Power in the Changing Global Order E-Book

Martin A. Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 462

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Power has been compared to the weather: people discuss it all the time, but very few really understand it. This book seeks to demystify this complex concept by providing students with an incisive and engaging introduction to the shifting configurations of power in the contemporary global order.

Drawing on the work of leading international relations scholars, philosophers and sociologists, the analysis goes beyond simplistic views of power as material capability, focusing also on its neglected social dimensions. These are developed and explored through a detailed examination of the changing international role, status and capacities of the United States, Russia and China since the end of the Cold War. Far from achieving multipolarity, the book concludes that the contemporary world remains essentially unipolar; America having moved to correct the mistakes of George W. Bush’s first term in office, while China and Russia have, in different ways, limited their own abilities to challenge American primacy.

This book will be essential reading for students of international relations and politics, as well as anyone with an interest in the shifting balance of power in the global system.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Power in the Changing Global Order

The purpose and plan of this book

The limitations of power analysis

Summary of the argument

1 Understanding Power

Power as relationships

Power as process

2 Power Resources

‘Hard power’ and material resources

‘Soft power’ and influence

Legitimacy

What is power?

3 Hegemony, Unipolarity and the US

Hegemony in the international arena

Liberal hegemony in practice: the US and Europe in the Cold War years

After the Cold War: the unipolarity debate

4 The Multipolar Moment? The US and the World in the 1990s

Multipolarity

The George H. W. Bush administration and the Persian Gulf crisis, 1990–1

Bush, Clinton and the Balkans, 1991–9

The puzzling ‘hyperpower’ critique

American power in the 1990s

5 A New Era? The George W. Bush Administration’s ‘War on Terror’

The US, NATO and Afghanistan

The Iraq War

Causes and consequences of the Bush approach

The degradation of American power under George W. Bush

6 Return to Multilateralism?

The International Criminal Court

North Korea’s nuclear weapons programmes

From unipolar assumptions to multilateral accommodation?

Pragmatic corrective learning

7 Russia as a ‘Continuing’ or ‘Reviving’ Great Power

The Yeltsin approach, 1991–9

Russian power under Yeltsin

The Putin approach, 2000–

Abandoning old Soviet infrastructure

Domestic state consolidation and ‘sovereign democracy’

Russia as an ‘energy superpower’?

The irrelevance of soft power

The role of ideas

The limitations on Russian power since 1991

8 The Russian Multipolarity Debates

‘Neo-Gorchakovism’ and the concert system

Confrontationalist multipolarity

Competitive multipolarity

Concert-based multipolarity

9 China: ‘Rising Power’ or ‘Constrained State’?

China’s military power resources

Economic, financial and commercial issues

Population and demographics

Domestic legitimacy and fragility

Soft power

China as a constrained state

10 China, ‘Anti-Hegemonism’ and ‘Harmony’

Confucianism

A unifying domestic ideology?

A soft power resource?

‘Anti-hegemonism’

China’s ‘peaceful rise’

Harmony and peaceful rise as strategic requirements

Conclusions: The US, Russia and China in a Changing World

The social dimensions of power

The delicate multilateralist balance

The enduring unipolar moment

The United States in a continuing unipolar world

Selected Further Reading

Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 3

Chapters 4, 5 and 6

Chapters 7 and 8

Chapters 9 and 10

Index

Copyright © Martin A. Smith 2012

The right of Martin A. Smith to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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Acknowledgements

Notwithstanding its many other virtues, Sandhurst is a place where institutional support for academic research remains in some respects rather qualified and uncertain. I am, therefore, especially grateful to the individuals from within my department who have provided feedback on drafts of this work, either in whole or on particular chapters. Chief amongst these is David Brown, who read the complete manuscript and – as usual – provided detailed and very helpful critique. Donette Murray and Alan Ward kindly read and offered useful comments on individual chapters. Dr Murray also provided the opportunity for me to present an early draft chapter on China to a meeting of the department’s informal research group. I am, additionally, no less grateful for the very detailed and helpful comments and suggestions offered by the two anonymous readers commissioned by Polity. The book is substantially better as a result of their input.

One of the undoubted academic advantages of working at Sandhurst is the Central Library. Andrew Orgill and his team have been – as always – a source of immense help and support in obtaining books and other materials from a wide variety of sources. Grace Hudson of Bradford University’s J. B. Priestley Library also kindly provided me with a reader’s ticket, which enabled me to access her library’s very useful holdings of materials on Russia. I am grateful, finally, to Louise Knight and David Winters at Polity for their patience and understanding over a project which took rather longer to complete than originally intended.

In the final analysis, this book is the product of the author’s own research and thinking. Its contents and conclusions should not be taken to reflect the policy or views of the British government or Ministry of Defence, or the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Martin A. SmithCamberley, SurreySeptember 2011

Introduction: Power in the Changing Global Order

The purpose and plan of this book

This book is about international power. The topic has been discussed extensively, but thus far with some significant limitations as far as the world politics and international relations literature is concerned. The main one has arisen from a noticeable disinclination on the part of international relations scholars to explore in depth what the idea of ‘power’ actually means. Analysts working in the field have often seemed more comfortable thinking and writing about who has power and what they do with it, rather than about the core issue of what it is.

