Great Powers in the Changing International Order 9781588269744

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Great Powers in the Changing International Order

GREAT POWERS IN THE CHANGING INTERNATIONAL ORDER Nick Bisley

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU  2012 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bisley, Nick, 1973– Great powers in the changing international order / Nick Bisley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-833-4 (alk. paper) 1. Great powers. 2. International relations. I. Title. JZ1310.B57 2012 327.1—dc23 2011031585

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Fred Halliday

Contents

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Acknowledgments 1

Great Powers in World Politics

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The Origins of the Great Power Role

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Confronting the Twentieth Century

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The Contradictions of the UN Order

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The Anachronism of the Great Powers

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The Greatest Power?

113

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The Impact of the Emerging Powers

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Power and Order in Contemporary World Politics

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185 187 201 209

List of Acronyms Bibliography Index About the Book

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Acknowledgments

This book was written over a number of years during which time I incurred debts to many people. I would like to thank the staff at the UN Archives in New York, who were very helpful during my time in Manhattan. Parts of the argument were presented to the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, to the Social Sciences Research Seminar at La Trobe University, and to the annual convention of the International Studies Association in Chicago in 2007, and I thank all of the participants at those sessions for their constructive criticism. I would also like to thank the following colleagues, whose thoughts have helped, both directly and indirectly, to improve the argument set out in the book: Nicholas Barry, Andrew Phillips, Brendan Taylor, Shogo Suzuki, Vivek Chaudrhi, Joe Camilleri, Dennis Altman, and John Ravenhill. I would particularly like to thank Melinda Rankin for her excellent research assistance on various chapters of the book. I especially acknowledge the role played by the wonderful intellectual setting provided by my colleagues in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University, and in particular the leadership of Judy Brett, our head of school, who has been instrumental in fostering this environment. The book of course would not exist without the enthusiastic support of my publisher, Lynne Rienner, and I would also like to thank the referees for their many excellent suggestions. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of Fred Halliday, whose sudden death in April 2010 robbed the world of international relations scholarship of one of its sharpest minds. Fred’s influence on my own career was immense, as it was on countless others, and while there is much here with which he would disagree, in some small way this book reflects Fred’s ongoing legacy to the study of international politics.

—Nick Bisley

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1 Great Powers in World Politics

On the evening of April 25, 1945, hundreds of diplomats filed into San Francisco’s luxurious Opera House to attend a glittering ceremony orchestrated by a Broadway musical designer. It was the opening not of the latest operatic production but of an international conference with an ambition not reflected in the event’s somewhat awkward and colorless name, the Conference on the International Organization. The diplomats had gathered to undertake negotiations that would lead to a unique creation. As the strategic tide had turned in World War II, the Allied powers began to plan for the world that would come once the war was won. They sought not only to reconstruct the devastated economies and societies of Europe and Asia, but to create international conditions that would prevent the recurrence of another systemwide conflict, the second cataclysmic war of their lifetimes. Many had hoped that the first of those would end all wars; yet it was but a tragic prelude to the astonishing destruction of the second. The ingenuity of industrialization fused to the protean power of nationalism had produced a capacity for violence and devastation for which the term total war seemed almost inadequate. As research into atomic weapons began to yield results, the need to build reliable mechanisms to manage international order and to prevent war among the powerful took on an existential urgency. It was with these ideas firmly in mind that the representatives took their seats in the Opera House to begin the negotiations. Postwar policy elites saw multilateralism as fundamental to securing international order. In the set of Bretton Woods institutions, they created bodies that would oversee the reconstruction of the ruined economies, stabilize the circumstances of international economic relations, and preclude nationalism from interfering in the business of capitalism. On the political front, they believed that international peace and security required the creation of a univer1

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sal international institution that would manage the political differences between states and stabilize the military and security aspects of the international order. The original vision for the United Nations was not just of an international mechanism that would promote cooperation. Rather, it was to be the centerpiece of a system in which order would be achieved by harnessing power to principle. It was to be universal—all states, regardless of stature, that were committed to this ideal could join—and it would protect the rights of all sovereign states, regardless of regime type, ideology, or interests. The United Nations was to be nothing short of an institution that oversaw the rule of law governing the international system. It was this towering ambition, to create a multilateral body to manage the political and strategic relations of the postwar world, that brought the delegates to the Bay City. The conference proceedings reflected the difficulty of realizing such lofty aims, yet the delegates clearly recognized the unparalleled circumstances that had created this opportunity. The breadth of issues covered, to say nothing of the interests many were keen to protect, meant that the participants’ often larger-than-life personalities clashed in quite striking ways. Chairing the entire conference was the dashing but evidently out-of-his depth Edward Stettinius. The lead delegate from the USSR, foreign minister and Stalin’s protégé Vycheslav Molotov, regularly threatened to walk out on proceedings as he thought, and not entirely incorrectly, that the UN could easily become a tool of the capitalist powers. At one point, a senior US delegate, Texas senator Arthur Vandenberg, even ripped up a draft of the charter to drive home a point.1 The reason for Vandenberg’s confetti was not just his taste for melodrama, but because of widespread discontent among the delegates about something that the planners had felt was the putative organization’s most important feature: the privileged place that was granted to the great powers. At the center of the proposal put to the conference was a council that would be superior to the other parts of the institution and that would be tasked with responsibility for questions of international peace and security. The membership and decisionmaking processes of this council represented a belief by the UN’s designers that a small group of powerful states had to be given a special status to ensure the orderly functioning of the organization. Unsurprisingly, this met with opposition in San Francisco. Many were uneasy with the idea that the small group should be identified at the outset and named as members of the council in perpetuity. Permanency in a world of dramatic change seemed a recipe for built-in obsolescence. Not only did it undermine key principles that the organization would purportedly protect, such as sovereign equality, it cemented problems of legitimacy into the foundations of the body. However, the main point of contention focused on the council’s voting procedures. A group of states, led by Australian foreign minister H. V. Evatt, attempted to limit the way in which the proposed permanent members of the council could use their ability to veto decisions. Although these efforts ultimately failed, the dispute

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derived from a deep-seated and ultimately unresolved tension. On the one hand, the putative organization was to embody the fundamental idea of modern international relations: all sovereign states are equal, regardless of stature. On the other hand, many believed that international order could emerge only if the small number of preponderant powers underpinned the system by exercising special privileges. Planners and delegates had the experience of the League of Nations, and its failings, foremost in mind. The lesson of the League that most delegates seemed to draw upon was that while recognition of sovereignty through the representation of all was very important, any attempt to promote order needed to face the reality of significant power inequalities among states. In an international system lacking a formal and substantive center of authority, those who had the resources were the only ones in a position to act in a way that could ensure compliance with broader rules. The UN order was intended to be one in which rules and not raw power mattered most, and this meant that power inequalities had to be incorporated into the system. The challenge was to work out how inequalities in power could be harnessed to promote order. The founders of the United Nations did this by giving the powerful special rights in return for certain responsibilities. The logic reflected the need to provide the powerful with incentives to participate because the legal order they sought needed the powerful to think of their interests in new ways. The question of their participation was not guaranteed. As Vandenberg’s actions made abundantly clear, if the United States did not get what it sought—special treatment in the form of the veto—the institution would suffer the same fate as the League: death on the floor of the United States Senate. This much is well known. The conference produced an agreed-upon United Nations Charter and led to the creation of what has proven to be a remarkably successful institution that sits at the center of an ever-growing network of institutions and processes attempting to promote international cooperation as well as at the symbolic heart of an extremely complex and expanding international system. What is less well recognized is that the UN system, and more particularly the UN Security Council (UNSC), represents the institutionalization of a long-term historical process whereby a special place has been accorded to the powerful to manage international order. The structures established at San Francisco were shaped not, as many claim, simply because multilateralism had to doff its cap to the realities of power, but by a particular understanding of the kind of role that great powers were thought to play in producing international order. The deal that was struck at San Francisco— wherein great powers were to be treated differently and in return for which they manage order—represented a traditional diplomatic compromise as well as the more deeply held belief that only by legally enshrining the unequal position of the great powers could the kind of international order that was envisioned in 1945 be achieved. The structure of the United Nations embodies a

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particular answer to a series of fundamental questions: What is the relationship between inequalities of power and stable, orderly relations in the anarchy of the international system? What role do institutions and the rule of law play in such a system? How important are ideas and principles in relation to material factors such as wealth and military power? To each of these, the UN Charter sets out clear, if not unproblematic, answers. In this setting, great powers were thought to be the guarantors of the system, representing the particular way in which the United Nations aimed to harness the uneven distribution of power among states to foster systemwide stability. Without great power privilege, and the assumptions on which it rests, the international rule of law that the UN sought to create would be entirely unimaginable. Yet, throughout its life, the Security Council has rarely worked as intended. The Council’s shortcomings, in the Cold War and beyond, have prompted a near continuous demand for reform.2 Defenders of the existing structure fall back on essentially similar arguments to those made in 1945: it is necessary to recognize the realities of existing circumstances and the need for great powers to be granted special privileges to ensure that they participate and underwrite the system. While the United Nations struggled with the ideological freeze of the Cold War, and the rapid expansion of its membership brought on by decolonization, one could find excuses for the failings of the UN in contextual circumstances. But it is contemporary experience—the absence of an ideological divide, globalization, and the emergence of a range of large and ambitious powers—that insists that we ask whether the institutional design of the current order is appropriate to current circumstances and whether the assumptions on which it rests need to be rethought. A fundamental part of this is questioning what role great powers play in the contemporary system. The creation of the United Nations was an explicit attempt to place great power managerialism at the heart of the postwar order. It was premised on the idea that the process of active cooperation among the most powerful had created Europe’s remarkably peaceful nineteenth century and that the League had failed precisely because it had not incorporated this principle into its structures. The purpose of this book is to examine the origins of the idea of great power managerialism, an idea of fundamental importance to the current order. In particular, it aims to show that the political and social conditions that make great power managerialism able to impart international order not only no longer exist, they have not done so for over 100 years.

Why This Book? The UN order was established on the assumption that great powers could manage international relations through judicious diplomacy, institutional process,

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and the exercise of power. There appear to be good reasons to question whether these assumptions remain convincing, if indeed, they ever were. Given the immensity and immediacy of changing power configurations in contemporary world politics, it is necessary to consider the origins and status of great power managerialism. It is almost a truism that great powers shape the parameters of life in the international system. In the anarchical realm, those who have the greatest concentrations of power, and particularly military force, have been of greatest importance. As such much of the empirical and theoretical literature in international relations (IR) is concerned with the actions of the powerful. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in Kenneth Waltz’s structural theory of international politics, which is built on the idea that a theory of international politics is by definition a theory about great powers, understood as the militarily most powerful actors in the system.3 But this depiction of international relations, while clearly a function of the particular kind of theory Waltz was attempting to craft, overlooks important, non-power-related factors that fundamentally shape international politics, such as the role of norms, values, ideas, and their historical evolution. Furthermore, it neglects the way in which the actual conduct of international relations has led to the creation of the idea of a special group of states, which has been incorporated in the constitutional structures of international order. In the various legal settlements that became increasingly important to the character of international order, in Westphalia, Utrecht, Vienna, and of course San Francisco, one sees the imprint of great powers. Not only do the great powers seek to shape the political and economic order in their own interest, in these settlements they have been accorded a kind of managerial function in the broader system. In their efforts to do so they have molded not merely the veneer of legalism to this order, they have established the structural limits of an order so conceived. The purpose of this book is to provide an extensive analysis of the origins and current status of the idea that great powers are distinctive members of international society that carry a particular managerial burden and to consider the continued utility of this idea in contemporary world politics. I seek to answer four related questions: What role does great power managerialism play in international order? How did this idea emerge? Can it provide order in a globalizing international system? What does the status of the idea of the great powers tell us about the nature of international order in the twenty-first century? While the status of great powers and their role is of perennial importance to students of international relations, a contemporary study of great power managerialism is particularly pertinent for a number of reasons. First, although the idea of great powers is central to the discipline of international relations, and to the practice of the current order, the topic has been neglected in the contemporary literature. Recent studies that have dealt with the great

