Perpetual Concert: A League Of Nations In 1815?

WI Immanuel Kant's ideas for a true league of nations had been adopted after the end of the Napoleonic Wars? In OT it was the Concert of Europe which emerged to balance out the great powers in an attempt to prevent further war.

Would such an organization have been able to prevent World War One? Or would it suffer from the same internal divisions and lack of will which led to WW2 in OT?
 
WI Immanuel Kant's ideas for a true league of nations had been adopted after the end of the Napoleonic Wars? In OT it was the Concert of Europe which emerged to balance out the great powers in an attempt to prevent further war.

Would such an organization have been able to prevent World War One? Or would it suffer from the same internal divisions and lack of will which led to WW2 in OT?

The Congress of Vienna was able to maintain general European peace from 1815 until the Crimean War in 1855, forty years of peace more or less. I think the problem that you're going to face in trying to have a League of Nations so early is that the regimes you're going to rely on to be in this league are not very stable.

For instance:
-The German kingdoms and Italian Kingdoms exist, but if Germany and Italy is to be united, they are going to be swept away
-the Austrians are ruling over a multi-ethnic hodge-podge. Really, none of the ethnicites in the Empire want to be in the Empire -- the Germans who are the regime's supporters could probably be brought into a Greater Germany and all the other nations could (and indeed in OTL did) become independent.
-The Ottoman Empire's European possessions are a powder-keg -- though Balkans' nationalisms can be switched around and changed, they are still going to exist.

The upshot of all this is that this *League of Nations is going to be committed to trying to maintain an unsustainable status-quo. That will not be good for the longer-term prospects of this institution. I think that the Holy Alliance was the closest that you're going to get in 1815.
 
Top