The discussions that follow in this brief introduction will address this limitation in more detail. Chapters 1 and 2 will follow on from this by developing an approach to the understanding of power in the international arena. This will then form the conceptual basis for analysing the ‘power’ of the three states under consideration in this book. Because of the relative absence of relevant work in the world politics and international relations fields, much of the analysis in these opening chapters will draw upon the work of scholars working within the fields of sociology and philosophy.

Having developed a working understanding of power, in subsequent chapters of the book I will test and explore its utility in helping to construct and inform assessments of the ‘power’ of the contemporary United States, Russia and China. The overall aim here is not to offer a comprehensive introductory guide to power and power relations in the contemporary world per se. Hence, relatively little will be said about other states (or groupings of states), such as India, Japan or the European Union, that may be considered significant powers in their own right. By the same token, there will be little discussion of supposedly ‘emerging’ powers such as Brazil or South Africa.

The three states under consideration here have been chosen on the basis that they represent distinct and important case studies of key aspects of international power in the contemporary world (defined here as the period since the ending of the Cold War in 1989–91). Analysis of their particular characteristics, features and actions therefore affords the opportunity to develop a nuanced assessment of key distinctive features of power in the modern international arena.

After 1945, the United States became the central actor in an international system based on structures, norms and processes of what has been called ‘liberal hegemony’, which will be analysed in chapter 3. The US has remained, by common consent, a – if not indeed the – pivotal international power since the end of the Cold War. Accordingly, the post-Cold War US will receive substantial analytical attention in this book.

Analysts have generally defined the United States’ status since the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 with reference to the existence of a ‘unipolar’ world order. The premises of the unipolar concept will be introduced and examined in chapter 3. Chapter 4 will then assess the extent to which the ‘real world’ order of the 1990s was indeed marked by American unipolarity. During that decade, debates and controversies first arose (and have continued since) over whether the US was accumulating ‘too much power’ in the absence of an effective system balancer of the kind that the Soviet Union had been during the Cold War.

These debates reached a new intensity after the turn of the millennium. This was a development fuelled largely by the George W. Bush administration’s alleged misuse of the US’s unipolar status in ways that, according to some, ultimately damaged its international power. The controversies and debates surrounding the initial Bush approach to American power will be examined in chapter 5. There is strong evidence to suggest that the Bush administration recognized the damage that was being done by its early approach to the conduct of international relations, and that it learned from its mistakes and altered its course in significant ways during its second term in office from early 2005. In order to offer a fully rounded assessment of this controversial presidency, this evidence will be examined and discussed in chapter 6.

Russia occupies a unique place in post-Cold War power politics. During the 1990s, its leaders argued that the Russian state was the rightful and legal ‘successor’ to the defunct Soviet Union, and therefore a leading power in its own right. On the basis of this legal/ideational underpinning, coupled with efforts to consolidate the strength of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin, its leaders have made a claim that their state should be treated by others in the international arena – and most especially by the US – as an important centre of international power. The basis and substance of these Russian claims will be investigated in chapter 7.

Contemporary Russia’s main contribution to the conceptual debates about international power has been the notion of ‘multipolarity’ as the most appropriate form of international relations and organization amongst leading states. Whilst multipolarity has remained largely ritualized rhetoric when used by leaders of states such as China and France, in Russia the debates about its meanings amongst officials and analysts have been, relatively speaking, quite sophisticated. Analysis of multipolarity should be an important component of any study of contemporary international power relations, and the Russian understandings of the concept will be explored here in chapter 8.

Since the 1990s, there has been much debate about the apparent ‘rise of China’ and the impact that this is having on the contemporary international order – in particular the position and role of the US. China’s status differs from that of Russia because, whilst Sinologists sometimes argue that history suggests that it too is a ‘natural’ Great Power, contemporary Chinese leaders have cast its status clearly as that of a ‘rising’ power, suggesting that something new and unprecedented is emerging. At the same time, they have consistently stressed the non-threatening nature of this evolution, using phrases such as ‘peaceful rise’ and ‘peaceful development’. The discussions in chapter 9 will focus on the bases and nature of China’s rise. The analysis will focus in particular on the extent to which China’s emergence can indeed fairly be assessed as a potentially threatening development.

As they have become increasingly confident in claiming the rise of their state, China’s leaders have sought to develop the idea – inherent in their concepts of peaceful rise/development – that this will help to promote a ‘more harmonious world’. The idea of ‘harmony’, borrowed from the Confucianist philosophical tradition, has featured prominently in what might be termed the official ideology of China’s rise. In view of its importance in this context, its meaning and implications in the contemporary world will be discussed here in chapter 10.

