The Ghost of the Roman Empire (Re)Wanders Over Europe (3).

IV. Congress of Vienna (Matternich) Period

After the French army was defeated and Napoleon was sent back to the Elbe Island, the Congress of Vienna was convened under the leadership of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to give Europe a new order. With the decisions taken in this congress, which was held with the participation of almost all European states except the Ottoman Empire, the European balance of power was restructured. In the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the restructuring of Europe, the most important role was played by Austrian Prime Minister Matternich, who was the chairman of the congress.
The Maternich order took the Westphalian order to a new level. According to this; Under a large Roman-Germanic union, a community of states that were actually independent but connected to each other by a continuous union bond was established. Thus, the emergence of new great powers, a united Germany and an independent Italy on the European mainland was prevented.
Metternich aimed to form the German unity in small statelets under the rule of princes that Austria could bring under its sovereignty. Therefore, in Metternich's plan, a very difficult task was given to Austria, located in the center of the continent. This task; It is a pioneering task in ensuring the continuation of the new order established on the basis of the new state system and the old social structure. But this order did not last long. Because he soon faced some challenges.

The first of these was the unification of Italy. As a result of the developments in Italy, efforts to unite the country began and with the proclamation of Victor Emmanuel as King of Italy on March 17, 1861, Italian unity was established. In addition, the process of establishing the German Empire began by unifying the small German states under the leadership of the Prussian State. As a matter of fact, when Prussia won the wars with Denmark and Austria-Hungary and defeated the French in 1871, the German Empire was established.

Thus, the order that Maternich tried to establish was destroyed and the European power balances changed again. After that, a process emerged in which the newly established empires started the colonial struggle with the imperialist empires by taking Austria-Hungary, which was in danger of preserving their unity, and sought to change the current balance in their favor. At the end of this process, Europe was divided into two blocs. These blocks started to drift towards a new war under the names of alliance and entente.

V. The First World War and the Paris Conference

As a result, World War I, the biggest war that has occurred since the beginning of history, broke out. With the contribution of technological and economic developments, very large armies were established in this war and a great slaughter was experienced when these armies came face to face on the battlefields. Since the balance of power was close to each other, the war lasted for four years because the parties could not win. When we look at the regions where the battles in this war were intense, it is seen that the battles took place mainly within the widest borders of the Roman Empire, except for the short-lived struggle in the colonies, although it is called the world war.
World War I ended with the withdrawal of the Allied Powers from the war, not only militarily but also economically, politically and demographically exhausted. However, the victorious Entente bloc has also come very close to the point of exhaustion. More importantly, regimes have changed in all the defeated states. The new regime that emerged in Russia, one of these states, has features that will radically affect the future of the world order.

The Bolshevik revolution primarily changed the form of warfare. Bolsheviks dominated the country with large armies in which volunteers participated rather than battles with classical armies. In the struggle to establish the new regime, which they had to fight with the Allied Powers, they used ideological and psychological warfare methods as well as classical warfare methods, and they were effective in this.

After the war, 32 states gathered in Paris on January 18, 1919 in order to bring a new order to the world. Perhaps the most important achievement of the Paris Conference was the establishment of the League of Nations. Thus, an institution that can be considered the ancestor of today's United Nations Organization emerged. The purpose of this institution is to maintain international peace and stability and to ensure that there are no more major wars.

However, in the Paris Conference, the League of Nations could not establish a permanent peace order, on the contrary, the foundations of the bipolar world order that would continue until the 1990s were laid. In this period, although the Soviet regime, hostile to the capitalist world, emerged as a threat to the West, the first rebellion against the world order imposed by the Paris Conference came from the Germans, not the Russians.

VI. World War II and the Cold War Era

Germany takes the balance in Europe with a new challenge. he broke it again. The manifestation of this challenge, the Second World War, resulted in the defeat of the Germans, but the war also weakened the great colonial empires of the past. As a result, Russia became the most profitable country from the war, and the Soviet Union came closer to the heart of Europe thanks to its new communist ranks.

Just as the motivation to form a union has always emerged in Europe when faced with a threat from the north or east since the Roman Empire period, the expansion of the Soviets into Europe has similarly brought about the search for a new European union. For this purpose, first; The Western European Union for defense purposes was established with the Brussels Treaty signed on 17 March 1948 by the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Later, these states were joined by Italy and Germany.

Since a significant part of Europe came under the control of the Soviet Union thanks to the Communist Regimes; this union was deemed insufficient to meet the threat. This weakness was corrected by the North Atlantic Treaty signed in Washington in 1949 with the participation of the United States, Canada, Belgium, England, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Norway and Portugal. Thus, NATO was born. Thereupon, the Russians established the Warsaw Pact on May 14, 1955, together with other communist states.

In addition to these agreements for defense purposes, Europe also laid the foundation for attempts to establish a new union in the economic and political field. For this purpose, first in 1951; The European Coal and Steel Community was established between Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, France and Italy in order to develop the coal and steel sector. This community was renamed the European Economic Community in 1957 and became the European Union in 1992.

The European Union has been stuck in the dilemma of choosing between the Roman order and the Roman-Germanic order since its establishment. In other words, it oscillated between the idea of ​​evolving into an economic and political union, in which each state largely retains its independence, and the idea of ​​achieving a complete political and economic union.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the territories of the Roman Empire (EU and NATO Countries) began to expand again against the Asian powers. Thus, in Eastern Europe, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine gained their independence and these states changed regimes and started to join the EU and NATO. A similar process was experienced in the Balkans and the Caucasus. It is quite interesting that these developments resemble the order established by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk rather than the order established by the Paris Peace Conference.

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In this article, the dates, place names, personal names and treaty names have been written by checking Wikipedia to avoid any inaccuracies.
Except for the ones taken from Wikipedia, all the information was written extemporaneously.