Coping with Geopolitical Decline: The United States in European Perspective 9780228004875

Table of contents :
Cover
Copyright
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction Coping with Geopolitical Decline
1 What Is Decline?
Part One The European Experience
2 The Culture of Decline in Later Byzantium
3 Defeat and Decline: Understanding Military Failure in Victorian Britain and in America after Vietnam and Iraq
4 Decline in Denial: France since 1945
5 Resisting Decline: Russia, the West, and Eurasia
Part Two Coping with American Decline
6 American Decline and Performative War, or How to Do Things with Force
7 Adjusting to Rise and Coping with Decline: The China-US Relationship in Historical and Theoretical Context
8 American Decline, Liberal Hegemony, and the Transformation of World Politics
Conclusion European Lessons for America
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

coping with geopolitical decline

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Hu ma n D i me nsi o ns i n F or e i gn P o l i cy, M i l i tary Stu dies , a nd Se c ur i t y St ud i e s Series editors: Stéphanie A.H. Bélanger, Pierre Jolicoeur, and Stéfanie von Hlatky Books published in the Human Dimensions in Foreign Policy, Military Studies, and Security Studies series offer fresh perspectives on foreign affairs and global governance. Titles in the series illuminate critical issues of global security in the twenty-first century and emphasize the human dimensions of war such as the health and well-being of soldiers, the factors that influence operational effectiveness, the civil-military relations and decisions on the use of force, as well as the ethical, moral, and legal ramifications of ongoing conflicts and wars. Foreign policy is also analyzed both in terms of its impact on human rights and the role the public plays in shaping policy directions. With a strong focus on definitions of security, the series encourages ­discussion of contemporary security challenges and welcomes works that focus on issues including human security, violent conflict, terrorism, military cooperation, and foreign and defence policy. This series is published in collaboration with Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada with the Centre for International and Defence Policy, the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, and the Centre for Security, Armed Forces, and Society.   1 Going to War? Trends in Military Interventions Edited by Stéfanie von Hlatky and H. Christian Breede   2 Bombs, Bullets, and Politicians France’s Response to Terrorism Christophe Chowanietz   3 War Memories Commemoration, Recollections, and Writings on War Edited by Stéphanie A.H. Bélanger and Renée Dickason   4 Disarmament under International Law John Kierulf

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  5 Contract Workers, Risk, and the War in Iraq Sierra Leonean Labor Migrants at US Military Bases Kevin J.A. Thomas   6 Violence and Militants From Ottoman Rebellions to Jihadist Organizations Baris Cayli   7 Frontline Justice The Evolution and Reform of Summary Trials in the Canadian Armed Forces Pascal Lévesque

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  8 Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism Assessing Domestic and International Strategies Edited by Stéfanie von Hlatky

10 Coping with Geopolitical Decline The United States in European Perspective Edited by Frédéric Mérand

  9 Transhumanizing War Performance Enhancement and the Implications for Policy, Society, and the Soldier Edited by H. Christian Breede, Stéphanie A.H. Bélanger, and Stéfanie von Hlatky

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Coping with Geopolitical Decline The United States in European Perspective

Edited by

Frédér ic M é rand

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-2280-0352-6 (cloth) 978-0-2280-0353-3 (paper) 978-0-2280-0487-5 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-0488-2 (eP UB)

Legal deposit third quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Coping with geopolitical decline: the United States in European ­perspective/ edited by Frédéric Mérand. Names: Mérand, Frédéric, 1976- editor. Series: Human dimensions in foreign policy, military studies, and security studies; 10. Description: Series statement: Human dimensions in foreign policy, military ­studies, and security studies; 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200274279 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200274473 | ISB N 9780228003533 (paper) | IS BN 9780228003526 (cloth) | I SB N 9780228004875 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228004882 (eP U B ) Subjects: L CS H: Geopolitics—Europe. | L CS H : Geopolitics—United States. Classification: L CC J C319 .C 67 2020 | DDC 320.1/2—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5 / 13 Sabon.

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Contents



Tables and Figures  ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Coping with Geopolitical Decline  3 Frédéric Mérand

  1 What Is Decline?  23 Jonathan Sachs part one 

the european experience

  2 The Culture of Decline in Later Byzantium  53 Cecily Hilsdale   3 Defeat and Decline: Understanding Military Failure in Victorian Britain and in America after Vietnam and Iraq  77 Richard Lachmann   4 Decline in Denial: France since 1945  107 Olivier Schmitt   5 Resisting Decline: Russia, the West, and Eurasia  127 Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem part two 

coping with american decline

  6 American Decline and Performative War, or How to Do Things with Force  163 Julian Go

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viii Contents

  7 Adjusting to Rise and Coping with Decline: The China-US Relationship in Historical and Theoretical Context  194 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson   8 American Decline, Liberal Hegemony, and the Transformation of World Politics  222 G. John Ikenberry

Conclusion: European Lessons for America  251 Frédéric Mérand

Contributors 265 Index 267

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Tables and Figures

ta b l e s

0.1 3.1 5.1 7.1 7.2

A typology of strategies to cope with geopolitical decline  8 US military spending as a percentage of G D P  83 Elite vs mass foreign policy orientations, 1993–2000  142 China’s economic rise vs other states  204 China’s military rise  205 figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

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William Playfair chart 1  36 Details from figure 1.1  37 William Playfair chart 2  38 Putin’s approval rating  138 Attitudes toward the US  144 “Is Russia Today a Great Power?”  146 Attitudes toward the E U 148

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Acknowledgments

Like many edited volumes – and probably quite a few cases of geopolitical decline – this book has been long in the making. A first version of most chapters was presented at a workshop on decline management and power transitions that I organized in January 2015 in a hotel designed by Dan Hanganu in Montreal. I thank the participants and discussants, especially Prerna Singh, Pierre Martin, Nancy Turgeon, Vincent Pouliot, T.V. Paul, and Xavier Lafrance. The workshop was sponsored by the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies, the Chair in American Economic and Political Studies, the Université de Montréal Centre for International Studies (C ÉR IU M ), and the International Security in the Globalization Era research team funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec sur la société et la culture. Subsequent versions of the chapters, to which G. John Ikenberry added his own contribution, were presented as a presidential theme panel of the 2017 annual conference of the International Studies Association in Baltimore. I thank the discussant Iver B. Neumann, along with T.V. Paul, then president of the I S A , for inviting us to present our work. Dominika Kunertova and Antoine Rayroux have provided invaluable research assistance ever since I began my ruminations about geopolitical decline and coping strategies. I don’t think I could have completed the book without the help and craftsmanship of Jean-François Bélanger, who prepared and provided detailed comments on the manuscript at a critical stage when my mind was diverted to other projects. Finally, I would like to thank our editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, Jacqueline Mason, as well as Stéphanie Bélanger, Stéfanie von

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xii Acknowledgments

Hlatky, and Pierre Jolicoeur, who welcomed the book in their series. Ryan Perks did a superb job as copy editor. This book is dedicated to Steven Rytina, who introduced me to historical sociology at McGill University, gave me my first research assistantship when I was still an undergraduate student, and convinced and helped me to apply to graduate school at Berkeley. That was one of the three best decisions I ever made. Frédéric Mérand Université de Montréal

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coping with geopolitical decline

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Introduction

Coping with Geopolitical Decline Frédéric Mérand

Globalization has led to the rise of new powers and precipitated the decline of old ones. While considerable attention is paid to the former, mainly around the question of whether China will challenge world order, there is not much discussion about how declining nations adapt to shifts in the balance of power. What does it mean for people to feel that they live in shrunk powers? Which political, economic, military, and ideological strategies do leaders develop to stave off, deny, or combat a perceived loss of status? What consequences do these strategies have on international orders, from the global to the regional level? When one thinks about geopolitical decline, the contemporary US debate quickly comes to mind. Back in the 1980s, Paul Kennedy predicted the decline of the US due to “imperial overstretch.”1 Scholars such as Samuel Huntington were quick to retort that, thanks to its internal dynamism, America would actually find the strength for renewal. Huntington added that the prediction of US decline was a recurring fad that had never had much of an empirical basis.2 The end of the Cold War seemed to settle the debate in his favour, as America became, in the words of French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the unipolar world’s “hyperpuissance.”3 As we enter the twenty-first century, China’s rise rekindles the debate.4 In the declinist camp, realists, historical sociologists, and world-systems theorists argue that we are moving to a bipolar or a multipolar world in which US influence is diminishing relative to China and perhaps even other emerging powers such as India.5 In the renewal camp, liberals (mostly) argue that US power resources are certainly not declining in absolute terms, and that the US possesses a

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Frédéric Mérand

unique set of strategic tools that will allow it to remain the pre-eminent power in the institutional order it created well into the century.6 The election of President Donald Trump in 2016 hardened positions. His ambition to put “America First,” combined with a practice of antagonizing rivals and allies, is a real test of whether individual leaders make a difference in preventing or accelerating geopolitical decline. This book speaks to this debate through the angle of decline management, or “coping strategies.” Unlike realists and liberals, we take an agnostic stance on whether such strategies are effective at preventing decline. Working from the bottom up, our modest aim is to understand how leaders deal with decline, and what impact they have on domestic and international developments. We distinguish leaders, or decision-makers, from elites – that is, the social stratum that embodies the critical socio-political context in which geopolitical decisions are made. Coping has something to do with what Erving Goffman called “impression-management”:7 How do leaders try to keep up appearances as they feel the earth moving under their feet? The US example demonstrates that the perception of decline matters because it signals a loss of standing and reputation in the world, or, more simply put, a declining social status.8 Lebow argues that states are not only motivated by their appetite, but also by a quest for spirit (i.e., the intersubjective ambitions of prestige and glory).9 Since symbols matter, the perception of decline collides with this quest for status.10 So does the inability to muster material resources that are commensurate with a state’s previous rank. Now, trying to align the presentation of oneself with the world’s perception may allow for a peaceful power transition. But there is also a risk that the mismatch between self-perception and social status generates conflict. Exploring four European cases before turning to the contemporary US debate, we argue that coping strategies rely on a mix of military, political, economic, and ideological power resources. These resources, which are differently affected by geopolitical decline, are mobilized in different combinations to deploy coping strategies that are embedded in a political entity’s deep context. For example, Byzantine leaders sought to offset their declining economic power with ideological power, while Russia is increasingly resorting to its remaining military might. Why do leaders deploy certain strategies rather than others? What is the impact of these strategies on the fate, broadly understood, of the states that use them?

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Introduction 5

As a tentative answer to these questions, this book puts forward two main arguments. First, geopolitics is not fate. Whether leaders choose to modernize their economy, bolster their diplomatic status, or launch preventive war makes a huge difference to the extent and the speed of a country’s decline – and can perhaps even reverse it. The following chapters provide several illustrations. For example, British leaders launched military reforms when they precociously identified, around the turn of the nineteenth century, possible roots of what would become secular decline in military defeats. France succeeded in postponing geopolitical decline after World War II with a series of military, economic, political, and ideological initiatives that are often subsumed under President de Gaulle’s strategy of grandeur. More recently, Russia managed to mitigate its decline after 1991 by harnessing oil and gas resources for economic recovery, and by developing a strategy of military rebuilding and strong nationalism. Not all strategies are successful. Polish rulers, for example, famously failed at backing their ambitions with material capabilities, such that their status “sank drastically” after World War I.11 Although it is too early to tell, several observers see in the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European Union a decline-management strategy that may backfire and throw the country into geopolitical irrelevance. Such a decision, which can only be explained by domestic sociological, political, economic, and ideological factors, including intra-elite conflict, belies the notion that geopolitics overdetermines the dynamics of decline. Although Brexit does not feature in the case studies, this is a theme we will return to in the conclusion. Our second argument posits that coping strategies impact international orders, which include the balance of power, the concert of great powers, liberal regimes, interdependence, and the exercise of hegemony, either at the regional or the global level.12 Some strategies may stave off decline but precipitate military conflicts with neighbours; others may preserve the peace at the expense of a country’s standing. To take Russia’s example again, it is quite obvious that Putin’s military and ideological strategy has had a direct, conflict-generating impact, as seen in the partial dismantlement of Georgia and Ukraine. It has also heightened tensions with the West by making eastern European countries more insecure, providing cover to anti-democratic forces in Europe and North America, and destabilizing the West’s strategy in the Middle East. For a coping strategy that strengthens regional order,

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Frédéric Mérand

it is interesting to turn to Byzantium, whose leaders expended considerable resources on ideological prestige at the cost of economic and military sustainability. Today, observers who criticize Barack Obama’s preference for multilateralism (“leadership from behind”) argue that the US shot itself in the foot by appeasing rivals rather than imposing its domination. By contrast, all the authors gathered in this book, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, argue that the US would do worse if it chose preventive war, for example with China, Russia, or North Korea. Taken together, these two arguments suggest that coping matters. Note that our time frame is the moyenne durée: over centuries, all dominant powers end up giving way to others; what concerns us here is the period, roughly that of a single lifetime, when leaders can actually make a difference. When Edward Gibbon wrote about decline, he was thinking in terms of centuries; today, the debate is often centred on a decade. A “lifetime” carries a different meaning in dynastic systems, when the rule of kings or emperors actually lasted a lifetime, compared to today’s democracies, when leaders’ legacies may be quicker to ascertain. For example, George W. Bush ruled only eight years but he inherited the foreign policy of his father’s advisers and made decisions that, as we write this book, continue to be felt acutely in the Middle East and Afghanistan. This narrowed temporal consideration allows us to go beyond contingent policy discussions over last year’s growth rate while keeping a grip on structural constraints that leaders are capable of perceiving as well as strategies that they can envisage and develop. As a result, this book contains studies that eschew grand theory à la Kennedy and speculative abstractions à la Hegel. Rather, they pay attention to real people dealing, in their view, with real problems. To do so, the book embraces, like world-systems theory but in a way that emphasizes agency, a decidedly multidisciplinary approach. While it is understandable that political scientists shape the debate about geopolitical decline, other disciplines have much to contribute to an approach that privileges elites as the level of analysis: literary scholars who can capture their collective representations, art historians who analyze the material forms taken by coping strategies, and sociologists who uncover the complex power structures that underlie leader strategies. For social scientists, leaders and the socio-political elite provide tangible empirical material that is more easily tapped into than abstract international systems.

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Introduction 7 a t y p o l o g y o f c o p i n g s t r at e g i e s

To compare and analyze a selection of “declining” cases across time and space, we introduce a typology of coping strategies. Leaders deploy coping strategies at two levels: vis-à-vis other states in the international system and vis-à-vis each other or other groups at the domestic level. We take as a given that coping strategies take place in a context where the political entity is felt to be declining in relation to rising powers. We define strategy as the context-specific practice of trying to shape the environment in order to reproduce one’s position, or status, in the world.13 For leaders, coping with real or perceived decline consists of using extant economic, military, cultural, and political resources competently – or strategically – vis-à-vis other actors. Such strategic performances can be informed by more or less conscious objectives. Leaders’ decisions will generally be aligned with the hierarchy of resources valued in the relevant socio-political context: the domestic elite. As Michael Mann has shown, the relative value of economic, military, cultural (ideological), and political resources has evolved over the centuries and will differ from one context to another.14 If, for example, cultural resources are dominant among the elite, we expect that leaders will adopt strategies that emphasize such resources. This is a relatively standard approach when analyzing state-society relations in a comparative-historical perspective. When considering geopolitical decisions in particular, it is also critical to add the elite’s social representations of the international order, for, as Hayes and James argue, they, too, “think in terms of theory.”15 Today, their implicit theories are often reconstructed with an international relations (IR) vocabulary, which talks of “prevention” or “retrenchment” when contemporaneous elites may have lacked such words. Alongside the domestic context, these “theories-as-thought” shape the strategies, used in combination or not, that are deemed commonsensical to elites and leaders. How much autonomy do they have? That is one of the empirical questions addressed in this book. The following paragraphs describe these strategies in terms of the impact we expect them to have on (1) peace, conflict, and international orders, or what we call international strategies, and (2) the mediumterm status of the political entity, or domestic strategies. Combining history, sociology, and IR theory, we identify eight possible strategies of decline management: self-strengthening, isolation, engagement, retrenchment, competition, innovation, imitation, and prevention.

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8

Frédéric Mérand

Table 0.1 A typology of strategies to cope with geopolitical decline

International system Prevention Competition Retrenchment Engagement Domestic Isolation Innovation Imitation Self-strengthening

While some of these strategies tend to precipitate decline, others smooth out the transition to a new international order; while some lead to conflict, others may preserve the peace. Although they do not exhaust the universe of possible strategies, they help us make sense of how leaders can mobilize power resources vis-à-vis different actors who play a role in the political entity’s decline. i n t e r n at i o n a l s t r at e g i e s

International strategies are shaped in relation to other states in the international system. The objective is to maintain a nation’s share of the world’s military might, or at least make sure that a country, despite its relative decline, does not lose its economic, political, or ideological edge in the medium term. Borrowing from Kindleberger, Gilpin argues that the international system is characterized by a historical succession of hegemonic powers that concentrate most military and economic capabilities. To maintain its status, the hegemon has no choice but to dedicate an increasing share of its resources to defence expenditures, and fewer to economic development and innovation. Sooner or later this paves the way for the rise of secondary powers that fight for a redefinition of world order through hegemonic wars.16 This argument permeates two strands of the IR literature: one dealing with power cycles and transitions, which shows the interrelation between the structure of the world economy and leadership in world,17 the other dealing with wars fought by or against major powers as a consequence of changing economic conditions.18 Since time immemorial, decline has had a geostrategic or military signification; it meant the imminent threat of being taken over, looted, and killed. Up until World War I, the loss of land resources and demography were understood as the main predictors of military decline. In I R theory, geopolitics and realism emphasize that world politics is a matter of relative gains and losses: whatever one’s situation, any increase in your neighbour’s material and human resources is a bad omen – up to a limit, of course: as Thucydides argued, territorial overstretch can also be the cause of one’s demise.

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Introduction 9

Two developments that altered elites’ understanding of decline occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. First, technology gradually replaced demography as the main predictor of a country’s military fate. Second, and relatedly, economic power acquired preeminence alongside military power. For most realists, prosperity is essential to maintaining military strength; despite their military investments, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union lost out to the US’s economic dominance. For liberals, the importance of the economy under capitalism means that absolute gains may end up mattering as much as relative gains: why should the US care if India or China are becoming richer, so long as Americans are also improving their lot while maintaining their security? Studies of the UK have demonstrated that record levels of economic growth can accompany military decline.19 Now, how can/should states and state leaders respond to decline? In IR, decline management has been approached mostly as a rational response to the evolution of the international system. By and large, the arguments are realist, with some liberal caveats, and they overwhelmingly deal with hegemonic powers, especially the UK in the nineteenth century and today’s US. The literature suggests four stylized ways of dealing with decline. The first strategy is prevention, which may take the form of preventive war. Copeland argues that dominant powers fight wars against rising challengers because they anticipate decline, which may be due to failing economic and technological structures at home, diminished economic power despite military domination, or a general weakening due to an arms race or the cost of maintaining an alliance. He describes the outbreak of World War I, with the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia orchestrated by Germany, which aimed to drive a rising Russia into the conflict.20 The literature on deterrence theory also suggests that major powers initiate wars to maintain their reputation for resolve – in other words to avoid signalling weakness and a sense of decline to their rivals.21 From the perspective of international orders, these and other examples suggest that prevention is conflict-prone. A second strategy is to engage in economic competition, either through currency devaluation, protectionism, or the exploration of new markets. Of course, this strategy hinges on a country’s p ­ osition in the structure of international trade. According to Lobell,22 if a hegemon faces liberal rising challengers, it is likely to co-operate and devolve hegemony to regional powers (external retrenchment) in order to safeguard its commercial and fiscal interests. This is so because a ­liberal challenger will strengthen the political weight of domestic

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liberal interest groups. Alternatively, however, an imperial challenger with mercantilist economic policies will likely be confronted by the hegemon, which will foster conflict and impede a smooth transition. In the US and Europe today, the argument that nations should re‑establish commercial barriers against Chinese competition is gaining significant strength. A third strategy is retrenchment, or operating a “graceful decline” in order to postpone it or attenuate its effects.23 This strategy of a more political nature may rely upon external balancing. External balancing may take different forms:24 proceeding to “offshore balancing,” (i.e., shifting foreign policy burdens to alliance partners or regional powers);25 retreating from overseas military involvements; redefining some foreign policy issues as less critical;26 and re-forming alliances that are more favourable to the dominant power.27 External balancing can lead to appeasement, or the settlement of disputes with asymmetrical or unilateral concessions. While many view appeasement as a sign of weakness, others regard it as a rational strategy to reduce threats and hostility, buy time, and postpone decline.28 Likely more peaceful than prevention, retrenchment may nevertheless make the world less stable because the hegemon’s capacity to lead is lost.29 In relatively peaceful regions, managing geopolitical decline may mean accepting its reality and supporting stability in order to focus on domestic affairs. We call this fourth strategy engagement. An ambitious way to postpone decline is to invest in the soft power defined by Nye as the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It relies upon three resources: culture, values, and policies, as long as those are seen as legitimate.30 In terms of strategy, soft power translates into public diplomacy and branding.31 More broadly, states seek to maintain their reputation and status, for example by portraying themselves as “overachievers” because they invest heavily in public goods and international institutions.32 While tempting, engagement alone may fail to postpone decline. A good illustration is provided by Byzantium, whose cultural and artistic reputation was at its highest precisely when its military and economic power was in decline, and which ended up succumbing to military defeat.33 In addition, there may be impediments to engagement. Legro34 stresses the importance of dominant collective ideas that act as “cultural barriers.” The rise of a challenger may not lead to a foreign policy reorientation on the part of the hegemon if

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Introduction 11

no new collective idea emerges on how to deal with this situation. Studies have used the case of Britain to highlight decision-makers’ misinterpretations, and their refusal to admit decline.35 d o m e s t i c s t r at e g i e s

Coping strategies also play out at the level of the state itself. The domestic level is consequential for a political entity’s status and may impact international orders. While they acknowledge the crucial importance of international systems, historical sociologists and neoclassical realists have put greater emphasis on domestic state structures than have realists and liberal institutionalists.36 For the former, the coping strategy of state leaders cannot be read off the structure of international relations. Looking inside the state is critical because geopolitical decline does not mean the same thing for everyone. This is obvious in the case of multi-ethnic empires, which are based on a core ruling a periphery.37 But even in more homogenous political entities, there are strong reasons to believe that decline does not mean the same thing for all elites. It is interesting to note that, while I R theorists from Huntington and Kennedy to Wohlforth and Walt are preoccupied with the question of the US’s declining power in the world, Hall and Lindholm’s38 sociological essay scarcely mentions international standing when addressing the question of America’s future prosperity and cohesion. What they fear instead is the impact of inequality on the social fabric. This suggests that the choice of a coping strategy is not limited to, as realists would have it, increasing military capabilities, forging alliances, or collapsing; or, as liberals would have it, to becoming competitive or falling into poverty. Also, unlike world-systems theory, the approach adopted here disputes the argument that a political entity’s choice is dictated by its position in the international division of labour. There is a wider variety of strategies, albeit a constrained one, for leaders to deal with global shifts in the balance of powers. If combined with a sustained level of military effort, the military restraint described above as retrenchment can lead to isolationism – that is, acknowledging decline rather than fighting it off.39 This strategy describes a domestic attitude about defence rather than international behaviour. Isolationism can turn a country into a hermit kingdom, as in Japan under the shogun’s kaikin policy between 1641 and 1853, or in North Korea today. But military isolationism can also

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be ideologically and economically quite open. The Swiss, for example, withdrew from world affairs while maintaining their military preparedness to a level that they thought ensured territorial and political integrity. Isolationism is a perennial temptation for certain groups in US foreign policy. Its impact on world order is probably negligible, but significant when it comes to the country’s status within it. Much as isolationism can be seen as the domestic flip side of prevention, competition can take the domestic form of innovation, or transforming the country from within to maintain its prosperity. Premised on learning and adaptation, this strategy may involve fighting corruption, addressing the demographic challenge, or reforming the economy, the military, and political institutions. For instance, Diocletian profoundly reshaped the structures of Roman government in the third century, probably allowing for a postponement of decline. According to Frank, Charles de Gaulle used the “fear of decline” to push for economic modernization.40 Economically, the international strategy of competition described above may include promoting technological or energy innovation at the domestic level.41 Elite unity is likely to be a crucial factor in determining whether states manage their decline in this manner. A trading nation such as the Netherlands, whose bourgeoisie is embedded in global economic networks, will not deal with decline in the same way as the political elite of a former imperial system, such as Austria. Studying postcolonial situations, Spruyt compares declining empires that have experienced soft transitions (the UK, the Soviet Union) with others that had to face colonial wars and strong domestic opposition (France, Portugal, the Netherlands). He explains these differences by the number of domestic veto players: the more diffuse the domestic political structure and the greater access pro-empire hard-liners have to veto points, the less peaceful the transition.42 The third domestic strategy is imitation. Up until the eighteenth century, the institution of marriage offered a dynastic strategy for kings to manage decline by merging their country’s ruling family with a promising or a dominant one. In modern times, an oft-used strategy is to copy other political models that appear more successful, as a method of changing the way a society is hard-wired. The Stanford School of sociology has shown how state scripts and templates have a tendency to diffuse around the world.43 In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, French leaders consciously studied German institutions in an attempt to rejuvenate their nation and perhaps

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Introduction 13

prepare for the next war. In the 1980s, there was much talk in the US of trying to emulate the Japanese political-economic model. While imitation transforms countries from within and is not self-evidently conflict-ridden, it often fails at postponing decline. Ideologically, the feeling of decline by contemporaries is almost inevitably accompanied by a cultural and intellectual crisis. According to Lachmann and Rose-Greenland,44 there is no shortage of “declinist writing,” from Rome’s Sallust to Anglo-America’s Niall Ferguson. The search for the causes of decline (or, as Jonathan Sachs puts it in chapter 1, the “anxieties of decline”) is construed as a “moral problem.” It becomes a debate over decadence, of which the Romantic movement is the best European illustration. Gibbon famously attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to the corroding impact of Christianity and the disappearance of civic virtue, including in its martial dimension. Often eschatological, the contemporary European debate is full of declinists who blame the erosion of moral virtues.45 A common strategy in moments of “soul-searching” is to call for self-strengthening, usually as a strong moral imperative. Intellectuals use declinist language to lambast the working class’s or the peasantry’s alleged laziness, rigidity, or lack of patriotism. In the mouth of Mancur Olson or Walter Laqueur, “decline” is a “wake-up call,” a rhetorical weapon to strengthen the traditional elites in the face of domestic challenges. From Vladimir Lenin to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, there is also a rich literature on imperialism as a way to divert the working class from domestic struggles. There is, in this line of thought, an attempt to transform class warfare into culture wars, using the fear of decline as an excuse. The strengthening of nationalism in the name of ideological rejuvenation, however, may make it difficult to engineer a peaceful transition to a diminished status.46 If geopolitical decline is irrelevant in most people’s lives, couldn’t trying to stave it off actually prove perilous? c o p i n g s t r at e g i e s a c r o s s t i m e a n d s p a c e

The literature on great powers, their rise and decline, is often grounded in studies of empire.47 Drawing on comparative analyses, scholars have identified patterns and causes of imperial decline, such as decreasing economic and technological resources relative to those of rising powers;48 unstable political structures due to the domination of a core elite over peripheral societies;49 the evolution of trade networks;50 or the irruption of new geopolitical factors.51 But how did

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contemporaneous elites make sense of such causes? Did their leaders do something about them? As should already be clear, our book is premised on the conviction that coping strategies cannot be read off the international system or the international division of labour. They are enacted by people who have the ability to make foreign policy decisions. Although public opinion may have an impact on strategies, as Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem show in chapter 5, the social milieu in which leaders and elites evolve is the right level of analysis. By “elite,” we mean members of the society who are involved in the formulation of foreign policy because they occupy key political, bureaucratic, or strategic positions. This broad definition is necessary to take into account the context-specific elaboration of strategic practices. In some contexts, the elite is defined as the narrow circle of individuals who form the political leadership: statesmen and military leaders. In chapter 6, Julian Go is interested in the strategic elite inside the White House, which makes decisions about war on the basis of political considerations. In chapter 3, Richard Lachmann focuses on defence intellectuals engaged in thinking about armed forces and strategy as well as public officials with the power to determine budgets, reform governmental organizations, and recast diplomatic alliances or initiate wars. Other chapters in this book take a somewhat broader perspective. For example, in chapter 2 Cecily Hilsdale looks at the upper class in the eastern Roman Empire to analyze their world views, cultural habits, and social practices. Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem, as mentioned above, look at the ruling elite that gathers around the Kremlin. They track the replacement of a liberal, Western-oriented elite in the 1990s by the siloviki, a security-minded group that embraces great power nationalism and turns its gaze to Eurasia. While this evolution is often attributed to the rise of Vladimir Putin alone and his alleged imperial ambitions, Lasnier and Köstem thicken the plot by examining how foreign policy priorities are often intertwined with domestic politics. In chapter 4, Olivier Schmitt pays attention to the political-­administrative elite that came to power in the Fourth Republic and carried Gaullist ideas well into the Fifth. Although these definitions are adapted to different times and places, they all seek to characterize the social-political context in which leaders make key geopolitical decisions. There can’t be one cross-historical and cross-spatial definition of the elite. The French decline-­management strategy of the 1960s was less about military strategy than were the

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Introduction 15

first British ruminations of the nineteenth century. As a result, the military establishment, informed by literature as it may have been, is the critical elite in nineteenth-century Britain, while a study of France requires a closer look at broader political and intellectual forces. Of course, public opinion is more important in today’s US, or even Russia, than it was in Byzantium. The first section of the book explains why it is important to analyze how leaders cope with geopolitical decline. For starters, Jonathan Sachs asks, What does it mean to cope with decline? Revisiting the work of Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and William Playfair, he argues that important standards for the measurement and understanding of decline appeared in the late eighteenth century. As the understanding of time and space developed, new practices emerged to measure and prevent decline, such as political economy, statistical graphics, and new forms of literary expression. These circulated in elite circles and made their way into the education of leaders, including military ones. Before seeking to understand the US predicament today, we take a detour through the past. Global history, after all, is replete with examples of political entities whose elites felt that they were experiencing decline. To inform our analysis of coping strategies, we therefore use the middle section of the book to build on four European cases. In the first historical case we explore, Cecily Hilsdale documents the cultural strategies deployed by Byzantine rulers, many of whom sent luxury items as diplomatic gifts to Paris and Moscow to give the appearance of cultural dominance when their empire was actually falling into economic and geopolitical misery. After this pre-modern case, we look at three European countries whose elites are only beginning to grasp their secular decline: France, Great Britain, and the U S S R /Russia. Europe’s growing marginalization in world politics conceals complicated trajectories. Over the past two centuries, Britain and France gradually went from world imperial powers to economically prosperous regional leaders.52 While their military decline was clear by the end of World War I, they remained politically and ideologically dominant well into the twentieth century. Richard Lachmann documents the debates over defence policy that accompanied the onset of British decline marked by the high casualties and inconclusive results of the Crimean and South African wars, which he compares with America in the wake of the Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq Wars. Britain managed its decline by exacting bloodshed in some former colonies and avoided domestic problems by externalizing

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repression through colonial troops. Olivier Schmitt, for his part, finds a different set of strategies at work in France. He analyzes the discourse of political independence, European integration, and cultural resistance, and the role it played in finding a new position for the country after World War II. In France, early, failed attempts at decline management through colonial wars led to radical domestic political change and the creation of the Fifth Republic. During his tenure, the mercurial de Gaulle found a coping strategy that turned out to be more peaceful, both internationally and domestically. In contrast to these two countries, Russia’s decline was quick, as it lost an empire, was partly dismantled, and saw its economy and demography collapse in a matter of five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.53 Moscow is now trying to fill the gap between the self-­perception of its own rank and what other powers make of it – a dangerous game indeed. Internationally, the impact can be seen in a succession of “preventive” regional wars, from Chechnya to Ukraine, while domestically, the regime has used authoritarianism as a coping strategy of self-strengthening. In their chapter, Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem argue that three mutually reinforcing factors explain the change in coping strategy between Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin: (1) the changing structure of the ruling elite, (2) consistent public support toward Russia’s great power status, and (3) the West’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s search for a greater role in world politics. Crucially, none of these countries disappeared in the way Byzantine, and more recently Austria-Hungary, did. According to the Correlates of War database, while the UK, France, and Russia have fallen somewhat in the league of great powers, these three European countries remain in the top ten in terms of economic and military rank. Again, this suggests that geopolitical decline is also a matter of perception and context, and is magnified by the current economic malaise in the case of Europe. This should caution us against the “dangers of linear thinking.”54 In the final section of the book, we explore the current US debate. Both Josh Shifrinson and Julian Go argue that the US is indeed in decline. From a realist standpoint, Shifrinson predicts that Washington should adapt its grand strategy to the rise of China by following a policy of retrenchment, to which China may respond positively. From a critical perspective, Go fears that the US will engage, as the UK did at the time of its own decline, in “performative militarism” that increases the odds of conflict. In his view, the US will accompany its military and economic decline by a last gasp of imperial expansion

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Introduction 17

aimed at sending a dual signal of prevention (to other nations) and self-strengthening (to the domestic public). Shifrinson and Go each adopt a less sanguine perspective on the possibility of US agency than G. John Ikenberry, who argues that the US is still capable of pursuing an enlightened strategy of engagement that restores authority in the liberal international order. For Ikenberry, if the US agrees to share hegemony, rising powers like China will develop their own coping strategies to maintain the US’s ability to provide public goods and avoid a return to the security dilemma. conclusion

Will the US decline abruptly, slowly, nor not at all? What will be the impact of Washington’s coping strategy on world order and American society? Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West precisely when Europe was at the apex of world power. Indeed, there is often a discrepancy between a political entity’s objective position in the international system and the perceptions held by domestic elites, ordinary people, and foreign elites. Elites have different ways – military, economic, ideological, or political – of coping with perceived decline. This book explores how the choice of strategy, or the combination of different strategies, can alter the course of decline as it runs into the expectations of domestic and other international actors. This is where the US is today. George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump elaborated very distinct coping strategies: based on prevention, retrenchment, and competition, respectively, with some engagement for Bush and Obama and a focus on innovation for all three. To understand the likely consequences, the European cases are useful. Will the US embrace Britain’s strategy of becoming the “Athens” of a future “Rome” through its cultural influence? Will it go down the muscular path, as Russia did? Will it manage to close the symbolic gap between past and present status, as France attempted? Responses to decline are indeed embedded in a global system, producing effects than can be more or less bellicose. An ability to close the gap between reality and perception by either meeting or changing expectations characterizes a well-managed, “graceful” decline. Conversely, a country’s status may fall abruptly when coping strategies begin to appear hubristic or too strikingly out of synch with other power resources. This growing mismatch leads to instability and potentially conflict in a state’s relation to other states. The quest

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for status can be successful even for declining states, but its impact on world order should not be neglected.

notes

  1 Paul Kennedy Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987).   2 Samuel Huntington, “The U.S.: Decline or Renewal?” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 76–96.   3 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Charles A. Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” National Interest 70 (2002): 5–17.   4 David C. Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (New York: Columbia University Press 2007); Robert S. Ross and Zhu Feng, eds, China’s Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2008).   5 Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York and London: Verso, 2003); Christopher Layne, “America’s Middle East Grand Strategy After Iraq: The Moment for Offshore Balancing Has Arrived,” Review of International Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 5–25; Robert A. Pape, “Empire Falls,” National Interest 99 (2009): 21–34; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New York: New Press, 2003); Terry Boswell, “American World Power or Declining Hegemony,” Journal of World Systems Research 10, no. 2 (2004): 516–24.   6 Edward Luttwak, “The Declinists, Wrong Again,” The American Interest 4, no. 2 (2008): 7–13; Joseph S. Nye, The Future of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011); Daniel Drezner, “China Isn’t Beating the U.S.,” Foreign Policy 184 (2011); William C. Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power Wars,” World Politics 61, no. 1 (2009): 28–57; G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis and Transformation of American World Order (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2011); Robert Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Josh Shifrinson and Michael Beckley, “Debating China’s Rise and U.S. Decline,” International Security 37, no. 3 (2013) 172–81.   7 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, “Stigma Management in International Relations: Transgressive Identities, Norms and Order in International Society,” International Organization 68, no. 1 (2014): 143–76.

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Introduction 19   8 Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1996); Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2008); Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition”; Gregory D. Miller, The Shadow of the Past: Reputation and Military Alliances Before the First World War (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2012).   9 Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10 T.V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, and William Wolhforth, eds, Status in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 11 Iver Neumann. “Status is Cultural: Durkheimian Poles and Weberian Russians Seek Great Power Status” in Paul, Larson, and Wolhforth, eds, Status in World Politics, 100. 12 John Hall, International Orders (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 13 Pierre Bourdieu, “Stratégies de domination et modes de reproduction,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 105 (1994): 3–12; Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Frédéric Mérand and Amélie Forget, “Strategizing about Strategy,” in Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations, ed. Rebecca Adler-Nissen (London: Routledge, 2012), 93–113. 14 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 15 Jarrod Hayes and Patrick James, “Theory as Thought: Britain and German Unification,” Security Studies 23, no. 2 (2014): 399–429. 16 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1981); Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2001). 17 George Modelski and William R. Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Ronald Tammen et al., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (New York: Chatham House, 2000); William R. Thompson, Systemic Transitions: Past, Present and Future (London and New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). 18 Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1999); Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2000); Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, The Arc of War: Origins, Escalation, and Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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19 Barry Supple, “Fear of Failing: Economic History and the Decline of Britain” Economic History Review 57, no. 3 (1994): 441–58; Peter Clarke and Clive Trebilcock, eds, Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20 Copeland, The Origins of Major War. 21 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, C T: Yale University Press, 1967); Patrick Morgan, Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (Beverly Hills, C A : Sage, 1977). 22 Steven Lobell, The Challenge of Hegemony: Grand Strategy, Trade, and Domestic Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 23 Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment,” International Security 35, no. 4 (2011): 7–44. 24 Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 25 Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2002); Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); Layne, “America’s Middle East Grand Strategy.” 26 Robert J. Art, “Geopolitics Updated: The Strategy of Selective Engagement,” International Security 23, no. 3 (1998): 79–113. 27 Charles A. Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 28 Daniel Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 345–73; Norrin S. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, “Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s,” International Security 33, no. 2 (2008): 148–81. 29 Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home, America: The Case against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (2012): 7–51. 30 Nye, The Future of Power. 31 Geoffrey Cowan and Nichols J. Cull, eds, “Public Diplomacy in a Changing World,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): 6–8; Eytan Gilboa, “Searching for a Theory of Public Diplomacy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616 (2008): 55–77; Kenneth A. Osgood and Brian C. Etheridge, eds, The United States and Public Diplomacy: New Directions in Cultural and International History (Leiden, N L: Martin Nijhoff Publishers, 2010); James Pamment, New Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century: A

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Introduction 21 Comparative Study of Policy and Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 32 Thomas Volgy et al., “Status Considerations in International Politics and the Rise of Regional Powers,” in Paul, Larson, and Wolhforth, eds, Status in World Politics. 33 Cecily Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 34 Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2005). 35 Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1988); Francine McKenzie, “Coping with Decline: Recent Books on British Diplomatic and Political History,” International Journal 53, no. 2 (1998): 352–61; Frank Heinlein, British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1945–1963: Scrutinising the Official Mind (London: Franck Cass, 2002). 36 John Hobson, The State and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kevin Marsh, “Managing Relative Decline: A Neoclassical Realist Analysis of the 2012 US Defense Strategic Guidance,” Contemporary Security Policy 33, no. 3 (2012): 487–511. 37 Alexander J. Motyl, Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse and Revival of Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 38 John Hall and Charles Lindholm, Is America Breaking Apart? (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999). 39 Christopher A. Preble, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2009). 40 Robert Frank, La hantise du déclin: la France de 1914 à 2014 (Paris: Belin, 2014). 41 Modelski and Thompson, Leading Sectors and World Powers. 42 Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire: Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2005). 43 John Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation-State,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 144–81. 44 Richard Lachmann and Fiona Rose-Greenland, “Why We Fell: Declinist Writing and Theories of Imperial Failure in the Longue Durée,” Poetics 50 (2015): 1–19. 45 Walter Laqueur, After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent (London: Thomas Dunne, 2012). 46 John A. Hall and Sinisa Malesevic, eds, Nationalism and War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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47 Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 1986). 48 Kennedy, Rise and Fall. 49 Motyl, Imperial Ends; Richard Lachmann, “Elite Self-Interest and Economic Decline in Early Modern Europe,” American Sociological Review 68, no. 3 (2003): 346–72. 50 Christopher Chase-Dunn and E.N. Anderson, eds, The Historical Evolution of World Systems (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 51 Jakub S. Grygiel, Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 52 Thomas Martin, The French Empire Between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press 2005); Roy Douglas, Liquidation of Empire: The Decline of the British Empire (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1743 (London: Penguin Books, Allen Lane, 2007); Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (New York: Knopf, 2008). 53 Ayse Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Frédéric Mérand, Martial Foucault, and Bastien Irondelle, European Security Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). 54 Matthias Matthijs, “Crying Wolf Again? The Decline of Western Economic Influence After the Great Recession,” The International Spectator 47, no. 3 (2012): 37–52.

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1 What Is Decline? Jonathan Sachs

In 1777, when the British loss at Saratoga was clear, the Irish physician and radical William Drennan wrote to his sister Martha McTier that he expected future historians “would date the fall of the British Empire from the 16th of October 77.” He added that nothing would be “more melancholy” than “a great empire that has thus outlived itself and is now degenerating into a state of political dotage, prophetical of its final dissolution.”1 Many must have shared his fears. It would have been hard not to read the potential loss of a large and productive colony as anything other than a sign of decline, especially for those invested in mercantilist understandings of empire as the source of national wealth and prestige. Adam Smith, however, thought differently. In response to a young correspondent who, like Drennan, feared that the loss at Saratoga signalled the ruin of Britain, Smith replied: “Be assured, my young friend, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”2 Smith’s comment forms the basis of this chapter. Most prominently, the comment reminds us of the distinction between perceived decline and actual decline. How do we tell the difference? Does that distinction matter? How, further, can we predict with any kind of confidence or lucidity when a perceived decline is occurring or will occur? Can we date decline in the precise manner that Drennan seems to do? What, in other words, are the signs of decline?3 Addressing these questions will help to shed light both on the kinds of anxieties felt by people like Drennan and Smith’s young friend who fear that they are living in or about to live in shrunk powers and on the kind of management strategies used to combat and deny a perceived loss of status. More, the interplay between the two will reveal a pattern in which the very fear

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of decline can produce, paradoxically, a renewed sense of stability. This is the kind of coping strategy proximate to what Frédéric Mérand describes in this volume’s introduction as self-strengthening, by which the very recognition of potential decline can produce a change in course that staves off actual decline. Crisis, in other words, can often produce confidence. Decline is a relative concept. As such, it inevitably involves comparison – comparison between two extant powers, often where one is understood as rising and the other as declining, as we see frequently in comparisons between contemporary China and the US; comparison between a contemporary power and a past example of decline, as, for example, in Julian Go’s recent Patterns of Empire,4 with its development of the parallels between Britain and the US from 1688 to the present, or, more popularly, in Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome?,5 which looks at the contemporary US alongside the Roman Empire. Such comparisons can also be internal, as when a nation’s present is judged negatively against its past.6 Such assessments are often most effective when they can measure concrete differences between the places or times being compared. Ultimately, however, this is not an argument for or against measurement but rather an argument that standards of measurement are produced and developed out of anxieties of decline and hence stand as an important cultural product of those very anxieties – a variety of innovation and self-strengthening in the terms of this volume.7 My discussion of Adam Smith and William Playfair’s emphasis on measurement is one episode in the history of prognosticating decline, an episode which, especially as it produces new techniques for measurement and new technologies of visualization, reminds us that we cannot know with certainty the relevant barometers of decline. And if this is the case, this chapter stands most of all as a reminder of the challenges of anticipating decline and of the inevitable unpredictability of the future – even when its course seems most set. This chapter, then, argues that important standards for the measurement and understanding of decline emerge in the later eighteenth century in the work of Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Smith’s self-proclaimed acolyte William Playfair. Smith encourages us to think about decline through the abstract comparison of particular quantities measured over a century, while Gibbon, who is invested less in the measurement of particulars than in the course of time during which they need to be observed, shifts the scale of measurement to the

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What Is Decline? 25

millennium. Playfair, in turn, draws both on Smith’s abstractions measured over a century and Gibbon’s broader millennial scale to produce novel graphic images that can be readily understood at a glance. Neither Gibbon, Smith, nor Playfair are decision-makers or elites in the sense of occupying political, bureaucratic, or strategic positions directly involved in the formulation of domestic or foreign policy; nonetheless their work, especially that of Gibbon and Smith, was certainly influential for those in such positions, and it would not be a stretch to say that their oft-cited and widely read ideas form a central component of elite policy culture. As a final example, this chapter considers an early nineteenth-century fantasy of decline by the poet Anna Barbauld that, like Playfair, asks us to visualize decline, but this time in the careful description of England’s ruined empire projected into the future. In this case, decline is not measured but assumed, and Barbauld provides an example of how cultural achievement compensates for the inevitable loss of national power and territory, a domestic coping strategy repeatedly discussed in this volume through the concept of innovation. In all of my examples, new cultural practices, from political economy to statistical graphics to new forms of literary expression, emerge from the encounter with decline. We might understand such confrontations with decline as management strategies keyed to what this volume calls innovation and self-strengthening, strategies which can be grasped as efforts to economize decline by turning the threat of obsolescence into the basis of continuity and the source of preservation. decline management, decline measurement

Such questions about the measurement and timing of decline are challenging and abstract. To get an initial purchase on them, we can consider Adam Smith, who addressed these issues directly in The Wealth of Nations8 a year before his exchange with his “young friend.” In a chapter on the accumulation of capital and the distinction between productive and unproductive labour,9 Smith develops his labour theory of value and reflects on the complex mechanisms of the domestic economy. Part of Smith’s objective in this chapter is to establish annual production (an early version of what we would call gross national product or gross domestic product) as a standard of national welfare. It is annual production, Smith insists – and not the relative balance between exports and imports, nor the quantity of gold and silver

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bullion reserves – that constitutes the basis of national prosperity. To clarify the point, Smith turns to the problem of perceived decline. Despite the increase in annual production from the restoration of Charles II (1660) to his present moment, Smith observes that jeremiads announcing national decline are regular and regularly believed: “five years have seldom passed away in which some book or pamphlet has not been published, written too with such abilities as to gain some credence with the public, and pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of the nation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated, agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade undone.”10 Smith has in mind here works like John Brown’s 1757 screed against luxury and decadence, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times,11 and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village,12 an elegy for a lost way of life marked by the depopulation of the author’s native village. Both were alarmist works that predicted the imminent decline of the nation. These are all, we should note, works published during what we now commonly consider to be the rise of the British Empire, and their timing underscores the importance of decline not only for “old” powers but also for new or rising ones. More, the obsession with decline during a period that a more distanced purview suggests was actually marked by an extended rise, further emphasizes decline as a problem of perspective in which what looks like decline from close up can be better understood differently with the passage of time or the cultivation of a broader perspective. Such a discrepancy further underscores the value of this volume in focusing on decline in what Mérand calls in his introduction the moyenne durée. Smith has great sympathy for the kind of claims for decline advanced by Brown, Goldsmith, and others. They aren’t simply the biased arguments of party; many, he notes, are “written by very candid and very intelligent people; who wrote nothing but what they believed, and for no other reason but because they believed it.”13 What’s more, when one looks back over the events of the eighteenth century, the grounds for pessimism and the perception of impending decline are everywhere: how many disorders and misfortunes have occurred, which, could they have been foreseen, not only the impoverishment, but the total ruin of the country would have been expected from them? The fire and the plague of London, the two Dutch wars, the disorders of the revolution, the war in Ireland, the four

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What Is Decline? 27

expensive French wars of 1688, 1702, 1742, and 1756, together with the two rebellions of 1715 and 1745.14 A formidable catalogue of disaster, indeed. And yet, Smith claims, this is really “the happiest and most fortunate period of them all.”15 Smith’s comments underscore the distinction between a series of events that collectively may feel like decline and the actual welfare of the nation. Wars, plagues, natural disasters, and rebellions are all traumatic events, events that on the surface at least seem incompatible with prosperity, but do they, in isolation or in combination, equate to decline? What exactly makes a narrative of sustained decline compelling? If eighteenth-century Britain was not experiencing decline, as so many clearly felt, how to explain the discrepancy between perceived decline and the actual welfare of the nation? Smith’s answer turns both on his understanding of human psychology and the problem of measurement. For Smith, the most accurate measure of national welfare is annual productivity. Arguments like those of Brown16 that emphasize the danger of luxury and lavish consumption overlook the power of private frugality. According to Smith, so long as people are frugal, they will seek a return on their wealth, which will produce capital reinvestment and the potential for increased productivity. Despite widespread alarm about supposed decadence and the negative effects of luxury, as voiced by Brown and others, Smith argues that individual prodigality or misconduct rarely if ever exists on a broad enough scale to impact the welfare of a suitably powerful nation. This is because such waste will inevitably be more than compensated for by legions of other, less prodigal individuals who save and reinvest their wealth. Furthermore, even when individuals are prompted to prodigal extravagance, such extravagance is usually only momentary and not sustained. In Smith’s social psychology, all men are born with an innate will to improve their lot. This desire “comes with us from the womb” and for the vast majority the desire to improve one’s lot not only dominates the potential for profligate waste, but it dominates it to a considerable degree.17 Collectively, what this means is that because, by the terms of Smith’s psychology, all men seek continuously to improve their conditions, in the normal order of things their efforts sustain a cycle of constant reinvestment that produces both public and private opulence. Even during periods of seeming decadence and private profligacy, or, more seriously, during times of government waste, corruption, and mismanagement, the

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impulse to private frugality can sustain economic reinvestment to an extent that such waste is more than compensated for. Even a state that invests too much in its military (unproductive labour in Smith’s account) can continue to prosper when its economy is bolstered by private frugality. Smith thus offers a powerful psychological explanation for why decline is unlikely in strong liberal democracies in which “law” and “liberty” protect individual property owners and encourage private frugality. The further point of Smith’s account is that private frugality is so powerful as to make “the natural progress of things towards improvement.”18 Decline then becomes an anomaly and Smith is consequently skeptical about predictions of decline and ruin. But the challenge here is that a nation of shopkeepers bent on improving their lot through private frugality and capital reinvestment is essentially hidden from sight while wars and rebellions and plagues are highly visible. This is why even during times of measurable prosperity, people often feel that the national welfare is in decline. To get a correct picture of the state of a nation, Smith insists, you have to make the seemingly invisible visible by means of quantification and comparison. You have to know what to compare – in Smith’s case it is the annual produce of land and labour – and you have to compare it on the territorial scale of the nation and at a temporal scale that is broad enough to reveal change over time, in other words at different periods that are suitably far apart to support the comparison. It is, by this account, only the comparison of quantified data over sufficient amounts of time that can reveal gradual progress. Failure to adapt the wide view afforded by national statistics measured over a significant period of time means that all too often local setbacks or problems in particular industries make it seem as if everything is in decline, especially to those living in the declining locality or working in the challenged industry. Smith’s point here is that local setbacks are not necessarily indicative of national decline and that, when assessing national welfare, we must find a measure that can be applied to every district of the country. Moreover, we have to look at that measure over an appropriately broad range of time, which for Smith, as I have argued elsewhere, is the century.19 Measurement combats myopia. It won’t do to point to a specific village, as Goldsmith20 does, and generalize decline from a single local example, nor, for that matter, can one accurately predict decline on the basis of an unproductive year, or even a series of bad years. These mistakes are indicative of a confusion of

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scale. They read the small scale as the large scale, the local (“certain districts”) as the national (“the country in general”). What might appear to be a process of decline and fall, Smith suggests, could with the shift in perspective to a larger amount of territory or a longer time scale be explained instead as part of a normal business cycle. The overarching point here is that for Smith, decline management is decline measurement. In Smith’s hands, the fear of national decline becomes an occasion to introduce a standard of value, annual production, and a theory of how that value can be increased through capital reinvestment in productive labour that grounds an understanding of progress. The standard of value is quantifiable, and analysis of its quantities enables strategic management of an economy in order to increase value consistently. Smith’s theory of capital reinvestment based on a distinction between productive and unproductive labour suggests that such progress can be open-ended as more capital is reinvested in labour-saving technologies and/or directed toward productive rather than unproductive labour. “We are more industrious than our forefathers,”21 Smith insists, and because all individuals aspire to improve their position, there is no reason why such progress needs to stop. In this context, we might understand Smith’s thinking about commerce and progress in connection with the doux commerce thesis that became increasingly common with the rise of commercial society through the eighteenth century. With the shift from a landbased notion of wealth to one grounded in trade, many came to understand that the zero-sum thinking associated with warfare over territory was no longer necessary and that prosperity could be shared rather than fought over.22 (We might think of this transition as a precursor to the move away from the emphasis on relative gains and losses associated with international relations theory, geopolitics, and realism to a new emphasis on the economy and absolute gains.) This does not mean that decline is impossible; instead, decline – or any attempt to assess the relative health or failings of the national economy – must be understood as a problem of numbers that can be addressed by measuring annual production and looking at the pattern over the long term of a century as a mark of capital reinvestment and national health. It is easy to forget this because with the development of political economy, the importance of measure and quantity seems self-evident. But my examination of Smith suggests that this was not always the case, and that it takes arguments of the sort put forward by Smith and other political economists to make quantity a valid

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symbol for the presence or lack of national prosperity, and hence to make decline a quantitative problem. This analysis of Smith provokes a comparison with another Enlightenment figure more commonly associated with decline: Edward Gibbon. In contrast to Smith, Gibbon does not emphasize quantity and measurement in his analysis of Rome’s fall, but he, too, emphasizes the need to think about decline in a sufficiently broad temporal scale. While Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall23 offers a series of explanations for the fall of Rome, the account is overdetermined, and Gibbon even goes so far as to suggest, in his 1781 “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,” why the decline of Rome might offer grounds for European security. Here, Gibbon resists a single or even a unified explanation for Rome’s decline. He emphasizes that “the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” and adds that “the story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”24 For Gibbon, Rome’s fall does not contain a moral lesson for Europe; instead, he suggests that “perhaps the same reflections will illustrate the fall of that mighty empire, and explain the probable causes of our actual security.”25 Gibbon then explicitly ventures three reasons that explain why Europe will not repeat the Roman narrative. First, because there are fewer barbarians and hence no external threat; second because a European system of balanced powers restrains the abuses of tyranny; and finally because the development of arts and technology that rise in tandem with civilization has been directed to the art of war, resulting most notably in the invention of gunpowder. This offsets the decline of citizen-soldiers, for “an industrious people should be protected by those arts, which survive and supply the decay of military virtue” and “Europe is secure from any future irruption of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.”26 Collectively this adds up to an optimistic claim for the durability and permanence of civilization on a grand scale of millennia, what J.G.A. Pocock calls “the enlightened narrative.”27 Gibbon claims that “the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.”28 For Gibbon conditions of war and debt create stability; debt can be

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associated with the manners developed by commercial society, while the expensive technologies of warfare that debt supports protect Europe from barbarians (or civilize the very barbarians that learn to produce them). In calling attention to this narrative, I want to underscore how it depends, like Smith’s account of decline in the Wealth of Nations, on thinking about decline in relationship to a particular time scale, in this case a particularly long one. Gibbon wants to situate our understanding of Rome’s decline and fall in the context of what he terms “the experience of four thousand years.” By adjusting his temporal scale to an especially long-term view, Gibbon can explain Rome’s decline and fall not as part of a cycle that all advanced civilizations are doomed to repeat, but rather as part of a longer narrative of civilizational advance. This story is one that at moments down the scale, like the first half of the first millennium B C E , may appear to be a narrative of decline and fall, but that in its broader scale is ultimately one in which civilization makes a series of advances that prove more lasting and more permanent than momentary collapse. For both Gibbon and Smith, the problem of decline is a problem of scale and measurement. And if my thinking about Gibbon and Smith here points to the relationship between decline and measurement, it also serves as a reminder that decline, which we commonly associate with cultural pessimism and a critical perspective on the present, can also be a source of cultural optimism. Both Gibbon and Smith directly confront decline as a potential problem and both come away with renewed confidence. Decline, then, is not always disabling, but is rather frequently generative: generative of new ideas, new perspectives, new techniques of analysis. Decline, in other words, produces innovation. This is especially clear in the example of William Playfair, whose early nineteenth-century work on decline, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations,29 combines Smith’s wealth and Gibbon’s decline and fall into an argument for how decline can be avoided.30 Playfair is perhaps best known today for his contributions to statistical graphics: he was the inventor of the time-series line graph, the bar chart, and the pie chart, and, as I will show, these kinds of images are central to Playfair’s thinking about decline.31 Playfair’s argument in the Inquiry hinges upon distinctions between wealth acquired by conquest, which in Playfair’s account is impossible to sustain and therefore will lead to

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an inevitable decline, and wealth acquired by commerce, which can be maintained indefinitely. Although Playfair’s broad survey of past empires suggests that decline is unavoidable, the relative novelty of a nation whose power is based in commercial wealth creates new possibilities. As in Smith’s account, decline is not inevitable. As Playfair explains in his preface: Though the career of prosperity must necessarily have a termination amongst every people, yet there is some reason to think that the degradation, which naturally follows, and which has always followed hitherto, may be averted; whether it may be, or may not be so, is the subject of the following Inquiry; which, if it is of importance to any nation on earth, must be peculiarly so to England; a nation that has risen, both in commerce and in power, so high above the natural level assigned to it by its population and extent. A nation that rises still, but whose most earnest wish ought to be rather directed to preservation than extension; to defending itself against adversity rather than seeking still farther to augment its power.32 The passage is striking for a number of reasons. For a start, it reveals a new Enlightenment attitude toward progress. For Playfair, as for Smith, the expansive potential for growth in commercial society, the possibility of wealth not limited by territory, means that progress rather than decline becomes the norm. Next, it marks out England as an exceptional nation, one whose power vastly exceeds what we might expect based on its population and territory. Neither of these, however, are particularly original insights. Rather, what I find most distinctive about Playfair’s comments here is their suggestion that even in states that we would consider to be rising, like Great Britain in the early nineteenth century, anxieties about decline are never far off. Strategies of retrenchment, then, though we may associate them with operating a “graceful decline,” may also be just as essential for navigating a “graceful rise.” Indeed, in the course of his more than three-hundred-page work, Playfair recommends strategies of decline management that we would associate with innovation, like cutting defence expenditures by focusing on an empire built not for territorial expansion but instead geared toward commercial dominance, shifting resources toward education and the development of technology; as well as retrenchment, as when

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Playfair advises crafting a less ambitious foreign policy and giving up the East Indies. “In respect to Britain,” he declares, “it has been shown, that the envy and enmity excited, are chiefly by her possessions in the East Indies; we have seen, also, that the wealth obtained by those possessions is but very inconsiderable, and that they have, at least, brought on one third of our national debt; it would then be well, magnanimously to state the question, and examine whether we ought not to abandon the possession; till we do so, it is to be feared that we shall never have a true friend, nor be without a bitter enemy.”33 The Inquiry is organized into three sections. Book one is a historical survey of empires divided into three periods. It opens with an account of pre-Roman empires that is especially attentive to Egypt. This is followed by a long account of Rome, and, finally, an account of European empires, including Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Turkey. The first book closes with a series of general thoughts about the uniform causes that produced the decline of all nations from 1500 BCE to the end of the eighteenth century. Here, Playfair attributes all decline to “the same leading cause”: namely, luxury, and the envy that poorer nations have for those with wealth and power as it translates into the decadence of the rich and the hunger to improve through conquest generated by poverty. But Playfair also suggests that an alteration in the nature of wealth, by which he means the development of commercial society, can make permanent those possessions “that have hitherto been found to be so evanescent and fugitive.”34 Book two then makes a distinction between internal and external causes of decline and surveys internal factors as wealth, education, tax policy, agricultural policy, and inequality, and external factors, like (as in the East Indies example above) the envy and enmity that wealthy nations inspire as a source of war. The account is largely weighted toward internal factors, and Playfair concludes by suggesting that “the decline of almost every nation has commenced within its own bosom, and has been completed by causes acting from without.”35 Book three then applies these distinctions to the particular example of England as Playfair explains the nature of British power and the kind of policies that can be developed to prolong it, including a national education policy, the reduction of taxes and debt, and the relinquishment of colonial possessions. Ultimately, Playfair’s main conclusion is that, while the kind of passions that cause manners to lapse and initiate decline cannot be controlled by individuals, they can be directed by government policy, and Playfair’s main argument for how to prevent decline is through

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centralized policy and the active interference of the government through policies on education, taxation, agricultural production and consumption, and the divestment of colonial possessions. Playfair’s work, then, suggests that even in times of rise, the problem of retrenchment and decline management is never far off. In addition, not only might the Inquiry be considered the first comparative history of empire, it is also distinguished by the statistical graphics that accompany its presentation. Decline, in Playfair’s hands, was not the inevitable fate of all great nations and empires, but rather something that could potentially be forestalled and managed in commercial empires if one knew what signs to look for and how best to respond to those signals. The most effective way to spot the signs of decline, Playfair insisted, was through the use of time-saving visual graphics. Though largely textual, Playfair’s argument in his Inquiry was organized around four such graphic images: two time-series line graphs, a circle and pie chart, and a geographical timeline of universal commercial history. These charts, as in the above examples from Smith and Gibbon, continue to link the problem of decline with issues of scale and measurement. All of these graphic forms had been previously introduced by Playfair, beginning with his Commercial and Political Atlas in 1786 and continuing with new editions of the Atlas36 and the Statistical Breviary.37 With these works, Playfair developed a succession of timeseries line graphs that showed the balance of trade between Great Britain and a series of trading partners and imperial colonies over the course, as per the full title of the Atlas, of “the whole of the eighteenth century.” Such charts not only enable their users to link the particular data of a year to a pattern spread across a century, but they also assume in their very form and scale that all annual data must be subsumed into the larger pattern of the century. Playfair’s time-series line graphs, in other words, all develop Smith’s insistence on the move from the smaller scale to the larger scale, from the annual to the centurial. (Although they ignore Smith’s argument that the relevant measure of national prosperity is not the more zero-sum balance of trade but the more open-ended rate of annual productivity.) Playfair’s charts might be understood in relation to the rise of statistical thinking described by Theodore M. Porter and others, and to the increasing importance of numbers in state policy and public life more generally, as characterized by Mary Poovey. Yet neither Porter nor Poovey make any mention of Playfair since his work does not

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contribute in a significant way to statistical methodology. What Playfair’s work does, however, is insert the diagram front and centre as a means of convenience by which members of the public, especially those described by Playfair as his target audience of men “of high rank, or active business,”38 can readily and quickly comprehend the meaning of financial and economic information. How, then, do Playfair’s graphs allow us to think about decline in a different way? For a start, Smith’s rebuttal to those predicting decline de-privileges the significance of seemingly profound setbacks like wars, bad harvests, and uprisings in favour of gradual processes that cannot be seen. Playfair’s response to the problem similarly de-emphasizes traditional events and promises to use graphic techniques to make visible the processes that were “non sensible” to Smith. Playfair’s Inquiry is accompanied by four charts, and by Playfair’s account, the entire argument of the book could be found in a brief look at these sophisticated graphics by one trained to read them. The first chart, for example, attempts to represent historical events over three millennia. With its effort to consider decline in a nearly global perspective over the course of millennia, it might be likened to Gibbon’s temporal scale in the Decline and Fall (see figure 1.1). Time extends along its horizontal axis, with an even chronology punctuated by “Remarkable Events Relative to Commerce,” as seen in figure 1.2. The vertical axis shows ancient seats, European seats, and America, all distinguished by colour. Combining the two allows Playfair to illustrate the arc of progress and decline and to offer a visual representation of the universal life cycle of commercial empires (though he markedly excludes the East). As Playfair suggests, “this chart is a sort of picture, intended to make those migrations and change of place distinct and easily conceived, on which the whole of this book has been occupied. Being once acquainted with the changes that have taken place, we may more accurately compare them with the state of the country at the present time.”39 One of the ironies of the chart of “Remarkable Events Relative to Commerce,” however, is that it works precisely like the other timeseries line graphs pioneered earlier by Playfair, but it contains no quantitative or measurable information. The rise and fall of past empires are graphed in a manner that repeats common understandings of critical events in their history, and assigns each event a relative portion of measure as part of a rise or a fall. Despite not being based in concrete, measurable data, Playfair’s illustrations, like Joseph

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Figure 1.1  William Playfair chart 1



What Is Decline? 37

Figure 1.2  Details from figure 1.1

Priestley’s earlier New Chart of History,40 turn abstract time into something that can be imagined and visualized concretely as a continuous linear progression. They attempt to bridge the temporal and spatial distance between territories and events by uniting them in a single visual plane. Characterizing his charts, Playfair notes that they “bring into one view the result of details that are dispersed over a very wide and intricate field of universal history.”41 The key here is uniformity of scale, a development located in the mid-eighteenth century by Rosenberg and Grafton in their recent history of the timeline. “Once that uniformity had been achieved,” they note, “projecting other kinds of quantitative data into the chronographic space was not difficult.”42 Nonetheless, graphical charts of the sort that Playfair used to illustrate his argument in the Inquiry were not common. Playfair also adds a further dimension to Priestley’s linearity. Playfair’s second

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Figure 1.3  William Playfair chart 2



What Is Decline? 39

chart, for example – shown in figure 1.3. – translates irregularly shaped landmasses into uniformly scaled circles (or pies). Each of these circles has two tangent lines, a yellow one for population and a red one for revenue. Assuming (and it is an admitted leap) that the proportion between a territory’s population and revenue is a valid measure for national prosperity, one trained to interpret this visual information can in a glace make a comparison of the relative present state of various empires. Additional charts present images of British imports and exports from 1700 to 1805 and the comparative increases in annual revenues between Britain and France from 1700 to the present. In each case, Playfair implies that decline is a relative category, one that can be quantified and measured. More, to this emphasis on quantification, he insists that decline can be seen visually, that it can be represented through lines, shapes, and colours plotted to show comparative national prosperity and productivity, most commonly over an interval of a century, but also by examining the movement of empires over a two-thousand-year period. In other words, it is not only in his title that Playfair combines Gibbon and Smith; the visualizations of change over time that he offers utilize a combination of the millennia that in Gibbon’s argument showed the development of prosperity if one adapted a perspective of four thousand years (as shown in figure 1.1) and the unit of the century that Smith insisted was the appropriate time scale for observing significant patterns of increase or decrease (as shown in figures 1.2 and 1.3). Collectively, my analysis of the understandings of decline articulated by Smith and Playfair reveals an attempt to use decline as an occasion to reflect on how it might be measured and avoided and on the appropriate time scale for considering such measurement. Smith and Playfair disagree about exactly what should be measured, but they concur on the need for measurement and further, that whatever measure one chooses, the time scale of a century is necessary to reveal a significant trend. Moreover, in each instance, the perceived threat of decline is something that can be managed, and through its management, diffused. Considered thus, we might understand decline as distinct from fall, as a threat that is potentially disabling but not necessarily so, and therefore as a cultural problem that motivates a range of culturally productive responses. And sometimes, as my next example will suggest, culture itself can serve as both compensation and solution to perceived decline.

