As a historical model of how to end an extended period of international conflict and to establish a stable and peaceful international order, the Vienna Congress has claimed the attention of academics and politicians ever since 1815. Against this background the chapter will deal with the question of how the Congress of Vienna and the Vienna system were regarded by various actors and under changing political circumstances. Rather than merely collecting views and interpretations of the Congress and the international system taking shape in 1814/15, the chapter will ask how the varying interpretations of Vienna and the Vienna system reflected changing ideas and visions of international order and what they can tell us about national and international security cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Tension between the Federal Republic's transatlantic policy and its relations with its neighbor across the Rhine was a constant during the forty-one years between its founding and German unification. Against the background of the East-West conflict, the Federal Republic's foreign policy had to combine a constructive policy toward the Atlantic alliance centered on German-American relations and a constructive policy on European integration focused on Franco-German relations. Overarching American hegemony did, indeed, guarantee a comparatively stable and predictable framework for the Western alliance and defined the foreign policy options open to its individual members. But there was scarcely a time when that hegemony went unchallenged. Indeed, the dynamic between the American claim to dominance and the efforts of the Western European states to escape from that dominance - or at least to weaken it - resulted in continual conflict among the Western nations after 1945. The Federal Republic and France, like the other Western European states, had no choice but to enter into alliance with the United States and submit to American dominance. This relationship offered the West German state the opportunity to improve its status and reestablish itself internationally. France, a defeated victor, saw the German-American relationship as detrimental to its own political importance, an impression reinforced by the rapid revival of its neighbor to the east.3 French reservations about Germany’s revival and, in particular, German rearmament created problems for the Federal Republic’s U.S.-oriented policy of Western integration as well as for U.S. policy on Europe. Particularly after 1958, France attempted to use West Germany’s importance for its own interests, hoping to create a “Third Force Europe” under French leadership to counter the United States.