Balance of Power: The Oldest Tool for Restraining Nationalism

Calling for nationalism to be restrained is one thing; actually doing it is another. Historically, states have relied on a handful of concrete mechanisms to keep national ambition from tipping into open conquest, and the oldest and most persistent of them by far is the balance of power – the practice of arranging alliances and counter-alliances so that no single nation ever grows powerful enough to dominate the rest outright.

England’s Four-Century Habit

Balance-of-power thinking became something close to a fixed principle of English foreign policy as far back as the reign of Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century, and it kept resurfacing in European statecraft for the next four hundred years. It shaped the treaties that closed the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, it drove the alliance that put Britain and Prussia against a dominant France during the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763, and it stood at the very center of the 1815 Congress of Vienna’s attempt to rebuild European order after Napoleon. By the early twentieth century it had become so deeply embedded in British diplomatic instinct that it shaped the crisis leading directly into the First World War: in August 1914, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey’s ultimatum over Austria’s confrontation with Serbia was framed explicitly around preventing the continental balance from tipping decisively toward the Central Powers, with Britain positioning itself alongside France and Russia precisely to keep that balance from collapsing.

When the Balance Broke

The theory’s record after 1918 was far less reassuring. The interwar balance of power, patched together across the 1920s and 30s, functioned poorly at best, and its practical breakdown is now widely treated as one of the direct preconditions for the Second World War – proof that the mechanism only restrains ambition when the major powers actually maintain it with any consistency, and does nothing at all once they stop bothering to.

A Genuinely Double-Edged Tool

Taken as a whole, the balance of power has done real work over the centuries in checking unrestrained national self-interest and expansion. But serious critics have pointed out that the tool cuts both ways: rather than reliably restraining nationalism, a balance-of-power arrangement can just as easily entrench it, hardening rival blocs against one another and giving each side a standing incentive to keep building up exactly the kind of military and alliance strength the system was supposed to be containing in the first place. It is, in other words, less a cure for nationalist rivalry than a way of managing it – and a fairly fragile one whenever the powers involved lose the will to keep it in balance.