The Balance of Power

Abstract

Abstract Wight analyzed nine meanings of “the balance of power” in international politics: “an even distribution of power,” “the principle that power ought to be evenly distributed,” “the existing distribution of power,” “the principle of equal aggrandizement of the Great Powers at the expense of the weak,” the principle of keeping “a margin of strength,” a “special role in maintaining an even distribution of power,” a “special advantage in the existing distribution of power,” “predominance,” and an “inherent tendency of international politics to produce an even distribution of power.” Three sources of confusion complicate assessments: “the mutability and inconstancy of the metaphor,” “the overlap between the normative and the descriptive,” and the fact that pertinent judgments “cannot be detached” and are “necessarily subjective.” In the two centuries after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, “the balance of power was generally spoken of as if it were the constituent principle of international society, and legal writers described it as the indispensable condition of international law.” Kant, Cobden, and others nonetheless found grounds to decry it. Oppenheim’s international law texts in 1905 and 1911 presented the balance of power principle as “indispensable” for international law, but in post-First World War editions it was replaced by the League of Nations and other new organizations. After the Second World War and the outbreak of the Cold War the balance of power became “once more a respectable and indeed indispensable part of the diplomatic vocabulary, and an object of almost metaphysical contemplation by the strategic analysts.”