Chapter 5
Rising powers and the
emerging global order
By Andrew Hurrell
Introduction
The post-cold war order
The US order under challenge
Three questions about emerging powers
Conclusion: rising states and the globalization
of world politics
Reader's Guide
After a period of US dominance of the
international political and economic systems, the world order began to undergo
what many came to see as a fundamental structural change from the mid-2000s.
This was initially associated with the rise of the BRIC countries (Brazil,
Russia, India, and China), but was then strengthened by the crisis of finance
capitalism that hit the core Western countries after 2007. This chapter begins
by examining the US-led global order that emerged at the end of the cold war
and at the arguments for this being likely to remain stable and to endure. The
second section considers the challenges to the idea of a US-dominated global
order, paying particular attention to the role of large, emerging developing
countries, to the idea of the BRICs, to the regional role of these countries,
and to the new Southern coalitions that were coming to play an increasingly
influential role in negotiations and institutions affecting trade, climate
change, and foreign aid. The third section distinguishes between different
views of the diffusion of power, discusses what is involved when we talk of rising
powers', and looks at some of the major theoretical arguments about how rising
powers affect global politics. The concluding section considers the argument
that today's emerging powers matter not simply because of their current and
likely future power, but rather because of the challenge that they pose to the
euro-centrism and Western dominance of the international order.
At the end of the cold war the structure of global
order irritated clear and straightforward. The West had won. The United States
was the sole superpower and the world was living through a period of unipolarity that,
many believed, would continue well into the twenty-first century. The US-led
order had three pillars: first, the unrivalled extent and many dimensions of US
power; second, the Western-dominated institutions and multilateral
organizations originally created in the wake of the Second World War - the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the World Trade Organization (WTO)
from 1995), and the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund; and third, the dense
network of alliances and close bilateral relationships across the Atlantic and
Pacific. For many commentators, this liberal Greater West had triumphed and was
bound to increase its global reach—partly through the intensification of
economic and social globalization, partly through the power and
attractiveness. of Western ideas of democracy, human rights, and liberal
capitalism, and partly through deliberate US policies and the effective
deployment of American power.
The central question, however, was whether
this period of US predominance would last. For many, the most important lesson
of history is that challengers to unequal power will always emerge, either
because of the competitive nature of international politics or because of the
restless and dynamic quality of global capitalism. On one side, analysts
considered the stability of US power. How far would the US fall prey to
‘imperial overstretch’—whether in the form of costly and frustrating military
campaigns, due to economic unsustainability and fiscal imbalances, or due to
the loss of domestic support for playing a global hegemonic role. In the case
of Europe, the 1990s also seemed to point to a rosy future. The enlargement of
the European Union (EU) had been a stunning success, institutions were
becoming deeper, and many saw the ‘normative power’ of the European model as
meshing perfectly with the way in which twenty-first-century international society
was moving (Manners 2006). But by the middle of the 2000s doubts were becoming
more evident, dramatically reinforced by the euro crisis. On the other side,
attention quickly came to focus on the large, fast- growing countries in what
had previously been called the Third World or the global South.
Following the introduction in the late
1970s of market-led reforms, China was establishing itself as the major manufacturing
power of the global economy and as one of the obvious major powers in the
system. And, in the next tier down, a range of other states were becoming both
more active and influential globally and acquiring a significant degree of
regional influence (as with Brazil in Latin America; India in South Asia;
Indonesia in Asia; Nigeria and South Africa in Africa). These developments came
to be seen as representing a power challenge to the US and Europe. But they
also constituted a challenge to the eurocentrism and
Western dominance of an international order that had been created historically
through the process of European imperialism.
Many academics, especially in Europe and
the United States, told three kinds of liberal stories about the post-cold war
world. Some stressed institutions and the cooperative logic of institutions.
Institutions are needed to deal with the ever more complex dilemmas of
collective action that emerge in a globalized world. The complexity of the
governance challenges meant that international law and international regimes
would necessarily increase in number, scope, and variety. It also meant that as
large states, including large developing states, expanded their range of
interests and integrated more fully into the global economy and world
society—as they ‘joined the world’ in the
popular language of the 1990s—they would be naturally drawn by the functional
benefits provided by institutions, and pressed towards more cooperative and
‘responsible’ patterns of behaviour. They would gradually become socialized
into a Western-led global order. The process would not necessarily be easy. It
would be uneven and often unsettling. But, on this view, the broad direction of
travel was clear.
Others stressed the Kantian idea of the gradual but
progressive diffusion of liberal values, partly as a result of liberal
economics and increased economic interdependence,
partly as a global civil society liberal legal order comes to sustain the
autonomy of a global civil society, and partly as a result of the successful
example set by the multifaceted liberal capitalist system of states. There was
little option but to accept the intrinsic superiority of the ideas that had,
on this view, quite literally conquered the world (Mandelbaum 2003).
A third group told a more US-centred
story. The US was indeed the centre of a unipolar world. But, true both to its
own values but also to its rational self- interest, Washington would have a
continued incentive to bind itself within the institutions that it had created
in the cold war era in order to reassure smaller states and to prevent
balancing against US power (Ikenberry 2001). A rational hegemon in an age of
globalization would understand the importance and utility of soft power and
self-restraint. In return for this self-binding and the procedural legitimacy it
would create, and in return for US-supplied global public goods and
the output legitimacy that they would create, other states would acquiesce and
accept the role of the United States as the owner and operator of the system.
For liberals, the challenge posed by the
Soviet Union and its allies (the so-called Second World) had been seen off with
the victorious end to the cold war. Through a mix of these three processes
those developing states of the old Third World that had previously challenged
the Western order (especially in the demands of the 1970s for a New International Economic Order) would now become increasingly enmeshed, socialized,
and integrated. The nature and dynamics of power were changing. Joseph Nye was
influential in arguing that soft power would outstrip hard coercive power in importance and
concentrations of liberal power would attract rather than repel or threaten
(Nye 2005). Just as the example of a liberal and successful European Union had
created powerful incentives on the part of weaker and neighbouring states
towards emulation and a desire for membership, so, on a larger scale and over a
longer period, a similar pattern would be observed in the case of the developing
and emerging world as a whole.
