The Difference Between Balance of Power and Restraint of Power

At a time when the United States of America appears to be encouraging a return to Great Power politics, it is good to think about fundamentals. Having clarified something about law in my last piece, this may be a good time to clarify something about power. I see Michael Rainsborough has already reminded us that we cannot forget about power. I agree completely. The first law of sound politics is that one should always think about both power and law.

First, some notes on books. For what I am going to show you is an argument that I found by reading Perry Anderson’s book about historians who wrote about the First World War, Disputing Disaster, published in 2024, and then by pursuing some leads: especially by reading about the last of Anderson’s six historians, not Christopher Clark (who reviewed Anderson’s book in the LRB in a niggardly way because, I think, he saw that Anderson did not quite think Clark’s Sleepwalkers the apex of achievement), but Paul Schroeder, who died in 2020. Schroeder you might not have heard of, but A.J.P. Taylor you have surely heard of. Well, Schroeder was the author of what was meant to be the prequel to Taylor’s Struggle For Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, published in 1954, entitled The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848, published in 1994. And Schroeder explained that Taylor was wrong about history.

The argument, like all historical arguments, is not always easy to see or recall, because it is shrouded in much detail and circumstance. But it is extremely simple. Schroeder thought that Taylor made far too much of the concept of the balance of power, and, at the same time, refused to interrogate what he meant by it. Did Taylor mean to say that the balance of power was an impersonal system which existed without anyone trying to sustain it consciously? Or did Taylor mean to say that it was an ideal, an aspiration, something that the Great Powers struggled to maintain? Schroeder said, in effect: ‘Taylor doesn’t care. For him, it is both. He is not thinking about it.’

In other words, and this is something we should always try to be aware of, Taylor treated the ‘balance of power’ as a not-to-be-interrogated entity. He used the phrase a lot, and never worried about what it meant. Well, we all do this, and most of us do it all the time. We use words without worrying about what they mean. We don’t think about them. But Schroeder wanted to think about them. And, in thinking about them, he came up with what Anderson noticed was a striking account of Great Power history between, say, the Peace of Utrecht, that’s in 1711, and the War in Ukraine.

But first let us clarify a distinction. This is the distinction between the balance of power and something else which lacks a name and for which we should find some sort of clear name. Schroeder calls it “concert” sometimes, and sometimes “alliances of mutual restraint”. He was thinking of the Congress of Vienna, and the Holy Alliance, also Bismarck’s various Bunds, but also the general inclination of British policy in the eras of Castlereagh and Salisbury. You can see why there is a problem: as long as it does not have a clear name we tend to confuse it with the balance of power. So let me try to prevent confusion. Bernard Shaw, surprisingly, was one of the most forensic about the weakness of the phrase ‘the balance of power’. This is from the preface he wrote to Leonard Woolf’s International Government in 1916:

Again, take the Balance of Power aimed at by our diplomatists. As long as each state works for its own hand, as at present, every diplomatist is necessarily engaged in a constant struggle to upset the balance of power in his own favour. He pretends to aim at nothing beyond preserving it; but he exposes all the rest at aiming at hegemony, at command of the sea, and so forth. Each nation feels that supremacy is absolutely necessary for its security, and that it, and it alone, can be trusted not to abuse it. War intensifies this feeling, and the present war is no exception. (International Government, 1916, pp. xiii-xiv.)

For Shaw, as for many during the War, the only alternative to the balance of power was international organisation. In my previous piece I distinguished two meanings of ‘international’: one meaning is something between states and the other meaning is something above states. Shaw, like all the theorists of the League of Nations, thought that the only way to end war, or minimise it, was to have a higher organisation. Schroeder would agree with the first part of Shaw’s analysis but not the second. He would say, ‘Yes, there is a problem with the balance of power, but there is an alternative that does not require us to trust in a dubious higher entity.’

So here is the distinction. THE BALANCE OF POWER, unconscious in Taylor, and conscious in Shaw, is:

A historically-emergent system in which states exert themselves on their own behalf as much as possible and find, as a matter of historical fact, that they cannot exert themselves over others, so they reconcile themselves to existing in a ‘balanced’ system, though they continue to act against it. In short, the balance of power is an unconscious system that emerges when everyone seeks to exert their own power as much as possible.

I am going to call Schroeder’s alternative the restraint of power. THE RESTRAINT OF POWER is:

A conscious attempt to sustain as much peace as possible in the world by engaging in alliances, not for aggrandisement but for mutual restraint, and by acting in such a way as to minimise not only the risks of exerting one’s own power but also the risks of anyone else exerting their power: this takes place by mutual restraint, indeed, but also, primarily, through the recognition of the value of self-restraint.

