Essays in Liberalism

Hon. Litt.D.; Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford; F.B.A.; Professor of English History in the University of London; Chairman of the Institute of Historical Research.

Professor Pollard said:—The usual alternative to the League of Nations, put forward as a means of averting war by those who desire or profess to desire permanent peace, but dislike or distrust the League of Nations, is what they call the Balance of Power. It is a familiar phrase; but the thing for which the words are supposed to stand, has, if it can save us from war, so stupendous a virtue that it is worth while inquiring what it means, if it has any meaning at all. For words are not the same as things, and the more a phrase is used the less it tends to mean: verbal currency, like the coinage, gets worn with use until in time it has to be called in as bad. The time has come to recall the Balance of Power as a phrase that has completely lost the value it possessed when originally it was coined.

Recent events have made an examination of the doctrine of the Balance of Power a matter of some urgency. The Allies who won the war concluded a pact to preserve the peace, but in that pact they have not yet been able to include Germany or Russia or the United States, three Powers which are, potentially at any rate, among the greatest in the world. So, some fifty years ago, Bismarck, who won three wars in the mid-Victorian age, set himself to build up a pact of peace. But his Triple Alliance was not only used to restrain, but abused to repress, the excluded Powers; and that abuse of a pact of peace drove the excluded Powers, France and Russia, into each other’s arms. There resulted the Balance of Power which produced the war we have barely survived. And hardly was the great war fought and won than we saw the wheel beginning to revolve once more. The excluded Powers, repressed or merely restrained, began to draw together; others than Turkey might gravitate in the same direction, while the United States stands in splendid isolation as much aloof as we were from the Triple Alliance and the Dual Entente a generation ago. Another Balance of Power loomed on the horizon. “Let us face the facts,” declared the Morning Post on 22nd April last, “we are back again to the doctrine of the Balance of Power, whatever the visionaries and the blind may say.” I propose to deal, as faithfully as I can in the time at my disposal, with the visionaries and the blind—when we have discovered who they are.

By “visionaries” I suppose the Morning Post means those who believe in the League of Nations; and by the “blind” I suppose it means them, too, though usually a distinction is drawn between those who see too much and those who cannot see at all. Nor need we determine whether those who believe in the Balance of Power belong rather to the visionaries or to the blind. A man may be receiving less than his due when he is asked whether he is a knave or a fool, because the form of the question seems to preclude the proper answer, which may be “both.” Believers in the Balance of Power are visionaries if they see in it a guarantee of peace, and blind if they fail to perceive that it naturally and almost inevitably leads to war. The fundamental antithesis is between the Balance of Power and the League of Nations.

Balance or League?

That antithesis comes out wherever the problem of preserving the peace of the world is seriously and intelligently discussed. Six years ago, when he began to turn his attention to this subject, Lord Robert Cecil wrote and privately circulated a memorandum in which he advocated something like a League of Nations. To that memorandum an able reply was drafted by an eminent authority in the Foreign Office, in which it was contended that out of the discussion “the Balance of Power emerges as the fundamental factor.” That criticism for the time being checked official leanings towards a League of Nations. But the war went on, threatening to end in a balance of power, which was anything but welcome to those who combined a theoretical belief in the Balance of Power with a practical demand for its complete destruction by an overwhelming victory for our Allies and ourselves. Meanwhile, before America came in, President Wilson was declaring that, in order to guarantee the permanence of such a settlement as would commend itself to the United States, there must be, not “a Balance of Power but a Community of Power.”

Opinion in England was moving in the same direction. The League of Nations Society (afterwards called “Union”) had been formed, and at a great meeting on 14th May, 1917, speeches advocating some such league as the best means of preventing future wars were delivered by Lord Bryce, General Smuts, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Hugh Cecil, and others. Labour was even more emphatic; and, responding to popular opinion, the Government, at Christmas, 1917, appointed a small committee to explore the historical, juridical, and diplomatic bearings of the suggested solution. A brief survey sufficed to show that attempts to guarantee the peace of the world resolved themselves into three categories: (1) a Monopoly of Power, (2) Balance of Power, and (3) Community of Power. Rome had established the longest peace in history by subjugating all her rivals and creating a Pax Romana imposed by a world-wide Empire. That Empire lasted for centuries, and the idea persisted throughout the middle ages. In modern times Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV. of France, Napoleon, and even the Kaiser were suspected of attempting to revive it; and their efforts provoked the counter idea, first of a Balance of Power, and then in these latter days of a Community of Power. The conception of a Monopoly of Power was by common consent abandoned as impossible and intolerable, after the rise of nationality, by all except the particular aspirants to the monopoly. The Balance of Power and the Community of Power—in other words, the League of Nations—thus became the two rival solutions of the problem of permanent peace.

