UGC NET/JRF EXAM, INTERNATIONAL & AREA STUDIES, December-2019* (PAPER-II)

For clssical realists, probably the greatest responsibility of statesmen was the responsibility to maintain a balance of military power among the great powers, The point of doing that was to prevent any great power from getting out of control and attempting to impose its political and military will on everybody else.

The two greatest examples in modern European history are French King Louis XIV's attempt to domainate Europe in the late seventeenth century, and Napoleon's attempt to do the same a century later. Both attempts ultimately failed.

The other great powers at the time united to form military alliances that defeated each of those French bids for European hegemony.

Thus in classical realist thinking, the balance of power is a valued political objective that promotes national security, upholds order among great powers, and makes the independence of states and their peoples possible.

The Second World War can readily be seen in this light: Nazi Germany and imperial Japan made a bid to impose their separate hegemonies on Europe and Asia; and Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States formed an alliance to counter those attempts and restore a balance of power.

The Cold war is generally portrayed as a bipolar balance of power based on nuclear weapons and often referred to as balance of terror-between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Ref. Robert Jackson and George Sorenson, introduction to International Relations: Theories and approaches, Oxford University Frens, 2010, PP-88-83.

Who of the following advocated that the greatest responsibility of the great powers was to maintain a military balance of power?

There are always economic or moral arguments for specific territorial annexations, Whether these be 'frontier rectification' or schemes of 'closer union' between a stronger power and a weaker.

And in every country there are many individuals who feel personally magnified by an increase in the frontiers of a the state.

Thus nationalism, which is the will of a historically selfconscious people to attain self-government, inclines scarcely perceptibly through irredentism, which is the will to liberate peoples claimed to be of the same nationality, towards imperialism, which is the will to rule other peoples.

No sooner had the Italians freed themselves from Austrian rule than they succeeded to the Austrian claim to dominate South Slavs.

No sooner had the serbs obtained a Yugoslav state than they forfeited the goodwill of their fellow Yugoslavs by establishing in the new state a harsh Serb predominance.

There are many recent instances of the transition from nationalism to irredentism, and of the uncertain distinction between irredentism and imperialism.

Eire claims Northern Ireland, and South Africa claimed the High Commission Territories, as India claimed Portuguese Goa, and Indonesia claimed Western New Guinea, by appeal to some principle other than the wishes of the inhabitants, which were either unknown or hostile to the claim.

Egypt hoped to absorb the Sudan, half of whose population are not Arab. Nkrumah sought a union of West Africa, which would reduce Liberia, with a hundred years experience in self-government, to a position subordinate to Ghana.

The settlers of Southern Rhodesia, in their march towards independence, constructed a Central African Federation of which Nyasaland Source;

Power politics by Martin W. Leicster Univ. press and RILA, Lin 1995, pp. 146-147

What happened to the fate of settlers of southern Rhodesia?