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Still the American System: Structural Power and the durability of Hegemony Nicholas Kitchen, LSE IDEAS [email protected] Abstract: Recent debates surrounding the relative power decline of the United States and the ‘rise of the rest’ highlight the anachronistic nature of realist conceptions of power in international relations. The theoretical poverty of these debates is endemic, primarily as a result of a reliance on power transition models rooted in the logic of great power war. In a world where international leadership depends more on the ability to engender cooperation than to forcibly coerce, the extent and importance of American structural power has been overlooked and underestimated. American hegemony is more durable than the declinists imagine. Paper presented at BISA, Manchester, April 2011-04-25 DRAFT, not for citation without permission Introduction Much has been made over the last few years of the prospect of power transition in world politics. The cyclically recurring debate about American decline has once again resurfaced, but this time there seems to be more substance to the claims that Western dominance of the international order may be on the wane; or as one commentator put it, ‘American decline – this time it’s real’.1 Talk of a pax americana, so fashionable in the early years of the twenty-first century, has rapidly given way to predictions of imperial failure, as the unipolar moment is condemned for having been just that, a moment.2 As Iraq and Afghanistan revealed the limits of the United States’ military power, the financial crisis exposed America’s fifteen-year economic boom as a mirage built not on production but on leverage. Big emerging markets, so loved by the Clinton administration, had become rising powers, and New Delhi, Brasilia and Moscow were increasingly seeking the political voice to match their economic clout.3 And all the while, China’s state-directed export capitalism had delivered rapid growth whilst financing America’s debt binge. Beijing, not Washington, would be the source of a new consensus in the international order, and the West itself would fragment.4 Yet for all the reams of commentary, the theoretical and conceptual poverty of the analysis of this apparent power shift has been glaring. Proponents of China’s rise and defenders of the Western order have argued with each other over whether a power transition is taking place, how fast it is happening, and debated what a post-American world might look like, but without really interrogating how a power transition might occur. Indeed, virtually the entire debate has made implicit assumptions about the nature of power transitions that are far from obvious. Power Transition Theory Power Transition Theory (PTT), although usually unstated, constitutes much of the implicit theoretical foundations for recent scholarship on power shifts. Developed by AFK Organski in the 1950s, it is essentially a realist theory of international politics, although later PTT scholars preferred the designation rationalist.5 PTT posits a hierarchical international system, in which a dominant power maintains preponderance over great powers, middle 1 Gideon Rachman, "Think Again: American Decline - This Time It's for Real," Foreign Policy Jan/Feb (2011). 2 Michael Mann, "The First Failed Empire of the 21st Century," Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (2004). 3 Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, Dreaming with Brics: The Path to 2050, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper No. 99 (New York2003). 4 Stefan A. Halper, The Beijing Consensus : How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010), Charles A. Kupchan, "The End of the West," The Atlantic Monthly November (2002). 5 Ronald L. Tammen, Power Transitions : Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000), 6. powers and small powers. The system may contain regional hierarchies that operate in the same manner, but those regional hierarchies are in turn subordinate to the global hierarchy. A country’s place in the international hierarchy is a function of its power, defined as ‘the ability to impose on or persuade an opponent to comply with demands.’6 The sources of power, in contrast to some areas of realist thought, are developmental, so that nations may increase their national power through means internal to the state. This understanding state power remains focused on material capabilities, which derive, ranked in order of importance, first from a state’s population, in particular those of working and fighting age; and secondarily from the sophistication of its political system and its ability to extract and use the resources at its disposal, and a nation’s level of economic productivity, or what we might call industrialisation.7 Yet this is not a simple case of summing capacities: how these capabilities develop over time – the speed, order and timing of the developmental sequence – is crucial to an understanding of a state’s power.8 Thus the global hierarchy reflects the relative size and levels of development of states. Within a given order however, dissatisfied states regard the system as misaligned with their interests, for historical, ideological, religious, personal or cultural reasons, and seek to change the norms and rules of the established system. Whilst most dissatisfied states are small powers, and more powerful states tend to be more satisfied with the status quo, occasionally a fast growing great power may emerge as a challenger to the dominant power.9 The concept of satisfaction is crucial to power transition