The 1990s, then, were marked by a clear
sense of the liberal ascendancy, a clear assumption that the US had the right
and power to decide what the ‘liberal global order’ was all about, and a clear
belief that the Western order worked and that it had the answers. Yes, of
course there would be isolated rogues and radical rejectionists. But they were
on the ‘wrong side of history’ as President Clinton confidently proclaimed.
The idea that this US-led order was stable
was not confined to liberals. One group of neo-realist thinkers argued that
the extent of US power was simply so great that the normal logic of the balance
of power had been overcome, and that no power was likely to emerge in the
foreseeable future with the capacity to disturb US power and primacy (Wohlforth
1999). This is especially the case since, for neo-realists, military power is
the most important form of power. In terms of military power the United States
is, quite literally, in a class of its own: it accounts for 45 per cent of the
world’s total military spending; it has an enormous lead in new military
technologies; it has a vast global network of over 750 overseas bases in over
100 countries, and it has a unique capacity to project power to any corner of
the world. Since active opposition was ruled out, the expectation was that
weaker states would have no option but to seek accommodation with the US and
with the US-led global order.
Many critical political economists also
saw stability. Across the developing world neo-liberalism was spreading,
partly imposed by the US and its associated institutions and partly reflecting
the choices of elites in what had previously been called the Third World and
was now increasingly referred to as the global South. The neo-Marxist account
has been neglected by mainstream Western debate on rising powers, but raises
important questions. On this view, an excessive focus on the emerging
nation-states of the South clouds and confuses the issue. What we are seeing
is, in reality, the transformation of global capitalism from
an old core centred on the advanced industrialized states into a far more
global and far more thoroughly transnationalized capitalist order (see
Robinson 2007). The systemic change has to do with the unfolding of a
deterritorialized global capitalism made up of flows, fluxes, networked
connections, and transnational production networks, but marked by inequality,
instability, and new patterns of stratification. Rather than count up and
categorize the ‘power’ of emerging powers, the intellectual challenge is to
understand the ‘transnational whole’ in which such countries are embedded and
the social forces and state-society relations that underpin the national
developmental projects pursued by emerging country elites.
After the end of the cold war, the global
South came to be redefined in transnational social terms rather than as a
grouping or category of nation-states. Attention was focused more and more on
the social movements that were emerging within and across the global South in response to
neo-liberalism: the World
Social Forum, anti-globalization
groups, and the protect movements that had come to prominence at the WTO
ministerial meeting in Seattle in 1999. Many argued that the challenge then to
the US-led order would not come from large developing countries (such as India,
China, or Brazil): it would come rather from radical rejectionist states (such
as Venezuela or Iran); from grassroots anti-globalization movements; and from
transnational anti-Western Islamic groupings and terrorist organizations. (For
an influential account see Hardt and Negri 2001.)
Key Points
During the 1990s there was near universal
agreement that the global system was dominated by the power of the United
States and its allies and by the institutions that the US dominated.
From the perspective of the dominant norms
of the system, the United States has rarely been a status quo power but has
often sought to mould the system in its own image. Since the end of the cold
war it has been a strongly revisionist power: in the 1990s, in terms of
pressing for new norms on intervention, the opening of markets, and the embedding
of particular sets of what it saw as liberal values in international
institutions; in the early years of this century, in terms of its attempt to
recast norms on regime change and on the use of force.
The states of the global South did not
face the United States within a stable notion of a 'Westphalian order'. From
their perspective, the dominant Western states were insisting that many of the
most important norms of the system ought to change, above all in ways that
threatened greater interventionism. But there was a widespread sense that there
was little alternative but to accommodate Western power.
There was widespread consensus that
challenges to the US-led order would result from 'blowback' or 'backlashes'
against US and Western power, and would be focused around anti-hegemonic social
movements or radical states
.
But by the late 1990s this picture of a
stable, US-dominated global order was coming under increasing challenge. The
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 underscored the darker side of globalization. The
experience of trying to fight a ‘war’ on global terrorism and of using hard
coercive power to dominate weaker societies (as in Iraq or Afghanistan) brought
to the fore the limits of military power for achieving political goals. The
mismatch between Washington’s rhetoric of human rights and democracy and its
systematic willingness to violate human rights in defence of its national
security (as with Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and the policy of so-called rendition
of terrorist suspects) undercut Western claims to moral superiority. And, for
many governments and for many groups within a broad range of societies, the
unilateralism of the Bush administration was undercutting the legitimacy and
acceptability of US leadership.
One of the most visible signs that
something was changing concerned the increased diplomatic activism on the part
of large developing countries. The intensive coalitional policies of Brazil and
India in the World Trade Organization provide a good example, most notably in
terms of the G20 trade coalition created at Cancun in 2003. At the fifth
Ministerial Conference of the WTO at Cancun in September 2003, developing
countries came together in several overlapping coalitions and decided to block
the negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda until their demands were met.
The Conference ended in deadlock. But the unified resistance of developing
countries in the endgame at Cancun appeared to represent an important landmark
in the international politics of trade. More generally, Cancun seemed to
represent a symbol of the dissatisfaction of the developing world with
‘globalization’, often understood as the imposition of neo-liberal economic
policies (commonly referred to as the Washington Consensus).
It is often simply assumed that the
dominant state or group of states in terms of power can be associated with the
status quo, and that it will be emerging states or rising powers that seek to
challenge the ‘basic norms of the system’ or to revise its ‘foundational
principles’. However, any status quo has at least two dimensions: the first focused
more or less directly on the distribution of material power; the second on the
character of the international order and its dominant norms. From the
perspective of the developing world, the US-led order of the 1990s had involved
a powerful move to change many of the rules, norms, and practices of global
politics—especially to do with economic and development policy and with new
forms of intervention. They saw themselves as part of the status quo, and the
West as the revisionists. But, as perceptions of their power grew, so there was
a greater willingness to act in pursuit of their collective interests and
against the developed world. In expressing this collective dissatisfaction, the
emerging powers of the developing world—Brazil, China, India, and South
Africa—took the lead, and were joined by many other developing countries.
