Some issues in international politics have been irreconcilable. They involve fundamentally incompatible positions on beliefs, essential values, and political purposes. Among the most important were conflicts over the structure and nature of the international system or society of states. The issues of religious conformity and tolerance, their expression in civil law and education, and conflicts over hierarchical versus pluralistic images of the appropriate political organization of Christendom combined to produce the Thirty Years War. Incompatible positions on hegemony versus pluralism, as maintained by the balance of power, were at the heart of the War of the Spanish Succession. The same issues were raised again during the French Revolution and Napoleon's reign.

The bilateral conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in 1914 did not touch upon the vital interests of Germany, France, and England. Although Europe was divided by two hostile alliance systems, no party sought hegemony in the way that the Hapsburg family complex, Louis XIV, or Napoleon had pursued it.