Ordering Europe: The Legalized Hegemony of the Concert of Europe

This chapter explains the Concert in a different way. It describes the emergence and maintenance of the Concert during the era of regional order-making before discussing how it unravelled as European powers became entangled in a new world crisis. The new world crisis of the second half of the 19th century needed a greater field of vision than the Concert's intra-European optic. The chapter discusses the way in which one dimension of the Concert - the system of 'legalized hegemony' - became incorporated into international law and global governance. 19th century witnessed a 'global transformation' in which industrialization, rational state-building, and 'ideologies of progress' generated the world's first global order. The 'global transformation' contained three interrelated components. The chapter assesses the main components of the Concert effectiveness and examines the ways in which the global transformation forged a transnational field that superseded the mechanisms established by the Concert, with one exception: the system of legalized hegemony.