theory’s analysis of the probability of conflict within a power transition. As a challenger rises it enters a situation of effective parity with the dominant power, defined within a twenty percent band of the dominant power’s level of power (i.e. parity exists when a challenger reaches 80% of the dominant state’s power, and ends when it exceeds 120%). A challenger may then overtake the dominant power, but the nature of that transition depends upon the challenger’s view of the international order: where a challenger that is dissatisfied with the prevailing order there is a high chance of war once parity has been reached, as the dominant power looks to protect its system which the challenger seeks to usurp. Yet if the challenger is regards the status quo as benign the transition tends to be peaceful and the rules of the existing order are likely to be reinforced.10 It should be noted however that the process is dynamic; as overtaking occurs, a challenger may become satisfied, reducing the chances of war and even leading to integration.11 6 Ibid., 8. A. F. K. Organski, World Politics, 2d ed. (New York,: Knopf, 1968), 475-6. 8 A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 212. 9 Tammen, Power Transitions : Strategies for the 21st Century, 9-10. 10 Organski and Kugler, The War Ledger, Tammen, Power Transitions : Strategies for the 21st Century, 21-4. In rare cases where both defender and challenger are dissatisfied, the probability of war is very high. 11 Tammen, Power Transitions : Strategies for the 21st Century, 26. 7 So power transition theory seeks to provide a model of the likelihood of war as global or regional hierarchies change. In particular, it seeks to explain under what conditions hegemonic war arises. It is, in essence, a refined version of the basic realist tenet that a nation-state seeks power for its own ends, and is prepared to use that power to fight in pursuit of those aims when they cannot be attained peacefully, and when that state believes it can win. As Thucydides had it, ‘What made the [Peloponnesian] war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused Sparta.’12 The Poverty of Power Transition Theory Power transition theory has much to recommend it, not least its focus on satisfaction, which suggests how hegemonic succession may take place peacefully, rather than inevitably producing conflict. Realist accounts of an offensive and defensive nature suggest that in the case of a power transition such as China’s ‘challenge to US hegemony’ conflict is ‘virtually certain’; and ‘no amount of goodwill can ameliorate the intense security competition’ that takes place.13 Power transition theory, by emphasising the relationship of states’ preferences to the prevailing system through the concept of satisfaction, is more subtle than such accounts, but that so much of recent dialogue on the rise of China assumes the maxims of power transition theory is worrying, since it is open to question whether its fundamental logic reflects the realities of the international system. In two respects, its reliance on great power war as a political outcome and its identification of system dominance in purely material terms, the assumptions of power transition theory, and the logic of the current power shifts debates that flow from them, cannot be said to hold. The dubious logic of great power war At its heart, power transition theory relies on the idea that states compete for dominance in the international system. As states enter the zone of parity, as we have seen, only if both the challenger and dominant power are satisfied is overtaking likely to be peaceful; if not, the chances of war between two great powers is high. At a very basic level then, power transition theory relies on the idea that war between two great powers is possible. This assumption is increasingly contestable, even for those that might consider themselves realists. The case for the obsolescence of major war, that is, war between developed countries of the sort that might result from a hegemonic transition, has been ever more discussed since the peaceful end of the Cold War, a period that had been animated by the fear of World War III yet which lacked direct major conflict between the belligerents. The absence of major war between the leading states in the system since 1945 is historically unusual, perhaps even 12 Thucydides, Rex Warner, and M. I. Finley, History of the Peloponnesian War, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1972), [check] 23. 13 Christopher Layne, "China's Challenge to US Hegemony," Current History 107, no. 705 (2008), John Mearsheimer, "China's Unpeaceful Rise," Current History 105, no. 690 (2006). unprecedented given the scale of great power war over the preceding centuries.14 John Mueller, writing directly on this point as the Cold War came to and end, saw war as a social institution that was becoming increasingly outdated and discredited, as slavery or duelling had.15 The underlying reasons for the diminishing likelihood of major war derive from a sharp change in the cost-benefit ratio of waging major wars. The technology involved in waging modern warfare is on the one hand financially expensive, and on the other incredibly destructive, both in terms of lives lost and physical damage sustained. War between nuclear armed states promises apocalyptic levels of destruction, to the extent that there could be no political end to which nuclear war could be a rational or plausible means. At the same time, the material rewards to be gained from war have diminished, and the notions of glory and honour been rendered hollow by the experience of history, to be replaced by welfare orientated societies predicated on peace.16 The question of nuclear weapons too, is about more than simply an escalation of the destructive capacity of warfare, but rather about the step-change the technology introduced into the calculus of risk. By not excluding leaders from their effects, and by raising the sceptre of mutual destruction, some have argued from a structural realist perspective that nuclear deterrence ensures peace between nuclear-armed states. 