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Smith, Gibbon, and Playfair collectively encourage us to recognize the sometimes enabling features of decline, the way that thinking about decline can often promote the possibility of stability and security through measurement and a moderated approach to the problem. A different but comparable example of decline as a productive phenomenon can be found in the Romantic fascination with ruins, and especially in the tendency of a number of works in this tradition to forecast and anticipate the ruin of Britain. Examples here include Thomas Lyttelton’s poem The State of England and the once Flourishing City of London. In a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul’s in the Year 2199, to a Friend settled in Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire,43 or Joseph Gandy’s images of John Soane’s bank in ruins even before its construction was complete (1798), or Anna Barbauld’s poem “Eighteen-Hundred-andEleven,”44 which richly imagines travellers from a future empire visiting a ruined Britain. Yes, the ruins foretold by these and other examples might be understood as threatening, but more often than not they work to project cultural power, to suggest a kind of greatness comparable to that achieved by the enduring legacy of ancient societies like Athens and Rome. Modernity, in brief, becomes the antiquity of the future, and while there may be a hint of the ominous in these apparent representations of decline, they are more commonly used as part of an argument that the achievement of a nation is best encapsulated by its cultural production, which endures far longer than worldly power and empire and might even be considered permanent. As such, my thinking about Barbauld bears comparison with Cecily Hilsdale’s understanding of the projection of Byzantine power in the fourteenth century through cultural production, and also with Olivier Schmitt’s account of French decline in the twentieth century, which underscores the importance of projecting cultural prestige through the promotion of world-class intellectuals and prestigious universities. In both of these accounts, empires fearing decline often trade worldly dominion and the possession of territory and economic influence for cultural achievement – a variety of both innovation and self-­strengthening – which is then understood to be less fragile and less threatened. To illustrate the contours of this claim, I turn to a close reading of Barbauld’s poem, which I take as representative of this particular manner of anticipating decline.

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Set during what would be the final years of the Napoleonic Wars – though before their outcome could be known – Barbauld’s poem delivers a scathing critique of the costs of war. Barbauld suggests that “war’s least horror is the ensanguined field,” and her poem attends closely to the domestic effects of a foreign war whose impact is felt most in the poor harvests and famines that follow in its wake and, even more, with the negative effects that warfare has on commerce, which she locates as the real source of British power. In a passage that chimes with contemporary discourses of US exceptionalism and isolation from distant theatres of war, Barbauld also delivers a rebuke to those who credit Britain’s island status as a shield against the horrors of war: And think’st though, Britain, still to sit at ease, An island queen amidst thy subject seas, While the vexed billows, in their distant roar, But soothe thy slumbers, and but kiss thy shore? To sport in wars, while danger keeps aloof, Thy grassy turf unbruised by hostile hoof? So sing thy flatterers – but, Britain, know, Thou who hast shared the guilt must share the woe.45 In an effort to shatter this pretense of security, Barbauld declares “Ruin … is here.”46 In this sense, Barbauld’s poem can be read as a plea to end the war and might be understood in connection with strategies of internal retrenchment that we associate with decline. The poem also contains a theory of empire that naturalizes the process of rise and fall: But fairest flowers expand but to decay; The worm is in thy core, thy glories pass away; Arts, arms and wealth destroy the fruits they bring; Commerce like beauty, knows no second spring.47 Barbauld understands commerce as the core of British power, and lines like this suggest that the same virtues that produce commercial prosperity also work to diminish its force and produce decline. The theory contains echoes of Gibbon and other eighteenth-century thinkers like Adam Ferguson, whose account of decline in An Essay on the

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History of Civil Society48 is predicated on the claim that material progress outstrips moral progress. For my purposes here, the poem is most interesting for its middle section. Here, Barbauld offers conditional speculation on British decline and a richly imagined sketch of a future in which England lies in ruins. Enduring cultural achievement then compensates for the potential bleakness of this vision: “if ’tis thy fate / To rank amongst the names that once were great” then “Not like the dim, cold crescent shalt thou fade, / Thy debt to Science and the Muse unpaid.”49 With its dismissal of the cultural achievements of supposedly Eastern powers, this is a kind of confident, blasé Eurocentrism. What follows is a celebratory catalogue of British achievement, as Barbauld first imagines future empires, nations “planted” by Britain, and grown through the English language, whose inhabitants will be enlightened by the “streaming radiance” of the British lamp. Here, British cultural production serves as the source of future efforts, much as the classics of Greece and especially Rome underpinned European learning for centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. These future empires, Barbauld is confident, will immerse themselves in British classics like John Locke and Isaac Newton, John Milton, James Thomson, William Shakespeare (and Joanna Baillie), and will take their themes and inspiration from British subjects. But the influence of this future British legacy will not be merely textual, and just as Barbauld’s contemporaries drew cultural influence and inspiration from Grand Tour visits to Rome and Italy, so future pilgrims from these new empires will come to walk among the ruins of Britain. Barbauld proceeds to offer a detailed description of what those ruins will look like when these future pilgrims come from the New World to see Stratford, the Lake District, Scotland, Runnymede, and the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, and other sites associated with what Barbauld understands as Britain’s distinct legacy of statesmen, sages, poets, and heroes. In Barbauld’s vision, all that remains materially of this once great empire will be “the grey ruin and the mouldering stone,”50 but the spirit of the empire refuses to be stamped out. Divorced from its context of imagined ruin, we can easily imagine her confident account of British achievement rolling from the lips of the most conservative patriot. The poem does not explicitly celebrate the potential ruin of England, and even sees this as a prospect to be avoided by withdrawing from war; but it is one thing to say that Britain will “sit in dust” shaded again by “Night, Gothic night,”51 quite another to suggest

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that this scene will, like Greece and Rome for Barbauld’s contemporaries, be visited by denizens of new seats of empire, cultural pilgrims seeking inspiration from the enduring example of England. Crisis, then, produces confidence. But confidence here is not in the ability of the military to bring about a successful conclusion to the war effort, but rather in the offshoots of imperial sway, in the kind of learned achievements that we traditionally understand as the superstructure that tags along with the economic base. Barbauld here reverses the significance of this order: in the long run, she implies, it’s not the base that supports the superstructure, not economic influence and the control of territory that ultimately matter, but rather the superstructure breaks free of the base and cultural achievement becomes that which does not perish, that which constitutes the longterm basis of national continuity and prestige. Paradoxically, a nation becomes secure only in its decline, and in Barbauld’s vision, Britain’s cultural achievement will not only resemble the standard of learning established by Rome and Greece, but will come to supplant them. British cultural achievement will be the “classics” of a new empire, one whose material centre is located elsewhere but whose knowledge and values are derived from the achievements catalogued in “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Eleven.” The work received such harsh criticism on its appearance that it was the last poem Barbauld wrote. Scholarly interest in Barbauld and her work has increased considerably in the last twenty or so years; most scholars attribute the harsh criticism the poem received as a confusion between gender and genre, an explanation that suggests critics reacted negatively to Barbauld’s boldness in writing in a supposedly masculine genre like Juvenalian satire. Such readings also tend to take Barbauld’s pessimism as a given and to credit her with a courageous willingness to curb British pretensions to imperial greatness and to speak harshly of the British war effort. My argument, in contrast, is that while Barbauld’s description of a post-imperial, ruined Britain may forecast British decline and fall, it does not represent a retreat and may be read instead as projecting a certain confidence in Britain’s enduring greatness. This is so because Barbauld shifts the grounds for Britain’s continuity from its commercial power, military strength, and imperial sway and toward its cultural achievements, especially the development of scientific knowledge, painting, and literature as she celebrates figures like Newton, Locke, Shakespeare, and Joshua Reynolds.

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Jonathan Sachs some provisional conclusions

In closing, I want to ask explicitly about what relevance a poem like Barbauld’s and literature more generally might have for our discussion of decline. What is the point of talking about a poem, and a long-­forgotten poem at that, in connection with more heady problems like decline management, state formation, globalization, and rising powers? My sense is that cultural productions like Barbauld’s serve as reminders of how past societies were also self-conscious about the prospect of decline and in their cultural production we can recognize some potential implications of our own attempts to think self-­consciously about the meaning of decline and the signs by which we measure it. Barbauld’s anticipation of future decline allows for a celebration of past and present accomplishments and helps to constitute a canon of value and permanence. The positive prospect of an enduring legacy can be seen only through the relief of the negative prospect of decline. This kind of double movement might be understood as an attempt to manage decline. There is, in other words, a way that Barbauld’s modern (for her) instantiation of imperial decline is fascinated by ancient ruins because it seeks to economize decline itself, to turn the threat of obsolescence into the basis of continuity and the source of preservation. It might help here to consider briefly a contemporary analogue. In his recent book Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Cullen Murphy proposed a series of six parallels between ancient Rome and the contemporary US that he sees as of “direct relevance for America.”52 The lesson of the analogy was obvious: unless the US changes its ways decline and fall would be immanent. But, as is often the case with such dire prognostications (and as implied by Barbauld’s poem), there is a silver lining: accepting the need to make changes would save everything. America does not, in other words, have to be Rome. My sense is that modern theories of decline most often emerge conjointly not with the end of empire but rather with its growth, and that admonitory anticipations of decay often serve as an index of imperial confidence rather than of crisis. I invoke Murphy’s book because I want loosely to suggest that my thinking about early nineteenth-century Britain might be relevant for thinking about the situation of the contemporary US. Murphy closes his book by re-posing the same question with which he began. “Are we Rome?” He concludes, “In important ways we’re clearly making some of the same mistakes. But the antidote is

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everywhere. The antidote is being American.”53 Murphy delivers a dire warning on the possible end of empire, but concludes with an echo of the same sense of US exceptionalism that his book ostensibly sets out to combat. The answer, then, is to transform a sense of imperial crisis into an occasion for renewed pronouncements of imperial confidence. It’s precisely this aspect of imperial anxiety that we find in early nineteenth-century Britain. The comparison is less one of situation and more one of attitude. As Barbauld’s elaborate fantasy about England in ruins would indicate, the question Are We Rome? had similar resonance in nineteenth-century Britain. In addition to the parallels of commerce and a multipolar world, one further crucial parallel is that these are both empires that self-consciously compare themselves to Rome. I’m asking, then, about the implications of this comparison, especially as it relates to Rome as the great narrative of decline and fall. Is it possible that later instantiations of empire are fascinated by decline because they seek to economize it, because they think that they can prevent it, paradoxically, through their very recognition of its inevitability? As decline in various guises continues to be the subject of vigorous public debate in our current historical moment, Barbauld’s poem and the larger Romantic sense of crisis of which it is a part stand as reminders, first, that our contemporary anxieties about the future and our attempts to foresee future decline have a history; and, second, that in our uncertainty about the future, we, like our Romantic precursors, may be forestalling decline, or at least changing the way that we understand it, paradoxically, through our very eagerness to entertain its inevitability. Our rhetoric, too, might be understood as a productive effect of decline.

notes

  1 William Drennan, Martha Drennan McTier, Maria Luddy, DrennanMcTier Letters Volume 1: 1776–1793 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), 29.   2 The reply also gives Winch the title of a subsequent essay on Smith. See Donald Winch, “A Great Deal of Ruin in a Nation,” in Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance, ed. Peter Clarke and Clive Trebilcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30–48.

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  3 Quoted in Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50. Smith’s comment also underscores that decline is part of a drawn-out process that is rarely sudden and thus hints at how anxieties about decline, like those voiced by Drennan and Smith’s young friend, might serve as an index of new Enlightenment and post-­ Enlightenment ways of experiencing secular time. I have written about this at some length elsewhere, and so will not address this topic here. See Jonathan Sachs, “Scales of Time and the Anticipation of the Future: Gibbon, Smith, Playfair,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 3 (2014): 697–718; Jonathan Sachs, “Future! Decline,” Poetics Today 37, no. 3 (2016): 355–68.   4 Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).   5 Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).   6 Examples here are legion, and increasingly common. Much recent attention has been paid to Eric Zemmour, La suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), and we can think in the US case of similarly nostalgic works. See, for example, Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), or Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011).   7 As such my argument does not contradict scholars like Michael Beckley, William Wohlforth, and Stephen Brooks, all of whom have challenged the importance of focusing on aggregate measurements as a barometer of decline. See Michael Beckley, “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters,” International Security 43, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 7–44; Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2008).   8 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). All subsequent citations refer to this edition.   9 Ibid., bk 2, ch. 3. 10 Ibid., 365. 11 John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757). 12 Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (London, 1770).

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13 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 365. 14 Ibid., 366. 15 Ibid. 16 Brown, An Estimate of the Manners. 17 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 362. 18 Ibid., 364. 19 See Sachs, “Scales of Time.” 20 Goldsmith, The Deserted Village. 21 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 356. 22 On the doux commerce thesis, see Albert O. Hirschman, Passions and Interests (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2013); on the shift from land-based notions of wealth to commerce, see especially John Greville Agard Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1975), and John Greville Agard Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 23 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994), vol. 2: 1776–88. All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 24 Ibid., 509. 25 Ibid., 511. 26 Ibid., 514. 27 John Greville Agard Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 304. 28 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 2: 515. 29 William Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations (London, 1805). 30 William Playfair was the younger brother of John Playfair, the champion of James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth who became professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Edinburgh University. William’s career, however, was much less conventional than his older brother’s. While John stayed in Scotland, William apprenticed with Matthew Boulton and James Watt in Birmingham, abandoned engineering for enterprise, and set off for France, where his Commercial and Political Atlas had attracted the attention of Louis XVI. In France, he stayed through the revolution (during which he was rumoured to have stormed the Bastille), became involved in the notorious Scioto land swindle, and left to escape prosecution just before the Terror. Back in London, his various enterprises included a bank, a newspaper, gun-carriage making, and a series of dubious efforts to

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supplement his income by blackmail, extortion, and one outright swindle that led to his conviction at the Court of King’s Bench in 1805, the same year that he published his Inquiry and the first critical edition of Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which included corrections and extensions of Smith’s ideas. See entry for William Playfair, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–11). 31 On Playfair as a graphic innovator, see Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT : Graphics Press.1983), esp. ch. 1, “Graphical Excellence,” 13–51. 32 Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall, iv–v. 33 Ibid., 284. 34 Ibid., 74. 35 Ibid., 185. 36 William Playfair, Commercial and Political Atlas (London, 1786), and ­continuing in new editions of the Atlas in 1787 and 1801. 37 William Playfair Statistical Breviary; Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe (London: Wallis, 1801). 38 Playfair, Commercial and Political Atlas, xiv. 39 Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall, 79. 40 Joseph Priestley, New Chart of History (London, 1769). 41 Playfair, An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall, xv. 42 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton, N J: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 136. 43 Thomas Lyttelton, The State of England and the once Flourishing City of London. In a Letter from an American Traveller, Dated from the Ruinous Portico of St. Paul’s in the Year 2199, to a Friend settled in Boston, the Metropolis of the Western Empire (London, 1780). 44 Anna Barbauld, “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Eleven,” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON : Broadview, 2001), 160–73. 45 Barbauld, “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Eleven,” 162, lines 39–46. 46 Ibid., 163, line 49. 47 Ibid., 173, lines 313–16. 48 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London, 1767). 49 Barbauld, “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Eleven,” 164, lines 73–4. 50 Ibid., 165, line 124.

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51 Ibid., line 121. 52 Murphy, Are We Rome?, 17. 53 Ibid., 206. For a powerful response to Murphy, one that seizes upon this very quote, see Vaclav Smil, Why America Is Not a New Rome (Cambridge, M A: M I T Press, 2010), esp. 24.

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part one

The European Experience

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2 The Culture of Decline in Later Byzantium Cecily Hilsdale

t h e b y z a n t i n e e m p i r e a n d t h e p e r i o d i z at i o n of its decline

At least since Edward Gibbon, decline has been inevitably associated with fall. Given Gibbon’s focus on the ancient Roman Empire, “New Rome” or Byzantium figures as an empire destined for demise. The later Byzantine period especially is treated as a failed moral, political, and military empire. Chapters 61–8 of his magisterial work cover the period from 1204 to 1453 – that is, from the conquest of Constantinople by the Franks of the Fourth Crusade (1204) to the final conquest of the imperial capital by the Ottomans (1453). The fact that these events are taken most frequently as the main chronological markers of the later Byzantine period is instructive in its own right. How could this period be understood as anything but tragic when bracketed by two cataclysmic moments of destruction and devastation? With its status as final and fleeting, Gibbon understands the later eastern and Christian continuation of ancient Rome as the eve of the empire’s end.1 All too often publications devoted to this later Byzantine period, especially art-historical studies, invoke environmental and organic metaphors to encapsulate the mood of immanent ending, and in so doing they suggest that history follows the laws of nature in its cyclical teleology. Title phrases such as the “twilight” of Byzantium, for example, evoke the coming darkness of night; the “final flowering” of culture in this period alludes to the inevitable wilting and decay that prompts a return to primordial earth.2 Against this tradition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is to be commended for avoiding such imagery for its 2003 exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power,

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1261–1557.3 Moreover, in its insistence on an end date of 1557, when the term “Byzantine” was adopted by early modern humanists to differentiate the medieval Roman Empire from its ancient predecessor, the title skirted an obvious emphasis on the political end of the empire associated with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.4 Still, the categories of “faith” and “power” were open for negotiation and interpretation in the later Byzantine period more than in any previous moment in the long history of the empire.5 On two separate occasions, Orthodoxy itself, the primary formalization of Byzantine faith and a key defining feature of the empire, was compromised in the service of diplomatic exigencies.6 Scholars have long noted the disjunction between visual culture and political realities in this period. The vibrancy of the cultural sphere, as testified by the extensive mosaic cycle in the Church of the Chora and the wide array of icons and sumptuous objects on display in the Byzantium: Faith and Power exhibition,7 stands in sharp contrast to the declining socio-political reality; and this contrast is treated as a paradox in most scholarship, even a cliché.8 My study of the period’s art and diplomacy sought to offer an explanation for this disjunction between artistic strength end socio-economic weakness by emphasizing the compensatory dimension of the cultural sphere, of the diplomatic gift and the recalibration of imperial imagery in particular.9 Gift-giving, it argued, constituted the most effective strategy for establishing heightened possibilities for action within the context of diminished political and economic influence. The present chapter revisits that argument with an eye to the larger historiography of decline and the cultural strategies developed and deployed in the face of that decline. The particular response to decline discussed in this chapter is cultural rather economic. In the categories of the present volume, the projection of power by means other than geopolitical force would be considered a form of engagement, specifically what political scientists have called “soft power.”10 In the final centuries of Byzantium, the cultural sphere – here construed as art objects, books, ritual practices, and artistic styles that are intertwined with diplomatic and ecclesiastical agendas – assumed a heightened strategic urgency. Cultural production as a projection of technical knowledge and refined sophistication had always been a fundamental facet of Byzantine identity, but in the later period the elite imperial administration – from the emperor himself to his advisers and the extended symbolic family of policy-makers and

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scholars – actively promoted and exported Byzantine culture in the face its reduced standing in the much changed later medieval world, a coping strategy akin to what Frédéric Mérand describes in his introduction as engagement in an international system and innovation in the domestic context. This case study thus supports the larger argument of the volume, but it is not a unique example from the past; one could make similar arguments for engagement as a coping strategy and as a form of soft power in many other times and places. What is particularly compelling here concerns the degree of hindsight and the privilege of historical distance, which are so fundamental to the way that the historiography of the “Roman past” has been characterized. Because of the historical distance afforded by hindsight, scholars today can track the full arc of Byzantine growth, prosperity, and decline over the course of more than a millennium; in so doing they can see what we might call a completed time horizon – we know how the story of Byzantium ended. But those historical actors living through the turbulent final years and decades of the empire did not. Strategies of cultural compensation and the strategic dissemination of Byzantine cultural capital are especially legible in later Byzantium because of the particular historical circumstances and the especially jarring dissonance between the dire political realities on the ground and the projection of timeless superiority in the cultural field. This legibility distinguishes the period as a counterpoint to our own contemporary moment, where it is less clear what work the cultural strategies deployed by elites and state powers actually aim to accomplish (let alone their effectiveness). With an empire – especially a fallen one, and a fallen one that conceptualized itself as superior to all others – we can see more clearly the contours of culturally grounded coping strategies like engagement and innovation. e d w a r d g i b b o n ’ s t e l e o l o g y o f d e c l i n e a n d fa l l

Before considering how Byzantines of the later period understood their own historical moment of decline and their strategies for exercising agency within those diminished circumstances – that is, for managing or coping with decline – it is worth considering more precisely how Edward Gibbon casts his history of the period.11 I linger on his modern history because of its immense influence on the subsequent historiography, and, further, because the tendency to link decline to fall conveys the impression of diplomatic strategies as futile

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and culture as ineffectual, points that this chapter, and indeed the entire volume, seeks to contest or at least call into question. Gibbon’s narrative is essentially one of teleological degeneration. This is evident even from a brief survey of the detailed table of contents for his monumental study, which was published in three instalments between 1776 and 1788.12 Chapter 62 covers the early Palaiologan period, primarily from the interregnum to the early fourteenth century. Following the Laskarids, it charts the reign of Michael VIII Palaiologos as an era marked by false union with the pope, hostile Angevin designs, the Sicilian revolt, and war on all sides. Medieval duplicity, hostility, revolt, and war culminate in a digression on the “present state of Athens.” For contemporary readers, according to Gibbon, “it would not be easy in the country of Plato and Demosthenes, to find or read a copy of their works … The Athenians walk with supine indifference among the glorious ruins of antiquity; and such is the debasement of their character, that they are incapable of admiring the genius of their predecessors.”13 In this radically diachronic move, Gibbon traces a direct line of descent, and degeneration, from antiquity to the later thirteenth century and ultimately to the later eighteenth century. His castigation hinges upon the Greek present’s failure to appreciate its antique past. Then in the subsequent chapter, chapter 63, Gibbon promptly returns back to the Palaiologan period, further elaborating “civil wars, and ruin of the Greek Empire.” As an interlude to the chaotic affairs of the ruinous Greek state, chapters 64 and 65 shift focus to describe the rise of power among Byzantium’s neighbours, primarily but not exclusively the Ottomans. The narrative threads then converge at the end of chapter 64 with the “distress of Constantinople” (1305–1402) and again in chapter 65 with the first siege of Constantinople (1422), both of which foreshadow the final Ottoman conquest of the capital in 1453, which is narrated a few chapters later. In between these two sieges, in chapter 66, we are presented with what constitutes essentially a litany of failed diplomatic activity: Byzantine emperors appeal to popes, they visit western Europe in person, and even convert to Catholicism. This account in chapter 66 motivates much of my thinking about decline and later Byzantine diplomatic strategies. For Gibbon, each of these diplomatic appeals to the terrestrial and spiritual authorities of the West are doomed to fail given how heavily weighted his account is with the heft of the eventual fall. They thus appear as empty gestures, laden with the pathos of futility.

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For Gibbon the only good to come from this story is the “revival of Greek learning in Italy.” Temporal and spiritual salvation proved “unavailing,” but all was not lost according to Gibbon, who then dedicates a third of the whole chapter to Greek learning and learned Greeks of the Palaiologan period.14 After all, in his words, “in their lowest servitude and depression, the subjects of the Byzantine throne were still in possession of a golden key that could unlock the treasures of antiquity; of a musical and prolific language, that gives soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstraction of philosophy.”15 The arc of Gibbon’s argument is well known and has shaped the historiography of the period profoundly: the Byzantines preserved the wisdom of the ancients to be reborn in Renaissance Europe, so the story goes. By this account, the Byzantines were passive conservators, whereas the European intellectuals actively brought the ancients back to life. Gibbon himself was not subtle about his prejudices: “the Greeks were stationary or retrograde, while the Latins were advancing with rapid and progressive motion.”16 Gibbon’s model influenced twentiethcentury histories, such as George Ostrogorsky’s “classic” History of the Byzantine State,17 but extended far beyond the discipline of history. Early twentieth-century art historian Adolf Goldschmidt provides a metaphor that encapsulates this line of thought vividly: he equated ancient Greek culture in Byzantium with dehydrated foodstuffs that were then made digestible by the moisture and heat of early modern Europe.18 The implications of this historiography are clear: Byzantium was a doomed state for Gibbon and even its greatest contribution to world history (classical literature) had to be accidental in some sense, or at the very least passive. Byzantium preserved but did not innovate. Gibbon is not my straw man, and my aim is not to defend later Byzantium from charges of decline. On the contrary, it is clear that intellectuals of the day were acutely aware of the sad state of affairs. The mid-fourteenth-century historian Nikephoros Gregoras laments that the imperial crown of his time was inlaid with mere coloured glass, the original gems having been pawned to Venice long ago, and that earthenware rather than silver vessels were used for banquets, which were held at the dilapidated imperial palace.19 He notes, poignantly, that there was nothing left in the imperial treasury “but air and dust, that is, the atoms of Epicurus.”20 Similarly, the epistolary corpus of Emperor Manual II Palaiologos, discussed below, conveys a sense of nostalgia for the past in particularly moving and, significantly, classicizing terms. As Ihor Ševčenko elaborated long ago, later

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Byzantine intellectuals were acutely aware of their situation: “looking at their country and at themselves [they] now spoke of ‘remains,’ ‘small remnants,’ ‘dregs,’ ‘refuse,’ of the great Roman Empire, of the Romans or of the Hellenes.”21 From Alexios Makrembolites to Nikephoros Gregoras, from Demetrius Kydones to the Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos, there was, according to Ševčenko, a “weary feeling that the hour was late.”22 But lateness is relational. The hour may have been late, but as Ševčenko asks, “with respect to what?” Decline must be seen in relative terms, always marked against an earlier and greater benchmark, and the relativism of decline has been elucidated by Jonathan Sachs in his contribution to this volume.23 For the present purposes, I want to stress that nostalgia for a more glorious past implies the belief in present decline, but in no way suggests a belief in the inevitability of an empire’s end.24 Therefore, it is imperative to disaggregate the concept of the empire’s decline from its eventual fall, which is not only implied in Gibbon, but crafted emphatically as an inevitability, and all too often taken as a given by modern scholars. This is precisely where the Byzantine and modern world views diverge most strongly. Recall that the Byzantines had lost their capital city before to the Franks in 1204 but had regained it again in 1261. A final termination of their earthly empire, which was understood to mirror the celestial one, was unimaginable. Steeped in apocryphal apocalyptic thought, the Byzantines understood their empire to be preordained as the last in all of universal history.25 As Angela Volan succinctly explains, “for the Byzantines, salvation was through empire, rather than from it.”26 Stratis Papaiouannou offers a concrete example of this Byzantine understanding of universal history: passages added to an early twelfth-century manuscript in Florence specify the “the divinely ordered sequence of kingdoms” as Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Macedonia, and Rome (i.e., Byzantium), “the one to be dissolved by the Antichrist” – that is, at the end of time.27 The end of Byzantium, in other words, was the end of the world. Decline was an altogether other matter. The seemingly irreversible passage from decline to fall is all too often assumed by modern scholars, even if unintentionally. With hindsight, modern scholars who know that the end of the empire was near cannot help but negatively evaluate later Byzantine coping strategies, which included important innovations in the cultural sphere. Again, the elaborate actions Gibbon narrates in chapter 66 of his history can only appear as empty and futile gestures against the

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looming backdrop of rising Ottoman power – the arc of his narrative precludes any other impression. But in order to assess more clearly the cultural history of the period on its own terms, it is necessary to suspend, momentarily at least, the negative judgment afforded by historical distance and hindsight. Decline was strongly felt during this period, and the imperial administration took unprecedented diplomatic measures in an attempt to change the direction of that decline; many of these measures involved a promotion of the cultural arena – art, marriage, religion, and Greek learning – again, the arena of soft power. To focus on the fact that these measures were unsuccessful in staving off the final end of the empire is to miss the point.28 What is at stake in this discussion is not decline itself but the teleology with which it is associated – again, the assumption that decline leads inexorably to fall. On this point the Byzantine and modern perspectives part ways. For these reasons and more, the later Byzantine period provides a particularly compelling historical case study for thinking about coping with geopolitical decline. byzantium’s decline and a question of scale

If territorial loss is understood to constitute a key predictor of decline, then a comparison of modern maps of Byzantium conveys a clear picture of decline. The real and imagined geography of the empire stretched, at its height in the sixth century, from the Adriatic to the Euphrates, but was reduced by the early fifteenth century essentially to Constantinople and its immediate hinterland as well as select Aegean and Ionian islands. This dramatic shrinking of territories is thrown into sharper relief still when seen in relation to the vast empires that immediately preceded and followed it. The ancient Roman Empire under Hadrian encompassed the entire Mediterranean coastline and beyond, and stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia, and in the centuries following the conquests of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire assumed the former territories of the Byzantine and Roman Empires, with the exception of western Europe. The shifts in territorial borders associated with this succession of powers from the ancient Roman to the medieval Roman (Byzantine) then to the Ottoman frames the Palaiologan period in a most unfavourable light. The eastern Mediterranean was for most of the long history of the empire solidly Byzantine – that is, until the later period, when, in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, power and territory was divided among

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competing kingdoms, leaving Constantinople and the imperial dynasty of the Palaiologoi financially impoverished and desperate to secure allegiances in the face of rising external powers. Roughly two centuries before the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, signs of decline were evident in nearly every facet of the political life of the empire. Some of the more pronounced internal and external factors of this decline, which are well-known to Byzantinists, can be summed up as follows: territorial loss resulted in revenue and resource reduction (and heavy taxation); two separate civil wars in the mid-fourteenth century left the treasury depleted, the populous divided, and the imperial line contested; and rival claims to the imperial line persisted outside Constantinople in tandem with the growth of regional authority more generally (i.e., the independent Byzantine polities of Epirus and Trebizond as well as the increased independence and influence of Serbian and Slavic powers). Concurrent with these factors was the most significant threat to Byzantine sovereignty: the emergence and consolidation of Ottoman power in Asia Minor, which transformed the political landscape of the Mediterranean irreversibly, relegating the Byzantines to vassals occupying a diplomatic middle ground between the Ottomans and the Latins, as the title of Nevra Necipoğlu’s recent study suggests.29 In response to this constellation of circumstances, which collectively created an unmistakable sense of decline, later Byzantine emperors developed new means to exert agency and effect change. The imperial administration made unprecedented concessions to the Ottomans as a means of appeasement, which ultimately resulted in glaring asymmetrical power relations. In concrete terms, later Byzantine emperors, beginning with John V Palaiologos, paid tribute and swore fidelity to the Ottoman sultan and even accompanied him on military campaigns. For the emperor of Byzantium, who historically only received foreign delegations at his palace in the capital, this reversal of imperial protocol is dramatic: he travelled on campaign as a virtual hostage of the Ottoman sultan, and when this relationship, asymmetrical as it already was, broke down further, he was forced to travel in person to the West as a supplicant seeking aid for his faltering empire. Once revered as the embodiment of sacrosanct authority, the Palaiologan emperor became a hostage and supplicant.30 What cannot be conveyed by a comparison of maps – nor an account of diplomatic activities delivered in such broad strokes, as I have provided here – is how that sense of decline was felt on the

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ground. What shape does decline take when scaled down to a generation or even a lifetime? The epistolary corpus of Manuel II Palaiologos provides some insight into this question of the scale of decline. In these letters we find a personal and deeply emotional response to the straightened circumstances voiced by the leader of Byzantium. A series of letters written by Manuel II Palaiologos to his friend and teacher Demetrios Kydones while travelling on an Ottoman military expedition in Asia Minor at the end of the fourteenth century are particularly evocative of the state of compromise. Lamenting the sight of the abandoned countryside on the Anatolian plains, the Byzantine emperor inquired about the names of the cities now lying in ruin (“a pitiable spectacle for the people whose ancestors once possessed them”), and was met with a chilling reply: “We destroyed these cities, but time has erased their names.”31 Physical destruction is one thing, the erasure of cultural memory and legacy is quite another. Poignantly highlighting the diminished world of the later Byzantine period, the emperor’s letters from the field express an acute recognition of the present ruinous state of the land in contrast to the great and illustrious past of his imperial forefathers, and, significantly, the distance is expressed in filial or generational terms.32 These letters convey a deep sense of nostalgia and emotional distress prompted by political loss. And this emotional dimension of decline is something often elided by the distant and global view of decline; on the ground, the reality of living through decline emerges in primary sources of the time as a heart-wrenching thing. Letter 16 continues: “I was seized with such sorrow although I bore it in silence, since I was still able to manage some self-control. But as you can imagine, when someone having no idea of the ancient name of a city would instead call it by some barbaric and strange-sounding name, I lamented loudly and was scarcely able to conceal my distress.”33 In addition to sadness and nostalgia, some of the emperor’s other letters express anger and disappointment and a sense of complicity prompted by his having to work with the enemy. In another letter to Kydones, written while on Ottoman campaign in Anatolia, the emperor paraphrases Plato’s Phaedo in order to equate campaigning with the Ottomans to being in league with the Persians: But do you wish to learn exactly what circumstances we find ourselves in? … I think it is enough to say just this: we exchange fear for fear, danger for danger, labour for labour, small

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compared to the more serious ones, I mean, those we now undergo in league with the Persians compared to those we can expect from them if we do not fight along with them, just as the coins your companion Plato speaks of.34 This paraphrase, which, as George Dennis points out, the emperor in all likelihood produced from memory, differs from the ancient Greek original in key ways. Plato’s ancient discourse emphatically characterizes wisdom (phronesis) as the only currency of virtue: pain, fear, and pleasure, he insists, cannot be exchanged as coins.35 By contrast, the Byzantine emperor’s pairs, which notably omit “pleasure,” are transactable, and such a reversal transforms his paraphrase into an encoded lament of his complicity with the sultan. The particular encoding of Manuel’s lament is significant. It is cast in the guise of antiquity – the Ottomans are the Persians of his day – and this serves not only to compress time but also to showcase his deep knowledge and erudition. The emperor was not alone in expressing his awareness of decline in classical terms. Gregoras, as noted above, described the emptiness of the imperial treasury as an Epicurean issue. Greek learning, after all, was a source of Byzantine pride, and as such was to be showcased at every opportunity. Ultimately, the metaphor of phronesis as nomisma – or wisdom as coin, in Plato’s original and Manuel II’s paraphrase – is of particular urgency at the time of the letter’s composition, as Byzantine gold coinage ceased to be struck at all after the fourteenth century.36 For economic historians there could be no clearer indicator of decline. Even if fewer coins were in circulation in the later Byzantine period, ancient metaphors were in great supply. And the contrast between real economic and political strength, on the one hand, and what we might think of as cultural capital (in this instance Greek learning), on the other, was a contested issue. Another of the emperor’s letters to Kydones points to this tension between the literary expression and the “real” exercise of power. The letter was written clandestinely on Ottoman campaign, “in a small tent at night,” for fear of criticism: It is as though I were hiding, for those who cannot bear to see me devote my time to literary interests when I am at home would be far more vociferous in their criticism if they could see me doing the same thing out here. While they really have themselves to blame for all the trials [τῶν κακῶν] they have endured and are

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still enduring, they would turn things upside down and place the blame on literary studies, in the belief that I, and, quite obviously, perhaps you too, are not free of guilt.37 Manuel here is acknowledging a perceived conflict between the literary pursuits he shares with the tight group of literati of his day and the socio-political realities of devastation surrounding them. He is acknowledging the widespread criticism of the practice of writing, exchanging, and listening to the letters read aloud, salon-style, among his inner circle, which was perceived as profoundly disingenuous and escapist in the face of the dire circumstances of the period. Moreover, he is suggesting that literary studies have been blamed for those strained circumstances (τῶν κακῶν). The implication, to be blunt, is that the emperor should put down his books and engage the battlefield. But at this moment, there were no resources for battle; there was little he could leverage for a treaty of any kind with the Ottomans or, really, with any foreign power. Despite lack of political and economic resources, the rich tradition of classical rhetoric was alive and well in late Byzantine Constantinople, as Manuel II’s letters attest; and yet the relationship of his rhetoric to the dire realities of the period demands closer scrutiny. Recall that Gibbon lauds the Byzantines’ golden key, their “musical and prolific language,” for unlocking antiquity. For Manuel and his inner circle, however, antiquity was a living legacy, not something in need of unlocking; they were all great friends of Plato. In light of this, Hellenism can be seen in this context as a form of cultural capital to be mobilized as a diplomatic strategy. In the absence of “real” power, in other words, the classical tradition was cultivated and deployed strategically, with western Europe in mind. It has been pointed out that three of the era’s most prominent Byzantine ambassadors to the West – Demetrios Kydones (the addressee of many of the emperor’s letters, including those invoked here), Manuel Chrysoloras, and George Gemistos Plethon – were simultaneously key figures in the transmission of Byzantine humanism to Renaissance Italy.38 Humanist ideology and diplomacy merge in this political circumstance, and the logic of this merging can be summarized as follows: by educating Italians in Greek learning, these figures were essentially cultivating a taste for Greek culture, and that cultural taste would, ideally, prompt political support for the eastern empire.39 One important figure in this regard was Manuel Chrysoloras, the emperor’s friend, adviser,

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and ambassador, who taught Greek in Italy while raising money for the Byzantine cause. In one of his treatises he explicitly links the salvation of the Byzantine state to the promotion of its culture.40 Without documents that outline the precise contours of the official late Byzantine diplomatic program, it would not be appropriate to define this cultural promotion as official “state” policy. But the role of Byzantine diplomats as teachers of Greek in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is undeniable, and the educational capacities of such diplomats raises important questions about the relationship between politics and culture – between the elevated “escapist” literati of Manuel II’s epistolary circle, who were put to use in his diplomatic corps, on the one hand, and the devastating political realities they were trying to improve on the other. The emergence of Greek learning as a diplomatic strategy is particular to the later Byzantine period and should be seen in light of the failure of traditional official diplomatic protocol. In previous eras, for example, silk played a key role in diplomacy – sumptuary laws aimed at restricting its circulation to imperial contexts – but by the later period silk ceased to be a Byzantine monopoly. Pieces of precious relics served as diplomatic gifts in the later period, but after the Latin crusaders raided the church treasuries of Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade, these were no longer effective – after all, Louis IX of France had acquired the Crown of Thorns and other major relics of the Passion and built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris as a monumental jewel-like reliquary to house them in the mid-thirteenth century. With the end of the era of the Byzantine relic and silk, western appetites craved new eastern objects, specifically books from Byzantium. Books and ancient learning were, in Holger Klein’s words “the last truly priceless yet still affordable Byzantine gift.”41 Taking into account these new western desires, the cultivation of Greek – through both teachers and books – featured prominently in the later Byzantine diplomatic agenda and should be seen as a key strategy for managing decline. In thinking through this phenomenon in relation to the typology of coping strategies, Mérand makes clear in the introduction to this volume that the kind of variations of soft power that he characterizes as engagement in the international sphere “translates into public diplomacy and branding.” Put bluntly in the terms of modern social science, the promotion of Greek learning served as a sort of branding for Byzantium. The argument advanced here in many ways complements Anthony Kaldellis’s work on Roman identity in later Byzantium in that I see

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“Greekness” in the period as a situational development, as a diplomatic strategy developed in response to particular contemporary exigencies – that is, in response to increased Ottoman pressures and European appetites. In his study of Laonikos Chalkokondyles’s history, Kaldellis reassesses neo-Hellenism in later Byzantium, pointing out that the era’s strongest statements of Hellenic self-consciousness were voiced from within the western orbit of influence, specifically from Byzantine converts to Catholicism such as Demetrios Kydones, Manuel Chrysoloras, and Bessarion. He thus sees what has been taken for granted as an increasing sense of Hellenic identity in the period as a western construct: “In what remained of Byzantium, the Romaioi knew by now that they had a Greek alter-ego in the eyes of the west, and they had to play that role more often than ever in their diplomatic, commercial, and local exchanges.”42 The degree to which that Greek “alter-ego” was “internalized” was purely situational, “contingent on the facts of power.” My reading is less concerned with Hellenic identity in later Byzantium (or the modern legacy of late Byzantine neo-­Hellenism) than with the mobilization of a Hellenic selfrepresentation as a strategic diplomatic agenda. Whether or not later Byzantines understood themselves as Greek in addition to Roman, without a doubt they readily embraced a Hellenic dimension in diplomatic relations with western Europe. For Oikonomides, religion assumed a primary role in Palaiologan diplomacy; he had in mind Uniate negotiations with the Latin West in particular.43 The promotion of Greek, I believe, should be understood in tandem with this agenda – at least in terms of western diplomatic activity. At the same time as Greek teachers and books were being sent to the West, the imperial and patriarchal administration was actively engaged in bolstering relations with Slavic lands where Greek was of little interest – instead, the common commitment to Orthodox spirituality was emphasized in this diplomatic arena. Whereas fundraising in the West was the domain of ambassadors who simultaneously taught Greek, in Slavic lands this task was entrusted to the metropolitan, who was appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople. Later Byzantine diplomatic channels with Moscow, in other words, were maintained through the church hierarchy.44 This contrast between western and eastern diplomatic strategies suggests an awareness on the part of the Byzantines of what aspect of the empire – Hellenism or Orthodoxy – would resonate most strongly with different audiences. One could think of this phenomenon,

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in Erving Goffman’s terminology, as “impression management” in that the “self” the Byzantines chose to showcase was contingent. The diplomacy of the era aimed to project the impression of two distinct later imperial identities, that of the emperor as custodian of a long and venerable philosophical tradition and also as the guardian of Orthodox spirituality. One diplomatic strategy that seems to have been exercised in all circles and in all periods was marriage – a strategy for the extension of influence characterized throughout this volume as engagement – and Byzantine approaches to foreign marriage in particular are generally understood to correspond to the changing fates of the empire.45 Unlike in the earlier period, when foreign marriages were restricted so as to heighten their effectiveness, much like the sumptuary laws associated with imperial silk, emperors of the twelfth century advanced legislation to promote exogamy and dynastic supremacy in an unprecedented way.46 It should be noted that such a policy also prompted significant civil unrest. Although the practice of foreign diplomatic marriage as a key diplomatic strategy in these earlier periods met with varying degrees of success, it nonetheless assumed a heightened role in the political agenda of later Byzantine emperors. Of the final emperors of Byzantium, eight wed women from lands now known as Italy, Armenia, Germany, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia. In the fourteenth century, Pachymeres outlined the logic undergirding diplomatic marriage in lieu of war – or often to conclude wars – as follows: “peace obtains many results that the sword does not achieve, and the treaties which follow upon marriages, because they are very solid and firm, end up accomplishing that which battles and war have never achieved.”47 Such marriages were a particularly effective mechanism for achieving peace because they established kinship ties and networks of dynastic affiliation across multiple cultures and generations. The increase in foreign diplomatic marriage is generally taken as a sign of weakness reflective of the state’s economic vulnerability.48 But I believe we should shift perspective slightly and see the increase in foreign marriage as a strategy for combatting socio-economic weakness. Rather than “reflecting” fragility, the allegiances associated with foreign marriage were strategic exercises of agency. In combination with the networks of humanist interaction forged in Europe and ties to church hierarchs in Slavic lands, dynastic marriages were forged on both fronts. The son of Manuel II, for example, was married and allied three times, first to Anna of Moscow, then to Sophia

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of Montferrat, and finally to Maria of Trebizond. Other Palaiologan imperial marriages were conducted with the khan of the Golden Horde, the Ilkhanids, and the Ottomans. Religious difference was not at issue; in fact, marriage offered a particularly effective way of forging allegiances across confessional lines. Diplomatic marriage was tremendously advantageous, especially in lieu of war at a time of military weakness, as Pachymeres’s words suggest. There was also considerable risk associated with marriage.49 Great diplomatic hopes rested on the union of Manuel’s son to the Muscovite house, but the union was short-lived as his bride died soon after arriving in Constantinople and before producing an heir to the throne. Beyond specific marriages, the end result of the loosening of restrictions on foreign marriage in the later period was that the strategy seemed to backfire. Whereas a niece of the Byzantine emperor married to the ruler of Kiev at the turn of the millennia could produce a rich and long-lasting cultural and ideological link between Rus’ and Byzantium, by the early fifteenth century the diffuse kinship relations with Byzantium’s neighbours diminished the value of Byzantine kinship ties, and, further, meant that more people could claim imperial blood and hence posed potential rival claims to the imperial throne of Constantinople. some conclusions

While most studies of empires and decline focus on the root causes of the phenomenon, the essays in this volume are instead more invested in thinking about strategies for managing decline.50 With this shift, we can see productive terrain that exceeds the parameters of premodern history. In the context of this volume, then, what matters is less the particularities of later Byzantine history, instructive though they might be, but rather the lessons late Byzantium offers as a case study in cultural diplomacy keyed to compensation for socio-economic decline, strategies characterized throughout this volume as engagement and innovation. I have shown this to be an especially acute point in the early fifteenth century, but one that bears relevance today. While it would be hard to suggest that twentieth- and twenty-first-century US leaders and policy-makers were intimately versed in Roman and Byzantine history – although some no doubt were – the strategies of later Byzantine statesmen have not been lost entirely on modern North American policy-makers who developed such initiatives as Radio Free

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Europe and the Fulbright cultural exchange programs, which operate from the basic premise that “soft” forms of power in the cultural sphere can consolidate and extend influence in a manner that often paves the way for diplomatic and even military advance.51 While the Byzantines consistently promoted aspects of their culture in the diplomatic arena, in the later period they depended on the cultural sphere to an unprecedented degree to compensate for their lack of political standing in the wider medieval world. In this regard, the discrepancy between reality and self-representation (or impression) was at its greatest in this moment. The potency of the “soft power” strategies discussed here hinged on their insistence of an impression of superiority, but Byzantine superiority was at its farthest remove from the truth in this period – and this is among the most compelling aspects of the period. Some diplomatic staples of the past, such as silk, had lost their potency and thus ceased to be disseminated as diplomatic gifts. Other strategies, such as the gifting of relics and foreign marriage allegiances, continued despite their lack of effectiveness. In economic terms, the markets for Byzantine brides and relics had been flooded. Diplomatic foreign marriage, again, had intensified to the point of defeating its effectiveness as it became increasingly difficult to convince others that a kinship tie with Constantinople was advantageous. To return to Gibbon, where this chapter began, religion plays a decisive role in his account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, where it is linked with barbarism (“I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion”52). The Ottomans emerge in Gibbon’s account of later Roman/Byzantine history as the counterpart to the Gothic barbarians of late antiquity, and for Manuel II Palaiologos they were the Persians of his day. The religious “other” figures in all these accounts of decline, as the negative counterpart. And yet the reality on the ground was anything but black and white: the fate of Byzantium was intimately tied to Ottoman authority, and their royal houses were also linked dynastically through marriage. These intertwined histories continued well after 1453, with Byzantine visual culture playing a decisive role in a dynamic process of self-definition for the Ottomans who conquered Constantinople.53 In the field of late antiquity, scholars have ceased to speak of decisive breaks in favour of power transitions, in a language that is reminiscent of contemporary I R scholars describing the shift from UK to US

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hegemony (see chapters by Lachmann and Ikenberry in this volume). By contrast, 1453 still looms large in Byzantine scholarship despite the fact that the cultural dimensions of Byzantium lived on long past the empire’s formal demise. Where Orthodox faith continued – in Greek, Slavic, and Balkan communities – the visual culture of the church continued in the form of architecture, icons, and ars sacra. Further, the classical learning so central to the later Byzantine diplomatic agenda was crucial to the definition of post-Byzantine Greek identity and to the humanist revolution we call the Renaissance. This Byzantine legacy, of course, is well-known,54 but how it is characterized is significant. It is my hope that more agency will be attributed to the Byzantine side of the classical studies equation: by recognizing the fact that Greek teachers and books constituted an informed Byzantine diplomatic strategy, we may avoid relegating Byzantium to a passive role as preserver of antiquity and see instead a more active process of self-fashioning based on a living legacy of Greek.

notes

  1 To be clear, the Byzantines understood themselves and their empire as “Roman” (basileia ton Rhomaion). The term “Byzantine” was used in the sixteenth century as a means of distinguishing the eastern Roman Christian Empire of the Middle Ages from the Roman Empire of antiquity. The question of the “Romanness” of Byzantium has generated much scholarship. See, most recently, Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2015), as well as Ioannis Stouraitis, “Roman Identity in Byzantium: A Critical Approach,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 107, no. 1 (2014): 175–220.   2 “Twilight” features in both historical and art-historical studies of the Palaiologan period. See Constance Head, Imperial Twilight: The Palaiologos Dynasty and the Decline of Byzantium (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977), and Slobodan Ćurčić and Doula Mouriki, eds, The Twilight of Byzantium: Aspects of Cultural and Religious History in the Late Byzantine Empire: Papers from the Colloquium Held at Princeton University, 8–9 May 1989 (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1991).   3 Helen C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004); Sarah T.