The Theory of Balance

The discussion of their respective merits naturally led to an inquiry into what the alternative policies really meant. But inasmuch as the Foreign Office committee found itself able to agree in recommending some form of League of Nations, the idea of the Balance of Power was not subjected to so close a scrutiny or so searching an analysis as would certainly have been the case had the committee realised the possibility that reaction against an imperfect League of Nations might bring once more to the front the idea of the Balance of Power. The fact was, however, elicited that the Foreign Office conception of the Balance of Power is a conception erroneously supposed to have been expressed by Castlereagh at the time of the Congress of Vienna, and adopted as the leading principle of nineteenth century British foreign policy.

Castlereagh was not, of course, the author of the phrase or of the policy. The phrase can be found before the end of the seventeenth century; and in the eighteenth the policy was always pleaded by potentates and Powers when on the defensive, and ignored by them when in pursuit of honour or vital interests. But Castlereagh defined it afresh after the colossal disturbance of the balance which Napoleon effected; and he explained it as “a just repartition of force amongst the States of Europe.” They were, so to speak, to be rationed by common agreement. There were to be five or six Great Powers, whose independence was to be above suspicion and whose strength was to be restrained by the jealous watchfulness of one another. If any one State, like France under Napoleon, grew too powerful, all the rest were to combine to restrain it.

Now, there is a good deal in common between Castlereagh’s idea and that of the League of Nations. Of course, there are obvious differences. Castlereagh’s Powers were monarchies rather than peoples; they were limited to Europe; little regard was paid to smaller States, whose independence sometimes rested on no better foundation than the inability of the Great Powers to agree about their absorption; and force rather than law or public opinion was the basis of the scheme. But none of these differences, important though they were, between Castlereagh’s Balance of Power and the League of Nations is so fundamental as the difference between two things which are commonly regarded as identical, viz., Castlereagh’s idea of the Balance of Power and the meaning which has since become attached to the phrase. There are at least two senses in which it has been used, and the two are wholly incompatible with one another. The League of Nations in reality resembles Castlereagh’s Balance of Power more closely than does the conventional notion of that balance; and a verbal identity has concealed a real diversity to the confusion of all political thought on the subject.

Castlereagh’s Balance of Power is what I believe mathematicians call a multiple balance. It was not like a pair of scales, in which you have only two weights or forces balanced one against the other. It was rather like a chandelier, in which you have five or six different weights co-operating to produce a general stability or equilibrium. In Castlereagh’s scheme it would not much matter if one of the weights were a little heavier than the others, because there would be four or five of these others to counterbalance it; and his assumption was that these other Powers would naturally combine for the purpose of redressing the balance and preserving the peace. But a simple balance between two opposing forces is a very different thing. If there are only two, you have no combination on which you can rely to counteract the increasing power of either, and the slightest disturbance suffices to upset the balance. Castlereagh’s whole scheme therefore presupposed the continued and permanent existence of some five or six great Powers always preserving their independence in foreign policy and war, and automatically acting as a check upon the might and ambition of any single State.

The Change since Castlereagh

Now, it was this condition, essential to the maintenance of Castlereagh’s Balance of Power, which completely broke down during the course of the nineteenth century. Like most of the vital processes in history, the change was gradual and unobtrusive, and its significance escaped the notice of politicians, journalists, and even historians. Men went on repeating Castlereagh’s phrases about the Balance of Power without perceiving that the circumstances, which alone had given it reality, had entirely altered. The individual independence and automatic action of the Great Powers in checking the growing ambitions and strength of particular States were impaired, if not destroyed, by separate Alliances, which formed units into groups for the purposes of war and foreign policy, and broke up the unity of the European system, just as a similar tendency threatens to break up the League of Nations. There was a good deal of shifting about in temporary alliances which there is no need to recount; but the ultimate upshot was the severance of Europe into the two great groups with which we are all familiar, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy on one side, and the Triple Entente between Russia, France, and Great Britain on the other. The multiple Balance of Power was thus changed into a simple balance between two vast aggregations of force, and nothing remained outside to hold the balance, except the United States, which had apparently forsworn by the Monroe Doctrine the function of keeping it even.

