The Making of Balance-of-Power—Power Asymmetry, Domestic Politics, and the Making of Balancing Practices

Abstract

Abstract This article joins the growing body of literature that perceives balance of power as a social construct containing shared understandings that comprise states’ repertoire of balancing practices. Distinct repertoires of balancing have prevailed in different international orders. We build on this work and focus on a less explored, though important, political process to explain the variation in balancing practices over time. We suggest that external threats, domestic considerations of key states, and diffusion mechanisms deriving from hierarchical relations can explain the evolution of balancing practices. More specifically, we suggest that balancing practices evolve in the domestic arena of the dominant state at a given time, as leaders frame their foreign policy in terms that most closely resonate with their domestic circumstances. Secondary states, who depend on the dominant state for their security, will tend to adopt its balancing practice. They will do so because the hierarchy of the international system enables the dominant state to use positive and negative leverage tools to pressure them, or because they voluntarily calculate that this choice will enhance their security. To demonstrate the importance of studying the social construction of balancing practices and the impact of dominant states on the content of these practices, we examine two central case studies of different balancing practices—the rise of early eighteenth-century Britain and the emergence of the logic of a contrived balance of power, and the rise of American hegemony in the aftermath of World War II that generated the practice of ideological balancing