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  4

  5

  6

  7

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Brooks, ed., Byzantium, Faith, and Power (1261–1557): Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2006). On the periodization associated with 1453, see David Lawton, “1453 and the Stream of Time,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007): 469–91, and Olof Heilo, “When did Constantinople actually fall? ” in Wanted, Byzantium: The Desire for a Lost Empire, ed. Hélène Saradi et al., Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 15 (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2014), 77–92. The recent Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire concludes with 1492 in lieu of 1453; see Jonathan Shepard, ed., The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The contingency of these concepts contrasts the title of a previous Metropolitan Museum exhibition focusing on the Middle Byzantine period, The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 – “glory” being stable and uncontested as well as ideal and aesthetic. See Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds, The Glory of Byzantium: Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997). Note also Antony Eastmond’s new book, The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom (London and New York: Phaidon, 2013), whose chronology continues to 1453. On two separate occasions: at the Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439. Scholarship on this issue is vast. For a recent historical overview of the period, see Jonathan Harris, The End of Byzantium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). On the Chora more generally, see Robert G. Ousterhout, The Art of the Kariye Camii (London: Scala Publishers in association with Archaeology and Art Publications, 2002), and on the visual program of the Cora in relationship to the economic exigencies of the time, see Robert S. Nelson, “Taxation with Representation: Visual Narrative and the Political Field of the Kariye Camii,” Art History 22, no. 1 (1999): 56–82. On architectural developments in late Byzantine Constantinople more broadly, see Vasileios Marinis, Architecture and Ritual in the Churches of Constantinople: Ninth to Fifteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). According to Ćurčić and Mouriki, the editors of the Twilight of Byzantium volume, “the political and economic decline of the Empire was not neatly paralleled by a similar cultural decline” (3). In the opening lines of her study, Nevra Necipoğlu stresses the “cliché” that the later Byzantine

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period “was a time of decline in all domains except the arts and culture, which, paradoxically, flourished and revived during the very same period.” See “Geç Bizans Döneminde İmparatorluk ve İmparatorluk İdeolojisi: Gelenek, Dönüşüm ve Yenilik / Empire and Imperial Ideology in the Late Byzantine Era: Tradition, Transformation, and Innovation,” in Kariye Camii yeniden (The Kariye Camii Reconsidered), ed. Holger A. Klein, Robert G. Ousterhout, and Brigitte Pitarakis (Istanbul: Araştırmaları Enstitüsü, 2011), 285.   9 Cecily J. Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 10 To be clear, this is not the terminology employed in my study of art and diplomacy in later Byzantium, but the discussion that follows revisits some of the conclusions of my book in the terminology of the “Coping with Decline” workshop organized by Frédéric Mérand, out of which the present publication was developed. I expanded these ideas in a slightly different direction in “The Timeliness of Timelessness: Reconsidering Decline in the Palaiologan Period,” in Reconsidering the Concept of Decline and the Arts of the Palaiologan Era, ed. Andrea Mattiello and Maria Alessia Rossi (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 53–70. See also note 51 below. 11 On Gibbon’s place in the literature on decline, see the relevant essays in the following two collections: G.W. Bowersock, John Leonard Clive, and Stephen Richards Graubard, eds, Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1977), and Rosamond McKitterick and Roland E. Quinault, eds, Edward Gibbon and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For a succinct overview of these vast issues, including a contextualization of Gibbon within the context of British imperialism, see F.K. Haarer, “Writing Histories of Byzantium: The Historiography of Byzantine History,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed. Liz James (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 9–21. 12 Throughout this chapter, all Gibbon references are to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994). In “Gibbon and the Later Byzantine Empires” (in McKitterick and Quinault, Edward Gibbon and Empire, 101–16), Anthony Bryer discusses the sources used by Gibbon in his section on the later Byzantine period as well as the ­chronology of the text’s composition. 13 Bowersock, Clive, and Graubard, Edward Gibbon, 765. 14 “The journeys of three emperors were unavailing for their temporal, or perhaps their spiritual, salvation; but they were productive of a beneficial

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consequence; the revival of Greek learning in Italy, from whence it was propagated to the last nations of the West and North.” Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3: 894–909. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 895. 17 Maria Mavroudi, “Translations from Greek into Latin and Arabic during the Middle Ages: Searching for the Classical Tradition,” Speculum 90, no. 1 (2015): 34–5n29, stresses the importance of Ostrogorsky in this regard. 18 Goldschmidt’s metaphor is invoked by Erwin Panofsky in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960), 153. 19 The pawned jewels and earthenware vessels are cited in most studies of the later Byzantine period as poignant reminders of the diminished realities of the era. Even Constantine Cavafy’s 1926 poem “Of Colored Glass” evocatively draws on Gregoras’s lament. Scholars have been less interested in investigating the relationship between economic weakness and cultural strength, a point elaborated below. 20 Nicephoros Gregoras, Byzantina historia, ed. L. Schopen (Bonn, DE: E. Weber, 1829), 790. 21 Ihor Ševčenko, “The Decline of Byzantium Seen Through the Eyes of Its Intellectuals,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 15 (1961): 173. Note that these terms are direct quotations. 22 Ibid., 182. While the sense of the present not living up to the past had been voiced many times before, “the notions of impending doom and of inferiority to the past became much more pronounced in the final stage of the Empire’s history. This final stage began in about 1300.” Ibid., 171. 23 See Sachs, “What Is Decline?” in this volume. 24 Some key thinkers such as Metochites did see on the horizon an end to the empire. See Teresa Shawcross, “Theories of Decline from Metochites to Ibn Khaldūn,” in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium, ed. Anthony Kaldellis and Niketas Siniossoglou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 615–32. 25 The Last Days, as the late Angela Volan explained, “promised the renewal of the empire and its political institutions, rather than their total destruction.” See Volan, “Picturing the Last Judgment in the Last Days of Byzantium” in Klein, Ousterhout, and Pitarakis, Kariye Camii yeniden, 424. 26 Ibid. 27 Stratis Papaioannou, “Byzantine historia,” in Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World, ed. Kurt A. Raaflaub (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 305–6. See also Hilsdale, “The Timeliness of Timelessness.”

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28 Assessments of the effectiveness of diplomatic strategies are common to the scholarship on diplomacy in all periods of the empire. Alexander Kazhdan’s introduction in Jonathan Shepard and Simon Franklin, eds, Byzantine Diplomacy: Papers from the Twenty-Fourth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Cambridge, March 1990 (Brookfield, V T: Ashgate, 1992), charts the transformation of Byzantine diplomacy over time, from the breakdown of the satellite system of the earlier period, to balanced relationships in the middle period, to an imbalanced relationship in the later period, leaving the empire “no choice but to assume the role of a humble suppliant” (21). 29 Nevra Necipoğlu, Byzantium between the Ottomans and the Latins: Politics and Society in the Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 30 This brief survey is largely consistent with that presented in Shepard and Franklin, Byzantine Diplomacy. My interpretation diverges from this narrative in terms of determinism. Kazhdan’s concluding statement in his introduction to that volume emphasizes the lack of options in the later Byzantine period (again, according to Kazhdan, “it had no choice but to assume the role of a humble supplicant” [my emphasis]). But there were options ­available to rulers of the later Byzantine period, and by dedicating scholarly ­attention to those options, decline takes on a generative dimension – in other words, we can see what decline makes possible rather than what it forecloses. 31 George Dennis, ed. and trans., The Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus: Text, Translation, and Notes, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, vol. 8 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1977). 32 This is one of a series letters written the emperor’s friend and teacher, Demetrios Kydones, whose response underscores the pathos of the emperor’s lament: “For an emperor of the Romans to see cities, which had of old been peopled by the Romans, now under the lordship of the barbarians, cities which have cast off the name given by their settlers and exchanged it for those ruins, who would not be dejected in spirit and fill his eyes with tears?” Dennis, Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus, 50. 33 Ibid., 44–5. 34 Ibid., letter 14. Discussion of this epistolary exchange is drawn from ­chapter 4 of Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy. 35 Phaedo, 69a–b: “this is not the right way to purchase virtue, by exchanging pleasures for pleasures, and pains for pains, and fear for fear, and greater for less, as if they were coins, but the only right coinage, for which all those things must be exchanged and by means of and with which all these things are to be bought and sold, is in fact wisdom.”

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36 The political valences of the designs of Palaiologan coinage is treated in chapter 3 of Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy. 37 Letter 19 in Dennis, Letters of Manuel II Palaeologus, 58. 38 John W. Barker, “Emperors, Embassies, and Scholars: Diplomacy and the Transmission of Byzantine Humanism to Renaissance Italy,” in Church and Society in Late Byzantium, ed. Dimiter Angelov (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), 159–63. 39 Ian Thomson has called attention to the potential broader political agenda of Chrysoloras’s interaction with Italian humanistic circles, linking them ideologically to his diplomatic missions. Ian Thomson, “Manuel Chrysoloras and the Early Italian Renaissance,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 7 (1966): 78, characterizes this ideological agenda as ­follows: “if someone, somehow, could convince the right people in the West that the East had something worth saving – the entire heritage of Greek learning – then perhaps help would be forthcoming.” Thomson’s position, though called into question by Barker, has influenced many scholars, including, most recently, Chryssa A. Maltezou, “An Enlightened Byzantine Teacher in Florence: Manuel Chrysoloras,” in Orthodoxy and Oecumene: Gratitude volume in Honour of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomaios, ed. Elias Voulgarakis (Athens: Harmos, 2001), 447. Thomson’s characterization of this situation in terms of proselytization strikes me as too strong. 40 On the “Exhortation on Behalf of the Nation,” or the Παρακίνησις ὑπὲρ τοῦ γένοuς, see Ch.G. Patrinelēs and Dēmētrios Z. Sophianos, eds, Manouēl Chrysolōra, logos pros ton autokratora Manouēl II Palaiologo (Athens: Akademia Athēnōn, Kentron Ereunēs tou Mesaiōnikou kai Neou Hellēnismou, 2001), and C.G. Patrinelis, “An Unknown Discourse of Chrysoloras Addressed to Manuel II Palaeologus,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 13, no. 4 (1972): 497–502. 41 Holger A. Klein, “Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics and Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 312. 42 Anthony Kaldellis, A New Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West, Supplements to the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (Washington, DC : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 227. 43 Nicholas A. Oikonomides, “Byzantine Diplomacy: A.D. 1204–1453: Means and Ends,” in Shepard and Franklin, Byzantine Diplomacy, 75. See also Necipoğlu, “Empire and Imperial Ideology,” 292. 44 This dimension of later Byzantine diplomacy is discussed in chapter 5 of Hilsdale, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy.

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45 Ruth Macrides exposes the bias in treating marriage with foreigners in isolation as inherently political and diplomatic in contradistinction to those marriages “contracted at home.” See Macrides, “Dynastic Marriages and Political Kinship,” in Shepard and Franklin, Byzantine Diplomacy, 263–4. For a more recent discussion, see Sandra Origone, “Marriage Connections between Byzantium and the West in the Age of the Palaiologoi,” in Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of David Jacoby, ed. Benjamin Arbel (New York: Routledge, 1996), 226–41. 46 By incorporating outsiders, emperors relied on marriage to integrate wider groups and facilitate social advancement. See Macrides, “Dynastic Marriages,” and Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 47 The particular marriage to which Pachymeres refers was a most problematic union: the daughter of Byzantine emperor Andronikos II, who was only five years old at the time, and the kral of Serbia, who was forty-six, a fact that appalled contemporaries and sparked outrage far more than it brought union. 48 See Alice-Mary Talbot, “Revival and Decline: Voices form the Byzantine Capital,” in Evans, Byzantium: Faith and Power, 19–21, and Angeliki Laiou, “Byzantium and the Neighboring Powers: Small-State Policies and Complexities,” in Brooks, Perspectives on Late Byzantine Art and Culture, 50ff. The logic of medieval dynastic marriage is succinctly explicated in chapter 2 of Christian Raffensperger, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, Harvard Historical Studies 177 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2012), 47–70. 49 As Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, “Marriage between outsiders is a social advance (because it integrates wider groups). It is also a venture.” See LéviStrauss, The Elementary Structure of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 [Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, 1949]), 48. This citation serves as the point of departure for Hilsdale, “Constructing a Byzantine Augusta: A Greek Book for a French Bride,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 458–83. 50 See Mérand’s introduction to this volume. 51 The argument presented here is framed more explicitly in the terms of soft power in episode 18 of the podcast Byzantium & Friends hosted by Anthony Kaldellis, “Byzantine Soft Power in an Age of Decline, with Cecily Hilsdale,” 27 February 2020, available at https://byzantiumandfriends. podbean.com/e/18-byzantine-soft-power-in-an-age-of-decline-withcecily-hilsdale/. To be clear, soft power refers to the ability to attract and persuade, as opposed to hard power, which relies on coercion or force

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(military or economic), as developed initially by political scientist Joseph S. Nye in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990) and Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004). Jonathan Shepard has found the conception especially attractive for understanding Byzantium, which, in the later period especially, was punching well above its weight. See Shepard, “Superpower to Soft Power, within Overlapping Circles: Byzantium and its Place in Twenty-First-Century International History,” in Internationale Geschichte in Theorie und Praxis, ed. Barbara HaiderWilson, William D. Godsey, and Wolfgang Mueller (Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017), 81–122. 52 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 3: 1068. 53 Gülru Necipoğlu, “From Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Kostantiniyye: Creation of a Cosmopolitan Capital and Visual Culture under Sultan Mehmed II,” in From Byzantion to Istanbul: 8,000 Years of a Capital, June 5–Sept. 4, 2010 (Istanbul: Sakip Sabanci Museum, 2010), 262–78, and Gülru Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constantinople,” Muqarnas 29 (2012): 1–81. 54 Averil Cameron’s Byzantine Matters (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2014) discusses the association of decline with fall in the historiography of the empire and provides an apologia for Byzantium more broadly.

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3 Defeat and Decline: Understanding Military Failure in Victorian Britain and in America after Vietnam and Iraq Richard Lachmann

Hegemons view themselves as invincible. Britons and Americans, in their country’s respective heydays, liked to boast in remarkably similar phrasing that they possessed the greatest militaries in the world, the best and bravest fighting men in human history. Thus, in Britain during World War I, speakers were heard to claim about the British army, “it may be small but it is the finest army in the history of the world.”1 President Obama, echoing his predecessors, said in 2014, “The greatest Christmas present we have is the finest military the world has ever known. We could not be more thankful.”2 Military defeats, especially at the hands of minor powers or nonstate insurgents, lead military and civilian leaders and broad groups of citizens to reconsider their assumptions. Disagreements over whether defeat was a sign of incipient decline or the result of an erroneous strategy (or internal betrayal) serve as proxies for broader debates on the health of the hegemon’s polity and on the vigour and willingness to sacrifice of its citizenry. Diagnoses shape proposals for change. This chapter is an effort to compare how civilian and military officials as well as “defence intellectuals” in Victorian Britain, after high casualties and inconclusive outcomes in the Crimean and South African (Boer) Wars, and comparable American elites, in the aftermath of the Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq Wars, thought and wrote about their nations’ military setbacks and whether they linked the courses of those wars to broader worries about their nations’ decline. I examine Britain and the United States because they were the hegemons of their

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eras; indeed, over the past two hundred years no other polities besides these two can make the remotest claim to hegemony. This is, then, a comparison of two powers that in succession held, and perceived themselves as holding, unparalleled power to dominate rivals and more broadly to shape the world according to their designs. These five wars, in which Britain and the United States failed to achieve the objectives for which they fought, were significantly smaller and (for the hegemons) less bloody than other wars they had fought previously. The world wars were victories for Britain and the US and therefore cannot shed any light on how those two powers responded to defeat. Yet, because they were widely regarded at home as defeats, the wars under consideration in this chapter prompted military leaders, statesmen, opposition politicians, intellectuals, and journalists – who are my focus in this chapter – as well as the broader public, to doubt received understandings of their nation’s relative and absolute strength and to consider a range of proposals to revive or scale back British or American geopolitical ambitions. These unsuccessful wars came at different moments in Britain’s and America’s hegemony: the Crimean and Vietnam Wars occurred when Britain and the US, respectively, were at the peaks of their economic and geopolitical power, while the South African and Afghan and Iraq Wars took place when both hegemons felt themselves under economic pressure and when Britain faced true military rivals. My concern in this chapter is to trace the interaction between the purveyors of ideas and the developers and administrators of policies. In other words, I want to determine the social locations and interests of the advocates for the various interpretations of the five wars and of those who formulated and implemented (or blocked) policy innovations. I largely confine my focus to the ways in which British and American defence intellectuals and officials in military and civilian agencies – i.e., people who made military and foreign policy for their nations – thought about those wars and the policies they proposed and, more rarely, actually were able to implement. I address the opinions of ordinary citizens in a more limited way, mainly bringing them into the analysis to show how the opinions and demands of broader publics limited the options open to policy-makers. Despite the similarities in Britain’s and America’s world positions when they fought these wars, the two hegemons differ in key ways. Britain never enjoyed the overwhelming military edge that the US has

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held since the demise of the Soviet Union, thus the policy debates in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan, though not following Vietnam, are sui generis: in other words, this is partly an examination of how a nation with no major power rivals (indeed in a world in which no other country is able to project military force on a global scale) could fail to achieve its objectives. More critically for the purpose of this chapter, we know how the debates over decline in Victorian Britain were resolved. After the Crimean and South African Wars were concluded with complex treaties, in 1856 and 1902, respectively, Britain instituted various reforms yet remained committed to preserving (and indeed expanding) its empire while limiting its military expenditures. Ultimately it was the two world wars, fought in part over Britain’s effort to sustain European and world dominance over Germany, that delivered coups de grâce to both the British Empire and Britain’s claims to being a world power. The debate and policy-making in the United States is still ongoing. We know what effect Vietnam had, but the recent Afghan and Iraq defeats have launched but not yet resolved debates over American global ambitions and strategies. This chapter seeks to identify the strategies that Britain and the US adopted from the menu of possibilities outlined in the introductory chapter, and to explain why each of those declining hegemons pursued and were able to implement only some of the strategies and not others. Among the international strategies, both Britain and the US mainly retrenched. They did emphasize engagement, although as Ikenberry notes in chapter 8 of this volume, the appeal of British or American values was as much the result of other powers seeing the old hegemonic order as the cheapest and safest way to guard their own security and pursue their interests as it was the product of active proselytizing on the part of the hegemons. The US under Nixon sought to recast the global economic order to improve American competitiveness, while the British drew up speculative plans that they never were able to implement. The main strategic focus for both Britain and the US were innovations on the domestic level. However, innovation was much more successful in the US than in Britain. The different outcomes in the two countries were not preordained and cannot be explained by their geopolitical positions. Rather, domestic political dynamics determined the ways in which elites in the two countries responded to military defeats and thereby shaped the speed and trajectories of their countries’ declines.

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Britain and the United States achieved geopolitical dominance at the conclusions, respectively, of the Napoleonic Wars and World War II. Neither country faced even a remote threat of invasion of their home territories, and within Europe (the fulcrum of both conflicts) Britain and the US were able to ensure that no polity was able to emerge to challenge their dominance in the rest of the world. The neutralization of continental Europe was accomplished in both cases through mixtures of diplomacy and military power. Nineteenth-century Britain held out the threat of naval strangulation along with support for the Concert of Powers that preserved peace among the major continental players even as wars continued among and within smaller European countries still in the process of settling their borders.3 The US held a huge military advantage, which after the end of the Soviet Union became unprecedentedly overwhelming, that allowed it to enlist every country in Western Europe, and after 1991 most of those in Eastern Europe as well, as junior partners. Both powers did face military challenges beyond Europe: from rival powers attempting to encroach on Britain’s empire and on the US’s sphere of influence/informal empire, and from subjects attempting to escape from British or American domination. The two hegemons regarded each type of challenger differently. Britain worried only about rival European powers. Restless natives in various overseas colonies, the British assumed, could always be defeated, unless they were directly aided by a great power (as France repeatedly attempted to do, with great success in the American Revolution and failure everywhere else, most notably in Ireland and India). The British government did worry about the financial costs of fighting colonial wars, and developed an array of strategies for preventing or short-circuiting native uprisings: binding non-Europeans to Britain through trade and financial dependency; offering limited self-government to white settlers who otherwise might have been tempted to follow the example of the thirteen colonies; enticing local elites to ally with Britain rather than their Asian or African brethren; and engaging in exemplary violence to scare rebellious colonies into submission. Nineteenthcentury Britons recognized that their government’s efforts at imperial consolidation and expansion were cheaper and more effective than military or economic confrontation with the rising powers of Germany and the United States, a view supported by recent scholars.4

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Britain in the last decades of the nineteenth century saw danger in the economic rather than military realm, and therefore focused resources on maintaining control over and expanding its empire, which it saw as its principal source of wealth, rather than preparing to fight a European war. The government felt confident that it could sustain a balance of power within Europe, and saw its direct and indirect empire as invulnerable to challenge by the non-Europeans it ruled. British worries focused on long-term trends, which were regarded as ultimately unfavourable: Russian expansion in Asia and the rapid growth of the German and US economies, both of which seemed destined to overtake Britain’s. However, those economic tipping points were assumed to be decades in the future and British strategists thought they could be put off further by strengthening unity and thereby fostering economic growth within an empire that still was expanding. The US after 1945 was justifiably confident that it could defeat any polity that was not aided by the Soviet Union or China. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations and all of their successors recognized the impossibility of challenging Soviet domination in the Eastern European lands that massive Soviet armies occupied at the end of World War II.5 However, in the Third World, with of course the enormous exception of China, the US was able to block or neutralize leftist governments. The long list of America-sponsored coups, assassinations, puppet governments, and manipulated elections testify to the efficacy, and low cost in American money and lives, of US efforts to ensure submissive regimes in most of the world. During the 1960s, a growing number of countries escaped from the US orbit, though most of them sought to become non-aligned rather than ally with the Soviet Union or China. In no case, not even the Chinese Communist revolution, was the “loss” of a country to Communism or neutrality viewed as evidence of American weakness or decline. Rather, the escapees were seen variously as (1) so lacking in economic or geopolitical value that they did not justify any expenditure of US funds or military force, (2) evidence of the after-effects of British or French colonial rapaciousness in newly independent countries, (3) the results of American diplomatic inattention or miscalculation (or, as Joseph McCarthy and his allies claimed following the loss of China, internal betrayal), and/or (4) geographic proximity to the Soviet Union or China. Cuba, the one country whose Communist revolution couldn’t be dismissed with one or more of these four explanations, became an

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obsession of US policy-makers, but they never took the longevity of the Castro regime as a measure of American weakness. Government officials and those in civil society who sought to guide public policy both in Britain and the US identified measures they believed necessary for sustaining their respective country’s global power. Both countries believed it was essential to spend however much was needed to maintain a decisive military edge over rivals, although their conceptions of what was needed changed over time and was molded in part by fiscal concerns, especially in Britain. For Britain, naval supremacy was crucial since it was viewed as the most cost-effective way of neutralizing challenges in Europe and the empire. Britain never lacked the fiscal resources needed to sustain its military edge in the century leading up to World War I, as evidenced by the very low, and falling, interest rates it paid for loans in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the landed and financial elites that dominated Victorian politics did use their political power to successfully demand that taxes be kept low, even at the cost of slighting what military and diplomatic officials regarded as necessary expenditures. The British state thus used the nation’s fiscal strength to keep taxes low rather than to boost military spending enough to widen its strategic edge over European rivals. The overall budget of the national government fell from 23 per cent of GDP in the final year of the Napoleonic Wars to a range of 12 to 13 per cent in the 1830s and ’40s. The budget was 13 per cent of GDP in 1855, the peak year of spending during the Crimean War. That figure fell into the 6–7 per cent range from the 1870s to the 1890s, and rose only to 11 per cent in 1902, the peak year of spending during the South African War. In 1913, as Britain prepared to counter a militarized Germany, spending was just 8 per cent of GDP.6 British military spending as a percentage of G D P from 1870 to 1913 was “78% that of the French, 67% that of the Russian, and 41% that of the Japanese” and comparable to that of Italy, Germany, and Austria.7 However, since all those other countries used conscription, and Britain had to pay salaries to its soldiers, all of whom were volunteers, the data understate the gap between Britain and all the other great powers, except for the US, the only power that spent less than Britain (and which also relied exclusively on volunteers). Nevertheless, to “Victorian statesmen” the expenses were “onerous and deplorable.”8 The US has enjoyed an even more favourable fiscal edge over its geopolitical rivals than did Victorian Britain. Table 3.1 shows that

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Table 3.1 US military spending as a percentage of GDP

Year(s)

Percentage

1943–45 (World War II) 1952–54 (Korean War) 1955–59 1961 (Kennedy peak spending) 1968 (Vietnam peak spending) 1978–79 (post-Vietnam trough) 1986 (Reagan peak spending) 1999–2000 (post-Reagan trough) 2008 (G.W. Bush peak spending)

37 13–14 10–11 9.4 9.4 4.7 6.2 3.0 4.3

Source: Adapted from Office of Management and Budget, “Composition of Outlays: 1940–2021,” https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals, Table 6.1.

American military spending, as a percentage of G D P , has declined steadily over the country’s decades of hegemony, even as it maintained a nuclear balance with the Soviet Union and a stasis in continental Europe and enjoyed a far greater ability to project power around the world than did the USSR. Of course, since 1991 the American advantage has become overwhelming, even as military spending has continued to decline relative to the overall US economy. The US, like Victorian Britain, has been able to finance wartime expenditures through debt on favourable, low-interest terms and has largely avoided tax increases. Indeed, American taxes were cut, first in 1964 in a brief trough between the Kennedy Cold War buildup and the escalation in Vietnam, and repeatedly since 1981 along with the Reagan-era buildup and the Bush-era wars. Although tax surcharges were imposed during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and raised the majority of the costs of Korea and, at least in the 1968–70 period, a significant fraction of those for Vietnam, the costs of the Iraq and Afghan Wars were met entirely with debt. (The Gulf War was financed mainly by US allies – above all Japan, which is dependent on Middle Eastern oil, and by the Saudi and other Gulf monarchies.9) The US, unlike Britain, did make use of conscription, which was in force from 1948 to 1973, albeit with extensive deferments (most notoriously the student deferment, which was famously manipulated by Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, among many others) that were

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drastically expanded after the end of the Korean War. America, unlike Britain, did not have a colony like India upon which it could draw for soldiers. Indeed, while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was far more generous in military spending than the Warsaw Pact, US allies were even less significant in contributing manpower to America’s post-1945 wars than were Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to Britain’s wars. The US, and to a lesser extent Britain, benefited from the “exorbitant privilege” of having the world currency, which lowered borrowing costs, ensured that they would be the commercial and financial entrepôt of the world, with all the economic benefits that yielded, and made their bonds the primary safe harbour for the world’s investors.10 Both nations were aware of the advantages of having the dominant currency and worked assiduously to ensure that they maintained that position. Both powers also enjoyed advantages in military technology over their rivals. For Britain, the edge was narrow as great power rivals quickly were able to duplicate British innovations in warships.11 In any case, Britain enjoyed no advantage in land-based armaments. The US, in contrast, was the innovator in every military technology after 1945. The Soviet Union managed to match the US in land-based nuclear warheads and in some armaments for land-based troops, but never in planes or ships, and was totally outclassed in high-tech weaponry. Since the end of the Soviet Union, no power has tried to compete with US military technology; although Soviet/Russian surface-to-air missiles and some other lower-tech weapons – most famously the improvised explosive devices used in Iraq and Afghanistan – are able to blunt the effectiveness of US forces.12 Finally, both Britain and the US were buoyed by ideological confidence in the goodness of their motives and the superiority of their economic and political systems, which they believed all well-­ intentioned and rational peoples would want to imitate. Britons equated freedom in the first instance with free trade and free labour, ignoring their government’s use of force to guarantee the former while celebrating Britain’s supposedly high-minded abolition of slavery.13 Americans spoke of free markets, which widened from respect for private property during the Cold War era to a broader neo-liberal agenda since 1991. To this America adds a claim to unique virtue, both in its domestic practices and in its global role, something few Britons asserted in their empire’s heyday.14 This reached a pinnacle in the run-up to the Afghan and Iraq Wars. As one contemporary

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observer noted at the time, Bush administration officials and their supporters in politics and the media “tend to avoid terms like ‘militarism’ and ‘imperialism,’ but they do like the resonance of the noun ‘Empire’ and its adjective ‘imperial.’ These terms suddenly seem full of noble, civilizing, even humanitarian sentiments. The Empire will bring peace, freedom and democracy to the world! They will save oppressed peoples from their own ‘rogue’ leaders!”15 Victorian Britons and Americans during and after the Cold War thus had ample reasons to see their militaries as capable of meeting any challenge beyond Europe while being able to block their principal great power rivals – Russia, Germany, and France for Britain, and the Soviet Union and China for the US – from directly threatening the hegemons’ home territories or their global dominance in the military, diplomatic, or economic realms. In addition, the inhabitants of the two hegemons, or at least those who paid (uncritical) attention to foreign affairs, also believed that good intentions and moral right matched their nations’ might. These assessments and beliefs were overwhelmingly the dominant sentiments at the start of all five wars. We now need to assess the extent to which, and how, those views were transformed by the events and outcomes of the wars. b r i t i s h s u r p r i s e s o n t h e b at t l e f i e l d

Most of Britain’s nineteenth-century colonial wars were cheap in monetary terms and in British – though not in non-European – lives. “Much of the violence of British expansion was local, obscure, and grimly banal. Even where British troops were engaged much went unnoticed or escaped official record. Civilian casualties, direct or indirect, attracted little attention.”16 Singer and Small identify five wars in the 1816–1913 period, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars until the start of World War I, in which more than 10,000 “British” soldiers died: the AngloBurmese War of 1823–26 (15,000 dead), the British-Afghan War of 1838–42 (20,000 dead), the Crimean War of 1854–56 (22,000 dead), the Mahdist War in Egypt of 1882–85 (20,000 dead), and the South African War of 1899–1902 (22,000 dead).17 The Anglo-Burmese and Mahdist Wars provoked little debate or dissention in Britain, in part because they were successful in securing Burma and Egypt for British control and because almost all the “British” dead in fact were, in the case of Burma, Indian soldiers, while in the Madhist War they were Egyptians fighting for Britain rather than Britons themselves.18

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The British-Afghan War also was fought mainly with Indian troops.19 The 4,500 “British” troops who were massacred in 1842 in one of the worst defeats in British military history were fewer than 700 Britons and the rest were Indians.20 Britons evidenced no concern at all with the deaths of these Indian soldiers; however, there was opposition to the monetary cost of the Afghan war, especially since plans for the war were drawn up in secret and the war’s reasons and objectives were kept opaque by the government. The newly victorious Tories, who replaced the Whig government in 1841, midway through the war, contributed to Britain’s defeat: the Tory government instructed British commanders in Afghanistan to reduce costs. They did so by cutting their subsidies (bribes) to the Ghilzais, who then stopped protecting British troops, making the 1842 massacre possible.21 The massacre of the mainly Indian troops in Afghanistan “unleashed a torrent of criticism in the press in India,” while the British press focused on the financial costs of the war.22 The Times was typical: “This nation spent £15 million on a less than profitable effort after self-aggrandizement in Afghanistan.”23 The cabinet overcame domestic complaints by sending more, mainly Indian, troops to Afghanistan, massacring civilians, and destroying Afghan cities before claiming victory and withdrawing without taking on the long-term, impossibly expensive, and perhaps absolutely impossible task of pacifying and controlling the Afghan populace.24 The other two of Britain’s major wars in the years between 1816 and 1913 were longer and costlier in money and British lives than the military commanders or cabinet ministers expected. Britain’s difficulty, despite the help of its French and Ottoman allies, in winning a decisive victory against Russia in the Crimean War sparked debates over the causes of British military weakness as well as demands that the British army give an honest accounting of the number of war casualties. The Crimean War’s strategic blunders and the lack of supplies and medical facilities for wounded troops were described by war correspondents, reporting from the battlefield for the first time in Crimea. Public outrage over what was perceived as callousness toward British lives led to the resignation of the prime minister and war minister. Public reaction, during and after the Crimean War, was democratic in a way that was unprecedented for Britain and for any other nation in that it focused on the plight of ordinary soldiers. The army and the government were condemned mainly for their callousness and

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incompetence in preserving the lives of British troops. Anger was directed at the government’s and the high command’s profligacy with soldiers. Critics condemned both the initial decision to risk and sacrifice so many soldiers in a war that seemed to be fought over stakes marginal to Britain’s geopolitical interests, and the high command’s incompetence that sent so many soldiers to deaths that could have been avoided with better planning and more strategic intelligence (in every sense of that word). Finally, this was the first war in which the public became aware that a large majority of the deaths were due to un- or mistreated wounds and infections rather than battlefield fatalities, and that many of those dead (although in fact fewer than the public believed) could have been saved with better medical care.25 Journalists were the key actors in publicizing army malpractice and in orchestrating demands for retribution against public officials and for reforms. After the Crimean War, limited innovations were enacted to improve the army’s effectiveness. The government took over provision of troops, ending profiteering by officers. The organization of the army was simplified and centralized, eliminating autonomous departments outside the chain of command. Military schools were expanded to allow for in-service training of officers, though little effort was made in training ordinary troops.26 Resources and planning instead were put into preparing the army to fight small colonial wars, at which the British excelled and were almost uniformly successful.27 The debate over the Crimean War focused almost exclusively on the army. There is no evidence that any significant group of Britons saw their nation’s difficulties in that war as an indication of general national weakness or of British decline relative to other powers in the military or economic realms. Rather, a specific set of shortcomings in a single institution (the army) was assigned all the blame for the high casualties and mixed outcome of the Crimean War. We should be careful not to exaggerate the long-term effects of the debate over the Crimean War and the reforms that were enacted. The British army, as became evident in World War I, did not become more solicitous of the lives of their soldiers, and episodes like the Charge of the Light Brigade in Crimea (fewer than 200 British dead) were multiplied thousands of times over in World War I (more than 700,000 British dead), mainly in the repeated and ultimately fruitless assaults on German trenches. Compared with the Crimean War, the South African War came at a later and less optimistic moment in British history. Britain was just

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emerging from a quarter century of slowing economic growth and its edge in total industrial production had been lost to the US and Germany, the two rising industrial powers who in 1900 were about to surpass Britain in per capita manufacturing output as well.28 As Britain endured relative, though not absolute, industrial decline, British capitalists29 as well as strategists within and without the government (the Victorian equivalents of contemporary American defence intellectuals) saw future British prosperity as increasingly dependent on geopolitical power to guarantee British investments around the world rather than on industrial and organizational prowess or technological innovation, which they worried would increasingly come from German and American firms and universities.30 The army and especially the navy thus were viewed as the essential cornerstones of continued British geopolitical and economic power. However, most attention and investment were focused on the navy rather than the army. Naval pre-eminence, in numbers of ships and even more in their technological edge over rival powers’ battleships, was deemed essential if Britain was to control global shipping routes and to be able to blockade France, Germany, or Russia within Europe in a war against any of those powers. Less attention was focused on the army’s relative capacities, and little money was invested in technological innovation in land warfare. These lacunae were products of wishful thinking rather than careful strategic planning. “The British gave no serious thought to the strategic difficulties they might encounter in making good [their] commitments” to European allies to defend them against the Germans31 because the costs of fighting and the difficulties of winning such a war were too frightening and expensive to contemplate, so plans weren’t made to fight a European land war.32 Army spending was focused on buying the simpler technologies and fielding the (largely Indian) battalions needed to suppress and if need be exterminate native rebels. British success in the “scramble for Africa” seemed to validate successive Conservative and Liberal governments’ spending priorities. In addition, the new African colonies were further justified as important for protecting British sea-lanes between Europe and Asia. Britain’s conquests in Africa had been cheap and easy, but the financial returns from holding those new territories were minimal as well. The discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886 promised the first opportunity for a significant addition to imperial revenues and to the British economy. However, mining wealth also gave the Boer

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state enough revenue to buy modern weapons and pose a challenge to British troops far more dangerous than those of black Africans armed with pre-modern weapons. The war “cost three times as much as the Crimean War and involved four times as many troops … The war lasted for 2 years, 8 months, cost £230m, involved a total of 450,000 British and Empire troops, and resulted in the deaths of some 22,000 soldiers on the British side, about 34,000 Boer civilians and combatants, and an unknown number of the African population which has been estimated at not less than 45,000.”33 Because the British government decided to not use Indian troops or to arm black Africans to fight the Boers, the casualties were entirely borne by Britons and soldiers from white settler colonies.34 That made British casualties in South Africa truly “British” and therefore a prime topic in British newspapers and magazines. The Boers, who were viewed as fellow whites, received extended and sympathetic coverage in a way that no other victims of British imperialism ever had. That reporting did not alter British tactics in the war, but it did soften the ultimate terms that ended the fighting.35 The war was justified as necessary to secure a key part of the empire, preventing an alliance between Germany and the Boer state, yet the peace terms recognized that Boer consent to British rule had to be won by granting Boers citizenship rights in a South Africa that was on a path to ever greater autonomy from Britain, at least in domestic affairs. m u lt i p l e d e b at e s a n d f e w r e f o r m s : b r i ta i n 1902–14 3 6

Britain’s difficulty in defeating the Boers, despite the deployment of most of its army and a financial price that was seen as unsupportable, sparked a range of proposals for military reform. The previous unwillingness to face the budgetary increases and use of conscription that would have been necessary to pose a credible counterweight to German forces on the Continent continued. Naval spending did increase, but the main “reforms” were diplomatic. Britain in essence conceded control over the Americas and the western Atlantic to the United States. This détente also removed the rapidly growing US navy from British calculations of the number of ships it had to launch to equal the next two potentially hostile navies, and allowed the navy to redeploy most its ships to waters between Britain and Germany. The threat from Russia to India, which British strategists had obsessed over in the late nineteenth century, were suddenly seen as greatly

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lessened by Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 and the subsequent British-Japanese alliance in Asia.37 The fruits of British strategic diplomacy combined with the fortuitous Japanese defeat of Russia to convince British statesmen that the danger of geopolitical decline had been pushed decades into the future. (British strategists did not foresee the effects of railroads in facilitating the movement of men and supplies on the Continent, which undercut the effectiveness of naval blockades38 and which in 1914 fatally shortened the time and distance between the German decision to mobilize and its invasion of Belgium.39) At the same time, worries about economic decline persisted, but the proposed solutions had almost nothing to do with any lessons of the South African War. Indeed, there was almost no effort by the British military or civilian critics to analyze the strategic decisions made in South Africa to identify errors or shortcomings that could be ameliorated with new tactics or equipment. Instead, the most debated proposal was Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain’s ultimately quixotic plan for reforming British tariffs to create a gigantic and well-integrated imperial economy that could overwhelm the growing American, German, or Russian advantages in scale and, in the case of the first two, technology. Chamberlain’s proposal was compatible with vaguer schemes to strengthen “Britannic” unity: the idea that white people in settler colonies saw themselves as essentially British and therefore would voluntarily remain part of the British Empire or some less formal entity. Such Britannic polities would enjoy self-rule but share common political values, culture, and race, and be willing to fight for Britain in war if need be.40 The small role played by soldiers from the white dominions in the South African War supported that notion; indeed, that unity, rather than the cost of defeating and then accommodating the Boers, was the main lesson British strategists drew from that war. British debates over the unsatisfactory outcomes of the Crimean and South African Wars remained largely disconnected from discussions over British national and imperial decline. Civilian and military statesmen and most journalists and academic commentators saw decline as the result of forces larger than, and mainly separate from, the factors that rendered the British army inadequate to the challenges of Crimea and South Africa. Thus, the reforms proposed at the ends of the two wars, and even more so the meager reforms actually enacted, were laughably small compared to the forces Britons

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identified as challenges to continuing hegemony. The “lessons” of war remained circumscribed and the innovations successfully implemented did little to alter British politics or state policy beyond the army. As we will see below, the fallout from American defeat in Vietnam was quite different. The lessons of Vietnam extended far beyond the inner workings of the military and led to strategic rethinking in various dimensions. My goal, in the follow sections, is to trace and explain why Vietnam for America was so different than Crimea and South Africa for Britain, and to see what the ongoing debates over Afghanistan and Iraq portend for future strategic and geopolitical adjustments on the part of the United States. vietnam

Historians still debate why the United States government launched itself into a war in Vietnam that at its peak committed 550,000 US soldiers and ultimately resulted in 58,220 US military deaths and those of perhaps 2 million Vietnamese. Porter argues that the Vietnam War was propelled by a US military convinced that it enjoyed such an overwhelming strategic edge over the Soviet Union and China that it could roll back Communism in Vietnam without having to fear a significant pushback from any Communist power.41 Porter contends that the Soviets, Chinese, and North Vietnamese concurred in that view and were ready to standby as the US crushed the southern insurgency, but that the three governments were pushed into countering the US by the autonomous decision of South Vietnamese Communists (the Vietcong) to fight the Americans and their puppet government. Logevall finds that Johnson and some of his advisers already in 1964– 65 were highly pessimistic of the chances of winning the war, and that American allies and some in Congress and the media were willing to endorse withdrawal even if it led to Communist control in all of Vietnam.42 Logevall sees Johnson’s macho unwillingness to preside over the “first” American “defeat” as the main cause of the decision to escalate rather than withdraw. Porter’s and Logevall’s opposing interpretations of American motives both find support in government documents. Successful politicians like Johnson are highly skilled at taking varying and even opposed positions with different audiences, and documents are supplemented by the post hoc efforts of officials (and especially guardians of the Kennedy legacy) to exaggerate officials’ contemporaneous

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concerns and premonitions about the war. Nevertheless, both interpretations agree that the high command of the US military was ­confident that the war could be won and remained so even well after Tet. To that we can add the fact that both supporters and opponents of the war among the broader public did not see defeat as an indicator of broad American decline. Indeed, anti-war activists regarded the US government as too powerful and capable of inflicting massive damage around the world without the restraint of rival powers, hence the need for an anti-war movement.43 Furthermore, as Sachs explains in chapter 1 of this volume, ever since Adam Smith we have been accustomed to think about decline as measurable. Military defeat, and even more the ambiguous outcomes of the Afghan and Iraq Wars, are not quantifiable and are at odds with America’s more easily measured technological edge in weaponry. The American high command had good reason to assume they could intimidate the Soviets into staying out of Vietnam. The US economic and military edge over the Soviet Union and other great powers was wider than Britain enjoyed after the South African or even the Crimean War. Despite Kennedy’s phony claims of a “missile gap” during the 1960 presidential election, the Soviets would overtake the US in number of nuclear warheads only in the late 1970s, and never would come close in the accuracy or invulnerability of its weapons. The USSR by the late 1960s already was losing economic momentum and falling ever further behind the US, a fact of which US intelligence agencies were at least partly aware. Rather, the military and the broader foreign policy establishment viewed defeat in Vietnam more narrowly as the result of specific weaknesses in the military, and those were the focus of reform efforts in the years and decades following. Even as the Vietnam War was still being fought, competing explanations for America’s defeat were formulated and advocated within the government and by journalists, activists, and scholars. The dominant anti-war analysis – that the US lost because it fought on the wrong side (or was itself the wrong side), thereby arousing the righteous anger of the Vietnamese people – gained absolutely no traction within the government and had no influence on subsequent changes in US foreign policy and military doctrine. Far more influential were assertions that the US didn’t lose in Vietnam because it was weaker than the Vietnamese Communists but rather because Americans were unwilling to fight and die in large numbers over the many years required to win against an insurgency. At the time, this was not

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regarded as a sign of overall US decline. Rather US power on a world scale meant, as Johnson aide Bill Moyers wrote in a 1966 memo to the president, that voters “do not understand how a country of our size and power can seemingly make so little progress in Vietnam.”44 Instead, the blame was put on Johnson and the high military command, especially William Westmoreland. Since they had lied to the public and exaggerated US successes in weakening the Communists, Tet was a huge shock to the American public. Even though Tet was a devastating defeat for the Vietcong, who were largely wiped out (leaving the North Vietnamese as the main fighters for the rest of the war), the US public lost faith that the war could be won, and it became impossible to maintain, let alone expand, the number of US troops in Vietnam. American defeat, then, was inevitable. It was only later that retrospective analysts such as Hanson,45 Ferguson,46 and the Kagans,47 viewed Americans’ supposed self-indulgence and unwillingness to endure casualties as a principal cause of defeat in Vietnam. In essence they were advocating for a strategy of self-strengthening. That view animated the range of reforms that Nixon instituted, and that we will analyze first. By the mid-1970s a second view gained prominence, and propelled the Reagan military buildup: that the US no longer could intimidate the Soviets in Vietnam (or in southern Africa or Latin America) because the Soviets accurately believed that the US had fallen behind in nuclear and other high-tech weaponry. While that conclusion was as false as Kennedy’s missile gap, it became the focus of attention and spending throughout the 1980s. Finally, in the late 1990s, brute fiscal commitment was replaced with more focused innovation. The military began to concentrate more of its energies on developing counter-insurgency doctrines and the specialized forces to carry them out. All of these “lessons” from Vietnam were built on the assumption that the US had the capacity to sustain or restore global hegemony as long as the right strategies could be formulated and leaders could convince the public to invest enough money, if not lives, in the task. Let us see how and by whom each perspective was formulated and what reforms each spawned. Richard Nixon thought he had solutions to the problem of Americans’ unwillingness to keep dying in Vietnam or elsewhere in the world. Nixon, in his first successful campaign for president, pledged to “prepare for the day when the draft can be phased out of American life,” a pledge fulfilled in 1973 when the last American was conscripted into the US military.48 Nixon’s promise was a clever

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campaign tactic designed, along with his unspecified plan to end the war, to tap into anti-war sentiment, especially targeting young men who were in danger of being conscripted and sent to Vietnam if the war continued, and assuaging the fears of future draftees and their families. He also believed, “in terms of morale, efficiency and effectiveness, a volunteer armed force would assuredly be a better armed force,”49 both more capable of defeating enemies and also less vulnerable to the breakdown of “morale and discipline … drug use … GIs [who] resisted orders and went on to catalyze the anti-war movement as veterans and …‘fragging’ of officers by enlisted men” that was already widespread among American troops in Vietnam by 1968.50 Nixon’s shift to an all-volunteer military also was part of a larger geopolitical strategy, which he himself named the Nixon Doctrine in his 1969 “Silent Majority” speech. Nixon sought to transfer the burden of combat to foreign proxies: to an enlarged and upgraded South Vietnamese army that would allow a drastic reduction of US troops in Vietnam, and elsewhere in the world to regional powers, such as Iran under the shah. With non-Americans bearing most of the burden of fighting and dying, US forces would become “a highly professional, highly motivated force of men trained in the techniques of counterinsurgency” that would be needed in lesser numbers and suffer far fewer casualties.51 Perry Anderson, reflecting back on the sweep of US foreign policy from Truman to Obama, asserts that from the perspective of the goal of preserving American empire, “as no American ruler before or after him has been, Nixon was an innovator.”52 Anderson is correct. Nixon reset the parameters of US foreign policy. While maintaining the drive to sustain US hegemony in the geopolitical and economic realms, Nixon found ways to reduce the human and financial costs to Americans with the use of proxy armies, an all-volunteer force, and by recasting the methods used to maintain the dollar as the world currency.53 We should specify just what Nixon’s strategy attempted and did not attempt. First, there was no surrender of portions of the globe to rivals or lesser powers, as Britain did in the late nineteenth century when it ceded much of the Atlantic and Pacific to the US and Japan. Nixon’s use of proxies was more comparable to Britain’s use of Indian soldiers and efforts to recruit volunteers from the former settler colonies. Both hegemons sought to reduce the number of their own citizens who would have to fight abroad. However, the US

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military in the decades following the Nixon administration sought to figure out what, beyond foreign proxies, could substitute for the shrinking numbers of American infantry soldiers in the absence of the draft. At first, any potential reforms were hampered by the fact that military spending fell drastically under Nixon, from 45 per cent of federal outlays in 1969 to 26 per cent in 1975, and that the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was restricted by a series of treaties.54 Nixon hinted at one direction, when in his 1968 call for an all-volunteer army he stated, “we need a highly professional, highly motivated force of men trained in the techniques of counterinsurgency … soldiers [who] are linguists and civil affairs specialists as well as warriors.”55 American counter-insurgency doctrine developed slowly. Despite a retrospective effort to claim that General Creighton Abrams, who took over command in Vietnam from Westmoreland in 1968, developed a counter-insurgency strategy that was more successful than Westmoreland’s focus on body counts, in fact there was no serious effort to develop such a doctrine and no substantial buildup in special forces capable of carrying out counter-insurgency.56 Instead, a bipartisan, though mainly Republican, group of retired military officers and out-of-office civilian officials, along with executives from defence firms and conservative journalists, pushed for increasing the military budget so as to overtake the Soviet Union in numbers of warheads. (Some – though less – attention was given to technological innovation.) Led by the Committee on the Present Danger,57 these advocates echoed the views of 1960s generals, as presented by Porter,58 that a decisive nuclear advantage could be leveraged to intimidate the Soviets and their allies around the world. Despite the retrospective Reagan hagiography, there is no evidence that increased US military spending brought down the Soviet Union or even motivated Gorbachev’s reforms. The spending was mainly a massive waste of money that ran up US federal debt and left the US largely unprepared to fight counterinsurgency wars. i r a q a n d a f g h a n i s ta n

The US military finally took counter-insurgency seriously only in the midst of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. As with Britain in the years of its South African War, the US in the 2000s occupied a very different geopolitical and economic position than it did during and after Vietnam. There were substantial groups that worried about US

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economic decline, although, as with Britain, the greater worry was that Americans would refuse to reduce personal consumption to pay the higher taxes that would fund needed military expenditures rather than that the US really could not afford the cost of maintaining supremacy. Nor was there worry that America lacked the technical prowess to effectively spend the needed monies. Of course, the biggest difference between the US after 9/11 and Britain in the years before and after the South African War is that the US faces no real great power challenge. Its hegemony on the seas and skies of the world is totally uncontested. Thus, the focus for Americans today, unlike Britons after South Africa, is on the specifics of the Afghan and Iraq Wars. This produces a split between analysis of American strategy in those two wars and broader discussions of American decline. In a sign of the continuing influence of the Nixon Doctrine, much of the criticism of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq focuses on the Bush and Obama administrations’ inability to root out corruption in the governments of those two nations.59 Others point to the profiteering of contractors hired to fulfill functions formerly performed within the military, the politicization of the occupying authority by the Bush administration and its commitment to extreme neo-liberal ideology,60 or the employment of political hacks and ideological incompetents in the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority.61 Critics from within the military (expressed by retired officers, and by defence analysts such as van Creveld)62 argue that the effort to minimize the number of American troops used to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq ensured a lack of intelligence, antagonism on the part of locals exposed to often indiscriminate high-tech American weapons, and the eventual demoralization of the American troops who fought in the two wars. This argument is compatible, and often combined, with a criticism of Americans as suffering from an “excessively short time horizon.”63Americans’ quick departures from foreign trouble spots matter mainly, in Ferguson’s view, because potential local collaborators are unwilling to work with the US if it will soon depart, thereby leaving them at the mercy of anti-American forces. (Although the US had similar trouble recruiting reliable locals in Vietnam even when it appeared that the US was prepared to remain there indefinitely.) Thus, Obama was criticized for announcing the date of an American troop drawdown in Afghanistan at the same moment when he announced a surge there. This point of argument does link American failures in Iraq and Afghanistan to broader

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American weaknesses, but often the case is made in terms of an unchanging American character, and so is not couched as a harbinger of decline. Only when this American unwillingness to make long-term commitments of money, troops, and lives is presented a something new (as Hanson does), do these two wars appear as manifestations of and contributors to the fall of American hegemony. What influence will criticisms of the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have on the broader debate over US decline? The specific failings of the Bush administration are for the most part presented as sui generis and therefore not holding lessons about the US in general. Schwartz’s leftist argument that neo-liberalism spurred the Iraqi insurgency and doomed the US occupation does hold broader lessons about the effects of neo-liberalism on US politics and government policy, and has the potential to portray the wars as harbingers of US government dysfunction and American decline in non-military realms. So far, that critique has not achieved resonance among mainstream politicians and journalists, nor has it been adopted by Tea Party or other “populist” critics of “crony capitalism.” The argument that Americans are unwilling to endure long occupations or high casualties in other countries is resonant on the right. This leads to the conclusion, made most prominently by Ferguson,64 that the US will be unable to maintain its empire over the long-term as Britain did. From the left, Michael Mann, another Briton who made his career in the US, reaches a similar conclusion: “American kids are not brought up to be as racist, as stoic in combat, as selfdenying in crisis, or as obedient to authority, as British kids once were” and therefore make for less capable occupying imperial forces than Britons once were.65 Mann, in contrast to Ferguson, sees this softness as a virtue. Yet both authors suggest that Nixon’s hopes for a small army capable of counter-insurgency has not been achieved. For Ferguson, this lack is because men and women with the qualities and skills needed to become effective soldiers and imperial administrators prefer to live at home rather than abroad and to get rich rather than serve their country. For Mann, such occupying forces cannot be created since few outside the elite share an imperial ethos. The US military itself looks mainly to innovations based on hightech solutions to numeric or motivational shortages in its troops. Such weapons build on the continuing advantages of the US over its potential rivals: overall technological supremacy and an unparalleled ability to afford expensive weaponry. The US military itself does not see a

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contradiction between reliance on drones and other such weapons and the principles of counter-insurgency, although external critics like van Creveld,66 and the occasional retired general like Daniel Bolger, do.67 So far, critics of reliance on high-tech weaponry have had no effect on military spending priorities or strategies, and there is no indication so far that the US military even sees any lessons to be drawn from its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bolger is a lonely voice, at least so far. Nor is the military revising strategy to take into account Americans’ intolerance of casualties among its all-volunteer forces. However, Obama’s stated objective to “don’t do stupid shit” and his decision to make heavy use of drones do acknowledge limits in the American public’s appetite for war even as it maintains hopes for manipulating affairs in countries around the world. It remains to be seen if the Trump administration follows this cautious approach, or if a belief in US supremacy (or in an ability to maintain military supremacy even in the fact of decline in other realms) will lead to ambitious new interventions that rely on military power. Julian Go argues in chapter 6 of this volume that small wars against weak enemies, such as in Grenada in 1983 and the Balkans in the 1990s, which thereby are almost guaranteed to be successful, can serve a “performative” function of assuring Americans that their nation and military remain supreme, and therefore that they need not fear future wars. The goals of such performative wars are modest: to ensure that the US public does not actively block elite future military projects. However, such small wars in fact do little or nothing to secure major strategic goals and they don’t intimidate any but the weakest foreign actors. Nor does public acquiescence toward, or celebration over victories in, small wars predict or foster public support for larger wars that would last for years or produce significant American casualties. a l i m i t e d p a l e t t e o f s t r at e g i e s

British and American elites employed only a few of the possible strategies enumerated in the introduction to this volume. The main international strategy employed by both declining hegemons was retrenchment: in the case of Britain, turning over policing of the western Atlantic and much of the Pacific region to the US and Japan, and in the case of the US, fostering regional proxies like Iran and Israel under the doctrine Nixon invented and later presidents continued.

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This strategy had the effect of building up lesser powers. In the British case, it facilitated the rise of the US as the next hegemon. America’s proxies are not in a position to vie for global supremacy, but the Middle East now is dominated by the US’s once (Iran) and current (Israel) favoured little brothers. Britain did not attempt to sustain economic competition with the rising economies of Germany and the US. Nixon’s abandonment of both the gold standard and fixed exchange rates among currencies totally recast the global financial system. In employing this strategy of economic competition, Nixon ensured the dollar remained the global currency up to the present. It is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. That, far more than any ideological soft power, is America’s main non-military mechanism of hegemony. In the domestic sphere, neither hegemon pursued isolationism, imitation, or self-strengthening with any sustained seriousness. Neither Britain in the lead-up to 1914 nor the US since the end of the Cold War has followed an isolationist strategy by showing restraint in adding to its array of strategic commitments, and instead (as noted above) adopted the lesser strategy of retrenchment. However, when and where their allies and proxies fell short, Britain and the US then intervened – the opposite of isolationism. Neither power engaged in imitation, since Britain believed and the US still believes it is morally and materially superior to all other nations. While intellectuals outside of government advocated for various forms of self-strengthening, neither the British nor the American government took the most obvious step in that direction by imposing or, in the American case, reimposing conscription following military defeats. Indeed, Vietnam was considered, by the US military as well as by Nixon, a lesson in the drawbacks of conscription and the use of massive numbers of combat troops. There was a consensus in both countries that volunteer forces could maintain world dominance, and that the public’s role was mainly to offer financial and political backing for the wars their governments decided needed to be fought.68 Civilian and military leaders in both Britain and the US looked to innovation as the most effective strategy for preventing future military defeats and preventing overall decline. However, the US was far more successful in implementing reforms than was Britain. British officials achieved limited structural reforms in the army while investing in technological advances for the navy, which Germany and other rivals quickly matched. British elites’ opposition to real increases in

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spending and military officers’ continuing institutional power meant that innovation remained limited and narrowly focused. The US military underwent a technological revolution in the decades after Vietnam, but, as with Britain’s focus on bigger and more powerful ships that did little to affect the outcome of World War I, the American innovations proved to be of only limited value in the Afghan and Iraq Wars. conclusion

Failure in war creates worries about whether the nation is losing military prowess, and about the consequences of such a loss for the ability to maintain hegemony. The British and American military failures examined here did open debates over how to ensure military revival. However, the two British losses and the American defeat in Vietnam were not taken by either nation as signs of its broader decline. Instead, they were viewed as the failures of specific policies or leaders in the military or in the civilian government that was supposed to plan and direct wars effectively but failed to do so in Crimea, South Africa, and Vietnam. In the cases of Crimea and Vietnam, the debate was narrow because all other signs pointed to impressive British or American dominance over rivals in the economic and geopolitical realms, and so it was assumed that military shortcomings could be resolved. The South African War, like Iraq and Afghanistan, came at later and less auspicious moments in the trajectories of British and American hegemony. The South African defeat came when Britain already was worrying about, and trying to address, the growing challenge from the US, Germany, and Russia. However, South Africa was never seen as a real testing ground for potential future European wars, and therefore that war did not come to be seen as holding significant lessons for the British military. As a result, there was little pressure to undertake reforms and investments that would have left Britain better able to intimidate Germany before World War I began or to swiftly counter German forces in the early days of that conflict. It remains an open question how Iraq and Afghanistan will be regarded, in part because many Americans, both in and out of government, do not view those wars as defeats. There is no evidence that Germany was inspired to take the belligerent actions that led to World War I by anything they observed in South Africa. After Vietnam, some Third World countries did push for greater autonomy, but the large powers, most notably the U S S R and

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China, did not challenge the US. Indeed, China was pulled into the US orbit after Vietnam, and the Soviet Union came apart fifteen years after the last American troops left Saigon. Today, there is no evidence that China, Russia, or any other major power is moving to encroach on US claims around the world in the aftermath of Afghanistan and Iraq. The relationship between defeat in war and the debate over a nation’s standing in the world is not automatic. Rather, as we have seen, it is mediated: primarily by the nation’s overall economic edge and geopolitical position relative to other powers that are plausible competitors and rivals. Wars are evaluated in part by the hegemon’s understanding of the enemies that it was unable to defeat. Where those enemies are viewed as backward or geopolitically marginal, as in South Africa and for all three unsuccessful US wars, the implications of defeat are seen as less serious than if they had been defeated by a great power rival. The key conclusion we can draw is that it is hard to reform militaries. Even when defence intellectuals recognize the need for innovation and formulate proposals that would strengthen or revive the hegemon’s military dominance, implementation can be blocked by opposition to higher spending, the career interests of top officers, and defence firms’ interest in maximizing their profits. As long as elites maintain their capacities to protect those interests, innovation will be limited. Thus, the reforms that followed Britain’s two difficult wars were relatively minor. Some officer and institutional privileges were eliminated, but there was no major restructuring and military spending did not increase to meet the perceived dangers of the early twentieth century. After Vietnam, Nixon did push through major changes, but they were mainly in the realm of diplomacy and economy. A volunteer army capable of fighting counter-insurgencies did not develop under Nixon, and still remains only a partially completed task more than forty years later, as officers’ careers and contractors’ profits remain largely determined by the development of expensive, large-scale weapons systems utterly inappropriate for fighting counter-insurgencies.69 Based on the debates that followed Crimea, South Africa, and Vietnam, and the structural impediments to reform within the US military and in the American government more broadly, it is unlikely that American defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan will prompt significant military reforms. Those defeats may add to the widening sense that America is in decline, but they are not shaping debates on the causes of that

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decline, and they are certainly not eliciting plausible policy initiatives in sectors beyond the military.

notes

  1 Quoted in Peter Englund, The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (New York: Knopf, 2011), 154.   2 Quoted in Jodi Schneider, “Obama Tells U.S. Troops They’ve Made World ‘Better, Safer’ Place,” Bloomberg, 25 December 2014, https://www.­ bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-12-26/obama-tells-u-s-troops-they-vemade-world-better-safer-place.   3 Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003), 278–82; Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 27–36; Aaron L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1988), 212.   4 Bernard Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1983, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1984), John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012), and Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vols 2 and 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), offer the best overviews of British imperialist strategies.   5 Perry Anderson, “Imperium,” New Left Review 83 (2013): 5–111. Immanuel Wallerstein has made this argument repeatedly; see, for example, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–15.   6 B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–2000, 5th ed. (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave, 2003), 816–21, 905–13.   7 John M. Hobson, “The Military-Extraction Gap and the Wary Titan: The Fiscal-Sociology of British Defence Policy 1870–1913,” Journal of European Economic History 22 (1993): 480–1; see also Patrick K. O’Brien, “The Security of the Realm and the Growth of the Economy, 1688–1914,” in Understanding Decline: Perceptions and Realities of British Economic Performance, ed. Peter Clarke and Clive Trebilcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 49–72, who concurs in Hobson’s findings.   8 O’Brien, “The Security of the Realm,” 69.   9 Marc Labonte and Mindy Levit, “Financing Issues and Economic Effects of American Wars” (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service,

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2008), http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL31176.pdf, and the Institute for Peace and Economics, “Economic Consequences of War on the U.S. Economy,” (2011), http://economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/06/The-Economic-Consequences-of-War-on-US-Economy_0. pdf, offers overviews of US war financing and its economic effects from World War II to the present. 10 Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007); Barry Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 11 Holger H. Herwig, “The Battlefleet Revolution, 1885–1914” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050, ed. Macgregor Knox and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114–31. 12 David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); John Arquilla, Worse Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008); Barry R. Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (2003): 5–46. 13 Porter, Empire and Superempire. 14 Ibid. 15 Mann, Incoherent Empire, 9. 16 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 148. 17 David J. Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook (New York: John Wiley, 1972). 18 John F. Cady, A History of Modern Burma (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1958), 73–6; Singer and Small, The Wages of War, 392. 19 T.A. Heathcote, The Afghan Wars: 1839–1919 (London: Osprey, 1980), 67–83; John W. Fortsecue, History of the British Army, vol. 11 (London: Macmillan, 1923), 269–352. 20 Patrick Macrory, Signal Catastrophe: The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul, 1842 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1966), 207. 21 Diana Preston, The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838–1842 (New York: Walker, 2012), 135–41; Heathcote, The Afghan Wars, 52. 22 Preston, The Dark Defile, 22. 23 Quoted in Preston, The Dark Defile, 22.

