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The Comedy of Errors? A Reply to Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni

Dartmouth College, USA

Richard Little

University of Bristol, UK

Stuart J. Kaufman

University of Delaware, USA

David C. Kang

University of Southern California, USA

Charles A. Jones

University of Cambridge, UK

Victoria Tin-Bor Hui

University of Notre Dame, USA

Arthur M. Eckstein

University of Maryland, USA

Daniel Deudney

Johns Hopkins University , USA

William J. Brenner

Johns Hopkins University , USA

In her response to our article, Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni replaces balance-of-power theory (threat of hegemony begets balancing, which produces a tendency of international systems toward equilibria of power) with a complex congeries of competing and contingent conjectures about when states might balance. While these are certainly part of the extensive literature on the balance of power, lumping them together and calling them a `theory' invites a comedy of errors rather than an empirical test. The `ado' in our article was a novel empirical test of a theory that has been central to centuries of IR theorizing. As our review of the evidence confirms, this theory can indeed be evaluated in ancient and non-European international systems, and it is wrong: international systems do not tend toward equilibria of power, and balancing is relatively unimportant in explaining the equilibria that do occur. We end up agreeing with the gist of Sangiovanni's response: there is no empirically valid systemic balance-of-power theory, and it is time to turn to contingent middle-range hypotheses about balancing behavior.

Key Words: balance-of-power theory • hegemony • international systems • world history

European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 15, No. 2, 381-388 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1354066109103146


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