Balancing at Sea: Do States Coalesce Against Leading Maritime Powers?

While balance of power theory is often interpreted as a universal theory applicable to all international systems, we argue that it is bound by certain scope conditions. Its two key hypotheses - that sustained hegemonies do not form and that hegemonic threats generate great power balancing behavior - are applicable in principle to autonomous continental systems but not to trans-regional maritime systems, including the contemporary global system. In an earlier study we argued that the modern European system constitutes the "best case" for hypotheses on balancing, and found that European great powers have exhibited a strong, but not deterministic, propensity to balance when one state acquired a third or more of the total military capabilities in the system, but not at lower concentrations of power, and that higher concentrations of power have usually led to larger balancing coalitions. Given our argument that conventional balancing propositions do not apply to maritime systems, in this paper we construct and test an alternative series of hypotheses about balancing and bandwagoning for the last five centuries of the modern global system. Our general prediction is that great powers are less likely to balance against leading sea powers than against leading land powers under comparable levels of power concentrations. We also hypothesize that contrary to balance of power theory, great powers are less likely to balance against higher concentrations of maritime power and that the coalitions that do form are smaller for higher concentrations of maritime power than for lower concentrations of maritime power. With respect to bandwagoning behavior, we hypothesize that great powers are more likely to align with the dominant sea power than with the dominant land power, that the great powers are more likely to align with leading sea powers in stronger relative positions than those in weaker relative positions, and that bandwagoning alliances with the leading sea power are larger than are balancing alliances against the leading sea power. All of our hypotheses are supported by the evidence, and nearly all are statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]