"balance of power" as an emergent phenomenon is entirely fake, protracted peace in multipolar world invariably coordinated agreement between individual men with shared goals, change my mind
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Replying to @SpeakMouthWords @alicemazzy
How do YOU define the balance of power (saving you a response)?
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Replying to @SpeakMouthWords @alicemazzy
Sorry for the triple-tweet. Almost all emergent phenomena age the result of complex agent-based systems, see trite examples such as bird flocking and crosswalk stripes.
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Replying to @SpeakMouthWords
the core ideas of balance of power as I understand it are...
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Replying to @alicemazzy @SpeakMouthWords
a) states will act independently to maintain equilibrium, because absent a severe enough imbalance that one might achieve hegemony, maintaining equilibrium is optimal for all participants individually
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Replying to @alicemazzy @SpeakMouthWords
and b) this disincentivizes war, which is presumed to be employed chiefly to fulfill hegemonic ambition, but balancing incentives function like a poison pill
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Replying to @alicemazzy @SpeakMouthWords
but based on reading both of these assumptions seem completely wrong. rather than an emergent property of states, the few times a "balance" seems to persist...
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Replying to @alicemazzy @SpeakMouthWords
...are compacts between particular *men* with particular shared aims, and once those men exit the stage, or come to distrust each other, the whole thing falls apart
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and aside for these individual (one might say gentleman's) agreements, a multipolar world is constantly getting into and out of wars
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