Fears of Revolution and International Cooperation:The Concert of Europe and the Transformation of European Politics

Abstract

What explains the remarkable degree of great-power cooperation during the Concert of Europe? I focus on a period when there were regular congresses and argue that the transformation of the great powers’ respective domestic politics to where they had active revolutionary movements and feared upheavals at home played a key role in undergirding the transformation of European international politics into a more cooperative order. Fears of a common domestic ideological threat can cause states to bind together rather than exploit one another. The cooperation among the great powers was not just because they were constrained by the balance of power or satisfied with the territorial order or because the powers were meeting together. Their considerable cooperation was largely due to their preferences rather than those interactions.