A further example was the creation of IBSA
(India, Brazil and South Africa Dialogue Forum). This is a cooperation project
between the three democratic countries India, Brazil, and South Africa. The
organization was formalized with the Brasilia Declaration in June 2003, and
since then several initiatives have emerged to fuel cooperation on a broad
range of areas. The tripartite grouping works at all levels to deepen their
ties. There are annual meetings between the Heads of State, and
another meeting once a year between the
foreign ministers. These meetings at the highest level often lead to
declarations that consolidate common positions about global issues between the three
countries. There are also working groups in a variety of areas—such as agriculture,
defence, health, and trade—with the aim of exploring shared interests on
sectoral issues. A third example is provided by the BASICs (Brazil, India,
South Africa, and China). This group sidelined Europe in climate change
negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 and forced the United States to
negotiate in a very different institutional context. And, outside of the
economic area, Brazil and Turkey’s offer of mediation in the US-Iranian nuclear
dispute in the first half of 2010 seemed to suggest a potential future
shuffling of the diplomatic deck.
On their own, these events might have
attracted only passing attention. Yet, for many, they reflected a much deeper
structural change that was taking place in the global economy and in the
dynamics of global capitalism. And it is this phenomenon that is captured by
the idea of the BRICs( see Case
Study 1).
The BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and
China) com- rrise the four largest economies outside the OECD. Together they
hold around 50 per cent of the total global foreign exchange reserves. They
have reduced or eliminated any residual dependence on foreign aid and in the
cases of China, India, and Brazil have themselves become major aid donors. In
2009 new donors provided around US$11 billion of foreign aid. And they have
expanded their relations with each other, with China eclipsing the US as
Brazil’s major trading partner and Sino-Indian trade approaching US$60 billion
a year. South-South trade rose from being marginal as late as the early 1990s
and now accounts for 17.5 per cent of global merchandise exports.
The language of ‘BRICs’ and of ‘rising’
and ‘emerging powers’ took off from around 2003. Since then, both popular
commentary and a great deal of political rhetoric has focused on the diffusion
of power and the emergence of new powers. The central point of these debates
was not where world order is now, but where it was going to go in the future.
The BRICs were important not just because of their recent and current rapid
development, but because of the predicted changes that were going to transform
the global economy and change the balance of global economic power (see Table 5.1).
The financial crisis that hit the advanced
capitalist core in 2007 fed into these changes. In part this was the result of
the degree to which emerging economies were relatively less directly affected.
The 2007-9 financial crisis, regarded by many economists as the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression, were relatively well withstood by the BRIC
economies. Although Russia did see some dramatic fall in GDP from 2008 to 2009,
India and China still saw GDP growth in spite of the global setback. In the
years following the crisis, China, Brazil, and India have all increased their
contribution to world economic activity. The crisis also had less direct, but
perhaps more fundamental, impact. For many influential figures in emerging
powers, it was historically extremely significant that the financial crisis
broke out in the Western core countries. It not only seriously damaged these
economies but also undermined the technical and moral authority of the
institutions as the centre of the global capitalist system. The crisis shifted
the balance of arguments back to those who stress the advantages of large,
continent- size or regionally dominant states—states that are able to depend on
large domestic markets, to politicize market relations globally and regionally,
and to engage in effective economic mercantilism and resource competition.
Finally, the crisis also reinforced the
view that international economic institutions had to be reformed to reflect
shifting economic power. Brazil and India had long demanded reform of
international economic institutions as well as a seat on the United Nations
Security Council. Although there had been little progress with UN reform,
considerable change occurred within the WTO, with Brazil and India becoming
members of the inner negotiating circle (the so-called ‘new quad’ along with
the US and the EU). For many, a major symbolic step occurred with the creation
of the G20 in 2008 (see
Box 5.1). The G20 was a major symbol of how the
structures of global governance were shifting in response to the new geometry
of power, and a sign of what the future would bring.
Table 5.1
So who will be the biggest and best in 2030?
And 2050?
GDP ranking by country
Rank
|
1990
|
2000
|
2009
|
2030
|
2050
|
1
|
US
|
US
|
US
|
US
|
China
|
2
|
Japan
|
Japan
|
Japan
|
China
|
US
|
3
|
Germany
|
Germany
|
China
|
Japan
|
India
|
4
|
France
|
UK
|
Germany
|
India
|
Japan
|
5
|
Italy
|
France
|
UK
|
UK
|
Brazil
|
6
|
UK
|
China
|
France
|
Germany
|
Mexico
|
7
|
Canada
|
Italy
|
Italy
|
France
|
UK
|
8
|
Spain
|
Canada
|
Canada
|
Russia
|
Germany
|
9
|
Brazil
|
Mexico
|
India
|
Brazil
|
France
|
10
|
China
|
Brazil
|
Brazil
|
Mexico
|
Russia
|
11
|
Australia
|
Spain
|
South Korea
|
Italy
|
Turkey
|
12
|
India
|
South Korea
|
Russia
|
South Korea
|
Canada
|
13
|
Netherlands
|
India
|
Mexico
|
Canada
|
Indonesia
|
14
|
Mexico
|
Australia
|
Australia
|
Australia
|
South Korea
|
15
|
South Korea
|
Netherlands
|
Turkey
|
Turkey
|
Italy
|
Source:
IMF,
World Bank, Carnegie Endowment for International
Key Points
Over the last decade, countries such as
Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, the ASEAN states, and Mexico
have experienced significant economic development. For many, the continuation
of this trend is likely to result in an alteration in the economic balance in
favour of the dynamic emerging markets.
With this greater economic share of the
world market, they feel that they deserve a greater political say in the
international community as well, in fact, the 2008 financial
crisis-underscoring the shift in relative economic weight-only made this call
for a seat at the top negotiating tables stronger and more urgent.
Building on the idea that 'a shared voice
is stronger than a single voice' the emerging powers realize that they have to
cooperate in order to push forward their own agendas. On this view, the new
forms of Southern multilateralism led by today's emerging and regional powers
have put the idea of the global South firmly back on the political and
intellectual map.