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24 Heathcote, The Afghan Wars, 67–83. 25 Micheal Coldfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1618–1991 (Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 1992), 295–302. 26 Philip Warner, “Peacetime Economy and the Crimean War, 1815–56,” in History of the British Army, ed. Peter Young and J.P. Lawford (New York: Putnam, 1970), 150–61; Brian Bond, “Colonial Wars and Punitive Expeditions 1856–99,” in Young and Lawford, History of the British Army, 173–82. 27 Bond, “Colonial Wars.” 28 Friedberg, The Weary Titan, 34–45; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 261–6. 29 Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993). 30 Porter, The Lion’s Share; Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 126–32. 31 John Gooch, “The Weary Titan: Strategy and Policy in Great Britain, 1890–1918,” in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War, ed. Williamson Murray, Alvin Bernstein, and MacGregor Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 282. 32 Friedberg, The Weary Titan. 33 Christopher Saunders and Iain R. Smith, “Southern Africa, 1795–1914: The Two Faces of Colonialism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 617. 34 Ibid. 35 Arthur Davey, The British Pro-Boers 1877–1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1978). 36 This section draws on Max Beloff, Britain’s Liberal Empire: 1897–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1987); Friedberg, The Weary Titan; and John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830– 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 255–79. 37 Darwin, Unfinished Empire, 38–40. 38 Friedberg, The Weary Titan. 39 Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 131. 40 Darwin, The Empire Project, 144–79. 41 Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to the War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

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42 Frederik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 43 Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY : Syracuse University Press, 1990); Penny Lewis, Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2013). 44 Jonathan Darman, Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America (New York: Random House, 2014), 325. 45 Victor David Hanson, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). 46 Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005). 47 Donald Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: SelfDelusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). 48 Richard Nixon, “The All-Volunteer Armed Forces” (radio address), 17 October 1968, https://www.nixonfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2012/01/Candidate-Nixon-Statement-on-an-All-Volunteer-Force.pdf, 2. 49 Ibid, 8. 50 Brendan McQuade, “‘The Vietnam Syndrome’ and the End of the post‘Sixties’ Era: Tropes and Hegemony in History and Policy,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2, no. 1 (2014): 36. David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance during the Vietnam War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Haymarket, [1975] 2005), offers the most comprehensive ­history of G I resistance to the Vietnam War. 51 Nixon, “The All-Volunteer Armed Forces,” 6. 52 Anderson, “Imperium,” 68. 53 Eichengreen, Exorbitant Privilege. 54 Office of Management and Budget, “Composition of Outlays: 1940– 2021,” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals, Table 6.1 (accessed 26 February 2017). 55 Nixon, “The All-Volunteer Armed Forces,” 4. 56 Lewis Sorely, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1999). For a critique of Sorely’s inaccuracies, see Nick Turse, “The Pentagon Book Club” The Nation, 17 May 2010, https://www.thenation.com/article/ pentagon-book-club/. 57 Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End, 1983).

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58 Porter, Perils of Dominance. 59 For exemplary journalistic presentations, see Eliot Weinberger on Iraq, “What I Heard About Iraq” and “What I Heard About Iraq in 2005,” London Review of Books, 3 February 2005 and 4 December 2005, and David Samuels on Afghanistan, “Barack and Hamid’s Excellent Adventure,” Harper’s Magazine (August 2010), 49–57. For a leftist critique, see Michael Schwartz, War without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket, 2008), and for the view of a centrist economist, see Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (New York: Random House, 2012. 60 Schwartz, War without End. 61 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2007). 62 Martin van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Combat from the Marne to Iraq (New York: Random House, 2007). 63 Ferguson, Colossus, 13. 64 Ferguson, Colossus. 65 Mann, Incoherent Empire, 27. 66 Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War. 67 Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2014). 68 Ibid. 69 Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War.

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4 Decline in Denial: France since 1945 Olivier Schmitt

At the height of its colonial empire between 1919 and 1939, France was ruling 110 million inhabitants and 12,898,000 square kilometres of territory spread across all continents. Today, France is a country of 66 million and its outer-metropolitan territories (Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Caribbean, Southern Pacific, Antarctic, and Guyana) amount to 119,294 km2, or about 1 per cent of the country’s former colonial empire. In geopolitical terms, the loss of status is clear and France, once a world power, has lost a large number of traditional geopolitical resources, despite the fact that the variety of its outer-metropolitan territories grant Paris the world’s second-largest exclusive economic zone under international law. Yet France is still a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, holds a nuclear deterrent capability, and is the world’s sixth-largest economy (in terms of GDP). This suggests that, despite the importance of the country’s geopolitical loss, France adopted a number of coping strategies designed to mitigate decline that are still bearing fruits today. This chapter explores such coping strategies and argues that three phases are clearly distinguishable in post–World War II France. The first phase coincides with the Fourth Republic and is marked by an ambiguity regarding France’s role in the world. Immediately following the end of World War II, France was engaged in a war of national liberation in Indochina while trying to reconstruct a functioning economy and carving a role for itself in an international system beginning to be marked by bipolarization. The second phase lasts from de Gaulle’s ascension to power in 1958 to the end of the 1970s. France adopted a grand strategy of trying to go beyond the bipolarity of the

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international system, and designed the means to implement it: military autonomy, state-directed economic development, and cultural prestige through the promotion of world-class intellectuals and prestigious universities. This strategy started to crumble in the 1980s with the rise of mass unemployment, and completely collapsed in the 1990s with the end of the bipolar order within which France was quite comfortable, as it allowed Paris to try playing an independent role. Since then, French leaders have tried to maintain the same narrative about France’s role as during the second phase, with diminishing means at their disposal and without redefining the ends. I argue that the current French gloominess has a lot to do with the current disconnect between the narrative maintained by French leaders, the means at their disposal, and the vagueness of the ends. While France is still marginally benefiting from the second phase, it has failed to come up with a new coping strategy for managing decline in a world characterized by a unipolar distribution of power and becoming more and more heterogeneous in terms of norms competition. Absent a new coping strategy, a hard adjustment is to be expected, which would come as a shock to an already disgruntled French population. surviving world war ii: france in the fourth republic (1945–58)

After the end of World War II, France was forced to redefine its role in the world, as its place next to the winners was far from assured: Charles de Gaulle was invited neither to Yalta nor to Potsdam, in large part because of his awful relations with Roosevelt, but also because France, having been invaded by Germany, was in a poor economic situation and could hardly be compared to the United Kingdom. As such, France was heavily dependent on American economic support between 1945 and 1947, from oil and coal to warships. This dependence was epitomized by the Blum-Byrnes commercial agreements of 1946, in which the United States imposed preferential conditions for oil and the exportation of American cinema to the French market.1 While having to rebuild the country’s economy and infrastructure, French policy-makers had to simultaneously manage the return of the war prisoners from the oflags and stalags and find a way to maintain several hundred thousand people serving in the French armed forces; the French general staff estimated in 1945 that 770,000 troops (including seven divisions in Germany) would be

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necessary in order to achieve France’s security needs.2 Ultimately, French policy-makers drew an important conclusion from World War II: France owed its survival to the possession of its colonial empire. The colonies were the place where Gaullist troops challenged and eventually overcame the rule of the Vichy regime, served as a large supplier of troops in the French First Army commanded by de Lattre de Tassigny,3 and were the reason why France, despite its loss against Germany, was still considered an important power after World War II. This belief that the empire had been the key to France’s survival against the Axis powers informed the initial reaction of French policymakers to the first claims of decolonization that emerged immediately after the cessation of hostilities in Europe. Encouraged by the policy of “mandates” developed by the League of Nations in the interwar period,4 the Lebanese and Syrian populations claimed full independence from France, and May 1945 saw a succession of riots, protests, and even terrorist attacks in the region. Paris’s initial reaction was to violently repress these demonstrations, leading to the bombing of Damascus (27–30 May) by French artillery and air force. Yet the French government, under both external (Anglo-American) and internal (French Provisional Consultative Assembly) pressure, was forced to back down: an Anglo-French treaty stipulating the evacuation of the French forces was signed in December 1945 and went into full effective in the fall of 1946. The same logic informed the massacre committed by French troops in the Algerian city of Setif in May 1945: troubles in the empire could not be tolerated while France was only beginning the reconstruction process.5 The beginning of the Indochina conflict followed a similar pattern. In March 1946, France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a member state of the French Union, but the word “independence” was never mentioned. While the commander of the French expeditionary force, Marshal Leclerc, was favourable to an accommodation policy leading to independence,6 this was opposed by Georges Bidault, the French prime minister and later minister of foreign affairs, and Thierry d’Argenlieu, the French high commissioner.7 Following the unsuccessful Fontainebleau conference of July– September 1946 between Hô Chi Minh and French representatives, a number of incidents between French and Vietnamese nationalists occurred in November 1946. D’Argenlieu decided to forcefully retaliate by bombing Haiphong on 24 November 1946, causing between fifteen and twenty thousand deaths and forcing the government’s

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hand by preventing any further negotiations on Vietnamese independence. The subsequent war, which lasted from 1946 to 1954, only marginally interested the French public, and French governments never deployed conscript troops; only professional soldiers, especially from the elite French Foreign Legion and the paratroopers, were used,8 which further distanced the public from the war that was waged on the ground. Despite the French attempt to create an artificial Vietnamese state led by Bao-Daï, Viet Minh troops successfully waged guerrilla warfare (with the support from Communist China from 1949 onwards). The war culminated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, during which French troops were besieged and ultimately defeated.9 This defeat paved the way for the settlement of the conflict, as France recognized the partition of Vietnam and withdrew its troops from the region. At the same time that France was embroiled in Vietnam, troubles started to emerge in Tunisia and Morocco. Here again, the initial French reaction was to try to violently suppress the demonstrations and the attacks that began to emerge in 1948. For five years, the French government adopted a repressive approach, particularly in Tunisia from 1952 onwards, where the new French resident, Jean de Hautecloque, willingly excused the brutalities and excesses committed by the police. However, the negotiations over Indochina created a window of opportunity for the French government, by the point led by Pierre Mendès-France, to also try to solve the crises in Tunisia and Morocco, and both states become independent in 1956. To complicate matters, the Algerian war began in 1954 with the creation of the Front de Libération Nationale (F L N), which demanded independence for Algeria and which launched the so-called Toussaint Rouge, a coordinated wave of terrorist attacks on 1 November. The reaction of the French government was deeply hostile, and a cycle of violence was triggered between French troops and the F L N , which saw moderate Algerians caught between two extremist positions – full integration or full independence – with the majority preferring a gradual transfer of sovereignty starting with equal voting rights. On top of the war between France and the FLN, an Algerian civil war took place, which deeply divided the country.10 The battle of Algiers,11 along with the regular use of torture by French forces,12 largely contributed to the brutalization of the conflict. Here again, preserving the empire as a way to maintain France’s great power status informed policy-makers’ view of the conflict and their inclination to use force. Tellingly, JeanMarie Le Pen, the only living French politician openly nostalgic for

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French Algeria,13 declared in a 2016 radio interview that he had “a vision of a greater France, spread on both sides of the Mediterranean sea, which would have been a geopolitical asset of enormous value.”14 While Le Pen may be the only one who would speak openly about such a vision today, he nonetheless epitomizes a thinking that was widespread at the time. Finally, the same thinking can explain the 1956 Suez expedition, during which the United Kingdom, Israel, and France coordinated in order to punish Egyptian leader Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal. The hostile reactions of the USSR and the US transformed the military victory into a political defeat, but the rationale was the same: France, as a great power, had to intervene in order to protect its interests, in this case shared with the United Kingdom.15 In summary, the first coping strategy France adopted after World War II was a military strategy of prevention, with the type of neocolonial warfare reminiscent of the “performative war” described by Go in chapter 6 of this volume. By engaging in the wars of decolonization, French policy-makers were trying to preserve the empire, which had been identified as the indispensable asset that had allowed France’s survival after the German invasion. Losing the empire would have been tantamount to losing the country’s geopolitical status. This strategy was ultimately ineffective, as the largest part of the empire had become independent by 1962. In addition to the international strategy of prevention, France adopted a domestic strategy of innovation designed to rebuild the country after the war. Inflation was the main problem facing the French economy after World War II. Because numerous means of production had been destroyed during the war, the supply of consumption products was low. Yet, demand was high because of the emergency needs created by the war, which was leading to a rise in price levels. Between 1948 and 1959, inflation was of a yearly average of +5.6 per cent in France (+1.8 per cent in Germany and +2.9 per cent in the United Kingdom).16 Instead of adopting the policy of salary moderation proposed by Mendès France in 1945, the French government decided to initiate large-scale domestic borrowing in order to reduce the money stock in circulation. This was not sufficient, and the government was forced to devalue the franc in December 1945. France was then caught in an inflationist spiral that lasted until 1959. On top of monetary policy, a number of deep transformations of the French economy were launched immediately following the end of World War II. The first one was the nationalization of a number

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of firms. In part, such nationalizations were a punishment against C EOs who had collaborated with the Germans during the war, most famously the car manufacturer Renault.17 Yet, a number of strategic industries were also nationalized, notably coal production from the Pas-de-Calais, as well as the production and distribution of electricity with the creation of the two corporations Électricité de France and Gaz de France. A number of banking and insurance companies were also nationalized, including the Banque de France and the Credit Lyonnais, although corporate banking was left untouched. These nationalizations marked the transition from a classical liberal economy that had prevailed until World War II to a mixed model, in which public and private companies coexisted. It was, in essence, a redefinition of the role of the state, which was henceforth tasked with controlling strategic sectors in order to assert its sovereignty.18 Simultaneously, an office designed to guide and plan the economy (Commissariat Général au Plan) was created in January 1946 and led by Jean Monnet. The plan was constraining for nationalized companies only and simply an incentive for others: coupled with the financial help furnished by the Marshall Plan, it managed to put the French economy back on tracks. However, this state-controlled economic recovery quickly ran into limitations, which were overcome through the European project. From 1955 onward (and in a move that was followed by the Gaullist regime), French economic and political elites largely decided to support the European Economic Community (EEC). There was then a perception that the economic protectionism that had followed World War II would be unsustainable, and that managed competition organized within the EEC framework would provide the necessary incentives for French industries to innovate, without being too disruptive. Contrary to a common perception that there was a Franco-German “deal” about the EEC (which would favour German industries and French agriculture), recent archival work shows that it was mostly French industries (and elected politicians) that supported the first steps toward the common market.19 Finally, a number of large research structures were created or deeply transformed, including the National Centre for Scientific Research, the National Institute for Demographic Studies, and the National Institute for Agronomic Research. Also, the École Nationale d’Administration, designed to train high-level civil servants, was created in 1946. This was clearly the sign of a willingness to better train and equip French scientific and administrative elites.

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The economic strategy of innovation consisted of an attempt to give the French state more responsibilities in the organization and running of the French economy, which was deemed necessary in order to rebuild the country after the war and before entering an organized competition in the E E C framework. g r a n d e u r a s c o m p e n s at i o n (1958–81)

In 1958, when Charles de Gaulle came to power for a second time, he found France embroiled in the Algerian conflict and already increasingly concerned about military developments within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N A T O ), which were perceived as threatening France’s autonomy.20 His foreign policy during this period has fascinated French and international historians alike,21 and was the subject simultaneously of irritation and interest among France’s partners at the time. French historian Maurice Vaïsse found a very effective way to summarize de Gaulle’s foreign policy with the term grandeur (greatness): de Gaulle had a grand strategic design and a means to achieve it.22 The grand strategic design was to ensure the return of France’s presence everywhere in the world, create an autonomous Europe open to Africa, decrease tensions with the Eastern Bloc, and establish relations with China. The means of achieving these goals was to vocally claim France’s “autonomy” at every opportunity and to give the country the capabilities to implement and defend this autonomy. The means (military autonomy) is often confused with the end (grand strategy) in the assessment of de Gaulle’s foreign policy, as the former is more visible than the latter. Yet, distinguishing the two is analytically useful: “autonomy” was never an objective per se; it was, rather, a way to accomplish a foreign policy aiming at overcoming the bipolarity of the Cold War and the polarization of alliances that came with it. This foreign objective was, with some minor adjustments, adopted by de Gaulle’s successors during the Cold War.23 In order to achieve their foreign policy objective, one of the important means at de Gaulle’s and his successors’ disposal was the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent capability. Marked by the outcome of the Suez crisis, in which France and the UK were coerced to leave Egypt by the USSR and the US, de Gaulle accelerated the nuclear program initiated by the Fourth Republic with the aim of guaranteeing France’s freedom of manoeuvre in relation to the two superpowers.24 This period was marked by an intense debate in France

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regarding the proper nuclear strategy to adopt, which opposed the “Atlanticists” and the “sovereignists.” The first group, led by Raymond Aron and General Beaufre, contended that the French nuclear deterrent should be aimed at reinforcing American deterrence capabilities, similar to the British model.25 While France could be in competition with some allies on a number of issues, competition should not be confused with hostility: the enemy was to the east. The second group, which comprised famous officers such as Generals Gallois and Poirier, advocated that the French nuclear deterrent should not be targeted at any enemy in particular: deterrence cannot be shared, so there should be no reason to subordinate French nuclear capabilities to American ones. Because this strategic conception dovetailed neatly with de Gaulle’s foreign policy objective, it eventually won the strategic debate and was adopted as the French nuclear strategy. Furthermore, this nuclearization of French defence policy also had a consequence on the political regime itself – namely, by cementing the role of the French president. Because he commands the nuclear forces, the French president is, literally, the embodiment of French deterrence, which further reinforces the presidential nature of the Fifth Republic. It is no surprise that the French regime has been called a “nuclear monarchy.”26 The importance of the nuclear deterrent as a mechanism of coping with geopolitical decline is better expressed by de Gaulle himself, who declared to General Buchalet in 1966 that the bomb is “a political mean to sit at the same table as the Great Powers.”27 Another way to implement the goal of autonomy was to withdraw French armed forces from NA T O ’s integrated command structure in 1966. This decision was the culmination of gradual French disaffection vis-à-vis NA T O, and in particular the Anglo-American primacy in the alliance.28 Of course, French armed forces were never entirely disconnected from NATO’s defence planning process during the Cold War, as memorandums of understanding were agreed upon between French head of staffs and S A C E U R s.29 Yet, the withdrawal from N A TO’s integrated command structure was another way to sustain the autonomy objective, which was the means to implement an ambitious foreign policy. In military terms, the strategy adopted by de Gaulle and his successors can be qualified as a strategy of prevention, albeit with different means from the previous period. All this was possible thanks to a constitution that strongly favoured executive power over the legislative, even carving out a specialized role for the president in the conduct of foreign policy. This preference for the

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executive, and the associated empowerment of the administration tasked to implement the executive’s decisions, was a convenient way for the French presidents to carry on with their policy of autonomy from the great powers without too much legislative control.30 The second coping strategy was economic innovation, a continuation of the policies of previous period. France benefited from economic growth triggered by the baby boom and growing demand for consumer goods. Although the Gaullist regime and its successors wholeheartedly embraced European economic integration as a way to develop and transform French industry, the Gaullist rhetoric started blaming “Europe” for infringing on French “sovereignty,” a preview of the gap between the rhetoric of grandeur and the actual policy practices that will be described below. A number of important industries were developed in this period, which deeply structured the development of the French economy. First and foremost, the nuclear industry was strongly supported by the French state, for both its military and civilian applications. Gradually, the largest part of French electricity production ended up being supplied by nuclear energy (75 per cent in 2006). This was the result of a political decision to support the industry, which had an important consequence for scientific research, but also for related economic fields (e.g., construction, transport, etc.). Overall, French industry strongly benefited from private and public investments, which triggered a restructuring of several fields such as steel industry, naval construction, car construction, and house building. The French state also launched a number of massive industrial programs, which usually had a commercial purpose but were also designed to showcase French excellence in engineering. Among those programs massively supported by the French government were the TGV (Trains à Grande Vitesse) high-speed rail service, the Concorde supersonic commercial airliner, and the Ariane space launcher. Of course, there were a number of failures in those state-directed industrial projects. For example, the company Bull never managed to become a world leader in informatics and communication technologies, as was originally intended. President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was famously fooled by a program of “sniffing planes” (avions renifleurs) that were supposed to detect oil fields by simply flying over them. However, in retrospect, this period is remembered as one of continuous economic growth for the French economy, including full employment and the glory associated with world-class technological mastery.31

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In addition to a strategy of economic innovation, the French state adopted a coping strategy of ideological self-strengthening, which was based on support for French culture. Although it had a long tradition of state support,32 French cultural policy was institutionalized by Charles de Gaulle, who created a state ministry for arts and culture in 1959, to which he appointed the world-class French author André Malraux (winner of the Goncourt prize in 1933 for La Condition Humaine, he fought alongside the Spanish republicans and was a member of the French resistance). Malraux based his cultural policy on two pillars. First, he attempted to make culture available to the largest possible number of citizens. For example, he supported the opening of “Culture Houses” in major provincial cities, such as Grenoble, Amiens, and Bourges, and the large diffusion of cultural events such as the broadcast of The Persians by Aeschylus on live T V in 1961. Second, he facilitated the independence of artists by professionalizing them, and developing state-sponsored programs aimed at ensuring their financial independence; in his view, the state had to become the modern-day cultural sponsor. This policy facilitated the development of cultural production in France that was then easily exported: Duchamp and Klein in the plastic arts and Godard (and other New Nave filmmakers) crossed French borders and became internationally recognized artists. At the same time, the French literary and intellectual scene was particularly prolific.33 André Gide received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, François Mauriac in 1952, Albert Camus in 1957, and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1964 (although he declined it). French intellectuals of this period, such as Sartre, Beauvoir, and Aron, enjoyed a worldwide reputation, and the subsequent generation (Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida) had a deep influence on the development of critical theory as well as gender and cultural studies in the United States.34 Intellectual brilliance, and the notion that France was still the “mother of arts, arms and laws,” as poet Joachim Du Bellay had put it in the sixteenth century, was a very effective coping strategy for France’s objectively diminished geopolitical role. Not unlike Byzantium, government policy to sustain artistic developments met the favourable context of two generations of worldclass French intellectuals, and this combination of policy and chance contributed to the ideological self-strengthening of those years. The period, then, was marked by a foreign policy objective of overcoming the duality between the blocs sustained by a narrative of grandeur, which was translated into a number of coping strategies:

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a military strategy of prevention, an economic strategy of innovation, and a cultural strategy of self-strengthening. The cohesiveness of those three strategies was predicated on the sustainability of the narrative, which was itself a response to the structure of the international system at the time. But, as I discuss in the following section, the entire scaffolding collapsed with the end of the bipolar order. g r a n d e u r w i t h o u t a c a u s e : f r a n c e s i n c e 1981

The main characteristic of the period after 1981 is the growing disconnect between, on the one hand, a narrative of grandeur inherited from de Gaulle and still pushed forward by French politicians, and, on the other, the disappearance of the objective this narrative was designed to serve. In a new context, the coping strategy has involved sticking to a narrative unfit for to the evolutions of the international system, effectively functioning as a form of rhetorical entrapment, which is partly the cause of the current French gloominess.35 The election of de Gaulle’s arch-enemy, François Mitterrand, as French president in 1981 coincided with the end of the post–World War II economic miracle that had served Mitterrand’s predecessors so well. Mitterrand assumed power in the context of a degrading economy while having to simultaneously invest in industrial infrastructures in order to maintain the competitiveness of the country’s system of production. The French industrial production system had missed the opportunity to modernize during the postwar growth years and the Western world suffered a general economic slowdown due to the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. Immediately upon its arrival, Mitterrand’s Socialist government followed a counter-cyclical economic approach of nationalization and public spending, which was the result of difficult negotiations within the Socialist Party itself.36 This policy had disastrous economic consequences, accelerating capital flight, inflation, and the budget deficit. In October 1981, six months after the Socialist government was elected, it was forced to devaluate the franc by 8.5 per cent. This was followed by a second devaluation in June 1982, this time accompanied with austerity measures such as a freeze on salaries. Until 1986, the French government maintained a number of austerity measures. The Right came back to power that year, triggering the first cohabitation (president of one political party, government and parliament of another) and a wave of privatization of the companies Mitterrand had nationalized in 1981. Since then,

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successive French governments have adopted an economic mix of public spending and limited austerity measures, depending on their political affiliation, but no major transformation of the French economic structure had been initiated. In fact, public spending has consistently been between 50 and 57 per cent of GDP since 1981, without any effect on levels of unemployment and social insecurity. Most economists agree on the necessity of a deep transformation of the French labour market toward more flexibility, more technical training, the protection of workers instead of the protection of their jobs, better continuous education, etc.37 However, despite an impressive accumulation of policy reports over the years, no government has initiated a major reform of the French labour market due to a fear of the protests that even minor reforms usually generate. A number of prestige industries were closed in the 1980s and ’90s – for example, naval construction – putting thousands of employees out of a job. Yet, while France was closing some of its landmark industries, it failed to promote major new projects that would serve as displays of its technological mastery. In short, there has been no replacement for the major industrial projects like the Concorde, the TG V , or the Ariane shuttle. Even landmark military projects are currently lacking: the Rafale jet fighter and the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle were both conceived in the 1980s, and, as of 2019, their replacements are still only in the planning phase. Recently, the French government tried to promote French skills in new technologies by creating the label “French tech,” but the buzzword struggles to emerge beyond specialist circles, and certainly does not have the same appeal as the large-scale industrial projects of the previous decades. Therefore, there is a gap between the narrative of grandeur still sustained by the elites (“France is the sixth-largest economy in the world”) and the daily experience of most citizens. To a large degree, the “Yellow Vests” movement that started in the winter of 2018 is illustrative of this gap, as most of its claims revolve around issues of social justice. The transformation of the international system that followed the end of the Cold War also put French foreign and security policy under pressure. French exceptionalism was based on the desire to find a “third way” between the two blocs. With the rise of unipolarity,38 this premise disappeared. Therefore, a gap opened up between France’s foreign policy objectives, which had to be redefined, and the rhetoric and practice of independence, which was still implemented by French decision-makers out of habit and experience. Unsurprisingly, French

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policy-makers have shown a reluctance vis-à-vis the new international order, complaining against the “hyperpuissance”39 that the United States had become, and calling on multiple occasions for the emergence of a “multipolar world.” In their minds, this meant that Europe would become more independent from the United States, in effect a simple update of the autonomy objective inherited from the Cold War, without realizing that a “multipolar world” could mean that actors such as Russia or China may want to challenge the international order, pushing for alternatives to liberal norms and thus contributing to the “heterogeneity” of the system, to use Raymond Aron’s term. In other words, French decision-makers simply updated the rhetorical means to achieve France’s Cold War foreign policy objective (adding “multipolarity” to the traditional call for independence), which prevented the emergence of new thinking about the transformation of the international system and the consequences for French foreign policy. In short, after the Cold War, France confused the means with the ends, and was subjugated by the former without rethinking the core assumptions of the latter. Yet, much had to be done. The unipolar world order meant that, in one way or another, France had to reinvent its relationship with the United States, as it could not manoeuvre between two blocs of equivalent power any longer. It also meant that France’s relationship with NATO had to be reconsidered, taking into account the alliance’s new roles after the Cold War.40 Also, with multinational interventions becoming the new normal for Western states through a combination of normative pressures toward multilateralism and budgetary constraints,41 French armed forces had to learn how to co-operate with their partners, which highlighted differences in strategic cultures,42 but also the potential for convergence with the armed forces of likeminded countries.43 The nuclear order was also challenged, with new actors threatening traditional deterrence from the outside (by developing new capabilities, including nuclear capabilities in some cases) or from below (by conducting actions below the threshold of triggering nuclear reactions).44 Yet despite the amplitude of the transformation of the international system, the seduction of “autonomy” means that any change in French security policy is judged according to the threshold of a fantasized Gaullism, which serves as a rhetorical resource to shame any policy the relevant actors disagree with. This exercise is evenly spread on all sides of the political spectrum, thus validating de Gaulle’s ironic formulation when he forecasted that his legacy

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would be disputed by all political groups (“everyone has been, is, or will be a Gaullist”). Even Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande’s foreign policies were called “neo-conservative” (in opposition to the “Gaullo-Mitterandists”) because of their alleged militarism, although French military interventions abroad are numerically on the decline compared to the 1980s or ’90s.45 Therefore, a growing gap between the practice and the rhetoric is observable. The constant reference to the Cold War era, and subsequent shaming of any departure from it, is easily explainable by the absence of a new cross-partisan grand narrative relevant to the contemporary international system. But it overlooks the actual security policy changes France went through since the end of the Cold War. Notably, important aspects of those changes include the convergence in nuclear policies between Paris, London, and Washington;46 gradual normalization within N A T O ;47 and military emulation resulting from the war in Afghanistan.48 These important changes, triggered by pragmatic security needs, are not sustained by a new overarching foreign policy objective adapted to the unipolar world. On the contrary, successive French policy-makers have all made “autonomy” a grand strategic objective per se.49 But autonomy is not a goal, it is merely a means to achieve a goal, which still needs to be defined. There is, then, a contradiction between the pragmatic practice of French foreign and security policy (which is converging with the allies) and a dated rhetoric of autonomy still present in public debates. The media scholar and public intellectual Régis Debray’s reaction to France’s re-entry into NATO is telling: in an open letter, he feared this would make the French population feel less exceptional and more “normalized” within an alliance that would constrain its autonomy and “specific voice.”50 Finally, in terms of cultural attractiveness, France lacks a new coping strategy. While François Mitterrand failed to adapt the French economy and French foreign policy to globalization and the end of bipolarity, he launched a number of public projects designed to increase French cultural prestige: the transformation of the Louvre Museum, the building of the Bastille Opera, the Cité de la Musique, etc. His successors have not really followed this approach, as the only major cultural building to be initiated after Mitterrand’s tenure was the Musée du Quai Branly (dedicated to comparative anthropology), inaugurated in 2006. Neither Nicolas Sarkozy nor François Hollande have deemed it necessary or possible to launch major cultural projects.

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Similarly, French universities have dramatically fallen behind in terms of prestige compared with their German or British counterparts, as is revealed in international rankings. This is correlated with the quasidisappearance of truly global French intellectuals, with only Esther Duflo and Thomas Piketty able to claim such a status. The multiple problems plaguing the French education and university system (lack of funding, obsolete infrastructures, unattractive careers, etc.) probably explain the relative loss of worldwide intellectual attractiveness. Here again, the contrast between the mythologized 1960s and ’70s and the current situation contributes to a general gloominess, with current French authors discussing at length and in multiple forums the poverty of the French intellectual scene, something Sudhir Hazareesingh calls “the closing of the French mind.”51 While France had managed to carve out of a place of its own during the Cold War, it was taken aback by the end of bipolarity and economic globalization. Unwilling and/or unable to shape a new role for the country in this situation, French political leaders have kept using a narrative of grandeur that is more and more disconnected from the realities and experiences of citizens, thus in effect functioning like a rhetorical entrapment. Yet, in the absence of a new grand foreign policy and the accompanying narrative, the gap between a fantasized grandeur and the current reality contributes to a general disaffection toward politics, compounded by the limitations of a political system based on a strong executive promising much more than it can deliver.52 conclusion

Facing geopolitical decline, French leaders after World War II adopted a coping strategy based on military prevention and economic innovation. The first one failed, as it could not maintain the empire, while the second was quite successful at putting the French economy back on tracks. De Gaulle’s rise to power was a defining moment for contemporary France, as he had a grand foreign policy objective to ensure that France was a power to be reckoned with – that is, by overcoming the bipolarity of the Cold War. De Gaulle and his successors (Pompidou and Giscard) based this objective on a narrative of grandeur and three mutually complementary coping strategies: a military strategy of prevention, an economic strategy of innovation, and a cultural strategy of self-strengthening. Because it was based on the bipolarity

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induced by the Cold War, this scaffolding collapsed with the end of bipolarity and economic globalization. Yet it is hard to find traces of real “coping strategies” from 1981 onwards. On the other hand, French political leaders have clung to an outdated narrative with the counterproductive effect of highlighting the contradiction between a fantasized past and the current reality. While France is still a very able country, to a degree still enjoying the benefits inherited from the previous period, it will not be long before the absence of updated coping strategies begins to have an impact. One fears that the time for transitioning to a managed coping strategy is running out, at which point a forced adjustment will be forcibly imposed. The French case offers several interesting insights into contemporary US debates. First, the strategy of ideological strengthening sustained military and economic coping strategies during most of the Cold War, but ended up establishing narratives that would prove counterproductive once the distribution of power in the international system changed. Similar mechanisms could obtain in the US: Washington has been used to referring to its unipolar status as “dominance” or “primacy.” While the US’s relative power is diminishing, political elites will have to invent a new vocabulary to describe America’s place and role in the world in order to avoid a major “capabilities-expectations gap.” Slogans such as “Make America Great Again” do not indicate a move in that direction. Second, many of France’s coping strategies were based on the maintenance of important military capabilities, particularly nuclear weapons and deployable forces. The possibility of using the latter has cemented an interventionist mindset among French policy elites, with limited results: the recent interventions in Libya and Mali, despite some initial successes, have hardly delivered on their promises to increase security in the region. This is again similar to the US military interventionism of the past two decades, and both countries will need to take a hard look at the strategic value of military interventions in the future. Finally, part of the current French difficulty in coping with decline is related to the challenge of adjusting to the economic structure of “capitalism without capital.”53 Although the US economy is more dynamic than France’s, issues of wealth redistribution and equality are found in both countries. The way the US will reinvent, or not, an inclusive social contract will also determine the extent of its decline and the success of its coping strategies.

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  1 Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb, “The Economy of 1950s French Cinema,” Studies in French Cinema 6, no. 2 (2006): 141–50.   2 Jean Doise and Maurice Vaïsse, Politique Étrangère de la France: Diplomatie et Outil Militaire, 1971–1991 (Paris: Seuil, 1992).   3 Eric Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).   4 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).   5 Jean-Louis Planche, Sétif: Chronique d’un Massacre Annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2010).   6 Jean-Christophe Notin, Leclerc (Paris: Perrin, 2005).   7 Ivan Cadeau, La Guerre d’Indochine: De l’Indochine Française aux Adieux à Saïgon, 1940–1956 (Paris: Tallandier, 2015).   8 Marie-Danielle Demélas, Parachutistes en Indochine (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016).   9 Ivan Cadeau, Diên Biên Phu: 13 Mars–7 Mai 1954 (Paris: Tallandier, 2013). 10 Benjamin Stora, Histoire de la Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). 11 Pierre Pellissier, La Bataille d’Alger (Paris: Perrin, 2002). 12 Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’Armée pendant la Guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962) (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Jean-Charles Jauffret, Ces Officiers qui ont dit Non à la Torture: Algérie 1954–1962 (Paris: Autrement, 2005). 13 Le Pen resigned from his position as a member of the National Assembly in 1956 to fight alongside French troops. 14 Jean-Marie Le Pen, interview on “L’Atelier du Pouvoir,” France Culture, 11 June 2016. 15 Denis Lefebvre, Les Secrets de l’Expédition de Suez (Paris: Perrin, 2010). 16 Jean-Jacques Carré, Paul Dubois, and Edmond Malinvaud, La Croissance Française: Un Essai d’Analyse Économique Causale de l’Après-Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1972). 17 Renaud de Rochebrune and Jean-Claude Hazera, Les Patrons Français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997). 18 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos Jours (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 19 Laurent Warlouzet, Le Choix de la CEE par la France. L’Europe Économique en Débat de Mendès France à De Gaulle (1955–1969) (Paris: I GP D E , 2010).

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20 Jenny Raflik-Grenouilleau, La IVe République et l’Alliance Atlantique. Influence et Dépendance (1945–1958) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). 21 Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds, Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policy, 1958–1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Benjamin Rowland, ed., Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy of Ideas (Lanham, M D : Lexington Books, 2011); Sudhir Hazareesingh, In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 22 Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur. Politique Étrangère du Général de Gaulle (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 23 Maurice Vaïsse, La Puissance ou l’Influence? La France dans le Monde depuis 1958 (Paris: Fayard, 2009); Frédéric Bozo, La Politique Étrangère de la France depuis 1945 (Paris: Flammarion, 2012). 24 André Dumoulin, Histoire de la Dissuasion Nucléaire (Paris: Argos, 2012); Édouard Valensi, La Dissuasion Nucléaire. L’Aventure Nucléaire Française: Les Ergots du Coq (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013); Jean Guisnel and Bruno Tertrais, Le Président et la Bombe (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2016). 25 Christian Malis, Raymond Aron et le Débat Stratégique Français (1930– 1966) (Paris: Economica, 2005). 26 Samy Cohen, La Monarchie Nucléaire (Paris: Hachette, 1986). 27 Guisnel and Tertrais, Le Président et la Bombe, 40. 28 Frédéric Bozo, La France et l’OTAN . De la Guerre Froide au Nouvel Ordre Européen (Paris: I FRI , 1992); Maurice Vaïsse, Pierre Mélandri, and Frédéric Bozo, eds, La France et l’OTAN , 1949–1996 (Bruxelles: Complexes, 1997); Charles G. Cogan, Forced to Choose: France, the Atlantic Alliance and N A T O – Then and Now (Westport, C T : Praeger, 1997). 29 Sten Rynning, Changing Military Doctrine: Presidents and Military Power in Fifth Republic France, 1958–2000 (New York: Greenwood Publishing, 2001). 30 Nicolas Rousselier, La Force de Gouverner. Le Pouvoir Exécutif en France, XIXe–XXIe Siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). 31 François Cochet, Histoire Économique de la France depuis 1945 (Paris: Dunod, 1996). 32 Marc Fumaroli, L’État Culturel. Essai sur la Religion Moderne (Paris: De Fallois, 1991). 33 Herbert R. Lottman, La Rive Gauche (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 34 François Cusset, French Theory (Paris: La Découverte, 2003). 35 Marcel Gauchet, Comprendre le Malheur Français (Paris: Stock, 2017).

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36 Mathieu Fulla, Les Socialistes Français et l’Économie (1944–1981). Une Histoire Économique du Politique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2016). 37 Jean Tirole, Économie du Bien Commun (Paris: PUF, 2016). 38 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2008); Nuno S. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 39 Hubert Védrine, Face à l’Hyperpuissance (Paris: Fayard, 2003). 40 Rebecca S. Moore, NATO ’s New Mission: Projecting Stability in a Post– Cold War World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007). 41 Sarah Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: United States Military Interventions after the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Patricia E. Weitsman, Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions and Institutions of Interstate Violence (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). 42 Bastien Irondelle and Olivier Schmitt, “France,” in Strategic Cultures in Europe, ed. Bastian Giegerich, Heiko Biehl, and Alexandra Jonas (Munich: V S Verlag, 2013), 125–38. 43 Alice Pannier and Olivier Schmitt, “Institutionalised Cooperation and Policy Convergence in European Defence: Lessons from the Relations between France, Germany and the United Kingdom,” European Security 23, no. 3 (2014): 270–89. 44 Thérèse Delpech, Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy (Santa Monica, C A : Rand Corporation, 2012). 45 Alice Pannier and Olivier Schmitt, “To Fight Another Day: France Between the Fight Against Terrorism and Future Warfare,” International Affairs 95, no. 4 (2019): 897–916. 46 Guisnel and Tertrais, Le Président et la Bombe. 47 Annick Cizel and Stéfanie von Hlatky, “From Exceptional to Special? A Reassessment of France-N ATO Relations since Reintegration,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 12, no. 4 (2014): 353–66. 48 Olivier Schmitt, “Européanisation ou Otanisation? Le Royaume-Uni, la France et l’Allemagne en Afghanistan,” Politique Européenne 48 (2015): 150–77; Olivier Schmitt, “The Reluctant Atlanticist: France’s Security and Defence Policy in a Transatlantic Context,” Journal of Strategic Studies 40, no. 4 (2017): 463–74. 49 Laurent Fabius, Discours au Sénat, 15 October 2015. 50 Régis Debray, “La France doit Quitter l’O TA N,” Le Monde diplomatique (March 2013).

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51 Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (London: Allen Lane, 2015). 52 Nicolas Rousselier, La Force de Gouverner. Le Pouvoir Exécutif en France, XIXe–XXIe Siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 2015). 53 Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2018).

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5 Resisting Decline: Russia, the West, and Eurasia Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem

When thinking about geopolitical decline, Russia quickly comes to mind. Without having been defeated militarily, the country went from superpower status during the Cold War to a contested regional power in the 1990s. Russian rulers could stop neither the country’s diminishing international influence nor its domestic political and economic downfall. Between 1989 and 1996, Russia’s G D P fell by 43 per cent, contracting again by 4.9 per cent during the 1998 financial crisis. In addition, high inflation rates were the norm throughout the 1990s, skyrocketing to 2,500 per cent in 1992.1 Life expectancy fell by 6 years between 1989 and 1995, going from 69.9 to 64 years, which is even more dramatic considering the absence of war.2 Russian leaders’ choices during this period provide perfect examples of imitation and retrenchment strategies for mitigating decline, as defined by Frédéric Mérand in the introduction to this volume. In 1992, Russia’s first minister of foreign affairs, Andrei Kozyrev, wrote that Russia has a “lot to learn” in order to join “the community of civilized states” (i.e., the West).3 But in order to learn fast, Russia was also looking for guidance and was expecting Western assistance in the early 1990s, although this support proved to be rather thin. Meanwhile, the population was learning that political freedoms entail harsh realities and myriad responsibilities, and the new discourses about democracy began to ring hollow as the socio-economic stability of the Soviet period faded away. This state of continuous decline slowed in the 2000s, mostly due to rising oil prices that helped stabilize the economy. This economic improvement corresponded with a rise in self-strengthening discourses, which sought to reposition Russia as a great power (derzhava) with

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a strong emphasis on both multipolarity and the “near abroad.” Russia also began to look for alternative partners and new markets by intensifying its relations with the B R I C S countries, and more particularly with China, in line with a competitive strategy for preventing decline that quickly went beyond the economic dimension. Rather, at all levels (military, economic, political, and ideological), Russian ruling elites moved from almost complete acceptance and imitation of the Western norms and system to a self-strengthening and competitive rhetoric, primarily targeting a domestic audience. These new discourses and competitive actions troubled the Western community, whose reactions often further polarized Russian elites, by consolidating the great power nationalists in the Kremlin and making Russian public opinion more critical of the West. The book’s two central arguments fit the Russian case very well. First, geopolitics has never been an immutable fate in Russia. On the contrary, geopolitics has been deeply contested during the post–Cold War period.4 As noted in Mérand’s introduction, “looking inside the state is critical because geopolitical decline does not mean the same thing for everyone.” Post-Soviet Russia is a typical example of this assertion. Since 1991, Russian intellectuals and scholars have had divergent views on Russia’s changing roles and purposes in regional and international politics. Also, Russia’s international standing and status in world politics have been a major source of contention among Russian political elites.5 Second, as demonstrated by Russia’s war against Georgia (2008), annexation of Crimea (2014), and intervention in Syria (2015), Russia’s coping strategies impact the regional order significantly. Amidst ongoing sanctions on its economy, Russia continues to challenge the American-led international order with the goal of upholding its great power status. While Russia alone cannot affect the distribution of global power or the fate of the US-led liberal international order, its behaviour nevertheless has implications for the normative basis of that system. In this chapter, we explain the evolution of the coping strategies used by Russian ruling elites to deal with the country’s declining geopolitical status by highlighting the transformations these strategies have undergone from the reign of Yeltsin to that of Putin. In particular, we explore the gradual move from the imitation and retrenchment strategies of the early 1990s to the self-strengthening and preventive strategies employed during Putin’s three terms in office as president. We argue that a changing structure in the ruling elite, shifting public

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opinion, and an antagonistic West are the three factors that explain these transformations. Although reinforcing each other, these factors do not carry the same weight in the causal chain. While the main causal factor has been the change in the structure of the ruling elite, public opinion has evolved from constraining to enabling the Kremlin’s foreign policy adventurism. In turn, the West’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s search for a greater role in world politics has been a constant antagonizing factor in the post-Soviet period that has helped bring Russian’s leaders’ preferences more in line with public opinion. In the discussion that follows, we will concentrate mainly on the transformation in the ruling elite structure and the evolution of public opinion, given that the antagonizing role of the West has already been covered elsewhere.6 r u s s i a ’ s e v o lv i n g r u l i n g e l i t e : f r o m i n t e g r at i o n with the west to unassailable leadership in eurasia

Russia’s geopolitical status and standing vis-à-vis Europe, the US, China, and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union has been a quintessential issue of debate for the country’s elites. Russian intellectuals, foreign policy experts, scholars of international relations, and politicians have prescribed different roles for Russia in world politics and favoured various foreign policy options since 1991.7 Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign policy priorities and national interests were among the top agenda items in Moscow, even amidst ever-growing socio-economic problems and the pressing need to restructure Russia’s national institutions. We argue that the main causal factor behind Russia’s changing response to its geopolitical decline has been the transformation of the structure of the ruling elite. In other words, the world views of Russian political leaders have influenced the formation of the country’s national interests and the determination of foreign policy priorities. Westernizers dominated Russian policy-making in the international sphere in the early 1990s, favouring closer political ties and eventual economic integration with the West. The balance started to shift in the mid-1990s, when President Yeltsin brought back into power Russia’s traditional elites, whom we call “great power nationalists.” Great power nationalists in Russian politics are a group of policymakers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals that conceptualize Russia as a traditional great power with legitimate authority to organize the

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political order in Eurasia, or the post-Soviet space. They also resist the American-led unipolar world order, calling instead for multipolarity, in which the world’s regions would be under the influence of traditional great powers such as Russia, India, and China.8 Great power nationalists therefore criticized Yeltsin’s foreign policy in the first half of the 1990s for ignoring Russia’s own national interests and relentlessly seeking integration with the West.9 Moreover, they thought that the Russian state had to regain the confidence of the Russian people, which was greatly shaken due to the poorly managed economic transition. However, unlike Eurasianism, another strong strand of geopolitical thought in Russia, great power nationalism does not have an essentialist discourse that divides the world into different civilizations.10 The influence of great power nationalists has grown even more under the Putin administration. Ultimately, the growing rift between Russia and the West (the United States and the EU) has pushed Russia’s great power nationalist alliance to look for a more active role for Russia in Eurasian and Middle Eastern affairs, which deliberately aims to end post-Soviet Russia’s geopolitical decline. Russian Ruling Elites under Yeltsin: Westernizers versus Great Power Nationalists In the early years of post-communist transition, Russian ruling elites led by President Yeltsin favoured “imitation” at home and “retrenchment” abroad. Liberal and pro-Western ideas were prevalent among Russia’s leaders in the first years of the post-Soviet transition. Russia’s westernizers, who were in power, simultaneously aimed to achieve radical domestic economic reforms at home, rebuild Russia’s national institutions, and shift the country’s foreign policy priorities toward integration with Western economic and security structures.11 Russia’s pro-Western foreign policy in the early years of the transition was also in line with Boris Yeltsin’s political career as a democratically elected leader who stood up against the Soviet military and prioritized building post-Soviet Russia’s national institutions. Ironically, Yeltsin himself ended up strengthening the powers of the presidency with the constitutional referendum of December 1993, which resulted from the crisis between the legislative and executive branches, during which Yeltsin ordered tanks to shoot at the Russian Parliament.12 As Jackson analyzes in detail, in addition to domestic concerns, one of the key areas of contention between Yeltsin and the Parliament

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was Russia’s role in international politics.13 More specifically, there was disagreement over Russia’s position vis-à-vis the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet space, and the growing influence of the United States in eastern Europe. Opposition members in the Parliament criticized Russia’s liberal reformers for alienating Russia from its traditional sphere of influence, the so-called near abroad or post-Soviet space, and allowing the West to be superior to Russia in the region. Despite the efforts of Andrei Kozyrev, minister of foreign affairs, and Yeltsin himself, a growing part of the Russian elite felt that the US and European major powers excluded Russia from key decisionmaking mechanisms and aimed to reduce Russia’s role to that of a minor partner. As NA T O and the E U planned to enlarge eastwards, Russia was left out of the picture. According to Pouliot, N A T O ’s double enlargement in eastern Europe brought back the “great power habitus” in the Kremlin and weakened its “proto-liberal habitus.”14 In other words, discourses on Russian state tradition as a great power with equal rights in world politics were strengthened at the expense of previous rhetoric aiming at moving Russia toward the Western liberal-democratic club of nations. On the other hand, a deteriorating socio-economic situation at home was coupled with the bloody first Russo-Chechen War. Domestic privatization plans resulted in the emergence of an oligopolistic power structure rather than a stable and efficient free market,15 whose dramatic consequences for the population will be discussed later. Meanwhile, Russia’s traditional great power nationalists felt the country also suffered from a severe weakness in the foreign policy realm. The appointment of Russia’s spy chief, Evgenii Primakov, as minister of foreign affairs in January 1996 was an obligatory political manoeuvre for President Yeltsin, who aimed to strengthen his political and bureaucratic base of support amidst growing economic and security problems at home. By the mid-1990s, Yeltsin no longer enjoyed high popularity ratings in the eyes of ordinary Russian citizens. Most importantly, Primakov’s rise to power was a turning point for the Kremlin’s response to its geopolitical decline. Together with Primakov, whom Tsygankov called “the father of Russia’s new statism,” 16 Russia’s great power nationalists re-emerged as an influential group within the country’s security and foreign policy establishment. Primakov’s main point of criticism toward the West was its unilateralism. As Makarychev and Morozov demonstrate, Russia’s call for

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multilateralism was in fact a desire to bring back great power management as the key mode of operation in Russia’s relations with the US and the E U.17 Multipolarity resembled the Concert of Europe of the nineteenth century, in which major powers were not allowed to interfere in the domestic affairs of others and would be responsible for providing security in their respective spheres of influence.18 Primakov harshly criticized both NATO enlargement in eastern Europe and the bombing of Serbia in 1999, which ultimately resulted in Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008. As Hopf analyzes, N A TO’s bombing of Serbia was a tragic event for the Russian ruling elite, which fueled growing anger in Moscow toward the West, and the US in particular.19 Equally important is the fact that under Primakov’s term as minister of foreign affairs, Russia reoriented its foreign policy interests toward greater co-operation with China and India and reintegration in the post-Soviet space. Russian Ruling Elites under Putin: The Dominance of the Siloviki and Great Power Nationalists In July 1998, Russia went through a devastating financial crisis. In September of that year, Yeltsin appointed Primakov to serve as prime minister with the hope that with his background in the security services he could ease Russia’s domestic instability. In addition, Primakov was seen as a power broker among the competing factions of the political and economic elites. However, Primakov soon lost ground to Vladimir Putin, an intelligence officer with little background in politics who was appointed prime minister in 1999. Soon enough, Putin became the new rising star of Russian politics, buoyed by rising oil prices and the Second Chechen War. Primakov abandoned his bid for the presidential race two months before the March 2000 elections, paving the way for an easy victory for Putin. Despite his secondary role, Primakov remained an ally of Putin and a keystone figure for Russia’s great power nationalists. His views gradually became standard operating procedure for Russian foreign policy under Putin’s presidency. After Putin was elected president for the second time in a row in 2004, ruling elites put Primakov’s priorities into practice. In terms of Russia’s response to geopolitical decline, 2004 marked a second turning point because the domestic political power of the ruling elites became consolidated. Vladimir Putin’s political allies from the security services, the so-called siloviki, increased their control over strategic

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sectors of the economy.20 It was under the leadership of Igor Sechin – Vladimir Putin’s old friend from the KGB – that Gazprom began its coercive policy of playing with the price of natural gas to coerce smaller partners such as Belarus and Ukraine to move away from Western economic structures and toward closer alliances with Russia.21 In the eyes of many Western critics of Putin, the new structure of political power (which was also called the “power vertical”) clearly meant that Russia had moved away from the westernizers’ earlier goals of democratization and making the country a staunch member of the Western alliance.22 However, in the eyes of the Russian ruling elite, the enlargement processes of both N AT O and the E U , as well as the wave of “colour revolutions” that stormed through the post-Soviet space, legitimized growing authoritarianism at home and required an assertive foreign policy. While Putin’s first presidential term (2000–04) aimed to stabilize Russia’s socio-economic situation, prevent crime, and revitalize its economic growth, his second term (2004–08) was driven more by international concerns. The focus was put on preventing a potential colour revolution in Russia and gaining strategic advantages in the post-Soviet space, based on Russian dominance in the production and delivery of natural gas.23 In 2006, Putin’s political adviser Vladislav Surkov introduced the concept of “sovereign democracy,” which offered a model for many authoritarian states for balancing their need for survival with electoral democracy. Surkov defended the Kremlin’s right to organize and even control the social and public space in order to prevent the emergence of a potential protest movement that would result in the toppling of presidents, just like in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.24 As a result, many Western-funded N G Os have been closed since the mid-2000s due to a series of laws that have been passed by the Duma to control civil society in Russia. Vladimir Putin has also been more successful than Yeltsin in firmly controlling the Duma, and its upper chamber, the Federation Council. For example, United Russia, or the party of power, has been one of the key instruments in achieving the Kremlin’s goal of silencing and channeling the opposition. As Smyth, Lowry, and Wilkening argue, “the formal institutional changes and increased reliance on coercive informal institutions that marked the Putin era” generated a strong incentive for Russia’s political elites “to invest in building an entrenched hegemonic party, both to perpetuate stability and to remove the threat of future succession crises.”25 United Russia has held the majority of the seats in the Duma since 2007.26 In the words of Kryshtanovskaya

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and White, this process of “sovietization” of Russian politics “eliminated alternative centers of power” and strengthened the siloviki at the expense of the liberals in the Kremlin.27 Contrary to Russia’s liberal westernizers, great power nationalists have come to argue that Moscow had not lost the Cold War to the Americans; instead the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a deliberate policy followed by Yeltsin’s westernizing coalition. Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2005. This catastrophe was not limited to Russia’s declining geopolitical status; it had socio-economic consequences as well. In Putin’s words: As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory … Individual savings were depreciated, and old ideals destroyed. Many institutions were disbanded or reformed carelessly. Terrorist intervention and the Khasavyurt capitulation that followed damaged the country’s integrity. Oligarchic groups – possessing absolute control over information channels – served exclusively their own corporate interests. Mass poverty began to be seen as the norm. And all this was happening against the backdrop of a dramatic economic downturn, unstable finances, and the paralysis of the social sphere.28 This statement demonstrates how the ruling elite’s understanding of geopolitical change after 1991 clearly resonated with Russian peoples’ demand for better socio-economic conditions, order, and economic stability. At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin sent a strong signal to an international audience, which indicated that Russia was unhappy about the West’s triumphalism and that Russia will do its best to re-emerge as a great power in world politics.29 As Putin’s presidency reached its constitutional limit in 2008, his close ally Dmitry Medvedev took over with the primary goal of modernizing the resource-cursed Russian economy. In line with the innovation strategy outlined in the introduction to this volume, Medvedev aimed for “transforming the country from within.” That entailed prioritizing a focus on high-tech products, diversification of the ­economy away from a dependence on raw materials, and increasing competitiveness in the domestic market.30 However, Medvedev’s

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modernization plan did not last long and was cast aside during Putin’s third term in office. In fact, Medvedev, who was initially perceived as coming from the liberal faction of the Kremlin, turned out to be a more hawkish president where foreign policy was concerned.31 It was under Medvedev’s presidency that the Russo-Georgian War erupted, and Russia intensified its economic coercion over post-Soviet states such as Ukraine and Moldova during this period as well. Although the Georgian, Ukrainian, and Moldovan governments did not follow a united course of action against Russia, they all aimed at moving closer to European/Western economic and security institutions instead of joining Russia-led co-operation mechanisms. At the same time, Russia strengthened its co-operation with China through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which has aimed to prevent American dominance over the security agenda in Eurasia. Putin Is Back: The Rise of Geopolitical Rivalry and Anti-westernism in Russian Foreign Policy Putin was re-elected president in 2012, and his third term has been marked by several important developments. First, Putin announced in the pro-regime daily Izvestiia in 2011 that the key target of Russian foreign economic policy in the post–global financial crisis turmoil should be forming the Eurasian Economic Union (E A E U ).32 The Kremlin’s main fear was that the European Neighborhood Policy would offer incentives in pursuing closer economic and political ties with the European Union to pro-Western post-Soviet states such as Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia, as well as the traditionally more Russia-oriented Armenia.33 Moscow, therefore, presented its own EAEU as a new centre of trade, modernization, growth, and development in Eurasia, which would offer a genuine economic alternative to regional states. In addition to its economic functions, the E A E U served an important purpose for Russian foreign policy: it was, according to the Kremlin, a clear sign that Russia was the leader of the Eurasian pole in world politics, and was able to take regional dynamics under its control. This is most likely why the Kremlin has followed a coercive method in enlarging the E AE U ’s membership. Russia has benefited from the economic and political weaknesses of Kyrgyzstan and Armenia and has convinced these states to join the E AE U .34 In the case of Ukraine, which was the key target of E AE U enlargement, Moscow followed a preventive strategy. As Russia’s most

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economically enhanced neighbour, Ukraine has become the key bone of contention in Russia’s Eurasian project. Ukraine was also important for symbolic reasons; the Kyiv principality was the central Russian state in the medieval era and Ukrainians are ethnically close to Russians. In November 2013, President Yanukovych of Ukraine decided to postpone the signing of the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement, which would have led the former toward a Eurocentric course of domestic political and economic reform, as well as a trade agreement with the E U. Ultimately, the pro-E U “Maidan revolution” resulted in Yanukovych fleeing the country in February 2014 in the face of growing violence in Kyiv. The Kremlin responded to Ukraine’s pro-EU choice by destabilizing the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea after a controversial referendum in March 2014. As explored later in this chapter, Russian citizens have offered strong support to the Kremlin for its increasingly aggressive foreign policy behaviour. As Moscow claimed rights over the so-called Novorossiya (New Russia), the US and the EU decided to apply sanctions on the Russian economy starting in March 2014. Due to the sanctions and falling oil prices, the Russian ruble was devalued by more than 50 per cent in less than two years.35 Upon annexation of Crimea, Russia’s participation in the G8 – of high symbolic importance for Russia’s great power status in the 1990s – was also suspended. During Putin’s third term, Russia turned to the BRICS countries as alternative power centres through which to challenge the Western-led international economic order.36 Arguing that the Western-led neoliberal economic order is itself in decline, Russian leadership proposed a greater role for B R I C S countries in restructuring international economic governance. While the Kremlin’s economic challenge to the West has remained rather weak, its military activism – or prevention strategy – has become quite successful in pushing the United States toward accepting Russia as an equal partner on international security issues. Russia’s intervention in the Syrian conflict in the fall of 2015 changed the parameters of the game for all parties involved, including the Assad regime. Indeed, Russia’s military intervention in Syria has served multiple purposes. On a practical level, Russia was able “to test improvements in Russian military capabilities resulting from military reforms” carried out since Medvedev’s presidency.37 Second, Russia was able to secure the Assad regime, whose societal support base and military capacity vis-à-vis the other parties to the conflict had waned significantly since

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2011. Finally, the hesitance of American and European leaders to take a more active stance to end the Syrian conflict offered a golden opportunity for Russia to come back to the negotiation table as an equal partner. In the eyes of the Russian ruling elite, Russian military intervention in Syria is a clear indicator that Russia is no longer in decline; instead, Russia today is a great power with the capacity to radically and dramatically influence international developments. According to a renowned Russian international relations expert, “these moments of cooperation highlight the fact that … when an acute international crisis breaks out, Russia and the United States are often the only actors able to resolve it.”38 The Kremlin’s ability to devise and implement its own road map for a ceasefire in Syria has served its long-lasting desire of being respected by the US as a great power.39 Consequently, since 2012, Russia has followed a prevention strategy, or what Julian Go terms in chapter 6 of this volume performative militarism. In terms of the economy, Russia pursued regional hegemony in the post-Soviet space and closer co-operation with China and other BRICS countries, directly competing with the US-led international order. Politically, Russia has once again directly challenged the West by annexing Crimea in 2014, and intervening in Syria to protect the Assad regime in 2015, signifying its power to other states. But, as Go reminds us, military performances are often not geared exclusively toward an external audience. Rather, the audience also “includes domestic publics who might be fretting about their state’s capacity or ability to exert itself in the world.”40 Similarly, the Putin years have witnessed the consolidation of a self-strengthening strategy at home that aims to curb political pluralism and revive Russian national values to support a strong state. As the next section will make clear, the evolution of the ruling elites’ strategies was facilitated by a shifting public opinion, toward which they were also targeted. public opinion: from constraining to enabling t h e r u l i n g e l i t e s 41

Although Vladimir Putin’s support at home had always been a source of envy for the majority of Western leaders, his popularity skyrocketed even more after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, nearing 90 per cent (see figure 5.1). This domestic success might seem to illustrate how inclined the Russian population is toward patriotic and neo-imperial ideas to the detriment of democratic goals.42 It is

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08.1999 03.2000 10.2000 05.2001 12.2001 07.2002 02.2003 09.2003 04.2004 11.2004 06.2005 01.2006 08.2006 03.2007 10.2007 05.2008 12.2008 07.2009 02.2010 09.2010 04.2011 11.2011 06.2012 01.2013 08.2013 03.2014 10.2014 05.2015 12.2015 07.2016 02.2017 09.2017

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Approve

Disapprove

Figure 5.1  Putin’s approval rating Source: Levada Center, “Odobrenie deiatel’nosti Vladimira Putina,” 2017, http:// www.levada.ru/indikatory/odobrenie-organov-vlasti/.

