Szabad György: Kossuth and the British „Balance of Power” policy 1859-1861 - Studia historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 34. (Budapest, 1960)
British historiography1 has reason to say about the policy of the balance of power that it asserted itself on the Continent after the revolutions of 1848 just as consistently as at the time of the Ancien Régime or the Restauration. Yet it had to overcome ever growing obstacles, although the unequality of development led to its liquidation only half a century later. While the defenders of the balance of power could content themselves in the 18th century by containing the expansive forces of single powers, in the first, and still more in the second half of the 19th century they had, in addition, to help powers, threatened not only by external aggression, but also by internal subversion, maintain their positions within the balance. The Hapsburg Empire and Turkey, both of medieval structure and welded together by dynastic connections and wars of conquest, could keep their heads over the tide of homogeneous national states on the one hand, and the liberation movements of peoples living within their borders on the other, only with the aid of Great Britain, the conductor of the power concert. And the British Government, if it was to maintain the given system of the balance of power, had to come necessarily at loggerheads with the liberation movements of these empires. Much as the courses followed and principles professed by Malmesbury, Palmerston and Russell (to name only the representatives of the epoch under examination) differed from each other, their political practice was in this field virtually the same. Russell supported, if not always consequently, the movement of “Unita Italia”, for the unification of Italy, far from upsetting it, added a new bulwark to the system of the balance of power. But he opposed the Hungarian liberation movement, because he feared that its eventual success would endanger the existence of Austria, considered indispensable in the given system 1 A. W. Ward—G. P. Gooch: The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy 1783—1919. Cambridge, 1923. II. 3.; A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848—1918. Oxford, 1967. XIX— XX.