The limitations of power analysis

As noted at the beginning of this introduction, international relations scholars have often shied away from detailed consideration of the question ‘what is power?’. Defining it has indeed proved challenging. The noted French thinker Michel Foucault once described power as ‘the most hidden, the most occulted, the most deeply invested experience in the history of our culture’.1 Joseph Nye, a leading international relations scholar, suggested in similar vein that ‘power in international politics is like the weather. Everybody talks about it, but few understand it.’2

In the related academic disciplines of history and international relations, the challenges of defining power have been especially evident. Broadly speaking, they have engendered three distinct responses. A first has been simply to ignore the challenge. This is a temptation that even eminent scholars have not always been able to resist. Thus, for example, in his 1980s bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy offered nearly 700 pages of analysis without once clearly defining what he understood a Great Power actually to be. The closest Kennedy came in this book was with an oblique reference to France in the early twentieth century having slipped from Great Power status – ‘if the mark of a Great Power is a country which is willing and able to take on any other’. Further clouding the picture, Kennedy then proceeded with the contention that this semi-definition was, in any event, ‘too abstract’ to be of much use in explaining actual French policy during the period in question!3

A second response to the challenge of defining power has been to reduce it wholly or mainly to the possession of material resources, especially those of an economic or military kind. Indeed, these are often referred to by the shorthand terms ‘economic power’ and ‘military power’, respectively, as if power is produced naturally and automatically as a consequence of their existence and possession. This approach has held particular appeal for scholars working within the so-called realist tradition in international relations. Realist analysts tend to stress the competitive nature of international politics and the primary role played by states in shaping international relations, motivated largely by their leaders’ desire to maximize relative security and power. Against this backdrop, John Mearsheimer, one of the best-known contemporary realist scholars, has identified military, and what he calls ‘latent’, power as being pivotal. Mearsheimer defines latent power as ‘the socio-economic ingredients that go into building military power’.4 For him, therefore, it is clear that military capacity constitutes the basis and indeed the essence of power per se.

A final and quite common response to the challenge of defining power has been to begin with a broad, simple and basic definition. Typically this suggests that power exists when actor ‘A’ gets actor ‘B’ to do something which ‘B’ might not otherwise have done. In this straightforward formulation, ‘power’ is effectively a commodity or resource which becomes tangible, quantifiable and effective when it is operationalized. This approach has the virtue of addressing definitional issues directly. An important limitation to it, however, is that it has proved prone to being used as a basis for the kind of reductionist analysis that equates ‘power’ simply with the possession of economic and military resources and capabilities.

It will be argued in the following chapters that this approach is, therefore, too narrow and limited and that it misses crucial social dimensions of power. Power is essentially social because it is always relative and a product of human relationships. If only one relevant actor existed, or if individual actors had no contact with one another, there would, by definition, be no opportunity (or need) for power. Thus, power, as John Rothgeb has put it, ‘is found only when members of [a] system interact with one another’.5 Therefore it is not solely or mainly a naturally occurring product of a given actor’s material resources. Rather, power should be looked for mainly in the nature and outcomes of the actor’s interactions with others.6

Summary of the argument

Power is mainly a social and relational construct, although it might well have a basis in the possession of resources. Such resources need not be material in nature, however, as the discussions in chapter 2 will make clear. It can also be argued that power is not a primordial phenomenon. That is to say, it is not something that exists simply as an inherent feature or product of the natural environment, and as a quality of certain actors within it. Power is created and operationalized as a consequence of social interaction. It requires conscious human endeavour and activity in order to assume tangible existence.

Notes

1 Michel Foucault, Power (Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 3), ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 17.

2 Joseph Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 25.

3 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 290.

4 John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 55.

5 John Rothgeb, Defining Power: Force and Influence in the Contemporary International System (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 17.

6 For an early articulation of this view in the international relations literature, see A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 305.

1

Understanding Power

As the discussions in the introduction here have indicated, there is relatively little for students of world politics and international relations to go on from within their own discipline in attempting to develop a deeper understanding of the nature of power. In order to do so it is, therefore, necessary to step outside disciplinary boundaries. It is worth considering, in particular, insights put forward by sociologists, who have argued that power is embodied in human relationships.

Power as relationships

Sociologists are, indeed, interested primarily in human relationships. Therefore, if it is accepted that power is essentially a social phenomenon, it is hardly surprising that notably detailed and sophisticated explorations of it should have been developed by them. Amongst the best known of those who have studied power has been the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. His distinctive insight was the suggestion that, in terms of its functionality, power can usefully be compared to money. In developing this metaphor, Parsons stressed that power is not primarily a material commodity or resource. Rather, he argued that it should be viewed as a vital – indeed the vital – medium of exchange in social and political relations, just as money is the vital medium of exchange in economic and commercial life.1 In Parsons’s analysis, if it is viewed as a medium of exchange, then power, like money, is worth very little in its own right. Its real value is found in the extent to which – and the effectiveness with which – it can be operationalized to obtain desired outcomes. Thus, in this view, power is essentially instrumental. Its worth lies in the extent to which it helps in achieving or advancing desired objectives.

In the world politics and international relations literature, the power/money comparison has been quite widely criticized. Such criticisms have been made on the grounds that power resources, especially material ones, are less fungible than money. To speak of the fungibility of money means that it can be converted into something of equivalent worth and value in a variety of different transactions and contexts. With this in mind, it has been argued that, for example, a significant military capability will not necessarily convert into an effective power resource in the economic or commercial arenas. Traditional military capabilities might not even realize effective power in the face of certain types of armed threat, such as those involving the kinds of insurgency which occurred in Afghanistan after 2001 and Iraq after 2003.2

Yet, Parsons did not conceptualize power primarily in resource terms. The underlying point that he strove to make with his metaphor was that the operational utility and value of it are essentially interactive. Because it is relative, power can only be present in interactions amongst and between different actors. Power is therefore evident primarily in defined social processes and systems, rather than amongst essentially detached individual actors. This is an important core assumption of much of the sociological analysis.