Figure 5.1 Putin’s approval rating

Source: Levada Center, “Odobrenie deiatel'nosti Vladimira Putina,” 2017,

undeniable that the notion of “great powerness” (derzhavnost’) resonates well with the Russian population. During the post-Soviet period, http://www.levada.ru/indikatory/odobrenie-organov-vlasti/. the great majority of Russians continued to view their country as a great power (velikaia derzhava), notwithstanding the country’s generalized and steep decline after the collapse of the USSR. This contrast introduced significant discomfort in terms of how Russians imagined their country and its appropriate role in the world.43 However, despite being intrinsically linked to the dominant geopolitical culture, the concept of great power can be defined in various ways, without necessarily implying imperialist or aggressive inclinations that would support a strategy of prevention.44 While public opinion is in general viewed in the literature as a constraining factor for state leaders’ risky behaviour at the international level, we argue that in post-Soviet Russia, public opinion has gradually evolved from a constraining factor during the 1990s to an enabling factor during the 2000s. We contend that recent domestic support for a more aggressive great power (i.e., prevention strategy) had its roots primarily in the Russian state’s failures to institutionalize economic, social, and political benefits for its population. The discrepancy between how Russians think of their country in the abstract as a great power and how they regularly have to cope at home with an ineffective and corrupt bureaucracy, coupled with precarious economic conditions,

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creates a degree of cognitive dissonance. In turn, the West’s antagonizing behaviour toward Russia exacerbated this dissonance throughout the 2000s and was increasingly instrumentalized by the great power nationalists in order to avoid blame and promote their world views.45 Notably after the 2008 global financial crisis, the relative economic stability of Putin’s first two mandates vanished for an important part of the population; yet, authoritarian trends only intensified. This made geopolitical successes, such as the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and the 2015 Syria intervention, the last strongholds where popular sentiment of “great powerness,” while failing to be a reality at home, could be at least imagined in the world arena. While the way the ruling elites cope with geopolitical decline might seem to evolve primarily in reaction to international issues, we argue that the choices that they make are often grounded in domestic politics, as elites actively try to ensure their legitimacy at home. Consequently, we need to understand Russian domestic politics, and especially how public opinion has evolved during the post-Soviet period. Russians Coping with Generalized Decline during the 1990s While the rapid decline that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was addressed above at the macro level, we must also think of what this decline meant for ordinary Russians. Not only did Russians abruptly lose their superpower status at the international level, but they also had to reconceive of their country within smaller borders at the regional level, having lost a considerable portion of the previous U S S R territory.46 In particular, for many Russians, the separation from the former Soviet republics was experienced as a real shock, given the nested historical, cultural, and family ties between Russia and other post-Soviet states such as Ukraine and Belarus. To echo Putin’s statement (quoted above), in the wake of the U S S R ’s collapse, about 25 million Russians found themselves suddenly living outside of Russia.47 Consequently, one of the most shared foreign-policy preferences among Russians has persistently been the need to establish further relationships with the post-Soviet space. However, this preference may have different implications for different people. For some, it is a desire to foster closer economic ties; for others, it can go so far as wanting to reconstitute the territory of the former Soviet Union. The majority’s preference often lies between these two poles.

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Perhaps even more importantly, Russians experienced in a harsh way what geopolitical and economic decline meant in their daily lives throughout the 1990s. The loss of an omnipotent state, which provided socio-economic rights, social status, as well as a firm ideological orientation to all citizens, left a considerable vacuum.48 As the Russian writer Sergei Minaev explained, “in the 1990s they [the ruling elites] drastically changed everything … They said, forget about all the heroes, forget about the entire cultural heritage, forget about everything. We’ve changed the picture. Now survive.”49 This period also showed how inaccurate the dominant assumptions about economic transition were in many post-Soviet countries. Beyond a tiny majority who became very rich in Russia (the so-called oligarchs or New Russians), the majority of people were sheer losers.50 While unemployment suddenly became a new reality for many, a great number of workers remained officially at work but had to consistently deal with significant wage arrears.51 As reported by the New Russian Barometer survey, a majority of Russians thought that their economic conditions deteriorated during the transition, in comparison to what they had known before Perestroika.52 More generally, while social practices were completely redesigned, people’s adjustment to the new realities did not evolve at the same speed. Ouzhakine describes this social disjuncture by highlighting how the feeling of generalized loss and trauma was self-constitutive of the post-Soviet identity during the 1990s, when many Russians became bound together by a “patriotism of despair.”53 As a result of these multi-faceted losses, Russians were primarily focused on domestic concerns during the transition, neither showing a real enthusiasm for the westernizing elites (and their imitation/retrenchment strategies), nor cultivating any hostile sentiments toward external others (i.e., prevention). Public Opinion Constraining the Rulers In the 1990s, Russians did not express great interest in foreign policy issues. According to Kolossov, about one-third to one-half of the population either had no interest in or was deeply misinformed about geopolitics.54 While this is hardly unique to Russia, it also does not mean that public opinion had no influence on leaders’ geopolitical decisions, as Lachmann shows for the British and US cases examined in chapter 3 in this volume. After the Vietnam War, it was generally

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acknowledged that public opinion could often act as a constraining factor against the reckless tendency of elites to employ force, especially in times of crisis.55 Building on this literature, many authors have shown that this constraining effect also applies to post-Soviet Russia.56 Discussing the results reproduced in table 5.1 below, Zimmerman argues that Russian elites were more disposed to use force internationally than were mass publics, and that disposition to use force increased between 1993 and 1995. Mass publics were a drag on such inclinations. They were no more inclined to use force abroad in 1995 than they had been in 1993 – they did not respond to elite attitude shifts – and their response to N AT O expansion was restrained.57 In addition to constraining the use of force (which might have enabled a prevention strategy), Russian public opinion constrained the rulers’ will regarding economic integration with the West, thus limiting the imitation strategy discussed above.58 In table 5.1, this can be seen in the difference between how little of the Russian public thought the country needed Western assistance to rebuild its economy (31 per cent in 1993, 28 per cent in 1995, and 17 per cent in 2000) compared to elites’ opinion on the very same matter (57 per cent in 1993, 46 per cent in 1995, and 30 per cent in 2000). As O’Loughlin stresses, in the1990s “a major gap has emerged between the geopolitical priorities of the elites and the day-to-day concerns of ordinary Russians.”59 The only area where public opinion has consistently been more prone to international intervention when compared to the ruling elites was on the protection of Russians abroad (especially in the post-Soviet space). However, it is important to note that the population was less ready to employ military means (as shown in table 5.1). This also echoes Rose and Munro’s findings on the preferred strategies to defend Russians living in the former Soviet republics if they were under threat; in 2003, 95 per cent of respondents favoured negotiation, 70 per cent economic pressure, while only 23 per cent said they would support deploying the Russian army.60 Using data from the Fond Obshchestvonnoye Mneniye (Foundation for Public Opinion) collected in 2003, O’Loughlin and Talbot also found that less than 1 per cent of Russians supported the idea of using force to recreate the former territory of the Soviet Union.61 Thus, although expressing

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Table 5.1 Elite vs mass foreign policy orientations, 1993–2000

Elites (in percentage)   US a threat to Russian security Agreed: Russia should “send its army, if asked, to aid countries of the former USSR” To aid other countries “For the most part the national interests of Russia should extend beyond its ­current territory” Rebuilding the Russian economy cannot be done without help of West “The defense of Russians abroad in the former republics of the USSR” is a very important foreign policy goal In other countries Increase military spending

Mass (in percentage)

1993 1995 1999   1993 1995 2000 27 56

53 78

62 72

26 35

44 35

68 56

35 77

53 80

39 83

19 58

16 60

26 –

57

46

30

31

28

17

69

72

64

79

64

81

38  5

48 46

34 64

53 15

38 35

49 –

Source: Reproduced in part from William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy: Russian Elite and Mass Perspectives, 1993–2000 (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press 2002), 92.

deep connections with the post-Soviet space, Russians were not ready to aggressively rebuild the Soviet Union, if only because they were against spending already scant resources on any new Eurasian project. One may object that the Russian population has always been rather sensitive to imperial and aggressive ideas by pointing out, for example, to the important success that the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR ) obtained in the parliamentary elections of 1993, when the elite’s westernizing discourse was in its heyday. The L D P R’s leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is well-known for his nationalistic rhetoric and hawkish stance in foreign policy, particularly toward post-Soviet countries. However, the LDPR’s domestic support proved to be rather ephemeral.62 In the subsequent 1995 parliamentary elections and 1996 presidential elections, Russians massively backed the Communist Party, the K P R F , and its leader, Gennady Zyuganov. Rather than illustrating any specific foreign policy preferences, these unstable allegiances should be seen more as a reflection of domestic concerns – namely, as a reaction to economic and social upheavals. As Lo notes, “Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s success in the 1993 Duma elections did not

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reveal popular dissatisfaction with the conduct of foreign policy, nor even a broader anti-Westernism, but rather resentment against the (Westernizing) politicians responsible for painful economic reforms.”63 For most Russians, many of the problems with which they had to cope during the 1990s began to be increasingly associated with the imitation strategy of the elites and their neo-liberal vision of democracy. Even when looking at the attitudes toward N AT O and the US at the peak of the Kosovo crisis, which was vividly denounced by the ruling elites, as discussed earlier, one can again see that Russians’ reactions were overall more balanced and prudent than those of their rulers.64 O’Loughlin argues that “Russians reacted with worry rather than indignation and with caution rather than recklessness to the N A TO actions.”65 This also suggests that Russians were reacting to what was perceived to be a growing threat to national security posed by US military actions during the 1990s (see table 5.1), rather than lusting for more power. In fact, as figure 5.2 shows, popular attitudes toward the US, often seen by Russians as the most unfriendly country, fluctuate a lot and are thus heavily dependent on the context.66 For example, after the Kosovo crisis, despite all the hostility expressed by the elites toward NA T O and the US, 66 per cent of respondents in a V T sI O M poll held either “positive” or “mostly positive” feelings toward the US, versus 22 per cent who had “negative” or “mostly negative” feelings.67 While showing more restraint than the ruling elite, Russians were not necessarily rejecting the idea of “great powerness.” In 2001, they ranked the return of superpower status as the most important priority for Russia’s foreign policy for the next ten to fifteen years.68 Although the overwhelming majority of Russians has been used to thinking of their country as a great power, a brief glimpse into public opinion from the 1990s reveals that this inclination does not necessarily imply support for military prevention or imperialist ideas. A poll conducted by the Levada Center in 2000 shows that the main attributes of derzhavnost’ for Russians were vast territory, nuclear arms, as well as abundant natural resources.69 O’Loughlin, Ó Tuathail, and Kolossov find that Russians “consider economic might and social well-being as the main criteria of a great power.”70 The important point remains that, despite Russians showing little interest in foreign policy during the transitions, elites were still concerned that public opinion might be important and tried to adjust their foreign policy rhetoric in order to secure domestic support.71

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90

04.1990 12.1998 09.1999 07.2000 11.2001 05.2002 10.2002 04.2003 08.2003 01.2004 06.2004 11.2004 04.2005 09.2005 02.2006 07.2006 12.2006 05.2007 11.2007 05.2008 03.2009 03.2010 01.2011 01.2012 11.2012 09.2013 09.2014 07.2015 05.2016 03.2017

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Positive

Negative

Figure 5.2 Attitudes toward the US Source: Levada Center, “Otnoshenie k stranam,” 2017, http://www.levada.ru/indikatory/ otnoshenie-k-stranam/.

Yeltsin’s decision to appoint Primakov as the minister of foreign affairs just before the 1996 presidential elections is a prime example of such concerns. As a result, public opinion should be considered a constraining factor to elite foreign policy preferences throughout the 1990s, limiting both the westernizers’ drive to further imitate the West as well as the Eurasianists’ more radical and aggressive projects. Public Opinion Enabling Elites The arrival of Vladimir Putin at the turn of the 2000s also corresponded with a substantial improvement in the Russian economy. Not only did Russians become gradually more confident about their country’s economy as a whole, but a majority also became more optimistic about their individual economic situation. In turn, this affected their attitudes toward the new president and the external world.72 At the beginning, Putin’s popularity at home was thus highly contextual, as the constitutive Other rapidly became the prior decade of transitions, the time of bezpredel (time of troubles), rather than any specific state or alliance.73 In fact, at the beginning of the 2000s, a majority of Russians held a quite positive view of the external world and were more likely to

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see other countries as friends rather than foes.74 Although socioeconomic conditions are not the only factor driving geopolitical preferences, the improvement in living standards seemed to be positively linked to Russians’ foreign policy attitudes. According to O’Loughlin and Talbot, people who were optimists about the economy were more likely to “accept the present-day borders of Russia and [did] not feel that Russia must exercise any kind of suzerainty over the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.”75 As a result of this optimistic and rather benign view of the world, many authors stressed the opportunity for closer co-operation with the West, at least on a pragmatic basis.76 However, among the ruling elites, as explained earlier, westernizers were increasingly marginalized to the benefit of the great power nationalists, who were pushing a different agenda. For example, while the importance of the post-Soviet space for Russians had been constant, leaders were now ready to take these preferences more seriously and did not hesitate to use them to get support. All parties running in the 2003 Duma elections advocated for closer ties with the former territories of the Soviet Union.77 Citing a 2005 Levada Center poll asking where Russia’s future lies, Rose and Munro show that 69 per cent of respondents thought that it laid with the post-Soviet space,78 while 31 per cent chose instead western Europe.79 The regime’s authoritarian tendencies, already visible during Putin’s first mandate – for example, with the taming of oligarchs and the media – worsened in his second mandate, especially with the colour revolutions. These events also affected the way Russians in general perceived the West. While NA T O’s expansion into Hungary, Poland, and the Baltic states were met with quite relaxed reactions, the possibility that Ukraine would join NA TO after the Orange Revolution raised greater concerns, with 41 per cent of respondents in 2005 saying that this would go against Russian national interests.80 The new official discourse on “sovereign democracy” that promoted a more assertive stance in the international area, particularly stressed during the 2007 Munich Security Conference, capitalized on these new concerns and found significant support at home.81 As a result, Russians massively supported military action against Georgia in the summer of 2008, with 87 per cent saying Russia was justified in standing with the Ossetians during the conflict.82 As shown in figure 5.3, the percentage of Russians who consider their country to be a “great power” doubled in four years, rising from 30 per cent in

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80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 03 .1 99 9 04 .2 00 0 10 .2 00 1 03 .2 00 4 11 .2 00 5 11 .2 00 6 11 .2 00 7 07 .2 00 9 11 .2 01 0 11 .2 01 1 03 .2 01 4 03 .2 01 5 11 .2 01 5 05 .2 01 6

0

Yes

No

Figure 5.3  “Is Russia Today a Great Power?” Source: Levada Center “Natsional’naia gordost’,” 30 June 2016, http://www.levada. ru/2016/06/30/natsionalnaya-gordost/.

November 2005 to 61 per cent in June 2009, before sharply declining after the financial crisis.83 After the 2008 crisis, however, relative economic stability and improving living standards, which many Russians directly attributed to Putin, appeared all of a sudden to be less certain. While it became increasingly obvious that, despite Medvedev’s discourse, the regime did not intend to modernize economically or liberalize politically (i.e., adopt an innovation strategy), Russians had to cope with growing political restrictions and pervasive corruption. Popular discontent with the ruling elites started to grow, which also affected Putin’s approval ratings, as shown in figure 5.1 above.84 Social activism was on the rise and culminated in a massive protest movement during the 2011–12 electoral cycle, which was in turn followed by even more repression after Putin’s return.85 Many authors pointed out that the 2011–12 protests showed the extent to which the regime had lost its seeming invincibility by representing a significant challenge to its legitimacy, now increasingly tied to past successes. In 2012, the most important sources of national pride were history (80 per cent), sporting achievements (74 per cent), and literature (73 per cent). As noted by Aleksei Grazhdanskin from the Levada Centre, these cultural accomplishments helped “keep the pride of the country despite the fact that we have nothing to be proud of in the economic and political spheres.”86

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The annexation of Crimea in 2014 in the wake of the Ukrainian Maidan revolution changed everything. By triggering two critical foreign policy concerns for Russians – namely, the importance of the post-Soviet space and great power status – the annexation of Crimea galvanized the feeling of pride and even succeeded in reversing the de-legitimation trends of the regime.87 Support for Crimea’s annexation among the Russian population has consistently been above 80 per cent since March 2014, consolidating the public around Putin’s regime. While in 2003, the most popular answer to the question of which achievements Russians could be proud of was a telling “nothing” (25 per cent), in 2015 the most frequent answers were both the “president” (34 per cent), and “the people” (32 per cent).88 According to data from the Levada Centre, 79 per cent of Russians see in the Crimea’s annexation a sign that the country has regained its great power status.89 In May 2016, 67 per cent of Russians thought that Russia was now a great power once more (see figure 5.3). Economic sanctions imposed by Western countries, despite having negatively affected Russia’s economy and living standards, have not succeeded in stopping this trend; instead, these actions have produced a “rally around the flag” effect. In January 2015, when asked about how Russia should react to Western sanctions, 69 per cent of respondents said that Russia should continue its foreign policy actions regardless of the sanctions, and only 21 per cent thought that Russia should seek compromises in order to ease the sanctions.90 In fact, what increased tensions between the West and Russia seemed to produce is a change in the main criteria that constitute great powerness for Russians. More attention is now paid to military strength (48 per cent in 2016 compared to 37 per cent in 2008) than economic power (39 per cent compared to 57 per cent in 2008) and social wellbeing (41 per cent in 2016 compared to 66 per cent in 2008), and even less attention is given to being respected by other states (15 per cent in 2016 compared to 24 per cent in 2008).91 While we previously stated that Russians’ image of the external world, including Western countries, was generally positive until the mid-2000s, the renewed tensions following the Ukrainian conflict negatively affected Russians’ perceptions of the West, with attitudes toward the US and the E U plunging dramatically in early 2014 (see figures 5.2 and 5.4). This section has shown that despite the idea of great power status being part of the dominant geopolitical culture, Russians do not have preconceived or immutable opinions of how this status should be

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90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

12.2003 08.2004 03.2005 06.2005 09.2005 12.2005 03.2006 06.2006 09.2006 12.2006 03.2007 06.2007 10.2007 01.2008 09.2008 03.2009 09.2009 05.2010 11.2010 05.2011 11.2011 05.2012 11.2012 05.2013 12.2013 04.2014 09.2014 03.2015 09.2015 03.2016 09.2016 03.2017

10 0

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Figure 5.4  Attitudes toward the EU Source: Levada Center, “Otnoshenie k stranam,” 2017, http://www.levada.ru/indikatory/ otnoshenie-k-stranam/.

embodied at the regional or international levels.92 As we argue, Russian public opinion evolved from constraining rulers’ adventurism during the 1990s to enabling it from the mid-2000s onward. Beyond the antagonizing role played by the West, which can be considered as a constant factor during the post-Soviet era, what seems to best explain the change in Russian public attitudes lies in the realignment and promotion of elite discourses toward more aggressive and imperialist ideas. As Pain argues, imperialist ideas are not inherent in the public consciousness of the entire population, or even in the Russian mentality. Imperial consciousness comes to life only when interested political forces – acting, moreover, under favorable conditions, as when people are tired of reform – consciously activate and reconstruct it.93 This trend has been notable since the mid-2000s, corresponding with a period of growing authoritarianism at home, as attempts to carry out structural reforms have failed and as the Kremlin has felt increasingly threatened by the colour revolutions. In the wake of the economic crisis and the erosion of popular support domestically, the regime’s legitimacy began to be almost exclusively built around past or present international “successes.” However, it was only after the

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annexation of Crimea that the coherence of such patriotic-imperialist discourses was enhanced, as the economic sanctions imposed by the West left no other choice to Russian elites than to align their discourses with concrete actions even in the economic realm, such as the recent trend toward import substitution. In a nutshell, from that point on, the three factors that we identified at the beginning of this chapter – the structure of the ruling elite, public opinion, and Western antagonism – converged more completely and perfectly than they ever had since the fall of the USSR . Nevertheless, continued support for the regime in the post-Crimea period might be more fragile than survey results seem to indicate, especially since geopolitical successes do not often translate into reallife benefits. This discrepancy is even more acute in a time of prolonged economic crisis.94 Already in 2016, public opinion surveys showed that mass assessment of the Putin’s regime was neither monolithic, nor carved in stone, as its performance after more than fifteen years in office was judged rather low in all dimensions except foreign policy.95 Commenting on those results, the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences noted that, “the values of ‘a great power’ and ‘a steady hand’ are largely ceremonial and declarative. 60 percent of respondents say that their ‘personal interests are more important that the state’s interests.’”96 In the long run, it is not a given that public opinion will remain satisfied merely with Russia being an assertive great power at the international level if domestic conditions continue to lag behind this externally projected show of power. The sharp drop in Putin’s popularity at home in 2019 (his approbation rate declined by 20 per cent since his re-election in March 2018) testifies again to the growing dissatisfaction of the population. But this time, this declining support is not only directed against Putin’s policies, but also against Putin himself, whom more Russians are now ready to hold responsible for the country’s problems.97 This also shows that the Crimea consensus is definitely over, and that the Kremlin can no longer surf exclusively on imperialist version of great power without delivering concrete benefits at home. conclusion: lessons from russia’s decline

This chapter has demonstrated the shifting domestic and international strategies that Russia has employed in attempting to counter its geopolitical decline since 1991. The 1990s under Yeltsin were dominated

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by imitation at home and retrenchment in foreign policy. After Putin and his allies consolidated their political power, Russia gradually shifted toward self-strengthening at home and prevention abroad. In a 2016 special report on Russia, The Economist described Russia as a declining power that needs to be contained. Conversely, the Kremlin today is firmly committed to making the US and the E U agree on a single fact: that Russia is not a power in decline, but rather one that should be viewed as a traditional great power with certain privileges, such as hegemony in the post-Soviet space and equal say in international politics. While Sakwa thinks this is neo-revisionism in world politics with “profound resonance in domestic affairs,”98 Larson and Shevchenko explain Russia’s increasing aggressiveness with a socialpsychological argument: the Kremlin has been aiming to recover from its “perceived humiliation and disrespect.”99 The roots of this perception go back to the 1990s, when Russia’s liberal westernizing elites targeted political and economic integration with the West, but failed to do so. Russian elites’ response to geopolitical decline has had mixed outcomes in terms of the regional and international order. At the regional level, Russia has struggled to build security and economic institutions to preserve its hegemonic power in the post-Soviet space. Moreover, smaller states in the region, such as Georgia and Ukraine, have resisted Russia’s hegemonic projects and instead chosen integration with the West. At the international level, Russia’s intervention in Syria practically challenged the West’s regime change agenda and demonstrated Russia’s ability to keep the collapsing Assad regime in power. More importantly, Russia has demonstrated that it can uphold the traditional norms of international law such as sovereignty and non-intervention. The Kremlin lacks the material means to shake the foundations of US hegemony and alter the distribution of global power. However, its normative resistance to US unilateralism has revealed the weaknesses in the US-led liberal international order and the perceived global universalism of the West. The Russian case has lessons for American decline as well. First, the evolution of Russia’s elite structure demonstrates that coping with geopolitical decline is as much about domestic political contestation as it is about international factors. Different elite groups define national interests and foreign policy priorities differently, which shapes the way nations cope with their declining status. Trump’s anti-­establishment rhetoric and practices can over time evolve into

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the consolidation of a new US strategic outlook that prioritizes isolationist nationalism and a retreat from globalism. This retreat might be a greater threat to the liberal international order than the ones posed by a resurgent Russia or a rising China. If, as Shifrinson argues in chapter 7 of this volume, the structural balance of power favours a continuing US advantage over China, the domestic balance of power in American politics can nonetheless expose the country to strategic ambiguity in the years to come. Second, the Russian case demonstrates that relying on foreign policy aggression can pay off in the short run by boosting the public’s support for the government, especially in times of economic turmoil and acute political crisis. However, that is clearly not sustainable in the long run and foreign policy revisionism cannot compensate for genuine economic and political reform. As Lachmann shows in chapter 3, declining hegemons can refrain from pursuing genuine reform. Our findings from Russia, in turn, provide a caution about the dangers of relying on nationalist and aggressive foreign policy that boosts political leaders’ popularity, which eventually prevents political and economic reform. As long as Putin and his great power nationalist alliance remain in power, the Kremlin will resist Russia’s declining geopolitical status and will continue to see the country as one of the poles in a multipolar world with a distinct set of political and social values. Furthermore, as Müller argues, “the more the West seeks to contain Russia, the more Russia will fall back on a geopolitical identity as a great power,” which actually nourishes the self-strengthening discourses that resonates well with the population.100 However, the Kremlin will need to maintain the high levels of societal support explored in this chapter in order to live up to its anti-westernism. If oil prices do not recover and Western sanctions on the Russian economy persist, a nationalistic foreign policy will prove to be difficult to sustain, although it will remain the only tool that the Kremlin can use to divert the domestic audience from enduring problems at home. Civilizational debates on Russia’s self-belonging and distinct cultural values have become more salient since the annexation of Crimea. The Kremlin, with support from Eurasianists, Russian nationalists, proKremlin think tanks, and the Russian Orthodox Church, has relied on the argument that Russia is a “distinct civilization.” On top of this agreement between the ruling elites, pro-regime intellectuals, and the people stands the Russian state as the protector of Russia’s values

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and interests in the face of internal and external enemies. This conservative and civilizationist turn has seemed to resonate well with some right-wing groups in many Western countries. As Neumann has aptly demonstrated, since the nineteenth century, Russia was not accepted as an equal great power by the West because its domestic regime was not “socially compatible” with other recognized major powers in the West.101 Perhaps the current rise of authoritarian populism in the United States and Europe will offer Moscow a historic chance to overcome the legitimacy problems emanating from its lack of “social power.” This can be another historic moment for Russia’s international status.

notes

  1 Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Profile: Russia – Main Report (London: Economist Intelligence Unit, 2000).   2 Namvar Zohoori, Thomas A. Mroz, Barry Popkin, Elena Glinskaya, Michael Lokshin, Dominic Mancini, Polina Kozyreva, and Mikhail Swafford, “Monitoring the Economic Transition in the Russian Federation and Its Implications For the Demographic Crisis – The Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey,” World Development 26, no. 11 (1998): 1977–93.   3 Andrei Kozyrev, “Russia: A Chance for Survival,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 1–16.   4 Andrei P. Tsygankov, “Mastering Space in Eurasia: Russia’s Geopolitical Thinking after the Soviet Break-up,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 36, no. 1 (2003): 101–27.   5 Anne Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia’s Resurgence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).   6 Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, “Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to US Primacy,” International Security 34, no. 4 (2010): 63–95; Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, “Russia Says No: Power, Status, and Emotions in Foreign Policy,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47, nos 3–4 (2014): 269–79; Andrei P. Tsygankov, “Vladimir Putin’s Last Stand: The Sources of Russia’s Ukraine Policy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 31, no. 4 (2015): 279–303.   7 Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239–99.

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  8 Evgenii Primakov, Mir bez Rossii? K chemu vedet politicheskaya blizorukost’ (Moscow: ZAO Izdatel’stvo Tsentrpoligraf, 2016), 23–7.   9 Seçkin Köstem, “Different Paths to Regional Hegemony: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Economic Strategy in Russia and Turkey,” Review of International Political Economy 25, no. 5 (2018): 726–52. 10 Great power nationalists also do not use ethnic nationalist discourses that prioritize ethnic Russians over minorities in the Russian Federation. For a more detailed account of Eurasianism, see Mark Bassin, Sergey Glebov, and Marlene Laruelle, Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). 11 For a detailed account of the influence of the idea of the West on Russian foreign policy, see Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) 12 At that time, the Russian Parliament was still the Supreme Soviet of Russia, but it became the State Duma as a result of the 1993 constitutional crisis. 13 Nichole J. Jackson, Russian Foreign Policy and the CIS : Theories, Debates and Actions (London: Routledge, 2003). 14 Vincent Pouliot, International Security in Practice: The Politics of N A T O Russia Diplomacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148–93. 15 Juliet Johnson, A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2000). 16 Andrei P. Tsygankov, The Strong State in Russia: Development and Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92. 17 Andrey Makarychev and Viatcheslav Morozov, “Multilateralism, Multipolarity, and Beyond: A Menu of Russia’s Policy Strategies,” Global Governance 17, no. 3 (2011): 353–73. 18 Iver B. Neumann, “Russia as a Great Power, 1815–2007,” Journal of International Relations and Development 11, no. 2 (2008): 128–51. On the importance of history and tradition for Russian foreign policy, see Sergei Lavrov, “Istoricheskaia perspektiva vneshnei politiki Rossii,” Rossiia v Global’noi Politike, 6 March 2016, http://www.globalaffairs.ru/ number/Istoricheskaya-perspektiva-vneshnei-politiki-Rossii-18019. 19 Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identity and Foreign Policy, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 211–57.

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20 Brian D. Taylor, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion after Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 21 Margarita M. Balmaceda, The Politics of Energy Dependency: Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania Between Domestic Oligarchs and Russian Pressure (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 22 For example, see Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2013). 23 English translations of Putin’s addresses to the Russian Federal Assembly can be accessed at the Kremlin’s official website: http://en.kremlin.ru/ events/president/transcripts/messages. 24 Vladislav Surkov, “Russian Political Culture: The View from Utopia,” Russian Politics and Law 46, no. 5 (2008): 10–26; Gail W. Lapidus, “Between Assertiveness and Insecurity: Russian Elite Attitudes and the Russia-Georgia Crisis,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 2 (2007): 138–55. 25 Regina Smyth, Anna Lowry, and Brandon Wilkening, “Engineering Victory: Institutional Reform, Informal Institutions, and the Formation of a Hegemonic Party Regime in the Russian Federation,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 2 (2007): 119. 26 United Russia ended up with 223 seats out of 450 as a result of the 2003 parliamentary elections. 27 Ol’ga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, “The Sovietization of Russian Politics,” Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 4 (2009): 303. 28 President of Russia, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation,” 25 April 2005, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/ transcripts/22931\. 29 Munich Conference on Security Policy, “Putin’s Prepared Remarks at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy,” Washington Post, 12 February 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/­ article/2007/02/12/AR2007021200555.html. 30 Silvana Malle, “The Policy Challenges of Russia’s Post-Crisis Economy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 28, no. 1 (2012): 66–110. 31 Tsygankov, The Strong State in Russia, 111–14. 32 Vladmir Putin, “Novyi integratsionnyi proekt dlia Evrazii – budushchee, kotoroe rozhdaetsia segodnia,” Izvestiia, 3 October 2011, text available at https://echo.msk.ru/blog/statya/817588-echo/. 33 David Cadier, “Eastern Partnership vs Eurasian Union? The EU-Russia Competition in the Shared Neighbourhood and the Ukraine Crisis,” Global Policy 5 (2014): 76–85. 34 Nicu Popescu, Eurasian Union: The Real, the Imaginary and the Likely (Chaillot Paper no. 132) (Paris: European Union Institute for Security Studies, 2014).

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35 Richard Connolly, “The Empire Strikes Back: Economic Statecraft and the Securitisation of Political Economy in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 68, no. 4 (2016): 750–73. 36 Juliet Johnson and Seçkin Köstem, “Frustrated Leadership: Russia’s Economic Alternative to the West,” Global Policy 7, no. 2 (2016): 207–16. 37 Dmitry Gorenburg, “What Russia’s Military Operation in Syria Can Tell Us about Advances in Its Capabilities,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo 424 (2016): 5. 38 Fyodor Lukyanov, “Putin’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 3 (2016): 30. 39 For a historical analysis of Russia’s desire to be accepted as an equal partner by Western major powers, see Neumann, “Russia as a Great Power.” 40 See chapter 6 in this volume, “American Decline and Performative War, or How to Do Things with Force.” 41 Polling data in non-democratic countries can present reliability issues. However, the data used in this chapter largely come from an independent polling survey agency, the Levada Center, which is respected both in Russia and the West. The Levada Center was formed after a split with the official polling agency, V T sI OM , which was co-opted by the government in 2003. See Oksana Yablokova, “Levada Leaves VT sI O M for V TsIOM -A,” Moscow Times, 10 September 2003. 42 See, for example, Richard Pipes, “Pride and Power,” Wall Street Journal, 24 August 2009, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405297020355 0604574358733790418994, or Matthew Dal Santo, “Putin’s Popularity, Explained,” National Interest, 14 December 2015, http://nationalinterest. org/blog/the-buzz/putins-popularity-explained-14609. 43 Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); I. Levada, Ishchem cheloveka: Sotsiologicheskie ocherki 2000–2005 (Moscow: Novoe izdatel'stvo, 2006). 44 Martin Müller, Making Great Power Identities in Russia: An Ethnographic Discourse Analysis of Education at a Russian Elite University (Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2009). 45 Ted Hopf, “‘Crimea Is Ours’: A Discursive History,” International Relations 30, no. 2 (2016): 227–55. 46 John O’Loughlin and Paul F. Talbot, “Where in the World Is Russia: Geopolitical Perceptions and Preferences of Ordinary Russian,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 46, no. 1 (2005): 23–50. 47 Richard Rose and Neil Munro, “Do Russians See Their Future in Europe or the C I S ?” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 1 (2008): 49–66.

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48 A Levada poll conducted in both 2000 and 2008 asked respondents whether life was better for ordinary people in the Soviet Union or Western countries in the 1970s and ’80s based on different criteria, including socio-economic rights (i.e., health care, employment, education, etc.). The overwhelming majority selected the Soviet Union for all criteria, except for the protection of civil rights. Moreover, when asked why life was better for ordinary people in the Soviet Union, the most popular answers in both 2000 and 2008 were that there were free health care and education as well as no unemployment. Far behind was the issue of being a strong and ­powerful state, although there was an important change in this answer between 2000 and 2008. See Levada Center, “Gde byla luchshe zhizn’?” (press release, 13 March 2008), http://www.levada.ru/2008/03/13/ gde-byla-luchshe-zhizn/. 49 Sophia Kishkovsky, “The Tortured Voice of Russia’s Lost Generation,” New York Times, 22 December 2007, http://www.nytimes. com/2007/12/22/world/europe/22minaev.html. 50 Joel S. Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203–34. 51 For example, in 1996, 78 per cent of the respondents to the New Russian Barometer survey reported that they did not receive their wages or received them late. See Richard Rose, Russian Responses to Transformation: Trends in Public Opinion since 1992 (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2004), 31. 52 Ibid. 53 Serguei A. Ouzhakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2009) 54 Vladimir Kolossov, “‘High’ and ‘Low’ Geopolitics: Images of Foreign Countries in the Eyes of Russian Citizens,” Geopolitics 8, no. 1 (2003): 131. This is in no way exceptional to Russia, however, as ordinary citizens in Western countries, such as the United States, also tend to be less focused and informed on geopolitics than on domestic issues. Many authors had thus claimed that public opinion had little effect on the decision-making process regarding foreign policy, what Holsti called the Almond-Lippman consensus. See Ole R. Holsti, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Challenges to the Almond-Lippmann Consensus,” International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1992): 439–66, and Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 55 Holsti, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy”; Bruce W. Jentleson, “The Pretty Prudent Public: Post Post-Vietnam American Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” International Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1992): 49–74;

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Bruce W. Jentleson and Rebecca L. Britton, “Still Pretty Prudent Post-Cold War American Public Opinion on the Use of Military Force,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42, no. 4 (1998): 395–417. 56 John O’Loughlin, “Geopolitical Fantasies and Ordinary Russians: Perception and Reality in the Post-Yeltsin Era,” Geopolitics 6, no. 1 (2001): 17–48; Lo, Russian Foreign Policy; Kolossov, “‘High’ and ‘Low’”; William Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy: Russian Elite and Mass Perspectives, 1993–2000 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2002). 57 Zimmerman, The Russian People, 4. 58 Ibid. 59 O’Loughlin, “Geopolitical Fantasies,” 1. 60 Rose and Munro, “Do Russians See Their Future in Europe,” 62. 61 O’Loughlin and Talbot, “Where in the World Is Russia?” 33. 62 O’Loughlin, “Geopolitical Fantasies.” 63 Lo, Russian Foreign Policy, 28. 64 Zimmerman, The Russian People, 209; Kolossov, “‘High’ and ‘Low,’” 140. 65 O’Loughlin, “Geopolitical Fantasies,” 22. 66 Also see Roy Allison, Margot Light, and Stephen White, Putin’s Russia and the Enlarged Europe (New York: Chatham House, 2006). 67 Lo, Russian Foreign Policy, 27. 68 V TsIOM , “Rossiiane o tseliakh venshnei politiki i o sammite v Italii” (press release), 19 July 2001, http://www.levada.ru/2001/07/18/rossiyaneo-tselyah-vneshnej-politiki-i-o-sammite-v-italii/. 69 A.A. Golov, “Rossiia kak velikaia strana” (press release), 20 November 2000, http://www.levada.ru/2000/11/20/rossiya-kak-velikaya-strana/. 70 John O’Loughlin, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Vladimir Kolossov, “The Geopolitical Orientations of Ordinary Russians: A Public Opinion Analysis,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 47, no. 2 (2006): 146. 71 Lo, Russian Foreign Policy, 28; A. Rakitov and V. Shemiakin, “Vmeshatel’stvo vnutrennikh del vo vneshnie,” Expert, 1 July 1996. 72 Rose, Russian Responses to Transformation, 38. 73 Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics. 74 Kolossov, “‘High’ and ‘Low,’” 116; Allison, Light, and White, Putin’s Russia, 141; Rolf Shuette, “EU -Russia Relations: Interests and Values – A European Perspective,” Carnegie Papers 54 (2004): 16. 75 O’Loughlin and Talbot, “Where in the World Is Russia?” 46. 76 However, popular attitudes toward the West are neither linear nor monolithic. Kolossov, “‘High’ and ‘Low,’” argues that “Most Russian citizens combine in their representations the ideas of an organic hostility and

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anti-Russian feelings rooted in the West with the sincere and profound hope of good relations and co-operation” (145). 77 Allison, Light, and White, Putin’s Russia, 135. 78 In the original survey, “the Commonwealth of Independent States (C IS)” is the wording used. 79 Rose and Munro, “Do Russians See Their Future in Europe,” 53. 80 Allison, Light, and White, Putin’s Russia, 146. 81 Surkov, “Russian Political Culture.” 82 Levada Center, “Zhiteli krupneishikh gorodov Rossii o gruzino-osetinskom konflikte” (press release), 26 August 2008, http://www.levada. ru/2008/08/26/ zhiteli-krupnejshih-gorodov-rossii-o-gruzino-osetinskom-konflikte/. 83 Karina Pipiia, “Natsional’naia gordost” (press release), 30 June 2016, http://www.levada.ru/2016/06/30/natsionalnaya-gordost/. 84 Sergei Belanovsky, Mikhail Dmitriev, Svetlana Mishikina, and Tatyana Omelchuk, “Socio-Economic Change and Political Transformation in Russia,” Center for Strategic Research, 7 November 2011, https://csisprod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/legacy_files/files/attachments/ 111107_CSR_Report_November_2011.pdf; Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield, “Forward to Democracy or Back to Authoritarianism? The Attitudinal Bases of Mass Support for the Russian Election Protests of 2011–2012,” Post-Soviet Affairs 29, no. 5 (2013): 387–403; Graeme Robinson, “Protesting Putinism: The Election Protests of 2011–2012 in Broader Perspective,” Problems of Post-Communism 60, no. 2 (2013): 11–23; Daniel Treisman, “Putin’s Popularity since 2010: Why Did Support for the Kremlin Plunge, Then Stabilize?” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 5 (2014): 370–88. 85 Virginie Lasnier, “Demobilisation and Its Consequences: After the Russian Movement Za chestnye vybory,” Europe Asia Studies 69, no. 5 (2017): 771–93. 86 Maksim Ivanov and Sergei Goriashko, “Rossiiskaia demokratiia ne povod dlia gordosti,” Kommersant, 21 November 2012. 87 Denis Volkov, “Russia of the mid-2020s: Breakdown of the Political Order,” in Russia in Decline, ed. S. Enders Wimbush and Elizabeth M. Portale (Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2017), 312–22. 88 Romir, “Rossiiane nashli, chem gordit’sia” (press release), 26 August 2015, https://romir.ru/studies/rossiyane-nashli-chem-gorditsya. 89 “64% rossiian schitaiut, chto Krym vsegda byl rossiiskim,” Izvestiia, 7 April 2016, https://iz.ru/news/608984.

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  90 Levada Center, “Sanktsii Zapada: posledstviia i reaktsiia” (press release), 3 February 2015, http://www.levada.ru/2015/02/03/sanktsii-zapadaposledstviya-i-reaktsiya/.   91 Pipiia,“Natsional’naia gordost.”   92 O’Loughlin, Ó Tuathail, and Kolossov, “The Geopolitical Orientation of Ordinary Russian”; Rose and Munro, “Do Russians See Their Future in Europe?”   93 Emil Pain, “The Imperial Syndrome and its Influence on Russian Nationalism,” in The New Russian Nationalism, ed. Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud (Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2016), 62–3.   94 Anton Tsvetov, “What Will Russia Look Like in 20 years?” Russia Direct 4, no. 6 (June 2016): 22–3   95 John P. Willerton, “Russian Public Assessments of the Putin Policy Program: Achievements and Challenges,” Russian Politics 1, no. 2 (2016): 131–58.   96 Viktor Khamraev, “Russians Think Their Country Should Become ‘A Great Power’” Russia Beyond, 24 November 2016, https://www.rbth.com/­ politics_and_society/2016/11/24/russians-think-their-country-shouldbecome-a-great-power_650669.   97 Elena Mukhametshina, “Chetvertyi krizis reitingov Putina za 20 let: chto delat’ vlasti?” Vedomosti, 21 February 2019, https://www.vedomosti.ru/ politics/articles/2019/02/21/794828-chto-delat; “VT sI O M : reiting doveriia Putinu dostig istoricheskogo minimum,” Novaya gazeta, 18 January 2019, https://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/2019/01/18/148477-vtsiom-reytingdoveriya-putinu-dostig-istoricheskogo-minimuma.   98 Richard Sakwa, “Russia’s Identity: Between the ‘Domestic’ and the ‘International,’” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 6 (2011): 972.   99 Larson and Shevchenko, “Russia Says No,” 270. 100 Müller, Making Great Power Identities in Russia, 219. 101 Neumann, “Russia as a Great Power.”

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part two

Coping with American Decline

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6 American Decline and Performative War, or How to Do Things with Force Julian Go

How do falling empires behave? Evidence suggests they do not behave well. As they decline in their relative economic power, they are likely to become more aggressive than before.1 Take the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. During the mid-nineteenth century, England had enjoyed hegemonic status, maintaining a relative preponderance over the world economy. But in the 1870s through to the 1890s, as rivals like Germany, France, Japan, and the United States increased their productive capacities and took up greater shares of the world’s gross domestic product, the British imperial state unleashed a new wave of aggression overseas – a “new imperialism” famously critiqued by John A. Hobson and other liberals. The same goes for the United States, whose decline began in the 1970s. Facing more and more economic competition, it has turned to its last resource – military power – to try to ward off threats to its ailing economic hegemony. During the 1990s alone, the United States embarked upon four times as many military operations as had it since the late 1940s.2 But the militaristic turn had begun even before the 1990s, with the invasion of Grenada in 1983. From 1946 to 1980, there were twenty-five major interventions, while in the 1981–2004 period, there almost twice as many (forty-eight).3 In short, these cases suggest that economic hegemons, as they lose relative power, are more likely to turn to imperial expansion or militaristic aggression. Let us accept this pattern. But we must now address the question it summons: What are the functions of such acts of aggression amidst decline? Surely, increased imperialism and militaristic aggression can serve as a means by which the falling hegemon

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tries to thwart or at least temper its decline. Imperialism helps to secure privileged access to, and control over, raw materials and potential markets abroad: a way of trying to regain economic dominance while preventing rivals from rising. To be sure, England in the late nineteenth century took new colonies in Africa partly to prevent others from taking them, thereby keeping competing empires at bay. Or, to take a more recent example, if the US can assert full control over the global oil spigot, economic rivals can be brought to their knees, and America’s economic supremacy could be maintained if not regained. In the event, aggression amidst decline would stand as a combination of what Frédéric Mérand, in the introduction to this volume, calls “preventive war” and “economic competition,” or, put differently, the use of violence against other states and territories as a tool of economic competition. But beyond these economic – and related geopolitical – functions, might there be other logics at work? Might, for instance, declining empires turn to militaristic aggression for symbolic reasons? Might they use force performatively, deploying military power not primarily to achieve military objectives or longer-term economic goals but also to show others that they are not yet out of the game? All empires use signs. But do falling ones resort to performances? This chapter explores such a possibility by examining the US in its period of decline and two subsequent military ventures: the invasion of Grenada in 1983 and interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s. By taking a closer look at these cases, we can see a logic of performative war amidst decline. I conceive of performative war as a variant of preventive war. Preventive war, as noted by Mérand, is initiated by a great power as one strategy for coping with decline. Political leaders use war strategically, initiating state violence against other states in the hopes that the war will prevent, thwart, or halt decline. But we can imagine such wars to be of different types. In one type, the ailing power initiates war directly with its rivals in order to gain advantage over them. A state tries to gain strength over and against its competitors by coercively weakening those competitors. What I am calling “performative war” operates differently. In performative war, the state does not try to weaken its rivals by fighting with them. Rather, it tries to project strength by attacking other, typically already weak states. Performative war is an attempt to assert dominance symbolically: war as a way by which the elites in the declining state try to show that they are not even declining. The intended target of such a war is not other state

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rivals, at least not exclusively. Performative war is aimed, rather, at a wider audience – an audience that includes rivals, other enemies, potential enemies, and even the domestic electorate. It is in this sense a show, and the battleground is the stage: a “theatre” of war indeed. But understanding this type of war by declining states first requires specifying what we mean by decline in the first place. american decline

“Decline” is a multifaceted term. As Sachs shows in chapter 1 of this volume, self-proclaimed analysts of decline can and have thought about it in multiple ways, each having their own distinct logic and effects. For present purposes, we can think of decline in terms of relative economic position. If a state is “hegemonic” when it enjoys a relative preponderance over the world economy, we can say that a hegemon is in decline as it loses that preponderance relative to other countries, and as other countries take up increasing shares of world economic activity. By this definition, America’s decline should be apparent enough. The sun began to set on America’s economic preponderance as early as the 1970s – particularly in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.4 The resulting recession involved decreasing profits and productivity.5 And while the recession was followed by a brief period of optimism through the 1990s, that boom was a bubble that already began to burst before decade’s end.6 But more importantly, since decline is a relative and global matter, it is important to note that these decreases in profits and productivity were accompanied by the rise of competitors around the world: America’s economic standing in relative terms fell from the mid-1970s, while that of its competitors rose and continued to rise. Initially, beginning in the late 1960s even, the key competition came from Japan and Germany. Then, by the 1980s, the European Union became a challenger. The period also saw the rise of Russia as a potential economic monster, and then China. There are various indicators that show all of this. In 1956, for example, 42 of the 50 biggest multinationals in the world were American. The rest of the world only had 8. By 1980, only 23 were American, with about the same number of European firms. Japanese firms increased their number too.7 Other data shows a continuation of the trend through the 1990s. Non-American firms constituted 9 of the 10 largest electronics and electrical equipment manufacturers

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in the world; 8 of the 10 largest automakers and utility companies (gas and electric); 7 of the 10 largest petroleum refiners; and 6 of the 10 largest telecommunication companies. Half of the 10 largest pharmaceutical firms were non-American too. And of the top 100 corporations in the world in 2000, as ranked by foreign-held assets, only 23 were American. As Du Boff writes, “Together, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, with a combined G D P seven-tenths that of the United States, had forty; Japan had sixteen. During the 1990s, the share of U.S. multinationals in the foreign sales of the world’s one hundred largest multinationals decreased from 30 to 25 percent; the share of E U-based companies increased from 41 to 46 percent.”8 Measures regarding shares of the world economy are similarly informative. In 1950 the United States supplied half of the world’s gross domestic product; in 2002 it only supplied 21 per cent. Sixty per cent of manufacturing production in the world in 1950 came from the US, only 25 per cent in 1999. Studies using somewhat different measures arrive at the same conclusion. In 1999, the US contributed only 28 per cent of world GD P , while the European Union had 30 per cent of the total. Japan was only 12 per cent and China’s only 4 per cent, but East Asia (excluding Japan) was the world’s fastest-growing economy since the late 1990s.9 These figures have not been lost on observers and policy-makers. By 2004, the Institute for International Economics (which included on its board prominent economists and policy-makers like Paul Volcker and Larry Summers) finally declared that “the United States is no longer the world’s dominant economic entity.”10 The institute listed three key “structural challenges” that the US was facing and would continue to face in the future. First, the “advent of an expanded European Union with an economy as large as America’s and a single money that provides the first rival to the dollar since it became the world’s key currency.” Second, “the meteoric rise of China (with India perhaps coming in its wake).” And third, “the evolution toward an East Asian economic bloc that could create a tripolar world economy, with significant geopolitical as well as economic implications for the United States.”11 In 1997, an astute report from the CI A registered the same concerns and anticipated the possibility that China and Europe would form a rival bloc and perhaps exclude the United States: “As East Asian economies – particularly China – grow, Europe will find its economic interests shifting toward that area. We anticipate growing trade and investment between these two regions.”12

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Still, as Mérand points out in the introduction to this volume, economic decline is not the only type of decline. Another is decline in military power. On the one hand, there is no dispute that the US maintained the largest and most powerful military of the second half of the twentieth century. But a series of events in this period, while not challenging America’s share of world military power, has nonetheless put dents in America’s prestige. Here we can suggest that accompanying America’s economic decline has been the threat of military decline as well – a decline relative to America’s previous military reputation. The historian Alfred McCoy has suggested that the beginning of the American debacle in Iraq in 2003 marks this decline: “Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America’s downfall.” But actually it began earlier, in the 1970s.13 The failures of the Vietnam War produced the infamous “Vietnam syndrome,” which has pervaded American foreign policy ever since, but they also demonstrated to the world that American military power was not omnipotent. “The crux of the Vietnam syndrome,” writes Barkawi, “is that a nation that is powerful ‘objectively,’ in terms of economic and military power, can be defeated by weaker powers.”14 Indeed, four years after US troops finally left Vietnam in defeat, Iranian revolutionaries seized the US Embassy in Iran and took American hostages. Then came the seizure of American hostages in Lebanon and, in 1983, the Beirut bombings that killed 299 American and French servicemen. While these later events were nothing like the scale of Vietnam, they represent a public puncturing of the American shield. And occurring in a wider context of rising economic competition and domestic economic problems, not to mention declining confidence in the US dollar, they did nothing to attenuate the global hegemon’s seemingly downward spiral.15 The 1990s also posed new problems, not least as the Somali debacle presented images of an American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu – perhaps a piercing metaphor for America’s decline in status despite its apparent rise after the end of the Cold War. Given this context of decline, we can now ponder America’s military interventions in the same period, considering, first, Grenada in 1983. o p e r at i o n u r g e n t f u r y , o r t h e

“ m a d e - f o r - t v - i n va s i o n ” 16

In 1983, an American force of 7,000 troops invaded the island of Grenada, a 133-square-mile former British colony of 110,000 people.17 Known as Operation Urgent Fury, the assault swiftly defeated

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the Grenadan People’s Revolutionary Army and Militia and, within days, established control over the island. The invasion was swift and efficient: 45 Grenadans were killed and only 18 US personnel lost their lives. Comparably speaking, this was a “little war.” But it is significant nonetheless. It was the first use of American combat troops in the Caribbean in almost twenty years and the first major use of military force abroad since the Vietnam War.18 The invasion of Grenada signalled the possibility that the United States had gotten over its “Vietnam syndrome.” Deployed against a small and weak southern neighbour, it also signalled that the United States might return to its policies of the earlier decades of the century, when it had invaded small countries in the Caribbean and Latin America and utilized “gunboat diplomacy.”19 But what was it all about? What was the rationale behind Operation Urgent Fury? The Reagan administration gave two reasons. The first was to protect the lives of American students and citizens in the country amidst internal disorder. Previously, in 1979, the MarxistLeninist New Jewel Movement (N J M ) led by Maurice Bishop had seized power and instituted an autocratic regime. Divisions within the movement led to factional infighting and, by 1983, to violent clashes between supporters of Maurice Bishop and his co-leader within the Grenadan government Bernard Coard. Amidst those clashes, members of the Grenadan military massacred over a hundred people on 19 October 1983. On the twenty-fifth of that month, Secretary of State George Schultz mentioned on television that the administration feared that American citizens might be hurt or taken hostage. The administration expressed concern for the students attending St George’s University Medical School in particular. Two days later, President Reagan himself stated that his administration was determined to “to protect innocent lives, including up to 1,000 Americans.”20 The second major reason was geopolitical. The Cold War was in full swing. On 27 October, the Reagan administration declared that Grenada was set for a takeover by Soviet-backed Cuban forces. Grenada was a “Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastian to export terrorism.”21 Amidst the invasion, Reagan asserted on national television that US forces had discovered a Cuban military force and a “complete base with weapons and communications equipment, which makes it clear a Cuban occupation of the island had been planned.”22 Moscow “had encouraged the violence” in Grenada, Reagan claimed,

