‘Ideal’ and ‘punch‐bag’: Conflicting views of the balance of power and their influence on interwar British foreign policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is possible to identify two general descriptive applications of the term ‘balance of power” that affected British policymaking in the years following the First World War. These two applications reflected simplistic historical interpretations of the European States System in the period before 1914 and Britain's role in it. One application of the term was pejorative and associated with the discredited system of pre‐1914 Great Power diplomacy. The second application stemmed from a more a positive assessment of Britain's prewar diplomacy, seeing it as the traditional goal of preventing the domination of the European continent by a single power. The purpose of this article is to examine both uses of the expression balance of power and demonstrate how tliey influenced the direction of British diplomacy in the interwar period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".