ABSTRACT
Moving beyond the narrow focus on great power diplomacy that characterizes much of the international relations (IR) literature on the Concert period, this chapter examines the institutional arrangements and political dynamics of the German Bund – the federation of 41 states, including Austria and Prussia, designed at the Congress of Vienna to stabilize German and European affairs. I argue that the precarious balance created in 1815 lay in a field of tension between various political, economic, and constitutional impulses that can be likened to a permanent stress test on the federal structure of the Bund. The resulting political paralysis destabilized interstate relations after 1848 and led to the erosion of international order in the middle years of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the story of the Bund serves as the connecting tissue between the cooperative regional system of the first half of the nineteenth century and the competitive globalized system of the second half, adding an important piece to our understanding of European politics at the time.