Power is also more than just the sum total of the aggregate results of such interactions. Talcott Parsons rightly argued that it reflects, rather, ‘the capacity of a social system to get things done in its collective interest. Hence power involves a special problem of the integration of the system, including the binding of its units, individual and collective, to the necessary commitments’ [emphasis in the original].3

How might this view of power help us more usefully to understand it with particular reference to world politics and international relations? For realist scholars, the international system remains essentially anarchic, in the sense that there is as yet no established, reliable and embracing system of global governance, and therefore no ultimate global collective. Non-realists generally accept this, although they tend to be relatively more optimistic about the prospects for meaningful international cooperation and collaboration nonetheless.

Does the essentially anarchic nature of the international arena undermine the value of insights from those such as Parsons, who stress the importance of social systems? Not necessarily. A functioning social system does not have to be a structural entity, such as a state or government. Max Weber, perhaps the best-known sociologist of all, argued that a structured collective entity could not, in fact, exist. To that end, Weber wrote: ‘Collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual[s], since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action … there is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts” ’ [emphasis in the original].4

Thus individual actors do matter, although their importance in terms of power relations accrues mainly through their interactions with others. A viable and meaningful social system develops on the basis of a defined sense of shared interests and values amongst the individual actors. This, in turn, produces shared objectives and promotes common activity in pursuit of them. It does not mean that the constituent actors must always agree with each other on individual issues. It does, however, suggest that they must reach enduring agreement on some basic objectives and principles, which then condition their behaviour over a period of time.

This is important in order both to underwrite and to maintain the value of the shared exchanges amongst themselves. Individual actor-participants must be aware of, and willing to take into account, the prospective impact of their actions and activities on others when making decisions and contemplating action. This is the essence of what Max Weber termed ‘social action’.5

Essential equivalence amongst actors

Bringing Parsons’s power/money metaphor back into the picture at this point suggests that chief amongst the ground rules for social action should be acceptance that those participating enjoy in some meaningful way an equivalent status as actors, although this does not necessarily mean being regarded as equals across the board. This is important if power (or money) is to constitute a genuine and meaningful medium of exchange, given the mutuality and fungibility inherent in that.6

This argument can be illustrated by considering the hypothetical example of two individuals. If money is to retain its overall value and continue to be generally trusted as the key medium of economic exchange, then £100 spent by someone with nothing else left in the bank has to be worth as much at the point of transaction – and therefore be able to purchase as much in the transaction – as £100 proffered by a millionaire. In this particular context, therefore, the two would enjoy an essential equivalence, notwithstanding the basic material differences that exist between them. The latter of course are hardly irrelevant in the wider picture. The level of sacrifice and commitment required of the relatively impoverished individual in spending their last £100 is self-evidently significantly greater than that demanded of the millionaire. Context and the relative command of resources are therefore important conditioning – if not always determining – factors.

In international politics, what might be called essential equivalence is best reflected in what is known as the juridical equality of states. This is a legal construct. Its essential meaning is twofold. Firstly, in terms of the overall international system, states are legally identified as the most important individual actors. Secondly, all recognized states are legally entitled to the same core rights, entailed in their possession of legal sovereignty. The principal sovereign rights are recognition of bounded territory, formal protection from aggression by other states, and the right to participate in international diplomatic relations and processes. Legally speaking it is these, rather than the possession of military and economic capabilities, that constitute the foundation of what might be called a state’s ‘national power’.

This might in practice, as Stephen Krasner has argued, rest to a significant extent on ‘organized hypocrisy’ on the part of the states themselves, particularly the larger and more materially capable amongst them.7 For Krasner, the ‘hypocrisy’ resides mainly in the extent to which the legal equality of all states is accepted as the basis for conducting international relations, notwithstanding the significant differences that exist amongst states in terms of size and material capabilities. States are clearly not equal in terms of their respective capabilities. Legally, however, they enjoy what is here called essential equivalence.

This is a very important ‘hypocrisy’. A clear majority of states have evidently felt it important to maintain it as the basis of the international system since it was formalized in the mid-twentieth century, mainly through the United Nations Charter. For the argument being developed in this book, this matters because it provides the structural framework within which processes of international power, as understood here, can and do operate.

Evidence for the enduring hold of the idea of juridical equality (enshrined since 1945 mainly in Article 2 of the UN Charter)8 can be seen in the intense controversies and hostile reactions engendered on the occasions when it can be seen to have been violated. Often this has occurred as a result of external military interventions. The North Korean attack on its southern neighbour in June 1950 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 are obvious examples. Perhaps more revealing are the controversies generated by proclaimed ‘policing actions’ designed to prevent or halt human rights abuses or attacks on civilians taking place within states. These declared ‘humanitarian interventions’ can themselves give rise to concerns about interference in a state’s ‘sovereign affairs’. The NATO bombing of Serbia over Kosovo from March to June 1999 is a well-known case in this context. Possibly mindful of the controversies generated by that action, NATO members in early 2011 accepted significant constraints on the military operations which they conducted over Libya, under a UN resolution calling for the protection of civilians from attack in the context of that state’s degeneration into a de facto civil war.

