Concert of Nations

The Concert of Nations emerged in the nineteenth century as the ideal for international relations in Europe. In order to understand its practical and theoretical uses, it is important to review the philosophical history behind its formation. By its historical definitions, concert can mean a musical performance event, or it can designate the act of cooperation between multiple parties pursuing a single enterprise. Which meaning is primary and which is secondary has varied through time, and to this day there is no consensus on the true origin of the word. The Great Chain of Being also provides much-needed context for understanding what the Concert of Nations meant to nineteenth century politicians. This philosophy declared that every being has its place under God's rule, and that harmony between all creatures is only achieved when each accepts the duties and joys to which it has been designated. Music served as an example for pieces working together, from the overtones of the planets’ motion to the ordered motion of musical voices in an ensemble. Not everyone is a soloist, but everyone's part, in its own way, is essential to all the rest.

Since the Concert of Nations was conceptualized in such strongly musical terms, these competing definitions of the concert did not seem so far apart for citizens of the nineteenth century as they do for us today. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 is the seminal example of putting Concert ideologies to work. Not only did diplomats establish a system to maintain European political stability, but they did so in a way that emphasized harmony over power. Much of the significant negotiations happened around music or dancing rather than just formal meetings.[1][2] While every nation had its own agenda to pursue and many less-powerful voices were lost in the concert, diplomats worked to blend interests within the common goal of maintaining an imperialist structure.

Given the great success of the Congress of Vienna, many politicians have resurrected the idea of a Concert of Nations in order to support their contemporary agendas. Two excellent examples of this come from U.S. Senator France in 1921 and again from Senator Fulbright in 1961. Both of these cases face the difficulty of adapting concert politics to the twentieth century while disassociating themselves from its imperialist roots.

In contemporary politics, both first-world powers and developing nations use Concert of Nations as a tool to promote their political agenda on the international stage.

Finally, musical groups also continue to draw from the nineteenth-century concert ideas by bringing together musicians from different countries to pursue literal and figurative harmony. Two significant examples of this are the West-Eastern Divan and Le Concert des Nations. The West-Eastern Divan explicitly explores using music to cross boundaries of political conflict by bringing together young musicians from Israel, Palestine, and Spain on an orchestral tour every summer. Le Concert des Nations works with period instruments, but it also intentionally gathers a highly international group of performers. These groups demonstrate the sustained symbolic relationship between musical and political discourses, though they have somewhat diverged from their nineteenth century unity.