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The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Alfred Vagts  and
Detlev F. Vagts
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Extract

The existence of a significant relationship between the concept of the balance of power and international law would be regarded as improbable by most modern international lawyers. They would think of the balance as a wholly obsolete conception and, in any case, as a part of international policy, or worse, part of cynical Realpolitik rather than of law. Earlier generations of jurists, however, did see international equilibrium either as an integral part of the system of rules of the law of nations or at least as a necessary precondition to the existence of such a law. Such a view of the interrelationship was never unanimous; indeed, there were in the past many legal observers who saw the balance of power as an obstacle to the development of an international legal order based on something more moral than force alone. This article is devoted to a study of the relationships between those two concepts as seen by the publicists who created the corpus of international law, principally during the period from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is not a study of the balance of power at large—a topic to which volumes might be dedicated—but only of that idea’s relationship with law.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 73 , Issue 4 , October 1979 , pp. 555 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1979

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References

1 For histories of the balance of power idea in general, see the bibliography in Guuck, E., Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (1955)Google Scholar. Perhaps the most extensive single review of the legal writers is in Stieglitz, A., De l’Equilibre Politique, de Légitimisme et du Principe des Nationalités (1893)Google Scholar. A briefer lawyer’s review appears in Nys, , La Théorie de l’Equilibre Européen , 25 Rev. Droit Int’l et Légis. Comp. 34 (Ire, sér., 1893)Google Scholar.

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17 Gross, supra note 2, at 20.

18 See note 2 supra.

19 The balance of power phrase in the statute was first included in 1726 (13 Geo. 1, at 287). We last find it in 30 Vict. c. 13 (1867). It is omitted in 31 Vict. c. 14 (1868) and thereafter.

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31 Id. at 65.

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33 See note 2 supra.

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54 Ortolan, E., Des Moyens D’acquérir Domaine Internationale (1851)Google Scholar. Note that the 1849 edition, an academic dissertation, did not contain the balance of power material. See also his article, Balance of Power, in 1 Cyclopedia of Political Science, Political Economy and of the Political History of the United States 187 (Lalor, J. J. ed. 1886)Google Scholar.

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