Download Still the American System: Structural Power and the durability of

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DRAFT, not for citation without permission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? The Limits of Realist Power Analysis and Their Implications
with Regard to U.S. Grand Strategy," in British International Studies Association United States Foreign
Policy Working Group Annual Conference (University of Leeds2010).
57
Chan, China, the US and the Power-Transition Theory : A Critique, 122.
58
NEEDS CHINA-FEARS REF
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