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powers have done so either as part of a broader theoretical endeavor, such as Mearsheimer’s efforts to elaborate his “offensive realism”;4 as focal points for assessing factors that influence foreign policy choice, such as Haas’s examination of the role of ideology in shaping great power preferences;5 or as part of an assessment of uneven treatment in international law.6 There has been no sustained examination of the role that great powers play in international society published in the past ten years and, more remarkably, given the policy interest in the emerging powers and their prospects of “greatness,” there is little sustained reflection on what it means to be a great power in the current order. Second, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the balance of world power appears to be in flux. Few would doubt the place of the United States atop the global totem pole, but after the self-inflicted damage done to its reputation and strategic capacity by the Bush administration and its aftermath, as well as the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, there is cause to reconsider the millennial assumptions that this century would be as “American” as the last. The spectacular economic success of China and India, the return of Russia, the new-found confidence of Brazil, and an expanded and consolidated European Union (EU) give many reasons to think that international relations are set for considerable change. The rising powers are important not only because of their size and newfound wealth, but also due to their ambition to assert themselves at the global level. World politics is beginning to enter a phase of power redistribution, and it is vital that we are as well equipped as possible to make intellectual and policy sense of these changes. The rise of China, India, and Russia and the emergence of Brazil and South Africa, as states of global importance, prompts questions of how much power they have and are likely to acquire; much ink, both scholarly and policy related, has been spilled trying to determine whether or when these rising powers will achieve the lofty status of a “great power.”7 Their emergence also forces us to consider what it might mean for the structure of the existing international order. One of the most compelling criticisms of the UN-centered order is the anachronistic distribution of power that the permanent membership of the Security Council reflects. As more power and influence is acquired by large, populous, and non-Western states and societies, both the institutional and normative underpinnings of the current order will be put under considerable stress. Third, the specific changes associated with the emergence of new powers and the relative decline of the North Atlantic states is a result of the broader transformative effects of globalization and provides further perspective on that process. While globalization has not yet led to the creation of a postWestphalian political and economic order, it is nonetheless driving changes in the strategies of states, reducing the effectiveness of some approaches, and providing those who can respond best to its circumstances with unparalleled

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opportunities. It also helps accelerate the growth and impact of emerging powers, while enabling relatively weak groupings to be able to exert their will over others in ways that previously would not have been possible.8 Globalization is subtly but profoundly changing the rules of the game in world politics and its implications for great powers—both their individual prospects and the broader role of great power managerialism—have been significant. In some ways, globalization’s impact on the great powers is a microcosm of the changes it is bringing to bear across the system; it is important, easy to overstate, and occurring in unexpected and uneven ways. Before moving into the argument proper, it is important to clarify the particular view of the great power role that is the focus of this book, that of great power managerialism. While there is a range of different accounts of what great powers are and their systemic role, this book is concerned with the notion that is most important to the politico-legal principles of the current order and that is itself in keeping with an influential strand of thought in international relations theory.

What Is Great Power Managerialism? What are great powers and how do they shape international order? The theoretical literature in international relations proposes three main ways of identifying great powers and the role that they play. The first sees great powers defined purely in terms of material capabilities, the second in terms of the nature of their interests, and the third sees great powers as authoritative or managerial players on the international stage. The most common approach to conceptualizing great powers focuses on their preponderance of material power. This group argues that in the modern international system, those states that are at the top of the military tree— however that may be defined—are of interest not simply because of their weight but because the distribution of power is thought to be of fundamental importance to the international system. The most influential classical articulation of this view was penned by the German father of historicism, Leopold von Ranke. His famous essay “The Great Powers” surveys the variegated fortunes of Europe’s major powers from the late 1680s until the mid-nineteenth century and argues that the emergence and interplay of great powers represents an unfolding of world history. Not only have great powers emerged to defend their interests in particular circumstances, the very idea of a great power as a specific kind of entity was a function of this process. Indeed, his depiction has been of particular influence on the way in which the emergence of great powers is thought to be a natural, even inevitable, part of the evolution of international systems. This process of naturalization will be discussed further in the next chapter. Ranke’s oft-cited definition notes that “if one could establish as a def-

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inition of a great power that it must be able to maintain itself against all others, even when they are united, then Frederick had raised Prussia to that position.”9 The best example of this approach in contemporary scholarship comes from Waltz’s seminal work of neorealist theory. The rank of great power is determined by “how they score on all of the following items: size of population and territory; resource endowment; economic capacity; military strength; political stability; and competence.”10 For Waltz, having a supremely effective fighting force will not get a state to the top table unless it is able to match the others in the system in all the other measures.11 For a second group, great powers can be identified by (and their distinctive role in the system follows from) both their material power attributes as well as the character of their interests. The broad-ranging character of the concerns of these states, in terms of geographic scope and breadth of issue area, are such that they play a distinctly different role in international society than ordinary powers. The classical statement of this position comes from the British historian Arnold Toynbee. Articulated in a study of the international relations of the post–World War I era, he asserts that a “Great Power may be defined as a political force exerting an effect co-extensive with the widest range of the society in which it operates.”12 Unusually, he argues that the historically distinctive character of great powers emerged in the aftermath of the 1417 Council of Constance, which brought about the end of the great papal schism. While the origins of the great power role will be considered in further detail in the next chapter, his approach is significant here because it overlays an important political dimension on the foundation of power. Explicitly drawing on this approach, Martin Wight argues that “great powers are powers with general interests, i.e., whose interests are as wide as the states-system itself, which today means world-wide.”13 The key point for Wight lies in the relationship of the state to the system and more particularly to the way in which the system operates. In Wight’s view, it is the expansion of a European practice of diplomacy and international relations to a global stage that makes the idea of distinguishing the “great powers” from all the others of particular interest. Similarly, Robert Jervis sets out a conception of great powers in which their distinctive place is a function of their position in the system: A great power is more tightly connected to larger numbers of other states than is a small power. Because it has involvements all over the world, a great power is at least slightly affected by most changes in relations of other states. . . . Although most states had not direct concerns in Vietnam, they were affected by what happened there because of the changes in US policy that the war produced.14

The third strand of thinking within the literature associates great powers not only with power, but also with a degree of organizational responsibility.

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The most clear-cut, and influential, expression of this approach is set out by Hedley Bull, who argues that great powers actively working to manage the system are a fundamental feature of the modern order. As he writes, they “contribute to international order in two main ways: by managing their relations with one another, and by exploiting their preponderance in such a way as to impart a degree of central direction to the affairs of international society as a whole.”15 Similarly, Gerry Simpson argues that this process, entailing the substantive predominance of the great powers in a system of formal equality, is recognized in the practices, and some of the principles, of international law, a situation he describes as “legalised hegemony.” This idea attempts to capture the awkward middle ground that exists between the formal equality that is the letter of international law—and the core principle of international politics— and the substantive inequality of world politics as it actually exists. Like Bull, Simpson argues that legalized hegemony entails the great powers carrying categorically different roles from ordinary members of international society, which derive from their special rights as great powers, but which also imply a particular set of duties.16 Simpson’s approach identifies great powers by their substantial military capacity, the systemic character of their interests, and the particular status that has been accorded them by the structures of legalized hegemony. Great powers have responsibilities to the international system that convey certain rights and, as such, great powers are not beholden to the sorts of moral, legal, and political constraints experienced by normal members of international society. Central to this third group is the recognition by other states that the great powers exist as a distinctive, and unequal, category of membership of international society. It is important because it is thought to be central to providing stability to the system through the explicit management by the powerful. Great powers, from this perspective, are not states like any other. They carry a particular role of responsibility to the system and are central to maintaining order under conditions of anarchy. Order depends on harnessing inequality for the overall benefit of the system. In doing so, it puts an important contradiction at the system’s center, given the formal significance of sovereign equality as a fundamental organizational principle. Inequality is thus not something unfortunate with which one must live, but is a necessary means of reconciling the uneven distribution of power with the fact of anarchy. As the foundational proposition of the international system, the principle of sovereignty and its corollary, the formal equality of all sovereign states, creates an anarchical system. Great power managerialism assumes that great powers are different from ordinary members of international society and, as such, they have a key part to play in managing international order as well as protecting the underlying system and the values that it represents. Central to this proposition is the belief that the interests of the powerful are linked fundamentally to the underlying values that the system advances. Minor powers

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may be frustrated by the evident hypocrisies of international society, but they put up with them not only because they must, but also because they recognize that the existing configuration of the international system depends upon it.17 This brief overview of the three main approaches to the great powers shows the considerable diversity of views as to what great powers are as well as the absence of consensus as to precisely the kind of role they are thought to play. This also underlines the important point that there is no correct interpretation of what the great powers do or what their role in the international system ought to be. While some see the special place of great powers deriving from their capacity to act as guarantors of international order, others see it as a manifestation of, or evidence for, the existence of an international society. This is neatly articulated by Ian Clark: “Order exists when the Great Powers perform the dual tasks of both managing their relations with each other and also imparting a degree of central direction to the workings of the international society as a whole.”18 Others take a more skeptical view of things. Wight points out that the notion that great powers club together to manage the system is more often than not a self-serving delusion. “History affords little support for the assertion the great powers like to make that they are more restrained and responsible than minor powers. It suggests, rather, that they wish to monopolize the right to create international conflict.”19 In this book I will explore how the idea of great power managerialism has evolved and show that while the great power function may appear to be a “natural” feature of international relations, it is in fact the product of a specific set of historical, material, and ideational processes and as such is always subject to change. As Morgenthau claims, the idea of “the great powers” as “an institution of international politics and organization, carrying differences in legal status . . . sprang from the brains of Castlereagh and became the very foundation of the scheme adopted in 1815.”20 The preceding discussion draws attention to the range of views about great powers and shows that while the concept has become a central feature of the current international legal architecture, it is not the only way of making sense of the role of powerful states in an anarchic system. Thus while there is no specific function of the great powers that is applicable across time, a particular conception has become more important to the workings of the international system. In the current order, the idea of the great powers that is built into the constitutional foundations of the international system most closely resembles the account described in the third strand discussed above. The great powers have been cemented into the centerpiece of the international legal and political order that is run through the United Nations and, as will be discussed in the coming chapters, draws directly on this kind of thinking about what great powers are and their function in managing international order. In this book, then, I will examine the historical emergence of this idea, its gradual constitutionalization in various institutional efforts to manage

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international order, and the particular challenges that this idea faces in the early twenty-first century. It is useful at the outset to summarize the core ideas of great power managerialism. First, great powers are generally understood to be in the top tier of military powers in the international system and that their interests are understood as bound up across the system as a whole. Second, those states are distinguished from normal members of international society by a set of rights and responsibilities that they owe to international society as a whole. They have the right to exempt themselves from key norms and laws in return for which they have a broader obligation to help manage international order and to ensure that the values it represents are protected. Third, membership in the great power grouping is primarily a function of the recognition accorded the powers by international society more broadly. This is not simply the crude supplication of the weak at the altar of power, but in recognizing great powers in this way, states give some basic consent to and acceptance of the legitimacy of this arrangement. Other states consent to the substantive inequalities that overlay the system of formal equality and are reflected by the institution of the “great powers,” even if this consent is at times somewhat begrudging. They do so because in a basic systemic sense it serves their interests. This view—that a system of formal equality in which power is in fact unevenly distributed must endow the most powerful states with special rights and responsibilities so that they maintain order—has become a central feature of the contemporary international order, even while it contradicts some of the core norms that underpin the modern system. I aim to show that this idea should be understood as a specific political, legal, and diplomatic response to the inequalities of power that exist in a system of political relations founded on the principle of formal juridical equality in which there is no central authority to enforce principles and rules and, more broadly, maintain order.

