It was unhealthy for world peace because an entire country was wiped off the map. Doesn't that qualify?
Balance-of-power theory has no problems providing some kind of justification for naked aggressive acts like the partitions or Manifest Destiny partly because nobody ever defines what a balance of power actually is in a manner that means anything to all parties. To the Russians in the late 18th century, a balance of power meant that the European states were too tied up in their own quarrels to do anything about Russia conquering and otherwise subjecting Eastern Europe. To the Poles, a balance of power was a situation, essentially, in which their state survived, largely territorially intact, presumably with the assistance of some foreign power or other, depending on which Pole you asked (Prussia, Austria, and Russia were all thrown out for consideration at the time).
There is no objective measure of the balance of power because there is no objective measure of "power", and even if there is agreement on the substance of power between states, there is no universal opinion as to what constitutes balance between the powers of various powers.
p) You might get historians arguing that the events of 1792-5 actually restored a kind of balance of power in Europe, since France had been uncharacteristically passive before that, while the Eastern states had been preying on the Polish cadaver and the Brits were at the time establishing hegemony over an entire subcontinent. Or you might get historians arguing that they destroyed any semblance of a balance of power, because, uh, France was overrunning and conquering tons of stuff.My original comment, about balance-of-power theory making scavengers out of all states that adhere to it, is based partly on this. The logic of the Polish partitions was that one state's expansion had to be matched by that of other states, in order to keep a balance between those states. The same proposition obtained in Italy, where Bonaparte destroyed the Venetian Republic and handed it to Austria on the grounds of "compensation", all the while well aware that he had just given an enemy of his a rebellious province and taken away an invaluable buffer zone. And in Germany, where mediatizations were invoked so as to maintain the balance between Prussia, Austria, and a gaggle of Kleinstaaterei, all the while destroying intermediary bodies like the Church lands and a collection of minor territories. Any attempt to justify what Stalin and Hitler did on purely balance-of-power grounds - a desire to balance out a rival's gains by making some of your own - is fundamentally similar. The gains are almost always made at somebody's expense. The act of making those gains is inherently a threat to peace, not necessarily the geopolitical configuration that results.
At any rate, I won't pretend to disagree with whatever you were originally saying about Stalin and expansionism, and I won't pretend to agree with it either. Just my usual anti-balance-of-power rant.
