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The Balance of Power: Growth of an Idea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Alfred Vagts
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Extract

Twice within 25 years, in 1919 and again in 1944–5, the idea of the balance of power hasbeen pronounced dead, and twice it has arisen from its seeming demise soon after such funereal exercises. Foremost among the obituaries were those of American statesmen, like Woodrow Wilson and Cordell Hull. When the latter returned from conferences in Moscow in the autumn of 1943, he stated, as if he were the true heir of Wilsonism, that “as the provisionsof the fournations declarations are carried into effect, there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security.”

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , October 1948 , pp. 82 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1948

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References

1 Dr. Karl A. Menninger discussing causes of high blood pressure before a conference of physicians. On this occasion “primal fear” was indicated as a clue (New York Times, April 20, 1948). Should not the historian of diplomacy in a deeper, more searching analysis of the fear of “encirclement” make use of this clue?

2 New York Times, April 23, 1948.

3 Langer, Walter C., Psychology and Human Living, New York, D. Appleton-Century, 1943.Google Scholar

4 Cited in New York Times June 26,1944. Another expression of skepticism about balancing is the young Holmes', O. W.Astraea; the Balance of Illusions, a Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College, Boston, 1850.Google Scholar

5 Letter of d'Alembert to King Frederick the Second of Prussia, July 30, 1781, citinga mot of Fontenelle.

6 New York Times, November 11, 1945.

7 Question and answer were promptly relayed to the Germans. German ambassador in Moscow toGerman Foreign Office, July 13, 1940, Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939–1941, Washington, D. C, Government Printing Office, 1948, p. 167.

8 Did the United States and the New World go to war to redress the balance of the Old? It ought not to be considered election year maliciousness to refer for one of the first steps in this direction to statements by Henry Wallace, Democratic candidate for the Vice- Presidency in 1940, during that campaign. He told California audiences at that time that Japan's accession to the Axis meant “that the old balance of power upon which the U. S. relied for safety is now gone.Only if we are speedy and efficient in our defense can we keep aggressor nations, or any combination of them, from coming to this country … The old balance of power under which the Monroe Doctrine was easily defended is gone. We must look to our own defenses, relying on ourselves to repel any aggression.” UP dispatch from Los Angeles, September, 1940.

9 Droysen, Johann Gustav, Hiitorik, Munich and Berlin, 1937Google Scholar, paragraph 37.

10 As an illustration: Long before publicists wrote of the state system in Europe as the necessary, unavoidable, quasi-lawlike connection and interdependence of the states there was Galileo's Didlogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632). Only around 1700 was the concept ‘system’ applied to the relationships between states.An anti-French author of the Spanish War of Succession wrote in 1701 Le portage du lion de la fable.II. partie, English translation The Fable of the Lion's Share verified in the pretended partition of the Spanish Monarchy, 1701, Repr. StateTracts III, 129 ff., addressing himself to the pope by saying that the Holy Father “certainly knew‘the system of Europe’ too well not to know that religion played no role in it.” A German encyclopedia of about the same time—Hübner's, JohannReales Staats, Zeitungsund Conversationslexicon, 1st ed.Leipzig, 1704Google Scholar (I amusing the 4th edition of 1709)—does not yet register this new concept which is certainly marking a further step in the secularization of politics, asGalileo had done in another time and place. According to this encyclopedia “Systema is such a bookin which a whole doctrine is extensively proposed. In astronomy it means the miraculous composition of the sky and earth.” For the further developmentof the concept of the European state system during the 18th century see Doerries, Heinrich, “Russlands Eindringen in Europa in der Epoche Peters des Grossen,” Osteuropmsche Forschungen N. F., vol. 26 (1939), pp. 19–21.Google Scholar

11 For the view that a state system had come into existence by the late Middle Ages see Kienast, Walter, “Die Anfänge des europäischen Staaten-systems in späteren Mittelalter,” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 153 (1936).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Holtzmann, R., “Der Weltherrschaftsgedanke des mittelalterlichen Kaisertums und die Souveränität der europ. Staatensystems,” Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 159 (1939), pp. 251. ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Ranke, Leopold von, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation Phaidon, ed., Vienna, n. d., pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