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providing “direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists.” Reagan also warned of “advisors from the Soviet Union, Cuban troops on the island, and Soviet-Cuban weaponry.”23 We now know that these reasons only partially account for the invasion, if they account for much at all. US officials and administrators at the medical school admitted “at the time and in retrospect” that the American students were “never in danger.”24 General Hudson Austin, of Grenada’s Military Council, had “desperately” tried to negotiate with Washington before the invasion and offered security to the American students at the school. He had personally guaranteed the safety of all American citizens and promised them all safe evacuation if they wanted to leave. He, along with Cuban officials, saw these measures and others as a way to prevent an American invasion. The prime minister of Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, reacted to these attempts to secure safe passage for Americans by saying, “Obviously, if they [the Americans] had the authority to do that, I cannot see any reason for invading to protect your nationals.”25 Yet all of these messages from Grenada fell upon deaf ears in Washington. Other evidence has since mounted that American officials indeed had every opportunity and means to evacuate the Americans in Grenada but simply refused to. And even some of the parents of the students at the medical school were not worried for their children’s safety, sending a cable to President Reagan informing him “that their children were safe and asking him ‘not to move too quickly or to take any precipitous actions at this time.’”26 What of the Soviet-Cuban threat? President Reagan had painted a frightening picture of Soviet advisers, Cuban troops, and Soviet-Cuban armaments. But the picture was disproportionate. While the Reagan administration warned that the island was overrun with over a thousand “well-trained professional” Cuban soldiers posing as construction workers, it was later revealed that, at most, there were forty-three soldiers.27 Moreover, the “Soviet presence on Grenada was limited to the usual diplomatic, advisory, and intelligence mix associated with a Soviet embassy.” In fact, “the number of Americans on the island, even during the Bishop period, was always far larger than the Cuban, Soviet, and Eastern European contingent.”28 As for armaments, American troops found one warehouse on the island that contained most of the weapons. But in that warehouse, there were only five mortars, one anti-aircraft gun, and some antiquated rifles dating back to the 1870s.29 Furthermore, President Reagan had warned that the Soviet-Cuban

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alliance was constructing a military base for the purposes of future invasions of North America, but the so-called base was merely an international airport like any other international airport in the region. It was funded by Cuba, to be sure, but also by fifteen other countries, including Canada and several Western European countries.30 To better appreciate the context in which the invasion of Grenada occurred, much more than American students and alleged CubanSoviet machinations must be taken into account. One factor is economic decline. As noted, there had been a decline in profitability among key sectors of the American economy since the mid-1970s. To deal with this situation, the Reagan administration sought ways to increase profitability. One was military buildup. By the end of the decade, the US economy was putting about $300 billion into the military, and already by the mid-1980s, the profit rate on defence contracts outran profitability in durable goods manufacturing.31 The other fact was deregulation. This had begun already under Carter but Reagan took it to new heights. Finally: foreign investment. The Reagan administration hoped to find new outlets abroad for American capital, and one part of the strategy was aimed at the Caribbean, which of course includes Grenada. In 1982, the year before the invasion, the administration therefore announced the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which aimed simultaneously to provide aid and liberalization. The invasion of Grenada fits easily into this larger economic situation. Reagan’s strategy of military buildup needed justification. Dov S. Zakheim, an official in the Department of Defense, explained the invasion as important on these grounds exactly, since it helped signal “a major step toward recovery from the Vietnam syndrome,” which had included calls from some in Congress to decrease the military budget. The invasion was important, therefore, for persuading Congress otherwise.32 In addition, the threat of communism spreading from Grenada had not only geopolitical but economic implications as well. It posed a potential challenge to Reagan’s regional liberalization strategy. If communist regimes like the N J M spread, the field for America investment would contract. Fittingly, Grenada was opened up to foreign capital soon after the invasion.33 But even more was at stake than these economic considerations. Later in 1983, Reagan publicly stated that “it isn’t nutmeg that’s at stake in the Caribbean and Central America; it is the United States’ national security.”34 Presumably this meant that though the communist threat was real, in reality, there was more to it. After all, for the USSR,

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Grenada was but a “raindrop in the swimming pool.”35 The real issue, then, was not the USSR specifically but American strength and power in the world more generally. At stake was decline and America’s reputation. As noted, Vietnam had been lost seven years earlier. The Iranian hostage crisis still loomed large. And just two days before Reagan made the decision to send troops to Grenada he had received news of the Lebanon truck bombing that killed hundreds of US Marines and additional French servicemen. The US appeared to be weakening. Combined with the economic problems and America’s larger decline relative to other industrialized countries, the US as a world power and leader was put into question. The assault on Grenada followed from these combined economic and geopolitical issues. Not only did the invasion and ouster of the N J M facilitate the Reagan administration’s broader regional strategy for reinvigorating American capital (and also justifying the military budget), it was also a strategy for restoring America’s prestige amidst its putative decline. Here is where the war figures as a preventive war, albeit one subject to certain performative logics. Officials in the Reagan administration later stated that their “overriding reason for invading Grenada was to keep the United States from being perceived as a ‘paper tiger’ in the eyes of both friendly and hostile Latin American nations.”36 One senior official said, “if we said no [to the invasion], not only might there have been another Iran with the American students … but no one would have taken us seriously any more down there. What good are maneuvers and shows of force, if you never use it?” The United States had to show that “it would stand by its friends, even the tiny islands of the eastern Caribbean.”37 In short, the invasion of Grenada was performative, a projection of power to keep decline at bay. It followed that the US military needed to manage the media – that is, to make sure the performance was seen and heard to the right effect. Prior to the invasion, the role of media in military interventions had already become a hot issue for Washington. The Vietnam War, known as the “first T V war,” was the only major war before the Grenada intervention – and that war showed the media to be an enemy of the Pentagon rather than an ally. Journalists had been given almost unlimited access to campaigns. And while coverage prior to the Tet Offensive had been mostly positive, thereafter the press became more critical, upending Washington’s claims that a US–South Vietnamese victory was imminent.38 The image of an adversarial press working against military interests was

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solidified. “Real men don’t talk to the press”: this had become the new military mantra by the time of the Grenada invasion.39 To ensure the proper performative impact of Operation Urgent Fury, the military had to put the clamp on. Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf had hoped to ban the media entirely from the campaign. And for the first few days, the ban was effective. Reporters were kept off the island or near it, with some complaining in Barbados about their lack of access. Former president Jimmy Carter later noted that the military’s ban on journalists had been “much more repressive in nature than anything I remember in the history of our country.”40 What, then, was shown to the public? As Andersen notes, nightly news broadcasts showed journalists in helicopters flying around the island desperately trying to cover the combat.41 Any reporting that emerged was tightly controlled. “Members of the press were escorted to Charleston Air Force Base, where returning medical students kissed the ground, exhilarated to be out of harm’s way.” These were the images that took pride of place in the media.42 “The invasion of Grenada,” Pine declares, “was something of a testing ground for what we’ve seen come afterwards, in which the media was extremely controlled, so that the message coming out was the message that the United States wanted to hear. It was one of the first of these Media Wars that culminate in what we see today with journalists actually being embedded with the troops and only reporting the vision that is the official vision of the United States Army.”43 All the world was not a stage, but to military leaders and officials in the White House, it was a receptive audience. What was the effect of this control over the media and of the invasion generally? Did it succeed at what this book calls self-strengthening, a rhetorical weapon to build morale and legitimize the elite? Surely it fed Reagan’s claim that the real danger was to American citizens and that the United States got to Grenada “just in time.” House Democrat Tim Valentine of North Carolina exclaimed, “We have heard the terms ‘war monger’ and ‘gunboat diplomacy.’ Well, last night we saw the results of that action. Students were getting off the plane. They were kissing the ground. They were saying ‘God bless America.’ They were thanking the President for sending in the marines and the rangers.”44 The images also boosted Reagan’s ratings. To some, Grenada was the “most successful single foreign policy event of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.”45 Indeed, all polls showed that Reagan’s popularity increased after the invasion.46 Furthermore, and

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perhaps most importantly for our purposes, the “made-for-T V invasion,” as it came to be known, boosted support for the war – which only 22 per cent of the American public opposed – while symbolizing a renewed and vigorous American power.47 The war was a “show of overwhelming force.”48 Vice-President George Bush bragged at the Republican National Convention in 1984: “Because President Reagan stood firm in defense of freedom [in Grenada], America has regained respect throughout the world.”49 As Zakheim of the Department of Defense explained in 1986, The cumulative impact of Grenada on America’s self-image should not be underestimated. It represented a clearcut military success – something that the American public had not witnessed since before Vietnam. It marked the expression of vigor in foreign policy, and signified an understanding of the role of force as a vehicle for the support of U.S. foreign policy objectives … Since 1980, President Reagan has spoken of a determination to restore the United States to its role as a world leader and stand up to those who threaten American interests. Perhaps more than any other action since he has come to office, the invasion of Grenada has lent substance to such goals. … The “message” of Grenada is that the United States does not intend to remain a passive observer on the international scene … The final message of Grenada is that after the wrenching decade of the Vietnam era, the American people are again prepared to support a vigorous foreign policy that protects and underscores American interests throughout the world.50 If the invasion of Grenada was meant to regain a loss of status in the public eye, it was working. The English-language press announced that, with the Grenada invasion, “the United States has shown itself willing to use force,” with the “quick military victory” adding to the image.51 The Washington Post reported that “the United States has finally recaptured a seemingly lost capacity for great-power military response.”52 The Wall Street Journal announced, “The question is not whether America has the power to protect its friends, but whether it has the will. This demonstration shows that it does indeed … Unless we fritter away the advantages in an orgy of self-doubt and indecision, the Grenadan action is bound to result in an overnight improvement in the US geopolitical position.”53 Around the United States, opinion

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pages were positive about the function of the invasion. “President Reagan,” declared the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, “has shown that the tiny nation of Grenada cannot push the U.S. around.”54 The Columbus Citizen-Journal proclaimed that Reagan’s decision to invade Grenada proved that the United States would not be “embarrassed and weakened” anymore.55 The views of Norman Podhoretz, neo-conservative editor of Commentary, encapsulate these views. Prior to the invasion, Podhoretz had been critical of Reagan, and of economic policies in particular, fretting that “it is still too early to say whether the Reagan administration will have succeeded or failed in the great objective of reversing the decline of American economic power.”56 He was also critical of Reagan’s foreign policy, accusing the administration of being too soft on communism and especially of failing to “reverse the decline of American power in the world.” 57 Reagan suffered from a belief in the “Nixon-Kissinger form” of détente. He was not strong enough.58 Podhoretz later criticized Reagan’s tentative deployment of Marines in Lebanon in 1982, around the same time as the assault on Grenada, on the same grounds. It represented an “incoherent” strategy and did not in the least represent “the resurgence of American power that some of us had been hoping for.” It simply showed the same old “inhibitions against the use of military force that prevented the Carter administration from doing anything about the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by Iranian ‘students’ in 1979.”59 But Podhoretz saw the invasion of Grenada as a salvation of sorts: “Looking at Lebanon, then, one would have to conclude that we are still very far from anything resembling a resurgence of American power. But Grenada tells a different story, and the contrast is both instructive and inspiring.” By “openly using military power,” and moving “decisively and effectively” to overcome any charges of “impotence,” the United States found in Grenada a “way back to recovery and health.”60 In short, the theatre of Grenada was highly successful, winning over critics and supporters alike and summoning, in Podhoretz’s phrase, a possible “resurgence of American power in the world.” Aimed at prevention vis-à-vis foreign powers, performative war also served domestic self-strengthening. But again, there was nothing unintentional about this. Faced with economic decline and contingent threats to America’s standing, the Reagan administration was determined to use Grenada as a showcase for reviving the American eagle. Richard Haas, who would later serve under Vice-President George Bush,

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admitted that the invasion was intended not just to install a noncommunist regime but also “to show that the United States could still act effectively in the world in the aftermath of the Beirut debacle.”61 The invasion of Grenada was a military performance with audiences besides the Grenadan enemy in mind. performing in the balkans

Yet there was nothing entirely unusual about Grenada: it happened at America’s “back door,” occurred under a hawkish political party, unfolded after highly damaging events like the Iranian hostage crisis, and occurred at the height of the Cold War. What about other interventions? It is instructive to look at America’s role in the NATO interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s. The first was Operation Deliberate Force in 1995: a bombing attack upon Serb-held Bosnia and Herzegovina. The second was Operation Allied Force in 1999, a much larger air campaign initially aimed at the infrastructure of the Yugoslavian military (and then related economic targets like key power plants, roads, etc.) in response to Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. While both of the interventions were officially N A T O operations, they were both American-led and American-dominated. Operation Deliberate Force was carried out fully by US aircraft. The 1999 campaign is even more notable. Unlike the 1995 campaign, Operation Allied Force was not authorized by the United Nations and marked the very first time when a N A T O assault occurred without approval from the U N Security Council. US investments were high: the central military base for the operation, Camp Bondsteel, was the largest American base since the Vietnam War.62 It was so much a US operation that the French Ministry of Defence declared that “military operations were conducted by the U.S. outside the strict framework of N AT O .”63 A look at American interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s is a good counterpoint to the Grenada case for various reasons. For one, they occurred under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat and hence, at least in theory, subject to different partisan pressures and programs than President Reagan and the Grenada invasion. Additionally, the Balkan campaigns happened after the end of the Cold War and amidst a period of relative domestic economic growth. The United States was still a hegemon in decline: relative to other countries, its economic share of the global pie was dwindling still. But unlike President

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Reagan’s first term, there had been domestic economic expansion. Finally, it happened in Europe. “For the first time,” observes Johnstone, “a European country as subjected to the type of U.S. intervention usually reserved for Central America.”64 In this very different context than Grenada, what could these campaigns have been all about? Were they also meant to function symbolically? The official reasons for the interventions are well-known. Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 was meant to discipline the Bosnian Serb Army for encroaching upon “safe areas” in the Bosnian war. Operation Allied Force in 1999, though not approved by the UN Security Council, had something of a humanitarian identity. “Our military objective is to degrade and damage the military and security structure that President Milosevic (Yugoslav President) has used to depopulate and destroy the Albanian majority in Kosovo,” Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen stated to the Senate Armed Services Committee on 15 April 1999.65 The campaign has thus been seen as “the first major bombing campaign intended to bring a halt to crimes against humanity being committed by a state within its own borders.”66 And there is evidence that humanitarian concerns motivated the interventions. Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 followed from various agreements that emerged in direct response to the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. And Operation Allied Force in 1999 came partly from a perceived failure to have stopped the ethnic violence that encompassed the region. “N A T O states were united by a sense of shame that, in the first four years of atrocious wars in the former Yugoslavia (1991–95), they had failed … to devise coherent politics and to engage in decisive actions.”67 This was known as the “Bosnia syndrome.” President Clinton later recalled: “the killings were all too reminiscent of the early days of Bosnia, which, like Kosovo, bridged the divide between European Muslims and Serb Orthodox Christians … I was determined not to allow Kosovo to become another Bosnia. So was [US secretary of state] Madeleine Albright.”68 But the ostensible humanitarian motives must not be overestimated. Critics point out that, rather than halting ethnic cleansing, Operation Allied Force exacerbated it, prompting Milosevic to unleash a new round of barbarism. This had been foreseen. General Wesley Clark, N A TO commander, told the press that it had been “entirely predictable.” He said that “military authorities fully anticipated the vicious approach that Milosevic would adopt, as well as the terrible efficiency with which he would carry it out.” He had informed Secretary of State

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Madeleine Albright of this possibility weeks before, in the planning stage of the campaign. “Almost certainly [the Serbs] will attack the civilian population” and NA T O wouldn’t be able to stop it.69 Wesley Clark later explained: “We were operating … under the instructions from the political leadership. It was not designed as a means of blocking Serb ethnic cleansing. It was not designed as a way of waging war against the Serb and mob forces in Kosovo in any way. There was never any intent to do that. That was not the idea.”70 But if the campaign was not meant to stop ethnic cleansing in the short term, maybe the real point was to force Milosevic into negotiations and thereby prevent further ethnic violence in the long term. This is highly likely. But there is evidence to suggest that the US could have more easily forced Milosevic into a negotiated settlement, but chose not to. According to some scholars, for instance, the so-called Rambouillet peace conference that preceded the bombing was not meant to actually force Milosevic into peace: For some in the Clinton administration, as indeed in key allied capitals like London, the purpose of Rambouillet was not so much to get a deal that few thought attainable. Rather it was to create a consensus in Washington and among the N AT O allies that force would have to be used. While the talks failed to get agreement on an interim accord, they did succeed in convincing everyone that diplomacy without the use of force would not ­succeed in ending the conflict in Kosovo. From this perspective, Rambouillet could be viewed as successful.71 The point at Rambouillet was to obtain a warrant to unleash military power, not withhold it. As Andrew Bacevich, a former colonel in the US army, explains: “Operation Allied Force was neither planned nor conducted to alleviate the plight of the Kosovars.” Secretary of State Albright never intended for Milosevic to accept a negotiated settlement, for this would preclude N A T O action. Instead, what the US wanted first and foremost was “military action” – that is, “a demonstration of what a new, more muscular alliance under U.S. direction could accomplish.”72 If the humanitarian motive was one factor at best, economic concerns also qualify. It is here that America’s economic decline is relevant. While the profit rate for American capital finally increased relative to previous years, this did not happen until the early to mid-1990s.

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And at the time, the future was uncertain.73 Moreover, the domestic economic growth of the 1990s did not halt relative decline: the US continued to hold a decreasing share of world GDP while rivals’ share continued to grow, albeit in fits and starts. In this economic context, the successive crises in the Balkans posed a serious threat. Europe had been a vital site for American exports. As Secretary of State Warren Christopher stressed in 1995, “all told, Europe accounts for almost half of the foreign revenues of American firms. Our investment in Europe alone roughly equals that in the rest of the world put together.”74 Stability in Europe was key, and the maintenance of an American-led NA T O apparatus and an end to the Bosnia crisis were important for maintaining this stability. William Odum, the former director of the NSA, had warned in 1992 that “failure to act effectively in Yugoslavia will not only effect U.S. security interests but also U.S. economic interests. Our economic interdependency with Western Europe creates large numbers of American jobs.”75 As early as 1993, Senator Richard Lugar, Republican from Indiana, supported intervention in Bosnia because “there will be devastating economic effects in Europe of a spread of war and, thus, the loss of jobs in this country as we try to base a recovery upon our export potential.”76 And just before the later bombing campaign in Kosovo in 1999, President Clinton likewise told an audience of local government employees of the AFL-CIO: “if we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world, Europe has got to be a key … That’s what this Kosovo thing is all about.”77 Access to and stability in Europe was necessary for maintaining the profitability of American capital amidst the threat of economic decline.78 But there was another issue that was tied to the economic threat: the credibility of NA T O and hence of American hegemony in Europe. Here, the end of the Cold War, rather than reducing the need for military intervention abroad, contributed to it. The Cold War had provided the US with its primary justification for its military presence in Europe and, relatedly, Europe’s dependence upon the US. The US and Western Europe had a “social compact” as part of the Cold War, the essence of which was “an exchange of European deference for American delivery of peace and security.” Hence, “continental Europe generally followed wherever America led. And it did so because America’s nuclear shield and America’s promotion of global economic expansion enabled it to deliver on its promissory notes of peace and prosperity to a continent that had known neither for four decades.”79

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At stake after the end of the Cold War era was the potential loss of American political hegemony in the region – and that hegemony had been represented primarily through N A T O . Why should Europe depend upon the US if the communist threat was no longer palpable? Why should Europe continue with the N AT O alliance? Why should Europe not form its own security apparatus autonomous from American control? The future was wide open in the early 1990s. One possible scenario pinpointed in policy-making circles was the end of NATO entirely – or a new incarnation of NATO but European-centred, emanating from the growing European Union.80 This was an overriding fear held by Washington.81 America’s decline meant the rise of economic and hence geopolitical competitors, and already by the 1990s, Eurasia was pinpointed as a hot spot out of which an unprecedented threat might emerge. The growing economic power of the European Union was itself a possible threat: by the end of the 1990s, its share of world GDP already surpassed or was equal to that of America’s. And what if Europe were to fall under the influence of a rival Soviet-Sino alliance? The expulsion or at least the attenuation of US power from the Eurasian region and its replacement by another power was a serious concern. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski powerfully expressed these concerns. Alluding to the “heartland” theory of Halford MacKinder, which stated that control over Central Asia meant control over world politics, Brzezinski emphasized that “geopolitics has moved from the regional to the global dimension, with preponderance over the entire Eurasian continent serving as the central basis for global primacy.” And while the Cold War put an end to the Soviet Union, it did not put an end to Russia. Brzezinski thus warned of “residual Russian imperial temptations” in Europe and the need for the US to “send a clear message about its global priorities,” which meant making clear that “if a choice must be made between a larger Europe-Atlantic system and a better relationship with Russia, the former must rank higher.” The “immediate task” in “a volatile Eurasia,” therefore, was “to ensure that no state or combination of states gains the ability to expel the United States or even diminish its decisive role.”82 These concerns were part of a larger question of America’s role in the post–Cold War world and the need to ensure that it could maintain its post–Cold War position as the only geopolitical superpower. A 1992 Pentagon document assessing the post–Cold War global landscape had stressed that “our strategy [after the fall of the Soviet Union]

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must refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” And this concern was directly tethered to worries in Washington about economic competition and American decline. Military competitors and economic competitors could conjoin to undo America’s standing in the world. The Department of Defense document thereby worried about all advanced countries, not just China or Russia. The US, it declared, “must sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.” The document referenced Europe, and declared that “we must maintain the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”83 All of this meant, in short, that the US had to maintain its influence in Eurasia and hence N A T O while retaining a central role in both. Prevention was necessary, and retrenchment was not an option. Because “Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead in Eurasia,” Brzezinski explained, N A T O was vital. It “entrenches American political influence and military power on the Eurasian mainland.” He continued: With the allied European nations still highly dependent on U.S. protection, any expansion of Europe’s political scope is automatically an expansion of U.S. influence … A wider Europe and an enlarged NA T O will serve the short-term and longer-term interests of U.S. policy … At stake in this effort is nothing less than America’s long-range relationship with Europe. A new Europe is still taking shape, and if that Europe is to remain part of the “Euro-Atlantic” space, the expansion of N AT O is essential. The alternative, Brzezinksi warned, was not good. “Failure to widen N A TO, now that the commitment has been made, would shatter the concept of an expanding Europe and demoralize the Central Europeans. Worse, it could reignite dormant Russian political aspirations in Central Europe.”84 These were the same views expressed by the Pentagon in the early 1990s. Its 1992 plan specified that it was vital that there be a “substantial American presence in Europe, and continued cohesion within the Western Alliance [N A T O ]. It is of fundamental importance to preserve N A T O as the primary instrument of Western defense and security … We must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only

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security arrangements which would undermine NATO.” Philip Zelikow and Condoleeza Rice, serving in the administration of President Bush Sr, similarly insisted upon the importance of NATO, supporting Bush’s statement that even after the Cold War the US had to remain a “European power” and that NA T O was vital for it.85 The trick was to keep N A T O intact whilst also making sure the US maintained its traditional control.86 The problem is that there were questions about the utility of N A T O even among statesmen in Washington. Senator Richard Lugar in 1992 declared that N A T O needed to expand its role in Europe beyond containing Soviet power and toward fostering democracy and containing ethnic conflict. Unless it did this, it had no role. It needed to go “Out of Area or Out of Business,” as he put it.87 There had also been questions about N A T O from European capitals, making real the frightful possibility that Europe would overturn American influence. Some Western European countries were already becoming more assertive as the Soviet Union fell. In 1991, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft complained that Western European states were holding private meetings on security issues and posing a united front to the US. Around the same time France proposed that Europe create a rapid reaction force but that it be under the umbrella of the European Community, not NATO. And both France and Germany announced the formation of Eurocorps in 1992. This was to be a military force for the European Community consisting of some forty thousand troops.88 Washington stood aghast at the possibility that this would become an alternative to N A T O . An official in George Bush Sr’s administration fretted that the Eurocorps “undercut the whole American raison d’être in Europe.”89 Accordingly, the Bush administration wrote strongly worded letters to European capitals about it. And while the subsequent Clinton administration was more conciliatory, it nonetheless insisted that such a European security arrangement had to occur alongside a US-dominated N A T O .90 Enter the Balkans as a crucial arena to work these matters out. The trouble in the region was a test for the future of N AT O and, in turn, America’s role in Eurasia. Sperling explains that, as events unfolded in Bosnia without NA T O intervention, the “question of N AT O ’s usefulness” came to the fore. British writers referred to N A T O as a “twitching corpse.”91 US defense secretary William Perry in early 1995 said that NA T O “seemed to be irrelevant” and “in the process of unraveling.”92

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President Clinton’s decision to lead NATO into Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 followed from these concerns. As Bacevich explains, the campaign was not meant to “put a stop to ethnic cleansing or in response to claims of conscience, but to preempt threats to the cohesion of NATO and the credibility of American power, each called into question by events in Bosnia. In short, it was not Bosnia itself that counted, but Europe and U.S. leadership in Europe.”93 Fittingly, Air Force Chief of Staff General Michael J. Dugan wrote in the New York Times that a “win in the Balkans would establish U.S. leadership in the post-Cold War world in a way that Operation Desert Storm never could.”94 The larger campaign in 1999 in Yugoslavia, Operation Allied Force, operated according to a similar logic, but with an enhanced and renewed purpose. Kosovo was the “next test” for the alliance.95 On the one hand, in 1997, after the first 1995 campaign but before the 1999 Kosovo operation, a document circulating within the C I A declared that the first intervention had had a positive symbolic impact. “European publics will continue to support the U.S. military presence in Europe, partly as a hedge against Russia and renationalization of defenses, and as a result of NA T O’s entry into the Bosnia imbroglio – a step that reaffirmed the effectiveness of the Alliance in managing post-Cold war crises. Europeans will not find anything sacrosanct about the number of U.S. forces stationed in their countries – their views of American leadership will be determined less by the size of the American presence than by the use of these forces for combined operations.”96 On the other hand, in some circles, the 1995 campaign had come a little too late, and this time around the American state was determined to prove N A T O ’s prowess once and for all – and America’s centrality to it. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 1998 heard about Yugoslav terrors in Kosovo and concluded that N A TO needed to “avoid a repeat of the ‘carnage’ in Bosnia.” “If we allowed something like this to happen again,” she had said, the US and N A TO would have been “judged very harshly.”97 There can be little doubt that America’s concern over NATO’s credibility, and hence over American power in the region, was the motivation for the assault – if not the sole motivation, at least an overriding one. Observers like John Fox, director of the Open Society Institute and a specialist on the Balkans, warned: “The fact is that everyone in the Balkans, even the bad guys, look to America as the broker, as the one to exert pressure, to deliver what’s promised.”98 Brzezinski’s

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plea for the US to use NATO to assert its power in the Eurasian region was coming to fruition. About America’s role in Kosovo, Brzezinski said: “It’s the American-European security connection that’s the real issue here. NA T O is the expression of this connection, and if it is discredited or undone, the entire American-European security connection runs the risk of being severed.”99 As Operation Allied Force drew to a close, the US Department of Defense admitted forthrightly that one of the US’s three “primary interests” in the operation had been “ensuring NA T O’s credibility.”100 President Clinton agreed. In his 24 March 1999 statement on Kosovo, he first conveyed to the public that “Kosovo is a province of Serbia, in the middle of southeastern Europe, about 160 miles east of Italy. That’s less than the distance between Washington and New York, and only about 70 miles north of Greece.” After discussing the dangers of continued turmoil in the region, and reminding the public of the “lessons in Bosnia just a few years ago,” he then stated: “Imagine what would happen if we and our allies instead decided just to look the other way, as these people were massacred on N AT O ’s doorstep. That would discredit NA T O, the cornerstone on which our security has rested for 50 years now.”101 General Wesley Clark held the same view. He worried that inaction would have brought “worldwide repercussions on United States credibility and the significance of American commitments.” Clark had noted that if Milosevic was attacked, the Serbs would initiate its own attack on civilians, but that the US still had to proceed. “We put N AT O ’s credibility on the line. We have to follow through.”102 The timing of the campaign is also worth noting. Abdelaaty points out that the Kosovo crisis came at a “particularly inopportune” moment.103 The US had been in the midst of trying to redefine and reassert the value of NA T O, and NA T O ’s fiftieth anniversary loomed large. And indeed, in April 1999, to celebrate that anniversary, NATO heads of state and government met in Washington and drafted a “New Strategic Concept”: essentially a new post–Cold War mission statement. Underscoring that a “new Europe of greater integration is emerging, and a Euro-Atlantic security structure is evolving in which NATO plays a central part,” it stated that NATO “has committed itself to essential new activities in the interest of a wider stability” and that its commitment was first seen in the Balkans four years before. It then highlighted “complex new risks to Euro-Atlantic peace and stability, including oppression, ethnic conflict, economic distress, the collapse

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of political order, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” and it vowed to take the lead in managing these threats.104 In light of this, it is no surprise that Secretary of State Albright worried that the anniversary might coincide with inaction in the Balkans and continued humanitarian crises. “We would look like fools proclaiming that alliance’s readiness for the twenty-first century when we were unable to cope with a conflict that began in the fourteenth.”105 In short, “the intent of Operation Allied Force,” explains Colonel Bacevich, “was to provide an object lesson to any European state fancying that it was exempt from the rules of the post-Cold War era. It was not Kosovo that counted, but affirming the dominant position of the United States in a Europe that was unified, integrated, and open.”106 To be sure, it was not just that N AT O needed to reassert its power: the US also needed to reassert its central place within N AT O and hence reassert its own power. It was a message to Europe that it still needed America, and that America had to be the dominant player in the Western Alliance. This probably explains why US control and command over Operation Allied Force was so rigid and tight, prompting critical reactions from France.107 It also explains why the US acted without approval from the UN Security Council: if a resolution passed in the Security Council approving the action, a precedent would be set that the US, even working within N AT O , was not in full control. After all, Russia and China were permanently on the council. Albright therefore urged against attempts to get approval.108 Cottey fittingly explains that, among its many outcomes, Operation Allied Force ended up reaffirming “the centrality of the U.S. and NATO to European security.” Because “U.S. political leadership and military power were central to N A T O ’s decision to intervene and to the conduct of the campaign,” observers readily dubbed Operation Allied Force “the last American war in Europe.”109 Critics of American control were unabashed: “I wonder, in the future,” wrote British journalist Robert Fisk, “whether we can allow a European army to be driven by the United States. It was America, courtesy of Madeleine Albright, that pushed for this war. It was an American air force that took the leading role in bombing a European nation.”110 t h e l o g i c o f p e r f o r m at i v e w a r

So is a logic evident here? Can a pattern be detected? On the one hand, the purpose of military intervention seems clear: to subdue an enemy

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by force, to win battles, and hence win the war. The primary point is to win the war, or, if not to “win” entirely, at least to reach a more specified military goal – say, hitting certain targets and incapacitating the enemy, or dissuading an opponent from crossing a line. For these objectives there is always a symbolic element. To “shock and awe” an enemy is to use military power to frighten one’s opponent, thereby gaining an upper hand. It is a way achieving “rapid dominance,” the basis of which “rests in the ability to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary through imposing sufficient shock and awe to achieve the necessary political, strategic, and operational goals of the conflict or crisis that led to the use of force.”111 But if sheer force can be used as a sign to meet strategic military objectives – a semiotic weapon of war – so, too, can it be used by states to meet other objectives. In performative war, the use of force is not only directed at winning a battle by subduing the enemy through power or shock; it is aimed at other audiences entirely. The audience is not the adversary on the ground. It is a wider audience, an audience that includes domestic publics who might be fretting about their state’s capacity or ability to exert itself in the world, potentially recalcitrant allies or other states who might in the future make their own bid for dominance, or even corporations and capitalists wondering about who the next hegemon might be. In this sense it is like diversionary war: wagging the dog to distract attention away from potentially damaging issues on the domestic front.112 In diversionary war, the enemy is not the primary audience; domestic electorates are. But here performative war is even different from diversionary war. First, the audience is not just domestic electorates but also the international community more broadly. Second, the primary goal is not distraction. The goal is the projection of power. If diversion is the primary goal in diversionary wars, then losing the war or losing battles serve just as well. The function of performative wars is to persuade, not divert – that is, to persuade the world that your nation is not declining. Performative war is thus aimed at the wider global field: as a way of accruing a certain type of symbolic capital in the face of declining economic capital.113 If, as some scholars contend, weak states often use various means of “seeking status,”114 this suggests that a strong state that is weakening might use war to regain and reassert status. Recognizing the possibility for performative war might offer further insight into why falling empires do not behave nicely – why, in other

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words, they become more aggressive exactly as they become less powerful in the world. When the British Empire began losing its economic power in the world, and hence faced new competitors in both the economic and geopolitical field, it stepped up its imperialistic activity. The US did the same thing, beginning with Grenada. As seen in the earlier part of this chapter, from the 1980s onward, it engaged in ever more military interventions of various types and sizes – much more so than it did during its period of economic hegemony, from 1946 to 1973. But why? One explanation for why falling hegemons increase the frequency of their interventions as they decline is that they need military interventions to secure immediate economic and geopolitical objectives, which, in turn, help prevent decline. Preventing decline is indeed one of the objectives seen in the cases discussed above. Performative war is thus a kind of preventive war. It is a tool to help thwart decline. But it is also a particular kind of preventive war. It does not thwart decline by subduing rivals directly; it thwarts decline by pretending there is no decline in the first place. This is perhaps why performative wars are repetitive – why, for instance, since the 1980s the US has repeatedly engaged in small wars. After all, repetition is the intrinsic imperative of performance. Performativity does not signify a stable identity. It enacts it. Performativity is, as Butler put it long ago, a “stylized repetition of acts.”115 Likewise, military performativity does not signify an all-powerful hegemon; it is, rather, an attempt by the hegemon to convince others of its hegemonic identity. It follows that as hegemons decline, they need to perform their identity over and over again. They need to repeat, perhaps infinitely, their military prowess in a desperate effort to convince others that they are not declining at all. But that is only if political leaders choose performative war as their main coping strategy. On the one hand, as Lachmann suggests in chapter 3 of this volume, one of the “lessons” of Vietnam was that political leaders, the elite, and the public more broadly prefer smaller wars that do not require massive numbers of ground troops. Hence, wars like Grenada or operations like Kosovo are easier to pull off, and these are ripe for performances of power. On the other hand, Lachmann also suggests that, for instance, new technologies (such as drones) might enable the the US to realize some of its military goals in more subtle and hidden ways that fall short of outright “shock and awe” performances. Furthermore, as the other chapters in this volume show, and as Mérand’s introduction makes clear, preventive war is not the only coping strategy for decline. If Schmitt, in chapter 4, is

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correct, France declined without adopting war as a strategy for managing its decline. In fact, the initial strategy of prevention proved counterproductive. The strategies were not ultimately successful, but at least they did not involve war. In chapter 8, Ikenberry offers a different alternative altogether, one that points to a more optimistic route for the US: hegemony-sharing and the promotion of a liberal international order. For this to happen, performative war – or wars of any kind – would probably be anathema, unless, of course, political leaders choose to use war as a way of projecting American liberal power (i.e., “humanitarian” wars). In that unfortunate case, the sort of liberal solution offered by Ikenberry would go hand in hand with performative war.

notes

  1 Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).   2 United States Commission on National Security, New World Coming: the United States Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: United States Commission on National Security, 1999), 127.  3 Go, Patterns of Empire, 174–81.   4 For a recent study showing an earlier starting point than 1973 but ­affirming decline, see Christopher Chase-Dunn, Rebecca Giem, Andrew Jorgenson, Thomas Reifer, John Rogers, and Shoon Lio, “The Trajectory of the United States in the World-System: A Quantitative Reflection,” Institute for Research on World-Systems, Working Paper #8, http://irows. ucr.edu/papers/irows8/irows8.htm (accessed 21 March 2020).   5 The average annual increase in labour productivity in the US from 1948 to 1973 was 2.8 per cent, but from 1981 to 1986 it was only 1.2 per cent. The rate of profit in America’s traditional sectors like manufacturing fell similarly. See Max W. Corden, “American Decline and the End of Hegemony,” SAIS Review 10, no. 2 (1990): 16n3.   6 Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. in the World Economy (New York: Verso, 2002); Marcel Knudsen, “Capital Accumulation and the Rise of Finance,” Political Power and Social Theory 26 (2014): 81–105.   7 Albert Bergesen and Chintamani Sahoo, “Evidence of the Decline of American Hegemony in World Production,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 8, no. 4 (1985): 595–611.

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  8 Richard Du Boff, “U.S. Hegemony: Continuing Decline, Enduring Danger,” Monthly Review 55, no. 7 (2003): 1–15.   9 Terry Boswell, “American World Empire or Declining Hegemony,” Journal of World-Systems Research 10, no. 2 (2004): 516–24. 10 Fred C. Bergsten and Institute for International Economics, The United States and the World Economy (Washington, DC : Institute for International Economics, 2005), 20. 11 Ibid., xviii. 12 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2010 (Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1997). 13 Alfred McCoy, “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” CBS News, 5 December 2010, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-declineand-fall-of-the-american-empire. 14 Tarak Barkawi, “Globalization, Culture, and War: On the Popular Mediation of ‘Small Wars,’” Cultural Critique 58 (2004): 115–16. 15 Giovanni Arrighi, “The African Crisis: World Systemic and Regional Aspects,” New Left Review 15 (2002): 21. 16 Kai P. Schoenhals and Richard A. Melanson, Revolution and Intervention in Grenada (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), 153. 17 “An Island of Mountains,” The Times (London), 26 October 1983. 18 Terry Nardin and Kathleen D. Pritchard, Ethics and Intervention: the United States in Grenada (Washington, DC : Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, 1990), 1. 19 Richard Haass, Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post–Cold War Period (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 31. The invasion of Grenada was a potential portent, and in 1988, that potential was realized. In that year, President George H.W. Bush authorized an invasion of Panama, deploying some 24,000 US troops against a modest 6,000-man force constituting the Panamanian Defense Forces. This was an even larger intervention than Grenada. While Grenada marked the first major use of force since Vietnam, Panama was the largest military engagement of US forces up to that point since Vietnam. 20 Robert A. Pastor, “The Invasion of Grenada: A Pre- and Post-Mortem,” in The Caribbean After Grenada: Revolution, Conflict, and Democracy, ed. Scott Macdonald, Harold Sandstrom, and Paul Goodwin (New York: Praeger, 1988), 89. 21 Hendrik Smith, “Report to Nation,” New York Times, 28 October 1983, A1. 22 Bernard Gwertzman, “Reagan Speech,” New York Times, 28 October 1983, A 10 23 Ibid; see also Wendell Bell, “The American Invasion of Grenada: A Note on False Prophecy,” Foresight 10, no. 3 (2008): 33.

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24 Quoted in ibid., 30. 25 Ibid., 31. 26 Quoted in ibid., 32. It is the case that Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 loomed large, making it plausible that the Reagan administration did not want to take any chances. And Reagan had indeed referred to the crisis when expressing fear at the fate of the American citizens in Grenada. Still, as Bell, among others, notes, the threat of US citizens ever being taken hostage by Grenadans, who never expressed anti-American sentiments at the time, was minimal at best. See Bell, “The American Invasion of Grenada,” 32. 27 Pastor, “The Invasion of Grenada,” 105. 28 Bell, “The American Invasion of Grenada,” 33. 29 Philip Taubman, “The Reason for Invading,” New York Times, 1 November 1983, A17; see also Also Bob Woodward, Veil: the Secret Wars of the CIA , 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 30 Bell, “The American Invasion of Grenada,” 35–6. 31 Michael A. Bernstein, “Understanding American Economic Decline: The Contours of the Late-Twentieth-Century Experience,” in Understanding American Economic Decline, ed. Michael A. Bernstein and David E. Adler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23. 32 Doy S. Zakheim, “The Grenada Operation and Superpower Relations: A Perspective from the Pentagon,” in Grenada and Soviet/Cuban Policy, ed. Jiri Valenta and Herbert J. Ellison (Boulder, C O: Westview Press, 1986), 179. 33 Tim Shorrock, “The Year in Review: Regan Administration: Beating Plowshares into Swords,” The Multinational Monitor 5, no. 1 (1984), http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1984/01/review-reagan.html. 34 Quoted in Gary Williams, “Brief Encounter: Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop’s Visit to Washington,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34 (2002): 661. 35 Charles W. Maynes, “Comments,” in Valenta and Herbert J. Ellison, Grenada and Soviet/Cuban Policy, 187. 36 Bernard Gwertzman, “Steps to the Invasion: No More ‘Paper Tiger,’” New York Times, 30 October 1983. 37 Ibid. 38 Peter Young and Peter Jesser, The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), 91–2. 39 General John Shalikashvili, quoted in Frank A. Aukofer and William P. Lawrence, America’s Team: The Odd Couple – A Report on the Relationship between the Military and the Media (Washington, DC : Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, 1995), ch. 3.

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40 Quoted in Robert Andersen, A Century of Media, a Century of War (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 124. 41 Ibid., 199. 42 Ibid., 124. 43 Pine quoted in “US Invasion of Grenada Laid Blueprint for War,” Russia Today, 25 October 2010, http://rt.com/usa/usa-invasion-grenada-war/. 44 Quoted in Schoenhals and Melanson, Revolution and Intervention, 155. 45 Quoted in Nardin and Prichard, Ethics and Intervention, 1. 46 Zakheim, “The Grenada Operation,” 180. 47 Schoenhals and Mason, Revolution and Intervention, 153. 48 Russia Today, “US Invasion of Grenada.” 49 “Transcript of Acceptance Speech Given by the Vice President,” New York Times, 24 August 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/24/us/transcriptof-acceptance-speech-given-by-the-vice-president.html?pagewanted=all. 50 Zakheim, “The Grenada Operation,” 180, 184. 51 Editorial, “Thin Ice in the Caribbean,” The Times (London) 26 October 1983, 13. 52 Quoted in Trevor Fishlock, “Press Voices US Sceptisim,” The Times (London), 27 October 1983. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Quoted in Schoenhals and Melanson, Revolution and Intervention, 160. 56 Norman Podhoretz, “The Neo-Conservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy,” New York Times Magazine, 2 May 1982. 57 Ibid. 58 ibid. 59 Norman Podhoretz, “Proper Uses of Power,” New York Times, 30 October 1983. 60 Ibid. 61 Haass, Intervention, 25. 62 “Camp Bondsteel,” Army Technology, http://www.army-technology.com/ projects/campbondsteel/ (accessed 21 march 2020). 63 Elize Belzil, “Can I R Theory Explain US-NA TO Engagement in Kosovo?” E-International Relations Students, 29 March 2013, http://www.e-ir. info/2013/03/29/can-ir-theory-explain-us-nato-engagement-in-kosovo/. 64 Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 1. 65 Quoted in Kent Harris, “Kosovo Revisited: A Look Back at Operation Allied Forces 10 Years After the Massive NA TO Air Campaign Began,” Stars and Stripes, 23 March 2009, https://www.stripes.com/news/kosovorevisited-1.89446.

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66 Adam Roberts, “N ATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,” Survival 41, no. 3 (1999): 102. 67 Ibid., 104. 68 Quoted in Lamis Abdelaaty, “Operation Allied Force as Humanitarian Intervention? Assessing the Role of Norm Entrenchment in the Decision to Intervene,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February–March 2007. 69 Phyllis Bennis, Before and After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis (New York: Olive Branch, 2003), viii. 70 “Panorama Transcript,” BBC-1, 19 April 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/ english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_ 19_04_99.txt (accessed 21 March 2020). 71 Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO ’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Instituion Press, 2000), 85. 72 Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104–5. 73 Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble. 74 Warren Christopher, “Charting a Transatlantic Agenda for the 21st Century: Address at Casa de America,” US Department of State Dispatch 6, no. 23 (1995): 468. 75 Quoted in Christopher Layne, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy,” International Security 22, no. 1 (1997): 100. 76 Ibid. 77 Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 105. 78 In the end, economic benefit accrued. US investment in Europe “increased sevenfold between 1994 and 1998” and “trade between the United States and the European Union also rose handsomely, to $450 billion per year”; see Bacevich, American Empire, 105. 79 Thomas J. McCormick, “American Hegemony and European Autonomy, 1989–2003: One Framework for Understanding the War in Iraq,” in The New American Empire, ed. by Lloyd C. Gardner and Marliyn B. Young (New York: New Press, 2004), 77. 80 Andrew Cottey, “The Kosovo War in Perspective,” International Affairs 85, no. 3 (2009): 598. 81 Peter Gowan, Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999); Bacevich, American Empire; Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2006). 82 Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 5 (1997): 50–65.

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  83 Patrick E. Tyler, “US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, 8 March 1992; emphasis added.   84 Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 10, 198.   85 Quoted in Layne, The Peace of Illusions, 109.  86 Bacevich, American Empire, 103–7.   87 Quoted in Stephen Rosenfeld, “N ATO’s Last Chance,” Washington Post, 2 July 1993.   88 Ted Galen Carpenter, “That Was Then, This Is Now: Toward a New NSC 68,” SAIS Review 19, no. 1 (1999): 131–2.   89 Ibid., 132.   90 Ibid., 134.   91 Quoted in James Sperling and Mark Webber, “NA TO: From Kosovo to Kabul,” International Affairs 85, no. 3 (2009): 493.  92 Ibid.  93 Bacevich, American Empire, 104.   94 George Kenney and Michael J. Dugan, “Operation Balkan Storm: Here’s a Plan,” New York Times, 29 November 1992.   95 Sperling and Webber, “From Kosovo to Kabul,” 495.   96 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2010.   97 Quoted in Sperling and Webber, “From Kosovo to Kabul,” 494.   98 Tyler Marshall, “U.S. in Kosovo for the Long Haul,” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jun/10/news/mn-39553/2.  99 Ibid. 100 See “Kosovo/Operation Allied Force – Action Report,” report to Congress, 31 January 2000, 4. For other rationalizations along these lines, see the comments of Tony Blair and Robin Cook, quoted in House of Commons, “Select Committee on Foreign Affairs,” Fourth Report (Session 1999– 2000), para. 73. 101 “Transcript: Clinton Addresses Nation on Yugoslavia Strike,” CNN.com, 24 March 1999, http://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/25/ clinton.transcript/. 102 Clark quoted in Abdelaaty, “Operation Allied Force.” 103 Ibid. 104 Department of State, “N ATO Alliance Strategic Concept,” 24 April 1999, http://1997-2001.state.gov/www/regions/eur/nato/nato_990424_ stratcncpt.html. 105 Albright quoted in Abdelaaty, “Operation Allied Force.” 106 Bacevich, American Empire, 104–5. 107 Belzil, “Can I R Theory Explain US-N ATO Engagement?”

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108 Abdelaaty, “Operation Allied Force.” 109 Cottey, “The Kosovo War.” 110 Robert Fisk, “Was it Rescue or Revenge?” The Independent (London), 21 June 1999, http://www.sam.hi-ho.ne.jp/~minovic/fisk/f621c.html. 111 Harlan Ullman and James Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1996), 19. 112 Karl DeRouen, “Presidents and the Diversionary Use of Force: A Research Note,” International Studies Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2000): 317–28. 113 I speak of “field” here in the Bourdieusian sense. I outline my use of the notion of “global field” elsewhere. See Julian Go, “Global Fields and Imperial Forms: Field Theory and the British and American Empires,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 3 (2008): 201–29. 114 Benjamin Carvalho and Iver Neumann, Small State Status Seeking: Norway’s Quest for International Standing (New York: Routledge, 2015). 115 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519.

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7 Adjusting to Rise and Coping with Decline: The China-US Relationship in Historical and Theoretical Context Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson

To what extent should a declining United States fear the future intentions of a rising China?1 Cueing to long-standing expectations that rising states generally expand their foreign ambitions, many policymakers and scholars have long worried that, left to its own devices, China will become increasingly aggressive and assertive as its relative power grows.2 The nature of this aggression remains poorly defined, but has at times included concern that the People’s Republic of China (PR C ) might challenge American allies, threaten East Asian stability, seek regional hegemony, and even contest the United States’ dominance of the international system.3 Nevertheless, facing the geopolitical constraints posed by a shifting distribution of power, American policy-makers and elites are divided over how to address this risk. Indeed, the discussion over how to manage China’s rise has prompted some of the starkest debates in post–Cold War US foreign policy. On the one hand, a prominent and growing array of American policy-makers and analysts have called for the United States to adopt an increasingly hardline strategy aimed at deterring and thwarting Chinese revisionism – in effect, embracing a “new Cold War,” containing the P R C , and preventing a Chinese challenge.4 In contrast, a second group of policy-makers and practitioners has long underscored the need for the US to blend engagement into its relations with China in order to limit China’s potential for revisionism.5 The specific blend of engagement6 and containment varies, but has at points included calls for the United States to deepen

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economic relations with the P R C , to integrate China into the US-led “liberal order,” and to encourage the P RC’s domestic liberalization, while developing the requisite security arrangements to deter China as needed. In any case, forestalling revisionism on the part of a rising China is seen to require careful American efforts to shape Chinese behaviour in ways conducive to American interests – otherwise, a rising China is apt to pose major problems for US security.7 The ongoing debate among US decision-makers will help set the course of US-Chinese relations in the years ahead. Still, important though this debate is, it elides a more fundamental question about US assumptions regarding China’s rise: Why should US policy-makers assume Chinese revisionism is the baseline outcome and shape US strategy to avoid this anticipated result? Of course, declining great powers often and regularly fear the aggressive designs of relatively rising states, as the chapters by Lachmann, Schmitt, and Lasnier and Köstem in this volume remind us. In this regard, contemporary American concerns with a rising China are not unique. Nevertheless, even a cursory read of the history of great power politics – particularly in Europe – challenges much of the contemporary policy-making debate: the widespread pessimism regarding what a rising China will want and how it will behave is off base.8 After all, for every Wilhelmine Germany that threatened established states such as Britain, there are notable cases of rising states looking to avoid challenging their declining peers. In fact, rising states often try to keep some declining great powers as comparatively powerful members of the international system. For example, even while challenging Great Britain for maritime dominance in Europe, Wilhelmine Germany expanded ties with a weakening Austria-Hungary by extending its diplomatic and military backing before 1914.9 Likewise, the United States co-operated with and supported a weakening United Kingdom after World War II, extending Britain significant diplomatic backing, security assistance via N A T O , and economic aid via the Marshall Plan.10 Nor was the United States alone in these efforts: as recent research shows, a surging Soviet Union also tried co-operating with Britain after 1945, forming plans to divide Europe into British and Soviet spheres of influence and offering Britain an alliance against what was expected to be an aggressive United States.11 Meanwhile – and besides cases of rising state support for declining great powers – rising state predation can itself vary in intensity across time. There is a marked difference, for example, between Germany’s efforts to

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challenge British naval dominance before 1914, and its efforts to diplomatically embarrass Britain in the 1880s and ’90s.12 That rising states support declining great powers in some instances while in others preying upon them with varying intensity poses two problems for American strategy vis-à-vis China. First, it raises the possibility that American strategy may be founded upon an unrealistic baseline expectation: rather than preying upon a declining United States, it is possible that a rising China will seek ways to engage and support the United States for its own reasons.13 Second, and even if the PR C were to prey upon the United States, the examples noted above suggest that the solutions currently discussed in scholarly and policy circles may not actually help the United States manage China’s rise. For instance, both the US and the Soviet Union supported Britain, and Germany supported Austria-Hungary, despite significant variation in the extent of their economic interdependence, political compatibility and values, embeddedness within the international order, and military policies. As such, if the strategies intended to cope with the United States’ decline and to manage the rise of China today are unrelated to the success or failure of prior interactions between rising and declining states, then the policies under discussion today may well harm US-Chinese relations. Accordingly, this chapter begins making the case that scholars and policy-makers alike have been overly concerned with the risk of aggression on the part of rising great powers in general and China in particular. It does so by first developing insights from balance of power realism to explain rising state behaviour and illustrating them with examples from the history of European great power relations, before applying the results to the rise of China. In contrast to other contributions in this volume, this approach largely brackets the role of leaders in shaping strategy: of course, policy-making elites and leaders make decisions, but their approaches are largely driven by systemic considerations of power, security, and the pursuit of state interests. This intellectual exercise thus remains useful as a way of developing our thinking as to how rising states may interact with decliners over time, and so refining our understanding of how the dynamic between rising and declining states may play out regardless of who or what is in charge of the states. Far from being natural born killers, I argue that rising states and their leaders often face strong incentives – up to and including the threat of the decliner adopting a strategy of prevention or competition14

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of its own – to limit or avoid preying upon other great powers in a state of relative decline. Risers do so largely to ensure their own relative power and security in a world of potential threats. In particular, rising states that face other great power threats and that see some possibility of using a declining state to contain or weaken these other threats tend to support the declining state in order to bid for its assistance. Predation, on the other hand, tends only to occur when (1) rising states face few if any threats to their security aside from the decliner, and (2) the declining state lacks military options to keep a rising state’s ambitions in check through prevention or competition. This framework and the history undergirding it provides room for cautious optimism that a rising China may not actually pose problems for the United States regardless of whether the solutions currently under discussion are employed. As elaborated below, the fact that China is rising in an international arena in which the United States, Japan, India, and potentially Russia pose real or potential threats gives China strong reasons to limit the challenge posed to the United States. Even if China and the US face a problematic relationship today, China cannot be confident that it will not face even greater challenges from other states in the future, against which the United States might be of assistance. There is no guarantee, of course, that Chinese leaders read the international situation in the same way; by the same token, it is possible that the future growth of Chinese economic and military strength may leave the PRC so powerful that the US – as the strongest actor in the international system today – is the sole state able to oppose China. Even then, however, the United States’ continuing investment in its military and leadership in high-end military technologies should ensure that it is able to threaten retaliation and limit the extent of Chinese predation. Baldly stated, there are grounds to expect that a rising China will either support the United States, or be a highly cautious challenger for the foreseeable future. In turn, not only is it premature for the United States to itself move toward prevention and competition to address China’s rise, but there are conditions under which American engagement and/or retrenchment might strengthen the United States’ position vis-à-vis the PRC. I return to this theme below. The remainder of this chapter proceeds in four sections. Following this introduction, I elaborate on the rationale for rising states to support or otherwise limit their challenge to declining great powers. I then begin applying this framework to the rise of China, emphasizing the external constraints on the P R C vis-à-vis other great powers and

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the incentives this provides for Chinese strategy versus the United States. I subsequently return to the question of how the United States and its leaders are coping with geopolitical decline by distilling the implications of the argument for US strategy in addressing China’s rise and America’s relative decline. Finally, I conclude by discussing the results of this study for declining states’ international coping strategies and the consequences of shifting power for international order more generally. balance of power logic, historical experience, a n d t h e r i s e o f g r e at p o w e r s

As other chapters in this volume emphasize, policy-makers and analysts in declining states have regularly worried that rising states – great powers whose relative power is growing vis-à-vis one or more competitors – will prove to be natural born killers inclined to challenge the security of other states in world politics.15 Indeed, a widespread assumption in both scholarly and policy discussions (historically and in the contemporary world) holds that rising states tend to pursue increasingly ambitious foreign agendas as the distribution of power shifts in their favour – as Fareed Zakaria has written, rising states have generally “redefined and expanded their political interests abroad.”16 Along the way, this shift is often linked to domestic factors as rising states embrace nationalist appeals, resource demands and/ or calls for economic expansion, and elite-driven “myths of empire.”17 In turn – so this logic goes – rising powers are apt to conflict with other, relatively declining great powers by placing increasingly stringent political, economic, and military demands upon their declining peers.18 Eventually, these escalating demands can threaten a declining state’s vital interests, leaving it in the position of accepting challenges to its survival or risking war.19 Meanwhile, because decliners anticipate this possibility, policy-makers in declining states have often worried about the future and feared, as Dale Copeland observes, that “if they allow a rising state to grow, it will either attack them later with superior power or coerce them into concessions that compromise their security.”20 As a result, declining states have themselves coped with worries surrounding rising states’ future behaviours by embracing an array of aggressive and/or competitive strategies aimed at either containing a rising state’s emergence or utilizing preventive action to stymie a rising state’s growth.21

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Still, despite the prevalence and intuitive appeal of the assumption that rising states tend to become increasingly ambitious and expansive as their power grows, there are strong reasons rooted in balance of power logic to question whether rising states are apt to behave in a predatory fashion. For one thing, states threatened by an ambitious adversary can always use or threaten war to protect their own interests – in other words, they can balance.22 As a result, great powers that expand and pursue policies that threaten their relatively declining peers are apt to trigger significant counterbalancing as worried actors facing an adverse shift in the distribution of power arm and ally among themselves to deter or defeat the riser. Again, these efforts may include hard-edged strategies such as containment and preventive action that may threaten a rising state’s continued growth (if not survival) and/or prevent it from enjoying greater power and influence in world affairs.23 Insofar as states are rational actors, rising great powers thus face a stark incentive to anticipate these dangers and cap their foreign ambitions to limit counterbalancing so long as other great powers can penalize aggrandizement. Not coincidentally, this logic also provides reason for questioning the salience of domestic politics in driving rising state behaviour. After all, although some rising states (e.g., Wilhelmine Germany) face domestic pressures for expansion, states that respond to such pressures prematurely risk encountering substantial international blowback that can stymie their rise. Although not impossible, it would thus take especially strong domestic pressures to be the primary drivers of rising state behaviour. Instead, operating in a competitive international system, most rising states at most times are pressed to focus first and foremost on international constraints and opportunities – sidestepping or ignoring domestic pressures along the way.24 Significantly, the risk of counterbalancing and the limits this imposes on rising state behaviour may endure for a long period of time. The historical record – especially in Europe – is full of instances in which states went to extreme lengths to balance even significantly stronger opponents. Watching the rise of Prussia in the 1860s, for example, many of the small German principalities gambled with their national survival in a frantic bid to ally and arm in a strategically meaningful – though ultimately futile – effort to forestall Prussian dominance.25 More recently, the early postwar period saw sustained efforts by France, Britain, and West Germany to integrate their economies and develop the military forces able to oppose a Soviet Union that was

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at least three times as strong as any of those states individually.26 Meanwhile, the late Cold War saw the U S S R itself devote a growing share of national wealth to military purposes in an effort to keep pace with an economically, militarily, and technologically surging United States, which was already more than twice as strong as the U S S R in economic terms.27 Notably, these efforts can have a significant effect on a rising state’s own international ambitions: European balancing, for instance, helped frustrate the USSR’s ambitions in Western Europe, just as policy-makers in the surging United States still felt compelled to expend significant time, energy, and resources balancing the Soviet Union through the end of the Cold War.28 Second, because several great powers may be present and have objectives that conflict with a rising state’s own, rising powers may need partners to offset other great power threats.29 These situations are likely to give rising states a strong incentive to forego competition with one or more declining states and, instead, pursue supportive policies to “bid” for a declining state’s collaboration.30 Declining states, after all, are still great powers for a reason – they hold significantly greater military and economic capabilities than most other states in the international system. Even if waning in relative terms, sustained engagement by a rising state with a decliner may help a riser obtain meaningful assistance and co-operation that can be used to overcome other threats by sharing or bearing entirely the costs of containing other challengers.31 However, since a declining state is unlikely to engage and assist a riser that itself seeks gains at a decliner’s expense, rising states must minimally avoid challenges to a declining state; more likely, a riser may need to offer economic, political, and military concessions to a decliner in order to facilitate its support while preventing other great powers from themselves gaining the declining state’s assistance. Of course, rising states are unlikely to extend this assistance to all decliners. Instead, rising states’ incentives to co-operate are greater when the following criteria are met: (1) the more a declining state is geographically positioned to help oppose other threats to the rising state, (2) the less a declining state’s political leadership seems inveterately opposed to a rising state, and (3) the less likely a declining state is to pose a military threat to the rising state compared to other potential challengers. Just as states balance threats to their security, so, too, are they unlikely to partner with decliners that are poorly situated to oppose other great power threats and that do not seem

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to be inclined to reciprocate co-operative gestures.32 If these conditions are present, however, then the riser’s need to obtain partners to balance other great power threats provides an additional constraint on rising state competition – in fact, it can spur significant rising state support. a r a n g e o f r i s i n g s tat e s t r at e g i e s

Collectively, these dynamics indicate that rising states are more likely to limit their challenge to declining states than is widely believed. Instead, three distinct outcomes – each of which offers its own set of risks and opportunities for declining states – are possible. First, rising great powers are only likely to issue direct and sustained challenges – to operate as the conventional wisdom suggests – to a decliner if the declining state is of little or no help against other great power threats, and if it lacks the military tools of its own to deter or defeat rising state competition (i.e., if declining state prevention or competition is impossible). In such situations, rising states have both motive and opportunity to pursue foreign ambitions as they see fit. For their part, declining states lacking the ability to oppose a rising competitor are likely to be compelled to strike whatever deals they can with a rising state in the hope that joining that state’s bandwagon will provide some modicum of security against the rising state’s machinations.33 Second, rising states are likely to embrace varying forms of support for declining states the more they face other threats to their security that the declining state can help address, and the lower the threat posed by the declining state itself. In this situation, rising states interested in ensuring their own security have grounds for seeking out the declining state as a partner, cutting it diplomatic deals and offering strategic concessions to maximize the chances for co-operation; in effect, rising states are poised to cope with their relative rise by engaging decliners and attempting to reinforce their geostrategic position. Meanwhile, the declining state’s own limited ability to engage in prevention or military competition ensures that a rising state can comfortably extend such co-operation in the calculation that doing so is unlikely to simply empower a future opponent or antagonize other great powers by suggesting the formation of an offensive coalition. Finally, rising states are likely to engage in mixed strategies when a declining state is at least as militarily threatening as the next-largest

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challenge to the rising state, and/or is the only threat present but can still militarily penalize rising state revisionism through prevention or competition.34 These mixed strategies – which see rising states look to make slow, sequential gains at a declining state’s expense while engaging in tactical co-operation with a decliner if tensions begin to rise – reflect the fact that rising states, like all great powers, face strong incentives to limit counterbalancing that can harm their security. Indeed, if anything, this incentive is especially strong for rising states that, seeing their relative power grow, will be comparatively more secure tomorrow than today and so have good grounds to avoid causing other states to initiate a conflict in the near-term. Seeking to forestall this outcome, rising states faced with a militarily potent declining state are encouraged to lay low and, while working on the margins to further its rise at the decliner’s expense, let the distribution of power continue to shift in its favour. i m p l i c at i o n s f o r c h i n a ’ s r i s e : w e i g h i n g t h e s tat e o f p l ay i n e a s t a s i a

What does this mean for the rise of China and for US-PRC relations? Although policy-makers understandably fear that a rising China will prove revisionist and aggressive, the framework here suggests that the matter will ultimately depend upon China’s threat environment and the constraints and opportunities this imposes on the P RC. On this basis, a series of quantitative and qualitative indicators provides room for cautious optimism that China – at worst – will pursue a mixed strategy vis-à-vis the United States. As importantly, there are reasons to expect that China may adopt a supportive strategy. The logic is simple: not only is the Chinese threat environment such that it is far from clear whether the P R C would be able to mount a sustained challenge against the United States without significantly impairing its security – ultimately courting the risk of American prevention or competition – but China faces competitors besides the United States. Combined, these factors should give Chinese leaders pause before they pursue an overtly revisionist course, and may even offer them ground for seeking sustained US-P RC co-operation.35 To be sure, Chinese economic and military strength has grown rapidly in recent decades, so much so that some analysts predict the end of the United States’ “unipolar era.”36 Consider, for example, the overall distribution of economic strength as measured by GDP. China’s

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economy has grown dramatically. Having begun the 1990s with a GDP barely one-tenth that of the US and not even a quarter of Japan’s, Chinese GD P was over half that of the US and double Japan’s barely twenty-five years later (see table 7.1). Military spending (shown in table 7.2) tells a similar story. Whereas Chinese military expenditures were less than one-tenth that of the US and less than two-thirds that of Japan in the early 1990s, the mid-2010s saw China spending over one-third that of the US and more than four times that of Japan. Although military expenditure is skewed by countries’ different inclinations to spend on the military, the basic trend is one of marked Chinese growth. Still, and as Sachs reminds us in chapter 1 in this volume, these figures need to be considered in light of what they represent. Any measure of a state’s capabilities is an attempt to assess the resources a state could mobilize to advance or defend its interests – in extremis, by going to war – and the likely success of these efforts.37 Critically, when viewed in this light, the fact that China’s economy may be nearing parity with the United States and growing vis-à-vis competitors like Japan and India does not mean China will be free to challenge other states without focusing on the strategic consequences. Two factors are decisive. First, even a China that is on par with or even somewhat ahead of the United States in economic or military terms would still need to compete with a relatively shrunken United States. This is significant. The last two decades have seen the United States increasingly compete with China when China was not yet at parity with the United States. Inverting the situation should yield a similar result – China (now in the United States’ shoes) would feel compelled to shape its policy to anticipate American reactions and, often, avoid overtly antagonizing the United States (like China today, in a strong but inferior position). Second, states such as India and Japan could still pose major potential challenges to China. Today, for example, Japan is in roughly the same position vis-à-vis China as China is relative to the United States; India, with an economy approximately one-quarter that of China’s, is where China was vis-à-vis the United States in the early 2000s. In these situations, China would enjoy comparatively greater latitude and resources to pursue its interests than it had in the past, but it is unlikely to be able to ignore or sidestep opposition from these states when voiced; tellingly, Japanese leaders worried about, and were compelled to respond to, a rising China in the late 1990s, when China

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1992

$9,379,735,498,400 $1,035,554,630,009 $4,878,113,691,339 $1,147,447,070,570 $2,751,950,092,715 $1,626,362,942,522 $502,757,925,254 $437,525,961,000 11 21

2000 $12,713,058,213,400 $2,237,080,505,067 $5,348,929,464,259 $951,558,450,751 $3,124,093,841,060 $2,075,949,258,807 $811,546,865,004 $710,034,937,603 18 42

2010 $14,964,372,000,000 $6,100,620,356,557 $5,700,096,491,338 $1,524,916,112,079 $3,417,298,013,245 $2,429,602,904,821 $1,656,562,168,649 $1,094,499,338,703 41 107

2015 $16,597,445,985,800 $8,909,477,686,321 $5,986,138,405,666 $1,616,147,420,523 $3,696,832,993,377 $2,682,892,908,375 $2,295,154,999,988 $1,266,580,310,209 54 149

Source: Adapted from World Bank, “DataBank: World Development Indicators,” 2020, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=worlddevelopment-indicators#. All calculations by the author.