Structure of the Book The longevity of the UN system and the changes in the UN’s conduct have obscured the fact that the institution’s managerial vision of international order, with great powers acting as collective guarantors of the order, represents an unusual and by no means the only, or indeed even optimal, way of organizing international relations in the post–World War II world. While great powers have always played a distinctive and singularly important part in international relations, the managerial version embodied in the United Nations is the product of a very specific history that produced a particular vision for the way in which disparities of power could be tamed, or at the very least harnessed, for a broader systemic benefit. My central argument is that the managerial conception of international order, and the particular role of the

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great powers within that order, is an outdated approach to organizing international relations. In Chapter 2, I examine the historical origins of the idea that great powers act as key managers of international order and, in particular, the nineteenth-century circumstances that allowed great power managerialism to work. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the way in which the great power role established in the nineteenth century has become increasingly formally integrated into the structures of twentieth-century international society. In Chapter 3, I focus on how this was attempted through the creation of the League of Nations. In Chapter 4, I explore the place of the great powers in the constitutional structure of the United Nations. Chapter 5 is concerned with the extent to which the idea of the great powers that is incorporated in the current international order is appropriate under contemporary circumstances. Attention is paid both to the structural problems of great power management and to the changes in the context of world politics that have made the exercise of the great power role increasingly problematic. In the context of these problems, in Chapter 6, I examine the place of the United States in the international system as a means of considering the contemporary character of the great power role. Then, in Chapter 7, I consider the current implications of the emergence of a number of powers of global weight and significance. Chapter 8 is a brief conclusion that includes a reiteration of the main lines of argument put forward in the book. Here I also reflect on some of the broader challenges that this study has uncovered. In examining the origins, contemporary challenges, and emerging prospects of the great power role, I have emphasized how some of the bedrock foundations of the postwar international order are increasingly unstable. There is an urgent need to recognize the structural nature of the challenges facing the multilateral mechanisms that have been constructed to try to stabilize the international system. I do not argue that power no longer matters to international relations, nor that powerful states are an irrelevance in an era of globalization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, my point of departure is that we need to rethink how it is that power matters, and how the inevitable inequalities of power in world politics can be harnessed to better provide order in a complex world. In this book I challenge the idea that the great powers are always vital managers of international society. This at once generous and self-serving idea has become increasingly entrenched in the formal legal principles of international order. The process through which this has occurred (which will be explored in the next two chapters) has served to build into the international system a series of assumptions about how the system works that were always at best questionable and that now are badly out of date. The notion that international politics can (and should) be managed by a club of the powerful sits

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very uneasily in the current order. Beyond the obvious tensions between the formal egalitarian principles of the contemporary international system and the iniquities that are required for such a system to work, there is a sense that the underlying mechanics of the international system are simply not manageable by any state or even small group of states. The sheer size of the world’s human population; the level, extent, and character of the economic, political, and cultural links between and among these populations; and the vast array of threats and challenges we face today cast doubts that an institution created in the diplomatic salons in the heart of early nineteenth-century Austria belongs in a globalized world. Indeed, one might reasonably wonder why it was that the founders of the United Nations thought that a principle of aristocratic nineteenth-century diplomacy, born of a world in which the dual systems of sovereignty and imperialism dominated the globe, was going to work in a decolonizing world beset with the destructive power of atomic weaponry. To answer this question, we must consider the evolution of the European international system and how it has been understood to make sense of why the idea of great power management, ostensibly sprung from Viscount Castlereagh’s head, found such fertile ground in the minds of the hard-headed diplomats designing the United Nations during the final years of World War II.

Notes 1. For a good overview of the conference and the background to the foundation of the UN, see Schlesinger, Act of Creation. 2. See, for example, Bourantonis, History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform, and Franda, United Nations in the Twenty-First Century. 3. Waltz, Theory of International Politics. 4. Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 5. Haas, Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics. 6. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States. 7. For some examples of this literature, see Michael Brown (ed.), Rise of China; Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower; and Panagariya, India. 8. On this, see Bisley, Rethinking Globalization. 9. von Ranke, “The Great Powers,” 202–203. Interestingly, historian Paul Kennedy modelled his best-selling survey of the rise and fall of the great powers over the past 500 years on Ranke’s 1833 essay. This is evident in the definition it provides for a great power: it is “by definition a state capable of holding its own against any other nation,” Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 697. 10. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 131. 11. Other examples of such views of great powers include Posen and Ross, “Competing Visions for US Grand Strategy,” 17; Pastor, “Great Powers in the Twentieth Century”; and Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 5. 12. Toynbee, World After the Peace Conference, 4. 13. Wight, Power Politics, 50.

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14. Jervis, “Systems Theories and Diplomatic History,” 215. For further examples of this approach, see Snyder and Diesing, Conflict Among Nations, 419; and Miller and Kagan, “Great Powers and Regional Conflicts,” 54. 15. Bull, Anarchical Society, 200. 16. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States. 17. For other examples of this approach to the great powers see, Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 16; Suzuki, “Seeking ‘Legitimate’ Great Power Status in Post–Cold War International Society,” 45–63; and Buzan, United States and the Great Powers, 68. 18. Ian Clark, Hierarchy of States, 38. 19. Wight, Power Politics, 42–43. 20. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 459.

2 The Origins of the Great Power Role

The period of early modern European history—from the Westphalian peace of 1648 through to the 1815 conclusion of the Congress of Vienna and to the end of the nineteenth century—is of profound importance to the development of the contemporary international system. The first phase, bookended by the Thirty Years’ War and the defeat of Napoleon, often neglected in much international relations (IR) scholarship, encompassed a series of long and devastating conflicts, culminating in the tumultuous wars set off by the French Revolution and Napoleon’s ambition. But it was also the period when the foundations of a recognizably modern system of international politics were laid down. During this time the idea of the sovereign state became the standard form of political organization in Europe, the practice of diplomacy was transformed from an ad hoc business of the Italian city-states into the primary institution mediating interstate relations, and modern international law was born in the writings of Grotius, Gentili, Pufendorf, and Vattel. The second phase, the long European peace that followed 1815, involved all the major European powers rapidly accelerating their colonization of nonEuropean lands, a process that had begun in the sixteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, European powers controlled over a third of the world’s territory and population, and European statesmen, diplomats, lawyers, and scholars began to think that the practices and procedures governing their relations with one another were naturally universal. It was this sense, not entirely unreasonable—after all, Europe’s experiences had become the world’s—that led many to think that the keys to understanding the mechanics of a global system of international relations were to be found in this period. The idea that international society has a special category of membership for great powers, one that is a function of a rightsresponsibility trade-off, emerged in this period. Without this development, the 15

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institutionalization of great power privilege into the legal structures of the twentieth-century international order would not have occurred. This period is also of vital concern because many have assumed that European experiences necessarily translate into global ones and this outlook has shaped the way in which the great power role is currently manifested. Moreover, the way in which the great powers established a diplomatic system to manage Europe’s international order in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars was central to stabilizing Europe’s international system and depended upon very specific social and political circumstances. This context needs to be understood if we are to make sense not only of the history of the role but also the historical and practical shortcomings of the current institutional setting and why it may not be well suited to twenty-first-century world politics. The purpose of this chapter is to chart the emergence and development of the idea that great powers act as key managers of international order. It begins with the first inkling of this notion in the treaties of Ösnabruck and Münster, which formed the Westphalian peace, and concludes with the breakdown of the European international system in the early years of the twentieth century. Although most scholars argue that the explicitly stated managerial role of great powers was created at Vienna in 1815, there is an anterior history that plays an important part in the evolution of the idea. The first part of the chapter thus examines the way in which one can identify aspects of what came to be the great power role during the initial formation of the European state system, during what some historians have called the “long eighteenth century.”1 The second will focus on the settlement forged at the Congress of Vienna, which set in place the system of international order that functioned, with varying degrees of formality, up until World War I. Historians continue to argue about the extent to which the remarkable European peace of the nineteenth century (at least in comparison to the preceding centuries of war) was a function of the Vienna settlement’s great power diplomatic system or whether other factors created peaceful conditions for which Vienna is wrongly given credit. The point is not to resolve what appears to be an intractable dispute, but to understand the way in which the idea of great power management was believed to be the key to peace and the extent to which this understanding of the past has influenced both the theory and practice of international relations in the twentieth century.

The Anterior History of the Great Power Role: 1648–1815 The modern sense of the great power role—that the participating state is a distinct member of international society with special privileges that are granted in return for responsibility to manage international order, and embodied in the UN Charter—was a creation of the nineteenth century. The strengths and

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weaknesses of the great power role, like many features of the contemporary world with long lineages, reflect the peculiarity of its historical origins. While a creation of the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, one must recognize that, contrary to Morgenthau’s claim cited in the preceding chapter, the idea of great power management did not spring spontaneously from the ether. It has a longer history in which diplomatic developments of the early modern period cleared the way for the settlement at Vienna. While it may appear that when Prince Klemens von Metternich, Viscount Castlereagh, and Czar Alexander thrashed out the terms under which post–Napoleonic Europe would be run they were essentially inventing things as they went, in reality they were working with ideas and principles that had, in part, been prefabricated. The period between 1648 and 1815 was one of momentous change. Europeans lived through astonishing, and by some measures epochal, transformation of their diplomatic, military, cultural, and economic affairs.2 Almost no sphere of European society was left unchanged by the developments of this period. From seigneurial relations to the practice of international law, from architecture to agriculture, the scope, scale, and reach of social transformation in Europe between 1648 and 1815 was bewildering in an almost literal sense. Even if one were to reduce the European story only to matters of international politics, one could not do justice to the dozens of wars that were fought, alliances that were made and unmade, and borders that were drawn and redrawn, or indeed even set out a relatively coherent chronology of key events without filling the rest of this book and perhaps more. As such, this section of the chapter will draw out the salient developments of this time that were of particular importance to the development of the great power role and draw the reader’s attention to sources they may pursue for further detail. It will focus particularly on the key features of the Westphalian settlement and on the consolidation of the state system dominated by a number of roughly equivalent major powers, what has come to be known, primarily due to the historicism of von Ranke and his followers, as the “great power” international system. The Westphalian Peace The year 1648 is generally thought to mark the beginning of modern international relations. It is believed that Westphalia heralded the end of the period of overlapping spheres of authority and divided loyalties that had been the hallmark of medieval systems of politics and ushered in the modern era, in which territorially defined sovereign states became the norm. Feudal relationships were pushed aside and the patchwork quilt of political entities and the divided and overlapping structures of authority were subsumed by the modern principles spelled out in the terms of the peace. Revisionist scholarship contests this neat view, however.3 Although it would be impractical to enter the growing argument about the significance of the Westphalian peace here, it is important

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to emphasize that the modern international system was not instantaneously created, fully formed, by a peace settlement reached in the middle of the seventeenth century. The principles, procedures, and habits—what might be called the culture of a distinctly modern form of international politics—took a long time to emerge. The points of continuity between the early modern international system in Europe and its medieval predecessors are as notable as the ruptures. Dynastic ambition and concerns about succession continued to be central sources of warfare among what were effectively transnational ruling classes long after 1648. The absolutism that became the norm (although not universally so) among European states was a creation of the High Middle Ages, and the mercantilism that retained its predominance in economic thinking was decidedly premodern in its inclination. That said, ruptures there were; and even if the place of the Westphalian peace is somewhat overstated, or at least insufficient attention is paid to the subtleties of its complex history, it nonetheless stands as a crucial turning point for those interested in the history of international politics. The twin congresses of Ösnabruck and Münster—so held because the Protestant Swedes refused to sit at the table with representatives of the pope— which forged the Peace of Westphalia, are of particular significance for our purposes for a number of reasons. Westphalia’s most immediate function was to mark the end of Habsburg efforts to dominate Europe.4 The Habsburgs had sought to unify Europe under their leadership, in which the Holy Roman emperor (a Habsburg naturally enough) would rule the secular realm and the papacy the spiritual. Hegemonic ambition was thwarted, and, more importantly, the idea of a universal European polity that would subsume both spiritual and secular realms was brought to an end. Habsburg efforts to create hierarchy as the central organizing principle of Europe were defeated; and by default, a prototype of modern anarchy prevailed, as there was no clear consensus as to what principles of authority might replace the imperial or papal notions across the system as a whole.5 As a prominent international lawyer wrote in a piece marking the tercentenary of the peace, rather than creating a society of states or a community of Christendom, Westphalia “ushers in the era of sovereign absolutist states which recognized no superior authority.” 6 In this sense Westphalia marked a link between the modern form of international relations—exclusive authority defined in territorial terms—and the premodern forms of overlapping authority, where territory was of secondary importance and loyalties were regularly divided along dynastic lines. If Habsburg ambition, and its demise, was a key fault line in the Thirty Years’ War, its other main point of contestation was the question of religious toleration.7 The peace confirmed the famous term of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg—cuius regio eius religio—as well as met more specific demands for Calvinist toleration within the Holy Roman Empire. The notion became a bedrock principle of European politics. The authority and influence of Rome,