17 Yet the argument for the obsolescence of major war need not depend on this admittedly controversial thesis: Mueller saw nuclear weapons as essentially irrelevant to the long peace after 1945, arguing that the remaining great powers after the Second World War had already been sufficiently sobered by the conventional destruction of twentieth century conflict. Whilst nuclear weapons may have enhanced that imperative to avoid repeating those conflicts, for Mueller they represented little more than ‘extra insurance against unlikely calamity’. 18 At the same time, that extra insurance reinforces the likelihood that disputes between nuclear adversaries would remain peaceful. However, it is not as if power transition theory pays no heed to great power war, or ignores the negative externalities incurred by it. Indeed, power transition theorists have paid great attention to the costs and consequences of war, but argue that since their data shows that nations recover relatively quickly from war – a phenomenon termed the Phoenix Factor – the potential costs of war a relatively low, and do not change long term growth rates.19 Moreover, power transition theorists have sought to wrestle with nuclear deterrence and 14 Evan Luard, War in International Society (London: Tauris, 1986), Jack S. Levy, "Long Cycles, Hegemonic Transitions, and the Long Peace," in The Long Postwar Peace : Contending Explanations and Projections, ed. Charles W. Kegley (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). 15 John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). 16 Michael Mandelbaum, "Is Major War Obsolete?," Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 40, no. 4 (1998), Carl Kaysen, "Is War Obsolete?: A Review Essay," International Security 14, no. 4 (1990). 17 On the realist argument that nuclear proliferation may lead to more peace, see Kenneth Waltz, "The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better," in Adelphi Papers, ed. International Institute for Strategic Studies (London1981), Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth Neal Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons : A Debate, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). 18 Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, 218-9. 19 Organski and Kugler, The War Ledger, 104-46. the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, and in particular to escape what they view as the extension of the logic of balance-of-power into the nuclear age, and the implication of nuclear peace through proliferation. Organski and Kugler argued that US-Soviet nuclear rivalry was illusory, driven not by competition but more by neurosis, a diagnosis they accepted was somewhat unsatisfactory.20 In his earlier work, Organski had pointed to the level of risk-taking involved at various stages of the Cold War as evidence that ‘fear of nuclear weapons ought to deter the rulers of nations from taking the chances they do, but in fact it does not.’21 Nuclear weapons then reinforce rather than reverse existing trends in international politics, and for power transition theorists it is satisfaction, not security, that is the key driver of international political behaviour. Proliferation to smaller nations therefore becomes especially dangerous, since ‘nuclear weapons in the hands of dissatisfied powers, the risk takers of the international system, pose unusually severe threats.’22 Organski is particularly scathing in his assessment of deterrence theory, paraphrasing Tacitus’ judgement on the Romans, ‘They create a desert and call it peace’ and amending it: ‘They create terror and call it security.’23 There is of course a danger of using a ‘ledger’ of historic wars to predict the nature and likelihood of future ones, particularly when a disruptive great power technology as significant as modern nuclear weapons is unaccounted for in that historical data. Yet one does not have to believe that major war is impossible to regard its placement at the heart of power transition’s logic with some scepticism. Simply regarding such a war as intrinsically unlikely is at odds with the logic of power transition theory, which requires that hegemonic war be a plausible policy option in situations of parity, and a rational consideration for satisfied defenders or dissatisfied challengers. If, however, as many commentators do, one regards China’s rise as being somehow disruptive to the United State’s position at the apex of the international hierarchy, yet judge that war between the US and China is unlikely, then that involves rejecting one of power transition theory’s key predicates. If great powers in the contemporary international system are intrinsically unlikely to choose war then power transition theory’s approach may be wholly inappropriate for analysing the mechanics of China’s rise. The dubious logic of material dominance and the production hegemony The second core assumption of power transition theory that we should question is the idea that dominance of material capabilities translates into dominance over the international order. Unlike structural realist variants, that regard hegemony as a necessarily transitory state (even if, in John Mearhseimer’s offensive variant, it is what all states seek), power transition theory is closer to the realism of hegemonic stability theory in its approach to 20 Ibid., 202. Organski, World Politics, 329. 