And yet men continued to speak of the Balance of Power as though there had been no change, and as though Castlereagh’s ideas were as applicable to the novel situation as they had been to the old! That illustrates the tyranny of phrases. Cynics have said that language is used to conceal our thoughts. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that phrases are used to save us the trouble of thinking. We are always giving things labels in order to put them away in their appropriate pigeon-holes, and then we talk about the labels without thinking about them, and often forgetting (if we ever knew) the things for which they stand. So we Pelmanised the Balance of Power, and continued to use the phrase without in the least troubling to ask what it means. When I asked at the Foreign Office whether diplomatists meant by the Balance of Power the sort of simple balance between two great alliances like the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, I was told “yes”; and there was some surprise—since the tradition of Castlereagh is strong in the service—when I pointed out that that was an entirely different balance from that of which Castlereagh had approved as a guarantee of peace. You remember the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland—an excellent text-book for students of politics—and how the cat gradually faded away leaving only its grin behind it to perplex and puzzle the observer. So the body and the substance of Castlereagh’s Balance of Power passed away, and still men talk of the grin and look to the phrase to save them from war. Whether to call them visionaries or the blind, I do not know.

Mischievous Hallucination

In either case, it is a mischievous hallucination; for the simple Balance of Power between two great combinations is not only no guarantee of peace, but the great begetter of fear, of the race for armaments, and of war. Consider for a moment. If you want a balance, you want to have it perfect. What is a perfect balance between two opposing weights or forces? It is one which the addition of a feather-weight to either scale will at once and completely upset. Now what will that equipoise produce? The ease with which the balance may be destroyed will produce either on one side the temptation to upset it, and on the other fear lest it be upset, or fear on both sides at once. What indeed was it but this even balance and consequent fear which produced the race for armaments? And what does the race for armaments result in but in war? If we want war, we need only aim at a Balance of Power, and it will do the rest. So far from being a guarantee of peace, the Balance of Power is a sovereign specific for precipitating war.

Of course, there are arguments for a Balance of Power. Plenty of them, alas! though they are not often avowed. It produces other things than war. For one thing, it makes fortunes for munition firms. For another, it provides careers for those who have a taste for fighting or for military pomp. Thirdly, in order to maintain armies and navies and armaments, it keeps up taxation and diverts money from social, educational, and other reforms which some people want to postpone. Fourthly, it gratifies those who believe that force is the ultimate sanction of order, and, by necessitating the maintenance of large forces for defensive purposes, incidentally provides means for dealing with domestic discontent. Fifthly, it panders to those who talk of prestige and think that prestige depends upon the size of a nation’s armaments. For the sake of these things many would be willing to take the risk of war which the Balance of Power involves. But most of those who use the phrase are unconscious of these motives, and use it as they use many another phrase, simply because they know not what it means. For, assuredly, no sane person who had examined the Balance of Power, as it existed before the war, could ever advocate it as a means of peace.

Indeed, whenever there has been the prospect of a practical Balance of Power, its votaries have shown by their action that they knew their creed was nonsense. The late war, for instance, might have been ended in 1916 on the basis of a Balance of Power. There were a few who believed that that was the best solution; but they were not our latter-day believers in the Balance of Power. Their cry was all for a fight to a finish and a total destruction of the Balance of Power by an overwhelming victory for the Allies, and their one regret is that a final blow by Marshal Foch did not destroy the last vestige of a German army. What is the point of expressing belief in the Balance of Power when you indignantly repudiate your own doctrine on every occasion on which you might be able to give it effect? And what is the point of the present advocacy of the Balance of Power by those who think themselves neither visionaries nor blind? Do they wish to restore the military strength of Germany and of Russia and to see an Alliance between them confronting a Franco-British union, compelled thereby to be militarist too? Is it really that they wish to be militarists and that the League of Nations, with its promise of peace, retrenchment, and reform, is to them a greater evil than the Balance of Power?

Where the Line is Drawn

There is yet another fatal objection to the Balance of Power due to the change in circumstances since the days of Castlereagh. He could afford to think only of Europe, but we have to think of the world; and if our specific has any value it must be of world-wide application. We cannot proclaim the virtues of the Balance of Power and then propose to limit it to the land or to any particular continent. Now, did our believers in the Balance of Power ever wish to see power balanced anywhere else than on the continent of Europe? That, if we studied history in any other language than our own, we should know was the gibe which other peoples flung at our addiction to the Balance of Power. We wanted, they said, to see a Balance of Power on the continent of Europe, to see one half of Europe equally matched against the other, because the more anxiously Continental States were absorbed in maintaining their Balance of Power, the keener would be their competition for our favour, and the freer would be our hands to do what we liked in the rest of the world.