Perry Anderson

A comparison of the Concert of Powers born at Vienna in 1815, comprising Russia, the United Kingdom, Austria, Prussia, and eventually France, with the Concert of Powers that took shape after the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, comprising the United States, the European Union, Russia, China (and potentially India), and the disintegration that ultimately overtook each—the terminal collapse of the Vienna system a century later with the First World War, and the much swifter dissolution of the new world order proclaimed in 1991, with successive conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, the Black Sea, and the Far East. The underlying logic of each original entente between the great powers of their day, followed by the fateful dynamic of its undoing over time, define the explananda of this inter-temporal enquiry.