Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:58:41.630Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Deconstructing the balance of power: two traditions of thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Richard Little
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 1919 when the first tentative steps were taken to establish the study of international relations as an independent discipline, liberals in the United States and Europe believed that the First World War had been caused by European statesmen who had been pursuing policies designed to promote a balance of power. It was gloomily predicted, moreover, that the continuing influence of balance of power thinking would precipitate another world war. One of the major objectives of the nascent discipline was to identify alternative ways of organizing international relations so that the pernicious influence of the balance of power could be permanently eliminated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 15 , Special Issue 2 , April 1989 , pp. 87 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. C. Delisle Burns, for example, argued that ‘since the principle of the Balance of Power is again embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, a more devastating war than that of 1914–1918 is absolutely inevitable so long as the policy of the Balance of Power dominates the relations between states.’ International Relations (London, 1920), p. 141.

2. Pollard, A. F., ‘The Balance of Power’, in Essays on Liberalism (London, 1922), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., p. 27.

4. Ibid., p. 19.

5. See, for example, Rostow, W. W., ‘Beware of Historians Bringing False Analogies’, Foreign Affairs, 66 (1988), pp. 863–868CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a review of Kennedy's, P.The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500–2000 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, and the subsequent exchanges in Foreign Affairs, lxi (1988), pp. 1108–13.

6. See, for example, the list of meanings identified by Wight, M. in ‘The Balance of Power’, James, A. (ed.), The Bases of International Order (London, 1973).Google Scholar

7. I. L. Claude, for example, is very critical of the explanations involving the balance of power offered by Taylor, A. J. P. in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar, and Morgenthau, H. J. in Politics Among Nations, 4th edn (New York, 1967)Google Scholar. See his Power and International Relations (New York, 1962).

8. See, for example, Claude, Ibid.

9. See, for example, Organski, A. F. K., World Politics, 2nd edn (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

10. See the introduction in Wright, M., ed., Theory and Practice of the Balance of Power 1486–1914 (London, 1975), pp. xii–xiii.Google Scholar

11. For an extended discussion, see R. Little, The Balance of Power: Models, Metaphors and Myths (forthcoming).

12. See his essay ‘Of the Balance of Power’ in Wright (note 10).

13. This is the view of Lukes, S. in Power: A Radical View (London, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Thucydides, History of the Pelopponesian War, trans. R. Warner (Harmondsworth, 1972), V, 105, p. 404.

15. A modern version of this argument appears in Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1986).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. Cited in Pouncey, P. R., The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides' Pessimism (New York, 1980), 1.17, 1.3.4, p. 51.Google Scholar

17. For an analysis of the very sophisticated conception of power developed by Thucydides, see Woodhead, A. G., Thucydides on the Nature of Power (Cambridge, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford, 1881), Vol. 1, 4.92, p. 306.

19. See Hobbes, T., The Leviathan, ed. Plamenatz, J. (London, 1962).Google Scholar

20. Cited in Morgenthau (note 7), p. 181.

21. Thucydides (note 14), p. 103.

22. Ibid., p. 48.

23. Hobbes (note 19), p. 174.

24. Discourses 1.6. Cited in Sullivan, R. R., ‘Machiavelli's Balance of Power Theory’, Social Science Quarterly, liv (1973), pp. 258–270, p. 265.Google Scholar

25. Zimmer, H., Philosophies of India (Princeton, 1951), p. 90.Google Scholar

26. Thucydides (note 14), p. 243.

27. Ibid., p. 242.

28. Gunn, J. A., ‘Commentary’ in Fleisher, M. (ed.), Machiavelli and the Nature of Political Thought (London, 1973), p. 277.Google Scholar

29. Baldwin, D., ‘Power and Social Exchange’, American Political Science Review, lxxii (1978), pp. 1229–1242, p. 1224.Google Scholar

30. Arendt, H., On Violence (London, 1970), p. 44.Google Scholar

31. Arendt, H., On Revolution (London, 1963), p. 174.Google Scholar

32. See Parsons, T., ‘On the Concept of Political Power’ in Bell, R., Edwards, D. V. and Wagner, R. H., Political Power: A Reader in Theory and Research (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. The essential feature of communal power is that it comes into existence as the result of collaborative action. It does not carry the connotation of one party submitting to the will of another.

33. Fink, Z. S., The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Evanston, 1945).Google Scholar

34. Cited in Ibid., p. 4.

35. Cited in Ibid., p. 9.

36. Sir Petty, William, The Petty Papers, ed. Marquis of Lansbury, 2 Vols. (New York, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 219.Google Scholar

37. As quoted in Wight, M., Systems of States, ed. Bull, H. (Leicester, 1977), p. 21.Google Scholar

38. Cited in Hinsley, F. H., Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge, 1963), p. 166.Google Scholar

39. Hirschman, A. O., The Passion and the Interests (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar

40. Cited in Kratochwil, F., ‘On the Notion of “Interest” in International Relations’, International Organization, xxxvi (1982), pp. 1–30, p. 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Ibid.

42. Cited in Gulick, E. V., Europe's Classical Balance of Power (Ithaca, 1955), p. 32.Google Scholar

43. The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 5 Vols. (London, 1754), Vol. 1, p. 296.

44. Woodward, L., ‘A British View of Mr. Wilson's Foreign Policy’ in Beuhrig, E. H. (ed.), Wilson's Foreign Policy in Perspective (Bloomington, 1957), p. 155.Google Scholar

45. Webster, C. K., The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh (London, 1931), p. 268.Google Scholar

46. Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 119–120Google Scholar. See also M. I. Midlarsky, ‘The Balance of Power as a Just Historical System’, Polity, xvi (1983), pp. 181–200.

47. Cited in Hafner, D. L., ‘Castlereagh, the Balance of Power and Non-Intervention’, The Australian Journal of Politics and History, xxvi (1980), pp. 71–84, p. 74.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., p. 80.

49. Cited in Webster (note 45), p. 144.

50. Bolingbroke (note 43), Vol. 1, p. 431.

51. Brougham, H., Contributions to the Edinburgh Review (London, 1856), p. 135.Google Scholar

52. Bolingbroke (note 43), Vol. 2, p. 449.

53. C. D'Avenant, The Political and Commercial Works, Revised by C. Whitworth (London and Farn-borough, 1771, republished 1967), p. 300.

54. Ibid., p. 308.

55. See for example, Waltz, K. N., Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass., 1979).Google Scholar

56. Morgenthau (note 7), pp. 330–1.

57. Wight, M., Power Politics, ed. Bull, H. and Holbraad, C. (Leicester, 1978), p. 173.Google Scholar

58. P. C. Sederberg, argues that meaning is never inherent in any event but only in the social response to that event. See The Politics Of Meaning (Tucson, 1984).

59. Levine, D. N., The Flight From Ambiguity (Chicago, 1985), p. 87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60. Ibid., p. 8.