100 International Relations Theory of War
as an unsuccessful model until its final collapse when the Crimean War
broke out in 1854.^104 Robert Jervis argues that the European Concert was
held in 1815–1854 but was at its best only until 1822.^105 The appearance
of the Concert was explained in a number of ways. Some argue that the
formation of force-balancing systems or a concert depends on the prefer-
ences of the players.^106 At the system level, it is difficult to explain the
appearance of the concert. Neorealist theory cannot explain any behav-
ioral difference at the system or unit level before 1945, including the con-
cert system, because its independent variable, the polarity of the system,
remained constant throughout that period. Richard Elrod argues that the
European Concert was a conscious and usually effective attempt made
by European statesmen to maintain the peaceful relations between the
sovereign states. According to him, the Concert had an important func-
tion in peace and stability in Europe between the Vienna Congress and
the Crimean War. The Concert was a functional promising system of inter-
national relations that was markedly different from the power-balancing
politics of the 18th century and the total wars of the first half of the 20th
century.^107
The two peaceful periods that occurred in the 19th century to the 1920s
stemmed from the bipolarity that occurred in them. In 1815–1848 there
was a bipolar system headed by Great Britain and Russia, two superpow-
ers. The three alternative explanations that were shown above for the sta-
bility of the European system in the 19th century are ruled out, as is the
argument that Great Britain served the purpose of suppressing conflicts
that a unipolar country can play because even at the peak of its influence,
after 1856, it was never a land power.^108
The Stability of the Bipolar System, 1946–1991International relations research assumes for the most part that the sys-
tem in the Cold War period was bipolar and stable. The causes of the sta-
bility of this period are disputed. Some researchers assign it to bipolarity
and some to the possession of nuclear weapons by the two superpowers
that constituted the system, the United States and the Soviet Union. Now
the book’s argument of bipolarity being the cause of stability in this period
will be established as being preferable to the alternative argument that the
large arsenal of nuclear weapons that the two superpowers possessed was
what caused the relative stability of the period.
The Long Peace in the Cold War Period and Its CausesThe peace of the Cold War strongly contrasted with the European poli-
tics of the first half of that century, in which two central wars, the First
and the Second World Wars, along with a large number of major or minor
wars were fought and several crises nearly led to war. About 50 million