Overall, juridical equality has helped both to shape and to constrain the ways in which power is conceived and operationalized in the international system. This does not mean that Hans Morgenthau was wrong in his classic realist assertion that ‘international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power’.9 What matters is how that ‘struggle’ is conducted. Many individuals might wish to make more money. It would make no sense, however, for them to ‘struggle for money’ in ways that risk destabilizing and beggaring their local, regional or national economies, and thereby impoverishing everybody, including themselves. By the same token, a ‘struggle for power’ can take place in ways and with means that do not presuppose that an international system based on the juridical equality of states will become seriously or terminally degraded. This does not, of course, guarantee that this will necessarily happen in practice. The situation outlined here assumes that the actors involved will proceed on the basis of a rational calculation that individual and collective gains are closely bound together, if not, indeed, inseparable.

Notwithstanding his contention that power is an ‘existential necessity’,10 Morgenthau did accept that, in international practice, states have devised means to ensure that it is channelled and constrained – imperfectly but nonetheless significantly – by a body of international law. This has been developed amongst states in relation to such fundamentally important matters as their own juridical equality, mutual recognition and territorial jurisdiction, and the use of armed force. These are the essential accoutrements of the legal concept of sovereignty.11 As one analyst observed at the end of the twentieth century: ‘Although all states do not obey international law all the time, they obey it often enough for law to constitute an important formative fact in modern international relations.’12 Analysts have further noted that formal international law has been buttressed by the evolution of more informal but nonetheless significant ‘international regimes’. These are principles, norms and patterns of accepted behaviour, which also help to shape the expectations and behaviour of state actors in the international system.13

Reflecting on the points made above, it can be said that the underlying nature of contemporary international relations is perhaps best represented as approximating to the ‘anarchical society’ depicted most famously in academic terms by Hedley Bull.14 There remain no overarching system or structures of global governance. Yet a significant and influential system of law, norms and rules has been constructed by and around the constituent state actors. Taken together, these serve significantly to shape and regulate the behaviour of most states for much of the time. As suggested earlier, they also provide the framework for the operationalization of international power.

‘Networked power’

Since the end of the Cold War, some analysts have been suggesting that, as a result of advances in communication and information technologies, a new dimension to the evolving ‘international society’ has been increasingly in evidence. The voguish concept of ‘networks’ has often been used to try to capture and explain this development.

As with many ‘in’ terms, this one has been used rather loosely and with reference to different phenomena. The notion of ‘networked power’ has been employed by some in specific reference to the role played by new and accessible information and communication technologies, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, in helping to facilitate the mobilization of popular movements seeking change against established political regimes. The dramatic upsurge of mass protest in the Arab world in the early months of 2011 was attributed in part to the increasing availability of such tools amongst general populations. The historian Dan Snow, for example, argued that the rise of the protest movements showed that ‘“connectivity” [via popular access to new technologies] is a precondition of turning discontent into revolution’.15

The significance of the impact of new technologies in this context can be exaggerated. After all, the rapid and largely peaceful collapse of communist governments throughout Eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989 – the events that triggered the ending of the Cold War – was at least as dramatic as the events of the ‘Arab spring’ twenty-one years later. The former events took place in an era before internet and mobile telecommunications technologies were widely available to the general public.

Notwithstanding this, it would be foolish to write off the emerging technological networks as having no potential effect on power relationships. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have suggested that the growing significance of the new technologies places an increasing premium on information. For Keohane and Nye, the key for states seeking to retain or develop power in the current ‘information age’ is credibility. They see power as emanating increasingly from the reliability and honesty of the information that actors provide. On this basis, they predict that ‘geographically based states will continue to structure politics in an information age, but they will rely less on material resources and more on their ability to remain credible to a public with increasingly diverse sources of information’.16 Keohane and Nye’s argument is based on the notion that the key to power resides in the extent to which actors can make themselves attractive to others on the basis of information provided by and about themselves. This has clear links with Nye’s earlier concept of ‘soft power’, which will be discussed further in chapter 2.

In their argument, Keohane and Nye perhaps overestimate the extent to which the availability of technologies is creating a more level playing field between state and non-state actors with regard to controlling, distributing and accessing information. The former have shown that they can take effective action to curtail the availability of information if they are determined to do so. A well-known example of this in recent years has been the creation and maintenance of the so-called great firewall of China. This term has been used to describe the restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on internet service providers and search engines seeking to link up Chinese users. Using the threat of denying or rescinding licences to operate in the vast Chinese services market, the government has thus far been largely successful in compelling the providers, in effect, to self-censor the information available on their sites, by filtering out links containing information which the Chinese government considers to be detrimental to its interests. In another example, the government of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, battling to resist popular protests in January and February 2011, compelled the major mobile-phone networks operating in the country to turn off their signals, using threats to revoke licences in order to ensure compliance.

