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A century before the guns of August opened fire on Belgrade in 1914, the Congress of Vienna opened proceedings in September 1814. The contrast between the current memories of these two moments is striking. The centenary of the outbreak of World War I attracts worldwide interest: witness the numerous popular commemorations that will take place in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere this year, on top of the estimated 25,000 books written about the conflict since 1918. Meanwhile, the bicentenary of the Congress has hardly caught the eye of a public beyond the academia. What can this comparison tell us about why we write history? And how might we re-assert the power of peace amid the prevailing talk of war?

All continental wars in the past five centuries of European history ended in disarray. As Winston Churchill aptly noted in 1946, “among the victors there is the babel of jarring voices; among the vanquished the sullen silence of despair.” Yet, order must somehow emerge again from the confusion of war. What has truly shaped the fate of Europe – and often the wider world – in the longue durée is the series of great diplomatic conferences like Utrecht (1713), Vienna (1814-15), Versailles (1919), and Yalta (1945). For better or worse, those were the watershed moments; but the proceedings in each case were largely undramatic. Peace-making raises little commotion. What Churchill called “jaw-jaw” has little of the popular pulling power of “war-war.”

The First World War is closer to our time and naturally more vivid than the Congress of Vienna: after all, we have a large supply of photographs and even films from the cauldron of war, but only prints and memoirs to evoke the process of peace. Could the imbalance in our collective memories of peace and war be due to something beyond our contrasting perceptions of screaming soldiers charging against machine guns, and the image of diplomats in 1814 quietly seated around a table in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat?

Do we tend to read the hand of fate in violent upsets in a way we do not for such placid negotiations? We assume the First World War was pivotal because it heralded the end of empires and the birth of new nation-states. Yet in August 1914, no one had the faintest idea the war would be long or even consequential – it was not before three long years of war of attrition that empires (starting with the Russian one) would definitively start to fall........

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