Concepts Don’t Float Above Politics
IMPORTANT: Concepts like balance of power and anarchy still frame both academic and policy debates today. Senior Research Fellow Morten Skumsrud Andersen (NUPI) has studied them.
We often take certain ideas in international politics for granted. Many students of international relations would tell you that because there is no world government, states exist in anarchy, and therefore they balance against each other. Simple, timeless, and quite natural?
Not quite, argues Morten Skumsrud Andersen, Senior Research Fellow at NUPI, in a new article just published in International Studies Quarterly (open access): Anarchy is What the Balance of Power Made of It: Two Core Concepts and the Public/Private Distinction in International Relations.
The article, part of the CHOIR project at NUPI on the history of core concepts in international relations, makes a bold claim: the balance of power didn’t arise out of anarchy but actually helped create the modern idea of anarchy itself.
From public order to private competition
Andersen traces how the meaning of “balance of power” shifted over time. In the 18th century, during the Peace of Utrecht (1713), the concept became tied to the idea of a common European order. It was supposed to serve the public interest by preventing any one state from dominating the continent.
By the 19th century, however, things looked different. States were reimagined as independent, competitive actors, more like firms in a market. This was linked to a broader revaluation of “private interests”, which were no longer dismissed as selfish or corrupt but increasingly seen as productive and legitimate. Once states themselves were treated as private, self-interested actors, it became natural to imagine the international sphere as anarchic: a place with no central authority, only competition.
This 19th-century reconfiguration came to shape modern IR theory. Prussian thinkers and later scholars like Kenneth Waltz cemented the view of international politics as an anarchic system of rival states, behaving like private companies in a market.
Why it matters today
For Andersen, this history isn’t just academic hair-splitting. Concepts like balance of power and anarchy still frame both academic and policy debates today.
“When someone talks about the balance of power now, it can sound like a neutral and commonsensical description of reality”, he says. “But it actually reflects a particular way of thinking about competition, interests, and authority that took shape in very specific historical moments”.
That matters when policymakers use these concepts to justify choices about war, peace, or great power rivalry. Framing U.S.–China tensions as all but natural and inevitable, or explaining, even defending, Russia’s actions as part of a balance of power dynamic, carries with it a hidden history of assumptions about how the world works.
Concepts in practice
What gives Andersen’s argument additional weight is that it is grounded in how the concepts were actually deployed in treaties, speeches, legal debates, diplomacy.
“I’m not trying to define what the balance of power is in the abstract” he explains.
“I’m rather interested in what the concept has done in practice - how people have used it in concrete arguments, justifying policies and defining what international order is supposed to mean”.
This, he insists, is why studying concepts matters
“Concepts don’t float above politics but are an integral part of it”.
Looking ahead
The article zeroes in on two crucial changes, but Andersen sees this as part of a bigger story.
“Space was tight, so I had to focus on two key transformations. But the broader history stretches across centuries and different political languages. That’s what I’m currently working on in a book - expanding this conceptual history to show how the balance of power became one of the most powerful, and misunderstood, ideas in international thought”.
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