22 Tammen, Power Transitions : Strategies for the 21st Century, 33. 23 Organski, World Politics, 337. 21 dominance in the international system.24 The dominant power uses its power to preserve international order, a public good for satisfied states, and extracts from other states contributions in order to pay for it, a relationship that, as Snidal points out, is essentially coercive.25 Gilpin’s formulation of a hegemonic structure therefore mirrors that of power transition theory, in emphasising preponderance over material resources such that ‘a single powerful state controls or dominates the lesser states in the system’.26 The reliance on material dominance as the source of hegemony is at odds with earlier classical realist scholarship, which emphasised both the role of ideas and the ways in which influence is accrued in sustaining legitimacy for hegemonic order, and which is now beginning to be rehabilitated by neoclassical realist scholarship.27 A more normative understanding of hegemony derives from Gramsci, who argued that supremacy is maintained by rulers by cultivating the belief that the inequality of power is legitimate.28 Hegemony then ‘is a relation, not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership. It is the organisation of consent.’29 Following Gramsci, Robert Cox argues that hegemony represents ‘a structure of values and understandings about the nature of order that permeates a whole system of states and nonstate entities *which+ appear to most actors as the natural order.’ A state’s dominance is not sufficient to create hegemony without ‘the acquiescence of the dominant social strata of other states’ to the ways of thinking underpinned by the structures of power.30 In the production of hegemony, ‘ideas and material conditions are always bound together, mutually influencing one another, and not reducible one to the other.’31 This neo-Gramscian understanding of hegemony has its roots in political economy – it is about the expansion and infiltration of the ideas of capitalism as an answer to the historical problem of social change arising from Marxist analyses. When extended to the international relations in Robert Cox’s work, hegemony becomes the prevailing system of rules, norms and constraints within which states operate – it is the zeitgeist of the international system. Of course, first among those are ideas about capital and the modes of production, followed 24 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, London: W.W. Norton, 2001), Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1979). 25 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 34, Duncan Snidal, "The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory," International Organization 39, no. 4 (1985): 588. 26 Gilpin, War and Change, 29. 27 Hans J. Morgenthau, W. David Clinton, and Kenneth W. Thompson, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 30-32 CHECK. On neoclassical realism and hegemony, see for example, Berenskoetter and Quinn, Hegemony by Invitation 28 Lavina Lee, US Hegemony and International Legitimacy : Norms, Power and Followership in the Wars on Iraq, Contemporary Security Studies (Abingdon, Oxon. ; New York: Routledge, 2010), 11-12. 29 Roger Simon, Gramsci's Political Thought: An Introduction, Rev. and reset. ed. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1991), 24. 30 Robert W. Cox and Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151. 31 Robert W. Cox, "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations : An Essay in Method," Millennium - Journal of International Studies 12, no. 2 (1983): 168. 32 by ideas about forms of states and world orders. This foundation in international political economy continued through the work of the likes of Charles Kindleburger, Stephen Krasner, 33 and Susan Strange, who speak about hegemony primarily in terms of economic power. Power transition theory, as we have seen, places significant weight on economic capacity, but primarily as a means to the production of military force, from which dominance derives. In its quest to present a rationalist theory with clearly identifiable metrics, power transition’s reliance on this rigid materialist mode of producing hegemony neglects the ways in which states may be bound to the international order of the dominant power through cooption and acquiescence and the cultivation of legitimacy.34 As Adam Watson notes: ‘the use of force, and by extension the ability to coerce, has traditionally been associated with hegemony, and is one conspicuous way to exercise hegemonic influence. But it is not the only one.’35 Alternative ways in which hegemonic influence may be produced and exerted is through the cultivation of and association with the structures of the system itself, so that it is less associated with power per se than with a pattern of international order that is broadly acceptable and legitimate.36 It is in this sense that great powers are not simply wielders of capabilities, but bearers of broader ideas of progress.37 The successful construction of hegemony is therefore about more than simply the accretion of material power, as power transition theory suggests, but about the successful articulation of purpose with which others can find common cause, and through which dominance is legitimated and accepted. Thus power transition theory’s reliance on dominance misses a key aspect of how leading states construct and preserve international order, the extent to which they are able to enrol others in the hegemonic project, to bind together people, objects and institutions around a vision of order that the hegemon has convinced, cajoled and coerced others they want.38 32 Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton, "A Critical Theory Route to Hegemony, World Order and Historical Change: Neo-Gramscian Perspectives in International Relations," Capital & Class 82 (2004): 87-88. 