Balance of Power

hi my name is Allen sands and I'm standing outside Green College at the University of British Columbia this College is a residential college for grad students postdoctoral and doctoral fellows who are all interested in interdisciplinarity in their teaching and learning welcome to the global politics instructional video series in this series we're exploring a number of different concepts and ideas that are central to the study of international relations and global politics and today we're looking at the balance of power now obviously the balance of power is a key concept the study of global politics and we hear about it all the time in the media or in reading history books but when we talk about global politics and balance of power in the context of global politics we're referring mostly to this idea that the balance of power is a theory of state behavior it makes an argument about why states act the way they do and how they act when faced with certain situations the whole idea of the balance of power is a very big part of realism and the political realism theory in international relations so let's have a look at the balance of power okay the balance of power now as I said earlier balance of power can be simply described as a theory of state behavior and what they're really means is that states act to preserve a balance or if you like equilibrium of power in the system so what I thought I'd do is simply draw an international system here for you and I'm going to populate it with five states and this is going to assume that all of these states a B C D and E are all roughly equivalent in power has their approximate identical size and the whole idea of this balance of power behavior is that States act to preserve a balance of power in the system to prevent any one of these states from dominating all the others in other words if it looks like any of these countries is growing in power to the extent that it could dominate the entire system maybe even conquer all the other states in the system these states these other states will act to balance that power in an effort to achieve an equilibrium in the system now balancing can be achieved in one of two different ways the first way states can balance against a growing power is by increasing their own power so let's use an example let's say state a for whatever reason experiences a growth in power perhaps a combination economic and political reasons state a's power in the system is enhanced now according to theory balance of power these other states are going to be nervous about that and they're not going to want to take measures to ensure that they balance against this growth in power by state a because they don't want to see state a grow to the extent that is capable of dominating the system or maybe even conquering all the other states in the system so they're going to be balancing in one of two different ways the first way is by increasing their own power so let's say state de looks at state a and the government of state d says hmm we see that state a has increased its power we want to balance that power to make sure that state a doesn't dominate the system and so state d can try to increase their own power and that might involve increasing their military capacity or or so on and the whole idea then of course is that they have achieved an equilibrium or a balance between state a and themselves but not all countries are capable of increasing their power that easily there may be resource constraints and monetary constraints and so on and so the second way to balance power is through alliances and in this case state B in state C may look at the growth in power by state a and think to themselves mm-hmm we need to balance against that growth in power but we really don't have the potential to increase our own power so we are going to form an alliance and this idea that of forming an alliance means that states b and c are combining their efforts in order to balance the growing power of state a and so either through increasing their own power or by forming alliances States engage in this type of balance of power behavior and therefore the balance of power or equilibrium in the system is maintained a state a is no longer in a position where it could perhaps come to dominate the system now preserving the balance of power could mean a long period of peace for example if this system that we have here is in equilibrium and stays that way there might very well be no war in the system but sometimes preserving the balance of power does require war so for example let's say state a decides to attack state e for whatever reason now in this case countries B C and D are going to be very worried because of state a conquers state e it will take the economic power the resources the population and so on to that state and add it to its own doesn't vastly increasing its own power and States B C and D you're going to want to prevent that and they'll prevent it by going to war to support state II against state a in this case balance of power behavior actually leads to war because war becomes necessary to restore or maintain an equilibrium or balance in the system now obviously this is all very dynamic very fluid and the relative power of states the systems and constant flux it's changing all the time and so this requires constant adjustment States increasing their own power or engaging in alliances and all this behavior can change over time alliances can shift today B and C are an alliance but maybe in the future C and D would form an alliance and all of that will be determined by who is considered more threatening to the system on how the systems polarity or distribution of power is maintained the whole idea of this of course realists say captures the entire history of international relations the history of the rise and decline of state power the history of shifting alliances and the whole ideas all of this originates with a basic theory that states are engaging in policies to achieve a balance of power or an equilibrium amongst them in the system to ensure that that system cannot be dominated by one actor okay so that was the balance of power now what's interesting about the balance of powers a theory is we can apply it to today so if you look back in history many have argued that most of the balance of power systems in the world have been multi polar systems and what that means is that there were multiple centers of power in the system for example Europe prior to World War one and World War two in those periods you could say that the system was multi polar in that there were a number of different countries five to seven depending how you add them up that had the most power in the system and we traditionally call those the great powers the warring States period of China many argue there were as many as nine kingdoms that were in the struggle for power in that part of the world at that time now after World War two we have a situation which is often described as a bipolar balance of power system a system in which there were two centers of power one centered on the United States and the Western world and a second centered on the Soviet Union in the so called communist bloc now after the Cold War we have a situation that many describe as unipolar with one state the United States acting as a hegemon and this is really interesting because what this means is that if balance of power theory holds for the future we should see States balance against the United States balance against this single hegemonic actor and the extent to which we are seeing that kind of behavior or not seeing that kind of behavior is a very big part of contemporary debate in global politics I hope you enjoyed this video join me again next time

Channel: allensens

Views: 248,270

Rating: 4.9374199 out of 5

Keywords: Clip5, Balance, of, Power, HD

Id: -WwCm889Vqo

Length: 10min 16sec (616 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2012