The bicentenary of the Congress of Vienna, organized to settle the questions outstanding from the 22-year Napoleonic Wars, is a slightly uncertain date. The Congress itself opened officially on October 1, 1814 and the Final Act was signed on June 9, 1815, but on the other hand the British Foreign Secretary Robert, Lord Castlereagh arrived in Vienna on September 13, 1814 and the official bicentenary conference (in Vienna, naturally) opens on September 17. So this seems as good a week as any to celebrate the conference that, with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles a failure and no peace conference after World War II, was effectively the foundation of the global system we inhabit today. It established a number of principles of international governance, some of which we have kept and others that we would do well to re-apply.

While there had been multi-party peace conferences before, notably for the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht and the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the Congress of Vienna for the first time attempted to create a “Congress System” system of future regular coordination between the Great Powers. This resulted in the Quadruple/Holy Alliance of 1815 (which became the Quintuple Alliance when France joined in 1818.)

Czar Alexander I of Russia wanted to include a spiritual component to international co-operation, and managed to get the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia to agree and sign a joint document. However Castlereagh, more thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the rational Enlightenment, regarded the spiritual provisions as “a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense” and prevailed on Britain’s Prince Regent not to sign those provisions, but merely to issue a letter of support for the concept.

With or without the spiritual provisions, the Congress System was highly effective for the crucial years of economic disruption following the wars’ end. Four Congresses met between 1818 and 1822, at Aachen, Troppau (Opava), Laibach (Ljubljana) and Verona. The Alliance powers’ principal objective was to prevent any outbreaks of revolutionary violence such as might overthrow legitimate governments and had led after 1789 to twenty years of war.

Accordingly the Alliance was prepared to intervene in domestic quarrels, but only to prop up or restore existing regimes, not to overthrow them. This was encapsulated in the 1820 Troppau Protocol, mostly the work of the Austrian Klemens von Metternich, which provided that “States, which have undergone a change of government due to revolution, the result of which threaten other states, ipso facto cease to be members of the European Alliance, and remain excluded from it until their situation gives guarantees for legal order and stability. If, owing to such alterations, immediate danger threatens other states the powers bind themselves, by peaceful means, or if need be, by arms, to bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.”

In practice, there were considerable differences between the Continental autocracies and the conservative but constitutional British parliamentary system. Even between the autocracies objectives differed, as did the degree of commitment to autocracy, with the French and Prussian governments being weaker and more liberal than Austria and Russia. Accordingly, even given full commitment by all five participants, it’s not clear how long the Congress System could have lasted, once the immediate danger of systemic destruction had lifted.

In the event, the system was already showing its strains, divided over the proper response to a constitutional uprising in Spain, when Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822. The system was however destroyed by Castlereagh’s successor, the arrogant liberal George Canning. He made it clear that he was not interested in working with the Continental autocracies to preserve the peace of Europe, but instead preferred to “league himself with the revolutionary rascals and blackguards of Europe and America” as the pro-Alliance diarist Harriet Arbuthnot put it. The result was several 19th Century wars that might have been avoided and two twentieth century successors to the Congress System, the League of Nations and the United Nations, neither of which had its strengths.

The Congress of Vienna nevertheless produced a number of new ideas that have survived to this day. One was the principle that the major powers could work together on a recurring basis to preserve peace and ensure that the world order met certain generally agreed objectives. At the time, an important such objective was to stamp out the slave trade, which had been prohibited by Britain in 1807, and was abolished in French, Spanish and Portuguese possessions, with a five-year delay, by the Congress. In practice, the Congress did not abolish slavery itself, while Britain no longer controlled the United States and, in the event Portugal turned out no longer to control Brazil. Still the Royal Navy’s work in stamping out the global slave trade over the next few decades would have been impossible without the Congress’s authorization.

Later in the century, the Congress of Vienna precedent began to be used to move towards free trade on a coordinated basis. This was impossible at the Congress itself, since only the British delegation and the prime minister Robert, Lord Liverpool was convinced even theoretically of free trade’s advantages, but such progress as was made in mid-century rested on various international agreements covering shipping, postal services and other international trade matters.

The principle of major powers working together to preserve the peace and promote trade has survived to this day, with international agreements and Congresses being succeeded by permanent international bureaucracies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization – the delegates to the Congress would have been horrified by our need for bureaucracy, living as they did in a period when Britain’s Foreign Office had only 36 clerks.

There were however two principles adopted at the Congress of Vienna which we have abandoned, much to our detriment. One was that decisions should be agreed between a small number of major powers, each of which was large enough to disturb peace on a Europe-wide basis, and which shared a basic commitment to the existing international order. Smaller powers would be expected and indeed compelled to abide by decisions reached by their betters. This principle survives today in the G7 economic club, but is notably absent in the U.N., the WTO, NATO and other international agencies. It would have been impossible to apply during the 1917-1991 hegemony of the Soviet Union, when the major powers shared no commitment to the existing international order, but has been rather closer to applicability since then.

The other principle of the Congress System, embodied in the Troppau Protocol quoted above, was that intervention would take place only to prevent or reverse regime change, not to produce it. You can see the effect of such a principle by considering the U.S./Nato interventions since the 1970s: by the Troppau Protocol intervention would have occurred in 1979, to prop up the Shah of Iran, in 1990 to remove Saddam Hussain from Kuwait, in 2011 to prop up Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and possibly in 2014 to remove Russia from Ukraine, but on no other occasion. Alternate History is impossible to prove scientifically, but I cannot help thinking the world would be very much better off under such a regime.

The Troppau principle, of intervention in limited cases only to prop up existing regimes when change would endanger the country’s neighbors, has a number of advantages over our current ad-hoc approach to intervention. Politically, the chance of unforeseen bad outcomes from regime change is eliminated. The mullahs’ regime in Iran, and the chaos in Libya, were both unforeseen before the removal of their predecessor regimes, and were both far worse for the country’s inhabitants and the world as a whole than the regimes they replaced.

Economically, the Troppau principle is optimal because it minimizes disruption; an existing regime, however corrupt, is already taken account of by businesses seeking to operate in the country, and hence propping it up eliminates substantial “menu-changing costs.” The economic chaos from regime change is even worse when regime change involves geographic disruption; the countries of former Austria-Hungary suffered badly during the inter-war period, as did the post-Soviet republics in the 1990s and the countries of former Yugoslavia after 1991.

Human history contains many examples of well constructed peace treaties following painful conflicts. But the Congress of Vienna was about the best of them, benefiting from far-seeing statesmanship of the highest quality from at least two participants, Metternich and Castlereagh (and from Liverpool behind the scenes). Many of its principles still govern our world today; we would do well to revisit some of its innovations that we have lost.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)