“Making peace is harder than waging war,” Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister, said in 1919 of the Paris Peace Conference. It was a lesson those who met at the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic wars knew well, as did those who attempted to end the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century. The clothes are different today, and their wearers arrive by plane and not by horse. They no longer have powdered wigs or embroidered waistcoats but they still sit around grand tables and they still try to guess what the others want. History echoes, as Mark Twain suggested, and in those echoes there are warnings for today.
“締造和平比發動戰爭更難，”法國總理喬治?克列孟梭(Georges Clemenceau)在1919年的巴黎和會上說。這是那些在拿破侖戰爭結束時參加維也納會議的人們深知的教訓，正如那些在17世紀試圖結束三十年戰爭的人們一樣。今天的服裝不同了，穿著者乘飛機而不是騎馬到達。他們不再戴假發或穿刺繡背心，但他們仍然圍坐在大桌子旁，仍然試圖猜測其他人的想法。正如馬克?吐溫(Mark Twain)所說，歷史在回響，而在這些回響中有對今天的警示。