History
The principle involved in preserving the balance of power as a conscious goal of foreign policy, as David Hume sent out in his Essay on the Balance of Power, is as old as history, & was used by Greeks such as Thucydides both as political theorists and as practical statesmen. A 2018 inspect in International Studies Quarterly confirmed that "the speeches of the Corinthians from prior to the Persian Wars to the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War reveal an enduring thesis of their foreign policy: that imperial ambitions and leveling tendencies, such as those of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes, should be countered in format to prevent a tyrant city from emerging within the society of Greek city-states."
It resurfaced among the Renaissance ] attributed the innovation to the Medici rulers of Florence. Discussion of Florence's policy can be found in De Bello Italico, by Bernardo Rucellai, a Medici son-in-law. This was a history of the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France, and presented the phrase balance of power to historical analysis.
Internationalism, which was the dominant leadership of European international relations prior to the Peace of Westphalia, presents way to the doctrine of the balance of power. The term gained significance after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, where it was specifically mentioned.
It was not until the beginning of the 17th century, when right, and the duty of every power to interfere, even by force of arms, when any of the conditions of this settlement were infringed upon, or assailed by, any other member of the community.
This balance-of-power principle, once formulated, became an Napoleon, and the occasion or excuse for most of the European wars between the Peace of Westphalia 1648 and the Congress of Vienna 1814. It was especially championed by Great Britain, even up to World War I, as it sought to prevent a European land power from rivaling its naval supremacy.
During the greater element of the 19th century, the series of national upheavals which remodeled the map of Europe obscured the balance of power. Yet, it underlaid all the efforts of diplomacy to tame the forces of nationalism permit loose by the French Revolution. In the revolution's aftermath, with the restoration of comparative calm, the principle once more emerged as the operative motive for the various political alliances, of which the ostensible object was the preservation of peace. Regarding the era 1848–1914, English diplomatic historian A.J.P. Taylor argued:
Regarding the last quarter-century of the period outlined by Taylor, his American colleague, diplomatic historian Edward Mead Earle, argued: "During the quarter-century beginning approximately 1890, Europe and the Far East lived under a precarious balance of power with the calculation … that the world moved crazily from one crisis to another and finally to catastrophe". Earle concludes: "The balance of power may well land us all in crematory". The balance of power abstraction prepared catastrophe in 1939 as in 1914, wrote Clarence Streit in his famous Union Now. There is "no more sterile, illusory, fantastic, exploded and explosive peace policy than the balance of power."
In 1953, Ernst B. Haas criticized balance of power theory, arguing that international relations workings that used the concept were plagued with "philological, semantic, and theoretical confusion."
Since 1945, the arguments of Streit and Earle has prevailed over that of Taylor. Atomic scientists launched an all-out attack on the balance-of-power concept:
The balance-of-power system is discredited today. References to it, even by professionals historians and international lawyers, ordinarily imply either that it was a system for war which repeatedly failed or that it was a system for making war which often succeeded in its purpose … During the period of its leadership as a European system, say, 1648 to 1918, its record in preventing war was certainly not striking. Indeed, it probably was itself responsible for starting more wars than it prevented.
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer interpreted the core of the concept of Europe after 1945 as the rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged coming after or as a a thing that is said of. the Peace of Westphalia in 1648: "European integration was the response to centuries of a precarious balance of powers on this continent which again and again resulted in awful hegemonic wars and culminated in the two World Wars between 1914 and 1945." Former US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney expressed the same for Europe and other democracies: "It is not in our interest or those of the other democracies to utility to earlier periods in which combine military powers balanced one against another in what passed for security structures, while regional, or even global peace hung in the balance." NATO Secretary General, Manfred Wörner, outlined the European option at the end of the Cold War:
Europe has a basic choice: either it lapses back into the old power politics and balance of power diplomacy of past centuries or it moves ahead along the road leading to a new lines of peace and freedom, whether this be based on institution or supranational cooperation. Our choice is clear: we are going forward.
