CHIOS Perspectives – 2025, 1

Miroslav Šedivý (University of Pardubice): Why we are back in the mid-19th century. The transformation of an international order without a major war

In this first essay in our e-paper series CHIOS Perspectives, CHIOS Senior Fellow (2024-25) Miroslav Šedivý argues that today’s prevalent historical analogies linking our age of disruption, insecurity and disorder to the fundamental ruptures of the 20th century, the First and Second World War, neglect an alternative: a possible transformation of the international order without a major war, as it happened in the mid-19th century, when the order created after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 was significantly modified without collapsing into war.