19th Century Balance Of Power

If the balance of power is the ‘constitution of international society’ (von Gentz) why has it generated such hostility?
{Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science}

The original idea of a perfectly balanced system was introduced in the political debate by Ruccellai and Guicciardini, two Italian political writers, at the end of the 15th century. According to Haslam, “the situation which prompted the emergence of the Balance as a ruling principle of international relations was the period in Italy … from the peace of Lodi (1454) to the invasion of the French under Charles VIII (1494), during which five Powers maintained a balance on the peninsula: Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples”.[1] In 1713, the aim “to settle … an equal balance of power” between states involved in the War of the Spanish Succession was embedded in the Treaty of Utrecht.[2] After that, further developments of the concept followed, in particular those elaborated by Fénélon and Hume in the 18th century: the former referred to the balance of power as a natural tendency of states that shared common interest and were able to enjoy good relations and political stability (“a kind of society and general republic”).[3] Similarly, the latter saw the balance of power as the “aim of modern politics”.[4] Despite ambitious and peaceful political objectives, the balance of power was applied as a theoretical justification in the division of Poland between Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1772, 1793 and 1795 and finally was openly contested in Britain by the radical and pacifist MP Richard Cobden.

In the wake of the Smithian idea of free market, according to which trade required and created conditions for peace, the balance of power was rhetorically blamed for encouraging war and of being pro-aristocratic and anti-bourgeoisie: “[It] is a chimaera! It is not a fallacy, a mistake, an imposture – it is an undescribed, indescribable, incomprehensible nothing”.[5] Nonetheless, such an idea was suggested again by von Gentz and it became Metternich’s main driving concern in reorganizing the European state system soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. In the 19th century Europe was ruled by a Concert of Great Powers shaped as a balance-of-power system which was able to maintain peace and stability for a century. Why was this system so harshly contested by such contemporary thinkers as Cobden? What were the main causes which prompted him, and “liberalists” at the beginning of the next century, to blame the balance of power as a mean to preserve hegemonic interests and political status quo? Why did such a system fail and result in the bloodiest war man had seen at that time? Most importantly, could one truly speak about of balance of power during the 19th century? In this essay I argue that it was a different kind of politics to generate hostility, while a more comprehensive and systematic concept of balance of power was elaborated only in the Cold War period.

The idea of Balance of Power in the 19th Century

The main reason for hostility toward the balance of power in the 19th century laid down on its conservative and hegemonic implications. As a matter of fact, Metternich set up the creation of the Concert relying on the basic tenets of balance of power defined as “a guiding principle for decision-making on the part of governments”, with the unconcealed objective to re-establish the previous state system through restoration of monarchies throughout the Europe.[6] This kind of political aim married with the great concern to avoid future resurgences and revolutions, which had provoked the Napoleonic Wars and that put at risk independent sovereignty in Europe.

Preserving the balance and ensuring the European state-system was the primary interest of F. von Gentz (1764 – 1832), a former pupil of Kant, who worked as a Metternich’s adviser in Austria. The thoughts of von Gentz shaped policy outcomes of the Restoration, which looked at the balance of power as “an international institution vital to the preservation of the total institutional status quo”,[7] it allowed European states to co-exist and to develop a shared network of rules. In fact, according to a rationalist view, Gentz identified Europe “not as an anarchic arena but as a union or federation of states”,[8] each of them responsible to maintain a just equilibrium and the integrity of the system. However, this idea of balance of power ended up justifying the existence of strong counterforce and a concept of stability completely uninterested in the fate of weaker countries: peace was solely a priority for great powers and the partition of Poland was considered as an effective balancing policy because did not damage the European state-system and it represented a “degree of progress on the previous era”: in this way states avoided war at the expense of other subjects.[9] This pattern of action was pursued in the 1815 peace settlement where, as Schroeder shows, three major areas (Italy, Balkans and Poland) were identified as “intermediary” bodies among the winning empires: their later ineffectiveness in preserving peace and stability was brought about by willingness of empires to dominate them in the name of the status quo, triggering further changes in the structure that would undermined the entire system (calls for independence and the emergence of new states).[10]

Alternatively to the hierarchical structure of power, Holsti suggests the existence of an imperfect system of governance in the 19th century: polyarchy. Departing from a polycentric distribution of power between the five great state actors after 1815, Holsti identifies two common tasks on the ground of this multi-polar system: preventing hegemony on the continent and avoiding a pan-European war.[11] Such a system was the final result of the complementary nature of Concert and balance, where the first “could not work unless there was a balance, defined in territorial terms: employment of institutions (norms, consultation, common decisions), ideational consensus on tasks of governance and authority and legitimacy of collective outcomes were the three main criteria of that governance system until 1914.[12] The restricted nature of the Concert, which involved a balancing-mechanism limited to its participants, did not take into account states committed to fighting wars for different concerns such as nationalism in the Ottoman Empire and Balkans in the late 19th century.[13]

The growing presence of a number of nation-states in Europe generated further hostility for balance of power, seen as the ideological justification for the great powers to preserving the old distribution of power, defined in territorial terms, between its first advocates. This structural transformation challenged the concept above-mentioned, and showed how it was incapable to working also for a wider spectrum of states. Given the contradictions that such a definition of balance of power aroused, is it possible to speak about a straightforward definition of balance of power system between 1815 and 1914? An answer to this question could be helpful to understand better why the balance of power as conceived in the 19th century generated a great deal of hostility both during that period and in the aftermath of the Concert breakdown.

