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defense (the “worst case” scenario), security dilemma between states can be so acute as to virtually squeeze out the “fluidity” necessary for any balance of power to occur (Jervis 1978, 186-189). By incurring incorrect “inferences”, offensive advantage and offense-defense indistinguishability ultimately serve to alter the perceived intention of the adversary as being aggressive or non-aggressive (Jervis 1978, 201). This will then dictate the smaller states’ decision to or not to balance. If, however, the major power is perceived to have not only a non-aggressive intention, but also a benign intention of providing certain public goods, smaller states may choose to free-ride on these benefits while submitting to the major power’s sphere of influence in return. An outcome of so-called “hegemonic stability” may then ensue (Keohane 1984, 12). Thus along the dimension of perceived intention, balance of power occurs when states have reservations about the major power or the hegemon’s intention but not to the extent that a precipitation to war is so imminent as to render balancing infeasible.
VVSecond, balance of power is closely related to the states’ preference for relative versus absolute gains. From an offensive realist point of view, John Mearsheimer contends that states concerned with balance of power must think in terms of relative rather than absolute gain – that is, their military advantage over others regardless of how much capability they each have. The underlying logic here is at once intuitive – given a self-help system and self-interested states, “the greater military advantage one state has…the more secure it is” (Mearsheimer 1994-95, 11-12), and problematic – since the auxiliary assumption that every state would then always prefer to have maximum military power in the system (Mearsheimer 1994-95, 12) is practically meaningless. Similarly, Joseph Grieco points out that with the ever present possibility of war in an anarchic system, states may not cooperate even with their allies because survival is guaranteed only with a “proportionate advantage” (Grieco in Baldwin ed., 127-130). The concern for relative gain predicts that states will prefer balance of power over collective security because the latter requires that states trust one another enough to completely forgo relative gain through unilateral disarmament, which is inherently at odds with the idea of having a positional advantage for self-defense (Mearsheimer 1994-95, 36). Meanwhile, the neoliberal institutionalist cooperation theory essentially presumes the pursuit of absolute gain over relative gain for states to achieve cooperation (Keohane 1984, 68). On a broader scale, therefore, the pursuit of relative gain would undercut international cooperation in general, in both high and low politics. It is safe to say that in practice, states are concerned with both relative and absolute gains to different degrees under different circumstances. Scholars like Duncan Snidal and Robert Axelrod have rigorously demonstrated the complexity of situations in which these two competing interests dynamically interact and change over time (see for example Snidal in Baldwin ed. and Axelrod 1984, Chapter 2). In general, though, a prevalent preference for relative gains and more specifically, military positionality among states increases the likelihood of balancing relative to collective security. If states tend to favor absolute gains instead, we are more likely to see phenomena such as deep international institutions and pluralist security communities.