While the focus of the book is on the interstate use of force post-WWII, this chapter holds a rear mirror and offers a perspective of evolution of restraints that started long before states came into being. It recounts how human societies over the centuries became states free from widespread internal use of armed force and how great powers sought to avoid major armed conflicts through policies of balance of power and multilateral conferences. It describes how they developed common rules by concluding conventions and built institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to create a rule-based order and mechanisms and methods to prevent the interstate use of force.

Chapter 1 offers a reappraisal of the pathbreaking efforts of the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) to establish a more durable European peace order, and a new European concert, after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It then shows how the 19th century’s Vienna system provided novel mechanisms, rules and understandings to preserve peace and a new, more legitimate international equilibrium in and beyond Europe, thereby also creating essential conditions for the rise of the United States. Yet it also illuminates how changes in international politics and competing nationalist aspirations eventually led to the disintegration of the peace order of 1814–15 and the European concert in the aftermath of the trans-European revolutions of 1848–49 and the Crimean War of 1853–56.

As a historical model of how to end an extended period of international conflict and to establish a stable and peaceful international order, the Vienna Congress has claimed the attention of academics and politicians ever since 1815. Against this background the chapter will deal with the question of how the Congress of Vienna and the Vienna system were regarded by various actors and under changing political circumstances. Rather than merely collecting views and interpretations of the Congress and the international system taking shape in 1814/15, the chapter will ask how the varying interpretations of Vienna and the Vienna system reflected changing ideas and visions of international order and what they can tell us about national and international security cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.