FRIEDRICH VON GENTZ (1764–1832), Prussian diplomat and advocate for international cooperation to resist the French revolution and the Napoleonic expansion that followed it. Working closely with the Austrian chancellor, Metternich, Gentz played a prominent role in the Congress of Vienna, which brought the Napoleonic wars to an end. In his essay on the European balance of power (1806), Gentz anticipated the post-war system in which the balance operates to maintain the equal rights of states as members of an international society. By enforcing international law, the balance of power functions in international society in a way analogous to the judicial and executive power within a state.
From “The True Concept of a Balance of Power”
What is usually termed a balance of power is that constitution which exists among neighbouring states more or less connected with each other, by virtue of which none of them can violate the independence or the essential rights of another without effective resistance from some quarter and consequent danger to itself.
Many misconceptions have arisen as a result of the similarity with physical objects upon which the term was based. It has been supposed that those who saw in the balance of power the basis of an association of states were aiming at the most complete equality, or equalization, of power possible, and were demanding that the various states of an area which is politically united should be most precisely measured, weighed and rounded off, one against the other, in respect of size, population, wealth, resources, etc.
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