Three
questions about emerging powers
Debates about the diffusion of power and
the emergence of new powers have become ubiquitous. But there are many more
questions than clear answers.
First, if
power is shifting, where exactly is it shifting to? One view is that power is
simply shifting to major emerging states as part of the on-going dynamic of the
rise and fall of great powers (see Wight 1978, especially the chapter on great
powers). This is the whole point of stories about ‘Superpower China’, ‘India
Rising’, or ‘Brazil’s Moment’, and about the rise of the BRICs or the BASICs.
We can debate exactly who these new actors are, how they have behaved in the
past, and what they might want in the future. But the issues have fundamentally
to do with what ‘they’ will do with ‘their’ power—a limited number of important
new actors acquiring substantial amounts of new power.
An alternative view, however, is that we
are witnessing a much more general diffusion of power, often linked to
technological changes, to changes in the global economy, and to new forms of
social and political mobilization. Thus, if rising China is one central part
of contemporary global politics, the Arab Spring is another. Both illustrate how power may be
diffusing, but in very different ways. The ‘general power diffusion’ view holds
that the story is really about the ‘rise of the rest’ (Khanna 2009). This will
include other fast- developing societies, such as the so-called MINTs— Mexico,
Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. But it is also going to involve a multiplicity
of new actors. On this account the international system is increasingly characterized
by a diffusion of power, including to emerging and regional powers but also to
many private actors and transnational groups; by a diffusion of preferences,
with many more voices demanding to be heard both globally and within states as
a result of technology, globalization, and democratization; and by a diffusion
of ideas and values, with a reopening of the big questions of social, economic,
and political organization that were
supposedly brought to an end with the end of the cold war and the liberal
ascendancy.
If this view of a general diffusion of
power is true, then effective power and influence will be harder for everyone
to achieve, including both the currently strong and the new emerging powers. It
will be harder for the emerging powers to control their own regions and to
secure sustained support from weaker states. This suggests, for example, that
we need to pay as much attention to the relations between emerging powers and
weaker actors as we do to relations between emerging powers and the currently
dominant states. Another likely consequence is that it will be harder for the
governments of large, fast-developing states to maintain coherent and
consistent foreign policies as more groups domestically are mobilized and
empowered. The overall expectation would be of less effective power, both
within states and internationally.
Second, what is power? Power is one of the most complex and contested ideas
in the social sciences. It is an essentially contested concept in that it is
subject to the kind of debate that is not rationally resolvable. There is no
overarching theory of social power and no single analytical approach that can
provide a magic key. Political scientists differentiate between different
levels of power (Barnett and Duvall 2005); (1) relational power and the
capacity of a political unit to impose its will on another and to resist the
attempts of others to impose their will; (2) institutional power—power here
becomes the ability to control the agenda, to decide what gets decided, and to
exclude those issues which threaten the interests of the most powerful; and (3)
different forms of structural power that have to do with the constitution of
action and the material and discursive conditions for action. Others
distinguish between hard, coercive power on the one hand and soft power on the
other—the power of attraction, of getting others to emulate your own society
and its values. Almost all the arguments (for example Cox 2012) that reject the
decline of the US and of the West highlight the importance of combining these
different levels: global military dominance, the economic resilience and
attractiveness of US society, its continued pivotal role across global
governance institutions, and its unrivalled structural power, including the
capacity to generate and to promote the most powerful conceptions of
international and global order.
When we are told that a country is an
emerging power, the first question that we need to ask is: influential over
what actors, in what period, with respect to what matters? Thus we might want
to trace the growing role of South Africa, India, or Brazil in terms of their
influence in a particular region and the way in which being recognized as a
regional power may be an important part of their growing global influence. Or
we might want to understand Brazil’s influence not in terms of its very limited
military capabilities, but rather in terms of its diplomatic activism in
international organizations and what one analyst called its ‘diplomatic GNP’.
This has been visible in its active diplomacy in the WTO or in climate change
negotiations, and its policy of seeking to be a bridge-builder between the
emerging and industrialized worlds (Hurrell 2007). A further lesson from the
literature on social power is still more important. Discussion of power and
influence cannot be separated from the analysis of motives and values. It may
be true that all states, including emerging powers, seek power and security,
but the real question is the one pressed by constructivists: what sorts of
power do they seek, and for what purposes? Thus what makes a rising state want
to revise or challenge the system is unlikely to come solely from calculations
of hard power and material interest. Historically, revisionism has far more
frequently been the result of particular sets of foreign policy ideas within
rising states that explain why the existing status quo is unacceptable, even
intolerable— for example, that the existing order embodies historical
humiliations (as in the case of China); or that it does not grant the social
recognition to which the rising state feels entitled as a result of its power,
its values, its culture (as in the case of India or Brazil); or that the
existing order works against legitimate claims to special status within ‘its’
region.
Third, power for what? This is the most important question. It is impossible
to make any sense of the idea of a power shift unless we have in our heads some
idea of why shifting power is important and what it might be affecting. The
BRICs mattered to Goldman Sachs because they were emerging markets. They were
therefore important for profits and long-run investment decisions. But this
says absolutely nothing about why these same countries might matter politically
or geo- politically. This is why the analysis of rising powers cannot just
involve lists of power resources and evaluations of how different kinds of
power have shifted from one state or society to another. It has to connect with
our theoretical understanding of world politics.
For some, the history and theory of
emerging powers is simple and straightforward. International Relations has
always been a story of the rise and fall of great powers. For realists, this
forms the very heart of the subject and there is a well-established set of
ideas for understanding what is going on and for guiding policy responses. The
names of the countries may change but the logic does not. From this perspective
we should most certainly care about power transitions.
