Although states of most types receive distinct advantages when they formalize their cooperation through public, legally binding agreements, we argue that absolute monarchs are uniquely able to capture personal benefits from secret, cartel-like cooperation. Domestic decision-making in absolute monarchies is unchecked, nontransparent, and highly personal, and these norms reproduce themselves at the international level when absolute monarchs cooperate with each other. We assess the explanatory strength of our theory through two in-depth case studies. First, we examine how the Austrian, Prussian, and Russian monarchs used informal agreements strategically during the Concert of Europe to suppress domestic unrest. Second, we explore how the Iraqi, Jordanian, and Saudi monarchs used secret agreements to counter domestic pro-republican sentiment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Irrespective of geography, religion, and time period, the nontransparent and unilateral manner with which absolute monarchs implement domestic policies facilitates and encourages this type of informal cooperation.

The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.

Chapter 1 begins by discussing the nineteenth century as the age of internationalism, forms of which developed in various realms. International relations underwent a significant degree of legalisation and a law-based international order emerged along the lines of supposed European ‘civilisational standards’, enshrining clear hierarchies of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ states and thereby preparing the further course of European colonialism and imperialism. In the realm of civil society, social and political reform movements began to form cross-border networks and to explore new means of exerting influence in the transnational sphere, making deliberate use of the ‘public sphere’ as a resource to rally support for their causes. Yet at the state level, too, the period following the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) saw a tremendous increase in international cooperation between the European great powers. In intense diplomatic consultation at regular conferences and meetings of ambassadors and in special committees, the ‘Concert of Europe’ tried to find joint solutions to international conflicts, civil wars and humanitarian crises. This form of cooperation and collective crisis management is often regarded as one of the first forms of international governance.

The function of intervention, in this context, was to act as a corrective in international politics. Fundamental questions posed by this practice of intervention by force in the internal affairs of a sovereign state are addressed in Chapter 2, which locates them in the context of the Vienna order. What can be observed here is, first, the emergence of an anti-revolutionary paradigm of intervention, by means of which the ‘Holy Alliance’, made up of the continental powers Russia, Austria and Prussia, made a collective attempt to prevent and suppress internal unrest and revolutionary movements. Second, and in parallel to these efforts, the British struggle to suppress the Atlantic slave trade gave birth to a further-reaching conception of intervention centred on the military enforcement of an internationally agreed humanitarian norm.

Chapter 1 examines the social and intellectual backgrounds of the pro-league of nations movement. Although previous research has focused on the movement’s activity predominantly during the inter-war period, the post-war plan emerged from an older European intellectual tradition. This chapter, therefore, contextualises the pro-league movement into this rich legacy by exploring two broader contexts: the immediate backdrop to the evolution of the movement and the history of ideas about war and peace. In the pre-1914 period, the future pro-league activists already had networks of influence that became the basis of a pro-league movement. While they drew upon a European intellectual legacy, the problems they faced differed from those of their predecessors – the breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the rise of nationalism. These problems led the pro-leaguers to not only develop fresh perspectives on the causes of war, but also conclude that a new world order should be established.

This chapter analyses the survival of aristocratic elite families in European polities during the nineteenth century. I show that aristocracy and monarchy survived and even prospered by adapting to modern politics until the beginning of World War One. Certainly strong liberal, nationalist and socialist forces challenge hereditary power but they were only successful in Britain and France. The Central European, Ottoman and Russian monarchies and aristocracies were ousted only because of their defeat in World War One. The capacity of monarchies and aristocracies to survive even in the century of modernization means that the idea that kinship and political order are incompatible is weakened further. It is possible to have modern states ruled by elite families and legitimated by hereditary rule. However, it is not possible to build democracies on such foundations.

This chapter looks at how contemporaries understood changes occurring in the structure and practices of the European security regime emerging around 1815, and how we can understand its ordering functions in international society today from a broader historical perspective by applying theoretical notions developed in regime and governance theory. By highlighting not only the innovations but also the deficiencies of the Vienna security regime, this chapter questions its 'model' character. Yet the experiences and practice of the normative order emerging from the Vienna regime contributed to later forms of international governance in the League of Nations, the United Nations and the Security Council.

The European peace and security system established in the course of the Congress of Vienna is presented here as a more complex arrangement than conveyed in the traditional political model of the balance of power. The statesmen and diplomats who drafted the settlements of 1814-1815 genuinely and succesfully sought to ban war and to establish a lasting peace after the long and bloody wars against Napoleon, a peace which endured until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. Instead of a balance of power based on mutual military deterrence, they arrived at a balance of negotiation, a compromise based on active cooperation. As such, the order of Vienna, though imperfect, was a definite refinement compared to the traditional paradigm of the balance of power inherited from the Treaty of Utrecht. It created a Concert of Europe, which even beyond its impact throughout the nineteenth century still frames a European political ethos up to this day.

Between 1812 and 1828 Friedrich von Gentz acted as political correspondent for three successive princes of Wallachia. This chapter reveals the complex relationship between the freelance diplomat and his generous clients, in which Gentz acted as an unofficial diplomatic agent, confidant and tutor, thereby engaging in a process of ‘distance social teaching’ in relation to his princely correspondents, who themselves were ‘intelligence brokers’ in Europe’s southeastern periphery. In turn, the hospodars kept Gentz regularly updated on the Danubian principalities' political situation, and appealed to Gentz’s expertise for guidance in the diplomatic conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, in which ambassadorial conferences worked for the cooperative management and resolution of international crises. The relationship between Gentz and his Wallachian correspondents provides a telling example of a practice that disseminated to southeastern Europe a new political and security culture.