The case of a global concert

In May last year, I wrote in these pages that the ghost of the Concert of Europe should be neither romanticised nor dismissed. It's harder to ignore sixteen months later.

Take a look at the world this week. A war which began in late February with the US-Israel strikes on Iran has expanded to Lebanon and the Strait of Hormuz and drawn in Gulf states. The Houthis and Saudi Arabia have clashed in Yemen, triggering a US security warning over the region recently. In Europe, Russia's war in Ukraine is ongoing, with drones, sabotage and violations of airspace, and senior European officials warning of deliberately ambiguous attacks on NATO territory that are big enough to cause some fear but not enough to trigger the defence clause.

Each fire is handled through ad hoc measures: emergency calls, borrowed mediators, statements after the fact. And they all are connected. British intelligence reportedly believes that the Kremlin may see Washington's focus on Iran as distracting. When things get tough in the Gulf, risks increase in the Baltic, and no one can observe both simultaneously.

It is an old problem. Following the Napoleonic wars, the great powers of Europe convened at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and resolved disputes without war. The consequence was a Concert of Europe without a constitution, no court, only an informal tradition of consensus diplomacy that for about four decades helped manage disputes among its members.

Charles Kupchan's new proposal would restore that practice. Writing in Foreign Policy Magazine, the Global Concert he pitched would meet not occasionally, like the original, but continuously, every day, in a strategically positioned city, with subconcerts on flashpoints such as Ukraine and Iran. He questioned the impact of fly-in fly-out summits like the recent G-20 and BRICS one. His concert would also run on goodwill mostly, with no charter and no binding commitments.

But can a voluntary body work? Asia offers clues. ASEAN cannot force anyone to do anything but decades of regular meetings have created habits of consultation and crisis management. SAARC was entirely voluntary in its design, but the summits were not regular and, when the relationship turned sour, they ceased. Maybe it's continuity, rather than enforcement that lends goodwill its heft. The stakes are not abstract for the Global South whose economies depend on energy passing through Hormuz and on Gulf labour markets. And when the Gulf is on fire, they burn first.

Trine Flockhart's addition is important here. In her latest essay she argues that there is no multipolar world but rather a multi-order one. She suggests that there are several orders that exist simultaneously and each have its own rule and legitimacy. The relations between orders are as important as the relations within. Today's crises appear to fit here. The Gulf war is not a fight between poles, it's a fight between overlapping orders. Whereas the conflict in Europe is between the liberal and the Russian order. She warns that the liberal order itself could split and Moscow's calculation about Washington's distraction shows how a fracture inside one order becomes an opening for another.

Looking into history, the great powers of then decided on the fate of others without consulting them. Consider Berlin in 1884-85 when Europe partitioned Africa with no Africans at the table. Any modern version of this that spoke only for the strongest ones would inherit that flaw.

I am not claiming to know whether a concert is the answer as it is still an ongoing debate. But the questions it's raising are now hard to ignore. Who communicates with whom on a daily basis when there is a crisis? Who sits in the room and who merely lives with its decisions? The lesson from Vienna is that peace needs a standing habit of talking before acting. And in a world of many orders and many fires, the idea of it may be worth hearing out. Even if only to learn what it lacked then: a seat for everyone else.