ABSTRACT

One of the many senses in which the phrase ‘balance of power’ has traditionally been employed is to describe or explain an historical state system. It is one of the ways in which the balance conception can be said to have played a critical part in the historical development of international relations. Historians have applied the ‘balance of power’ description to the European international systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century itself, statesmen referred to the balance of power system created by the treaties which ended the War of the Spanish Succession as ‘the system of Utrecht’.