Periods of shifting power are difficult
and dangerous times. Rising states will naturally seek to challenge the status
quo and to revise the dominant norms of the system to reflect their own
interests and values. And established powers will be tempted to use their power
to block the emergence of rising or revisionist states, including through the
use of military force. Classical realists,
neoclassical realists, neo-realists, and power transition theorists differ as to whether
conflict derives more from the actions of revisionist power-seeking to remake
the rules of international order or from the status quo powers anxious to
preserve their power (Chan 2006). However, in the realist camp there is wide
consensus that if new powers are to count’ globally it will be exclusively
through their impact on the global balance of power, and that power
transitions are dangerous and unsettling. The clearest example is the view of
John Mearsheimer (2013) that conflict between the US and China will be very
hard to avoid.
As one would expect, this neo-realist
approach to emerging powers devotes great attention to the measurement of
material power, the construction of hierarchies of power, and the implications
of power transitions and power differentials for both institutionalized
cooperation and for the outbreak of major war. It is the possession of material
capabilities, and especially of coercive power, that determines who counts as a
great power. And for many in the realist tradition, it is the successful
deployment of coercive power, above all in a conflict against another major
power, that is the true entry card into the world of great power politics.
If the results of power transitions are
manifest in crises, conflicts, and hegemonic wars, the underlying dynamic
results from structural changes in the global economy. As Paul Kennedy
expressed it in the most influential modern version of this old idea:
[T]here exists a dynamic for change,
driven chiefly by economic and technological developments, which then impact
upon social structures, political systems, military power, and the position of
individual states and empires ... [T]his uneven pace of economic growth has had
crucial long-term impacts upon the relative military power and strategical
position of the members of the state system ... As the above narrative has
shown, economic prosperity does not always and immediately translate into
military effectiveness, for that depends upon many other factors, from
geography and national morale to generalship and tactical competence.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that all of the major shifts in the worlds
military-power balances have followed from alterations in the productive balances;
and further, that the rising and falling of the various empires and states in
the international system has been confirmed by the outcomes of the major Great
Power wars, where victory has always gone to the side with the greatest
material resources.
(Kennedy 1988: 566-7)
The most persuasive part of the realist
tradition moves beyond material power and stresses instead the importance of
the search for status and the acquisition of prestige. For Robert Gilpin, the
existence of a ‘hierarchy of prestige’ is central to the ordering of
international relations, and it is precisely the disjuncture between existing
perceptions of prestige and changing material capabilities that underpins the
logic of hegemonic conflict and the dynamics of change in international
relations (Gilpin 1981). Prestige is the currency of international politics.
International politics is characterized by a recurring distance that opens up
between changes in material capabilities and the hierarchy of status, and perceptions
and markers of prestige and esteem. This means that emerging powers are likely
to pursue particular policies for reasons of prestige. (India’s nuclear test
in 1998 is often seen as an example, although this is contested.) Equally,
Shogo Suzuki examines the way in which emerging powers attempt to persuade
their peers that they are worthy of legitimate great power status through
various forms of ‘recognition games’—Brazil sending troops to Haiti, for
example, partly to show that it was qualified for membership of the UN Security
Council (Suzuki 2008).
Finally, if power is shifting and if
conflict is to be avoided or limited, then it is crucial that new powers are
accommodated. The ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have nots’ need to seek new forms of
accommodation and negotiation.
This perspective is stressed by classical
realists, but especially by international society writers who see great powers
and great power concerts as fundamental to the ordering of international
society. The natural response to shifting power, from this perspective, is to
return to a far more great power-centred order—both to avoid tensions and
potential conflict amongst the existing and rising powers but also to achieve
the consensus needed to tackle the new and complex challenges such as climate
change, terrorism, and global economic governance. This can involve the reform
of formal multilateral institutions—such as bringing new members onto the UN
Security Council. But it can also involve increasing emphasis on different sorts
of informal groupings, clubs, concerts, and coalitions. Indeed, the
proliferation of discussion of new Groups such as the G2 (US-China), the G8+5, or the G20 has been viewed in terms of a revival of
concert diplomacy.
In the 1990s many argued that traditional
international relations were becoming less important than globalization, and that inter-state relations should be viewed within
a more complex picture of global politics. For many analysts, however, the
debate about emerging powers brings these traditional realist concerns firmly
back into view. Economics does not exist in a vacuum, and economic
globalization will inevitably affect the balance of global power—feeding back
into the structures and dynamics of a Westphalian state system rather than pointing
towards its transcendence—as liberals had expected. The state as an economic
actor proved resilient in seeking to control economic flows and to police
borders; and in seeking to exploit and develop state-based and mercantilist
modes of managing economic problems, especially in relation to resource
competition and energy geopolitics. Most significantly, the very dynamism and
successes of liberal globalization was having a vital impact on the
distribution of inter-state political power—above all towards the East and
parts of the South. If the debate over power shifts in the 1990s concentrated
on the shift of power from states to firms and non-state actors, the ‘power
shift’ of the past decade has focused on rising and emerging powers, on
state-directed economic activity, and on the mismatch between existing global
economic governance arrangements and the distribution of power among those with
the actual power of effective economic decision-making.
In addition, other factors appeared to be
pushing global order back in a broadly Westphalian direction.
These have included: the renewed salience
of security, the re-valorization of national security, and a renewed
preoccupation with war-fighting and counter-insurgency; the continued or
renewed power of nationalism, no longer potentially containable politically or
analytically in a box marked ‘ethnic conflict’ but manifest in the identity
politics and foreign policy actions of the major states in the system; the
renewed importance of nuclear weapons as central to the structure of regional
security complexes, and in the construction of great power hierarchies and the
distribution of seats at top tables; and finally the quiet return of balance of
power as both a motivation for state policy (as with US policies in Asia) and
as an element in the foreign policy of all second-tier states—not hard
balancing and the building up of hard power, but what is called soft
balancing, either in the form of attempts explicitly to de-legitimize US
hegemony or to argue for alternative conceptions of legitimacy.
It is of course possible to see these
developments simply as international relations returning once more to its
Westphalian norm—the return of history and the end of dreams, as the US
commentator Robert Kagan (2009) has expressed it. But others would stress the
complex, hybrid, and contested character of international society—a society
that faces a range of classical Westphalian challenges (especially to do with
power transition and the rise of new powers), but one that faces these
challenges in a context marked by strong post- Westphalian characteristics (in terms of the material conditions
of globalization, the changed character of legitimacy, and the changed balance
between the international and the domestic, even in large, introspective
societies) (Hurrell 2007).
