event: the Congress of Vienna was the first attempt in European history to stabilize a post-war order not through a peace dictated by a single victor, but through a multilateral—albeit deeply hierarchical—system of equilibrium. One may rightly criticize the outcome—the restoration of the old dynasties and the disregard for national and liberal movements. Yet the method employed—the struggle for equilibrium rather than hegemony—was to shape the ensuing century and, as will be shown, continues to resonate in the present day.

The Swiss Confederation on the Diplomatic Stage

For a Swiss audience, examining the country’s own role in this game is particularly worthwhile, as the Confederation was not a sovereign player among equals in 1814; rather—as contemporary sources bluntly record—it was an “object of negotiation” for the Great Powers. It was only by the narrowest of margins that the deeply divided Diet (*Tagsatzung*) had adopted the Federal Pact on September 9—nine days before that informal opening in Vienna—under pressure from the victorious powers; this pact was the minimum constitutional prerequisite for participation. Three days later, it dispatched a three-man delegation to Vienna: Hans von Reinhard, the Mayor of Zurich, acting as spokesperson; Jean de Montenach, a conservative patrician from Fribourg; and Johann Heinrich Wieland, a moderate from Basel—a trio that embodied the deep internal rifts within the Confederation itself.

The Great Powers pursued a clear geostrategic interest regarding Switzerland: following the experience of the Coalition Wars, they sought to create a neutral yet militarily viable buffer state between France and Austria. The outcome was ambivalent, as compromises often are. There were significant gains: the Lordship of Rhäzüns—which the Habsburgs had been forced to cede to Napoleon in the 1809 Treaty of Schönbrunn—returned to the Grisons; the Fricktal, part of Aargau since the Act of Mediation in 1803, was now definitively awarded to Switzerland, dashing Austrian hopes of reclaiming it. In 1815, Geneva, Valais, and Neuchâtel joined the expanded Confederation as new, full-fledged cantons. However, regarding what was lost, much of what the old cantons had hoped for remained mere wishful thinking: Bern regained neither Vaud nor Aargau; Uri did not get back the Leventina; and Schwyz and Glarus failed to recover the territories of Uznach, Gaster, and Sargans. Nor did a separate canton materialize for the former Prince-Bishopric of Basel or for Biel—territories that were instead incorporated into the cantons of Bern and Basel, a decision that would prove to be a political powder keg in the Bernese Jura well into the 20th century.

Ultimately, following Napoleon’s brief return and final defeat at Waterloo, the Great Powers guaranteed Switzerland’s perpetual neutrality and territorial integrity in November 1815—a status the country invokes to this day. It is a delightful irony that a congress driven by aristocratic vanity bestowed upon the small Confederation the very form of existence that would become its hallmark.

Nomos and Dance Step

Anyone wishing to grasp the events of 1814–15 not merely as a chronology but in terms of political theory can hardly overlook Carl Schmitt. In his later work *The Nomos of the Earth* (*Der Nomos der Erde*), Schmitt describes *nomos* not as an abstract law but as an originary "land-appropriation" (*Landnahme*): that founding act in which an order becomes territorially embodied, draws boundaries, assigns property, and thereby creates the very condition for law to exist. Viewed from this perspective, the Congress of Vienna is a prime example of such *nomos*-setting: it does not merely end a war; it literally redraws the map of Europe, distributes territories such as Rhäzüns or the Fricktal, creates new state entities like the German Confederation, confirms the neutrality of others—and thereby establishes that *Jus Publicum Europaeum* which Schmitt regards as the true achievement of the European state system: a legal order among sovereign powers that recognize one another as equals. This order does not abolish war, but limits its destructive force, as it is waged between organized states rather than between a universal claim and its adversaries.

From this vantage point, the image of the "dancing" Congress appears in a new light. The dancing is not mere excess; it is ritual—and rituals, as every cultural historian knows, are the sensory practice of an order before it is cast into the text of treaties. In Vienna, knowing with whom one was to dance the quadrille meant already knowing the hierarchy that would later be inscribed on maps as territorial boundaries. Schmitt’s concept of *nomos* reminds us that order never simply falls from the sky without preconditions; rather, it always emerges from a concrete act of spatial appropriation—one often violent, or at the very least saturated with power. The elegance of the ballrooms masked the harshness of this process; it did not negate it. One need not overlook Schmitt’s own deeply problematic entanglement with National Socialism to find his analytical category fruitful; on the contrary, awareness of that very fact sharpens one’s perception of how easily the sober observation of the formation of state order can turn into an apologia for raw power. Schmitt describes the *nomos*; he does not thereby justify it. Making that distinction is the task of the reader, not the author.

