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PURPLE PATCH: Alliances Vs Counteralliances —Hans Morgenthau

The struggle between an alliance of nations defending their independence against one potential conqueror is the most spectacular of the configurations to which the balance of power gives rise. The opposition of two alliances, one or both pursuing imperialistic goals and defending the independence of their members against the imperialistic aspirations of the other coalition, is the most frequent configuration within the system of the balance of power.

To mention only a few of the more important examples, the coalitions that fought the Thirty Years’ War under the leadership of France and Sweden on the one hand, and of Austria on the other, sought to promote the imperialistic ambitions especially of Sweden and Austria and at the same time to keep the ambitions of the other side in check. The several treaties settling the affairs of Europe after the Thirty Years’ War tried to establish a balance of power serving the latter end. The many coalition wars that filled the period between the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 and the first partition of Poland of 1772 all attempted to maintain the balance that the Treaty of Utrecht had established and that the decline of Swedish power as well as the rise of Prussian, Russian, and British strength tended to disturb. The frequent changes in the alignments, even while war was in progress, have startled the historians and have made the eighteenth century appear to be particularly unprincipled and devoid of moral considerations. It was against that kind of foreign policy that Washington’s Farewell Address warned the American People.

Yet the period in which that foreign policy flourished was the golden age of the balance of power in theory as well as in practice. It was during that period that most of the literature on the balance of power was published and that the princes of Europe looked to the balance of power as the supreme principle to guide their conduct in foreign affairs. It is true that they allowed themselves to be guided by it in order to further their own interests. But, by doing so, it was inevitable that they would change sides. Desert old alliances, and from new ones whenever it seemed to them that the balance of power had been disturbed and that a realignment of forces was needed to re-establish it. In that period, foreign policy was indeed a sport of kings, not to be taken more seriously than games and gambles, played for strictly limited stakes, and utterly devoid of transcendent principles of any kind.

Since such was the nature of international politics, what looks in retrospect like treachery and immorality was then little more than an elegant maneuver, a daring piece of strategy, or a finely contrived tactical movement, all executed according to the rules of the game, which all players recognized as binding. The balance of power of that period was amoral rather than immoral. The technical rules of the art of politics were its only standard. Its flexibility, which was its peculiar merit from the technical point of view, was the result of imperviousness to moral considerations, such as good faith and loyalty, a moral deficiency that to us, seems deserving of reproach.

Hans Morgenthau’s work is considered a classic in the realist tradition of international relations. His main work relates to the nature of the state and inter-state relations. Morgenthau believed that states tend to create a balance of power. Such a balance can either be achieved as a conscious policy or may just happen. But no system can stay without it for too long. This passage is from his ‘The Balance of Power in the Modern World.’

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