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or any other aspirant spiritual force, would ultimately be at the mercy of the princes. Many see the Augsburgian confirmation as representing the first vestiges of the modern version of sovereignty, that is, each prince is free to impose his will on his people. But in the decidedly more secular realm of war and peacemaking, states within the Holy Roman Empire were given their freedom to wage war, forge alliances, and sue for peace independently (with the proviso they did not imperil the emperor).8 This move was presented as restoring the “Germanic liberties” that the German elements of the Holy Roman Empire were supposed always to have had. This feature is particularly important for our concerns. Not only does it reflect a clearly modern move—delinking war making from superior authority emanating from beyond one’s territory—it attempts to reinforce the peace by making an important provision. The liberties were guaranteed in the terms of the peace by the dominant powers. By the terms of the treaty, France and Sweden, the two preeminent powers, are given the right to interfere in the empire if the liberties are put at risk. The victors not only gave themselves generous terms but reserved for themselves the right to guarantee the terms of the peace. This is the first time one can see traces of an embryonic great power role evident in European diplomacy. The major powers that emerged out of the conflict arrogated themselves the right to underwrite the specifics of the agreement. The intention was not merely to try to ensure that the Habsburgs would not be able to make another lunge for European dominance, but to try to preserve the general terms of the peace. The idea of a peace being guaranteed by several major powers was new, even if the idea of treaties being guaranteed in general was not.9 This is significant for two reasons. First, it put the idea of a broader, more generalized guarantee into a treaty in ways that can be seen as constitutional of the international order—a practice that would become of growing importance up until 1815. Second, it sees great powers as specific holders of this guarantee. The intended order did not last long, however. While Westphalia had a number of important features relating to the long-term creation of an order managed by great powers, its broader impact on the constitution of Europe’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century international system should not be overstated. It was, after all, an effort to create a specific peace and not a broad-ranging system to create a peaceful order.10 War maintained its place as a central feature, and indeed focus, of European international relations.11 But an important precedent for the management of international order had been set even while the peace was backward looking and did not really address what today would be called the underlying causes of the war; and, of course, it did not work as intended. However, the basic principle of major power guarantees was accepted. Finally, Westphalia is important because of the way in which it established a number of central principles for diplomacy, a practice that was, at the time, slowly being formalized to become the institution that we recognize

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today. Beyond its obvious contribution to the development of international law, Westphalia established the idea that general congresses of European states should be called as the means to resolve conflicts and to settle the terms of peace.12 All subsequent significant wars during this period were resolved, or at least had resolution attempted in some form, at international congresses that were general in their membership—general here meaning that they included more than just the combatants. The Congress of Ryswick was called to end the Nine Years’ War (also known as the War of the League of Augsburg), the first war ensnaring Britain in continental conflict for several hundred years. The Congress at Utrecht in 1713 ended the War of the Spanish Succession.13 And Sweden’s decline from its position in 1648 was marked by the congress held to resolve its defeat in the Great Northern War at Nystad. The War of the Austrian Succession was brought to an end by the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. And, of course, the most famous of them all, the Congress of Vienna, thrashed out the complex settlement of the Napoleonic Wars.14 Westphalia thus began the move not only toward a European state system that looks to some degree modern, it established a set of key developments— the end of Habsburg power and the broader efforts to establish a hierarchical structure to early modern international relations—and for our concerns derived the principles of congresses and great power guarantees that provide the first hint of the formal great power role that was to come. The Rise of the Pentarchy and the Idea of the Great Powers In most international histories, and indeed in much international political theory, the period between Westphalia and Vienna is principally taken up with recounting the emergence and consolidation of a modern state system. In the century or so prior to 1648, so this literature goes, Europe had a premodern mélange of contested authorities and mixed political systems and was dominated by the Habsburg Empire. After 1648, the basic structure of an anarchical system was established through the eventual development of an increasing number of roughly equivalent major powers. This process culminated in the five powers, or “Pentarchy,” of Britain, Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia (the newest major power), which dominated matters during the nineteenthcentury consolidation of the state system.15 The way in which the international system developed in Europe was crucial to shaping future thinking about how international systems operate in general. The European system did not develop as a hegemony of one dominant power, nor did it entail the preponderance of two major powers. Rather, the fact that European history produced a system comprised of five powers— which had a relatively even distribution of military, economic, and diplomatic power—became fundamental to shaping the idea that international systems in

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general tend to produce groups of major powers that balance one another. If the distribution of power had played out differently, say if Louis XIV’s France and Austria had created what might be termed a bipolar structure, then not only would Europe’s history have been different, but our ideas about what international systems are and how they operate would have reflected these very different circumstances. This period of history and equally its historiography was important to the development of the broader idea of the balance of power and to the belief that international systems have a tendency to create divisions of power among the powerful in order to limit the ability of any one to dominate the system as a whole. Of course, central to this development— one that fed into the evolution of the idea of the special role of the great powers—was the subsequent understanding of this period not as a particular historical moment but as illustrative of natural processes, which meant that European experience in the early modern period should be seen to be universally applicable. The year 1648 marked the end of Habsburg domination of European international politics. The two main victors, or at least the two who came out of the Thirty Years’ War in positions of greatest strength, were Sweden and France. Sweden was distinctly the lesser power, with some seeing it as little more than a French regional affiliate. Its position subsequently declined quite rapidly and, in retrospect, the mid-seventeenth century marked the high point of Swedish power in Europe. The material weakness of the Habsburgs, alongside the structural advantages established by Westphalia, meant that Louis XIV’s France was able, for an initial period, to make itself the preeminent power in Europe. As a French diplomat of the time remarked, the Peace of Westphalia was “one of the finest jewels in the French crown,” as it provided a key means for French domination over central Europe.16 Although it never reached Habsburgian heights, between Westphalia and the peace brought by the Ryswick Congress in 1697, France was Europe’s most powerful state. French decline was precipitated by a raft of factors, most notably the way in which its military advantage was undermined by rivals copying its tactics, notably the Dutch and German states; the move to a more defensive strategy brought about by a failure to incorporate new military technology; and the rise in wealth and power of others, most particularly Great Britain.17 Britain’s emergence as a naval power, as well as its ability to lead a continental coalition in strategic and diplomatic terms, was the beginning of the end for France’s hegemonic ambitions, at least for a hundred years or so. Although Ryswick did not finally resolve the question of the Spanish succession (that resolution came at Utrecht-Rastatt), the congress was an important development because it provided intimations of how European international politics was going to be organized. It did so by providing a clear sense that one power was going to find it extraordinarily difficult to dominate Europe militarily. At the congress, statesmen recognized that the structure of

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European international politics was going to be shaped fundamentally by the way power was divided and the distribution of influence, “rather than the preponderance of one state.”18 The idea that the division of power was the key to European peace was first formally articulated in the Treaty of Utrecht. While some later historians and theorists have tended to overstate the extent to which the nebulous idea of the balance of power embodied in the treaty determined diplomatic behavior, there can be no doubt that Utrecht further advanced thinking about how European international relations ought to be managed.19 Military technology had made the kind of decisive victories that had brought Louis XIV his dominance ever harder to achieve, and France’s natural advantages were being increasingly undermined by changing economic and strategic circumstances. In short, smaller and smarter powers were able to become major players in ways they could not in the past. Utrecht is a part of the evolution of the idea of great power managerialism not only because it was a key step on the path to the creation of the nineteenth-century pentarchy and order through the division of power, but also because it reflected a further development of the thinking about how that division should best be managed. As Holsti argues, the makers of Utrecht “envisaged the use of community power to enforce the settlement, rather than sanctioning unilateral intervention, as had been provided for in Westphalia. There is thus the idea that the entire community of states has a stake in preserving the peace settlement.”20 Russia’s defeat of Sweden in the 1660s, and then the collapse of the Swedish empire in the early years of the eighteenth century, gave the czar ascendancy in the north and northeast, which very slowly began to give the giant of the East the opportunity to make its claim as a major power. Although France and Britain both tried to keep Russia out of European politics, its influence, reflected in the creation of a series of permanent Russian ambassadors to the rest of Europe, and particularly its growing interaction with Austria and then Prussia during this period, made Russia a central figure in European politics.21 During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Austrian part of the Habsburg family, who had benefited rather well from Ryswick and Utrecht, overtook their Spanish cousins to entrench their position as the fourth major power in Europe. Given their geographic scope and lineage, this is not entirely surprising, although ever since the mid-sixteenth-century division, the Vienna branch of the House of Habsburg had been particularly threatened by the Ottomans. Only after their defeat in 1683 was Austrian power and influence at the European level confirmed.22 That France, Austria, and Russia would be major powers in Europe is not entirely surprising given their basic material attributes and the natural advantages of their territories. Britain’s physical isolation from the continent and protection from the immediate threat of land warfare similarly gave it a structural advantage. Of course, these powers were not merely propelled by his-

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tory’s kind hand, their standing reflected the complex combination of domestic economic and social circumstances, government ability in general and fiscal capacity in particular, and an interest in a particular brand of diplomacy and statecraft. But it was Prussia’s emergence out of the patchwork of Germanic states to become the fifth great power that was less expected. Frederick the Great’s remarkably modern approach to statecraft and foreign policy and his inheritance of a considerable military force, established by his father, Frederick William II, propelled the Prussian state to the top table.23 By the end of the War of Austrian Succession, concluded in 1748 at the Congress of Aix-laChapelle, Prussia, or more particularly Frederick the Great, had confirmed his domination of Germany and it was in a position to seriously challenge Austria. As Blanning puts it, “As Spain and the Dutch Republic had clearly forfeited their great-power status, Prussia joined France, Great Britain, Austria and Russia to form a pentarchy of states capable of acting independently in international affairs.”24 Great Powers and the System Over 100 years or so, Europe moved from being dominated by a single power with multiple forms of polity and overlapping spheres of authority to having a reasonably consolidated modern international system. Central to this development was the self-conscious recognition of international politics as a discrete realm of state policy by diplomats and statesmen that had a dedicated administrative apparatus (staffed primarily by aristocrats) and an established institution to regulate these relations. Diplomacy, while not born in this period, was made into its modern form by the conflicts and machinations of European states as well as by the rationalization of foreign policy by European statesmen during this time.25 The creation of an international system where the key elements were comprised of territorially defined sovereign entities was firmly established by the mid-eighteenth century. It was, however, the nature of that system, in which power was relatively evenly distributed among five powers following a long period of contestation and conflict, that made many historians and theorists describe the European state system as a “great power system.” It was von Ranke’s 1833 essay that gave birth to this historiography, a view of European international history that retains much of its influence today. As a description of developments and a depiction of the distribution of power, the notion of a great power system has much to recommend it. For one thing, it goes some of the way toward explaining why the balance of power gained such a totemic place in diplomatic and scholarly thinking—the notions of “poise” and “equipoise” make a certain kind of sense in such a finely balanced world and one in which societies had been fighting almost continuously for 120 years or so. But it does not follow that these experiences were inevitable, nor that they should be understood as universal, as many scholars have

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implied. Indeed, it is important to recognize the particular political purpose of Ranke’s historicism. Ranke and his fellow travelers sought to portray the emergence of the great power system in Europe as a natural development in order to depict revolutionary and Napoleonic France (with its liberal and nationalist ideas) as a historical aberration. In unwittingly accepting this particular interpretation, scholars have written into much of the history and theory of international relations a bias against the contingency of events in Europe.26 This bias has a number of important consequences. First, it means that when we look back to European history we are encouraged to see universal truths in the practices of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European statecraft that apply across time. For example, this can be seen in studies that seek to understand the dynamics of alliances in the late twentieth century by describing an alliance among European states in 1822 that is functionally the same as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the late 1980s.27 While there may be some analytic utility at the margins, such exercises are fraught with difficulties because of the second problem that this bias induces—that it encourages us to overlook the crucial historical circumstances on which these developments depended. It is useful to look to the past to understand contemporary events, like alliances, but one must be mindful of neglecting specific historical factors that were of fundamental importance to particular developments. There can be no doubt that what diplomats thought constituted Europe’s society of states in 1815 is radically different from what constitutes even Europe’s society of states today, to say nothing of contemporary Asian, African, or Latin American state systems. Third, and perhaps most perniciously, it encourages analytically questionable reasoning that has realworld implications. The following is an example of precisely this problem: The European structure of international systems expanded around the world to become global, and as such, the global international system has a European history. It follows from this, therefore, that the world will experience an evolution along the lines of Europe—the world will have a number of great powers, they will need to be guided by the dictates of the balance of power, and they will need to be managed by the cooperative actions of a club of great powers. Yet there is no good reason for assuming that the historical legacies, accidents, and egos that gave Europe five major powers (and a number of smaller not-quite great powers, such as Spain and the Netherlands) should occur elsewhere in the world. Moreover, it entirely neglects the role that European colonialism played in taking the system to the world. The method of the expansion of the system matters both to the structures and to the political practice of modern international relations. Given its arbitrary division of the world, its brutality, and remarkable cultural hubris, this is no small shortcoming. By the time Napoleon began what were ultimately futile efforts at European dominion, the ground had been prepared for the diplomats at Vienna to

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come up with the idea of great power management of international order. Europe had a number of roughly equivalent powers, and while it was believed that a strategic balance was required among them, experience had shown that it would not spontaneously emerge; it had to be encouraged and indeed for some actively managed and protected. Also, the revolution in military strategy that came out of the Napoleonic Wars had made the price of conflict appear unbearably high.28 Together, these developments made fertile ground for the idea that international systems required a managerial elite. For some, the invention of great power managerialism was entirely self-serving.29 To a degree this was so. But it is important to emphasize that given the history through which they had lived, the great powers’ representatives genuinely believed that it was only through the management of order that Europe’s peace could be maintained and revolutionary ideas and policies kept at bay. The fact that conditions were ripe for the development and institutionalization of the idea that great powers should play a managerial role was not sufficient to make it so. The odd combination of old and new diplomatic practices, as well as the ideas of the diplomats and statesmen at Vienna, were needed to take that step.

