Balance of power

By Professor John Charmley

new perspective Vol. 6,  No. 1

The balance of power was defined by the nineteenth century radical, Richard Cobden, as a ‘figment’ of the imagination. His even more radical colleague, John Bright, denounced it as a ‘foul idol’, the worship of which had ‘loaded the nation with debt and with taxes’. But the dominant figure in mid-nineteenth century diplomacy, Lord Palmerston, derided both men for their ignorance, and called it a ‘doctrine founded on the nature of man’. He explained that ‘it was in the interest of the community of nations that no nation should acquire such a preponderance as to endanger the security of the rest’. The task of preventing any power acquiring a ‘preponderance’ was one which weighed heavily on almost every British foreign secretary during the period 1914 to 1939. Some would go even farther, and argue with the Edwardian diplomat, Eyre Crowe, that concern for the balance of power has been the predominant theme in British diplomacy since the time of Elizabeth I. The concept itself certainly goes back that far, although it is debatable whether the same is true of Britain’s concern for it.

Historians have generally dated the concept back to the wars between the Italian city states of the fifteenth century, tracing its first use to Guicciardini’s 1561 History of Italy; but being ‘founded on human nature’, it is not implausible to see the Greek alliance against ancient Troy as its earliest manifestation. The long period of Franco-Spanish rivalry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century encouraged the development of the idea of a self-righting balance of power, as power ebbed and flowed first one way and then the other. But the concept of the balance of power as part of the immutable law of nature received a jolt in the Age of Enlightenment. If the scientific revolution questioned the whole notion of a static and stable ‘nature’, then the late eighteenth century partition of Poland by Russia, Austria and Prussia, questioned the whole notion of the ‘balance’ as a stabilising force. If the three ‘Northern Courts’ could destroy Poland in the name of the ‘balance of power’, then the old idea that the interests of individual states and of the states system as a whole were always reconcilable, was plainly wrong. Napoleon’s decade of conquest at the start of the nineteenth century confirmed this view, as he came close to making Continental Europe a French colonial empire.

The statesmen who defeated Napoleon knew that in order to really win the war against him they needed to create and maintain a balance of power. This was done at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15. The Austrian Chancellor, Prince Metternich, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, tried to create a balance of power which would both confine France, and prevent Tsar Alexander I of Russia from exercising too much influence in the affairs of Europe. Because they were self-consciously creating a balance of power rather than punishing France, the settlement made at Vienna endured for longer than anyone could have supposed. France was surrounded with buffer States, but otherwise treated leniently. Article VI of the 1815 Treaty of Paris provided for periodic meetings of the Great Powers to discuss problems of mutual interest, and at the first of these, in 1818, it was decided to readmit France into the Concert of Europe. Despite differences of interpretation between Britain and the Northern Courts, the balance of power was adjusted with some success without war until 1854. Even the Crimean War was, as we have seen, justified by Palmerston in the name of the balance of power. Russia, it was felt, had become too strong and needed to be put under some restraint.

One of the central problems of nineteenth century history was trying to reconcile the management of the balance of power with the demands from Italy and Germany for national self-development. Napoleon III thought he could square the circle by championing Italian and German nationalism and, at the same time, channelling it into Europe shaped according to French interests; this proved to be an illusion..

It was in the name of the balance of power that, faced with a rising Germany, Britain settled her old imperial rivalries with France and Russia in the early twentieth century; it was in the same cause that she went to war with Germany in 1914, despite the fact she had no treaty commitment which bound her to this act. As Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, told the Commons on 3 August 1914, a ‘common interest against the unmeasured aggrandisement of any Power,’ necessitated a declaration of war.

It proved much more difficult then in 1815 to recreate a balance of power. It was a sign of the triumph of nineteenth century liberalism (and American influence), that an attempt was made to create an alternative to power politics in the form of the League of Nations. But the League lacked the ability to enforce its will, and its enemies did not. Hitler’s attempt to dominate the Continent after 1939 demonstrated that any balance of power in Europe needed American aid; Stalin’s attempt to dominate it after 1945 showed that a global balance of terror had replaced the complicated diplomacy of the old regime in Europe.

The balance of power was primarily a product of the European ancien régime and was a motivating force in nineteenth century diplomacy. During the Cold War era the concept was adapted to symbolise the stand off between NATO and the forces of the Warsaw pact. With the collapse of the bipolar world system in 1989, following the demise of the old USSR, the balance of power, as a concept, has fallen on hard times – although it might be as well to remember Palmerston’s observation that it is ‘human nature’.

John Charmley, Professor of History in the University of East Anglia, is the author of Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power, 1999.