Concert Of Great Powers And Trans-regional Security Governance

Concert of great powers is one kind of multilateral security regime to manage international issues through diplomatic conferences by the major great powers. Firstly, this article argues that the concert of great powers stems from concert of Europe. In the post cold war times, because of the changes come from system level and unit level, concert of great powers has been enjoying a renaissance, various mechanisms obviously come into being. Just like G8, G20, the BRICS summit and other concert mechanisms for some specific international issues. For example, the concert of the five great powers aiming at the Cambodia issue from1989to1991, the concert of the five great powers aiming at the nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan in1998, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear issue and the six-party talks on the Iranian nuclear issue.Secondly, from the angle of historical development, the concert of great powers can be divided into three forms:concert of regional great powers, concert of multi-regional great powers and concert of global great powers. Concert of global great powers tends to be part of a broadly defined concert of multi-regional great powers and it is the higher stage of concert of multi-regional great powers. This article focuses on the concert of multi-regional great powers, namely, managing important regional issues through diplomatic conferences by the great powers come from different regions of the world, which manifests that the concert of great powers can carry out the multi-regional security governance. I argue that contemporary concert of great powers involve multi-regional security governance falls under the category of interregionalism, specifically, it is multi-interregionalism that great powers play a dominant role and is based on issues so that emphasizes functionality.Thirdly, this article includes two cases, one is about the Cambodia settlement agreements and the other is about the nuclear crisis between India and Pakistan. These cases show the characters of this kind of multi-interregionalism, meanwhile, I analyze the ways and effects of contemporary concert of great powers involving trans-regional security governance. The concert of multi-regional great powers retains the core rules of a concert:the rule of informal consultation, the decision rule of consensus, the rule of collective response and the rule of self-restraint. After the cold war, its effects mainly depend on three variables:the consensus of great powers is the foundation, the powers’ will to take responsibilities is the key cause and the development degree as well as the practical capacity of regional organization is an assistant variable. Moreover, the relationship between the concert of multi-regional great powers and the regional organization mixes competition and cooperation.At last, this article evaluates the effect of the concert of multi-regional great powers in two dimensions:validity and legitimacy. From the perspective of validity, the concert of multi-regional great powers can make up the deficiency of UN Security Council and become a useful addition to the international security governance; once the significant regional issues are solved, the concert of multi-regional great powers can create more opportunities for regionalization; the concert of multi-regional great powers emphasizes multilateral cooperation which can limit American hegemony. From the perspective of legitimacy, the evaluation is designed from two aspects:legalization and rationality. On the one hand, the five permanent U.N. Security Council members have taken special responsibilities on maintaining international peace and security due to the international law, international security governance of the post cold war particularly emphasizes legitimacy. The concert of multi-regional great powers and collective security tend to integrate in practice, and the former comes into being legalization by drawing support from the latter. On the other hand, the concert of great powers has a value proposition of maintaining the existing order. Therefore, contemporary concert of great powers requires that international society strives to improve the relationships among the major powers and strengthen the legitimacy of concert mechanisms. Moreover, how to reform "the negative peace" into "the positive peace" should be taken into consideration. This would require the great powers’ attention both to its own interests and the public interest. The concert of great powers should transform relying on the consensus of mini-multilateralism into relying on the consensus of macro-multilateralism.