A Directorate of the Great Powers: 1815–1914 In 1919, when diplomats and statesmen were trying to settle the terms of the peace following World War I, the Congress of Vienna’s settlement had an extremely strong appeal.30 In part, this was because the congress appeared to be responsible for a truly remarkable period of peace among Europe’s major powers: a peace all the more notable given the brutality of the preceding 150 years. Indeed, the order established at Vienna is thought by some to have worked almost too well. One of the congress system’s leading admirers believes that its success in no small way contributed to the disaster of World War I: “In the long interval of peace the sense of the tragic was lost; it was forgotten that states could die, that upheavals could be irretrievable, that fear could become the means of social cohesion.”31 There is good reason to argue that rather than dwell on 1648, students of international relations should focus more on 1815 and the settlement concluded at the Congress of Vienna. Not only did it usher in, for a period, a successful phase of great power diplomacy, which explicitly managed international order through a cooperative and consultative process, it marked more clearly than ever before the flowering of a distinctly modern form of international politics. Dynastic concerns of succession ceased to be the cause of major wars, international law took on an impersonal and rational form, and the state, as opposed to the sovereign, became the subject of this law. The premodern practice whereby treaties were conducted between sovereigns, and thus made null and void by the sovereign’s death, ceased after 1815. The formal

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recognition of sovereign equality, the mutual recognition of rights in international law, and a rational administrative system of diplomacy to manage international politics all became fundamental features of the European state system. Indeed, it is in 1815, and not really before this, that Europe’s international politics can be said to have taken on a Pufendorfian systemic quality.32 But for our concerns, it is during the period set in train by the Congress of Vienna that the idea of great power management of international order, through the formalization of unequal treatment in the face of the norm of sovereign equality, was created and had, arguably, its greatest success. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 ended Habsburg efforts to impose a single secular authority on Europe. Since then no one, despite Louis XIV’s and Napoleon’s best efforts, was able to replace the Habsburg vision of central authority with their own. Moreover, the idea that a balance of power was needed to stabilize the region, and the kind of diplomacy that had attempted to pursue this idea, had created a disastrously violent period. After Vienna, however, this changed. The post-Napoleonic peace, the victors determined, could not be made in the old ways. The astonishingly bloody conflicts of the period, followed by the strategic difficulty of actually defeating Napoleon’s drive for domination—Europe had been at war almost perpetually for nearly twentyfive years, and it had taken seven coalitions to defeat the Corsican general— demanded not only an effective peace settlement and a new diplomacy, but also a recognition that a stable order required more than efforts to divine the balance of power. The solution was to selectively overturn the notion of sovereign equality by granting named “great powers” with special status in return for their maintenance of the European peace. Writing in the late nineteenth century, British lawyer T. J. Lawrence argued that the great powers had, through their Viennese settlement, essentially killed off the principle of sovereign equality: The Great Powers have by modern usage a position of pre-eminence in European affairs, which is so marked, and has such important legal results, that the old doctrine of absolute equality before International Law of sovereign states is no longer applicable. It is not merely that the stronger states have influence proportionate to their strength; but that custom has given them what can hardly be distinguished from a legal right to settle disputed questions as they please, the smaller states being obliged to acquiesce to their decision.33

While uneasy about such a dispatch, Lawrence concluded that on balance great power management of European order worked and that unequal treatment was a price worth paying. As in the major wars of the twentieth century, the members of the various alliances that were required to defeat Napoleon began planning for the peace long before it had been achieved. An example was the 1804 visit made by the

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Russian envoy Nikolai Novosiltsov to the British prime minister with a proposal, drawn up by the Polish foreign affairs adviser to Czar Alexander, Adam Czartoryski, for a postwar European order based on the “sacred rights of humanity.” This included a proposal for a universal system to guarantee the security of European states through public international law.34 While the specifics of this proposal came to nothing, it was illustrative of the ideas being fomented by the times and that ultimately produced the congress system of great power diplomacy. As with the previous section, it is impossible to provide even a cursory overview of the extraordinarily complex diplomatic dealings that produced the Vienna settlement. This section will instead draw attention to the salient features of the period for the argument at hand. It will first set out what is meant by the “Vienna settlement,” its key terms and the distinctive role assigned to the great powers in the order that it envisaged. Second, it will evaluate the international order created in 1815, one that hinged on cooperative great power management, and reflect on the extent to which it embodied principles for managing international order that are applicable across time. The point is not to describe this vast and complex period—there is insufficient space to do this—but to examine the system’s successes and failures and the extent to which this was a function of the new structural footing on which European diplomacy had been placed, a footing that was in turn built on a number of key foundations that are often overlooked in the orthodox accounts of great power management. The Vienna Settlement Over time, the diplomatic system forged at Vienna has been interpreted in different ways. Many see it as a means to underwrite the counterrevolutionary impulse in Europe and a diplomatic mechanism to ensure a conservative order in the post-Napoleonic age in the face of liberal and nationalist challenges.35 The revisionist scholarship of the 1880s read it as a mechanism to regulate British and Russian competition for European dominance.36 Scholars have also interpreted it as a self-conscious effort to apply what has been described as “concert theory” to the management of international order;37 and it has also been described as an ultimately fraught way of managing the balance of power.38 This breadth of interpretation reflects not only the various intellectual interests of scholars, and the political times in which they worked, but also the sheer complexity of the negotiations and diplomatic wrangling and the fact that the settlement itself was not codified in one clear and unequivocal statement. Moreover, the period over which it is thought to have held sway exceeded 100 years. As such, it is necessary to make clear one’s terms. “Congress system” and “Vienna settlement” will be used interchangeably to refer to the core principles of the international order established in the post-

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Napoleonic age, and which lasted, with varying degrees of influence and power, up until World War I, but which was manifested in quite varying forms. The settlement was forged between 1814 and 1815 and was most clearly, although not completely, articulated in the text of the Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance (also known as the Second Treaty of Paris) signed on November 20, 1815. Prior to explaining it in more detail, it is helpful to summarize the key components of the international order founded at Vienna. The order was intended to maintain the territorial and ideological settlement of the Napoleonic Wars, to use congresses and conferences to manage international disputes and conflicts, and was founded on a commitment by the great powers to undertake self-restraint in their actions with one another so that they could collectively manage this complex system. Held between September 1814 and June 1815, the Congress of Vienna established the essential diplomatic features for the European system of international politics managed by the great powers. The congress was notable for many reasons: the peace it forged, the diplomatic system that bore its name, the extracurricular activities of many participants at the epic array of dances and dinners that went on, and, interestingly, for the fact that it never officially convened.39 It was called to confirm the terms of the Treaty of Paris of May 30, 1814 (also known as the first Paris Peace), which had followed Napoleon’s abdication on April 11 and the April 23 armistice between the allies and France.40 As noted, it never formally met in official congress and suffered interminable negotiations over minor matters such as diplomatic protocol, the demands of the lesser powers, and of course Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his final stand, the “Hundred Days,” which dated from his March 1 landing in France to his famous defeat at the hands of the Prussians and British at Waterloo on June 18, 1815.41 The negotiations at Vienna caused significant divisions among the key powers and these turned on two major issues. The first was the practical matter of the peace: who should get what territory and which deals struck during the wars would be honored and which neglected. There were also quite different views as to what kind of territorial settlement would produce a stable postwar period. Some wanted France to be partitioned, as unlucky Poland had been in the eighteenth century, while the British and the Russians wanted to ensure that, in the face of Prussian power, Europe continued to have a “soft center” created by the many minor states within that area. Beyond these more immediate issues was the second line of dispute. This derived from the wide differences of opinion as to the nature of the order necessary to underwrite a more stable system of European international relations. Castlereagh envisioned a more cautious setting than either Metternich’s or Czar Alexander’s respectively more expansive and assertive views, in which the maintenance of order would require minimal intervention by the great powers.42 Castlereagh wanted to avoid an expansive order that would require general commitments

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to an open-ended European guarantee that could potentially compromise Britain’s interests. Essentially, he wanted the group to do the least possible to maintain the territorial settlement. In contrast, Metternich had a much more activist counterrevolutionary vision in which the settlement would advance a broader conception of Europe’s international society, while the czar saw himself as the savior of Europe and the group as a way of achieving this salvation. Although there were divisions about the means and the character of the settlement, one can identify the three primary aims that the congress sought to achieve. The first was the prevention of revolution. The victors were of one mind in their belief that the ideas and practices of revolutionary France were at heart to blame for the twenty-three years of warfare that had killed five million Europeans. The first priority for the settlement, then, was to provide the means to snuff out future revolutionary embers; indeed Metternich famously styled himself as the “Doctor of Revolution.”43 It is particularly notable that the statesmen believed that a distinctly international bulwark was necessary to prevent revolution from disturbing European states and societies. This reflects an understanding of the necessarily linked nature of domestic and international orders whereby revolutions in one state can and, in the view of the statesmen at Vienna, must be prevented by others to preserve the broader system.44 The language of a unified European society, a commonwealth of Europe in Burke’s terms, was common at the time.45 The second aim of the Vienna settlement was to create a strategic equilibrium in Europe by forging a consensus on the territorial settlements as well as an agreement as to the means through which they should be maintained or adjusted. The problem lay in determining what equilibrium actually meant in practice. While the establishment of a roughly even distribution of power was an important aspect of the settlement, equilibrium required more. For some, particularly Metternich and his more recent supporters, equilibrium was about the combination of power and legitimacy. Equilibrium is achieved when there exists a broad-ranging consensus on the principles of reasonable and just conduct among states. For others, best expressed by Paul Schroeder, the notion was ultimately political: “Equilibrium meant a balance of satisfactions, a balance of rights and obligations, and a balance of performance payoffs, rather than a balance of power.”46 While differences persisted about the precise content of the equilibrium, the Vienna settlement was achieved through a combination of military balance and political consensus. The horrific military experiences of the eighteenth century had shown that military power alone would not suffice to produce a stable international system, and thus the third aim of the settlement was to prevent the near constant occurrence of great power war. The violence and cost of the Napoleonic period, as well as that of the 100 years preceding it, convinced statesmen that perennial great power war was simply unsustainable. The diplomats at the