An attempt for conceptual clarification

So far the term of balance of power has been associated to the role of “stability, peace, rule of law, the mutual guarantee of rights and the supervision of all major changes in the system by the great powers”. However, in the 19th century the distribution of power was not balanced and the working definition for “balance” meant a “dominant coalition set up against a supposed aggressor”.[14] In addition, balance of power tenets were employed to justify the extinction of weak states, while no independence for all states was guaranteed. In such a system there was anarchy only for the weakest actors, while the members of the restricted circle of great powers lived within an international society with its rules and its own equilibrium.

Such an international system was not entirely shaped by a clear concept or practice of balance of power. In fact, as Schroeder underlines, “what Germans meant by equilibrium [was different from] the standard British conception throughout the century. These basic conceptions of the European balance have nothing in common but the name”.[15] Contradictions between core meanings and practices about the term reflected the basic confusion between an “equilibrium as stability and peace through the rule of law and great-power unity or equilibrium through balance of power”.[16] The need to clarify semantically this term was recognized by Haas, who identified in 1953 eight different meanings of balance of power and four different historical and political uses.[17] As a result, Schroeder explains that such term suffered from conceptual over-stretching and when European statesman referred to “European or political equilibrium”, they meant exactly that and not “balance of power”. Therefore, political equilibrium is a very different concept which requires “a balance of satisfactions, a balance of rights and obligations and a balance of performance and payoffs, rather than a balance of power”: states were not concerned in equal distribution of power between actors of international system, but in a kind of artificial harmony based on the acquisition of individual goals and interests through the institutions of war, alliances, diplomacy and international treaties.[18]

As Haas pointed out, the purpose of “Gentz’s theory of balance of power … was to give the Austrian and British governments an excuse for unleashing a new war on Napoleon”, in order to fulfil their own national interests.[19] Bismarck, most importantly, learned very fruitfully the political grammar and the working rules of the 19th century international society. When united Germany took part in it as a newborn great power in 1871, Bismarck harnessed diplomacy and took advantage of a highly-balanced system of alliances in order to preserve and to maintain the existing political equilibrium instrumental to the institutional strengthening and economic aggrandizement of his country.[20] Analyzing the 19th century through the lens of national interests and predominance of states’ power is useful for understanding its own collapse in 1914 and after the World War I, both due to the disappearance of political equilibrium in Europe (as a balance of rights and satisfactions between states) and Germany’s growth in power and ambition which broke down that mechanism in the early 20th century.[21]

Systematic definitions of balance of power were elaborated only after the Second World War, primarily by Waltz and Bull. Waltz sees the balance as an automatic consequence of the interactions of functionally similar units operating in an anarchy.[22] Bull, although not interested in the system’s mechanisms, means by balance of power “a state of affairs such that no one power is in a position where it is preponderant and can lay down the law to others”, irrespective of states’ size and encompassing both local and general balance of power.[23] Both approaches were reinforced with the introduction of nuclear weapons, which made possible identifying the Cold War period as the most suitable one for a balance of power theory (in terms of a balanced distribution of capabilities and nuclear peace as the final and the best possible outcomes).

Conclusion

Balance of power, although remaining a fundamental institution of international society, was not a pillar of it in the 19th century. As we have seen, what generated hostility was instead the achievement of the so-called policy of “political equilibrium” between great powers. This concerted purpose was inherently conservative and this was the reason for aversion. As a matter of fact, the necessity to sustain status quo and power relations resulting from the Restoration was perceived as instrumental to great powers objectives and their internal stability. In the late 19th century, this view of the world became progressively anachronistic because of the emergence of new states (especially Germany) which saw in this model of “equilibrium” a constrain to their further increasing national interests and ambition. As a result, the misuse or the overuse of the “balance of power” concept prompted suspicion until the end of the Second World War. At that time, the emergence of two superpowers, ideologically and militarily in competition, and the appearance of nuclear weapons, required an original re-elaboration of balance of power as conceived until then, focused on protection of national sovereignty, worldwide peaceful co-existence and nuclear deterrence between the American and the Soviet hegemonies.

Citations & Bibliography