Overall, the significance of networked power, in the sense in which that concept has been understood in the popular media and by academic analysts such as Keohane and Nye, is still open to doubt. It is therefore an area that would benefit from further research. The relative influence and significance of technology-based networks has not yet been systematically proven. All too often, it appears that its importance and significance is simply asserted and assumed. Did Mubarak’s attack on the Egyptian mobile-phone networks in 2011 reflect an appropriate evaluation of the impact of such technologies in mobilizing opposition against his regime, or does the fact that it did not ultimately prevent a successful revolution against him suggest that the key drivers for change lay elsewhere? Intuitive common sense suggests that mass popular movements of the kind that sprang up in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world in early 2011 were likely spurred into existence by a complex and disparate interplay of factors and facilitators. Ready access to communication and information networks was likely to be one, but its relative importance is difficult to determine. It also remains thus far somewhat unquantified and under-analysed.

Of rather more direct relevance and consequence for the discussions in this book is the broader understanding of networks suggested by Anne-Marie Slaughter, an American academic and former senior official in the Obama administration. The approaches discussed so far in this section basically see networks as being technology-based phenomena. In Slaughter’s view, the term appropriately describes a broader and more complex array of means and channels for interaction, coordination and discussion amongst actors. Of course many of these can be and doubtless are facilitated and enhanced by modern technological innovations. However, networks in this broader view are in essence socially, rather than technologically, based.

Slaughter argues that, in the modern world, the principal ‘measure of power is connectedness’. As with other ‘network theorists’, it is apparent that, for her, states remain major, but by no means the only, actors of significance on the world stage. She suggests that, ‘in this world, the state with the most connections will be the central player’. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this former State Department official also believes that, of the major world states, the United States is currently best placed to be that central player.17

Slaughter’s specific arguments about the US will be explored further later in this book, particularly with regard to the approaches adopted by the administrations led by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively. In the context of the unfolding discussions here, her notion of international networks reinforces the core point that power is fundamentally about interactions and relationships. It is also, simultaneously, about process, and it is to this second aspect that attention will turn for the remainder of this chapter.

Power as process

Reflecting their view that power is at bottom about human relations, sociologists in particular have long argued that it should be viewed as being a process rather than a ‘thing’. In this context Dennis Wrong, for example, has argued that: ‘power … is not a separate resource possessed by individuals or groups additional to the resources of wealth, status, skill. … Power is, rather, the activation of these resources in order to pursue goals or outcomes.’18 This helps us to identify an essential link with what are frequently referred to as ‘power resources’. For many working within the fields of world politics and international relations, power resources are to be found chiefly in the population size, military capability and basic economic measurements of individual states. It is, however, an oversimplification to suggest that power resides innately in such resources and therefore is itself some kind of commodity that can be possessed in a reliable and tangible way. These resources in themselves are effectively inert. What matters in converting them into factors of power is their ‘activation’, to use Wrong’s term. This occurs through human agency and is most reliably effected through social interactions and processes.

State actors can thus in practice be less – or indeed more – ‘powerful’ than their possession of material resources might on paper suggest. The key is the effectiveness and skill with which their leaders can harness their possession of relevant resources to achieve desired ends through interactions with others. Some have referred to the de facto ‘space’ between material base and potential operationalized effects as constituting the essence of an actor’s ‘latent’ power.19 This broader understanding of latent power has become more generally used and accepted than the narrower one developed by John Mearsheimer, and briefly discussed in the introduction to this book.

Resources, therefore, do have an important role to play, as suggested by Wrong. Money, for example, cannot just be assumed to exist. Its value must be represented in a tangible form (most commonly of course in the shape of notes and coins) in order for it to be operationalized. This is also the case with power. A key difference is that, unlike notes and coins, which carry a set, ascribed and accepted denomination, the value and hence effectiveness ascribed to power resources is often far more subjective and conditional. It is dependent substantially upon how they are used, in what context, and by whom. Nevertheless, resources do play an important – if essentially supporting – role in giving power a tangible form and hence also value and effect in practice.

Political will

If power is a process, it is certainly not a depersonalized one. Its operationalization occurs, as noted, as a result of conscious and deliberate human initiative and activity. In this context, the sociologist Steven Lukes has rightly argued that ‘observing the exercise of power can give evidence of its possession, and counting power resources can be a clue to its distribution, but power is a capacity, and not the exercise or the vehicle of that capacity’ [emphasis added].20

This raises the question of the role and importance of what is often called ‘political will’. This has historically proved relatively straightforward for observers to identify as a key power factor. Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of the early twentieth century, wrote extensively about both collective and individual will. He argued that ‘reality is a product of the application of human will to the society of things’.21 In similar vein, the controversial American sociologist C. Wright Mills defined ‘the powerful’, in American society, as being, ‘of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it’.22

In debates about world politics, ‘will’ has often been ascribed an important role as well. This has sometimes been done explicitly. Hans Morgenthau, for example, defined a Great Power as being ‘a state which is able to have its will against a small state, which in turn is not able to have its will against a Great Power’.23 On other occasions the notion of will has been an implicit – but nonetheless important – element in attempts to conceptualize international power. Another well-known international relations scholar, Klaus Knorr, introduced into the debate the notion of what he called ‘actualized’ power. This represented Knorr’s attempt to get to grips with the idea that material resources do not in themselves constitute the essence of power. Knorr concurred with the view that resources become important to the extent that they are consciously employed as a result of human decision in order to try and produce particular desired effects. In this way, he argued, the ‘putative’ power of resources becomes ‘actualized’.24 More recently, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall have drawn a similar distinction between what they have rather grandiloquently called ‘social relations of constitution’ and ‘social relations of interaction’.25

