After the second victory against Napoleon, Allied deliberations about peace and security were inevitably juxtaposed with the threat of ‘terror’. The threat of new revolutions and the rise of new despots like Napoleon loomed over the Allies, leading to the concept of ‘balance of power’ being used in a normative context: notions of peace, tranquillity and harmony were not only principles of politics, but expressions of a collective sentiment that bonded the European community of statesmen together. The ‘balance of power’ was also a hierarchical principle, as it served to reorder the map of Europe and of the world beyond it, and smaller nations were at the mercy of the four powers and their decision-making. More a guiding principle than a concrete set of policies, the ‘balance of power’ represented a collective desire for peace and security in Europe, but the statesmen had to implement and order that balance and peace on a daily basis, in a time of distress and transformation.

In recent historiography, the fear of a coordinated international conspiracy threatening the regimes established in the Vienna Settlement is depicted as a form of political paranoia, evoked to create an all-powerful police state. Instead, it is argued here that these fears were a rational response to an actual wave of revolutionary activity across Europe, but that there was widespread disagreement about the extent of international concertation of these various movements. In the attempts to corroborate suspicions of an international revolutionary conspiracy against the Restoration order, a variety of epistemic operations, practical routines and institutional forms of police cooperation were developed, which all contributed to the emergence of a European security culture. However, this culture was riddled with political tensions as a result of competing political interests in the fight against threats to the Restoration order.