Despite the initial enthusiasm surrounding the „new world order“, established multilateral institutions have been unable to bring some of the most critical post-Cold War crises effectively under control. Largely based, in ambition and membership, on the pre-supposed power structures and ideological fault lines af a bygone era, standing institutions like the UN and NATO often fail to provide sufficient focus for effective crisis management. To tackle the most pressing challenges in the Middle East and Northeast Asia, moreover, their membership is both too broad and too narrow at the same time; providing small developed nations with disproportionate influence while not adequately reflecting the rapidly growing sway of emerging regional and functional powers.
As the situational dimension of international conflicts and crises was greatly appreciated with the demise of bipolarity, it thus became necessary for interested and affected states to circumvent these increasingly ineffective and inefficient structures by custom-tailoring their response to any given concrete setting. Against this background, informal great power forums, self-selected on an ad hoc basis, gained popularity as instruments of crisis management. Resembling in many ways the Concert Diplomacy of the nineteenth century, formats like the Yugoslavia Contact Group and the Middle East Quartet seek to bundle the interests of affected nations and align the capabilities and strategies of relevant powers.
The proposed paper seeks to explore these groups as a new and distinct diplomatic instrument, and potential challenger to the established, egalitarian multilateral order. In doing so, it seeks to evaluate the causes for the (re-)emergence of a new, contemporary form of Concert Diplomacy after the Cold War, the conditions for its successful operation, its potential contribution to the crisis management toolbox and repercussions for established international institutions.
