ABSTRACT
In his famous 1907 memorandum, Eyre Crowe noted that it had become ‘an historical truism to identify England’s secular policy with the maintenance of [the] balance of power…. [It] assumes almost the form of a law of nature, as has been theoretically demonstrated, and illustrated historically by an eminent writer on English national policy’.1 A few years earlier, the then assistant undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office expressed his hope that Britain would ‘remain the country holding the balance between Dual and Triple Alliance’.2 What the more systematic and methodical Crowe had advanced in somewhat rigid terms, Sir Francis Bertie expressed as merely an aspiration. The thrust of their argument, however, was the same: the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe was a British strategic interest.
