Hegemony or balance of power? What the wars of ancient China teach us
A new book on the Spring and Autumn period and its experiments in conflict and diplomacy helps explain today’s global order
The historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote one of the most powerful openings of any book. “In the state of nature which Hobbes imagined, violence was the only law, and life was ‘nasty brutish and short’,” he wrote in The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918.
“Though individuals never lived in this state of nature, the Great Powers of Europe have always done so. Sovereign states have distinguished European civilisation, at any rate since the end of the fifteenth century. Each individual state in Europe acknowledged no superior and recognised no moral code other than that voluntarily accepted by its own conscience …”
If Hobbes saw true, he wrote, “the history of Europe should be one of uninterrupted war. In fact, Europe has known almost as much peace as war; and it has owed these periods of peace to the Balance of Power”.
But statesmen, he observed, are often tired out by the balance of power, as the situation resembles anarchy among states; and wars periodically break out.
“Men have not always acquiesced in the perpetual quadrille of the Balance of Power,” he continued. “They have often wished that the music would stop and that they could sit out a dance without maintaining the ceaseless watch on each other.”
So what is to be done? “The simplest ‘solution’ for anarchy, as Hobbes held, is that one Power should subdue all the rest.”