Although, as the quotations above indicate, the question of the importance of the ‘balancer’ in balance of power systems has generated strong opinions from both critics and proponents, it has never stimulated a specific study of the balancer. The picture of the balancer as it currently exists has to be obtained by abstracting descriptions of the balancer role from general writings on the balance of power. This is unfortunate for even those authors like Padelford and Lincoln who saw the balancer role as critical, failed to devote more then a few paragraphs to the topic. The aim of this paper therefore is to try to clarify the nature and function of the balancer by synthesizing the views of analysts of the role over the past three centuries to produce a paradigm of the balancer strategy.

There is increasing acceptance among International Relations scholars that there is a group of writers which should be recognized as constituting a distinct school of thought. More often than not this school is called, following Roy E. Jones, the ‘English school’. However, acceptance of such a school is often accompanied by disagreement and confusion as to its definitive or unifying characteristics. In the January 1988 issue of this Review, Dr Sheila Grader directly confronted this disagreement and confusion by rejecting wholesale the assertion that there is an English school. However, her own assertions and arguments fail to convince. Indeed they serve to cast the matter into deeper obfuscation.

Disease is a transnational phenomenon which pays no heed to territorial state boundaries; yet it rarely features in the discussion of International Relations. It is important that the discipline should address the issue of disease and more broadly, health, not simply to facilitate containment of disease transmission across international borders but also because central notions of justice, equity, efficiency and order are involved.

Determinist views are prevalent in human thinking. King Solomon's reflection that ‘What has been is what will be done and what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun’ seems as valid today as it was three thousand years, ago. The international arena, overrun by scenes of bloody, wars, acute crises and protracted conflicts is a constant reminder of the truthfulness of this pessimistic view.

Two points can be made at the outset. South Africa will not go away. South Africa is not about to engage in a transfer of power to its opponents. It is necessary to say this because for a decade or so (at least since the Soweto uprising of 1976) much contemporary scholarly literature and most popular journalism has concerned itself with two basic questions: when will the revolution take place and what happens after it? The assumption is that South Africa is now in the classic pre-revolutionary stage and therefore the most important field of political analysis is the economic and social character of the post-apartheid state, be it socialist, nationalist or multiracial capitalist.

Many scholars in International Relations will register surprise and perhaps amusement at the recent 'discovery' of the state by sociologists. They could accurately claim, it has never been similarly neglected in their own discipline. International Relations is about states and the system of states. Classical realism relies on explicit understandings about what states are and their place in the international system.

Norman Angell is a theorist of whom everyone has heard and few take seriously. In the years before the First World War, he had published The Great Illusion, the famous argument which outlined the disutility of war and which appeared to imply that governments would henceforth be restrained in the use of force. It was widely acclaimed and promoted with fervour by proponents of the peace movement. A few months before the outbreak of the First War, Angell had published another major tract predicting that future wars would be less ferocious than past wars. When these predictions proved less than accurate, the luckless theorist became a target for the realist criticism of ‘idealism’; indeed, he became a constant reference point in their defence of the realist position. The label was sufficient to assure that, while frequently referred to, his own ideas should receive scarcely any critical attention.

Students of international politics do not need to be told of the unsatisfactory state of balance of power theory. The problems are well known: the ambiguous nature of the concept and the numerous ways it has been defined, the various distinct and partly contradictory meanings given to it in practice and the divergent purposes it serves (description, analysis, prescription, and propaganda); and the apparent failure of attempts clearly to define balance of power as a system and specify its operating rules. Not surprisingly, some scholars have become sceptical about the balance of power ‘system’ and a few have even denied that balance of power politics prevailed in the nineteenth century. None of the methods generally used seems to promise much help. These have included studying the views and theories of balance of power held by individual publicists, theorists, and statesmen, making case studies of the balance of power in certain limited periods, analysing events and policies within an assumed balance of power framework, or constructing theoretical analyses comparing the supposed system of balance of power to other systems. Undoubtedly a method for operationalizing the study of the balance of power would be very valuable, and efforts to do this have yielded useful information. But the obstacles to establishing reliable indices of power and status and the problems of quantifying alignments and co-operation-conflict ratios in international affairs are formidable indeed.

