ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what lessons can be learnt from the recent history of Europe’s Baltic rim regarding the viability of specific alliance theories. Stephen Walt’s alliance theory respects the non-mobility axiom and its implications. By contrast, a trend distinction between bandwagoning and balancing is logically exhaustive: either one moves one way or the other or not at all. The universal trend in the sphere of a unipole-and a little bit beyond-is bandwagoning. A member of an opposing alliance, including a weak power, will not typically engage in bandwagoning. The weak power may even be able to jump into an opposing alliance or, more often, to a roughly symmetric position between two power poles. Some of them move from being part of the unipole to an opposing alliance, others move just a little bit: out of the unipole sphere, but not enough to enter an opposing alliance, or modestly within an opposing alliance.