Salons and Censorship

While Schmitt reveals the logic of the "appropriation of land" (*Landnahme*), Jürgen Habermas draws attention to a quieter revolution taking place at the same time: the structural transformation of the public sphere. Habermas describes the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century—in coffee houses, reading societies, and periodicals—that asserted the right not merely to endure political rule but to discuss it publicly. He contrasts this with the older "representative public sphere" of the royal court, where authority did not seek to justify itself but rather presented itself as a spectacle: pageantry, ceremony, and the sovereign demonstrating his power through its sensory display.

Vienna in 1814–15 marked perhaps the greatest—and certainly the last—monumental appearance of this representative public sphere on European soil; yet it was also the moment when it was already being undermined by the new, critical public sphere. For even as princes and diplomats reached agreements on borders and crowns behind closed doors, a spirit of mockery was already proliferating in pamphlets, caricatures, and early mass-circulation newspapers—mockery that exposed the court’s self-presentation for what it increasingly was: an anachronism. The Congress’s secret diplomacy—its deliberate refusal to offer any public account of its actions—was not a peripheral detail but a deliberate policy. Precisely for this reason, it became a target for the reading public’s new and inexorably growing capacity for criticism—a capacity Habermas identifies as the defining hallmark of modernity.

This dual dynamic is what makes the Congress of Vienna historically so fascinating: it represents the final great triumph of secretive cabinet politics and, simultaneously—albeit unintentionally—acted as a catalyst for the very public sphere that would make such secretive politics increasingly difficult to sustain in the future. The restoration he initiated was politically successful, yet from the outset it contended with an adversary it could not eliminate: the reading, judging, self-empowering public.

The Longing for a New Vienna

Two hundred and twelve years later—on yet another September 18th—it is hard to resist the temptation to search for a contemporary equivalent: Where, today, is the congress that might remap our fragmented world order? The list of candidates is long and dispiriting: a war in Ukraine that has reduced the European security architecture established in 1990 to rubble; a Middle East conflict that seems to defy all mediation efforts; an intensifying rivalry between the United States and China that recalls the bloc-building of the 19th century, yet lacks its predictability; and international institutions increasingly perceived as stages devoid of a play. The longing for a new Vienna—a summit of order capable of tying together these frayed threads—surfaces, more or less explicitly, in almost every foreign policy debate today.

Yet the conditions of 1814 cannot be replicated, and for good reason. The Congress of Vienna succeeded because, despite their rivalries, the participants shared a common normative horizon—dynastic legitimacy, monarchical sovereignty, and a court culture that fostered connections even across the battle lines of war. It is precisely this shared horizon that the modern world order lacks. Who could seriously claim that Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels share an understanding of legitimacy that could be choreographed into a dance? Thus, the longing for a new Vienna is often a longing for a kind of homogeneity that will never exist again—and perhaps should not, for it was the price paid for those old orders: the exclusion of everyone who did not belong to the illustrious circle of royal courts. Self-criticism is in order here—including on the part of the columnist: it is tempting, from the vantage point of two centuries later, to admire the elegance of past diplomacy while forgetting the human misery it exacted. The ballrooms of Vienna were brilliantly lit, even as the harvests of the war years lay devastated elsewhere. Any aestheticization of the establishment of a historical order risks overlooking the suffering that lay at its foundation. When we call for a new Vienna, we should ask ourselves whether we truly desire the return of that specific order—or rather, in a more contemporary sense, that minimum level of shared understanding without which even the shrewdest diplomacy comes to nothing.

The Last Dance

Let us return to the Hofburg on that 18th of September, when several men met for a conversation destined to redraw the map of a continent—without anyone taking notice. Music continued to play in the adjoining halls; quadrilles were danced, and champagne glasses were filled and emptied. It is this juxtaposition of frivolity and fundamental decision-making that makes the Congress of Vienna seem so strikingly relevant today: history’s great turning points rarely announce themselves with the solemnity attributed to them in hindsight. They begin in an adjoining room, in a fragment of a sentence, in the casual conversation of two diplomats who do not yet realize how far-reaching their agreement will prove to be.

Perhaps therein lies the true lesson of that day for our own times—not the illusion that the old order can simply be replicated, but the sober reminder that any new order, should it come to pass, will likely begin just as unspectacularly: not with a summit staged as a historic event, but with a conversation no one deems historic until it is far too late to ignore it. The Congress danced—yet at some point, between two dances, it also signed the papers. Perhaps that is the true message of that 18th of September, more than any fanfare: to exercise patience with the seemingly trivial, for it is often in the trivial that the foundations are laid for what will later be deemed world-changing.

Sapere aude!

S.

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