I. THE ANCIENT WORLD
Classical antiquity carried political thought to a
considerable depth while
it discussed the problem of
the state as though only one example existed in
the
world; but its intellectual achievement is disappointing
in the
field of interstate relations. The notion that a
government should ally
itself with the power that it
fears the less against the power that it
fears the more,
and the idea that a state, when confronted by an ag-
gressor who is superior in strength, should
seek an ally,
hardly rise above the level of banality. Neither the
view
that small states should combine against a threatening
giant, nor
the habit of shifting alliances as circum-
stances change, can be regarded as more than the raw
material of
human experience, familiar long before the
rise of Athens. It is only too
easy for us to read into
such elementary phenomena a complicated notion
of
equilibrium which has become second nature to mod-
ern man.
Thucydides, though he does not envisage an actual
balance, may be said to
adumbrate a number of maxims
which would have been recognized in the
eighteenth
century as part of the complex of ideas which the
theory
embraced, e.g.:
You, Spartans, are the only people in Hellas who... instead
of
crushing an enemy in its infancy, wait until it has doubled
its
strength
(I.69).
Athens is capable of standing up against the whole of
our coalition
and is superior to any one of us individually;
so unless we go
unanimously to war with her, both as a
body and as individual
states and peoples, she will find us
divided and will overcome us,
one by one
(I.122).
The only assured basis for an alliance is for each party
to be
equally afraid of the other; for the one who wants
to attack is
deterred when the odds are not on his side.
... [Athens] was able
to lead the stronger states against
the smaller, leaving the former
to be dealt with last of all,
after they had lost its allies and
had become more easy to
deal with
(III.11).
Some writers have asserted that Polybius gave
“classic” expression to the principle of the balance
of
power. But we must take him at his word. He wrote
that
“it is never right to help a power to acquire a
predominance
that will be irresistible” (Book I, Ch.
83, 4). Though David
Hume tried to argue that the
idea of the balance goes back to the ancient
Greeks,
he discovered situations which provide analogies for
a modern
student, rather than the concept itself, pres-
ent in men's minds as a fertilizing thing. Observing
how the
Hellenistic governments failed to prevent the
rise of Rome, he had to admit
his disappointment at
the fact that no ancient writer reproached them
for
their neglect of the balance of power.
The Indian writer, Kautilya, who seems to have lived
three or four centuries
before the beginning of the
Christian era, has sometimes been thought to
have had
an idea of the balance of power. But one Indian com-
mentator has rightly called attention to
the “scholastic
elaboration” of some of his teaching
and has mentioned
other intricacies in his diplomacy which “had
appar-
ently much interest to kings and
politicians in ancient
India, though to us they appear dreary and
obscure.”
Another Indian commentator and translator tells
us
that “the text is hard and capable of several inter-
pretative twists.” The
Arths'āstra, which must be of
the
greatest interest when related to its proper intel-
lectual context, offers dangerous temptations to
the
twentieth-century student who seeks to achieve rapid
results and
reads the present into the past. Some of
its concrete maxims seem absurdly
trite, while some
seem to reveal a mind comparable to that of Machi-
avelli; but some seem not even
consistent with the idea
of the balance of power. Kautilya could say: “When
a weak king is attacked by a powerful enemy, the
former should
seek the protection of one who is supe-
rior to
the enemy.... In the absence of a superior
king, he should combine with a
number of his equals
who are equal in power to his enemy.” But
even a
passage like this makes one unsure about his apprecia-
tion of the notion of balance.
