The Dynamics of International Order

The Congress of Vienna ushered in a new period of diplomatic relations and new notions about how order was to be maintained in Europe. It was a decisive break from the past. Earlier statesmen, political observers, and commenters had an understanding of the ‘balance of power’ and invoked it to describe the bloody politics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but participants at the Vienna Congress reimagined the term, and reinvented its rules. Many of their innovations are still central to the way we understand international order today, but not all, and the ones we still invoke have often evolved in ways that create dramatically different political effects than their originators envisioned.