These formulations basically correspond to what here may be called, respectively, asserted and ascribed power. In the case of the former, an actor consciously and deliberately seeks to control the decisions and actions of others, whilst, in the latter, its role, position and status – along with that of the others – to a significant extent emerges from, and is effectively determined by, the social relations amongst them. This implies a markedly more consensual arrangement. Put in everyday English, this is essentially the distinction between possessing power over somebody or something and power to achieve some desired result or effect. In reality, both forms may be present simultaneously – though probably to different degrees – in any given social relationship.

‘Superior’ and ‘inferior’ power

Although easy to identify theoretically as an important element of the debates, the notion of will has long proved to be difficult to pin down in terms of how best to understand it, and the role it plays as a power factor, in practice.26 In an oft quoted definition of power, the philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that it involves ‘the production of intended effects’ [emphasis added].27 Similarly, in his recent work on power, Joseph Nye has argued that ‘from a policy point of view we are interested in the ability to produce preferred outcomes’ [emphasis added].28 For Russell and Nye, therefore, it is clear that power is not simply about the ability to produce outcomes per se. This is a vital point. In summary here, therefore, it may be said that, on the basis of the discussions in this section, a working definition of ‘will’ is that the term denotes deliberate human action with predictable and controllable consequences and outcomes.

The extent to which power is apparent only if it is clear that an intended effect or preferred outcome has been achieved is open to debate.29 The obvious question suggested by such formulations is whether power is apparent if an action results in the production of unintended effects or an outcome ensues that does not accord with the initiators’ preferences. This is an important question in the real world. The Soviet Union, for example, surely did not intend the brutal and costly consequences that followed from its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. These arguably included setting in train some of the processes and forces which ultimately led to its own collapse twelve years later. Similarly, it cannot convincingly be claimed that the US intended to plunge Iraq into bloody chaos following its invasion in 2003. Does this mean, therefore, that in these cases the actors concerned did not really operationalize power, as the effects of their policies and actions were neither desired nor, presumably, foreseen?

Russell did not really clarify his thinking on this important question. Nye is also somewhat fuzzy, writing that, ‘if the effects are unintended, then there is power to harm (or benefit), but it is not power to achieve preferred outcomes’. This is self-evident, but it still leaves unclear whether Nye thinks that the former is somehow a lesser kind of power.30 Dennis Wrong, meanwhile, has suggested that motivation is irrelevant.31 What ultimately counts for him are outcomes rather than intentions. The possession of a ‘will to power’ in itself does not guarantee that the outcomes produced by the operationalization of that will can be reliably predicted or controlled. What matters is the fact that effects clearly occurred that would not have happened otherwise. Therefore power has been produced at the point that those effects were generated, although the impact of this process on the producer may not be as intended, and may in fact be negative.

The progressively diminishing ability of the states concerned to generate intended or preferred outcomes in the cases cited above – evident for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the US in Iraq from mid-2003 – showed limitations on their ability to produce effective power from their own perspectives. This does not mean of course that power was objectively absent in these contexts. Rather, it was increasingly being produced by other actors against the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively. This reminds us, once again, that power is generated as a result of interactions within a social process – which can of course be an essentially violent one. It can therefore be produced by the ‘targets’ of the original actor against that actor, and in ways that are neither anticipated nor desired by the latter.

Taking into account the views of those such as Russell and Nye, it is useful here to suggest the existence of a qualitative distinction between power that produces intended or preferred effects and the kind that leads to effects that do not correspond to the power producer’s wishes. In both cases it is apparent that a type of power has in fact been operationalized. In the case of the former, however, the power produced may be described as qualitatively superior, because its effects had been demonstrably intended and outcomes have proven to be controllable by the initiating actor. The type of power that does not meet these criteria may, conversely, be described as inferior.

In order to achieve effects, whether intended or not, most analysts would agree that ‘power resources’ are required. These may be material or non-material in nature. In order to complete this overall evaluation of the essentials of power, the nature and importance of major resources will be examined and assessed in the next chapter.

Notes

1 Talcott Parsons, Politics and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1969), ch. 14.

2 These types of criticism of the power/money comparison have been put forward by, inter alia: David Baldwin, Stefano Guzzini and Joseph Nye. See David Baldwin, ‘Power analysis and world politics: new trends versus old tendencies’, World Politics 31/2 (1979), pp. 165–6; Stefano Guzzini, ‘The concept of power: a constructivist analysis’, in Felix Berenskoetter and M. J. Williams, eds, Power in World Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 35; and Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), pp. 3–5.

3 Parsons, Politics and Social Structure, p. 205.

4 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), I, 1.

5 In Weber’s view, ‘action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course.’ Ibid.

6 On the importance of mutuality in Max Weber’s analysis of money, see ibid., II, 6.

7 See Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

8 This Article both prohibits ‘the threat or use of force’ by any state against another and forbids UN intervention in ‘matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction’ of any state. See Charter of the United Nations and Statute of the International Court of Justice (New York: United Nations, 1945).