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congress sought to devise the means to prevent great power conflict. It should be emphasized that this did not mean that the congress sought to end war, which maintained its position as a legitimate policy choice throughout the period, rather it sought to limit if not prevent entirely the circumstances of great power war in Europe. The congress system reconciled these three potentially divergent aims by creating an international system in which a small group of major powers essentially managed the international order. The great powers would agree to the territorial shape of the order and the underlying principles of the system of management, the key to which was for the powers to act cooperatively and to communicate regularly about the critical issues of the day. To achieve this they suspended the equal-treatment norm, hitherto thought to be an unassailable norm of international politics, to give themselves special privileges so as to ensure that the great powers’ interests were conceived in terms of the broader system’s interests. The privileges were both instrumental and symbolic. They were instrumental in that the five powers became an elite body that determined the shape of international relations by managing changes to Europe’s geopolitical map as the body thought necessary and that reserved the right to interfere in the affairs of others in the name of the broader system. On the symbolic front, the system gave prestige to a small group. Prestige and honor were, and indeed still are, important but not especially rational influences on state behavior. A key feature of the Vienna settlement was the way in which great powers tied themselves to the system through the desire for status. As Richardson shows, “membership in the Concert [Vienna settlement] became a source of status for which states were prepared to pay by cooperating with other great powers. In this way they permitted their behaviour to be constrained.”47 We shall turn to the details of the settlement shortly, but in summary, it was arranged around the basic idea that the postwar system would be stabilized by the management of the great powers, and that this function demanded a distinctive status so as to tie their interests to the system and to facilitate its operation. Its appeal came from the ability to provide the advantages of imperial authority—that is, a unified and cooperative group of the predominant powers exercising an authoritative force over others—without the destabilizing and undesired consequences of imperial rule as it still existed in Europe. The balance between formal equality and substantive hierarchy has been described by some as a system of “diffused hegemony” or a “great power oligarchy.”48 Others have seen the European system under the settlement as a directorate of the great powers. Still others saw it as a “reformed balance of power enriched by other factors,” what might be described today as a normatively underwritten, militarily balanced, multipolar system.49 Vasquez summarizes things well: the “Vienna Order created a working peace system because it established a set of rules to guide behaviour. The leaders of major states were aware of these rules and used them to conduct diplo-

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macy.”50 The order appears to have been very successful at stabilizing the European international system, prompting self-restraint among great powers, and ensuring that extra-European competition did not lead to systemic crisis through a series of norms and rules that helped limit the damaging consequences when Europe’s powers had competing interests. Most importantly, there was a rough but nonetheless clear consensus as to the purpose of the postwar international order: it should support and protect the 1815 territorial settlement, it should maintain the domestic political foundations on which that settlement was founded, and it should ensure that great power interests are maintained in the framework of that order. In short, Europe’s international society after 1815 had a clear moral purpose on which all the major players agreed. The diplomats devised a set of core working principles that were intended to achieve this basic purpose and that acted as a touchstone for international dealings in nineteenth-century Europe. In this sense, the rules established the framework of European diplomacy. The first was that international order was to be determined by the great powers acting cooperatively. Great powers established the framework of order and any changes, whether to its territorial shape or the ideas that underpinned it, were to be subject to cooperative great power sanction. The collaborative aspect of this was vital as any failure to cooperate was thought to imperil the peace. The idea behind this is well expressed in a December 28, 1815, letter from Castlereagh to Metternich, although it focuses particularly on the counterrevolutionary dimensions: The immediate object to be kept in view is to inspire the States of Europe, as long as we can, with a sense of the dangers which they have surmounted by their union, of the hazards which they will incur by a relaxation of vigilance, to make them feel that the existing concert is their only perfect security against the revolutionary embers more or less existing in every State of Europe; and that their true wisdom is to keep down the petty contentions of ordinary times, and to stand together in support of the established principles of social order.51

This has a number of important dimensions. Clearly, no state is permitted to change the order unilaterally. To be sanctioned by the great powers, any putative changes to the map had to be recognized as not altering the broader equilibrium established in 1815. Great power consent thus implies that each power has a veto, but votes are not taken.52 The second key principle was that the great powers have certain rights to status and privilege, which derive from their obligation to underwrite the system. Their special treatment entails a duty to act when necessary. As Castlereagh famously put it, “the great powers feel that they have not only a common interest but a common duty to attend to.”53 In essence, the settlement was built on the idea that the great powers have their interests tied to systemic

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stability. The third principle was that great powers were to exercise selfrestraint. This was encouraged by the status accorded to the great powers, which harnessed the scale of great power interests to the needs of the system. Status and privilege were intended to encourage great powers to think of themselves in systemic terms and thus increase the incentive to exercise selfrestraint. Finally, the great powers devised a number of specific procedures to manage international crises. These involved regular communication, collective decisionmaking, the creation of intermediary bodies or buffer states, intervention by the powers where necessary to stop threats or resolve disputes, and the creation of clear demarcation lines of interest and spheres of influence. The great powers would put lesser powers under considerable pressure to ensure that disputes were peacefully resolved.54 The Vienna settlement began to shape Europe’s international politics from 1815 and set in train an international order that varied in its degree of formality and impact on state behavior throughout the nineteenth century. In its most formal phase, the system operated for a relatively short time, coming to an end in 1822. This year marked the withdrawal of Britain from the system of formal congresses held as a result of the Quadruple Alliance Treaty; this is largely thought to have come about because, with Castlereagh’s death, Britain had become less enthused with such a closely managed system. But the broader system pertained, even if in an institutionally less formal sense. The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 is thought to be a different end date for the system as it marked the first open war among the great powers since 1815. But it was not a systemwide war; it did not lead to any significant changes in either the basic geopolitical map of Europe or the underlying principles of the Vienna system. One can even argue that the system persisted, albeit in much more limited and informal fashion, right up until the summer of 1914. My view is that the congress system existed, in a formal sense, only for a brief period, that is, from the summer of 1815 until Britain’s withdrawal in 1822. From then until the Crimean War, European international politics was underwritten by the concerted and cooperative actions of the major powers—a period that is commonly referred to as the Concert of Europe, a name given to that phase of international history only in retrospect. As Holbraad points out, it was not officially referred to in these terms until the 1856 Treaty of Paris.55 After the Crimean War, things become more complex. The breakdown of Austrian-British relations after the 1840s makes it difficult to sustain the case that the system was operating quite as it had in the past. Moreover, between the late 1850s and early 1870s, the key intermediary powers of Europe, primarily the German states, disappeared by being incorporated into larger entities. This meant that a key contextual feature of Vienna no longer existed.56 But vital aspects of the system remained right up until 1914: the major powers managed their relations with a view to maintaining the basic structure of Europe, the major powers sought to advance their ends within its framework and did not seek to overturn the structure itself, conflicts and disputes at the

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margins were managed by the powerful and prevented from spiraling out of control.57 Most importantly, Europe avoided the calamity of general war for ninety-nine years and this was in no small degree due to the change in statecraft brought about by the system of great power management established at Vienna. To be clear, the term Vienna settlement here refers to the core features of Europe’s international order between 1815 and 1914. However, one can distinguish between three distinct phases of the system. The first, the formal system, lasted from its creation in the Paris Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance, signed on November 20, 1815, until its collapse in 1822.58 The second, the concert phase, lasted from then until the outbreak of the Crimean War. The third and final phase was sufficiently informal as not to be deemed by historians to warrant a formal title. It was the most degenerated phase of the international order constructed in 1815, from the end of the Crimean War until around the century’s end. During this time, the tone and tenor of international relations changed from the restraint of the concert—best exemplified by Bismarck’s efforts to moderate Prussian foreign policy—to the much greater degree of national competition leading up to the destructive alliance formation in the buildup to World War I. In the decade or so leading up until World War I, the settlement ceased to be the key organizing principle of Europe’s international relations, but nothing had replaced it. Why did European diplomats change their views in the nineteenth century as to how to run their international affairs? They moved from a position in which great power war was endemic, a function of the perverse incentives of balance-of-power thinking and the grip that notions of sovereign honor had in decisionmakers’ minds, to one in which the avoidance of great power war was a central aim of statecraft. Historians of the period and IR theorists have puzzled over this and as yet there is no consensus as to why exactly this came about. Given its centrality to the long-term formalization of the great power role, one needs to consider the key reasons put forward for this change in attitude. The first, and most obvious, relates to the scale and cost of warfare. Warfare among major powers had become prohibitively expensive, both in fiscal and human terms, particularly after its transformation caused by revolutionary France. The scale and totalizing nature of war meant that the incentives to avoid it markedly increased as, similarly, its rewards were perceived to decline. To be clear, people did not suddenly become disgusted with warfare. War was not yet perceived to be an illegitimate form of statecraft, and indeed under the nationalist urges of Heinrich von Treitschke and others later in the century, its benefits were positively extolled; rather, the strategic advantages of war were thought to have been dramatically reduced, prompting a greater level of restraint from European states. A second reason was the greater awareness of the benefits of peace and a recognition of what was required to bring this about.59 This arose from an awareness that many parts of Europe had benefited economically and socially

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from the stability that Napoleon’s empire had fostered. Equally, the complexities of managing the anti-Napoleonic coalition had shown that creating and maintaining a stable Europe required more than maneuvering around crude measures of national power to maintain a military balance.60 This prompted a more activist approach to the avoidance of major conflicts. A third reason relates to a shift in the “rules of the game” organizing European international relations. Here European statesmen are said to have moved away from the balance-of-power norm that had hitherto guided their thinking to a more complex and sophisticated set of underlying principles as guiding their behavior. This case is made most famously by Paul Schroeder. As he puts it: The period began with Europe still adhering to the old competitive eighteenth-century model, stressing balance through compensations and indemnities, the calculation of forces on the basis of territory, population, and revenues, and the management of threats and crises through hostile alliances and coalitions. It ended with a predominantly moral, legal, and social-communal model of balance in which equilibrium required first and foremost the maintenance of the political and social order as a whole and the unity of all powers in defence of the legally established order.61

The period from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, in this view, involved a fundamental shift in the way in which international politics was conducted due to changes in the attitudes of statesmen. This shift was most marked, he argues, in the Vienna settlement and the norms that produced a peaceful and nonrevolutionary Europe. The old diplomatic pursuit of an elusive balance of power had been replaced by a self-consciously and explicitly managed international order created by the great powers. In summary, the peace made at Vienna, and confirmed in the subsequent Peace of Paris, was built on a consensus among the key powers as to the purpose of the international order and provided for an international legal framework for the territorial division of Europe and a diplomatic confirmation of the geopolitical settlement of the war. It also provided a mechanism for ensuring that this settlement was not challenged by either ambitious powers or upstart ideas. It was founded on the principle that the great powers had to maintain the system, and to do so they needed to have some scope for its modification. An enduring order needed to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. Thus, Vienna established a diplomatic system that linked great power interests to the interests of system stability through mutual guarantees of recognition, good conduct, and common principles of behavior. To achieve this end, they created buffer zones or intermediaries to manage conflicts and, importantly, forged a clear distinction between European international relations and all others. As Blanning puts it, “they fenced off Europe from colonial, commercial, and maritime conflict.”62 In this sense, the settlement, both its structural features, which were the touchstones of the system, and its more detailed elements, was

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both forward- and backward looking. It resolved the territorial claims deriving from the Napoleonic Wars and set up principles to maintain the foundations of a new European order. It established a framework for European diplomacy, one that was distinct from the international dealings of European powers beyond Europe, and it gave great powers their distinctive place and established a set of fundamental normative principles about how international order should be managed. Evaluating the Settlement While the Vienna settlement was not perfect, it proved to be a very effective means for managing the terms of the Napoleonic peace, for moderating great power behavior, and for preventing convulsive systemic crisis. One should recognize that, contrary to some mythologizing, the nineteenth century was not, even in Europe, a century of peace. Wars were still fought, and soldiers were still killed. As an authoritative study points out, there was only a 13 percent reduction in the incidence of war in this century compared with its predecessor.63 That relatively small decrease somewhat obscures the fact that the wars were both smaller in scale and primarily located in Europe’s strategic fringe.64 As Holsti puts it, “except for the three brief wars of German nation building and Russia’s armed interventions into Hungary and Poland at midcentury, the center of Europe . . . constituted a significant zone of peace.”65 Importantly, great power collaboration through the Vienna settlement almost entirely erased conflict among those powers. Between 1815 and 1914, there was one sustained conflict, in the Crimea in 1853–1856, and three brief conflicts—the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1872, and the war between Russia and the Ottoman empire in 1877–1878—among Europe’s most powerful states. Importantly, none of these conflicts led to a significant reorganization of the geopolitical or diplomatic principles of the settlement. This has led many IR scholars to conclude that the period governed by the Vienna settlement was marked by the effective management of order by the great powers through a system of obligation, rights, and self-restraint. As Watson puts it, during its first thirty years “the five great powers came close to functioning as a directorate.”66 War in Europe was not banished, but great power war was almost entirely avoided, no mean feat. But this is only one, albeit important, indicator of an international order’s efficacy. How did the system of great power management fare when faced with other challenges, particularly crises that emanated from smaller states and from revolutionary ideas, particularly nationalism and its fellow travelers, secessionism and ethnic strife? The success of the system derived from its ability to decouple the link between issues at the margins of European states’ interests and great power conflict. As economists remind us, marginal changes matter. In a system dom-

