‘Vienna Calling’: Diplomacy and the Ordering of Intercommunal Relations at the Congress of Vienna

This article contends that diplomacy is an essential factor in the (trans)formation of ‘intercommunal relations’ — that is, international relations understood as social order(s) constituted by the practices of different sorts of actors. This relationship is illustrated by the regulation of ranks of diplomatic agents at the Congresses of Vienna (1815) and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) and its effects on international order. This regulation was supposed to — and indeed did — offer a solution to some typical ‘foreign policy problems’ of the early nineteenth century, whereas other equally typical problems remained unsolved. Yet the effects of this innovation resulted in a significant shift, both in diplomatic practice and in notions of international order, as it ‘ordered’ the relations between actors and constituted specific patterns of identity recognition.