balance of power

balance of power system of international relations in which nations seek to maintain an approximate equilibrium of power among many rivals, thus preventing the preponderance of any one state. Crucial to the system is a willingness on the part of individual national governments to change alliances as the situation demands in order to maintain the balance. Thucydides' description of Greece in the 5th cent. BC and Guicciardini's description of 15th-century Italy are early illustrations. Its modern development began in the mid-17th cent., when it was directed against the France of Louis XIV. Balance of power was the stated British objective for much of the 18th and 19th cent., and it characterized the European international system, for example, from 1815-1914. After World War I the balance of power system was attacked by proponents of cooperation and a community of power. International relations were changed radically after World War II by the predominance of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with major ideological differences between them. After the 1960s, with the emergence of China and the Third World , a revived Europe and Japan, it reemerged as a component of international relations. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, has been dominant militarily and, to a lesser degree, economically.

Bibliography: See H. J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (1960); H. Butterfield and M. Wright, ed., Diplomatic Investigations (1966); P. Keal, Unspoken Rules and Superpower Dominance (1984); R. J. Lieber, No Common Power: Understanding International Relations (1988).

balance of power meant different things at different times and operated centuries before it was ever defined. Article I of the first treaty of Paris of May 1814 spoke of establishing ‘a system of real and permanent Balance of Power’ in Europe. Writing of the period before 1914 the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, said, ‘I imagine it to mean that when one Power or group of Powers is the strongest ”bloc” in Europe, our policy has been, or should be, that of creating, or siding with, some other combination of Powers, in order to make a counterpoise to the strongest Power or Group and so to preserve equilibrium in Europe.’ Grey had in mind the balance between the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy and the Dual Alliance of France and Russia. In 1864 another foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, had provided a definition which was still closer to that of 1814 than to that of 1914. He said, ‘It means that it is to the interest of the community of nations that no one nation should acquire such a preponderance as to endanger the security of the rest; and it is for the advantage of all that the smaller Powers should be respected in their independence and not swallowed up by their more powerful neighbours. That is the doctrine of the balance of power and it is a doctrine worthy of being acted upon.’ The doctrine was always strongly attacked by radicals. Richard Cobden called it a ‘figment’, which he could never understand. John Bright rejoiced that it was dead, intemperately proclaiming that it had burdened the nation with debts, killed hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, and ‘desolated’ millions of families. Cobden and Bright objected to it, in part, because it was associated with the preservation of the Vienna settlement, arrived at at the end of the Napoleonic wars. The aim had been to ensure stability. So long as the territorial balance then created between the five great powers was preserved, no one power would be strong enough to disturb the peace. If any tried, the other four would automatically form a coalition against it. It has convincingly been argued that Bismarck destroyed the open self-balancing Vienna system by his obsessional creation of tight alliances to protect the newly unified Germany.

Muriel Evelyn Chamberlain