United States China Japan Russia Germany United Kingdom India South Korea China as percentage of US China as percentage of next-largest state (Japan)

State

Table 7.1 China’s economic rise vs other states (G DP at constant 2010 U SD )



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Table 7.2 China’s military rise (constant 2014 US D)

State USA China Japan Russia India Germany China as percentage of US China as percentage of Japan

1992

2000

2010

2015

514,822 28,426 44,535 57,641 16,548 64,288 6 64

414,768 43,230 46,315 28,838 27,266 50,448 10 93

757,992 144,383 46,527 60,940 48,470 49,418 19 310

595,472 214,485 46,346 91,081 51,116 47,046 36 463

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, https://www.sipri.org/databases/milex.

was even weaker relative to Japan than Japan is relative to China today.38 Even if China becomes several times more powerful than other major states as measured by macro figures such as military spending or GDP, the situation may potentially limit Chinese foreign policy as China devotes its attention to countering others. Still other factors, moreover, suggest that China may not be poised to overtake the United States, Japan, and other established great powers, as G D P and military spending figures might suggest. First, as Wohlforth and Brooks point out, in spite of China’s economic and military rise, the country is still modernizing. As a result, it often lacks the advanced industry, human capital, and technological base to generate cutting-edge military power and economic innovation akin to that witnessed in the United States, Japan, Germany, and other leading powers.39 There is little scholarly agreement on whether and when rapidly developing states are able to acquire such elements of national power, but the fact that China is relatively rising while also developing at home implies that China’s economic and military growth should be at least partly discounted.40 The United States, Japan, and other existing states are declining vis-à-vis China, but their comparatively more advanced societies and economies imply that this decline is neither as rapid nor pervasive as G D P or military spending figures alone suggest.41 The delicate balance of military power also appears to be weighted against China. The United States alone remains significantly ahead of China in key military areas, including naval power, reconnaissance

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capabilities, and modern aircraft. The US Navy, for instance, deploys 11 aircraft carriers to China’s 1, 54 nuclear attack submarines to China’s 9, and can draw upon more than eight decades of experience in fielding and operating large naval units far from US shores.42 Likewise – and akin to how other declining states have tried to innovate and leverage lingering areas of relative advantage – the US Air Force and Navy are in the process of deploying thousands of fifthgeneration fighter aircraft at a time when China is still unable to design and deploy a reliable jet engine. These forces are backed, meanwhile, with a constellation of satellites, intelligence systems, and communication networks that have traditionally given the United States significantly better operational information on opponents.43 China, in contrast, lacks similar systems of the same scale and complexity.44 Factor in the potential military capabilities of the relatively smaller – but by no means irrelevant – states around China’s periphery that are increasingly worried about China’s rise, and the military balance is even more starkly weighted against the P R C .45 None of this is to understate China’s growing military capabilities, particularly its growing “anti-access/area-denial” (A2AD ) kit, which would raise the costs of any military campaign around China’s periphery. Still, weighed as a whole, the United States in isolation remains significantly ahead of China in net military capabilities; add other states to the mix, and the military balance looks even worse for the P RC. china as cautious riser and potential partner

Collectively, these factors add up to a situation where China not only lacks an opportunity to readily challenge the United States, but it may in fact face structural reasons to support and engage the United States. The reason is simple: with several other major players, each of which can harm China, and which collectively can severely hinder Chinese security, China has good reason to pull its strategic punches for the foreseeable future, and may even want partners and allies to address these threats. More precisely, it is important to distinguish between the conditions that would lead China to co-operate with and engage the United States, and the conditions under which China would try to pursue gradual, sequential gains at the United States’ expense. The first scenario is more likely if and as Chinese growth begins to slow (or other

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countries around it grow faster), and China experiences difficulty acquiring military and economic tools to fully compete with the US, Japan, and other major actors. In this scenario, China would continue to face persistent threats to its security from several actors, with the country pushed to find effective ways to handle these threats. Under such circumstances, Chinese leaders would face strong pressures to avoid policies that catalyze significant counterbalancing and – more importantly – engage in activities that limit others’ proclivities to join an anti-China coalition. Here, the United States stands to benefit from China’s rise. To be sure, the United States in this world would represent China’s biggest potential competitor. Still, the US would retain great potential to help China contain states such as India and Japan that might seek to do China harm: US co-operation would not only be useful in restraining such actors from threatening China but, in a crisis or conflict, American assistance could be particularly efficacious in helping settle the conflict on advantageous terms. Moreover, problems in the US-PRC relationship pale in comparison to those bedeviling Chinese relations with other major states in the region. After all, the P R C and India have gone to war in living memory, just as relations have grown tenser over the last several years owing to territorial disputes, access to economic resources, and competition over regional leadership; relations between Japan and China are, if anything, even more fraught.46 In contrast, US-China relations have been problematic, yet are primarily affected by competition between China and US allies such as Japan rather than conflicting bilateral interests.47 As a result, China would face incentives to gain American backing in its disputes with regional competitors by bidding for American co-operation. This would require the PRC to offer the US concessions in diplomatic, military, and economic affairs – such as limiting the PR C ’s naval challenge to the United States, foregoing alternate economic arrangements in East Asia, and backing US-led initiatives in the United Nations – defined largely on American terms. The result could be a boon for the United States: even while declining vis-à-vis China, a relatively less capable United States could emerge in an empowered political position by virtue of China’s need for partners against other challenges. And although there is no way of knowing whether Chinese leaders conceive of the US-PRC relationship in these terms, there are hints that this is far from an impossibility: not only

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did Chinese officials spend a good portion of the 1990s seeking to keep the US engage in East Asia to restrain Japan, but China’s state news agency welcomed the election of Donald Trump by calling for continued US engagement in Asia.48 Conversely, it is possible that the PRC will continue growing rapidly while developing its economic and military base at home. Here, a rising China would far surpass the ability of Japan, India, and other prospective competitors to counterbalance Chinese strength, either singly or in alignment, leaving the US as the sole actor able to counterbalance. The result could be problematic for the United States. It would not take much for Chinese policy-makers and leaders to conclude that, if the P R C could further winnow down US strength or evict the US from Asia, China would have an opportunity to dominate the region as a hegemon. As a result, Chinese attention would focus on further undermining American strength – maximizing China’s power at the United States’ expense. Still, although in this scenario China’s goals may be predatory, the intensity and competitiveness of Chinese policy is likely to remain limited. After all, with the United States the PRC’s premier target and the last remaining source of effective opposition, Chinese leaders would be impelled to realize that pushing the United States too hard in a bid to establish Chinese hegemony could lead the US to lash out in a preventive war or in other aggressive forms of competition. Such a conflict, in turn, might stymie China’s rise. As a result, the P RC’s leadership would face a “better later than now” situation: although naturally incentivized to overtake the United States en route to regional hegemony, any steps China might adopt to attain this end would have a higher chance of success the longer China waits before directly threatening American interests. Along the way, we would expect the Chinese leadership to tamp down or attempt to sidestep what might be growing domestic calls for rapid expansion to seek China’s place in the sun. Though potentially fraught, the calculation among Chinese leaders here would be that prematurely adopting policies seen as overtly or intensely aggressive would be even more pernicious to Chinese security than risking nationalist or domestic backlash.49 In fact, the ideal scenario would be for China to wait to clearly maximize power at the United States’ expense until the distribution of power has shifted to such an extent that the United States can no longer credibly harm the P R C . This day, however, is likely a long way off: the fact that the US (1) is the world’s leader in developing and

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employing high-end military technology, and (2) looks likely to remain so for the indefinite future should continue to act as a significant brake on Chinese policy. Put differently, even if the P R C overtakes the US in many measures of national strength, lingering US advantages should give China pause before aggressing. Caution and prudence is likely for the foreseeable future, with even deeper forms of engagement and support a possibility. u s s t r at e g y a n d t h e r i s e o f c h i n a

In sum, there are good reasons rooted in both balance of power theory and the history of European great power politics to suspect that a rising China is unlikely to engage in an all-out quest for regional hegemony and advantage vis-à-vis the United States. Separate from the range of institutions and deep economic ties that connect the United States and China, the distribution of capabilities and China’s need to operate in a competitive international system provide strong constraints that are likely to moderate Chinese strategy. At worst, this may lead Chinese leaders to enact a strategy that embrace’s limited forms of competition – a mixed strategy – with the United States; at best, China may be pushed to support the United States in a bid to use the United States against other threats. Though it remains unclear which scenario will eventually emerge, the trend provides room for cautious optimism. In turn, the task for American policy-makers is to assess and manoeuvre within this shifting environment to maximize the United States’ own opportunities and to ensure its security. Increasingly, however, the United States is responding as most great powers faced with a rising prospective rival have before: it is building up military assets to deter or defeat the potential challenger, seeking ways to spur US economic growth, and crafting security relationships with local partners that might be useful in competing with the P R C (or even threatening preventive action).50 Insofar as US analysts are confident that China will grow in perpetuity, swamp potential local counterbalancers, and leave the United States as the sole actor able to affect Chinese security, these behaviours are reasonably strategic. Although taking on security commitments that would add little to directly confronting China is problematic, building up US military and economic strength would help ensure the United States has the military tools to keep Chinese opportunism and predation in check.

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That said, the current US attitude and the underlying policy assumptions it represents would be far less attractive in a scenario where China continues to face other security threats, for example from Japan and India. Here, the more American policy-makers push the US to play a leading role in fostering an anti-China coalition and retain the military capacity to severely harm the P RC, the lower China’s incentive to co-operate with the US, despite the PRC’s reasons to work with the US and tamp down other security risks. Put differently, the greater the United States’ preventive and competitive threat and the larger its opposition to the P R C , the lower the P RC’s incentive to bid for American assistance against states such as Japan and India. Instead, a sounder course would see American leaders ensure that US policy underscore the United States’ ability to assist against other threats to China’s rise by minimizing the United States’ own challenge to China while simultaneously communicating the United States’ interest in partnership. To do so, a combination of American retrenchment and engagement aimed at minimizing points of friction between the two states could potentially be an attractive way of coping with relative decline. By definition, key elements of existing US efforts in Asia might then have to be junked, including steps to commit additional military forces to East Asia while deepening defence ties with regional states in a nascent anti-China coalition. Although seemingly far-fetched, these moves could play to and reinforce China’s strategic incentive to find partners in a competitive world, creating conditions for the US to extract meaningful strategic concessions from China in return. Regardless of which scenario comes to pass, the takeaway is clear: the declining United States should have significant latitude in its fate vis-à-vis a rising China. In the final analysis, China will be severely limited in its ability to inaugurate an all-out challenge to the United States for the indefinite future. Though analysts understandably worry that a rising China will seek to push the United States into the dustbin of history, balance of power theory suggests this outcome is less likely than widely predicted. American strategists should thus be cautiously optimistic – the United States is playing a very strong hand and should recognize as much. c o n c l u s i o n : i m p l i c at i o n s f o r s t r at e g y , l e a d e r s , a n d o r d e r

Finally, what does this analysis tell us about declining states’ own coping strategies, and the effect of power shifts on the international

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order writ large? As noted earlier, a declining state’s efforts to cope with its waning fortunes through a variety of internal and external manipulations is motivated at least in part by concerns with its shifting position in the international distribution of power and the responses of other, relatively rising great powers to this trend. Along the way, declining states and their leaders often assume – implicitly or explicitly – that their decline will be exploited by other, relatively rising states. However, given the logic and evidence mobilized in this chapter, such a pessimistic view of rising state strategy should be taken with significant skepticism. Although rising states certainly enjoy greater leeway to challenge declining states as the distribution of power shifts, they not only fail to jump at this opportunity but – under certain conditions – may end up continuing to engage declining states and abet their maintenance among the ranks of the great powers. Put simply, the coping strategies of declining states must account for a more fluid and conditional view of rising states’ baseline behaviour. This situation reinforces the notion developed throughout the present volume that geopolitics is not fate. Declining states seeking to cope externally with shifts in the distribution of power retain significant (though certainly not total) influence over the behaviour of rising states and, in turn, whether their own declines proceed with greater or lesser degrees of conflict with risers. Rather, within the structural confines of geography and the distribution of power, a declining state’s own decision to compete and seek to prevent rising state challenges, or retrench and engage rising states on their own, play a major role in affecting a rising state’s own strategy. This may result in particularly problematic developments – foregoing co-operation that might otherwise exist – when the distribution of power and geography mean rising states otherwise face incentives to engage and co-operate with decliners: all things being equal, the more a declining state competes with and looks to prevent a rising state challenge under these circumstances, the less support a rising state is likely to offer. By the same token, declining states that retrench and continue to engage rising states when power and geography nevertheless incentivize rising state predation can end up undermining their security by empowering what is likely to be a potent long-term rival with predatory ambitions. In short, a key yet underexamined task for declining states seeking to cope with their declines is to accurately assess the likely future course and conduct of relatively rising states, and to adjust their declinemanagement strategies accordingly. This may not be straightforward.

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On one level, state intentions are fundamentally unknowable, thereby making any prognostication problematic.51 At the same time, there is no guarantee that state leaders themselves – as the other chapters in this volume highlight – necessarily have the individual mindsets and institutional intelligence structures to assess this problem accurately: there is room for misperception and miscalculation, even within a realist framework, if and when policy-makers and their intelligence agencies miss or ignore external strategic pressures, or hold particularly powerful cognitive or psychological blinders.52 Still, the framework employed here provides room for some optimism that declining states and their leaders may be able to at least perform a reasonable job assessing prospective competitors. After all, the argument outlined above hinges less on accurately assessing the intentions of relatively rising great powers and more on judging the structural incentives and political opportunities rising states faced to prey upon or support declining states in a competitive international system. Furthermore, because power shifts create especially strong strategic reasons for policy-makers to accurately evaluate their security environment, leaders are primed to pay close attention to the factors identified by balance of power logic and adapt state strategy accordingly.53 This does not mean they are bound to follow the dictates of, nor to think about the world in line with, this argument. However, insofar as policy-makers are likely to be attuned to state power and security, leaders who miscalculate are likely to encounter strong external pressures in the form of missed co-operation or excessive predation vis-à-vis rising states that mandate a course adjustment – pushing state policy in line with the above argument. The net result is a dynamic process in which rising and declining states are each poised to cope with shifts in the distribution of power through a process of interaction, adjustment, and strategic reassessment. This process, in turn, carries large prospective consequences for understanding change and continuity in international order. That is, power shifts affect the states experiencing a relative shift in the distribution of power, as well as the institutions, patterns of behaviour, and expectations that are built up around an extant distribution of power (often labelled part of the “international order”). Analysts and policy-makers alike often assume that shifts in power produce shifts in international order. Still, and as research by Ikenberry and others in this volume suggest, this linkage is not always automatic: the quality of an existing order – whether it is economically open, liberal, and

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so on – may enable an order to survive even if the underlying distribution of power undergirding it changes. Although emphasizing strategic and military factors within a generally realist framework, this project carries similar implications. Simply put, by highlighting (1) the conditions under which rising states tend to co-operate with, engage, and support declining states, and (2) the coping strategies declining states may need to adopt to encourage such rising state support, this chapter suggests circumstances in which rising and declining states may also seek to co-operatively sustain an existing international order. This does not necessarily mean leaving that order unchanged: as underscored earlier, declining states may need to retrench and grant greater space to a rising state in order to minimize points of friction with a riser, potentially mandating changes in an extant order. Still, insofar as this effort is successful in garnering rising state support for a decliner, it may help preserve elements of whatever order the declining state promoted when its power was comparatively greater. Conversely, the more geopolitical conditions and the declining state’s choice of strategy leave rising states poised to prey upon a decliner, the more likely international order is likely to be substantially altered or overturned. To be sure, future research should more directly explore whether and how variation in a rising state’s supportive or predatory approach toward a decliner affects international order itself. Still, as this chapter highlights reasons rooted in balance of power logic that may push a rising state to cooperate or compete with a decliner – again, contingent on geopolitics and the decliner’s own coping strategy – it suggests similar strategic factors that may enjoin a riser to embrace or overturn an existing order. Just as power shifts can prompt rising and declining states to cope with their changing strategic fortunes in distinct ways rooted in the competition for power and security, so, too, may this process shape continuity and change in international order. Ultimately, power shifts alone do not control the course or future of great powers. Within geopolitical confines, states have significant latitude in shaping their own strategies – actions that can themselves influence the other great powers, and may carry broader implications for stability or conflict in great power politics. Despite widespread pessimism that relatively rising states are poised to challenge and prey upon declining great powers, balance of power logic and substantial evidence from European diplomatic history suggests such concerns are overblown: there is an array of conditions in which rising states are

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unlikely to systematically prey upon declining great powers. The task before declining states and their leaders, therefore, is to simultaneously recognize this dynamic and to shape a coping strategy that exploits these conditions. Nowhere is this more important than for the contemporary debate among American policy-makers over China’s rise.

notes



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A version of this chapter appeared as Joshua Shifrinson, “The Rise of China, Balance of Power Theory, and U.S. National Security: Reasons for Optimism?” Journal of Strategic Studies 43, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 175–216. Thanks go to the Journal of Strategic Studies for permission to include aspects of that article here. This chapter builds on that prior work by elaborating on the interactive nature of rising state–declining state relations. For the strategies of rising states, see Randall L. Schweller, “Managing the Rise of Great Powers: History and Theory,” in Engaging China: The Management of an Emerging Power, ed. Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert Ross (New York: Routledge, 1999), 1–31. Robert J. Art, “The United States and the Rise of China: Implications for the Long Haul,” Political Science Quarterly 125, no. 3 (2010): 359–91; Aaron L Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011); Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet S. Pardesi, “Can China and India Rise Peacefully?,” Orbis 56, no. 3 (2012): 470–85; National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternate Worlds, December 2012, NIC 2012-001; The White House, “Remarks by President Obama at the University of Queensland,” 15 November 2014, https://www.whitehouse. gov/the-press-office/2014/11/15/remarks-president-obama-universityqueensland. John J. Mearsheimer, “The Gathering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia,” The Chinese Journal of International Politics 3, no. 4 (2010): 381–96; Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, 24 September 2015, http://www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-warthucydides-trap/406756/. On the evolution of US attitudes, see Emma Ashford and Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Trump’s National Security Strategy: A Critics Dream,” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 2 (February 2018): 138–44. On the growing bipartisan consensus that containment and confrontation may be

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necessary, see Eric Edelman and Gary Roughead, eds, Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendation of the National Defense Strategy Commission, November 2018, https://www.usip.org/ sites/default/files/2018-11/providing-for-the-common-defense.pdf; Larry Diamond and Orville Schell, eds, Chinese Influence and American Interests: Promoting Constructive Vigilance, Report of the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States (Stanford, C A : Hoover Institution Press, 2018). Also useful are Friedberg, Contest for Supremacy; Thomas Wright, “The Return to Great Power Rivalry Was Inevitable,” The Atlantic, 12 September 2018; Tarun Chabra, “The China Challenge, Democracy, and Grand Strategy,” Brookings Policy Brief, February 2019; Hal Brands, “Democracy vs. Authoritarianism: How Ideology Shapes Great-Power Conflict,” Survival 60, no. 5 (September 2018): 61–114. Note, too, that some analysts are open to embracing the idea of a “new Cold War”; see Hal Brands, “America’s Cold Warriors Hold the Key to Handling China,” Bloomberg, 14 January 2019; Robert Kaplan, “A New Cold War Has Begun,” Foreign Policy, 7 January 2019.   5 William Clinton, “Remarks at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,” 8 March 2000, online by Gerhard Peters and John Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb. edu/documents/remarks-the-paul-h-nitze-school-advanced-internationalstudies; George W. Bush, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/­ organization/63562.pdf, 26–7; G. John Ikenberry, “The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive?,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 1 (2008): 23–37; Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Lean Forward,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (2013), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138468/stephen-g-brooks-g-johnikenberry-and-william-c-wohlforth/lean-forward. For recent discussion of this attitude in policy-making and elite circles, see Jeffrey A. Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012); Joseph R. Biden, “Building on Success: Opportunities for the Next Administration,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 5 (September/October 2016): 46–57; Orville Schell and Susan Shirk, eds, Course Correction: Toward and Effective and Sustainable China Policy, Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations – UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, February 2019, https://asiasociety. org/sites/default/files/inline-files/CourseCorrection_FINAL_2.7.19_1.pdf.   6 As used here, “engagement” builds on the definition offered in the introduction to this volume to reflect co-operative attempts to work with rising

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states by providing public goods, constructing international institutions, and encouraging trade and diplomatic exchanges so as to minimize points of friction in bilateral relations.   7 Art, “The United States and the Rise of China”; Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy; Ganguly and Pardesi, “Can China and India Rise Peacefully?”   8 A similar theoretical point is made in Jeffrey W. Legro, “What China Will Want: The Future Intentions of a Rising Power,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (September 2007): 515–34.   9 Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1959), 14–15; Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 310–14; Imanuel Geiss, German Foreign Policy, 1871–1914 (London: Routledge, 1976, 2002), esp. 29–43, 57–71, 110–18, 149–57. 10 Robert Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944– 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Respond to Power Shifts (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2018). As Lachmann observes in chapter 3 of this volume, elements of the future AngloAmerican special relationship emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Britain acceded to American naval dominance in the western Atlantic, allowing for a diplomatic détente between the two countries. For related research on this period, see Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2017). 11 Robert Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944– 1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Shifrinson, Rising Titans, ch. 5. 12 Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980). 13 For recent distillations of US policy, see Bader, Obama and China’s Rise; Thomas Christensen, The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power (New York: Norton, 2015). 14 As discussed in the introduction to this volume, “competition” is often taken to reflect a declining state’s efforts to adapt economically to outperform rising states and/or to slow a rising state’s growth. In theory, however, competition need not be limited to economic policies – it can also refer to efforts to sustain an existing distribution of power in the military realm and/or cultivating alliances to hinder a rising state’s continued growth. Notably, this broader version of competition seems to match how many policy-makers in declining states themselves think of competition.

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As Lachmann observes, for instance, British leaders attempted to compete with Wilhelmine Germany by consolidating the Royal Navy, accelerating military spending, and cultivating new partners in Europe, North America, and Asia; similarly, the United States after the Vietnam War eventually increased military spending and worked to prevent allies from leaving its camp. Above all, the United States today has responded to the rise of China by reallocating military forces to East Asia and attempting to shoreup alliances in the region. In this chapter, I use “competition” to reflect this broader definition. 15 Thus Thucydides’s observation that the Peloponnesian War resulted from the growth of Athenian power and “the fear which this caused in Sparta”; see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner and M.I. Finley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972), 1: 23. 16 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3; see also Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge, 1981). 17 See, for example, Jack L. Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); ­Randall Schweller, “Opposite but Compatible Nationalisms: A Neoclassical Realist Approach to the Future of US-China Relations,” Chinese Journal of International Politics 11, no. 1 (2018): 23–48; Robert C. North and Nazli Choucri, “Population, Technology, and Resources in the Future International System,” Journal of International Affairs 25, no. 2 (1971): 224–37. 18 Art, “Rise of China,” 361–2; Jack Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics 40, no. 1 (1987): 87. 19 For discussion of the trade-offs declining states face, see Samuel Huntington, “Coping with the Lippmann Gap,” Foreign Affairs 66, no. 3 (1987): 453–77; Gilpin, War and Change, 187–207; Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent, “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment,” International Security 35, no. 4 (2011): 7–44. 20 Dale Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2000), 4. For useful discussion, see also Jeffrey W. Legro, “What China Will Want: The Future Intentions of a Rising Power,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 515–34. 21 Copeland, Origins, ch. 2; Jack Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics 40, no. 1 (October 1987): 82–107. 22 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA : Addison-Wesley, 1979); Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1954).

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23 Snyder, Myths of Empire. 24 The case of Wilhelmine Germany is instructive. As Geiss, Snyder, and others show, the fragmented and cartelized nature of German domestic politics at the time helped push the state to expand and, ultimately, to risk war with Russia. What’s striking, however, is not that Germany embraced such a course but rather the extensive efforts – documented in Copeland’s work – to craft hospitable international conditions that would maximize Germany’s chances of victory. In other words, despite intense domestic drivers of expansion, German policy was still fixed on and heavily influenced by international conditions. Even in this particularly salient case for domestic arguments, domestic factors alone were hardly dispositive in shaping German policy. 25 Eric J. Labs, “Do Weak States Bandwagon?” Security Studies 1, no. 3 (1992): 383. 26 Sebastian Rosato, Europe United: Power Politics and the Making of the European Community (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2011). 27 Noel E. Firth and James H. Noren, Soviet Defense Spending: A History of CIA Estimates, 1950–1990 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), 129–30, table 5.10; ex post revelations from Soviet leaders suggests defence spending may have been as high as 20 per cent of GNP; see Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 188–9. 28 On the early Cold War, see John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Clarendon, 1997); Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1999). On the late Cold War, see Shifrinson, Rising Titans, 119–59. 29 This logic is implicit in theories of alliance politics: by allying with one another, states aggregate resources such that no one state accepts all burdens of confronting a challenger; see Stephen Walt, Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 17–18. 30 On overall the logic of accommodating other states to limit their participation in adversary coalitions, see Timothy W. Crawford, “The Alliance Politics of Concerted Accommodation: Entente Bargaining and Italian and Ottoman Interventions in the First World War,” Security Studies 23, no. 1 (2014): 113–47. 31 As Thomas Christensen and Jack Snyder observe: “some states try to free ride on others’ balancing efforts … to avoid bearing unnecessary costs or because they expect their relative position to be strengthened by standing aloof from the mutual bloodletting.” See Thomas Christensen and Jack

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Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, no. 2 (1990): 141. 32 Thus, as Lachmann suggests in chapter 3, it took a shift in British foreign policy attitudes at the turn of the twentieth century to facilitate a co-­ operative relationship between the rising United States and Russia: ­previously, British hostility toward both states contributed to fraught Anglo-American and Anglo-Russian relationships. 33 See Labs, “Bandwagon.” Thanks also go to Jasen Castillo for comments on this issue. 34 For an expanded typology, see Joshua Shifrinson, “Should the United States Fear China’s Rise?” Washington Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 69–73; Shifrinson, Rising Titans, 33–7. 35 For additional indicators and measures of the distribution of power, see Shifrinson, “Rise of China, Balance of Power Theory, and U.S. National Security,” 17–24. 36 Christopher Layne, “The Waning of U.S. Hegemony – Myth or Reality? A Review Essay,” International Security 34, no. 1 (2009): 147–72; Christopher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2012): 203–13. 37 Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson and Michael Beckley, “Debating China’s Rise and U.S. Decline,” International Security 37, no. 3 (2012): 172–81. 38 Chikako Ueki, “The Rise of ‘China Threat’ Arguments” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006). 39 Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14–72. 40 I am indebted to conversations with Drs. Steven Brooks, Mauro Gilli Jennifer Lind, Daryl Press, and Eugene Gholz for help on this point. 41 For a similar argument, see Michael Beckley, “China’s Century? Why America’s Edge Will Endure,” International Security 36, no. 3 (2012): 41–78. 42 Author calculations from International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance: 2018 (London: I I SS, 2017). 43 Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security 28, no. 1 (Summer 2003): 5–46. 44 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, ch. 3. 45 As Eugene Gholz points out in an important paper, the relatively smaller countries around China’s periphery hold military capabilities of their own that present significant problems for the PR C ; see Eugene Gholz, “No

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Man’s Sea” (draft article manuscript, January 2017). See also Michael Beckley, “The Emerging Military Balance in East Asia: How China’s Neighbors Can Check Chinese Naval Expansion,” International Security 42, no. 2 (2017): 78–119. 46 For Chinese regional behaviour, see M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2008); Alastair Iain Johnston, “How New and Assertive Is China’s New Assertiveness?” International Security 37, no. 4 (2013): 7–48; M. Taylor Fravel, “Why India Did Not ‘Win’ the Standoff with China,” War on the Rocks, 1 September 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/09/why-india-did-not-win-the-standoffwith-china/. 47 Along similar lines, see Charles Glaser, “A U.S.-China Grand Bargain?” International Security 39, no. 4 (2015): 49–90. 48 “China State Media Warns Trump against Isolationism, Calls for Status Quo,” Reuters, 10 November 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/ us-usa-election-china-media-idUSKBN1350P6. 49 On the link between Chinese nationalism and hawkish policy preferences, see Jessica Chen Weiss, “How Hawkish Is the Chinese Public? Another Look at ‘Rising Nationalism’ and Chinese Foreign Policy,” Journal of Contemporary China 119 (March 2019): 679–95. Clearly, the growing hawkishness of the Chinese public might give Chinese leaders reasons to consider a predatory stance; this would be especially true if, as often claimed, Chinese leaders worry about losing domestic legitimacy. Insofar as major international crises and/or losses would also be detrimental to Chinese aspirations, however, the risk of blowback from the United States should still act as a major brake on Chinese policy – meaning, in practice, we might expect to see China engage in limited forms of predation against the US, but avoid an intense effort to overturn the status quo. 50 On US security efforts to address China’s rise, see Nina Silove, “The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia,” International Security 40, no. 4 (2016): 45–88; Mark E. Manyin et al., Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Administration’s Rebalancing Toward Asia, C R S Report for Congress (Washington, DC : Congressional Research Service, 2012). For the general pattern of response, see Gilpin, War and Change, ch. 5; Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1988). 51 Sebastian Rosato, “The Inscrutable Intentions of Great Powers,” International Security 39, no. 3 (Winter 2015/14): 48–88.

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52 On misperception in international politics, the canonical statement remains Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1976). On intelligence and ­policy-making, see Joshua Rovner, Fixing the Facts: National Security and the Politics of Intelligence (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2011). 53 Shifrinson, Rising Titans, 37–8.

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8 American Decline, Liberal Hegemony, and the Transformation of World Politics G. John Ikenberry

Only a decade ago, the great debate in world politics was about how to deal with an over-powerful America. It was the unipolar moment. The Cold War was over and the United States did not face any serious geopolitical or ideological challengers. Never before had one country been so powerful and unrivaled. The United States began the 1990s as the only superpower and it continued to extend its economic and military advantages throughout the decade. The globalization of the world economy and the flourishing of democracy and markets reinforced American economic and political dominance. Under these new conditions of unipolarity, the world found itself in the midst of a geopolitical adjustment process. Governments had to figure out how an American-centred unipolar system would operate. Will a unipolar world be built around rules and institutions or the unilateral exercise of American power? Questions about how a unipolar world would operate, including the most basic questions about the character of world politic – namely, who benefits and who commands – were at the centre of world politics and scholarly debates.1 Today, as the introduction to this volume shows, the debate has changed. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a world economic downturn, and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is not American hyper-power that impresses the world but American weakness. The rise of China and shifts in the distribution of wealth and power away from the West to the non-Western world reinforce the sense of a coming end to the American era. The “end of unipolarity” that has now commanded the world’s attention. Again, governments are asking questions about how a post-unipolar and post-hegemonic world order

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will operate. If the world is moving “back to multipolarity,” will it be a stable system of great power co-operation or will it usher in an unstable and dangerous period of security competition and balance of power politics? Will the rise of China and other non-Western developing states, such as India and Brazil, divide the world between the West and “the rest?” Or will the old and new powers – those rising and those declining – find a way to engage in a concert-based system of shared leadership? In the background, scholars are also asking: If the world becomes less dominated by the United States, will it also become less dominated by liberal ideas about world order? If the American era is ending, is the great era of liberal internationalism also giving way?2 This chapter looks at the various pathways of American unipolar decline and the ways in which world politics might be transformed. My starting point is that the United States faces two options: retrenchment or engagement. Depending on which coping strategies US leaders adopt, rising states will react to American decline with coping strategies of their own. I consider different possibilities from the volume’s introduction, including retrenchment, competition, prevention, and engagement. Decline has an impact on international order, in this case on the liberal world order, so understanding the interaction between the strategies of decliners and risers matters. If the ability of the hegemon to provide public goods diminishes, how are “beneficiary” states liable to react, and how will their reactions impact world order? While the decline of Russia after the Cold War illustrates the negative dynamic of retrenchment followed by prevention and competition, leading to conflict, the transition from British to US leadership in the twentieth century illustrates a positive outcome in which engagement remains the dominant strategy. Two sets of variables will give shape to these alternative futures. One variable is the underlying distribution of power. It will matter how fast and how far power shifts away from the United States. The United States has experienced economic crises in the past and emerged stronger in the aftermath. It also matters whether the distribution of material capabilities diffuses outward to a wide array of rising states or if one country – namely, China – emerges as a powerful successor to the United States. Another set of variables relates to the strategic reactions of countries around the world to American relative decline, which are partly based on perceptions. This is a question about the “demand” for American hegemonic leadership. Will the elites of rising

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powers seek to remain tied to the United States and support a more modest American-led hegemonic order, or will their leaders make strategic moves away from this geopolitical formation? Can the United States continue to make commitments, provide security, and offer indispensable leadership – in other words, can it remain engaged even if its overall aggregate power position has weakened or declined? In this chapter, I argue that shifts in the material distribution of capabilities will gradually erode the unipolar system. But the implications of this erosion of unipolar power are not as catastrophic for the “old order” as some suggest. The United States will need to share power with other great powers in ways that it has not in the past. It will partially retrench from certain regional orders. We will likely observe more economic competition among the declining and rising powers, as well as local cases of military prevention. But the world is not in the throes of a classic power transition because past and possible continued engagement on the part of the US will shape the international order. In the classic model of a power transition, the dominant world power enters into long-term decline and the order it has built and ran begins to unravel. New challengers emerge that seek to translate their rising power into influence and control over international order. The old order reflected the interests of the declining hegemonic state and rising states seek to reorganize the system to accord with their interests. A struggle ensues, and the power transition ultimately yields a reorganized international order. A rise and decline of great powers leads to long-term shifts in the distribution of power – and the rules and institutions of the global system are transformed. This is not what is happening today. The relative decline of the United States is a manifestation of the success of the liberal international order that it has led for the last half-century. It is, to use the introduction’s framework, a result of the United States’ strategy of engagement, which has been institutionalized to such an extent that states are rising within the existing order and not outside of it. While China does not fully embrace the ideas and principles of this order, it is nonetheless at least partially a stakeholder within it. The wider grouping of liberal, capitalist, and democratic states – some of whom are rising while others are declining – do not seek to overturn the existing order. They seek to gain greater authority and rights within this liberal international order, but they do not challenge its deep principles and organizational logic. At the same time, the United States is seen by many of these

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rising states as an essential component of the stable functioning of this order. There is, in effect, still a demand for American hegemonic leadership; put differently, the main coping strategy adopted by the United States, that of engagement, has worked. As such, I argue the leaders of those states are likely to develop their own strategies for coping with US decline to maintain it in some forms. While the United States still has a strategic interest in pursuing a grand strategy of hegemonic leadership, there are a variety of strategies leaders may develop to deal with the situation. In the terms of this volume, geopolitics is not fate. Foreign policy elites have the capacity to formulate strategies and leaders can make decisions that are consequential for the United States and for world order. It is possible that we might witness an unravelling of American hegemony, but more likely we will witness some form of renegotiation of the liberal world order. American allies are likely to remain so. This outcome rests on the high likelihood of continued support by American allies due to the benefits they receive from the current system. After all, the current arrangement is superior to most other alternatives. Leaders realize the most probable alternative to US hegemony is a return to the security dilemma, with a mix of retrenchment and prevention, and an attendant decline in the overall provision of public goods. The resulting international order will be less American in character, but it will still bear the markings of the ideas and institutions that the United States has championed over the decades. This chapter begins by looking at the various pathways away from unipolarity. I then examine various strategic reactions to American relative decline. These strategic reactions hinge on the extent of American power decline and the degree to which there remains a demand for American hegemony and its credible provision. Finally, I look at the way in which rising states have stakes in the existing liberal order and incentives to build multilateral forms of great power co-operation. The world is experiencing the diffusion of power into the hands of more states, but this is not a world transition that it best seen as a “return to multipolarity.” Rather, it is better seen as a transition of leadership within an unfolding liberal world order. p a s s a g e s aw ay f r o m u n i p o l a r i t y

At the end of the twentieth century, the United States stood at the pinnacle of world politics. Geopolitical power was highly concentrated

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in the hands of a single state. The distribution of power was “out of balance.”3 In strict accounting terms, the United States may have been more powerful at the end of World War II. At that juncture, the war had seen rival great powers beaten down and the United States had a commanding share of world GDP, industrial production, advanced weapons, modern technology, and financial and gold reserves. But by the end of the 1990s, the United States had achieved an even greater position of dominance. Many observers expected the end of the Cold War to usher in a multipolar order with increasingly equal centres of power in Asia, Europe, and America. Instead, the United States began the decade as the world’s only superpower and proceeded to grow more powerful at the expense of the other major states. Between 1990 and 1998, the United States’ GD P grew 27 per cent, Europe’s grew 16 per cent, and Japan’s grew 7 per cent. At the turn of the decade, the American economy was equal to the economies of Japan, Britain, and Germany combined. The American military also was in a league of its own. It spent as much on defence as the next fourteen countries combined. It had bases in forty countries. Behind the American ascendency were wider global transformations – democratic transitions, market reforms, alliance expansions, and deepened economic cooperation – that seemed to suggest that the United States was at the vanguard of a modernizing global system and the rest of the world was following in its path. American power after World War II and after the Cold War provided the basis for the building and expansion of an American-led international order. During and after the Cold War, although it conducted preventive strategies at the regional level, the United States mostly engaged with others to create a liberal hegemonic order. It is an order built around open trade, multilateral institutions, alliances, client states, and democratic solidarity. It is an order in which the United States has been first among equals. It is an order in which the United States has provided various sorts of general public goods – that is, it has provided security for other states within regions and across the global system, supported an open world economy, generated resources and leadership to manage economic and political crises, protected sea lanes and the political stability of oil-exporting states. The American dollar and the US domestic market have been integral to the running of an open and expanding world economy. Special relationships and grand bargains have been the strategic underbelly of this hegemonic order.4

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In thinking about American “decline” and the transformation of world politics, it is important to keep in mind these two storylines. One concerns the distribution of power and the other is about the “political formation” that has been built “on top of” the distribution of power. To talk about “unipolarity” is to focus on the distribution of material capabilities. To talk about “hegemony” or “liberal hegemony” is to focus on the political formation that exists among states, reflected in the prevailing rules, institutions, relationships, and practices that aggregate together as international order. In this light, the question is: As America’s share of global material capacities declines, what will be the implications for international order? There is wide agreement that the unipolar distribution of power has indeed begun to erode. This might be seen most simply by the changing percentage shares of world GDP. As China, India, and other non-Western developing states have grown in recent decades, their shares of GDP have risen and America’s share has declined – and these trends seem destined to continue. According to Arvind Subramanian’s much-discussed study, China, India, and several other market-oriented developing countries are fast emerging as the largest economies. “According to the projections, between 2010 and 2039 emerging markets and developing economies will increase their share of world GDP (at market-based exchange rates) by a whopping 19 percentage points and by 15 percentage points at PPP exchange rates … China’s share of world GDP (in PPP dollars) will increase from 17 percent in 2010 to 24 percent in 2030, and India’s share will increase from 5 to 10 percent. China’s economy (in PPP dollars) will be more than twice that of the United States by 2030.”5 Even if these trends are not realized, the future will surely be one in which the US economy – and perhaps its larger basket of power assets – will be smaller relative to the rest of the world than it is today. We can, however, make some distinctions between different pathways that lead away from American unipolarity. There are different ways and degrees to which the US position can weaken. To begin, we can make a distinction between two major pathways of relative economic decline. We start with a focus on shifts in economic size and growth and go on to look at wider changes in the distribution of power capabilities. In one scenario, the United States makes a sharp and permanent economic decline. Other countries – China, India, and other developing states – continue on a path of rapid growth. The United States,

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however, continues to stagnate. American economic weakness may be a result of long-term technological and demographic shifts as well as failures of public policy. In any case, the United States finds itself in a radically weaker economic position. America’s slow-growth economy and the dramatic advances of other emerging economies alter the global geopolitical landscape. The United States is not undergoing a “slow fade” but rather a “sharp drop.” Economic crises of one sort or another might propel this economic weakening – systemic bank failure, currency crisis, debt ceiling fiasco, etc. As this scenario unfolds, the United States is no longer the leading economic world power. China and perhaps a few other countries emerge as major players in the world economy. The centre of gravity of the global trade and financial system shifts toward China and the non-Western developing world. The United States loses its economic capacities to lead. In these circumstances, countries around the world see a future in which the United States has less power and influence. According to some observers – including Julian Go, in chapter 6 in this volume – there is a risk that the United States will contemplate preventive wars. Others worry about the temptation of isolationism. Basic questions about global security, alliances, and governance of the world economy open up. In a second scenario, the shifts in the distribution of economic capabilities are less sudden and dramatic. Non-Western states continue to grow more rapidly than the United States, but there is a gradual narrowing of the growth gaps. China’s growth rate comes down from 9 per cent to something closer to 3 or 4 per cent.6 The United States, on the other hand, stabilizes its economy and returns to a more solid economic position. Advantages in technology, skills, education, finance, and domestic political institutions give the United States the capacities to rebound. Again, the United States does not return to its old era of unipolar dominance, but the world economy moves more slowly to a more integrated and diffuse system of markets. In this scenario, the United States is in relative economic decline, but it is not losing position to one specific rising state. Growth rates are converging and the world is becoming more integrated. In this situation, the world is not experiencing a transition of power from the United States to China. The United States has less weight as a player in the world economy, there is more economic competition than in the past, but it is playing on a field on which many countries are competing. The United States can still exercise leadership within a wider coalition of states. The

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global system looks less like an end of the American era than it does a transition to a more pluralistic system of politics and economics. As these two scenarios suggest, there are a variety of variables that will shape the nature of the transition away from a system of unipolar power. The extent and character of shifts in the distribution of economic growth and size will matter. If the shift is rapid, dramatic, and serves to propel China upward into a position as the world’s leading economic power, the stage will be set for far-reaching shifts in political alignments and leadership. The chances increase that divides may break out between groups of states tied to the United States and China. Blocks and divisions could emerge tied to America’s democratic and China’s authoritarian style of capitalism and politics, heightening the risks of prevention. On the other hand, if the shifts in the distribution of economic growth and size are more gradual and diffused more widely around the world, the possibilities grow for there to be continuities in leadership and the rules and institutions of the global system. The world looks less like it is in the throes of a grand power transition and more like it is undergoing a slow global process of diffusion and convergence. There is more competition but no specific state “replaces” the United States as the global economic or geopolitical leader. Beyond this, there are other variables that matter in the character of post-unipolar world politics. As Jonathan Sachs shows in chapter 1, the measurement of decline is not a straightforward exercise. The share of world GD P is not the only or even most decisive indicator of power capacities. This is particularly the case where economic capacities are widely distributed. A wider variety of assets – science and technology, education, demography, political institutions, capacities for partnership and learning – are also relevant. While we should not be deterministic, the geographic position of a state can matter in shaping its capacity to project power and influence. The United States is unique among the great powers in regard to its geographical position. Other states, including China, are situated in crowded regions in which other great powers exist, and so the growth of their power risks triggering a balancing backlash. The United States has been able to grow in economic and military power over the last century within a region where this threat of backlash does not exist. And even today, American power is seen as less threatening because of the remote position it occupies in the global system.7

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There are other variables that will also shape the degree to which American economic decline triggers a more general decline in the American-led hegemonic order. The United States has played a leading role over the last half-century by virtue of its willingness to engage with others and to organize and run a hegemonic order. It has provided security, supported open markets, and stabilized the global system during and after the Cold War. The question today is whether countries around the world that have willingly operated inside of this hegemonic order want to remain within it. That is in large part a question of perceptions. Is there still a “demand” for American hegemony? The related question concerns the ability of the United States to “supply” hegemony. Will the United States be less willing and able to pay the price of an extended hegemonic order as its share of the world economic product declines? Will US leaders want to continue to engage as the country’s relative decline becomes more apparent to the elite? It might be that countries would like to continue gaining the benefits of this hegemonic order, but the United States will be less able to pay the costs. The choices that leaders have about support or opposition to American hegemonic leadership will also presumably hinge on whether there is another state – such as China – that might step forward to offer hegemonic services. It is actually not clear that China could or would be willing and able to do so. Can an authoritarian capitalist state play the role of the world’s hegemon when the other leading states in the world are liberal, capitalist, and democratic? But can the United States continue to be a credible hegemonic leader when the world can clearly see the coming end of its economic dominance? And if the choices before the world are either support for a declining and increasingly weak American hegemon or a world without a hegemon, what will these states do? Finally, there is the question of American grand strategy. The United States has pursued a strategy of hegemonic leadership since the end of World War II. With relative economic decline – and problems of domestic political gridlock – will the United States come to a point in the future where it will rethink this forward-deployed hegemonic grand strategy? Alternative strategies of retrenchment, prevention, and offshore balancing do exist. Questions have been raised inside the United States in the last decade about the costs and prudence of maintaining such an extended global military and political presence. Although the leading voices within the American political establishment still support the global system of alliances and extended strategic

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commitments, contrarian voices are on the rise.8 The debate is not simply about whether the United States can afford to pay for its global hegemonic role. There is also the question of whether this role actually generates security and stability or whether it simply subsidizes other countries who should be paying for their own security. If the United States did “pull the plug” on its own hegemonic order, a farreaching global transformation will be triggered.9 We can now look at various ways that the leaders of rising states might react to American relative decline. The next section looks at the coping strategies implying diversification away from American hegemonic leadership that may be used by rising powers if their leaders feel that the United States is retrenching. I identify four possibilities: security hedging, whereby other states try to develop alternative, region-specific forms of engagement; a renewed security dilemma, which increases the likelihood of preventive strategies; the building of regional orders, with strategies of imitation and innovation leading some states to get closer to each other; and reduced co-operation overall, leading to the temptation of isolationism among elites abandoned by the US. The quick decline of Russia after the Cold War, which Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem document in chapter 5 of this volume, provides an illustration of how these coping strategies may play out to produce a negative outcome. The next section, however, looks at the coping strategies that could be adopted if leaders believe the United States is not retrenching, but rather renegotiating its engagement in the world order. I predict that rising states would respond to US engagement with various forms of their own engagement in the institutionalized order. This would include reformist stakeholder strategies to bring innovation to the international order and acceptance of burden sharing on the part of rising states who would imitate US practices. The relatively smooth transition from British to US leadership in the twentieth century provides a historical case for such a positive set of coping strategies. a m e r i c a n d e c l i n e a n d t h e s e a r c h f o r a lt e r n at i v e s to hegemonic orders

How might various rising powers respond to American relative decline? How might states that have tied themselves to this order respond when its hegemonic sponsor steadily loses its capacities? How might friends and rivals rethink their strategies? This volume

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identities the strategies employed by hegemons to cope with their own decline, but in so doing it raises the question: What kind of coping strategies are likely to be used by states benefitting from the public goods provided by American hegemony? An economically weakened America could be less capable and less reliable as a hegemonic leader engaged with others. States might need to begin to make alternative plans – or at least hedge against a future in which the US is less of a presence. States that have tied themselves to the United States will begin to think about other ways to secure themselves. If the United States is no longer the “vanguard state” – the most advanced and progressive state in the system – governments and peoples will start to look to other states for leadership and models of state, market, and modernity. If the United States is no longer the “hub” of the global system around which security and economic relationships are organized, elites and leaders will begin to identify fallback options. They will hedge against a more dramatic and irreversible American decline. Security Hedging The most straightforward response to American retrenchment might be among allies – that is, old friends who will begin to rethink their reliance on the US for security. If the second scenario holds, and decline is gradual and economic gains are diffused widely, these moments of strategic rethinking may come gradually. But if the first scenario holds – that is, if the US experiences a steep and rapid economic downturn – these existential strategic moments may be more dramatic, explicit, and unavoidable. At the very least, American allies might well begin to think about or act to hedge against a future in which the United States really is forced to retrench and radically scale back its global security commitments. There are various ways that leaders of US-allied states might engage in security hedging. First, they may simply seek to develop more military capabilities on their own to guard against an existential moment when the American provision of security ends. Japan, for example, may act more decisively to amend its peace constitution and expand its military capabilities. It already has latent nuclear capabilities. But new worries about the credibility of the American nuclear umbrella may lead Tokyo to take additional steps to advance its nuclear

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programs and prepare for actually building nuclear weapons. South Korea and other states in Asia and the Middle East may also go down this path. The key strategic objective is to become less dependent on the US for security by building greater national capabilities.10 Second, states may find themselves seeking new forms of security co-operation within regions, a sort of deeper, alternative regionspecific engagement. For example, Japan and South Korea might step up their military-to-military dialogues and begin to talk about actual security partnership. American-led security in East Asia is built around hub-and-spokes security ties. This hub-and-spoke system could gradually give way to more within-region bilateral and multilateral security ties. In Europe, N A T O would also be downgraded as the anchor of European security. Europeans might either decide to go forward with a more unified E U -centred security system or they might simply muddle through with a less capable collective system of defence. Third, states that are allied to the United States might also pursue more forthcoming strategies of engagement – even appeasement – toward security rivals within their region. For example, Japan and South Korea might move to upgrade their trilateral dialogues with China, doing so with the expectation that regional security “understandings” would be hammered out for a future in which the United States is not actively providing alliance-based security. States in East Asia will reluctantly cut deals with China that reduce tensions and ratify China’s dominant position.11 As Aaron Friedberg notes, to the extent that the United States is seen as being in long-term decline relative to China, or, even worse, if it appears irresolute, incompetent, unwilling, or simply unable to fulfill its security commitments, other governments could well conclude that they have no choice but to reconsider their national strategies. Some would probably try to build up their own defenses, perhaps acquiring nuclear weapons in hopes of deterring aggression and preserving a measure of independence. Others, demoralized and overmatched, might decide to distance themselves from the United States and cut the best deal they can with Beijing. Either way, America’s influence in Asia would be drastically reduced, and its run as the dominant player in the region would finally be at an end.12

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Cutting deals with China and acquiescing to its dominant position in the region could manifest in small or big steps. East Asian leaders might simply make concessions to China on certain issues, such as maritime territorial disputes, they might accept Chinese security assistance, or they might go further and sign treaty alliances. Meanwhile, western European governments – acknowledging the long-term decline in America’s capacities and willingness to station troops in Europe and lead N A T O – could step up their efforts to engage Russia. Various pan-European regional security schemes that Russia has proposed since the end of the Cold War could come back on the EU-Russian diplomatic table.13 Europe’s strategy toward Russia would be similar to Japan’s and South Korea’s strategy toward China. It would seek to settle disputes and develop working relations with Russia in anticipation of an era in which the United States is not watching Europe’s back. In each of these coping strategies, state leaders that are currently allied to the United States would be making decisions to diversify the sources of their security. Doing so does not require that the US itself make a sharp and abrupt decision to pull back from its security commitments. It only requires foreign policy elites to worry about this possibility. These elites might worry about both diminished underlying American economic capabilities and the political reliability of American security commitments. These moments of reassessment might follow from a decade in which the United States continues to reaffirm its security commitments but nonetheless takes steps to reduce troop levels and bases in Asia and Europe. The American security order would come to be widely seen as hollowed out, and security hedging emerges as an inevitable response. Rising Security-Dilemma Conflict America’s role as security provider to key states and regions is a hallmark of the postwar international order. This extended system of security co-operation – in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East – is widely seen as having had a stabilizing effect. The United States projected power into these regions. It forward deployed troops. It engaged in bilateral and multilateral security partnerships with key states. These extended commitments generated stability by helping to solve regional security dilemmas. If this American system of security weakens – and if the US begins to reduce and pull back from these regional

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commitments – security-dilemma-driven conflict could return or manifest itself in new ways.14 The stabilizing effect of the American alliance system is widely noted. In postwar Europe, some scholars have argued that NATO and the American military presence has served to “pacify” old rivals, providing security and reducing the uncertainty and mistrust that would otherwise spark security-dilemma-driven competition and conflict.15 In East Asia, scholars have argued that the US-Japan alliance has played a role in reducing the possibility for security-dilemma conflict between Japan and its neighbours, particularly China. The alliance provides security for Japan, making it unnecessary for Japan to build defensive military capacities – capacities that would alarm China and others in the region and trigger countermeasures.16 In the Middle East, the United States has underwritten the security of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf client states. This has served to dampen insecurity across the region. In each of these regions, the presence of the American out-of-region guarantee of security has helped to dampen security competition and the arms racing and other spirals of conflict that might otherwise break out. A reduced American presence in these regions would certainly generate worry among allies, and a complex and far-reaching chain reaction of policies and strategic adjustments reactions would follow. In Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia would surely be under pressure to expand their military capabilities for preventive purposes, including the acquisition of nuclear weapons.17 American security commitments and the nuclear umbrella are widely seen to have solved or pre-empted local security dilemmas, particularly in East Asia. If those commitments were withdrawn or seen to be in doubt, countries might be pressed to engage in military buildups or acquire nuclear weapons, with wide repercussions for the regional security environment.18 Uncertainty and insecurity would rapidly rise through the region as it faced a future marked by a rising China and an America that is both declining and reducing its security commitments. If the countries in the region do not find new ways to mitigate security-dilemma conflict, the “problems of anarchy” would increase. Arms races, security competition, nationalism, and balancing dynamics would intensify. Europe would presumably be less prone to security-dilemma-driven conflict. In the Middle East, America’s old client states, including Saudi Arabia, would need to look for new patrons.

