V. SINCE 1815
The theory of the balance of power reached its
climax during the conflict
with Napoleon, whose ene-
mies may have lacked
the required flexibility; all the
same, to meet the threat from France,
they gave
Prussia an important position in the Rhineland. Some
of the
theory had passed into the teaching about the
states-system at the
University of Göttingen, and lay
behind Ranke's famous essay on
“Die grossen Mächte”;
and there remained at
least the conviction that one
could not risk allowing any country to
acquire a pre-
dominance, and one must
never quite ignore the ques-
tion of the
distribution of power. In this sense the old
rules—which were
directed to the preservation of the
states-system—served to set
limits to policy, showing
the point beyond which governments ought not to
go
in promoting either their interests or their ideals. Soon
there
came to be less talk of a states-system, however;
for, from 1815, a group
of five or six Great Powers
acquired the leadership in Europe and the
balance was
regarded as existing between them. These indeed may
have
been carrying the eighteenth-century ideas a stage
further when, as members
of the same club, they tried
to turn the balance into a harmony and
establish what
was called the Concert of Europe. The maxims associ-
ated with the states-system were
probably contravened
less in the nineteenth century than in the
eighteenth,
and if Bismarck was an exception when he took
Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1871 such an exception
confirms the rule,
for Germany soon had reason to
regret it. But the maxims and rules seem to
have been
carried into the subconscious realm, for the tradition
of
formulating them—the literature of the states-
system—seems to have come fairly soon to an
end. One
might say that all the rules were broken in the course
of the First World War and though it could be argued
that this
was unavoidable, its consequences have con-
firmed the old predictions.
Even in the eighteenth century, the theory had had
to accommodate itself to
existing ideas of “legitimacy,”
i.e., the normal
recognition of dynastic rights and the
principle of hereditary succession.
It had circumvented
the difficulties by resorting to those
“Partition Treaties”
which were so common for a
period of about a century
and were feasible in the days when, for the
majority
of people, the local landlord or noble mattered so much
more
than the question of who might be king. Diplo-
macy found it less easy to adjust itself to a new kind
of
“legitimacy” which came to prevail and which
conceded
much more to the idea of the self-determina-
tion of peoples. But it was not impossible to adjust
the balance
of power even to this; and if Britain, after
the Napoleonic wars, insisted
on the union of Holland
and Belgium to strengthen the barrier against
France,
she gave way on this point in the 1830's.
The partiality which the Congress of Vienna (1815)
had had for the balance
of power helped to make
liberal opinion in Europe hostile to the principle
as
well as to the work of the Congress. Felix Gilbert has
shown that
in a nontechnical way the philosophes of
the
eighteenth century had attacked the current ideas,
calling for a new
“diplomacy” that in a certain sense
anticipated
Woodrow Wilson. The French Revolution
introduced something like the
“ideological” element
in diplomacy, though the
younger Pitt conceived his
war with France as directed purely against the
inter-
national offenses of that
country, while Fox, in oppos-
ing the war, had
brought out the same principles of
the balance of power—he
thought that Pitt, like Burke,
was making the conflict
“ideological.”
After 1815, first England and then France broke with
the policy of
Metternich, which regarded revolution
as an international menace, to be
countered by inter-
national action. At
the end of 1826, George Canning
announced that he had “called
the New World into
existence to redress the balance of the Old.”
French
revolutionaries in 1830 and 1848 called for a foreign
policy
that would promote the cause of liberalism,
particularly against
reactionary Russia. The foreign
policy of the Second French Empire and of
contem-
porary England showed a certain
degree of sympathy
with the nationalist aspirations of the Italians. The
idea
of the balance of power lost its presidential position,
as public
opinion made itself felt in international
affairs; but it remained (where
perhaps it ought to
remain) in the background of the minds of
statesmen.
At least, the balance was not overturned, and the
liberal
Frenchman of the first half of the century would
have been shocked to see how, for its sake, the young
Third
Republic made alliance with Tsarist Russia. The
greatest embarrassment for
the principle of the balance
of power occurred after 1900 when Germany
came
to be seen as so immediate a danger that men forgot
Russia—a danger calculated to be still more formidable
but as
yet more remote—the predicament presenting
the kind of problem
which it is the function of diplo-
macy to
solve.
After 1919 the reaction against what was called the
“old
diplomacy” led to a widespread condemnation
of the idea of the
balance of power. To that idea—
rather than to the cupidities
which it was intended to
keep in check—were imputed the
aggressive policies
which had led to war. The view was understandable
in that the theory fixed attention on the diagram of
forces and was
sometimes understood to mean the
subordination of everything to the
question of the
distribution of power. Also there existed after 1919 a
kind of “messianism”—the belief that a new
world had
been born, and a new diplomacy was needed.
The situation after the Second World War left room
for no such illusions;
and the significance of the
European balance was never more patent than at
the
moment when the balance was destroyed—destroyed
apparently in just that irretrievable manner which the
eighteenth-century
theorists had most feared. The lan-
guage of
the balance of power became current again
even when the equilibrium had to
be envisaged on a
global scale and as a system comprising, for a time,
only two giant members. It is only in recent years,
however, that, amongst
the students of international
politics, the question of the balance of
power has been
again the subject of that semi-scientific treatment
which was so characteristic of the eighteenth century.
But it is
interesting to see that the modern thought
in this field does not make a
development from the
point which the eighteenth century had reached,
for
the work of that century had been long forgotten. It
is difficult
not to believe that in certain modern writers
some of the formulations
would have been different
if the pre-1815 theories had been known.
It is sometimes suggested that the nuclear weapon
has made the notion of
balance out-of-date, since, when
two powers are both in a position to
destroy one an-
other, the superiority of either
of them becomes an
irrelevancy. But the competition for support in the
Third World—and the part which the uncommitted
states have been
able to play in diplomacy—would
suggest that nuclear
calculations are not supreme, and
that, in one contingency and another (in
diplomacy
if not in actual war) the consideration of the balance
of
power may still be a factor in the case. Since the
system prided itself on its assurance of an independent
foreign
policy to smaller states (and indeed depended
on this) it had to allow for
these latter choosing neu-
trality, and it
relied on their being converted to an
alliance when they realized the
necessity for taking
part.
