The Concert of Europe and the Rise of International Arbitration

The last two mechanisms nineteenth- and early twentieth-century diplomats relied on to keep nationalism in check moved in a genuinely different direction from balance-of-power politics and rigid alliance blocs: instead of counterweighting force with force, they tried building standing habits of consultation and impartial dispute resolution. Neither one fully succeeded, but both left a lasting institutional legacy.

The Concert of Europe: Great Powers Talking Instead of Fighting

For much of the later nineteenth century, European affairs and the ongoing management of the balance of power came to rely heavily on regular consultation among the continent’s great powers – Germany, Russia, Austria, France, and Britain – meeting periodically to work out shared problems before they escalated into war. Its most consequential product was the Congress of Berlin, convened to settle the fallout from the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. The great powers used that gathering to redraw the map of the declining Ottoman Empire’s Balkan territories among themselves, extracting concessions from a weakening Turkey, redistributing some territory to Russia, and granting outright independence to states such as Bulgaria and Romania while leaving a considerable portion of the Balkans under continued Ottoman control.

This kind of great-power consultation functioned, in effect, as an informal court for resolving disputes before they turned violent – but it depended entirely on the great powers actually wanting to cooperate, and once deep disagreements over the Balkans hardened rather than dissolved, the whole arrangement began losing its grip in the early years of the twentieth century, with catastrophic results not long after. When the 1919 Paris Peace Conference set out to rebuild international order after the First World War, it replaced this loose, informal habit of great-power consultation with something more permanent and more formally institutionalized: the League of Nations.

International Arbitration: Letting a Third Party Decide

Alongside great-power diplomacy, the past century also saw real, if more modest, progress through international arbitration – submitting disputes between hostile states to an impartial third party rather than resolving them by force. The Alabama Claims arbitration between the United States and Britain, settled through a tribunal in Geneva in the early 1870s under the Treaty of Washington, stands as one of the most influential early examples, demonstrating that even major powers could submit a serious grievance to binding third-party judgment rather than war. That precedent fed directly into the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, which built on the idea further and established the Permanent Court of Arbitration, giving states a standing, institutionalized venue for resolving disputes peacefully rather than having to construct an ad hoc tribunal each time a new conflict arose.

Taken together with the balance of power, alliances, and formal treaties, the Concert of Europe and international arbitration complete the nineteenth century’s basic toolkit for managing nationalist rivalry – five overlapping approaches, none of them fully adequate on its own, that later evolved into the League of Nations and, eventually, the United Nations system that inherited the same unfinished job.