33 Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (London: Allen Lane, 1973), Stephen D. Krasner, "State Power and the Structure of International Trade," World Politics 28, no. 3 (1976), Susan Strange, "The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony," International Organization 41, no. 4 (1987). 34 For a critique of power transition’s data analysis, see Richard Ned Lebow and Benjamin Valentino, "Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory," International Relations 23, no. 3 (2009). 35 Adam Watson, Hegemony and History, New International Relations (London ; New York: Routledge, 2007), 104. (my italics) 36 I. A. N. Clark, "China and the United States: A Succession of Hegemonies?," International Affairs 87, no. 1 (2011): 23-4. 37 Jeffrey Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). 38 John A. Agnew, Hegemony : The New Shape of Global Power (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 1-2. Structural Power and the US-China debate The implications of this less rigid understanding of power and dominion in the international system is that as states rise, they do so within a prevailing hegemonic order that is imbued with the characteristics and preferences of the dominant power. Power transition as a theory was conceived and developed during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union presented a fundamentally different model of international system to that offered by the United States. China may well present a different model of development to the neoliberal Washington Consensus model that has proved dominant since the end of the Cold War, and which, despite the financial crisis, remains basically intact.39 But where China’s ‘challenge’ differs from that of the Soviet Union is that its exportable model relies upon rather than contradicts the hegemonic assumptions of the prevailing international system; indeed, China’s has been based upon working within existing normative frameworks.40 That system contains within it significant structural advantages for the United States, which constitute a level of structural power that is neglected by power transition theory, and as a result has been overlooked by much of the literature on the rise of China and the decline of American hegemony. Structural power derives from the rules, institutions and norms that together define the nature of an international system, and which set the terms of interaction within it. These terms of international order reflects both the current strength of a state and its ability to create new structures, as well as being a ‘hangover’ from previously dominant relational power held at a moment of system-making. Thus Stephen Krasner argues that international institutions and regulatory regimes, created by powerful states, create a context for interaction that may render particular power resources more valuable than others to the benefit of the dominant state, and may continue to provide that advantage long after the power disparity that enabled it has dissipated.41 We can also identify structural power in the extent to which the decisions taken by a particular state have an unintended knock-on effect in other states, because countries are ‘systematically tied’ to that state.42 The crucial insight of structural power is that the overarching material and normative conditions within which interaction in the international system takes place are not neutral: the international system is biased in favour of particular states and particular types of state. These advantages may be obvious and harnessable, or they may be more amorphous and their impact indirect, but they are real and significant. The argument made here is that the United States retains a uniquely advantageous position in the international system, and that the rise of Chinese influence faces some profound structural obstacles. This is of course not the first time structural power has been evoked in debates surrounding alleged American decline. Susan Strange, railing against the declinism of the 1970s that had 39 Halper, The Beijing Consensus : How China's Authoritarian Model Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century. 40 Shaun Breslin, "Understanding China's Regional Rise: Interpretations, Identities and Implications," International Affairs 85, no. 4 (2009). 41 Stephen D. Krasner, "Regimes and the Limits of Realism: Regimes as Autonomous Variables," International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982). 42 Stefano Guzzini, "Structural Power: The Limits of Neorealist Power Analysis," International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993): 547. been engendered by the twin ignobilities of a failed foreign war and economic crisis, took aim at those who argued that the United States had lots its ability to direct the international economy because the costs of sustaining an open hegemonic order were eroding America’s own ability to build the regimes of international economic order.43 The United States, Strange argued, retained the power to set the agenda; to choose and shape the structures of the global economy within which others have to operate – in security matters, in economic production, in finance and credit, and in knowledge. [MORE TO GO HERE]44 Particularly notable in Strange’s analysis was her emphasis on the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency, and the United States’ unique advantage in being able to control the supply of credit denominated in dollars, and with it, to ‘exert predominant influence… over the creation of credit in the world’s monetary system.’ The United States had ‘the unconstrained right to print money that others could not… refuse to accept in payment’, and thus its persistent deficits were an indication not of American weakness, but of American power.45 In an updated version of this argument, Carla Norrlof finds that the US ‘gains both materially and in terms of policy autonomy from running persistent deficits… it has received more than what it ‘pays’ for the public goods it provides, and it reaps a higher benefit than other states… it gets more back than it puts in.’46 This is not to say that the United States is able to ignore its deficit, or to presume that others’ willingness to finance American debt-spending is somehow limitless. The point being made here is simply that the United States has a significant advantage over other states deriving from the nature of the international order. These ‘hard’ structural power arguments take a narrow view of the advantages bestowed by hegemony in the international political economy. But the case can be made more broadly along neo-Gramscian lines that the United States possesses major structural advantages in the wider sense of hegemony, that is, the ability to construct and sustain the ideational norms and structures of the global political order, and to gain disproportionately from them. The thesis that the United States constructed and sustained a liberal international order after World War II has been a central element of liberals’ approach to international relations.47 But the focus has tended to be on how the United States built an order that was in line with its preferences rather than on the specific advantages that America continues to 43 Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation : The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment, The Political Economy of International Relations Series (New York: Basic Books, 1975), Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony : Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), Stephen D. Krasner, International Regimes, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 44 Strange, "The Persistent Myth of Lost Hegemony." 45 Ibid.: 568-9. 46 Carla Norrlof, America's Global Advantage : US Hegemony and International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 47 G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). and Liberal Leviathan (forthcoming) benefit from as a result. There are of course obvious institutional factors of that order that can be pointed to – the security council seat, the command of NATO, the weighting of votes at the IMF and the World Bank – from which the United States confers benefit. But the endurance of the liberal international order – created in many ways by the United Kingdom and redrawn by the United States after World War II and to a lesser extent after the Cold War – confers something wider and less tangible: the dominance of American ideas in the international order. Consider the following ideas. Slavery is unacceptable. Progress is measured by economic development. Trade is a good thing. Governments do not have the unfettered right to treat their populations as they alone see fit. The international community has a say in its members’ disputes. International institutions operate on broadly democratic principles. Individuals are free beings, and are endowed with certain fundamental rights. Violence is not a legitimate means to resolve disputes. Capital and goods should be able to move freely. This is the ideational zietgesit of the international system, and it is one that favours the ideas of the United States far more than it favours the ideas of China. It has been argued recently that the United States has taken these for granted, and has stopped being a source of improved ideas of progress.48 But the fact is, that so entrenched are these principles that the United States can afford to take them for granted. A case in point: when discussing humanitarian intervention in Libya, the United States had both a formal veto on the process, and a de facto one by virtue of providing the capabilities on the one hand, and conferring legitimacy on the other. China had a formal veto in the UN security council, but the climate of ideas meant that in fact it could not use it: it was not so much that China’s attachment to non-interference was considered illegitimate in this case, but the idea that it might be legitimate to violate sovereignty was fundamentally, almost unconsciously assumed. China, rather than offering an alternative, a vision of leadership, meekly abstained in the vote on the resolution. It should be noted that these advantages are not the same as possessing ‘soft power’, defined as the ability to attract others as opposed to coerce them. Soft power may have merit, but it is a relational concept: one state, because of what it represents, has the soft power to co-opt another, but only if the other state is susceptible to the image being presented. Certain societies may be attracted by the glamour of Hollywood for example; but others are certainly repulsed by it. Structural power, even of the ideational kind, is unavoidable; to participate in the