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Last Updated: Nov 17, 2023 • Article History

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balance of power, in international

relations, the posture and policy of a
nation or group of nations protecting
itself against another nation or group of
nations by matching its power against the
power of the other side. States can pursue
a policy of balance of power in two ways:
by increasing their own power, as when
engaging in an armaments race or in the
competitive acquisition of territory; or by
adding to their own power that of other
states, as when embarking upon a policy
of alliances.

Category: History & Society

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sphere of influence

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The term balance of power came into use

to denote the power relationships in the
European state system from the end of
the Napoleonic Wars to World War I.
Within the European balance of power,
Great Britain played the role of the
“balancer,” or “holder of the balance.” It
was not permanently identified with the
policies of any European nation, and it
would throw its weight at one time on
one side, at another time on another side,
guided largely by one consideration—the
maintenance of the balance itself. Naval
supremacy and its virtual immunity from
foreign invasion enabled Great Britain to
perform this function, which made the
European balance of power both flexible
and stable.

The balance of power from the early 20th

century onward underwent drastic
changes that for all practical purposes
destroyed the European power structure
as it had existed since the end of the
Middle Ages. Prior to the 20th century,
the political world was composed of a
number of separate and independent
balance-of-power systems, such as the
European, the American, the Chinese,
and the Indian. But World War I and its
attendant political alignments triggered a
process that eventually culminated in the
integration of most of the world’s nations
into a single balance-of-power system.
This integration began with the World
War I alliance of Britain, France, Russia,
and the United States against Germany
and Austria-Hungary. The integration
continued in World War II, during which
the fascist nations of Germany, Japan,
and Italy were opposed by a global
alliance of the Soviet Union, the United
States, Britain, and China. World War II
ended with the major weights in the
balance of power having shifted from the
traditional players in western and central
Europe to just two non-European ones:
the United States and the Soviet Union.
The result was a bipolar balance of power
across the northern half of the globe that
pitted the free-market democracies of the
West against the communist one-party
states of eastern Europe. More
specifically, the nations of western
Europe sided with the United States in
the NATO military alliance, while the
Soviet Union’s satellite-allies in central
and eastern Europe became unified
under Soviet leadership in the Warsaw
Pact.

Because the balance of power was now

bipolar and because of the great disparity
of power between the two superpowers
and all other nations, the European
countries lost that freedom of movement
that previously had made for a flexible
system. Instead of a series of shifting and
basically unpredictable alliances with and
against each other, the nations of Europe
now clustered around the two
superpowers and tended to transform
themselves into two stable blocs.

There were other decisive differences

between the postwar balance of power
and its predecessor. The fear of mutual
destruction in a global nuclear holocaust
injected into the foreign policies of the
United States and the Soviet Union a
marked element of restraint. A direct
military confrontation between the two
superpowers and their allies on European
soil was an almost-certain gateway to
nuclear war and was therefore to be
avoided at almost any cost. So instead,
direct confrontation was largely replaced
by (1) a massive arms race whose lethal
products were never used and (2)
political meddling or limited military
interventions by the superpowers in
various Third World nations.

In the late 20th century, some Third

World nations resisted the advances of
the superpowers and maintained a
nonaligned stance in international
politics. The breakaway of China from
Soviet influence and its cultivation of a
nonaligned but covertly anti-Soviet
stance lent a further complexity to the
bipolar balance of power. The most
important shift in the balance of power
began in 1989–90, however, when the
Soviet Union lost control over its eastern
European satellites and allowed
noncommunist governments to come to
power in those countries. The breakup of
the Soviet Union in 1991 made the
concept of a European balance of power
temporarily irrelevant, since the
government of newly sovereign Russia
initially embraced the political and
economic forms favoured by the United
States and western Europe. Both Russia
and the United States retained their
nuclear arsenals, however, so the balance
of nuclear threat between them remained
potentially in force.

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and

updated by Amy McKenna.

