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