One post-Westphalian element has to do
with the structural changes in the nature of the foreign policy and governance
challenges faced both by individual states and by international society
collectively. Dealing with these challenges—climate change, stable trade rules,
flu pandemics, a credible system of global finance—will continue to involve the
sustaining of rules that shape how societies are organized domestically, that
are structurally tied to transnational processes, that go beyond entrenched
notions of territoriality and sovereignty, that depend on the active and
effective participation of a wide range of actors, and that necessitate many
varied forms of governance, international law and international political
organization.
From this perspective, rising states
matter not only, or even primarily, because of the material power resources
that they possess, but rather because of their unavoidable importance in
solving these kinds of global problems. Their detachment from or opposition to
current institutions is seen as one of the most important weaknesses of
existing institutions—think of the move away from the World Bank and IMF on the
part of major emerging economies, or the opposition to developed country
preferences in the WTO led by Brazil and India, or the effective breakdown of
the global aid regime in the face of the new aid donors such as China and India.
Such countries are therefore substantively critical to the management of major
global issues such as climate change or nuclear proliferation.
A second post-Westphalian element has to
do with the changing problem of legitimacy. All states and social orders need
to gain the authority and legitimacy that the possession of crude power can
never secure on its own. All major powers face the imperative of trying to
turn a capacity for crude coercion into legitimate authority. The Bush years
(2000-8) demonstrated the limits of hegemonic or top-down modes of governance
The financial crisis has exacerbated the already evident decline in the idea
that the legitimacy of international institutions could be grounded in claims
to superior economic or technological knowledge. The inherit institutions of
the Western-led international order have proved manifestly dysfunctional, and
neither leading market actors nor technical specialists have ready ideas or
answers. Legitimacy based on effective outputs and on technical knowledge has
therefore been in short supply and this is likely to strengthen demands for
institutions to expand their membership in order to increase their legitimacy
and representative authority. Emerging powers are therefore critical if
international institutions are to re-establish legitimacy and a degree of
representativeness, for example through reform the United Nations Security
Council or of the international financial institutions.
Key Points
For mainstream realist and neo-realist
writers, rising powers matter because their growing material power disrupts the
balance of power. There is great debate about exactly how changes in material
power cause conflict, but widespread agreement that power shifts are associated
with conflict and that this will continue: hence the prediction of many
neo-realists that conflict between the US and China is inevitable.
These materially-based approaches to
rising powers and global order remain highly influential. But they do not tell
us enough about the potential pathways that might lead to the emergence of
major power competition. What we want to know is precisely how an international
system might move across a spectrum from the general diffusion of power, to a
situation of multipolarity, to a system in which the foreign policies of the
major states are driven by balance of power politics and logics. Such systems
do not suddenly appear out of nowhere.
Material understandings of power provide
an insufficient basis for understanding the reasons for challenge and the
crucial importance of status and recognition as factors in
the foreign policy behaviour of emerging
powers. Even if one accepts the idea of rising states as revisionist, it is
difficult to understand the sources of their dissatisfaction purely within a
world of material power and systemically given incentives.
For international society theorists,
power hierarchies are noi simply about material power. Great powers constitute
a particular social category. Being a great power depends on recognition by
others and on the cultivation of legitimacy. The stability of power transitions
will be crucially affected by the accommodation of rising powers and the
reallocation of the seats around the top table of international politics.
For many theorists, the 'power' of today's
rising powers is noi just a matter of the power resources that they possess. It
derives from the role that they are playing in functional institutions created
to deal with ever more pressing sets of challenges (such as the management of
the global economy, climate change, nuclear proliferation). And it derives from
their equally necessary role in the creation of legitimate institutions and
representative structures of global governance.
Rising states and the globalization of world politics
There are broadly two ways in which a
global order might come into being. One is via the coming together on more or
less equal terms of a series of regionally- based systems, whether made up of
states, empires, or other political groupings. The other is by the global
dominance of what was originally a regional system. And it is this model that
stands behind global order in the twentieth century, with expansion of an originally.
European
international society onto a global scale— first, through the globalizing force
of capitalism, the economic rise of the West, and the immense transformative
impact that it has on the regions and societies which get drawn into a
deepening system of exchange and production relations; second, through the emergence
of an often highly conflictual international political system which, as the
English geopolitical writer Halford Mackinder argued, came to see the entire
earth as the single stage for promotion of the interests of the core powers of
the system (Mackinder 1904: 422); and third, through the development of a
global international society whose institutional forms (the nation-state, great
powers, international law, spheres of influence) were globalized from their
originally European context in the course of European expansion and the
subsequent process of decolonization (Bull and Watson 1985).
A
central part of the problem of global order in the twentieth century was the
struggle of the Third World, or later the global South, against what was widely
understood as the Western dominance of the international system. And a central
question about the idea of ‘emergence’ has to do with the ways in which the
rise of today’s emerging developing countries may be said to constitute a
challenge to this historically constructed Western order.
On
one side, it has become common to suggest that the rise of new powers, the
developmental gap that has opened up between them and other developing
countries, and their very different power-political, military, and geopolitical
opportunities and options simply underscore the outdatedness and irrelevance of
old-fashioned notions of the Third World or the global South. The very
substantial expansion of the role of China in Africa, and the emergence of both
India and China as significant aid donors, highlight the gap between them and
African countries. Although South-South trade has expanded, just fourteen countries
account for 75 per cent of that trade. Their success therefore places them in
an objectively different analytical category from other developing countries.