14 A large part of the above interpretation follows Hind, Arthur Mayger, A Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings preserved in the Departmentof Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, London, 1910, text vol., pp. 276 ff.Google Scholar, substantially reprinted in his Early Italian Engraving, New York London, 1938, text vol., pp. 251 ff. The woodcut is at length described by Schreiber, W. L., Handbuch der Holzund Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1927, IV, 103.Google Scholar Schreiber is inclined todate the woodcut, which is of South German origin, perhaps from near the Bodensee, earlier than the engraving, while Hind insists on the priority of the latter. The woodcut is from the National Gallery of Artand is printed with their kind permission; knowledgeof it I owe to Professor E. Panofsky of Princeton. The 16th century German woodcut is in the Munich State Library and is reproduced in the Ullstein-Weltgeschichte, ed. Walter Goetz, Berlin, 1908–1925, vol. IV.

15 For these art theories see Alberti's, Leone BattistaKleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften, herausgegeben und übersetzt von H. Janitschek, Vienna, 1877.Google Scholar

16 Wind, Edgar, “Studies in Allegorical Portraiture,” Journal of the Warburg Institute, I, 159.Google Scholar

17 Iconologia overo descrittione didiverse imagini cavate dal' antichità & di propria inventione, Trovate, & dichiarate da Cesare Ripa, Rome, 1603, p. 411.

18 Roover, Raymond de, “La Formation et l'Expansion de la Comptabilitéà Parie double,” Annales d'Histoire économique et sociale, nos. 44–45 (1937), pp. 171 ff.Google Scholar

19 Duhem, Pierre, Les Origines de la Statiquc, Paris, 1905.Google Scholar

20 Cited in Smith, Gregory, Elizabethan Critical Essays, Oxford, 1904, II, 102–3.Google Scholar

21 Genovesi (1713–69), Lezioni d'Economia, n.d. cited in Pribram, , “Die Idee des Gleichge-wichts in der nationalökonomischen Literatur,” Sckmotter's Jahrbuch, XVII (1908), 3.Google Scholar

22 Albèri, Eugenio, Relazionidegli ambasciatori veneti al Senate, Florence, 1839–1863, Ser. I, vol. 2, p. 465.Google Scholar

23 Ranke, Leopold von, Sämmtliche Werke, Leipziz, 1868–1890, vols. 53–54, p. 682.Google Scholar

24 II Principe, c. 20.

25 Capponi, Gino, Storia della Republica di Firenze, Sec. ediz. revista, Florence, 1876, II, 428–9.Google Scholar

26 Commynes, Philippe de, Mémoircs, ed. Calmette, , Paris, 1924–1925, III, 40 ff.Google Scholar

27 Thomas Lodge, Defense of Poetry, 1579. Cited in Smith, Op. cit. I,80, where the mis-fortune of exiles is called a subject of tragedy.

28 The History of Guicciardini, containing the Wars of Italy and Partes, reduced into English by Geffray Fenton, London, 1579.

29 Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette, Berlin, 1924, XVII, 28.

30 Gothein, Eberhard, Die Renaissance in Süditalien, Munich & Leipzig, 1924, p. 65.Google Scholar

31 Stubbs, William, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History Oxford, 1886, p. 225.Google Scholar

32 Kretschmayr, Heinrich, Geschkhte von Fenedig, Gotha, 1905–1937, III, 598.Google Scholar

33 “Autre épistre envoée de venise le dernier jour de juillet, 1536,” Oeuvres, ed. Guiffrey, Paris, 1875–1931, 111,450.

34 A history in nuce of Edward Grey's diplomacy could be written in terms of the balance of power. His diplomacy was guided by that very idea, but the radicals within his own party, the heirs of Cobden and Bright, with their dislike of what went with the phrase balance of power, kept it from appearing in his parliamentary speeches and memoirs, both of which were designed to defend his diplomacy and the after all disastrous entry of England into the war in 1914.