September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon asked of the term “Great Powers,” what defines a Great Power? In an initial answer he quotes his college professor, who defined the term to mean “any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” I think this was true in a particular way. “Great Power” is in part a historical term, denoting one of those European states—when the term was coined, France, Great Britain, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—that could in combination with any two of the others make an unassailable combination. The concept, if not the language, dated back to the mid-eighteenth century (in some ways, earlier), and lasted through the beginning of the First World War. I was once told that the great German historian Ranke thought that there would always be five Great Powers, with some falling from that rank as others rose. There is something to the last half of that—Spain had once been a superpower, before there was such a phrase, and Sweden a Great Power, but neither was either by the time of Castlereagh, the British foreign minister Mr. Gordon indentified as having coined the phrase "Great Power." There was once something to the first half of it: Bismarck clearly thought in terms of the number five when he remarked that the secret of diplomacy was simply to be one of the three rather than one of the two. After reunification, Italy became an honorary Great Power, but it didn’t possess the requisite military strength to play the role (Bismarck again, on Italy: “What a good appetite, but what poor teeth!”). After 1905, Japan in a sense became a Great Power, initially because it could affect the military balance of a system involving Russia. So Great Powers were states with the capacity to significantly sway the European balance of power by their own diplomacy; Middle Powers (Sardinia, at one period, similarly Saxony and Bavaria) were powers one might have to take seriously, but the movement of one of them did not almost inevitably alter the balance of power. An implication of the historical term Great Power was that power was additive in a straightforward way. One counted corps or divisions (at one time, battalions), or ships of the line, or battleships, or dreadnoughts, and toted up the numbers on either side. The alliance possessing the significantly larger number of the relevant unit of force could in theory get its way on any question where the other side could possibly back down. In an age in which decisions for war were made by monarchs or elite groups advised by smallish numbers of specialists, and war aims did not generally involve the extinction of an adversary’s sovereignty, backing down was usually possible, which didn’t mean that the apparently weaker party would inevitably do so, as the existence of war between coalitions, sometimes vicious and protracted wars, very clearly demonstrates. The habit of counting units of force to determine dominance, and assuming that the will of the stronger would usually prevail, lasted well into the nuclear age, where elaborate disputes over counting made up a discipline once wittily dubbed “nuclear theology.” There were almost always obstacles to counting and getting reliable and useful results, and there were often difficulties with weighing the effective power of a coalition, which might have various troubles bringing its theoretical quantitative advantage to bear. But a Great Power was simply a power whose numerical weight was thought intrinsically additive, impressive and decisive. Nowadays, most people realize that nuclear weapons are rarely this sense additive. Past a fairly low threshold, you do not necessarily get a proportionate or even obviously useful increment of power by having more of them, which helped dissolve the simple category of Great Power. Leaving aside nuclear weapons, increases in the relative power and reach of some states notoriously made two states first “superpowers” and then made one state a “hyperpower.” That would be us. Former Great Powers, even in combination, seemed dwarfed by the power of either superpower or the subsequent hyperpower. Claims that the current hyperpower cannot enforce its will by means of violence to my eyes suggest only what are by most historical standards the peculiarities of the current hyperpower—its relative restraint and moderation. In the past, economic power was not too sharply distinguished from military power, because it was thought that it could readily be turned into military power, by raising and equipping, or renting, military or naval units. The events of 1940, when Germany defeated and apparently came near to crushing the British and French empires, ought to have made clear the fact that the potential military strength suggested by economic power may not matter if the conversion of the latter into the former lags too much. It is possible that military power can nowadays be pretty effectively restrained by law, as Mr. Burns suggests. Alas, I have my doubts.
|
