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Abstract
Do Concerts enable great powers to ameliorate security competition, or are they forums for security competition where each great power tries to abuse the Concert for their own advantage? The return of great power politics in the 21st century, evinced by the rise of China and a resurgent Russia, has incentivized scholars of International Relations to examine great power Concerts and their potential impact on security competition. While some scholars argue that Concerts can be a benevolent platform that mitigates security competition between great powers, I argue the opposite, namely that the great powers that comprise a Concert have a structural incentive to abuse the Concert to gain relative power and security competition will therefore persist. By carefully analyzing the historical evidence of the only case of an attempted Concert, the Concert of Europe, I demonstrate that Austria successfully abused the Concert to advance her interests to the detriment of the other great powers. This abuse was most evident when the gaze of Europe turned to Italy in the wake of the Neapolitan Revolution, and the European great powers assembled at Troppau and Laibach to address the revolution. During these great power conferences, Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, successfully turned the Concert into a tool of Austrian statecraft, heralding the end of the Concert of Europe in its original form.