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alliance " Actions

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Written by David G. Haglund
Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Article History

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alliance, in international relations, a

formal agreement between two or more
states for mutual support in case of war.
Contemporary alliances provide for
combined action on the part of two or
more independent states and are
generally defensive in nature, obligating
allies to join forces if one or more of them
is attacked by another state or coalition.
Although alliances may be informal, they
are typically formalized by a treaty of
alliance, the most critical clauses of
which are those that define the casus
foederis, or the circumstances under
which the treaty obligates an ally to aid a
fellow member.

NATO and the Warsaw Pact

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Category: History & Society

Key People: Friedrich von Holstein

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Alliances arise from states’ attempts to

maintain a balance of power with each
other. In a system composed of a number
of medium-size countries, such as that in
Europe since the Middle Ages, no single
state is able to establish a lasting
hegemony over all the others, largely
because the other states join together in
alliances against it. Thus, the repeated
attempts by King Louis XIV of France
(reigned 1643–1715) to dominate
continental Europe led to a coalition in
opposition to France and eventually to
the War of the Grand Alliance; and the
ambitions of Napoleon were similarly
thwarted by a series of alliances formed
against him.

Although typically associated with the

Westphalian states system and the
European balance of power, alliances
have taken shape on other continents and
in other eras. In his classic work Artha-
shastra (“The Science of Material Gain”),
Kautilya, an adviser to the Indian king
Chandragupta (reigned c. 321–c. 297
BCE), argued that in pursuing alliances
countries should seek support and
assistance from distant states against the
menace of neighbouring ones (according
to the logic that the enemy of one’s
enemy must be one’s friend). The legacy
of colonialism in Africa retarded the
development of collective-defense
schemes there, but elsewhere in the
developing world alliances played a
critical role in the evolving regional
balance. For example, in the 1865–70
Paraguayan War, the Triple Alliance of
Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
devastated Paraguay, reducing its
territorial possessions as well as its
population by about 60 percent. Until the
Cold War in the last half of the 20th
century, ideology was not usually a
significant factor in the formation of such
coalitions. For example, in 1536 Francis
I, the Roman Catholic king of France,
joined with the Ottoman sultan
Süleyman I, who was a Muslim, against
the Holy Roman emperor Charles V,
another Catholic, because Charles’s
possessions almost encircled France.
Similarly, in World War II (1939–45)
Great Britain and the United States allied
themselves with the communist Soviet
Union in order to defeat Nazi Germany.

A new level of alliance building in Europe

was reached in the late 19th century,
when enmity between Germany and
France polarized Europe into two rival
alliances. By 1910 most of the major
states of Europe belonged to one or the
other of these great opposing alliances:
the Central Powers, whose principal
members were Germany and Austria-
Hungary, and the Allies, composed of
France, Russia, and Great Britain. This
bipolar system had a destabilizing effect,
since conflict between any two members
of opposing blocs carried the threat of
general war. Eventually, a dispute
between Russia and Austria-Hungary in
1914 quickly drew their fellow bloc
members into the general conflict that
became known as World War I (1914–
18). The war’s outcome was effectively
decided when the United States
abandoned its traditional isolationism
and joined the Allied side in 1917 as one
of several “Associated Powers.”

The Allied victors sought to ensure the

postwar peace by forming the League of
Nations, which operated as a collective
security agreement calling for joint action
by all its members to defend any
individual member or members against
an aggressor. A collective security
agreement differs from an alliance in
several ways: (1) it is more inclusive in its
membership, (2) the target of the
agreement is unnamed and can be any
potential aggressor, including even one of
the signatories, and (3) the object of the
agreement is the deterrence of a potential
aggressor by the prospect that
preponderant power will be organized
and brought to bear against it. The
League of Nations became demonstrably
ineffective by the mid-1930s, however,
after its members declined to use force to
stop aggressive acts by Japan, Italy, and
Germany.

