Balance of Power: The International Wanderings of a Liberal Idea.

Long-standing debates on the balance of power have failed to note an interesting paradox: the same concept, encapsulated in the ideas of checks and balances and market equilibria, underlies classical liberal constitutional and economic theory. The notion of interest balancing interest lies at the core of the liberal solution to the problem of anarchy and human nature, whether in politics, economics or the international sphere. Liberal scholars who question balance of power theories in international relations are thus rejecting the same mechanism that ensured liberalism's success at the domestic level. At the same time, realist scholars in IR uphold the balancing prediction-the same one that realist scholars in domestic politics, like Schattschneider, have sought to undermine. Nonetheless, in IR, Realism has been identified with balance of power theory. Andliberalism has been identified with a rationalist utilitarian or a normative approach, that seems to many as irrelevant in the realm of international politics and security. This intellectual confusion needlessly denies liberal theory a coherent and robust view of international politics; it also serves to undermine the coherence of realist theory, which has hitherto tried to accommodate two ultimately irreconcilable predictions (balance ofpower and power concentrations) under one paradigm, leading to widespread dissatisfaction with realism itself and 'paradigms' in general. In this paper, I explain how this conflation of theories came about, by tracing the trajectory of realism, statism and the balance of power from nineteenth-century German idealism to modern international relations. I also offer a defense of the classical liberal position that addresses realist and conservative critiques, suggesting that more than terminology is at stake: liberal theory needs to reclaim the balancing prediction, in domestic as well as in international politics-a need that current trends towards unilateralism have brought to the fore. At the same time, it needs to be recognized that neither theory is 'right' or 'wrong': both capture important and recurrent tendencies in the international system, and both sides can ignore each other only at their peril. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]