Looking
more broadly, the former president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has argued
for the ‘end of the Third World’:
If 1989 saw the end of
the ‘Second World’ with Communism’s demise, then 2009 saw the end of what was
known as the ‘Third World’: We are now in a new, fast-evolving multi-polar
world economy—in which some developing countries are emerging as economic
powers; others are moving towards becoming additional poles of growth; and
some are struggling to attain their potential within this new system—where
North and South, East and West, are now points on a compass, not economic
destinies. (Zoellick 2010)
If
poverty, weakness, and political marginalization defined the Third World,
something important seems to have changed. ‘The salient feature of the Third
World was that it wanted economic and political clout. It is getting both’ (The
Economist 2010: 165). On the back of such a view come calls for major
emerging powers to jettison claims for special treatment or special status—in
terms of the trading system they should ‘graduate’ from the developing country
category; in terms of climate change they should not hide behind the Kyoto
Protocol’s principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’; and in
terms of human rights they should no longer invoke outdated Third-Worldist conceptions
of hard sovereignty as a reason for inaction. In other words, they should no
longer use underdevelopment, poverty, and a prior history of colonialism or
historical marginality as ‘excuses’ to evade assuming their ‘responsibilities’
as emerging major powers.
On
the other hand, there is a powerful sense in much writing on rising powers that
they represent a challenge that cannot be understood solely in terms of the
distribution of relative power, shared characteristics and values, or
effective diplomatic coordination. Joseph Nye asks how seriously analysts
should take the term BRIC. And he goes on:
As an indicator of
economic opportunity, they should welcome it, though it would make more sense
if Indonesia replaced Russia. In political terms, China, India, and Russia are
competitors for power in Asia, and Brazil and India have been hurt by China’s
undervalued currency. Thus, BRIC is not likely to become a serious political
organization of like-minded states. (Nye
2010)
But
does this miss out aspects of what, why, and how today’s rising powers may
matter or how we might best understand the nature of the challenge that they
may pose to the existing global order?
In
the first place, there remains a commonality, if not directly in terms of the challengers then certainly in terms of the target of
that challenge. From this perspective the crucial point is that we are witnessing
a challenge to the ‘West’. Sometimes the focus is on the West as a historical
formation built around the history of European power and its colonial system
that was then inherited, transformed, and globalized by the United States.
Sometimes the focus is narrower, on the Euro-Atlantic world or even the
Anglo-American world or Anglosphere. Sometimes arguments centre on the
US-centred Greater West and the multilateral institutions created in the
post-1945 period. The language is everywhere ill-defined and fuzzy. The
widespread use of inverted commas—the ‘West’, the ‘developing world’, the
‘rest’—suggests hesitancy or uncertainty. But the ubiquity of this kind of
language implies that what fundamentally distinguishes today’s emerging powers
is their historic position outside, or on the margins of, some notion of the
West.
Second, it is important to ask about the
legacy of historical perceptions of second-class treatment, of subalterneity,
of marginalization, and of subordinate status in an unequal and exploitative
global political and economic system. A central element in the foreign policy
of many emerging powers has been the demand for status, for recognition, and
for respect. In the case of China, the need to acquire the power and wealth to
overcome external vulnerability and to reverse ‘a century of humiliation’ is
well known. For influential commentators, India’s evolution into a modern
nation-state has been marked by an powerful quest for international recognition
of its status (Mehta 2009). And a similar idea is captured by a speech by the
Brazilian president Lula da Silva in 2003: ‘As we grow, and as we convert
promises into reality, our participation in international relations will also
widen and deepen. It falls to us to demand, with simplicity but without
hesitation, the recognition and respect for the new dimensions of our
interests’ (quoted in Hurrell 2010).
A third factor has to do with the distinctiveness
of today’s emerging powers. Even if we place China in a category of its own,
countries such as India, Brazil, and South Africa are large developing
countries that will continue to be relatively poor in per capita terms. Poverty
and inequality remain major problems, and high growth rates remain a major
political imperative. For all their economic success, they remain developing
economies and developing societies marked both by incomplete development and by
incomplete integration into a global economy whose ground rules have been set
historically by the industrialized North. Moreover, a great deal depends on our
assessment of the nature
and extent of developmental gains and of
the actual power shifts that are taking place. It is easy to exaggerate the
power of emerging powers and the extent of the power shift that has taken
place. Yes, China, India, and Brazil have indeed acquired veto power in the
WTO; yes, changes are under way in the voting structures and governance
arrangements of the international financial institutions; and yes, the
creation of the G20 does represent an important change in the nature and membership
of the top table. But these changes are, thus far, hardly revolutionary.
Developmental policy space remains restricted by the current rules of the
global game. As a result, there remain many areas of common interest and common
concern amongst a broad range of developing countries which remain rule-takers
far more than rule-makers.
A final factor concerns the continued
relevance of North-South relations for the framing of global problems and the
extent to which this framing helps to structure the interests of emerging
powers. Climate change again provides an important example. Hence it may indeed
be the case that BASICs have been tempted to stress their special
responsibilities and to join clubs or groupings of major emitters, even if, as
at Copenhagen, this opens up major divisions with other developing countries.
It is also true that emerging Southern powers complicate the simple normative
picture of a world divided between a rich and powerful North and an
impoverished and marginalized South. This is in terms of the aggregate
contribution of their societies to the problem, in terms of their capacity as
states and societies to contribute in financial and technological terms to
solutions, and in terms of the moral relevance of unequal patterns of wealth
and resource use within them. But it remains very hard to think about climate
change outside the context of inequality, poverty, and the developmental
imperatives of large developing countries. It may be technically or
technologically possible to imagine dealing with climate change without
considering inequality and global poverty. But, from a wide range of moral
viewpoints, it would be wholly unacceptable to deal with climate change in a
way that would worsen the welfare and life chances of the currently poor; that
would fail to provide sufficient developmental and ecological space for these
poor to satisfy their rights to reasonable standards of subsistence and
well-being; and that would undermine or close off the developmental prospects
for the poor of future generations, including the very large numbers of poor
in ‘rising powers’—India most notably.
It may therefore be possible, and often
useful, to analyse emerging powers in terms of how they are seeking to navigate
and best position themselves within an existing state-centric, liberal, and
capitalist order while accepting most of the underlying assumptions and values of
that order. But the nature of that navigation has been shaped by their historical
trajectory in that order and by the developmental, societal, and geopolitical
context of their emergence.
