Jennifer Mitzen’s primary goal in this book is to show how states “concert” their power in order to “steer” political outcomes (p. 61). For Mitzen, the Concert of Europe provides the first modern illustration of states purposefully “grouping” in order to construct a legitimate “international public power” (p. 98). Public commitments made through “forums” (face-to-face meetings between sovereigns and their principal advisors accompanied by midlevel diplomatic meetings and the establishing of committees on a variety of issue-areas) encouraged practices of self-restraint and the emergence of generalized interests. For Mitzen, the forums that sustained the Concert served as participatory mechanisms that generated a thin social bond that, in turn, fostered a sense of collective solidarity and shared purpose. The Concert was the result of the collective intentions of states to jointly share in the management of European international politics.
For Mitzen, the greatest innovation of the Concert was that it was concerned not with dividing up the spoils of victory but with generating long-term order. This was achieved through a range of mechanisms—what she astutely calls the “visible hand” of international governance (p. 101). In terms of the primary aim of the Concert—avoiding war between the great powers—the visible hand worked well. There was no general war between the European great powers between 1815 and 1914 and no war of any kind between the great powers between 1815 and 1853. Considering the carnage that had preceded the Concert, this was no small achievement. Mitzen skillfully charts the ways in which the Concert prevented tensions between the great powers from degenerating into full-blown conflict, and equally skillfully examines the ways in which the mechanisms formulated by Concert powers have been consequential for later forums of global governance.
In this review, we concentrate on two lines of critical engagement with Power in Concert: The first concerns its historical analysis; the second, its theoretical framing. In both cases, our view is that the book would have benefited from a greater sense of global engagement.
Historical Analysis
Perhaps unsurprisingly for an international relations specialist, Mitzen is mostly concerned with the way in which the Concert sought to generate stability by preventing great power war in Europe. But this is only half the story. Although pre-Vienna discussions associated peace with defensive concerns about how to contain French expansionism, the escape of Napoleon and the ensuing “100 days” meant that the November 1815 meeting in Paris—and subsequent Congresses—assumed a more ambitious agenda: inoculating Europe against the revolutionary virus. As Metternich put it, “there is only one serious matter in Europe, and that is revolution” (in Mark Mazower, Governing the World, 2012, p. 6). Mitzen acknowledges that the early years of the Congress were punctuated by republican revolutions in Spain (1820), Naples (1820), and Greece (1821). Yet by the early 1820s, much of Spanish Latin America was free from Spanish rule; Brazil broke free of Portugal in 1822–23. And the author is silent on the wave of uprisings in the early 1830s, which engulfed France, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, and parts of Germany. In Britain, the unrest between mid-1830 and the 1832 Reform Act was so grave as to amount to a “revolutionary situation” (Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller, 2014, p. 541). In a similar vein, Mitzen’s chapter on the dissolution of the Concert is concerned with Crimea, not the wave of republican uprisings that extended over much of continental Europe in 1848, thereafter extending into a wider conflagration that stretched from the Americas to Ukraine, and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.
Mitzen’s relative silence on revolutions is crucial to her examination of great power “grouping” and “collective intentionality.” After all, republican movements exposed deep tensions within the Concert. Britain reluctantly agreed to an intervention to suppress a republican uprising in Naples in 1821, but refused to go along with other counterrevolutionary interventions. British ambivalence hardened after the suicide of its foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, in 1822. Castlereagh’s replacement, George Canning, was deeply suspicious of the interventionist agenda promoted by Russia and Austria. There was to be, as Canning put it, “no doctrine of a European police” (in Governing the World, p. 7). Under Canning, Britain made a declaration of nonintervention towards the Latin American republics, an act that directly contravened the views of its Concert partners. Canning rejected invitations to a Congress to discuss Latin America, and refused to directly address tensions between the Ottomans and the Greeks. After the 1830 revolutions, Britain deepened its commitment to nonintervention and constitutional monarchy, while Austria, Russia, and Prussia reasserted their support for absolutism. Thereafter, no collective agreement could be reached on intervention against republican movements; between 1830 and 1848, collaboration between the great powers was restricted to specific crisis points. The 1848 revolutions forced the resignation of Metternich, the last living architect of the Concert. In this sense, if Mitzen is right to point to Crimea as performing the last rites on the Concert, it is worth acknowledging that the patient had been ailing for some time. And the main cause of its ill health was a fundamental disagreement about how to deal with republican revolutionary movements.
