The Concert of Europe: A Fresh Look at an International System

This essay examines the Concert of Europe as an international system and offers some general reflections and tentative conclusions about the meaning, the nature, and the operation of concert diplomacy between 1815 and 1854. It focuses upon the assumptions and procedures engendered by the Concert which restrained and moderated the policies of the European great powers by peaceful means. It concludes that the European Concert was a conscious and reasonably successful attempt to devise a stable and peaceful system of interstate relations.