(BGF) – On the American Interest, Richard Rosecrance shared his view on Overbalance of Power in reference to maintain peace and security in the world, and its change through time. He also gave his thoughts on China’s intention towards the overbalance of western power.
Richard Rosecrance is the adjunct professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and also Research Professor of Political Science at the University of California and Senior Fellow in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He also is a major contributor to the Boston Global Forum in building a Framework for Peace and Security in the Pacific.
Click here to read the full article published in the American Interest.
The Emerging Overbalance of Power
(August 22, 2014) – When good guys have preponderant power, things tend to be all right—even with a Chinese accent.
Vast accumulations of power in world politics invariably come crashing down, or at least that is the conventional wisdom of most historians and realist policy analysts. Any “overbalance of power”, whether in the form of powerful regional or global empires, hierarchic dynasties, or other kinds of hegemonic orders, eventually bites the dust because efforts to counterbalance ultimately succeed. If nature abhors a vacuum, international politics punctures an imbalance; imperial nabobs and other over-reachers always get their comeuppance.
If the lesson stopped there, things would be oh-so-simple and clear. Yet balance-of-power systems fail, too, because of the inherent rivalries they provoke. As shown by the constant tension engendered by the rise and fall of great powers, bipolarity is the least stable of systems, though based on an ostensible balance of power. The systems fail because one member (or set of members in alliance) strives for primacy, and a mere balance does not deter action by either side. The fact is that we live in a war-prone state system no matter how we arrange its power geometry—and the jury is still out on whether weapons of mass destruction have changed anything in that regard.
The matter does not end there. It begins anew when we ask: How is peace spread over any given region of the world? It is done by getting nations to join and cooperate within what becomes a huge overbalance of power. Indeed, an overbalanced peace born of voluntary cooperation is vastly better than a balanced one born of mutual fear. Overbalancing can be good if it comes into being in a certain way to serve certain purposes. But how, more specifically, do we distinguish good from bad overbalances, and, insofar as their dynamics go, how do we separate justifiable from illegitimate uses of force on behalf of maintaining or protecting an overbalance of power?
In judging whether an overbalance is good or bad for peace and security, the means of augmenting power are the main determinant. The European Union is an overbalance of power in its region, and it is a good overbalance because none of its members has ever been coerced to join. It operates consensually.
In other cases, the means of creating an overbalance may be in some sense illegitimate according to the norms of the day, but the ultimate effect can still be beneficial. Every state, after all, is an “empire” of sorts by origin. Most are formed through aggrandizement, whether of territory, people, or even other states. Yet depending on its behavior, a state may become a boon. It was not for nothing that Machiavelli commented about 500 years ago that all benign political orders rest on antecedent crimes. Thus the United States now owns about half of what used to be Mexico, but it is difficult to argue that the U.S. Southwest or its original inhabitants’ progeny have suffered as a result of the transfer of power. As Hobbes showed in Leviathan, even smaller states are in effect empires in the sense that civil society—once set up as part of the social contract—becomes a hierarchical overbalance of power to protect citizens from violent death only at the cost of their personal sovereignty.
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