Balance Of Power
In international relations, the balance of power refers to a
nation's or group's posture and policy of protecting itself from another nation
or group by matching its power to the other side's power. There are two ways
that states can implement a policy of power balance: by increasing their power,
such as participating in an arms race or a territorial acquisition competition;
or by bolstering the power of other states, such as by launching an alliances
policy.
Also read: Disaster
From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, the
power relationships in the European state system were referred to as the
"balance of power," and Great Britain acted as the system's
"keeper of the balance. It would occasionally lean one way and then the
other, primarily because it sought to maintain balance, and it had little to do
with the policies of any European country. Great Britain was able to perform
this function because it possessed naval supremacy and was virtually immune to
foreign invasion. As a result, the European balance of power was adaptable and
stable.
The European power structure as it had existed since the end of the Middle Ages was practically destroyed by the sweeping shifts in the balance of power beginning in the early 20th century.
The political world was made up of several different and distinct balance-of-power systems before the 20th century, such as the European, American, Chinese, and Indian. However, the political alignments that came with World War I started a process that led to the consolidation of the majority of nations into a single balance of power. The British, French, Russian, and American alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I marked the beginning of this integration.
Also read: International Laws
The
integration continued during World War II, when a global alliance of the Soviet
Union, the United States, Britain, and China confronted the fascist nations of
Germany, Japan, and Italy. At the end of World War II, only two non-European
nations stood in the way of the traditional players in western and central
Europe gaining power. America as well as the Soviet Union. The result was a
power balance that was bipolar across the northern half of the world, pitting
Western free-market democracies against Eastern European communist one-party states.
More specifically, the countries of western Europe joined the military alliance
NATO with the United States, while the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union's
satellite alliances in central and eastern Europe, came together under Soviet
control.
The European nations lost the freedom of movement that had
previously made for a flexible system because the balance of power was now
bipolar and there was a significant power gap between the two superpowers and
all other nations. Europe's nations now clustered around the two superpowers
and tended to transform themselves into two stable blocs, as opposed to a
series of shifting and essentially unpredictable alliances with and against one
another.
The power balance after the war was also markedly different
from the one before it. The United States and the Soviet Union's respective
foreign policies were markedly restrained as a result of their fear of mutual
destruction in the event of a global nuclear holocaust. A direct military
confrontation on European soil between the two superpowers and their allies was
almost certain to lead to nuclear war, so it was best to avoid it at all costs.
Therefore, a massive arms race whose lethal products were never used and
political meddling or limited military interventions by the superpowers in
various Third World nations largely replaced confrontation.
Some Third World nations took a nonaligned stance in
international politics at the end of the 20th century and resisted the
advancements of the superpowers. Due to China's development of a nonaligned but
secretly anti-Soviet position and its independence from Soviet control, the
bipolar balance of power became even more difficult. However, the most
significant shift in the balance of power occurred between 1989 and 1990, when
the Soviet Union relinquished control over its satellites in eastern Europe and
allowed non-communist governments to take power there. The government of newly
sovereign Russia initially embraced the political and economic forms that were
preferred by the United States and western Europe at the time of the Soviet
Union's dissolution in 1991, rendering the idea of a European balance of power
temporarily irrelevant. However, the nuclear threat balance between Russia and
the United States remained potentially in place because both countries
maintained their nuclear arsenals.