Concert of Powers

Summary

Likened to a security management system “by committee”. In the words of Benjamin Miller, a concert is

an international institution or security regime for highlevel diplomatic collaboration among all the great powers of the day. It is a relatively durable, wide-scope, multiissue, and institutionalized framework of cooperation. This cooperation is the result of a convergence of longterm, stable, and deliberate collaborative approaches or strategies on the part of the great powers.

Concerts bring together a small group of major powers in order to regulate relations among themselves, to promote norms of cooperation, and to prevent conflicts between smaller states from provoking a larger war. Rosecrance and Schott describe a concert as a “club or group of powers that agree collectively to lower security costs for a given geographic (regional or worldwide) area”. They should be clearly distinguished from ad hoc singleissue diplomacy, “less institutionalized forms of great power diplomatic cooperation such as détente and entente”, and alliances of several major powers balancing against another power or powers.

An essential requirement for a functioning concert system is an agreement among concert members not to act unilaterally. Instead, decisions are made by consensus after consultation, and action to implement decisions is taken collectively. The central objective of a concert is to maintain stability, in effect the status quo of an international order. Because of this, the second important prerequisite for the establishment of a concert of powers is the acceptance of a set of common norms of behaviour by its members. Concert members must share compatible views of a stable international order. They must acknowledge one another's security interests and respect one another's domestic affairs. Members must agree not to act unilaterally against one another with force, or without consultation. Because concert systems can be informal, they have the additional advantage of not requiring complex institutional or bureaucratic mechanisms.