Schroeder alleged that eras of war in European and then world history were a consequence of breakdowns of alliances in restraint of power. He instanced 1848 and the 1850s, to a lesser extent the 1870s and 1880s, and then the 1900s and 1930s. He said, against Taylor, that it was not enough simply to say that the ‘balance of power’ had broken down. Nay. The ‘restraint of power’ had broken down, and certain powers had nothing to lose by going to war.

We would do a lot better if we somehow formalised this distinction between the ‘balance of power’ and ‘restraint of power’.

Of course, one cannot change everyone’s language in a day, and, besides, we all read the old writers. I was reading Herbert Butterfield last night (specifically, ‘The Scientific Versus the Moralistic Approach in International Affairs‘, International Affairs 27 (1951), pp. 411-422), and found that he agreed with Schroeder, but what I am calling here “restraint of power” he called, as was traditional, “the balance of power”. Care is required. I agree with what Butterfield wrote, but not with his name for it: I think Shaw’s, and Schroeder’s, clarification of the meaning of the balance of power is a great improvement, and means we must have a clear name for the alternative. Hence, until someone comes up with something better: restraint of power.

Butterfield, since I mentioned him, thought that one of the great shifts in the history of Europe, and quite possibly the world, took place in England at the time of the Exclusion crisis of 1679-1681. This was the last time that the Whigs were violent and unreasonable and factional. Against the Whigs, there appeared Halifax with his great conception of ‘the Trimmer’. The names hardly matter. I checked Butterfield’s book where he outlined all this, his The Englishman and his History, also written during a war, this time the Second World War. Butterfield was not a modern historian of ideas, and mentions only three names to establish his thesis: Bolingbroke, Halifax and Rapin. It doesn’t matter. The argument is that “the vivid fear of civil war provoked scientific reflection on the previous history of the Stuart conflict and on the historical processes involved, producing a science of policy in which the avoidance of revolution became the primary political end”. This concerned two arenas: the arena within the state, and the arena between states: what we would now call international and domestic politics. There was a new political science, says, Butterfield, composed of “maxims which accepted the fact of human conflict but seek to prevent conflict from overturning the whole civilised order of things”. These lines are from his 1951 essay, but in his 1944 book he called this discovery “the most significant transition in a thousand years of history”: that is, more significant than the Renaissance, the Reformation or the Enlightenment, and more significant than the Scientific Revolution because he thinks it caused the Scientific Revolution. It broke with the Renaissance veneration of Antiquity, it resolved the conflicts of the Reformation, and it caused what we now call Enlightenment.

It is pleasant to find serious thinkers like Shaw, Butterfield, Schroeder and Anderson in some sort of agreement. (Yes, Shaw was at times a serious thinker.) Anderson corrected Schroeder thus: “For Schroeder, the statesmen of Vienna thought European society needed to prevent revolutions in order to avoid wars. In reality, it was the other way round: for the Pentarchs, Europe needed to avoid wars in order to prevent revolutions.” (Disputing Disaster, p. 321.) Anderson said that Schroeder was a Burkean conservative, while he himself was an unreconstructed Jacobin. But in fact the difference does not matter. As Butterfield explained, war and revolution were tied together: and the newfound politics of the Trimmer, invented in England in 1679-81, was designed to defuse both war abroad and revolution at home by perpetuating politics in two worlds, the outer world of diplomacy and the inner world of state dominance of a population. For Butterfield, this meant to adopt a sort of minimally moralised and mindful Machiavellianism of prudential maxims. More exactly, it meant entirely avoiding any inclination to have a grandiose moralism of wars of right against might: of what both he in 1944 and Shaw in 1916 referred to as wars to end war. Butterfield’s assessment of the 20th century was that England, and Europe, had forgotten its proper tradition: and that, somehow or other, we should revert to the good sense of the 18th century Whigs: the ones who accepted the Trimmer correction and no longer and never again engaged in the politics of fanaticism, faction and violence, but saw restraint as a virtue.

As I said in the previous piece, international law is not international and it is not law. But it is a language, and it is a useful language of mutual restraint: a language by which Russia and China warn America not to go too far. We would understand everything much better if we saw it as an element in a valuable restraint of power.

Let me conclude as simply as I can. Our elites and establishments have lost restraint in the last few years. In relation to Covid, Climate, Wokery, etc. They must not also lose restraint about Great Power politics. The grave danger of the world, at the moment, it seems to me, is that everyone may think (when not thinking in terms of ‘international law’) in terms of the ‘balance of power’: where, if the USA does this, then Russia or China is justified in doing that, until the system collapses, or one side goes too far. It would be better if everyone thought in terms of restraint of power.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.