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bipolarity characterized by intense suspicion and tension, balancing did not happen as often as BOP would predict. The crux is the unexpected availability of new information which leads to a change in the course of action by altering preexisting beliefs and preferences. The European states’ collective decision to buttress the rising challenger Prussia in the 1800s despite the latter’s clear expansionist tendency shows that neither intention nor preference can be taken as a given, but both are subject to circumstantial construction (Goddard, 119). In times of crisis, this constructing effect may be especially strong. Such characterized the interwar period, and resulted in a significant lag in the European states’ learning which may have otherwise incurred greater balance against the revisionist Germany (Jervis 1978, 184). Still caught up in a spirit of collective security from the first war, these states were too “hot-headed” to switch to the phlegmatic behavior of balancing (Weisiger, lecture). This, however, had less to do with their perception of Germany or their pursuit of relative/absolute gains than with the transformational effect of the trauma of World War I. In short, the more rapid and unpredictable is the flux of information in a given situation, the less likely that the balance of power contingent on existing beliefs and preferences will occur as predicted.
III. THE FALL OF THE USSR, THE RISE OF CHINA, AND EMPIRICAL
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE BOP THEORY
VVHaving shown that BOP has less to do with polarity than with intention of aggression, preference for relative gains, and circumstantial factors in an anarchic world, I will now show why our current system characterized by American hegemony is not so much different from the preceding ones. Doing so will not only address the necessity question mentioned earlier, but also show that even if we accept the premise that BOP is less applicable to unipolarity than to multipolarity and bipolarity, this hardly affects BOP’s relevance to today’s world. Though BOP gained much leverage during the Cold War which is considered a textbook case of bipolarity, a closer look at Waltz’s discussion of American dominance at the time reveals what really resembles a picture of American hegemony rather than bipolarity (Waltz 1979, 146-160). Most important, however, is the fact that concurrent to this widening gap between the U.S. and the USSR, a corresponding increase in the balance of power against the U.S. did not occur. Rather, we saw the opposite happen where Soviet satellite states started drifting away one after another. This greatly undermines BOP’s explanatory power even for bipolarity. Richard Lebow’s succinct summary of the years leading to the Soviet collapse illustrates that not only did the USSR productivity remain vastly inferior to that of the U.S., but also that its military (nuclear) capabilities never reached the level as to be a real challenger to the U.S. Hence, the actual period of strict bipolarity during the Cold War is much shorter than is conventionally believed (Lebow, 28-31). It is debatable as to what extent the Soviet “anomaly” was primarily the result of perception, preference or contingency (such as that discussed in Risse, 26), but major discordances between the balance of power and polarity lend further support to my argument that BOP is not determined by polarity itself, but by variables inherent in the international system, which may or may not lead to a concurrence of balance of power and certain types of polarity.