Suchergebnisse

Waltz, K.: The United States and the new world order. - S.13-25. Hansen, B.: Nuclear weapons and European integration. - S.26-47. Kaufmann, S.: The Russian problem in European security. - S.48-68. Friis, L.: Germany as a soft great power? - S.69-98. Petersen, N.: Adapting to change: Danish security after the Cold War. - S.99-116. Hansen, L.: NATO's new discourse. - S.117-134. Oestergaard, U.: The return of empires? - S.135-171. Kelstrup, M.: Societal aspects of European security. - S.172-199. Petersen, I. D.: Victims of globalization. - S.220-221. Waever, O.: What is security? - S.222-254

Hansen, B.: NATO, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction. - S. 7-21. Campbell, E. S.: The Russian-American 'strategic partnership' and its impact on the US approach to NATO enlargement. - S. 23-33. Kaufman, S. J.: The 'war on terrorism' and the transatlantic relationship. - S. 35-58. Coker, C.: Some US-European differences over the war against terrorism. - S. 59-68. Voigt, K. D.: The Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU. Consequences for the Euroatlantic relationship. - S. 69-82. Dörfer, I.: The reluctant partners. - S. 83-93

The balance of power is one of the most influential theoretical ideas in international relations, but it has not yet been tested systematically in international systems other than modern Europe and its global successor. This article is the product of a collective and multidisciplinary research effort to redress this deficiency. We report findings from eight new case studies on balancing and balancing failure in different international systems that comprise over 2000 years of international politics. Our findings are inconsistent with any theory that predicts a tendency of international systems toward balance. The factors that best account for variation between balance and hegemony within and across international systems lie outside all recent renditions of balance-of-power theory and indeed, international relations scholarship more generally. Our findings suggest a potentially productive way to reframe research on both the European and contemporary international systems.

In her response to our article, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni replaces balance-of-power theory (threat of hegemony begets balancing, which produces a tendency of international systems toward equilibria of power) with a complex congeries of competing and contingent conjectures about when states might balance. While these are certainly part of the extensive literature on the balance of power, lumping them together and calling them a `theory' invites a comedy of errors rather than an empirical test. The `ado' in our article was a novel empirical test of a theory that has been central to centuries of IR theorizing. As our review of the evidence confirms, this theory can indeed be evaluated in ancient and non-European international systems, and it is wrong: international systems do not tend toward equilibria of power, and balancing is relatively unimportant in explaining the equilibria that do occur. We end up agreeing with the gist of Sangiovanni's response: there is no empirically valid systemic balance-of-power theory, and it is time to turn to contingent middle-range hypotheses about balancing behavior.