5 - THE STRUCTURE OF THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM: THE SYSTEMS LEVEL

Summary

Although the correlation of forces is constantly changing in favor of socialism, there is still no basis for speaking of its decisive superiority over imperialism.

Georgi Shakhnazarov

CRITERIA OF EVALUATION: POWER, CORRELATION OF FORCES, AND THE BALANCE OF POWER

In the preceding two chapters we noted the greatly increased recognition accorded by Soviet theorists of international relations to the concept of system. The “system” of international relations is understood in terms of political relations among sovereign states. Various theorists, among them Kokoshin and Pozdnyakov, have drawn attention to a certain “macrolevel stability” of the international system, whatever the dynamic qualities by which the system maintains itself (such as the evolution of a multipolar system to a bipolar one). Inevitably, the assertion of systemic stability raises an issue which, because of its imputed relation to “bourgeois” efforts to maintain the international status quo, has long been anathema in Soviet analyses of international relations, i.e., the balance of power in world politics.

At the outset, one must distinguish the balance of power as analytical tool and as policy argument in Soviet treatment of the concept. Genrikh Trofimenko, for example, a leading specialist on American politico-military strategy in the Soviet Institute of the USA and Canada, observed in 1976 that “the balance of power (balans sil) is no longer a feasible policy in contemporary conditions.”