9 Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (brief edn, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 29.

10 Jaap Nobel, ‘Morgenthau’s struggle with power: the theory of power politics and the Cold War’, Review of International Studies 21/1 (1995), p. 63.

11 See Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, ch. 16.

12 Torbjørn Knutsen, The Rise and Fall of World Orders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 2.

13 See the series of articles published in a special issue of the journal International Organization 36/2 (1982).

14 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977).

15 Dan Snow, ‘Syria’s uprising will not be a rerun of Tunisia’, The Times, 20 April 2011. See also ‘The protest network’, The Times, 2 February 2011.

16 Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, ‘Power and interdependence in the information age’, Foreign Affairs 77/5 (1998), p. 94.

17 Anne-Marie Slaughter, ‘America’s edge: power in the networked century’, Foreign Affairs 88/1 (2009), pp. 94–113.

18 Dennis Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2004), p. xxii.

19 See, inter alia, William Wohlforth, ‘Unipolar stability: the rules of power analysis’, Harvard International Review, 8 July 2007, http://hir.harvard.edu/print/a-tilted-balance/unipolar-stability (accessed January 2011).

20 Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 70.

21 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2005), p. 171.

22 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 9.

23 Hans Morgenthau, ‘From great powers to superpowers’, in Brian Porter, ed., International Politics 1919–1969 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 129.

24 Klaus Knorr, Power and Wealth: The Political Economy of International Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973), esp. pp. 14ff. Nearly twenty years later, in 1990, Joseph Nye grappled with the same issue – what he called the problem of ‘power conversion’ – when introducing his concept of ‘soft power’. See Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 27.

25 Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall, ‘Power in international politics’, International Organization 59/1 (2005), p. 46.

26 For a brief but helpful discussion of the complicating impact of will on attempts to define power, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 17–20.

27 Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 35.

28 Nye, The Future of Power, p. 7.

29 See, inter alia, Lukes, Power: A Radical View, p. 70.

30 Nye, The Future of Power, p. 7.

31 Wrong, Power: Its Forms, Bases, and Uses, p. xxi.

2

Power Resources

In a classic study of power and governance in an American city, first published in the early 1960s, Robert Dahl succinctly defined a resource as ‘anything that can be used to sway the specific choices or the strategies of another’.1 Resources in the sense in which Dahl understood them do not necessarily have to be material. The term can apply equally to less tangible, but nonetheless vital, attributes such as legitimacy and authority. Dahl also argued that resources are not directly a form of power itself. Rather, they are a potential means by which power can be produced, depending upon whether and in what way actors with resources seek to use them.2 These insights provide the basis for the understanding of the utility of ‘power resources’ which will be developed and used in this book.

‘Hard power’ and material resources

To restate a core point: the possession of significant resources will not automatically give those who hold them the ability to achieve intended or preferred effects – i.e., superior power. In 1972, Hans Morgenthau captured the essence of this argument in a pithy metaphor, which he used to describe American military impotence during the Vietnam War. Morgenthau compared the US to a man ‘who is attacked by a swarm of bees and has a sub-machine gun with which to defend himself’. He argued: ‘It is exactly the discrepancy between the primitive nature of the attack … and the high sophistication and potency of [his] weapon … which makes him helpless in the face of this particular challenge.’3

Material resources (or ‘hard power’, as they are often generically termed) are still important, however. To return momentarily to the metaphor of the poor man and the millionaire discussed in chapter 1: each of these individuals is both formally and actually equal for as long as they both wish to spend just £100. However, the latter of course has vastly greater monetary capacity, which he can additionally choose to employ if he wishes. Thus there is an essential difference between the two. It is the resource discrepancy that endows the latter with potentially significantly greater actualized power capacity. On the other hand, the real-world impact of this will very likely be context dependent, as Morgenthau’s metaphor of the bees illustrates. It is, therefore, by no means guaranteed that the power realized by the use of greater material resources will always be of the superior kind.

In international politics, two kinds of material resource are almost always identified as being especially relevant in the power-producing context. These are military and economic. Inis Claude, in an early definition of power by an international relations scholar, suggested that it was ‘essentially military capability – the elements which contribute directly or indirectly to the capacity to coerce, kill and destroy’. Claude acknowledged that this did not constitute the totality of power, although in the Cold War context in which he was writing: ‘The capacity to do physical violence … [was] the variety of power which most urgently requires effective management.’4

Neither the end of the Cold War nor arguments that the destructiveness of modern military technologies had been making major war effectively obsolete even before then5 have prevented realist scholars from continuing to assert that military capabilities remain the sine qua non of international power. As noted in the introduction, John Mearsheimer has argued for the near absolute primacy of the military element. Paul Kennedy, meanwhile, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argued that economic resources are of prime importance. His argument rests on the premise that, without a strong economic, commercial and financial base, a state will not be able to develop and sustain a significant military capability. Kennedy, therefore, by no means ignored the importance of military capabilities. Rather, he believed, quite reasonably, that economic capability is of vital instrumental importance in underpinning them.

The size of a state’s population has also been cited as a key power resource,6