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inated by balance-of-power thinking, relatively small shifts in territory, armaments, or naval capacity ran the very real risk of eliciting a dangerous reaction. The ability of the Vienna system to prevent a wide array of challenges to the status quo—such as state creation, secessionism, and nationalist tension— from leading to conflict among the most powerful of states is one of its abiding successes. Specifically, the system was especially good at dealing with problems that had the potential to disrupt the underlying structures of the settlement.67 The most notable achievements of this kind involved the provision of great power sanction for adjustments to the European map. Quite apart from the rapid reintegration of France into the order, a vitally important move, it oversaw the creation of the Kingdom of Belgium and helped prevent the Dutch Republic and the new kingdom from going to war in 1839, as well as facilitating the creation of an independent Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. It suppressed revolution in Spain, Piedmont, and Naples without significant international consequences and prevented international tensions deriving from the 1830–1832 revolts in the German states, the Italian peninsula, and Poland from bubbling over into conflict. It oversaw the recognition of independence of many Latin American states, and it facilitated the creation of Greece and prevented war between it and what was left of the Ottoman Empire in 1886.68 Some of these issues, most particularly Belgian and Greek independence, as well as many others, could quite easily have been the spark for a general war under the old diplomatic system. Of course, the system was not an unmitigated success; it did not prevent the Crimean War or the Franco-Prussian conflict, the powers often failed to meet at prearranged times, and issues were regularly not taken up for fear of the provocation that they might create. But even the shortcomings of the system are a testimony to its broader success as well as the underlying utility of an international order managed by the great powers. While the efficacy of the system is itself important, of greater significance are the reasons why the order worked in the first place. What was it about 1815 that made a great power oligarchy an effective way of running an international system ostensibly built on the idea of sovereign equality? In short, why did great power managerialism work? One of the key reasons for the functional efficacy of the system, particularly in its first thirty years, lay in the individual statesmen who devised and largely managed the system. If European powers had been represented by different figures, with less expansive views, then the character of the European order in the nineteenth century would have been vastly different. The particular worldviews of the key protagonists at Vienna and beyond, particularly Metternich, Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Czar Alexander gave rise to the core ideas of the settlement. While many differences among them existed, they were able to forge a common view on the geopolitical and ideological basis of the European order. They created what can best be described as a legitimate order in the sense that there was a consensus as to the means and aims of state-

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craft and the means for adjusting the system. Importantly, the order rested not simply on the skills of the diplomats but also on the ethic of duty to the order that the Vienna settlement created.69 The system fostered a sense of obligation to the settlement that was a powerful sentiment. Vienna’s great strength was its ability, over a long period of time, to influence the thinking of decisionmakers in such a way. Key to its ability to do so was the fact that the settlement served a clear purpose, that is, to provide an international support mechanism for conservative political regimes at home. The settlement was thus not only about the maintenance of strictly international concerns, such as borders and the balance of satisfactions, but also about the maintenance of a particular conception of domestic political life. This dual social purpose, what might be termed a domestic social anchor to international society, was crucial to the settlement’s success. A second view argues that the success of the great power system was ultimately a function of the realities of the distribution of power in Europe. It was not so much the norms and values of the system, although these clearly mattered to some degree, but the way in which the Napoleonic Wars ended, and the distribution of power it left, which created stability. Put simply, it was the particular way in which power was divided among the major players, specifically the exhaustion of France and the precariousness of Austria and Prussia, squeezed as they were by the European “bookends” of Russia and Great Britain, that meant that the great powers had little option but to avoid conflict. This is perhaps most famously put by Friedrich von Gentz, Metternich’s close adviser: “My opinion is based not on the structure of the system, the extreme fragility of which I myself recognize, but on the situations of the principal Powers that compose it, situations such that no one of these Powers can safely, without risking imminent ruin, leave the circle of its present connections.”70 For Gentz and others of this view, although great powers could change the system, each had an interest in maintaining their position within the structure and in the frameworks of that structure. From this perspective, the settlement was kept in place not so much by a sense of obligation to the order but by the circumstances of the powers, key among them was financial stress after twentyfive years of war. Schroeder represents a further interpretation. For him, the system worked because it provided a more effective means of managing European international relations, and it was recognized by all, with its many manifest limitations, as such. As he puts it, European powers had escaped the “quest” for the balance of power and achieved “something better, a political equilibrium based on the tacit acceptance by smaller powers of a general great-power hegemony so long as their independence and rights were guaranteed, and the acknowledgement by the Continental powers of Russian and British hegemony in their respective spheres provided it was exercised in a tolerable way.”71 Finally, some argue that the system worked because, by cauterizing

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European international politics from events going on in the wider world, it allowed European powers to expend their energies on colonialism without the risk of colonial rivalry dragging the continent once again into war. This argument, one of order through distraction, while not entirely convincing as a complete explanation for the long European peace, does remind us that the global context of the Vienna settlement must be remembered. During the time in which the settlement governed Europe’s order, European powers were undertaking extensive colonial expansion. While European states managed their mutual relations under the terms of the settlement, the means through which they conducted their relations with non-Europeans was decidedly different.72 There can be no doubt that colonialism reduced the likelihood of conflict in Europe by helping to broaden the geographic interests of the great powers and thus reduce the likelihood of friction, but it was only possible because of the guarantees provided by the Vienna settlement. That said, as the century wore on, colonial rivalry became harder to manage as clashes of interest increased in pace with the scale of expansion and as nationalism began to be increasingly mixed into the conceptions of interests and values underlying European powers’ foreign policy. The most convincing explanation for the efficacy of the order must surely lie with the first position, that is, that the order was able to strike the right balance between obligation and incentives to have had such a profound effect on the policy choices of the great powers. From a century of near constant conflict, to a century notable by its absence, Europe’s major powers had dramatically changed their approach to statecraft. While the fiscal limitations were real, at least in the twenty years or so after 1815, the durability of the order derived from a shared view as to the moral purpose of international society. Of course, crucial to containing rivalry was fencing off Europe’s international relations from those in the rest of the world, but central to keeping the international equilibrium was the shared sense of purpose that the order served. If the great power management of Europe’s order, forged on a consensus among like-minded aristocratic diplomats, was so effective, the question one must confront, of course, is Sarajevo. How could the European peace collapse in such a spectacular and horrific fashion? This is significant not only because one should be aware of the limitations, both structural and contingent, of the nineteenth-century order, but because of the broader implications of the shortcomings of orders that rely on great power management for the contemporary world. To be clear, my purpose here is not to explain why World War I happened, but to consider the reasons for the ultimate breakdown of the moral and political order forged by the Vienna settlement. As with all such large-scale events, the cause is essentially overdetermined, but a number of important factors present themselves as particularly significant. First, the link that Vienna had forged between great power interests and those of the system finally broke.

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Where at its high point the European order thrived by ensuring the satisfaction of the major powers with the status quo, its decline was inevitable when one of the powers ultimately became dissatisfied with the order. Over such a long period, and one that witnessed remarkable economic, social, and technological change, it is unsurprising that the key powers could not see their interests being consistently served by 1815. Ultimately, Prussia, Austria, and Russia became dissatisfied powers and thus the order became unsustainable. A second and related reason lay in the shifting sands of ideas. In the past, the system was able to maintain great power interest because the conservative domestic foundation of the order provided a common language and common political goal for statesmen to work toward. Yet as monarchism, whether absolutist or constitutional, was slowly diluted, and in some cases replaced, by nationalism and liberalism, the unified moral purpose of the domestic and international orders began to break down and thus the diplomatic consensus that was so crucial to the system’s success became ever harder to achieve. As Watson puts it, following the rise of liberal and national sentiment, and particularly following the unification of Germany and Italy, “the effect of these changes was to loosen the system and to make its member states less conscious of raison de système.”73 It was this systemic purpose, and the unified character of its moral purpose, that had been central to the success of the great power concert, the loosening of which eventually led to its demise. Third, the system broke down because of the revival of balance-of-power thinking in key European capitals. Europe had been well served not just by the basic norms and structures of Vienna, but also by the recognition of the value and worth of the settlement to the interests of the great powers; but when opinion shifted and statesmen no longer valued it as they had in the past, its ability to manage the order was badly undermined.74 Fourth, changing attitudes to war and changing conceptions of power are also thought to have contributed to the system’s inability to be effective over the longer run. The rise of nationalism brought with it a revival of arguments about the national benefits of war and indeed the moral virtues of conflict.75 These views were informed by eighteenth-century warfare, limited wars fought between professional militaries, and advocated what amounted to an argument for the social utility of war.76 They represented a shift in attitudes about war away from those that had dominated thinking during most of the Vienna period.77Also, the equilibrium was disturbed by changing understandings of power. In the past, military power was understood in a fairly mercantilist fashion in which raw elements—size of population, size of territory, strategic borders, and the like—determined a state’s ability to throw its weight. By the late nineteenth century, Europeans began to take a more sophisticated understanding of the workings of power. It now no longer depended purely upon raw size; technology and bureaucratic capacity meant that military and other resources could be leveraged. This was nowhere more evident than in the

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astonishing progression of Brandenburg from a quiet backwater of the Holy Roman Empire to its position as one of the (if not the singular) most powerful European military forces at the start of the twentieth century. When combined with a revival of overt competition, a distinctly nationalist conception of interests, and old-fashioned balance-of-power thinking, an explosive mixture had been created. No international order can last indefinitely. The system forged at Vienna, which gave great powers their unique place and which worked surprisingly well, like any other order, was always going to end. Indeed the underlying values that it supported were perhaps past their use-by date much earlier than the architects of the system would have wished. The tragedy of Vienna was that it ended in such a devastating fashion. In accommodating small changes but leaving the larger and more explosive issues under wraps, the system seemed almost to build into its foundations its own undoing. The guns of late summer 1914 brought a definitive end to the settlement of 1815. But to say that it was a function of the Vienna system, however, is perhaps a little unfair. The Vienna system created an oligarchic international order run by five great powers and was predicated on principles that were contrary to the formal principles of international law. It worked because it harnessed the interests of the powerful to the values of the system and was managed effectively by astute and pragmatic diplomats. It promoted self-restraint, created commonly accepted rules, and promoted a value in collective endeavor. Vienna is evidence that states can cooperate and advance commonly held goals that may be contrary to their own narrow interests. Richardson approvingly cites a cabinet memo of 1813 as evidence of this, and its text is worth repeating: “Britain has declared her disposition with certain exceptions to sacrifice these conquests for the welfare of the Continent, being Desirous of providing for her own security by a common arrangement, rather than by an exclusive accumulation of strength and resources.”78

A Very Particular Success The idea that great powers not only play a distinct role in the modern international system, but that they seem to hold the key to international peace and stability, can be traced to the early period of modern European history. It had its origins in the peculiarities of the emergence of the European international system. As it evolved, the practice of great power management emerged in response to the political, moral, and strategic circumstances of that time. It is not surprising, given the way in which the great powers ran their relations under the Vienna settlement, that scholars and practitioners looking back to the past have tended to give this period such weight. There are two crucial points to underline for the concerns of this book. The first relates to the specific cir-

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cumstances that made the Vienna settlement work, that is, the consensus as to the moral purpose of international society and the sense of obligation to the order that this promoted. By having a clear domestic anchor, one rooted in the protection of social order at home as well as in the international realm, the management of order by the powerful was possible. And it is these social aspects of the order that have tended to be overlooked by twentieth century scholars and practitioners. Vienna worked not simply because of smart diplomacy and a particularly judicious division of power, but because it served a particular moral and political purpose. Great power management is thus not a universal attribute of international systems, but was a particular artifact of Europe’s remarkably peaceful nineteenth century. The second point relates to this, and it is the way in which the Vienna settlement has come to be understood as the best example yet devised of an international system that seemed capable of creating lasting conditions of peace. Vienna appeared to work because the statesmen had finally divined the “true” workings of international systems and had managed to adhere to these rules. The blood of World War I was thought to result from a deviation from the appropriate logic. The problem is that this takes one, albeit important, part of the story, great power privilege, and isolates it from its historical context, a context that was so vital to its effective functioning. The aristocratic diplomatic system, the largely absolutist structure of power in Europe, and a nascent global system being forged by colonialism provided the circumstances in which great power tutelage could be effective. This is not to say that great power management cannot work in different conditions, rather it is to emphasize that the historical context of the order, and in particular its social foundation, has to be recognized and attention paid to the way in which it shaped the efficacy of the institutional structure. Of Vienna’s many legacies, one has been the idea that great power management is the key to order wherever international systems are to be found. But the logic that great power management is a key to international order has a very specific and very European history. It was the product of the peculiar way in which European states and societies developed domestically and the unique diplomatic means they devised for dealing with their international interactions. Scholars have recently shown that there is little historical reason for thinking that the balance of power, once deemed central to all international politics because of its European origins, is in fact a universal of diplomatic history.79 Similarly, there are very good reasons for being skeptical of the universal applicability of a special place for great powers in a global international system, regardless of the European character of that system’s historical origins. From Westphalia to Vienna and on to Sarajevo, the idea of the great powers as a “unique and special peer group” emerged and became a touchstone of international diplomacy.80 However, it had not yet taken the constitutional form that it was to take in the twentieth century. That process began with the attempts to build the idea into foundations of new, more institutionally con-

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crete, and, most crucially, global international orders. As the next two chapters will show, the efforts to institutionalize the great power premise in the two major efforts to shape a properly global system—first at Paris in 1919 and then at San Francisco in 1945—demonstrated the manifest difficulties of trying to apply an artifact of nineteenth-century aristocratic diplomacy to a global context radically different from that which gave the idea its birth.