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Regional Order Building During its era of global dominance, the United States has played a defining role in many of the world’s regions. It has projected power into Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East – providing security and stability and working with regional powers to organize economic and political order. In the words of Peter Katzenstein, the great regions of Asia and Europe turned into “penetrated regions,” geopolitical formations that fit within a larger American “imperium.”19 As America’s global position weakens – and as its capacity and reliability to act as a provider of order and stability decline – these regions will adjust. Leading states within these regions will look for ways to generate regional order and stability without an offshore American presence. Under conditions of American relative decline, there might be a general tendency for regions to develop more autonomous governance capacities; in other words, to imitate each other and develop collective political institutions. In the post-1945 era, the size and dynamism of the US economy attracted trade and investment, strengthened the “global” character of the world economy, and reduced relative regional economic autonomy. Europe and Asia both found themselves expanding their trade and investment with the United States, and intraregional trade and investment declined as a share of total world trade and investment. In effect, the globalization of the postwar world economy was a process in which trans-regional economic relations grew at the expense of intra-regional economic relations.20 As the United States declines relative to other states, this source of transregional economic integration will lose its efficacy. Absent the rise of another world power that takes America’s place – and perhaps this will be China – intra-regional trade and investment should rise in relative terms. After all, China is already the leading trade partner with most of the countries in East Asia. Regions should take on more of an integrated economic shape. With this growing economic regionalism, political relations will presumably follow. Regions will need to strengthen their ability to operate as regions. Asia is already travelling down this path. Intra-regional trade and investment in Asia is growing. Economic integration within the region is deepening. This is driving at least some of the political movement toward stronger regional institutional ties. Latin America is also experiencing a growth in intra-regional trade. There is also growth

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in trade between non-Western regions. Latin America and Asia are finding themselves more closely tied through trade and investment, driven in large part by China’s massive economic growth. In Europe, regionalism has its own logic, and it is not clear that American decline will have as profound an impact. Regional order building should also increase as regional leaders look for ways to stabilize their economies in the absence of an American hegemon. This tendency has already been seen in East Asia. Many in the region thought the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis was made worse by the failure of the United States and the I M F to come to East Asian nations’ rescue. The response was late and reflected American neo-liberal economic doctrine. In the aftermath of this crisis, the A S E A N countries, along with Japan, China, and South Korea, began discussions of region-wide financial stabilization mechanisms. The result was the Chiang Mai Initiative, which created a system of currency swaps and other standby arrangements to facilitate the management of future financial crises.21 This might be a model for future regional efforts in Asia and elsewhere to strengthen governance capacities. With US relative decline, we should expect more innovation this time around. Finally, there could also be new efforts by leaders in Asia and elsewhere to increase regional security co-operation. If the American security presence in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East is seen to be receding, there will be incentives for leaders to step forward with new regional-based security strategies. One danger that may increase with the withdrawal – or anticipated withdrawal – of American military forces and assistance is intra-regional security competition. Countries will worry about their own security and they will worry about the outbreak of security-dilemma conflict within the region. These dangers and worries – and their anticipation in the region – could trigger new efforts to build post-American regional security institutions. The US provided a “solution” to regional insecurity, but now regional players will need to find new solutions – doing so by engaging others within the region. Reduced Co-operation and Collective Action As the US declines in relative terms, states that currently co-operate with the United States may become more reluctant to do so. At a conference at Princeton University, a prominent Indian expert made

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precisely this argument: “If the impression of US decline gains deeper roots, India will cooperate less with the US.” The general logic of this view is straightforward. As the US becomes less powerful, its ability to do things to or for other states will decline. Its capacity to coerce, punish, influence, persuade, and attract other states will go down. As a result, other states will have fewer reasons to align themselves with the United States and do its bidding. America’s ability to shape the behaviour of other states will decline. US-led co-operation will decline, leading to an isolationist temptation in some countries. Many observers have argued that the era of American global dominance coincided with expanded international co-operation. It was a “hegemonic” order in the sense that the United States used its power to build institutions and relationships that fostered exchange and co-operation.22 If we are entering an era of diminished American power, this hegemonic source of co-operation will also erode. There are at least three causal logics at work.23 First, as noted above, a reduction in American material capabilities will reduce the resources available to the US to engage in co-operation building. It will have fewer carrots and sticks. Elites from different states will see that the US is weaker and they will be more reluctant to bend their policies in America’s direction. They will have fewer fears about not cooperating with the United States. Even before the US travels very far along the pathway of decline, leaders will begin to pay less attention to Washington. Second, America’s willingness to underwrite hegemonic co-operation will also decline.24 As the US declines, it will be less likely to identify its interests with the stability and openness of the overall system. It will be less willing to provide public goods or act on behalf of the international order as a whole. It was this impulse that made the US a hegemonic leader. It built institutions and relationships that strengthened the overall capacity of the international system to work together, solve problems, and engage in collective action. With the erosion of this hegemonic impulse, the US will spend less time and energy upholding those institutions and relationships. It will be less willing to engage in co-operation building. Third, as America declines, its credibility and reliability as a leader is likely to also decline. It is not just that the US is less powerful, it will also be seen as a less dependable and authoritative global leader. After all, the US will be showing the world that it is unable to get its domestic political and economic house in order. It has failed to reverse its own decline. The credibility of American commitments

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will weaken. Its reputation as a competent and capable leader will decline. The “risk premium” for dealing with the United States will go up. This sort of global reaction might have been foreshadowed in the August 2011 “debt ceiling” crisis. The United States revealed itself as just short of incapable of preventing a massive self-inflicted financial wound – a crisis that threatened the entire global financial system. Governments around the world will continue to watch this spectacle of American political stalemate and policy mismanagement and they will make new risk calculations about whether to continue to work with the US or to start to diversify relationships. In these various ways, American-led co-operation will decline and – absent a new hegemonic leader or other new impulses for co-operation – the overall capacity of the international system to engage in co-operation and collective action will also decline. c o n t i n u i t y , c o l l a b o r at i o n , a n d t h e c o n t i n u i n g d e m a n d for american hegemony

Another set of possibilities involves not an unravelling of American hegemony but its renegotiation. Countries that are currently allied to the United States remain so. This set of outcomes hinges on the view of many foreign policy elites – even those not closely tied to the United States – that the existing order, despite its faults, is better than most alternatives, and indeed the most likely alternative to US hegemony or a renegotiated liberal international order is less order, more security dilemmas, and a decline in the provision of public goods. Stakeholder Strategies A wide variety of elites around the world have made long-term strategic choices to tie themselves to the American-led international order. These ties might be political, economic, or security-related, or all three. As they watch American decline, they will ask certain critical questions: What are the alternatives to the American-led order? Who is going to lead and what sort of order will emerge in the aftermath of American decline? These questions do not generate happy answers for most. The alternatives to the current strategic arrangements are not easy to identify; no easy options can be found. There certainly do not appear to be options that are less costly or more stable. Under these circumstances, the leaders of many major states will seek to keep the existing hegemonic order working as long as possible.

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In this setting, we might expect to see what can be called “stakeholder” strategies by major states. Allies – such as Japan and the Europeans – will pursue policies to forestall an American hegemonic decline. Other states – such as India and Brazil – will take steps to become more active stakeholders in the existing system. The United States would welcome this type of response. This coping strategy of engagement might already be manifest today, for example, in the “institutional reform” agenda, which aims to “integrate rising powers.” Under the circumstances sketched here, the leaders of rising powers will respond favourably to US engagement. Their thinking is straightforward. The United States is in relative decline but the order that the US has led over the last half-century is one they would still like to keep. America’s position within the wider order will decline. So to preserve that wider order we will need to step up and play a more active role. They need to work with the United States to reform and expand that liberal international order because if they do not, the United States may itself be forced to take steps to withdraw from it or the order may simply break apart out of neglect. What is the “stakeholder” agenda? It essentially involves innovation by reforming and expanding the liberal international order. The Obama administration’s “order building” vision, contained in its national security strategy, fits with this agenda. It also involves engaging rising powers. It is seen in the formal shift from the G 8 to the G20, which was a very deliberate decision to co-opt countries such as China, India, and Brazil.25 The stakeholder agenda is also manifest in efforts to reallocate rights and authority – away from Europe and toward the rising non-Western states – in the IMF and World Bank. Reform of the UN Security Council is another aspect of this agenda. The G4 – Japan, India, Germany, and Brazil – will be encouraged to go forward with a proposal for expanding the Security Council. Overall, the stakeholder agenda involves a grand bargain between the United States (and the other declining Western states) and the rising non-Western states. These rising states will gain authority and “seats at the table” within the existing international order, and in return they will undertake new responsibilities and shoulder new burdens. Subsidizing the Costs of Hegemony A companion strategic option for states is to actually take steps to save the American-led order. Their leaders could do a variety of things

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to take some of the pressure – economic and otherwise – off the US position, allowing it to maintain sufficient capabilities to keep the system going. The calculation for key states is the same as the stakeholder strategy. Their leaders calculate that the alternatives to the existing system are either unavailable, too costly, or unattractive. So they make efforts to save the existing order. In this case, they make efforts to shore up America’s hegemonic position and pay more of its costs.26 There are several ways that states might do this. Allies might buy American debt even when they have opportunities to put their capital surpluses elsewhere. They may agree to give the United States more favourable terms for the stationing of US troops on their soil.27 They may agree to assume more of the financial burdens of funding the United Nations and its peace operations. They might agree to new free trade agreements with the United States that keep it tied to Asia and other regions. They might support the United States in various global governance venues when they might have done otherwise only a decade ago. States might decide to join the United States in putting pressure on capital surplus countries, such as China, to adjust their exchange rates or open their markets.28 This is not a new dynamic. At various moments in the postwar era, the United States has been able to externalize the costs of economic adjustment onto other states as part of the “cost” that other states paid for hegemonic services. For example, in the 1970s, Germany and Japan agreed to hold dollars beyond what might otherwise make economic sense with the understanding that it was part of a larger economic-security bargain with the United States.29 In effect, this strategy involves efforts from various states to save American hegemony by agreeing to be “taxed” more heavily for the hegemonic provision of stability and openness. It entails efforts to redistribute and share the costs of American hegemony. The general architecture of the international order is to remain in place, but the cost structure is to be renegotiated. In agreeing to be taxed more heavily, the leaders of these states are making a calculation that the alternatives to a more “expensive” American hegemonic order is still more costly and risky. The United States, in turn, will encourage greater burden sharing. Its strategy is to try to preserve its hegemonic position by getting others to pay more of its costs.30 This is, of course, a classic – if not always successful – strategy for a declining hegemonic state. In War and Change in World Politics,

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Robert Gilpin argues that declining hegemons often resort to increased domestic taxation and efforts to extract tribute from other states. Athens, for example, attempted to do this, although, as Gilpin notes, “Athens’s ‘allies’ revolted against Athenian demands for increased tribute.” Gilpin also points to indirect methods for generating revenue, such as inflationary policies and manipulating the terms of trade with other countries.31 In his study of British decline, Aaron Friedberg recounts Britain’s unsuccessful attempts during the 1895–1905 period to forge new arrangements with its self-governing colonies for sharing the burden of naval costs. The plan had little success, as colonies refused to contribute much toward their own protection.32 A Return to the British Model These strategies seek to keep the international order stable and open, with the United States playing a diminished role. The model for this sort of “minimalist” hegemonic order might be Britain in the late nineteenth century. Britain was a less dominant state in the nineteenth century than the US has been in the twentieth, and yet it was able to shape and lead the system. It was not unipolar but it was hegemonic, at least in critical respects. The United States – if other states acted to support it – might be able to survive as a hegemon or coalition leader even while its overall relative power assets are diminished. Britain offers a model in two respects. First, the gap between British power capabilities and the other great powers during the nineteenth century was never as great as the gap between the United States and other major states in the more recent era. In 1830, Russia and France were roughly the same size at Britain in terms of G D P . In 1870, the United States and Russia were both a fraction larger than Britain. In 1913, the United States, Russia, and Germany all had larger economies than Britain. In terms of military capabilities, in 1830, France had greater military expenditures than Britain, and Russia was close behind. By 1872, France and Russia were both ahead of Britain in military spending and by 1913, Germany had also surpassed Britain in military spending.33 To the extent that Britain did play a hegemonic role – protecting the seas, fostering world trade, stabilizing global finance, playing a balancing role in Europe – it did so without towering far above the other great powers. Second, even when other states overtook Britain in various power capabilities, London continued to play a leadership role. As Richard

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Lachmann documents in chapter 3 of this volume, Britain combined some innovation and economic competition. The hegemonic system that took shape in the early nineteenth century lasted into the early twentieth century. In various ways, other states had bought into the British-led system and that system lasted longer than might have been predicted given the shifting distribution of power. The United States may have had more economic capabilities by the 1870s, but it did not use them to wrench hegemonic leadership away from Britain until a half-century later. w h at d o e s t h e f u t u r e h o l d ?

In this chapter, I have argued that rising powers develop their own strategies to deal with the hegemon’s decline. These strategies are conditional on the declining state’s own coping strategy. Whether the decliner decides to retrench or continue to engage makes a significant difference to leaders’ calculations. Although I have laid out the different options, there are strong reasons to believe that both the United States and rising powers will continue to engage with the Americancreated international order. Are we really about to witness a realist-style cycle of power transition? There are several reasons to be skeptical. To begin, the nature of the American-led order is different than past international orders. The contemporary liberal-oriented world order has distinctive features. It is a hierarchical order, but it is more liberal than imperial. It is a deeply institutionalized order – more so than any other order in world history. It is an order built around liberal rules and norms of nondiscrimination and market openness, creating conditions for a wide range of states to participate within the order and advance their economic and political interests. Across history, international orders have varied widely in terms of whether the material benefits that are generated accrue disproportionately to the leading state or are more widely distributed. In the American-led order, the barriers to entry are low and the potential benefits are high. The “profits” of participation in an open, loosely rule-based order are spread widely. It is an order in which an array of states is able to exercise leadership. At the heart of this order are the advanced industrial democracies. In various governing institutions – the G 7 / 8 , the I M F and World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the US-led security alliances – these liberal states are able to share leadership. Within a wide variety of

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multilateral institutions, alliances, governance coalitions, and informal special relationships, states have access and voice.34 Many benefit from the current organization of the international system. As such, a set of coping strategies designed to maintain these positive externalities is more likely than strategic hedging and a return to the politics of security dilemmas. These features of the liberal hegemonic order have made it relatively open and accessible – and therefore legitimate, and therefore durable. Its rules and institutions are rooted in and reinforced by the evolving global forces of the liberal ascendency – that is, the rise of liberal democratic states to global dominance during the twentieth century. This is a liberal-oriented order that has a wide and widening array of participants and stakeholders. In all these ways, in comparison with past international orders, it is easier to join and harder to overturn. It is hard to envisage how a rival hegemonic state – such as China – could offer an alternative set of ideas or organizational arrangements that could generate an equal amount of access, consent, and legitimacy. If this characterization of the American-led hegemonic order is correct, the realist model of power transition may not hold. The order is not simply organized to serve the interests of the United States. It is an order with rules and principles that offer attractions and opportunities to a wider range of states. Even today, rising non-Western developing states, such as India and Brazil, are deeply embedded in this order. The trading system – and the rules and institutions behind it – is critical for the growth and modernization of these emerging states. The rules of non-discrimination and dispute settlement create tools for rising states to protect their interests and guard against discrimination by the older Western states. The overall complex of liberal-oriented institutions provides frameworks and platforms for these emerging states to project leadership and influence. If most of the major states in the global system are stakeholders in this liberal hegemonic order, the causal logic of hegemonic rise and decline becomes more complicated. Countries within the hegemonic order may rise in power and seek to gain greater authority within this order, but they may try to do so without attacking the more general ideas and principles of the order. The struggle between the United States and these rising non-Western developing states will be over the “distribution of authority” within the order – and not over the deep organizational principles of the order.35 The question is not whether the relative economic decline of the United States will lead

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to a new type of international order. The question is how and to what extent the United States remains engaged and moves to share its authority and privileges with other states. Moreover, because this order is so deeply institutionalized and supported by the leading liberal democracies, it is difficult to see the circumstances that might trigger a hegemonic war or other type of world-wrenching crisis that could trigger a hegemonic transition. The great order creating moments in history occurred in the aftermath of war between great powers. It was not just the slow relative economic decline of the leading state that led to a reorganization of global order, it was a war between rising and declining great powers that cleared the way for order building. The years 1713, 1815, 1848, 1919, and 1945 were the great moments when underlying shifts in wealth and power led to wars and postwar settlements. If the current world order does not “end” in a war, the question is: Will the order itself really end? Without some sort of catastrophic upheaval in the global system, the existing order might simply persist and evolve, albeit more slowly. Stepping back, it is important to make a basic distinction between the various ways that a more “multipolar” distribution of power might manifest. A “return to multipolarity” can be a more or less order-transforming event.36 The first step toward multipolarity is simply manifest in a diffusion of power from the unipolar state. Other states grow more quickly and gain in relative wealth and material capabilities. There is wide agreement that the global system is undergoing this sort of change. The second step toward multipolarity involves the rise of new “poles” of power. Here states that gain wealth and material capabilities start to take on their own identity as independent leaders of the global system. They each have their own networks and allies. An array of smaller states and commercial and political relationships crystallize around each pole. A third and final step toward multipolarity involves the activation of strategic rivalry and security competition between these new poles of power. For example, military mobilization and arms competition would be markers of multipolarity defined in this most dynamic and potentially dangerous way. But the world can move to “step one” in the return to multipolarity without going to “step two.” And the world can go to “step two” in the return to multipolarity without going to “step three.” If the major liberal democratic states are tied to each other in dense multilateral institutions, complex interdependencies, and alliance partnerships, is it really likely that a full-blown

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“return to multipolarity” will manifest – even if American relative economic decline continues?

notes



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This chapter was adapted by Jean-François Bélanger and Frédéric Mérand from an earlier draft, on which I received helpful comments from Alexander Lanoszka, Adam Liff, Randy Schweller, and Bill Wohlforth. My own writings on these questions include G. John Ikenberry, America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2001); Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William Wohlforth, eds, International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and a National Intelligence Council–commissioned paper, “Strategic Reactions to American Preeminence: Great Power Politics in the Age of Unipolarity,” 28 July 2003. For recent statements in this debate, see Charles Kupchan, No One’s World: The West, The Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Robert Kagan, The World America Made (New York: Knopf, 2012). Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2008). For a more detailed portrait of the American hegemonic order, see G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2011). The key point about the American hegemonic order is that it is not just the US “acting on the world.” Hegemonic order is a political formation – that is, it is a sort of primitive political system with various organizational features such as hierarchy, roles, rights, and a division of labour. Arvind Subramanian, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance (Washington, DC: Peter Institute for International Economics, 2011), 81–3. If China slows quickly over the next decade to 3 or 4 per cent, even if it continues to grow in nominal terms at a faster rate, it is China, and not the United States, that is likely to face the most difficult internal and external challenges. As one journalist amusingly said at a recent conference at Princeton University: “If you are declining less fast than other states, are you really rising?”

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  7 See William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World,” International Security 21, no. 1 (1999): 5–41; and Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance.   8 There are arguments being made in Washington foreign policy circles that it is time for the United States to begin to selectively curtail military commitments abroad. See Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. MacDonald, “The Wisdom of Retrenchment,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 6 (November– December 2011): 32–47.   9 For a survey of this debate and a critique of “off-shore balancing,” see Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Don’t Come Home America: The Case against Retrenchment,” International Security 37, no. 3 (2012–13): 7–51. 10 There is a parallel here with the 1970s, when the United States last found itself in an economic crisis with far-reaching global consequences. With the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a decade of economic stagflation, the Nixon administration took some steps to reduce American defence burdens and overseas security commitments. This retrenchment of defence burdens made some allies worry – even panic – and triggered initial steps in various capitals to prepare for greater selfprotection. In the case of South Korea, this included taking the first steps toward a nuclear weapons program, including securing a deal with France for the delivery of a plutonium reprocessing facility. In April 1975, the US stepped in to put pressure on South Korea to cancel the program and ratify the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Despite this, later in the year the Korean government indicated that it would need to recommence work toward a nuclear capability should the US nuclear umbrella be removed. See Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton, N J : Princeton University Press, 2007), 83–4 and 91. 11 Some scholars argue that these states are already appeasing or bandwagoning with China. See David Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power and Order in East Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), and Robert Ross, “Balance of Power Politics and the Rise of China: Accommodation and Balancing in East Asia,” Security Studies 15, no. 3 (2006): 355–95. This observation, however, is widely debated. 12 Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: Norton, 2011), 213–14. 13 See, for example, Judy Dempsey, “Russian Proposal for European Security Would Sideline N ATO,” New York Times, 27 July 2008, http://www. nytimes.com/2008/07/27/world/europe/27iht-nato.3.14811668.html.

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14 The classic account of the security dilemma comes from Thucydides. For important scholarly explorations of the security dilemma, see John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950): 157–80, and Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, no. 2 (1978): 167–214. 15 See, for example, Josef Joffe, “Europe’s American Pacifier,” Foreign Policy 54 (1984): 64–82. 16 See Thomas J. Christensen, “China, the U.S.-Japan Alliance, and the Security Dilemma in East Asia,” International Security 23, no. 4 (1999): 49–80. For a more recent discussion, see Adam P. Liff and G. John Ikenberry, “Racing Toward Tragedy? China’s Rise, Military Competition in the Asia Pacific, and the Security Dilemma,” International Security 39, no. 2 (2014): 52–91. 17 One of the drivers of Australia’s military buildup since 2008 seems to be a fear that the US will be less able or less willing to maintain its power projection capabilities in the region. The concern is more about the ability/ willingness of the US to maintain the current disparities in capabilities itself and China as China builds up, rather than a belief that the US will simply cut and run. But the effects are the same, at least up to a point. 18 Worries by allies about the future of America’s security commitment could lead these states to try to pressure the US for more credible signals of commitment. Western Europe in the 1950s and ’60s provides some evidence of this dynamic, although the comparison is not neat inasmuch as some national leaders were in fact calling for a reduced American presence. But some national leaders, such as Chancellor Adenauer of West Germany, reacted by adopting a hedging strategy and appeared to attempt to play the “nuclear card” – that is, by raising the possibility of a West German nuclear weapons program – a possibility that worried Eisenhower and Dulles. The French were also apprehensive and so, too, were the Soviets and their satellites. See Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1999). It is unclear if South Korea and/or Japan would actively threaten to “go nuclear” as a way of pressuring the United States to reaffirm its security commitments. But it is a bargaining chip that does exist, one that is potentially more credible than Adenauer’s. 19 Peter Katzenstein, A World of Regions: Asia and Europe in the American Imperium (Ithaca, N Y: Cornell University Press, 2005). 20 See Stephen Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics 28, no. 3 (1976): 317–47.

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21 See Ellen Frost, Asia’s New Regionalism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008). There have been several other major currency swap initiatives in the last several years – one in particular involving Korea, Japan, and China. 22 For the classic discussion of hegemonic power and co-operation, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). The American case of hegemonic co-operation is discussed in G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major War (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2001). 23 It is an open question whether hegemony is a necessary condition to sustain today’s expansive system of international co-operation. The United States may be less able and willing to foster co-operation and collective action, but other states may step in to play America’s old hegemonic role, or co-operation and collective action may be generated without a hegemonic leader. For an optimistic view, see Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, ch. 7. These arguments are explored in the next section. 24 The assumption here is that the “costs” of American hegemony will go up relative to the “benefits” that the US enjoys from providing hegemonic leadership. The US will be less able to shoulder the costs of hegemony and therefore will reduce its hegemonic responsibilities. There is, however, an ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of hegemony. To what extent, for example, does America’s global alliance system generate economic ­benefits for the US in the form of a stable environment for trade and investment and America-friendly relationships? For the most recent scholarly effort to calculate costs and benefits, see Carla Norrlof, America’s Global Advantage: U.S. Hegemony and International Cooperation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). More and better scholarship is needed on this critical issue. 25 For American arguments in favour of a more “assertive” China in support of the global order, see Thomas J. Christensen, “The Advantages of an Assertive China,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 2 (2011): 54–67. 26 There are a few instances in which great powers have taken steps to try to shore up the power of other major states. Britain and other European states worked to reintegrate France into a European concert after 1815. Turkey was propped up by Britain for almost a hundred years to help it resist Russian predations and support the European balance of power – the so-called Eastern Question. In the first years after the Cold War, the G.H.W. Bush administration tried to prop up Gorbachev (reflected in the “Chicken Kiev speech”) and support Russia’s nascent democracy. The high

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point came in January 1992, when the largest gathering of foreign ministers ever assembled at the State Department met to coordinate food and energy aid to Russia. 27 According to one estimation, the costs to the United States of maintaining overseas bases and troop deployments (not including Iraq and Afghanistan) was $102 billion per annum in 2009. See Hugh Gusterson, “Empire of Bases,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 10 March 2009. 28 One might also find this dynamic playing out in various international ­policy settings. Governments might decide to respond favourably to an American president in part as a way to help strengthen the president’s hand in relation his domestic – and less internationalist – opponents. This is a variation of the two-level bargaining dynamic explored by Robert Putnam. 29 For a portrait of these “grand bargains” that the United States has had with Germany and Japan – and more recently with China – see Michael Mastanduno, “Order and Change: The Financial Crisis and the Breakdown of the U.S.-China Grand Bargain” (unpublished paper, 2011). 30 In this situation, the United States uses its weakness – rather than its strength – to extract better bargains. 31 Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, 188. 32 Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1988), 116–17 and 297. 33 Bruce Russett, “The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony; or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead?” International Organization 39, no. 2 (1985): 207–31. 34 See Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, ch. 5. 35 I advance this thesis in Liberal Leviathan. 36 See G. John Ikenberry, “The Liberal Origins of American Unipolarity,” in Ikenberry, Mastanduno, and Wohlforth, eds, International Relations Theory and the Consequence of Unipolary, 216–51.

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Conclusion European Lessons for America Frédéric Mérand

In this volume, we did not seek to answer the question of whether the US is declining or not, in either relative or absolute terms. As Cecily Hilsdale writes in her chapter on Byzantium, “it is imperative to disaggregate the concept of the empire’s decline from its eventual fall.” Rather, we assumed that, compared to the unipolar conviction of the 1990–2004 period, there is a feeling of relative decline among American elites. In a survey conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2013, 53 per cent of the American public said that the US played a less important and powerful role as a world leader than it did a decade ago (compared to 20 per cent in 2004). Among the elite members of the C F R , the figure was 62 per cent, also a steep rise from the early 2000s. Seeking to “make America great again,” the election of Donald Trump addressed but also possibly increased this feeling of living through a power transition. Whether these elites are right or wrong is not what concerns us. What we want is to understand how they are likely to respond to a perceived sense of decline. Will the right coping strategies be adopted? Can US leaders – or, for that matter, Russian or European leaders – avoid making things worse? As the Trump administration isolates itself from its European allies, blurs its action in the Middle East, engages in preventive talk vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea, scholars and citizens cannot but worry how China will react to a strategy that seeks to put “America first” but dissolves long-standing alliances and partnerships in a context of diminishing political and ideological resources. Contemporary debates about America’s foreign policy are haunted by memories of past declines, especially European ones. It sometimes seems that little has changed since the last decades of Rome, famously

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chronicled by Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For some observers, Rome declined in the fourth and fifth centuries because of its own ideological, political, and economic contradictions, while for others it was eclipsed by contending powers such as Persia, a situation refracted through Barbarian demographic pressures.1 For still others, the empire morphed into new political entities, as Barbarians assimilated into Roman culture.2 Diocletian’s rule, under which many of the coping strategies studied here were employed – from innovation and competition to self-strengthening and prevention – is a critical moment to analyze how Romans dealt with decline. Did Roman rulers know what was happening to their civilization? If so, what did they do about it? There is no general answer to the question of whether elites realized what was really happening. But there is plenty of evidence that humans have worried about civilizational or geopolitical decline in many times and places. Sachs’s introductory chapter provided a strong illustration of how, walking in Gibbon’s steps, English intellectual elites started to think more systematically about how to identify and measure decline – a scientific and romantic exercise that flourished precisely when the British Empire was at the apex of its power. For Europe, the nineteenth century was the beginning of a long discussion on coping strategies that predated the continent’s actual decline. In the process, peoples were subjugated and colonies were lost, wars were won and borders were abolished, religions were imposed and ideologies were vanquished, markets were transformed and technological innovations changed lives. Unless they were fatalistic, it is plausible to think that leaders were seized by declinist moods and tried to do something about it. Based on the European experience from Byzantium to Russia, we identified eight possible strategies of decline management: while self-strengthening, isolation, imitation, and innovation target the domestic sphere, engagement, retrenchment, competition, and prevention target the international system. The European cases we analyzed provide useful elements to test the two arguments we laid out in the introduction. The first is that geopolitics is not fate: although structural shifts in economic, military, ideological, and political power go a long way toward determining a political community’s position in the international system, leaders enjoy significant autonomy when it comes to perceiving the causes of decline, identifying coping strategies, and mobilizing resources.

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Most of the time, these strategies are not conscious; rather, they reflect taken-for-granted practices and habits among diplomats, military officers, and other members of the elite.3 While it is beyond the scope of this study to demonstrate that these strategies were effective compared to alternative courses of action, it is not that difficult to show that they had discrete consequences on the domestic level: an energetic push to self-strengthen one’s nation or stimulate the economy most likely altered structural developments, thereby extending, at least temporarily, the impression of great standing. We return to this point below. The second argument is that some coping strategies reproduce international order, while others undermine it. To put it in blunt terms, strategies may be conducive to peace or conducive to war (we leave aside the question of whether they are just or not). While prevention is often sold as a strategy of last resort to save the peace, it is more often than not has the effect of triggering military conflict. Conversely, engagement with one’s rivals leads to accommodation – an “appeasing” move that, for some, recalls Edouard Daladier and Neville Chamberlain’s abdication to Hitler at Munich. Again, as Ivan Ermakoff shows in Ruling Oneself Out, these strategies are not a conscious response to objective factors; they are, rather, clouded in ambiguity and uncertainty, which leads elites to align with collective expectations.4 g e o p o l i t i c s i s n o t fat e

A key question for students of geopolitics is to determine whether decline is structural or a process that can be significantly altered by leaders. Retrospectively, historians of international relations tend to assume that there was not much leaders could do to prevent decline. The focus, then, is either on the variables that explain the rise of an empire, or the factors that explain its decline.5 It is much harder to imagine counterfactuals that could have prevented decline, or even identify factors that might have slowed it down. At the very least, European cases collected in this book substantiate the claim that elites do not accept decline as their fate. While decline is probably inevitable in the long term, Byzantines engaged in giftgiving and strategic marriages (engagement), Britons launched military reforms (innovation), and the French restructured their economy (competition), thinking (and writing) they could postpone decline for

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a certain period. The “eastern” Roman Empire, Byzantium, actually survived for another thousand years before Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Caught between crusaders crossing the empire from the West and Muslim and Turkish ascendency on the East, ravaged by civil wars, Byzantium’s decline was both seemingly irreversible and comfortably slow.6 To what extent can elites shape structural developments? Today’s Russia illustrates their significant room for manoeuvre. As Virginie Lasnier and Seçkin Köstem argue in their chapter, the replacement of Yeltsin by Putin signalled a shift in coping strategies, from imitating the West and retrenching from global politics to a reassertion of military power in Russia’s former area of influence, geopolitical rivalry with the US in Syria, and ideological self-strengthening through an exacerbated form of nationalism. While the new strategy enacted by Putin and his circle of siloviki was initially made possible by swelling state coffers, it has so far survived the drop in oil and gas prices that followed. Russia will not return to great power status in a bipolar system, but it is no longer the shrunk and humiliated former empire of the 1990s. In a somewhat different fashion, France and Britain managed to pay their way into world leadership for almost a century after World War I. Through seats on the U N Security Council, the development of nuclear weapons, expensive global diplomatic apparatus, resilient economies, and populations that, thanks to immigration from their former empires, continue to grow, these countries are still, a hundred years after the beginning of their geopolitical decline, in the top ten of world powers. At the same time, Olivier Schmitt shows very well how a coping strategy like “impression management” may backfire. Having kept up appearances during the Cold War through the Gaullist mobilization of economic, military, and ideological resources, French elites have found it increasingly difficult to reconcile the international discourse of grandeur and renewal with increasingly visible domestic problems. The same situation may currently face the British as they leave the European Union but seem unable to find partners that will accept their claimed return to global power status. The 2016 Brexit referendum was a critical juncture during which political, economic, and intellectual elites struggled over the right strategy to correct Britain’s perceived decline. Pitting the winners against the losers of globalization, the debate focused on whether E U membership enhanced or

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weakened the country’s ability to manage migration, compete in the global economy, and project its power on the international scene. Using language that sometimes resonated with post-imperial nostalgia, Leavers argued that Britain could regain its world status by setting itself free from a European Union beset by political and economic crises and in terminal decline. They pushed for closer ties with the US and the former dominions. Remainers countered that, without the EU’s power multiplier, Britain would become too small vis-à-vis China and other rising powers to matter.7 In the terms of this book, the Brexit referendum suggests that intraelite debates are not overdetermined by geopolitics. While Leavers chose isolationism (albeit with an odd imperial outlook), Remainers preferred engagement. The way in which Theresa May’s Conservative government tried to conduct negotiations in a highly transformed and constrained domestic political environment is further indication that coping strategies, like all social practices, are context-specific; they do not derive from leaders’ straight reading of the international system. And although Brexit’s impact on the UK’s future status in the world is still only a matter for speculation, it is interesting to note that most of the discussion is precisely about the direction and nature of that impact. In other words, decline-management strategies are assumed to matter. The contemporary debate around US decline is also instructive. It shows that even the most astute contemporaries are far from agreement when it comes to the reality and dynamics of decline. For some, having the right military strategy or continuing to shape international order guarantees that America will retain a predominant, if no longer hegemonic, role well into the twenty-first century. From different theoretical angles informed by realism and liberalism, Joshua Shifrinson and G. John Ikenberry illustrate this argument in their chapters. With the right strategy – which for realists involves either military retrenchment or external balancing and for liberals involves some combination of political engagement and economic competition – US decline may be postponed for a very long time.8 While there is sometimes a messianic element in the position that assumes the US to be the indispensable nation, it is true that the US begins from a position of military, economic, and ideological superiority that no political community has enjoyed since the Roman Empire.9 For Niall Ferguson, the US, like the Netherlands and Britain before it, will retain a significant edge in world politics, despite geopolitical decline, because

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it continues to invest in competition, science, the rule of law, medicine, consumerism, and a notable work ethic.10 Other commentators, however, are less sanguine: Michael Mann, Richard Lachmann, and Julian Go, for example, display greater pessimism for the future of their country. After Barack Obama’s “leading from behind,” which called for a graceful decline, the Trump presidency may launch a new era of nationalism but in a context of deep domestic divisions. Although it has not been tested yet, Trump’s push for economic protectionism and desire for a more muscular strategic policy that does not shy away from preventive action signify a shift from political engagement to military prevention, and from economic innovation to political isolationism. Not only does this shift show that decline-management strategies cannot be read off international politics, but it also points to the importance of analyzing the possibly growing gap between elites’ understanding of their influence and what the rest of the world perceives it to be. As Iver Neumann and Vincent Pouliot have shown in the case of Russia’s own decline trajectory, “hysteresis” can have significant impacts, not only on world order but also, crucially, on domestic politics.11 In sum, thinking about decline is a performative experiment. It is conceivable that declinism leads to a negative spiral of lost morale, pessimism, and abdication. This is often what conservatives fear. But identifying decline can also be a productive source of ingenuity. The Qing Restoration in China, for example, was characterized by an intense declinist debate focused around different ways to manage imperial decline.12 In several European cases, declinism generated coping strategies that changed nations’ social fabric, cultural dynamism, military institutions, or economic models. As Sachs puts it in chapter 1, the “very fear of decline can produce, paradoxically, a renewed sense of stability.” c o p i n g s t r at e g i e s a n d i n t e r n at i o n a l o r d e r

The second argument we made in this book is that coping strategies impact international order. Thinking about Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button, it is difficult not to assume this claim to be a truism. But in fact, we don’t know. As this book goes to press, the president’s decision to withdraw from international treaties, passive-aggressive attitude toward North Korea, coziness vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and Israel, and bombastic tweets have not altered the international system.

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European allies have not given up on N AT O , China remains broadly co-operative, and Russia has not seriously tested the US’s resolve in eastern Europe or Syria. All international institutions are still in place and no war can yet be blamed on the US. Trump’s presidency is an empirical test of our argument, unfolding before our eyes, in real time. Power transitions should not be assumed to be determined by human agency. But decline-management strategies may produce effects that take time to materialize. It is thus important to reiterate that we are interested in the moyenne durée. The task here is not so much to answer whether coping strategies determine a political entity’s tangible decline, but to begin to identify discrete impacts these strategies have on other actors in the international system. Domestic strategies such as ideological self-strengthening, innovation, emulation, or innovation have, at best, an indirect effect on international order. As the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires suggests, nationalism is an important factor in the end of empires, which goes hand in hand with the transformation of the international (or regional) system.13 In Prussia and Japan, the cultivation of nationalism by elites turned into external aggressiveness. In Yugoslavia, the instrumentalization of ethnic nationalism morphed into civil war. As Lasnier and Köstem show in chapter 5, elite nationalism is an important ingredient in the transformation of Russia’s attitude toward its neighborhood and the West. There are fewer historical examples of isolationism as a declinemanagement strategy. Its impact may be economic marginalization, as was the case in Japan during the Shogun and the in “Hermit Kingdom” (North Korea) under the Kims. If not transcended, emulation turns a country into a constant laggard, with more or less the same results. Arguably, this is what happened to China in the nineteenth century, to many Arab countries after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and decolonization, and to the New Russia under Yeltsin. But innovation may prepare the country’s path to great power status in the future, as was the case with Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth century. The case of France is interesting because innovation was used consciously as a way to sustain its claims to global power status. By contrast, coping strategies that specifically target the international system will almost inevitably have consequences on world order. For liberals, sharpening economic competitiveness is a strategy that can lead to win-win benefits if it takes place in a well-regulated world market. That is the kind of argument in favour of globalization

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one hears at Davos or reads in the New York Times column of Thomas Friedman.14 Here, the coping strategy tends to lead to peaceful results. But competition also carries risks if it turns into mercantilism, generalized dumping, protectionism, or currency wars. When Europeans organize blockades, or the US threatens to devalue the dollar, others feel the pain and, in the process of adjustment, the whole economic order may unravel. Although it is scientifically controversial, the received wisdom that unfair economic competition leads to heightened interstate conflict remains quite widespread. Retrenchment also has ambiguous consequences. While the act of stopping to interfere with others may sound harmless, it becomes a problem when the retrencher stops providing public goods or protecting its allies. Hegemonic stability theory famously argues that the world is better off with a hegemon that provides stability. Currently, there is much anxiety in Europe that a US withdrawal from institutions of global governance and military alliances may lead to a power vacuum in which no leader can deliver public goods. That is why Shifrinson, like McDonald and Parent,15 insists on collaboration with rising powers to ensure a stable position during the proverbial passing of the baton – what the UK did with the US and the US may still be in a position to do with China. Prevention is the least ambiguous, and probably the most preoccupying, existing strategy for our times. As Lachmann and Go document, prevention is tempting for leaders that want to test their strength, signal to their rivals that “they are still in the game,” or squarely defeat a challenger before it becomes too strong. In the mildest form of performative militarism, prevention merely serves as a signal to challengers but can still cause casualties. It has more to do with mob tactics than with international diplomacy. But as World War I reminds us, launching a preventive operation directly against a rising power can lead to all-out war, with all the unanticipated and far-reaching consequences that entails. While the effects of this strategy on the status of the declining state are unclear, the impact on the international system is undoubtedly to increase the level of conflict. Here again, it is interesting to note that coping strategies are context-specific: for Randall Schweller, preventive wars are selected by authoritarian regimes but not by democracies.16 The final decline-management strategy – engagement – is probably the least controversial. What’s wrong with being a good citizen of the world? Byzantium seems to fit this strategy. The imperial

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administration used the “cultural arena” – art, religion, and Greek learning – to improve its lot and continue to shape the world its elites knew they were going to live in. In the European Middle Ages and beyond, embattled dynastic monarchies deployed sophisticated marriage strategies to form alliances and protect their territory, much as ascendant rulers used marriage to expand theirs.17 Closer to us today, the strategy of very small European nations, like Sweden and the Netherlands, that substituted strong contributions to the United Nations for their lost empires, also fits this pattern. Engagement means rejecting the unavoidability of power transitions. For the US, engagement wouldn’t mean marriage strategies. But it does rely heavily on the mobilization of ideological and political resources, encapsulated in Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power: Hollywood, consumerism, US private law, leadership in international organizations, to name a few examples. “States,” Ikenberry writes in chapter 8, “are rising within the existing order and not outside of it … The United States is seen by many of these rising states as an essential component of the stable functioning of this order. There is, in effect, still a demand for American hegemonic leadership.” Is there a “right” strategy? Our study leaves that question open. But we can be fairly certain that Washington’s choice of coping strategies will impact not only the future of the US, but also world peace. So far, Donald Trump has displayed a penchant for ideological selfstrengthening, competition, and prevention – three strategies that have been shown, in European history, to have mixed consequences on a political community’s fate, and detrimental impacts on world order. Although he seemed drawn to isolationism and retrenchment during his campaign, his statements in office have proven otherwise. By contrast, he has expressed a dislike for engagement, innovation, and imitation. That is not reassuring. beyond the west

In The End of the West, David Marquand writes: By 1913, Europe’s share of global G D P was more than twice those of India and China put together. (It was twice that of the United States.) The British Empire covered one-quarter of the earth’s land surface; the City of London was the linchpin of the world’s first truly global market. The Russia Empire – not fully

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European, but ruled from its far-western capital in European St. Petersburg – extended from Warsaw in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. France ruled vast territories in North and West Africa as well as much of Southeast Asia. Soft power mimicked hard power. French was the language of diplomacy and culture, German of philosophy, and English of political economy. Of the great transformative ideologies of the age, liberalism was a British invention, republicanism a Franco-Italian one, and socialism and nationalism Franco-German ones.18 Compared to what many would see as a golden age, Europe has declined significantly. Slowly but surely, the continent’s military, economic, ideological, and political strength will be brought in line with the demographic reality that it accounts for less than 10 per cent of the world’s population. But we should not confuse external influence with internal strength. As Russian peasants, Galician Jews, and Senegalese tirailleurs can testify from their graves, great empires tend to be miserable places to live in for ordinary people.19 Like the quest for status, combating decline does not guarantee the welfare of the population. Between passively accepting decline and resolutely fighting it, the analysis of coping strategies leads us to ponder a final, more speculative question: Wouldn’t it be better to adjust one’s expectations to decline? In their article looking at Russia’s oft-disappointed ambitions over five hundred years, Iver Neumann and Vincent Pouliot suggest such a strategy. They argue that “Moscow’s relentless quest for equal status prompted quixotic practices that were often dismissed by Western countries and hampered the security of both parties.”20 Most political communities have little impact on world order. If you can’t change the international system, why not make it both safer and your position in it more comfortable? In relatively peaceful regions, managing geopolitical decline may mean focusing instead on the domestic issues that people care about. Willingly or not, Europeans have embraced this reality since the end of colonial empires. They created welfare states and the European Union, first to avoid further internal destruction, and then to cushion the impact of globalization on their economies and standards of living. Commentators, often Americans, lament that Europeans have become “Venuses,” “dwarves,” who, a bit like Switzerland in the Concert of Europe, are irrelevant to world politics. Perhaps. But many people around the world wouldn’t mind living in Switzerland.

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As the anthropologist Jack Goody suggests, our historical perspective on decline is biased by the fact that the West ruled over “the rest” for the past three hundred years.21 Because they were weak, entire continents were taken over, their political systems destroyed, their economies pillaged, and their cultures profoundly reshaped by Western conquerors. Africa and large parts of Asia were subjugated, while entire Aboriginal populations were obliterated in Oceania and the Americas. Although standards of living did not decline everywhere in absolute terms, in many identifiable cases imperial conquest and exploitation resulted in millions of deaths that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. During the westernization of the world, the lack of decline-management opportunities for “the rest” had dire consequences for ordinary people. China and India provide fascinating cases of political entities that experienced a steep decline concomitant with the rise of the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before resurging around the turn of the twenty-first. The rise of these two countries, which together comprise 40 per cent of the current global population, has mesmerized the world and forms the backdrop against which the debate on US decline currently takes place. The elite narrative that justifies the two countries’ newfound global role is largely based on the memory of economic destruction, political colonization, and cultural imperialism – what the Chinese call the “century of humiliation” – which followed a long period of economic prosperity, when they were the two largest economies in the world.22 So declining was, historically, pretty bad. The question is whether the twenty-first century presents us with an opportunity to imagine a power transition that will not have such consequences for Europe and America. Although it is not our intention to indulge in conjecture about the future, US elites may be well-advised to envisage this scenario. What if, rather than galvanizing its forces to continue to lead the world, the US prepared its soft landing by investing in education and culture to ensure the well-being of its population, in social policy to reduce inequality, and in infrastructure to prepare the next industrial revolution? The rise and fall of powers will always happen. As this book has argued, throughout history, coping strategies have been adopted to deal with this predicament. Some of these strategies seem to have positive effects on a political community’s fate and position in the world order. Others have clearly negative effects. But as social

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scientists, we have to recognize that Europe and America will have to decline a long time before they, in relative terms, come even close to their demographic importance. Our job is not to defend the West against the rest, but to think about creative ways in which geopolitical decline can become an irrelevant factor in determining the peace and welfare of humankind.

notes

  1 Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Macmillan, 2006); Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Peter Bang, The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).   2 Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971).   3 Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, International Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Frédéric Mérand and Amélie Forget, “Strategizing about Strategy,” in Pierre Bourdieu and International Relations, ed. Rebecca Adler-Nissen (London: Routledge, 2012).   4 Ivan Ermakoff, Ruling Oneself Out: A Theory of Collective Abdications (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).   5 Michael Doyle, Empires (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1986).   6 Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2007).   7 Kenneth A. Armstrong, Brexit Time: Leaving the EU – Why, How and When? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Sara Hobolt, “The Brexit Vote: A Divided Nation, A Divided Continent,” Journal of European Public Policy 23, no. 9 (2016): 1259–77.   8 Barry R. Posen, “Pull Back,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (January 2013): 116–28; Stephen G. Brooks, G. John Ikenberry, and William C. Wohlforth, “Lean Forward: In Defense of American Engagement,” Foreign Affairs 92, no. 1 (January 2013): 130–42.   9 Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 2008). 10 Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest. (London: Penguin, 2012).

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Conclusion 263 11 Iver B. Neumann and Vincent Pouliot, “Untimely Russia: Hysteresis in Russian-Western Relations over the Past Millennium,” Security Studies 20, no. 1 (2011): 105–37. 12 Nancy Turgeon, “Revisiting Imperial China’s Trajectory in the Context of the Rise of the West: The Eurocentric Legacy in Historical Sociology” (PhD diss., University of Sussex, 2015). 13 Wesley Hiers and Andreas Wimmer, “Is Nationalism the Cause or Consequence of the End of Empires?” in Nationalism and War, ed. John Hall and Sinisa Malesevic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 212–54. 14 Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in The World It Invented, and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011). 15 Paul K. McDonald and Joseph M. Parent, “Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment,” International Security 35, no. 4 (2011): 7–44. 16 Randall L. Schweller, “Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?” World Politics 44, no. 2 (1992): 235–69. 17 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2011). 18 David Marquand, The End of the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5. 19 James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 20 Neumann and Pouliot, “Untimely Russia,” 105. 21 Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 22 Alison Kaufman, “The ‘Century of Humiliation,’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order,” Pacific Focus 25, no.1 (2010): 1–33.

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Contributors

julian go is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. His books include Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688–Present (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (Oxford University Press, 2016). c ec ily hi l sda l e is professor of art history and communication studies at McGill University. Her book, Byzantine Art and Diplomacy in an Age of Decline, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. g. john ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is most recently the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order (Yale University Press, 2020). seç k i˙ n kö st e m is assistant professor of international relations at Bilkent University. He has recently published Turkey’s Pivot to Eurasia: Geopolitics and Foreign Policy in a Changing World Order (co-edited with Emre Erşen, Routledge, 2019). r ic ha rd l ac hma nn is professor of sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author of First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers (Verso, 2020).

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266 Contributors

v i r g i n i e l a s n i e r is a post-doctoral fellow at c é r i u m , the Université de Montréal Centre for International Studies. Her PhD dissertation examined demobilization processes after social movements in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus. She has published articles in Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and Russian Politics. fr édér i c mé r a nd is professor of political science and director of c é r i u m , the Université de Montréal Centre for International Studies. He is the author of European Defence Policy: Beyond the Nation State (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Political Commissioner: An Ethnography (Oxford University Press, 2020). jon atha n sac h s is professor of English literature at Concordia University. He is the author of Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–1832 (Oxford University Press, 2010) and The Poetics of Decline in British Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2018). joshua shi f r i nson is assistant professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies. He is the author of Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018). olivier schmitt is professor of political science at the University of Southern Denmark and head of research and studies at the French Institut des hautes études de défense nationale. He is the author of Allies That Count: Junior Partners in Coalition Warfare (Georgetown University Press, 2018).

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Index

Afghanistan, 6, 15, 77–101, 120, 222 Albright, Madeleine, 176–7, 182, 184 Algeria, 109–13 artists, 10, 54, 116 as e a n, 237 Austria-Hungary, 9, 12, 16, 82, 195–6, 257 balance of power, 3, 5, 81, 151, 196, 199, 209–13, 223 Balkans, 69, 98, 164, 175, 178, 181–4. See also Bosnia Barbauld, Anna, 25, 40–3 bipolarity, 107, 113, 120–2 Boers, 77, 88–90 Bosnia, 175–83. See also Balkans b r i c s , 128, 136–7 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 179–83 burden sharing, 10, 94, 231, 241–2 Bush, George H.W., 173–4, 181 Bush, George W., 6, 17, 83, 85, 96–7, 167 Byzantium, 4, 6, 10, 15, 40, 53–69, 251–4, 258

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Chamberlain, Joseph, 90 China, 3, 6, 9, 10, 16–17, 24, 81, 85, 91, 101, 110, 113, 119, 128–37, 151, 165–6, 180, 184, 194–214, 251, 255–9, 261 Clinton, Bill, 83, 175–83 Cold War, 3, 83–5, 99, 113–22, 127–8, 134, 167–8, 175, 178– 84, 194, 200, 222–3, 226, 230–1, 234, 254 colonies, 12, 15–16, 33–4, 80–90, 94, 107–11, 164, 242, 252, 257, 260–1 competition, 7–10, 12, 17, 99, 108, 112–14, 163–7, 180, 196–7, 200–2, 207–9, 213, 216–17, 223–4, 228–9, 243, 252–9 Concert of Europe, 80, 132, 223, 260 containment, 194, 199 Crimea, 15, 77–82, 85–92, 100–1, 128, 136–9, 147–51 Cuba, 81, 168–70 Davos, 258 decolonization. See colonies

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268 Index de Gaulle, Charles, 5, 12, 16, 107–8, 113–14, 116–21 diplomacy, 10, 54, 63–6, 80, 90, 101, 168–9, 258 Drennan, William, 23 East Asia, 166, 207–10, 217, 233, 235–7 engagement, 7, 8, 10, 17, 54–5, 64, 66–7, 79, 194, 197, 200, 208–10, 223–5, 231, 233, 240, 252–3, 255–6, 258–9 European Union (or European Community), 112, 115, 135–6, 165–6, 179, 181, 254–5, 260 France, 5, 12, 15–17, 47, 64, 107–22, 163, 166, 181, 184, 187, 199, 242, 253, 254, 257 Georgia, 5, 128, 133, 135, 139, 145, 150 Germany, 9, 66, 79–80, 82, 85, 88–9, 99–100, 108–11, 163, 165–6, 181, 195–9, 205, 217–18, 226, 240–2, 257 Gibbon, Edward, 6, 13, 15, 24–5, 30–1, 39–41, 53, 55–9, 63, 67, 240, 252 globalization, 3, 44, 120–2, 222, 236, 254, 257, 260 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 95, 249 Great Britain, 5, 9, 11, 15–17, 23–45, 68, 77–102, 195–9, 226, 242–3, 252, 254–5, 258 great powers, 5, 13, 16, 82, 92, 114–15, 130, 195–202, 205, 209, 211–14, 224, 226, 229, 242, 245

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Grenada, 98, 163–87 Gulf War, 83 hegemony, 5, 8–10, 17, 69, 77–85, 91–101, 137, 150–1, 163–7, 175–9, 185–7, 194, 208–9, 222–45, 255, 258–9 imitation, 7, 12–13, 99, 127–30, 140–3, 150, 231, 252, 259 India, 3, 9, 80–9, 94, 130, 132, 166, 197, 203, 207–10, 223, 227, 238, 240, 244, 261 innovation, 7–8, 12, 17, 24–5, 31–2, 40, 55, 58, 67, 78–9, 87–101, 111–21, 134, 146, 205, 231, 237, 240, 243, 252–9 intellectuals, 13–14, 40, 57, 77, 88, 99, 101, 108, 116, 121, 128–9, 151, 174 Iran, 94–9, 167, 171–5, 251 Iraq, 15, 77–101, 167, 222 isolationism, 11–12, 99, 228, 231, 255–9 Israel, 98–9, 111, 256 Italy, 42, 57, 63–4, 82 Japan, 11–13, 82–3, 90, 94, 98, 163–6, 197, 203–10, 226, 232–41, 257 Kennedy, John, 83, 91–3 Korea: North, 6, 11, 83–4, 251, 256–7; South, 233–7 Kosovo, 132, 143, 176–86. See also Balkans League of Nations, 109 Libya, 122

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Index 269

marriage, 12, 66–8, 253, 259 Middle East, 5–6, 83, 99, 130, 233–7, 251 military: capabilities, 11, 122, 136, 206, 232, 235, 242; spending, 79, 82–4, 95, 98, 101, 203–5, 242 Milosevic, Slobodan, 175–83 Mitterrand, François, 117–20 Morocco, 110 multipolarity, 119, 128, 130, 132, 223, 225, 245 Napoleonic Wars, 41, 80–5 nationalism, 5, 13–14, 109, 128–34, 139, 142–5, 151, 198, 208, 235, 254, 256, 257 n ato, 94, 113–20, 131–3, 141–5, 175–84, 195, 233–5, 257 Netherlands, 12, 33, 166, 255, 259 Nixon, Richard, 79, 93–101 nostalgia, 57–61, 255 nuclear power, 83–4, 92–5, 107, 113–22, 143, 178, 206, 232–5, 248, 254, 256 Obama, Barack, 6, 17, 77, 94, 96, 98, 240, 256 Ottoman Empire, 53, 56, 60–1, 63, 68, 86, 257 Playfair, William, 23, 31–40 Poland, 5, 145 power transition, 4, 8, 68, 224, 229, 243–4, 251, 257, 259, 261 prevention, 7–12, 17, 111, 114, 117, 121, 136–43, 150, 163–87, 196–202, 223–30, 256–9

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public opinion, 14–15, 26–7, 35, 78, 86–99, 110, 128–9, 137–49, 172–3, 182–6, 251 Putin, Vladimir, 5, 14, 16, 128–51, 254 retrenchment, 7–11, 16–17, 32–4, 41, 98–9, 127–8, 130, 140, 150, 180, 197, 210, 223–5, 230, 232, 252, 255–9 revisionism, 150–1, 194–5, 202 Roman Empire, 12–14, 24, 30–1, 40, 42–5, 53–9, 64–9, 252, 255 romanticism, 40, 45, 252 Russia, 4–9, 12, 15–17, 66, 79, 81–95, 101, 111–13, 119, 127–52, 165, 168–71, 179–84, 197–200, 223, 231, 234, 242, 249, 254–60 security dilemma, 17, 225, 231, 234–9, 244 self-strengthening, 7–8, 13, 16–17, 24–5, 40, 93, 99, 116–17, 121, 127–8, 137, 150–1, 172, 174, 252–7 Smith, Adam, 15, 23–30, 41 soft power, 10, 54–5, 59, 64, 68, 75, 99, 259 South Africa, 15, 77–96, 100–1 Soviet Union. See Russia Switzerland, 12, 260 Syria, 109, 128, 136–9, 150, 254, 257 Thucydides, 8, 217, 248 Trump, Donald, 4, 17, 98, 150, 208, 251, 256–9 Tunisia, 110

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270 Index Ukraine, 16, 133, 135–6, 145–7, 150 unipolarity, 3, 108, 118–22, 130, 202, 222–9, 242, 245, 251 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations, 107, 175–6, 184, 207, 240, 254, 259 us s r . See Russia

World War I, 5, 8–9, 15, 77, 82–7, 100, 254, 258 World War II, 5, 16, 80–1, 107–12, 117, 121, 195, 226, 230 Yeltsin, Boris, 16, 128–34, 144, 149, 254, 257

Vietnam, 15, 77–95, 99–101, 107–10, 140, 167–75, 186

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