The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea

Abstract

The existence of a significant relationship between the concept of the balance of power and international law would be regarded as improbable by most modern international lawyers. They would think of the balance as a wholly obsolete conception and, in any case, as a part of international policy, or worse, part of cynical Realpolitik rather than of law. Earlier generations of jurists, however, did see international equilibrium either as an integral part of the system of rules of the law of nations or at least as a necessary precondition to the existence of such a law. Such a view of the interrelationship was never unanimous; indeed, there were in the past many legal observers who saw the balance of power as an obstacle to the development of an international legal order based on something more moral than force alone. This article is devoted to a study of the relationships between those two concepts as seen by the publicists who created the corpus of international law, principally during the period from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is not a study of the balance of power at large—a topic to which volumes might be dedicated—but only of that idea’s relationship with law.