World Wars of the Twentieth Century 309
to be able to afford the luxury of quarreling among themselves when
the fighting ended.^2
Soldiers and subjects in past ages were not expected to share in
statesmen’s calculations of balance of power; but in the two world wars
of the twentieth century, citizens and soldiers on both sides and in
every belligerent state were invited to believe in war aims which ex
pressly repudiated such calculations as a satisfactory guide to public
affairs. To suffer and die maintaining a balance of power that had
allowed or even provoked the war was entirely unacceptable to the
combatants. Statesmen, too, whether for ideological or other reasons,
defied the principles of power politics by their particular actions time
and again.^3
Yet even if statesmen, citizens, and soldiers said and believed that
balance-of-power politics was evil and inadequate, the behavior of
governments and shifts of public opinion still conformed quite closely
to an ineluctable geometry of power. Presumably, as long as sovereign
states exist, whenever one of them seems to be growing so powerful as
to threaten the continued independence of the others, everything
tending to encourage hostility to the potential hegemonial power finds
congenial conditions within the states that feel threatened. Rapid
changes of mood and popular sympathy can and do occur under such
circumstances, forming and dissolving alliances and coalitions in a
matter of a few weeks or months. Contrary intentions and conflicting
ideals prevailed only when no pressing external threats provoked
balance-of-power behavior. This, for example, was the case between
the wars when German weakness invited both the Soviet Union and
the United States to try deliberately to transcend power politics. Each
did so by withdrawing within its boundaries, there to protect a purer
and preferred political faith.
Nonetheless, balance of power seems inadequate as a full explana-
- For a concise statement of this view of the German wars of the twentieth century,
see Ludwig Wilhelm Dehio, The Precarious Balance: The Politics of Power in Europe,
1494–1945 (London, 1963). For a more philosophical study cf. Martin Wight, Power
Politics (Harmondsworth, 1979).
- Lenin in Russia, like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United
States, made a career of repudiating balance-of-power politics as evil and outmoded.
Even Hitler sometimes disregarded the rules of the game, most strikingly in 1941 when
he relieved Roosevelt of an otherwise intractable dilemma by taking the initiative in
declaring war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The
Americans reciprocated by declaring war on Germany on 10 December, and were thus
able to pursue the “Germany first” strategy already agreed on with Great Britain. Had
Hitler not taken the initiative, however, it is hard to see how Roosevelt could have
asked Congress to start a war with Germany when the Japanese attack in the Pacific was
still to be avenged.
