A Political Science Perspective on the Balance of Power and the Concert

Abstract

arguments about important issues and theories of general political processes. Some of Schroeder's analysis is consistent with ideas developed by students of international politics; other parts represent major challenges. At a time when political scientists have shown renewed interest in the Concert of Europe both for its intrinsic significance and for its possible relevance in the post-Cold War era, it is particularly valuable to explore the differences between the Concert and the balance of power as seen by scholars in both disciplines.2 Some scholars may object that Schroeder's analysis is too sweeping, that it sees balance of power as one pattern when it should be seen as much more varied, that it draws excessively stark contrasts between balance and a managed system. Arguments on these questions can be fruitful but not definitive. Along with and usually inseparable from a sense of how ordered history is, scholars differ in their aesthetic senses of the attractiveness of parsimony and richness, just as some historians are lumpers and others are splitters. Some scholars strive for the kind of understanding that involves the fullest possible picture. In this light, few events closely resemble each other, and no single cause dominates any particular case. Others try to construct accounts that are much more parsimonious, in the sense of seeing a relatively large number of events-including ones that superficially appear quite different-as sharing crucial characteristics, of believing that one or two causes are primary in each case, and of suspecting that the same factors are at work in numerous instances. The price of doing so (too high for many