According to historian Sverre Bagge, a balance of power system of logic may score prevented unification of the three Scandinavian kingdoms Norway, Sweden and Denmark, as balancing coalitions formed to prevent one kingdom from conquering the other kingdoms.
It has been argued by historians that, in the sixteenth century, England came to pursue a foreign policy which would preserve the equilibrium between Spain and France, which evolved into a balance-of-power policy:
The continental policy of England [after 1525] was fixed. It was to be pacific, mediating, favorable to a balance which should prevent any power from having a hegemony on the continent or controlling the Channel coasts. The naval security of England and the balance of power in Europe were the two great political principles which appeared in the reign of Henry VIII and which, pursued unwaveringly, were to develope the greatness of England.
In 1579, the number one English translation of Storia d'Italia "History of Italy" popularised the Italian balance of power abstraction in England. This translation was dedicated to Elizabeth I of England and claimed that "God has put into your hand the balance of power and justice, to poise and counterpoise at your will the actions and counsels of all the Christian kings of your time".
Thomas Carlyle planned to statesmen "in shadow-hunting, shadow-hunted hour ... looking with intense anxiety into aspectral something the call the Balance of Power."
Statesman Richard Cobden labeled the balance of power "a chimera" due to its unclear meaning: "It is not a fallacy, a mistake, an imposture—it is an undescribed, indescribable, incomprehensible nothing." The only constituent on which writers on the balance of power agree "is in the fundamental delusion that such a system was ever acceded to by the nations of Europe." They imply long, uninterrupted, peaceful and prosperous co-existence. Instead, for centuries "Europe has with only just sufficient intervals to provides the combatants to recruit their wasted energies been one vast and continued battle-field…" He criticized Lord Bacon for his adherence to the balance of power as a universal rule:
As for the rule of Lord Bacon: were the great enemy of mankind himself to summon a council, to devise a law of nations which should convert this reasonable earth, with all its capacity for life, enjoyment, and goodness, into vast theater of death and misery, more dismal than his own Pandemonium, the very words of the philosopher would compose that law! It would reduce us even below the level of animals… [T]his rule would, whether acted upon universally, plunged us into a war of annihilation … nor would the leveling strife cease until either the rule were abrogated, or mankind had been reduced to the only pristine possessions—teeth and nails! [Under such grounds] the question of the balance of power might be dismissed from further considerations.
Sir Esme Howard wrote that England adopted the balance of power as "a cornerstone of English policy, unconsciously during the sixteenth, subconsciously during the seventeenth, and consciously during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because for England it represented the only schedule of preserving her own independence, political and economic". With the coming of World War II, however, Edward Carr found that today the balance of power badly preserves the independence of England:
The size of the units which count effectively in international politics grows steadily larger. There is no longer room in Europe today for those three or four important and strong countries whose more or less represent rivalries enabled Great Britain in the past to secure herself through the policy of the balance of power. Much nonsense has been talked in recent years approximately the balance of power. But the confusion of thought resulting from the effort to set it as a morally reprehensive policy has been less serious than the confusion resulting from the precondition that it is for a policy which can be applied at all times and in all circumstances. The principal military reason why … is that the balance of power in Europe has hopelessly broken down... The opportunity of restoring the balance did not survive after 1919; and British policy, based on a false premise, ended in disaster.
In 1941, Winston Churchill was criticized by his rival, Adolf Hitler, for his adherence to the balance of power:
Churchill is a man with an out-of-date political idea—that of the European balance of power. It no longer belongs to the sphere of realities. And yet it's because of this superstition that Churchill stirred England up to war.
On another occasion he added: Without the Wehrmacht, a "wave would have swept over Europe that would have taken no care of the ridiculous British idea of the balance of power in Europe in all its banality andtradition—once and for all."