There is a great deal of
uncertainty about who’s up and who’s down in contemporary global politics. As
in the 1970s, many believe that the EU has run into the sand. The optimists, on
the other hand, believe that the very seriousness of the euro crisis will
stimulate a further r round of the deeper integration needed both to resolve
Europe’s internal problems and to re-establish its position on internationally.
The 1970s also saw a protracted debate about US decline (and about the
‘inevitable’ global rise of Japan). But US ‘declinism’ gave way to a period in
n which US power was reasserted globally. The question today is whether the
diffusion of power and the complexity of global politics undermine the prospect
for a repetition of this kind of hegemonic reassertionism. In relation to the
emerging world, newspaper commentary shifts from day to day, with pundits
pointing to the slowdown in Chinese economic growth or the weight of corruption
p in India, or the seriousness of social violence in South Africa and of social
protests in Brazil. Such issues are not unimportant. But answering the deeper
questions about emerging powers depends partly on understanding their attributes,
their behaviour, and their goals, and partly on an evaluation of the changing
nature of the global order itself and of the kinds of power that matter now or
will come to matter in the future.
Case Study 1
The BRICs
The
'BRICs' is an acronym that refers to the emerging countries Brazil, China,
India, and Russia combined. The term was first coined in the research paper, Building Better Global Economic BRICS,
by
economist Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001, who regarded these four
countries as the key emerging market economies. O'Neill projected that the
relative size and share of the BRICs in the world economy would rise
exponentially.
In his
report, O'Neill also described the implications this has for the Group of Seven
(G7) and calls for a rearrangement of representation.
In
2003, the Goldman Sachs report compiled by Dominic Wilson and Roopa
Purushothaman called Dreaming with BRICs:
The Path to 2050 expanded on the
thesis of O'Neill. Their report predicted that, in all likelihood, by 2025 the
BRICs could account for over half of the size of the G7 in terms of GDP. And in
less than forty years the BRIC's economies together could be larger than the G7.
Several reports have followed up on this, offering more detailed aspects and
readjusted projections as the BRIC economies fared better than expected.
The key
underlying argument behind these predictions is that China and India will arise
as the world's principal suppliers of manufactured goods and services, while
Brazil and Russia will become similarly dominant as suppliers of raw materials.
What the countries also have in common is that they all have an enormous
potential consumer market, complemented by access to regional markets and to a
large labour force.
The original 2003
Goldman Sachs report entitled Dreaming with BRICs can be found at: http://www.goldmansachs.com/
ceoconfidential/CEO-2003-12.pdj The 2009 updated Goldman Sachs study on the
BRICs, The Long-term Outlook for the BRICs and N-77
Post Crisis, taking into account the impact of the financial crisis, can
be found at: http:/ www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/archive/brics-at-8
brics-the-long-term-outlook.pc
Box 5.1
From G5 to G20
In response to the financial crisis, the
first Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (G20) Summit
took place in 2008, reflecting the growing importance of the key emerging
powers in the world economy. The G20 countries represent about 90 per cent of
the world's gross national product and 80 per cent of world trade. Since the
initial meeting the G20 leaders have continued to meet periodically.
G5: United
States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada
G7: United
States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy
G8+5: United
States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Russia, Brazil, China, India,
Mexico, South Africa
G20: United
States, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, Russia, Brazil, China, India,
Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Korea, Argentina,
European Union
Questions
Has the United States been a status quo or
a revisionist power since the end of the cold war?
Should the United States, Japan, and
Europe be 'afraid' of the BRICs?
What is left of the BRICs without China?
Does this BRIC grouping represent a
cohesive economic unit and power bloc?
Does realism tell us all we really need to
know about rising powers and power transitions?
Will the permanent members in the UN
Security Council ever be willing to offer an additional seat to a country like
India, Brazil, or South Africa?
In what ways does China challenge the
existing international order?
Is India a great power?
Does Brazilian foreign policy indicate
that you can be a major power without significant military capabilities?
Do today's emerging powers mean the end of
the Third World?
Further Reading
Alden, C., Morphet, S., and Vieira, M. A.
(2010), The South in World Politics
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). An analysis of the global South and of the
new Southern coalitions.
Barnett, M., and Duvall, R. (2005), 'Power
in International Politics' International
Organization, 59: 39-75. One of the best discussions of type of
power in international relations and the complexities involved in making sense
of power.
Brooks, S. G., and Wolhforth, W. C.
(2008), World Out of Balance:
International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). A strong argument in favour of the
continued power of the United States.
Cox, M. (2012), 'Power Shifts, Economic Change, and the
Decline of the West?', International
Relations, 24(4): 369-88. Questions the idea of an irresistible
shift in power to the East and to the emerging world.
Foot, R., and Walter, A. (2011), China,
the United States and Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press). This book relates the evolution of US-China relations to the norms and
structures of global governance.
Hurrell, A. (2007), On
Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society (Oxford:
Oxford University Press). An analysis of contending approaches to the idea of
international and global order.
Hurrell, A. (2010), 'Brazil and the New Global Order', Current History, 109(724): 60-6. An
overview of post-cold war Brazilian foreign policy.
Johnston, A. I. (2003), 'Is China a Status Quo Power?', International Security, 27(4): 5-56. An
important analysis of China's rise that questions the categories of 'status
quo' and 'revisionism'.
Khanna, P. (ed.) (2009), The Second World: How Emerging Powers are
Redefining Global
Competition in the
Twenty-First Century
(New York: Random House). A broad and influential account of structural
economic changes and the ways in which flows of people, energy, and economics
are shifting the map of global politics.
Narlikar, A. (2007), 'All that Glitters is not Gold: India's Rise
to Power', Third World Quarterly, 28(5):
983-96. A sober assessment of India's rise.
Zoellick, R. B. (2010), 'The End of the Third World: Modernizing
Multilateralism for a
Multipolar World' <http://www.international-economy.com/TIE_Sp10_Zoellick.pdf>, last accessed 24 July 2013. How changing
patterns of development are affecting multilateralism.
Online Resource
Centre
Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book to access more learning resources on this chapter topic at www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/baylis6exe/
Visit the Online Resource Centre that accompanies this book to access more learning resources on this chapter topic at www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/baylis6exe/
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