I am flattered that Professor L. S. Pressnell and Sheila V. Hopkins took the time to write a commentary on my ‘Economic Diplomacy at the Atlantic Conference’, which was published in the Review of International Studies in 1984, and am grateful to them for pointing out a number of errors which I made.

These three books cover the gamut of argument about deterrence, ranging from its politics to its theoretical status and its morality. The authors, while diverse in their professional status, being government 'experts', lawyers, theologians, political scientists and philosophers, all have this in common: they seek to tell us what to do. They attempt to relate theory to practice either to justify instrumental means or goals or to prescribe them. In this sense they are all contributors to the field of strategic reasoning.

Martin Wight once asked why the balance of power ‘has inspired no great political writer to analysis and reflection’?

Looking back in 1923, Winston Churchill wrote:

One rises from the study of the causes of the Great War with a prevailing sense of the defective control of individuals upon world fortunes. It has been well said, ‘there is always more error than design in human affairs’. The limited minds even of the ablest men, their disputed authority, the climate of opinion in which they dwell, their transient and partial contributions to the mighty problem, that problem itself so far beyond their compass, so vast in scale and detail, so changing in its aspect—all this must surely be considered before the complete condemnation of the vanquished or the complete acquittal of the victors can be pronounced.

So far from eliminating the deficiencies of his original paper, Dobson compounds them. His defamatory thesis is that Churchill sought to cheat his Cabinet. Dispassionate checking showed his documentation to be flawed, his thesis unproven. His Reply offers special pleading and further blunders. He fails to recognize that, if the basis he explicitly constructs for his suppositions collapses, it cannot support those suppositions.

Hegemonic stability theory, which argues that international economic openness and stability is most likely when there is a single dominant state, is the most prominent approach among American political scientists for explaining patterns of economic relations among the advanced capitalist countries since 1945. It has provided a research programme for scholars, both as a positive guide and as a foil against which to test alternative theoretical explanations.

It is a pity that Pressnell and Hopkins do not make a more detailed rejoinder to the large number of points which I made in my original reply to them. They do indicate that the Cabinet did not include the specific phrase cheap labour in Abbey 35, but I also made that clear in my original article by quoting it at length. What the Cabinet did say was that they wanted ‘…to prevent our markets from being undercut by countries with a low standard of living like Japan’. The two authors may have scored a point here, but only at the cost of the issue. It seems to me much more plausible to suggest that Churchill's response in which he mentions cheap labour was prompted by the above phrase from Abbey 35 than to suggest, as the two authors dos that it is just as likely that it was prompted by point 5 of the Charter, concerning general welfare provisions, contained in Abbey 31.

The advent of nuclear weapons is clearly the single most important development which post-war balance of power thinking has had to accommodate. Although there have been earlier attempts to explore this relationship,1 an examination of the current debate on deterrence should throw some light on the issue of the continuing relevance of the balance of power concept.

Suddenly, in the summer of 1988, the United Nations was in the news. Positively. The process had got under way earlier in the year with the little-noticed (at the time) provision of UN military observers to watch over the Afghan-Pakistani agreements and the associated withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Then it was discovered that, after a ten-year hiatus, the UN might soon be called upon to implement the plan for its involvement in the accession to independence of Namibia, as South Africa seemed to be preparing to leave. There had been too many false all-clears on this particular front for it to be confidently assumed that the South Africans would in fact go.

The controversies surrounding the balance of power are both ancient and enduring, as the articles in this issue make clear. This brief concluding note highlights some of the convergences and differences in their approaches to these controversies. The choice of themes for this analysis is personal and selective, but it does reflect the central issues of balance of power theory and practice.