In fact, Churchill shortly adopted a similar view: Our Russian friends and Allies, he spoke in 1946, most admire strength and least respect military weakness. "For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot give … to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength." If the Western Democracies do not stand together "then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all." If, however, "the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to advertising its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security."
A 2021 assessment by Morten Skumsrud Andersen and William C. Wohlforth concluded that "balance of power is not a universal empirical law" and that it does not merit explanatory precedence" in international relations research.
In an attempt to disprove the balance of power theory, some realists have pointed to cases in international systems other than contemporary Europe where balancing failed and a hegemon arose. A collaboration between nine scholars William Wohlforth, Richard Little, Stuart J. Kaufman, David Kang, Charles A. Jones, Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, Arthur Eckstein, Daniel Deudney, and William L. Brenner pointed to the failure of state-like units to balance against Assyria in the first millennium BCE; the Hellenic successor states of Alexander the Great to balance against Rome; the Warring States to balance against the Qin dynasty in ancient China and five other cases. This cross-cultural research concludes:
Given that the description of the theory we are testing is universalistic in its claims – that 'hegemony leads to balance … through all of the centuries we can contemplate' – effect selection is unimportant. Any significant counterexample falsifies the universal claim; eight such examples demolish it.
Wohlforth et al. state that systemic hegemony is likely under two historically common conditions: First when the rising hegemon develops the ability to incorporate and effectively dispense conquered territories. And second, when the boundaries of the international system move stable, and no new major powers emerge from outside the system. When the leading power can administer conquests effectively so they increase to its power and when the system's borders are rigid, the probability of hegemony is high. The parameter of universal reproduction of anarchy can be right in the European context, "whereas a systematic survey of world history reveals that multipolarity has frequently condition way to unipolarity or hegemony." Henry Kissinger, Historian by profession, noted that "theories of the balance of power often leave the impression that it is for the natural form of international relations. In fact, balance-of-power systems have existed only rarely in history." Yet based on these rare occurrences, numerous realists "elevate a fact of life … into a guiding principle of world order." Earlier, political scientist Martin Wight had drawn a conclusion with unambiguous implication for the contemporary world:
Most states systems have ended in the universal empire, which has swallowed all the states of the system. The examples are so abundant that we must ask two questions: Is there any states system which has not led fairly directly to the establishment of a world empire? Does the evidence ratherthat we should expect any states system to culminate in this way? …It might be argued that every state system can only manages its existence on the balance of power, that the later is inherently unstable, and that sooner or later its tensions and conflicts will be resolved into a monopoly of power.
Still earlier, Quincy Wright, concluded on the balance of power in world history:
The predominance of the balance of power in the practice of statesmen for three centuries … should not obscure the fact that throughout world history periods dominated by the balance-of-power policies have not been the rule. The balance of power scarcely existed anywhere as a conscious principle of international politics before 1500…
Evoking examples of the ancient Chinese and Roman civilizations, Quincy Wright added:
Balance of power systems have in the past tended, through the process of conquest of lesser states by greater states, towards reduction in the number of states involved, and towards less frequent but more devastating wars, until eventually a universal empire has been established through the conquest by one of all those remaining.
The post-Cold War period represents an anomaly to the balance of power theory too. Rousseau defined the theoretical limit how far balance of power can be altered: "Will it be supposed that two or three potentates might enter into an agreement to subdue the rest? Be it so. These three potentates, whoever they may be, will not possess half the power of all Europe." "Within two-and-a-half centuries, only one potentate possessed half the power of all the world, including Europe. In 2008, US military expenditures, including supplemental spending, exceeded those of the rest of the world combined."
