ABSTRACT
For three centuries the balance of power idea played a central role in the workings of the European great power state system. In that period the meaning of the concept, and the way in which it was operationalised, changed significantly. During the twentieth century in particular, the rising costs associated with the use of the military instrument meant that balance of power politics fell into intellectual disfavour. They were redeemed to a large extent during the cold war, both because the rigid, at times almost Manichean, opposition between the two global political and military alliance systems lent itself to a simple conceptualisation of the international system in bipolar realist balance of power terms and because the advent of nuclear weapons produced a new version of balance of power thinking in the form of nuclear deterrence theory.