The key point to note is that by focusing on the prevention of great power war, Mitzen spends little time on the tensions that arose over revolution and, as a result, the changing forms of collective intentionality and generalized interests that took place within the Concert. The post-Vienna vision of the Concert was a settlement between nations that rested on the view that any such agreement required a settlement within nations—and this settlement was oriented around the prevention of revolution. This understanding held for Britain as much as it did Austria—the British cracked down on domestic dissent, most notably at Peterloo in 1819, just as firmly as their neighbors did. But this “hard” form of collective intentionality did not last for long. In part, this was because Britain began to take a different view of republican self-determination than its neighbors. In part, it was because British interests were increasingly being measured on a different scale than those of its rivals. As the author notes, the Concert was concerned primarily with intra-European affairs (p. 95). Along with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the Concert served to compartmentalize world politics into regional spheres of influence. Yet the emergence of new sources of power during the first half of the nineteenth century meant that such views were increasingly passé (Buzan and Lawson, The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations, 2015). This period saw Britain become the world’s only major industrial economy. Its consequent superiority in military and economic power allowed it to vastly increase its colonial possessions. Increasingly, British interests were measured through a global optic.
These developments help to make clear why, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s policy orientations became ever more detached from those of the continental great powers. So long as there was relative peace in Europe, Britain could pursue its global agenda. But this was not because of a shared sense of restraint, collective commitment, or strategy of grouping; nor was it a result of the ways in which public forums fostered collective intentionality. Rather, it was because a quiet home front enabled Britain to exploit its comparative advantages. If this is right, two questions arise: first, whether Mitzen’s account of the Concert needs a more sustained engagement with revolution and, in particular, with the relationship among war, revolution, and intervention; and second, whether Power in Concert should have extended its historical purview beyond intra-European developments. In our view, global dynamics are central to any judicious assessment of the Concert.
Theoretical Framing
The other deficit in the global positioning of this book is its U.S.-centric theoretical framing. The parochial proclivities of U.S. international relations were measured by Ole Wæver (“The Sociology of a Not So International Discipline: American and European Developments in International Relations,” International Organization 52 [no. 4, 1998]: 687–727) some time ago, and this book continues that tradition. Power in Concert is largely a contribution to theoretical debates between rationalists and constructivists. Yet this is almost entirely a U.S.-centric conversation; outside the United States, relatively few IR theorists see their universe as constituted by the parameters of this debate. And seen through the lens of a global IR enterprise, Mitzen’s book seems unnecessarily confined within the narrow bandwidth within which IR operates in the United States.
The most obvious point of contact that Mitzen could have made to wider theoretical debates is through the English School (Buzan, An Introduction to the English School of International Relations: The Societal Approach, 2014). It is true that Mitzen makes passing reference to both Hedley Bull (The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 1977) and the concept of international society (pp. 5–29). But she makes no systematic attempt to relate her work to the English School as a tradition of thought, and seems unaware that much of what she is trying to do fits closely with this tradition. Rather, she seems to see international society as a kind of inert background to the dynamics and mechanisms she highlights without realizing that much of the time, she is discussing the evolution and operation of international society itself. This leads to a number of missed opportunities. Adam Watson’s (The Evolution of International Society, 1992, p. 14) concept of raison de système, defined as “the belief that it pays to make the system work,” is more than passingly relevant to the concerns of Mitzen’s book. She could usefully have linked her narrative to the development of primary institutions, such as diplomacy, balance of power, nationalism, and great power management. She might also have built productively on Bull’s understanding of international and world society in working through her position on global governance (pp. 46–63).
The full scope of what is lost from a failure to seriously engage the English School becomes clear in the Conclusion. Mitzen sees the two main elements of her argument as being about collective intentionality and the normative commitments that states hold to each other, seeing both as alien to “mainstream IR scholarship” (pp. 222–28). These points may indeed be alien to mainstream IR in the United States, but they are the bread and butter of an English School understanding of international society. Indeed, all four of the theoretical contributions that Mitzen sees her book as making point strongly to an English School framing. Her first point, that “states can be important governors empirically and normatively,” is to all intents and purposes a statement of international society (p. 222). Her second point about collective intentionality is embedded in raison de système and the institution of great power management (pp. 223–25). Her third point about the importance of interstate forums is a potentially important contribution to the English School’s debate on how to relate primary and secondary institutions within international society (pp. 225–26). Her fourth point about the relationship between solidarity and global governance falls squarely within English School debates about pluralism and solidarism as the normative poles around which international society is analyzed and enacted (pp. 226–28).
Had Mitzen picked up these linkages, she could have written a book that would have spoken not just to mainstream U.S. international relations scholarship but to debates about IR theory and global governance more broadly. Within the confines set by U.S. international relations, Power in Concert is a major contribution. But our overriding sense is that if Mitzen had taken the opportunity to engage in a wider theoretical conversation, both her book and global IR would have benefited greatly.