These three countries soon formed the

Axis, an offensive alliance that contested
for world dominion in World War II with
a defensive alliance led by Great Britain,
France, China, and, beginning in 1941,
the Soviet Union and the United States.
With the defeat of the Axis powers in
1945, the victorious Allies formed the
United Nations (UN), a worldwide
organization devoted to the principles of
collective security and international
cooperation. The UN coexisted rather
ineffectively, however, with the robust
military alliances formed by the United
States and the Soviet Union along sharp
ideological lines after the war. In 1949
the United States and Canada joined with
Britain and other western European
countries to form the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO), and in 1955
the Soviet Union and its central and
eastern European satellites formed the
Warsaw Pact following West Germany’s
accession to NATO. The Cold War rivalry
between these two alliances, which also
included other treaty organizations
established by the United States (e.g., the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, the
Central Treaty Organization, and the
ANZUS Pact), ended with the Soviet
Union’s collapse and the dissolution of
the Warsaw Pact in 1991.

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The alliances of the Cold War were

publicly acknowledged peacetime
coalitions. In these respects they differed
from most previous alliances, such as the
partly secret German-Soviet
Nonaggression Pact (1939), which was
concluded less than 10 days before
Germany invaded Poland and started
World War II. Modern alliances generally
require a joint effort far more integrated
than was necessary in earlier times. For
example, in the coalitions of World War
II, combined agencies for military and
economic planning were a common and
conspicuous feature. Even in less tightly
knit alliances, such as NATO, great
importance was attached to close and
cooperative action, both military and
political, particularly in maintaining the
West’s strategy of nuclear deterrence and
in managing conflicts in regions on the
European periphery, such as the Balkans.

In the aftermath of the Cold War and in

the absence of clear European blocs at
the beginning of the 21st century,
scholars and policymakers debated
whether alliances required an enemy to
remain cohesive. For example, some
policymakers argued that there was no
justification for NATO’s continued
existence given the disappearance of the
Soviet Union. In contrast, others claimed
that the organization could and should
evolve to play an increased role in
conflict management on Europe’s
troubled periphery, particularly in the
Balkans. The latter view eventually
prevailed, as NATO undertook its first
uses of military force in Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1995 and against Serbia
in 1999. Beginning in the same period,
NATO membership was enlarged to
include most former Soviet satellites or
their successor states and the newly
independent Baltic republics.
Concurrently, various high-profile crises
underscored the traditional approach to
alliance making. For example, following
the terrorist attacks in the United States
on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the
administration of U.S. Pres. George W.
Bush forged a diverse coalition
comprising a variety of old (e.g., the
United Kingdom) and new (e.g.,
Uzbekistan) partners to combat
international terrorism.

David G. Haglund

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great power " Actions

international relations
Also known as: protecting powers
Written by Daniel Costa
Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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great power, sovereign state with

significant diplomatic, economic, and
military strength to exert power in
international affairs.

Europe, 1815

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state • offshore balancing

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The term gained currency after the

Concert of Europe, a general consensus
on international relations in Europe that
prevailed following the Congress of
Vienna in 1814–15. The consensus
acknowledged Austria, France, Great
Britain, Russia, and Prussia as the great
powers of Europe in the post-Napoleonic
era.

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20th-century international
relations

The criteria and responsibilities of a great

power, however, can be tasking to
pinpoint. Robert Stewart, Viscount
Castlereagh, the British foreign minister
at the Congress of Vienna, contended
that the control of negotiations at the
time should depend on the countries with
the greatest population and weight.
German historian Leopold von Ranke
suggested in 1833 that a great power
“must be able to maintain itself against
all others, even when they are united,”
citing Prussia under Frederick II as a
case in point. Since the 20th century, the
study of international relations has
focused variously on great powers’
exertion of both military strength and
economic resourcefulness to achieve
hegemonic influence. Although some
supranational institutions, such as the
United Nations Security Council and the
Group of Seven (G7), have provided
productive avenues for great powers to
cooperate and assert common policies
throughout the globe, scholars contend
that great powers operate according to
their own self-interest.

Becoming a great power involves

substantial military and economic
investment, the expenses of which are
usually outweighed by the benefits of
expansion. But because it is not always
expedient for a great power to continue
bolstering its posture in the international
balance of power, it is eventually faced
with the choice to cut costs or outspend
its capabilities. Such choices coincide
with periods of decline in which a state
may cease to maintain its great power
status.

After World War II devastated most of

the great powers of Europe, the United
States and the Soviet Union were left as
the major powers in the global arena
(and were dubbed “superpowers”). After
the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the