The main achievement of the Congress of Vienna was the creation of a system for maintaining international peace and regulating conflict in Europe which, after the territorial and political convulsions of the Napoleonic period, lasted for a number of decades. Combined with this was a fundamental, qualitative change in the style of international politics which all ‘players’ endorsed: the fixation on the purely individual interests of states was overcome in favour of a functioning European security order with predictable rules governing mediation and conflict management. The ambassadors’ conferences and the powers’ conferences held after 1814 were the first specific building blocks of this type of security order.

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The Austrian Empire under Metternich’s diplomatic management took a central role in the nineteenthcentury. European Concert of Powers with its complicated mechanisms for balancing spheres of influence, largely because of Austria’s territorial interests in the direction of the German states, Italy, and the Balkans. The development of the European state order from the Crimean War to the outbreak of the Balkan crisis in 1875, at the end of which the last European Great Power conference was held in Berlin in 1878, is well researched, but we still lack an adequate, easily accessible documentation of the Vienna Order of 1815, of central significance to European politics, and its development in the conference politics conducted well into the 1820s taking account of the systematic, international, and pan-European dimensions of this order. Thus to undertake a new project editing sources relating to the functioning of European power politics during the period 1814/15 to 1825, initially from the hitherto under-exposed perspective of the Vienna court, seems both overdue and rewarding. This task, which could be completed within the time period specified in the application, could be the starting point for a possibly long-term project on the topic ‘The European System of the Congress of Vienna’. The specific aim would be to produce a substantial volume which, on the basis of archival originals held in Vienna, would make available key documents on the content and the procedures of the European system of the Vienna Order. The addition of German-language summaries would ensure that the volume could be widely consulted and used in academic teaching. The intention is to use the files ‘Kongressakten’ (46 fascicles) and ‘Vorträge’ (37 boxes) from the holding ‘Staatskanzlei’ in the Austrian state archives (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv – Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv) in Vienna. In view of the two hundredth anniversary of the Congress of Vienna in 2014/15, this is intended as a first concrete and widely visible step towards integrating Austrian research and research initiated in Austria into the new interest in a systematically researched ‘international history’ of the ‘long’ nineteenth century.