The Centre for Statecraft & National Security is excited to host Dr Ziyi ‘Emily’ Wang for a talk on How Transactional Diplomacy Shatters a World Order: From Napoleon to NATO
What happens when an interest-based world order disintegrates into a series of transactions – and collective security becomes a contract up for annual renegotiation? As the post-1945 international order faces mounting strain, what wisdom can the collapse of an earlier world order impart?
Policymakers today risk learning the wrong lesson from history. Whilst Lord Palmerston may be right that there are no eternal allies, history shows that there are no eternal interests, either. Rather, history warns against the seduction of transactional diplomacy. Interests, unlike principles, can shift drastically; great powers, too, possess a wide array of competing interests, making it unpredictable which specific priority would prevail at each given transaction. It was precisely the perils of transactionalism that shattered the world order built in the aftermath of Napoleonic havoc through the Concert of Europe, serving as a cautionary tale for 2026.
Drawing on historical research from the forthcoming book The Concert Is Over: Shattered World Order from Napoleon to Bismarck and a recent article, diplomatic historian Ziyi ‘Emily’ Wang evaluates the transactionalism and collapse of the 19th-century world order, and examines the enduring lessons that history offers for diplomacy and security alliances at a reordering juncture today.
About the Speaker:
Dr Ziyi ‘Emily’ Wang is a Griffin Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where she serves as the Vice Chair of the Applied History Working Group. A diplomatic historian of nineteenth-century Europe, she has also published works on maritime chokepoints and the security of the Black Sea. She obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
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