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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
The balance of power is a system designed to maintain a continuous conviction in every state that if it attempted aggression, it would encounter an invincible combination of the others.
Quincy Wright, A Study of War (1942, p. 254)The aspiration of power on the part of several nations, each trying either to maintain or overthrow the status quo, leads necessarily to a configuration that is called the balance of power and to policies that aim at preserving it The balance of power and policies aimed at its preservation are not only inevitable but are an essential stabilizing factor in a society of sovereign nations.
Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (1973, p. 161)In this chapter and the next, we analyze the consequences of the assumptions offered in Chapter 2 by ascertaining the conditions under which both system and resource stability prevail in n-country systems. In doing so, we are able to resolve much of the confusion between assumptions and conclusions found in earlier attempts to theorize about balance of power. And although our model differs significantly in form from the verbal models that others before us formulate, our principal conclusion accords with the scholarly intuition underlying balance-of-power theories: stability of both sorts is possible.
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