Richard Little: The Balance of Power in International Relations - Metaphors, Myths and Models

Paperback: 317 pages

Publisher: Cambridge UP 2007

ISBN: 978-0-521-87488-5

The balance of power is one of the best concepts to study international relations say its advocates and one of the most ambiguous and worthless say its opponents. Richard Little has shown that, in reality, balance of power is all this. With sobering poststructuralist ethos, Little shows us the "correct reading" of balance of power theories - the metaphors, myths and models of international politics. As it often happens, people have been talking about different things. Little shows that all theorists have been developing their own theories without properly treating the previous attempts. His composite view of balance of power connects theories made by realists and advocates of the English School. The scholars studied are Waltz, Mearsheimer, Bull and Morgenthau. Little distinguishes between two different levels of understanding of the concept. First one asserts the balance of power as associational balance of power (in English School grammar this would be the international society). The other is the adversarial balance of power - ultimately competitive realm defined by military power (international system). Classical realism, I believe had this understanding at its core:

Morgenthau's balance of power should be understood on two levels: firstly, as an unintended balance of power, arising from the mechanistic drive to hegemony. The second as an ideational, social, moral etc. balance of power that ameliorates and controls the 1st. Thus, ideas do matter in international politics. Morgenthau's depiction of politics as "actors meeting under the sky where god's have departed" should be understood as a description of the adversarial balace of power - where the ideologies of states render their mutual understanding impossible.

My reading is that there always is a balance of power, some sort of composition of actors and military resources - and that there is also the deliberate and intentional pursuit of some political interests; the construction, if you will, of a new/better/more just balance of power. Hence the two-tiered focus of classical realism: relative material power and interests matter. A postpositivist reading would acknowledge the mythopoeic - mythmaking - dimension of political (IR-) theory. The ideological narrative of realism... hmm... is the desire to quantify resources that ultimately run rule in deciding political disputes (military power) and to import rationality and potential for calculation.