Explain the essential rules of the balance of power system and evaluate the role which balance of power plays in the stability of the global order in a multi-polar system. (1993)
Morton A. Kaplan (System and Process in International Politics, 1957) turned the balance of power from a metaphor into a specified international system, one of six models he set out. It has a structural condition (at least five essential national actors) and six behavioural rules that every essential actor must follow if the system is to maintain itself. Stability in his sense means the survival of the system and its members, not the absence of war.
Kaplan’s six essential rules
- Increase capabilities, but negotiate rather than fight. Power should be gained cheaply, with war kept in reserve.
- Fight rather than pass up an opportunity to increase capabilities. An actor that never fights is discounted.
- Stop fighting rather than eliminate an essential actor. War is limited because today’s victim is tomorrow’s counterweight, which is why France was restored in 1815.
- Oppose any coalition or single actor tending towards predominance. This anti-hegemonic rule is the core of the system.
- Constrain actors who subscribe to supranational organising principles, whether revolutionary, imperial or ideological, because they threaten the system’s plurality.
- Permit defeated or constrained actors to re-enter as acceptable role partners, and treat every essential actor as a potential partner. Alignments must stay flexible.
Rule 2 pushes towards war and rule 3 limits it; stability lies in holding both.
The balance of power as a source of multipolar stability
- Flexibility: with five or more poles a rising power can be checked by recombination rather than general war. The Concert of Europe managed change through congresses, giving about a century without a general war after 1815.
- Diluted hostility: Karl W. Deutsch and J. David Singer (1964) argued that more actors mean more cross-cutting interactions, so no single rivalry absorbs a state’s attention.
- A balancer: a detached power, such as Britain, can correct imbalances, the role Kautilya gave the madhyama and udasina kings in his mandala.
- Restraint and legitimacy: for Hedley Bull and the English School, a shared commitment to keeping the system in being turns the balance into an institution, not just a tally of forces.
The limits
- Kenneth N. Waltz (“The Stability of a Bipolar World”, 1964) held that multipolarity breeds uncertainty and miscalculation: it is unclear who will fight whom, and allies drag each other in.
- John J. Mearsheimer distinguished balanced from unbalanced multipolarity. The latter, in which a potential hegemon exists, is the most war-prone configuration, as Germany’s position before 1914 and 1939 showed.
- Buck-passing delays coalitions, as in the 1930s, and the rules ignore domestic politics, ideology, nuclear weapons and non-state actors.
- Stability came at the weak’s expense, through compensation (the Partitions of Poland) and colonial bargains.
The emerging multipolar order
Today’s system is unipolar militarily (US spending of $954 billion against China’s $336 billion in 2025, SIPRI), close to bipolar in technology and plural diplomatically: Amitav Acharya calls it a “multiplex” world. Balancing is visible in the Quad and in NATO’s rearmament. India advocates multipolarity, from the BRICS New Delhi Declaration (September 2026) to strategic autonomy, because more poles mean more room to manoeuvre; C. Raja Mohan (2006) cast it as the coming swing state.
Conclusion
Kaplan’s rules show that multipolar stability is a matter of conduct, not just numbers: it needs restraint, flexible alignment and readiness to readmit the defeated. Where those norms hold, the balance of power keeps the system stable. Where alliances harden or a would-be hegemon emerges, the same system produces general war.