international order is to feel its effects. Conclusion Of course, the international system, and thus the advantages that structural power may bestow to particular states within it, is not fixed. Whilst anarchy remains be the basic nature of international politics, creating imperatives for the interactions of states that constitute 48 Steve Weber and Bruce W. Jentleson, The End of Arrogance : America in the Global Competition of Ideas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). structure, it is those interactions themselves that characterise the system.49 What happens, in short, is as important to the nature of the international system as anarchy, and so events can disrupt the way in which states interact in profound ways. New technologies and new ideas are the primary source of such disruptions, a number of which have occurred since the end of the Cold War – the system which provided the conceptual foundations for power transition theory – that make the world within which international politics takes place today very different. The first is the universalisation of liberal economic principles in the international order since the end of the Cold War, and crucially, the way in which forces of globalisation have made that system more ubiquitous rather than providing the means for potential alternatives to flourish. The key lesson of the financial crisis was that no-one could offer a serious alternative to an open liberal economic system, arguing instead for more institutional regulation along the lines of the current order: in short, an improvement, not an overthrow. Chinese nationalist commentators may have crowed as America’s banks fell, but it offered no alternative to the prevailing American-led collective hegemony, agreed, operated and in the aftermath of Lehmann rescued by that loose collection of likeminded states we call ‘the West’.50 The second is the reduced ability of governments to control information, and as a result the ever-increasing need of governments – democratic or not – to respond to the needs of their people. This trend has been apparent in the revolutions in the Arab world and in the rise, ironically, of Chinese nationalism, which has driven some ill-advised foreign policy choices by Beijing. Great power transitions cannot be said to take place in a vacuum in which one progressively extracts from its national base the capabilities to surpass the dominant power; great powers are as much about purpose as they are about power, and in a world where individuals are increasingly free to make demands of those who govern them America’s commitment to individual liberty puts it on the right side of history.51 The third is the decreasing centrality of the military balance of power to international leadership, and in particular the erosion of the idea that economic might buys military power buys influence.52 Influence is a function of engagement with and willingness to lead within the international order; an area in which the United States has major advantages and in which China is uncomfortable operating. Without military power as the central arbiter, how transition might be said to work becomes more about leadership than pure power, and ‘the structural lines and the general pattern of a system are likely to remain more or less the same when one state replaces another in the hegemonial position.’53 49 Barry Buzan, Charles A. Jones, and Richard Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 50 On the notion of ‘collective hegemony’ see Watson, Hegemony and History, 106-7. 51 Jeffrey Legro, "Purpose Transitions: China's Rise and the American Response," in China's Ascent : Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics, ed. Robert S. Ross and Feng Zhu (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008). 52 Bruce Jentleson, paper presented at Princeton, Jan 2011 53 Watson, Hegemony and History, 111. Many have argued that Chinese power has not yet reached the point where we can talk about succession on power transition theory’s own terms. For Chan, ‘the available evidence does not support any claim that China is overtaking or even approaching the US… one of the scope conditions of the power transition theory… is not met.’54 Others have argued that primacy does not amount to hegemony, and that China does not present an alternative vision of legitimate order to the United States.55 Both may well be true, but the deeper analysis is that power transition theory is an inappropriate tool to use – explicitly or implicitly – when having this debate, because its assumptions do not reflect the nature of the international system and because it cannot account for the structural power of the United States within it. Most worrying, there is a possibility that power transition theory, and realist models of power more generally, may through feeding-in to the policy process become self-fulfilling prophecies.56 If ‘systemic wars are more likely to be launched by a nervous declining power’57 the dominance of the assumptions of power transition theory in American political discourse encapsulated in the recent calls for a more aggressive American approach towards China should provoke concern.58 A better quality of thinking in this debate may not just be an academic matter. 54 Steve Chan, China, the US and the Power-Transition Theory : A Critique (London: Routledge, 2008), 121. 55 Clark, "China and the United States: A Succession of Hegemonies?." 56 Lebow and Valentino, "Lost in Transition: A Critical Analysis of Power Transition Theory," 408, Edward Lock, "What Is the Ultima Ratio? 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