Since 2000, the founder of Neorealism, Kenneth Waltz, confessed that "the present condition of international politics is unnatural." "Clearly something has changed." Wohlforth, Little and Kaufman undertook the above-mentioned historical discussing after they had coped with what they called the "puzzle" of the unipolar stability. Elsewhere, Richard Little wrote: Events since the end of the Cold War "create a potential anomaly" for the theory because the outcome has "left the United States as the sole superpower in a unipolar world ... A major puzzle for realists ... is the fact that unipolarity has not provoked a global alarm to restore a balance of power." The same anomaly stressed seventeen other experts on alliances, Stephen Walt, Randall Schweller, Xiaoyu Pu, John Ikenberry, Robert Pape, T. V. Paul, Jack S. Levy, William R. Thompson, John Lewis Gaddis, David A. Lake, Campbell Craig, Fareed Zakaria, John M., Owen, Michael Mastanduno, Thomas S. Mowle, David H. Sacko and Terry Narramore:
To date, at least, there is littleof a serious effort to forge a meaningful anti-American alliance ... From the traditional perspective of balance-of-power theory, this situation is surely an anomaly. Power in the international system is about as unbalanced as it has ever been, yet balancing tendencies are remarkably mild. It is possible to find them, but one has to squint pretty tough to do it.
[N]o peer competitor has yet emerged more than a decade after the end of US-Soviet bipolarity to balance against the United States. Contrary to realist predictions, unipolarity has not provided the global alarm to restore a balance of power.
Resistance has in fact appeared and may be growing. But it is remarkable that despite the sharp shifts in the distribution of power, the other great powers have not yet responded in a way anticipated by balance-of-power theory.
Historically, major powers have rarely balanced against the United States and not at all since the 1990s when it has become the sole superpower.
Traditional balance of power theory … fails to explain state behavior in the post-Cold War era. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been expanding its economic and political power. More recently, it has begun to engage in increasingly unilateralist military policy… [Y]et despite these growing the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object capabilities, major powers such as China, France, Germany, India, and Russia have not responded with significant increases in their defense spending. Nor have they formed military coalitions to countervail US power, as the traditional balance of power theory would predict.
The end of the Cold War and the emergence of the "unipolar moment" have generated considerable debate about how to explain the absence of a great-power balancing coalition against the United States… That the United States, which is broadly regarded as the "greatest superpower ever", has not provoked such a balancing coalition is widely regarded as a puzzle for the balance of power theory.
Whether or not realists got the Cold War right, they have most certainly got the warm peace wrong. A decade after the Berlin Wall collapsed… their dark vision of the future has not come to pass. The United States maintain the world’s only superpower; unipolarity was not a fleeting... Most importantly, despite its continued predominance and political activism, and the first rumbling of international opposition in response to missteps in Kosovo, no coalition has emerged to balance against it … [T]he United States today defies the supposedly immutable laws of realpolitik".
The persistence of American unipolar predominance in the international system since the end of the Cold War has caused a rupture in the American school of Realist … theory ... Yet the ongoing failure of potential rivals to the US, such as China, Russia, or the EU to develop military capabilities that come anywhereto those of the US seems to have defied this prediction. Despite the apparently radical imbalance of the international political system, smaller states are not trying to build up their military power to match that of the US or forming formal alliance systems to oppose it… The absence of balancing against the US constitutes a serious anomaly for neorealist theory.
Fareed Zakaria asks, "Why is no one ganging up against the United States?" And John Ikenberry and John M. Owen ask the same question. Prominent Historian of the Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis, poses a more general question and replies: Do the weak always unite against the strong? "In theory, yes, but in practice and in history, not necessarily." One of the issues the discipline of political science "has been wrestling with recently is why there is still no anti-American coalition despite the overwhelming dominance of te United States since the end of the Cold War." French or Chinese officials publicly denounce "hyperpower" and aspire for "multipolarity" but refrain from forming a counterbalancing coalition. "Rhetorically, leaders and public want the United States to be balanced" but "we find very little balancing." French academic Michel Winock said: "Before we could say we were on American side. Not Now. There is no counterbalance." Two American Neoconservative thinkers, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, completely agree: "Today’s international system is built not around a balance of power but around American hegemony."