The great powers and the establishment of security regimes. The formation of the Concert of Europe, 1792--1815

Over the past two centuries, international relations have been marked by greater institutionalization. This trend has characterized not only trade and economic relations but also such highly sensitive areas as security and political-military cooperation among states. The institutionalization of security issues by means of establishing global and regional security organizations, such as the UN and NATO, or issue-specific security regimes, such as the non-proliferation regime, raises important questions about the changing nature of international relations. Why do states cooperate to establish international security regimes in the first place? Why do they succeed in establishing security regimes in some cases and fail in others?;In my dissertation I addresses these questions by studying several attempts made by the great powers between 1792 and 1815 to form an early case of a security regime, known as the Concert of Europe. As an example of successful great power cooperation in security issues, the study of the Concert has recently acquired a great deal of political as well as academic importance, leading to the emergence of substantial scholarship among historians and political scientists. The literature on the Concert is abundant, however, it suffers from a major weakness: it offers bivariate explanations of regime formation, emphasizing either power, interests or knowledge as the key variable. The same weakness characterizes the regime scholarship in general. I redress these weaknesses in the scholarship by using a multivariate approach to the study of the formation of the Concert. I focus on the interplay of four key factors -- power, interests, knowledge and leadership in the creation of the European Concert.;I do not treat the formation of the Concert of Europe as a single case study. The formation of the Concert constitutes a series of mini-cases and thus may be viewed as a small-N study. Between 1792 and 1815 the great powers went through several rounds of negotiations over the creation of a European concert, which corresponded to the formation of several anti-French coalitions. The Second and the Third Coalitions represent cases of failure to form a European concert, while the Grand Coalition (1814-1815) is a clear-cut case of success.;The findings reached on the basis of all four case-studies are numerous and shed new light on the relative role played by the key major factors - power, interests, knowledge and leadership in the creation of security regimes. As a theory-generating small-N study, the findings of the dissertation may be tested in other cases of security regime formation such as the creation of the League of Nations (1919) or the United Nations (1945).