Notes 1. See, for example, O’Gorman, Long Eighteenth Century; and Scott and Simms, eds., Cultures of Power in Europe During the Long Eighteenth Century. 2. For an expansive overview of the period, see Blanning, Pursuit of Glory. 3. For a trenchant critique, see Teschke, Myth of 1648. 4. See generally, Fichter, Habsburg Monarchy, especially pp. 31–55; and Kann, History of the Habsburg Empire, especially pp. 25–53. 5. See Holsti, Peace and War, 38–39. 6. Gross, “Peace of Westphalia,” 39. 7. For the most comprehensive assessment of the war, see Wilson, Thirty Years War. 8. Article 28 of the treaty confirms the settlement of Augsburg and article 65 allows the taking of arms and making of alliances for states in the Empire. English translations of the text can be found in Symcox, War, Diplomacy, and Imperialism, 40–62, and online via the Yale Law Library Avalon Project at http://avalon.law .yale.edu. 9. Gross, “Peace of Westphalia,” 24. 10. See Holsti, Peace and War. 11. George Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century. 12. See Gross, “Peace of Westphalia”; and Grewe, Epochs of International Law. 13. With a smaller congress held at Rastatt concluding the war with the final settlement between Austria and France. 14. For discussion of these conflicts and their congresses, see the following: McKay and Scott, Rise of the Great Powers; and Black, European International Relations. For studies that look at the second half of the period in more detail, see Scott, Birth of a Great Power System. 15. See note 14, above, for typical examples of international history that represent this approach. On international theory that does this, see Watson, Evolution of International Society, 198–213. 16. Cited in Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 535. 17. On the French military at this time, see the comprehensive Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siecle; on the wars and France’s decline, see Lynn, Wars of Louis XIV; on Britain’s rise, see Prest, Albion Ascendant. 18. McKay and Scott, Rise of the Great Powers, 53. 19. For example, Wight, Systems of States. 20. Holsti, Peace and War, 79. 21. See Dixon, Modernisation of Russia, particularly pp. 27–56. 22. On the Austria Habsburgs, see Ingrao, Habsburg Monarchy, particularly chapters 3 and 4.

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23. On Prussia, see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom, 183–239. 24. Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 575. 25. See Anderson, Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 41–96. 26. On the conservative bias in the historical school, see Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society. 27. For example, Simon and Gartzke, “Political System Similarity and the Choice of Allies.” 28. The Napoleonic Wars did not involve significant technological development, but huge operational and ideological advances that revolutionized the character of war. For a good overview of this, see Colin Gray, War, Strategy, and International Relations, chapter 3. 29. Wight, Power Politics, 42–43. 30. For an example of a cautious comparison between 1814 and 1919, illustrative of thinking about great power management, written in 1922, see HeadlamMorley, Studies in Diplomatic History, especially “The Guarantee Treaties, 1814/5–1919: A Comparison,” 146–156. Meanwhile, Nicholson’s influential history of the Congress of Vienna took as a central focus the lessons of 1815 for the post–World War I world; see Nicholson, Congress of Vienna. 31. Kissinger, World Restored, 6. 32. Pufendorf famously described a state system as “several states that are so connected as to seem to constitute one body but whose members retain sovereignty.” For a detailed discussion of Pufendorf’s work, see Boucher, “Resurrecting Pufendorf and Capturing the Westphalian Moment.” 33. Lawrence, Essays on Some Disputed Questions in Modern International Law, 227, from the essay “The Primacy of the Great Powers,” 208–233. 34. See Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 17–18. 35. For example, Kissinger, World Restored. 36. For example, Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution. 37. For example, Holbraad, Concert of Europe. 38. For example, Nicholson, Congress of Vienna. 39. Making up for much neglect, two recent histories focus on these issues, as well as the politics, diplomacy, and strategy: King, Vienna, 1814; and Zamoyski, Rites of Peace. 40. For very traditional and dry accounts of the diplomatic dealings, see Nicholson, Congress of Vienna; and Webster, Congress of Vienna. 41. For detailed depictions of the negotiations, see Webster, Congress of Vienna; Nicholson, Congress of Vienna; and Kissinger, World Restored. 42. On Castlereagh’s view, see Webster, Foreign Policy of Castlereagh, vol. 1, particularly pp. 46–73. For an influential view of the distinction between Castlereagh and Metternich, see Kissinger, World Restored, chapters 2 and 3. 43. Halliday, Revolutions and World Politics, 208. 44. On this, see Bisley, “Counter-revolution, Order, and International Politics.” 45. On which, see Welsh, “Edmund Burke and the Commonwealth of Europe,” 173–192. 46. Schroeder, “Nineteenth-Century System.” 47. Richardson, “Concert of Europe and Security Management in the Nineteenth Century,” 57. 48. See Watson, Evolution of International Society, 239–240. 49. Gruner, “Vienna System,” 172.

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50. Vasquez, “Vienna System,” 237. 51. In Walker, ed., Metternich’s Europe, 40. 52. Hinsley argues that the following were the key rules for the great power management of international order under the Vienna settlement: (1) great powers had the responsibility for maintaining the terms of the Vienna settlement and for any changes to it; (2) changes must not be made unilaterally; (3) changes to the settlement are not to significantly change the underlying distribution of power; (4) consent of the great powers is required for change; and (5) consent gives each great power a veto, although votes were not taken and to be avoided. Hinsley, “Concert of Europe,” 53. 53. Cited in Elrod, “Concert of Europe.” He also includes a list of assumptions and rules; see pp. 163–167. 54. For more detail, see Lauren, “Crisis Prevention in Nineteenth-Century Diplomacy.” 55. Holbraad, Concert of Europe, 3–4. 56. See Schroeder, “Lost Intermediaries.” 57. Kissinger, World Restored, 5. 58. Article 6 of the treaty calls for “meetings at fixed periods, either under the immediate auspices of the Sovereigns themselves or by their respective Ministers, for the purpose of consulting upon their common interests, and for the consideration of the measures which at each of these periods shall be considered the most salutary for the repose and prosperity of nations and for the maintenance of the peace of Europe.” Cited in Holbraad, Concert of Europe, 1. 59. Watson, Evolution of International Society, 239–240. 60. See Richardson, “Concert of Europe.” 61. Schroeder, “Nineteenth-Century System,” 141–142; for a full statement of this position, see his Transformation of European Politics. 62. Blanning, Pursuit of Glory, 673. 63. Holsti, Peace and War, 142. 64. Schroeder argues that rates of death in war in Europe were seven times lower in the nineteenth century than in the preceding one; see Schroeder, “Nineteenth-Century International System,” 11. 65. Holsti, Peace and War, 142. 66. Watson, Evolution of International Society, 242. 67. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics. 68. On the successes of the system, see: Holsti, Peace and War, 166–169; Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 577–582. 69. On this, see Kissinger, World Restored, who, knowingly or not, echoes the ideas of Edmund Burke in the third of his Letters on a Regicide Peace. See Burke, Select Works. 70. von Gentz, “Considerations on the Political System Now Existing in Europe,” 73. 71. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 578. 72. See Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society. 73. Watson, Evolution of International Society, 247. 74. For example, Schroeder, “Nineteenth-Century System,” 146–148. 75. The scholar and politician Heinrich von Treitschke is perhaps the best known example of this process.

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76. Although these opinions were not universal, the late nineteenth century saw pacifism emerge as an important social movement. 77. On this, see Holsti, Peace and War, 160–163. 78. Cabinet Memorandum, December 26, 1813, cited in Richardson, “Concert of Europe,” 48. 79. Kaufman, Little, and Wohlforth, eds., Balance of Power in World History. 80. Elrod, “Concert of Europe,” 167.

3 Confronting the Twentieth Century

On April 18, 1946, after a final Assembly meeting, the League of Nations was officially closed, and its property and what was left of its functions were formally transferred to the newly created United Nations. One of its strongest supporters, British diplomat and statesman Lord Cecil, then aged eighty-one, is said to have ended this final meeting by declaring: “The League is dead. Long live the United Nations.”1 With this echo of British constitutional tradition, one failed effort to recast international order was replaced with a new edifice deliberately designed to make good the shortcomings of the recent past and to manage the postwar world. As after World War I, the new order was to be centered on a multilateral institution devoted to the international rule of law. Unlike the League, however, a special managerial role was to be played by a select group of powerful states. The role entailed providing a set of privileges for a small number of states in the heart of an institution ostensibly predicated on the principle of sovereign equality. This move was the culmination of a series of long-term processes in which the managerial function of the great powers had become increasingly and formally a part of international society. The move to build the UN order on the premise that the great powers were to manage the order in return for the granting of special privilege was the result of two main factors. The first, as detailed in the previous chapter, was a particular understanding of the past and the belief that what had made peace in post–Napoleonic Europe could be transposed onto the postwar international system. The second factor included the explicit efforts of the founders of the UN to rectify the League’s shortcomings, and most particularly the belief that the failings of the League were in the main a function of the incomplete way in which great powers had been incorporated into its institutional structure. The League was thought to have failed because the great powers had remained 47

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aloof from its processes and because its structure did not strike the appropriate balance between rights and privilege that was necessary to foster and maintain great power interest. Between the summers of 1914 and 1945, the international system underwent a set of cataclysmic convulsions. In little more than a generation, not only was the geography of world politics recast and power redistributed through two unprecedentedly violent wars, but the basic organizing principles of international relations were also redrawn. Central to this process were two efforts to construct formal institutional mechanisms to manage the aftermath of systemwide war. These efforts have attracted much attention due to their importance in the broader history of the development of international politics and law, and particularly their place in the increasing role that international institutions and multilateralism have come to play in the international system.2 But the desire to reorder the world through the creation of formal bureaucratic institutions is notable also because of the part played in their development by the great powers and the idea of great power management. The creation of the League and the United Nations represent two of the most important steps on the path to the contemporary international order, with its multilateral and legalistic underpinnings, but also crucially important was the development of the role and efficacy of great power managerialism. This chapter examines the formation and structure of the League of Nations. The purpose of doing so is twofold. First, it is to continue charting the way in which the great power role has become increasingly and formally integrated into the structures of international society. Second, it is to illustrate how the League reconciled principles of sovereign equality with unequal concentrations of power in order to explore how reactions to this fed into decisions about the structure of the United Nations. It begins with an overview of the League, the place accorded to the great powers in the Covenant of the League, and the role those powers played in the international system during the period of the League’s formal existence. Many have argued that the League failed because it did not pay sufficient respect to the requisites of power in an anarchic international system. In contrast, I argue that the League’s problems were not caused by neglect of the realities of power so much as they derived from the inability of the peacemakers to devise a means to harness power to order. They could not build a consensus on either the purpose of international order or the role to be played by powerful states in underwriting that order. As a result of this failing, the achievement and maintenance of not merely a managed international order of the Vienna style but of a much more expansive legal order was always going to be impossible to achieve. Subsequently, Chapter 4 will examine the United Nations and the role of great power managerialism in the post–World War II order. In many ways, both Paris and San Francisco were efforts to rewrite the script of 1815 for a twentieth-century context. The dominant theme that emerges during this period is the tension between the

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principles of sovereign equality and the requirements of order central to the ambitions of the two institutions. While the tension between principle and practice was evident in the nineteenth century, it was not especially politically problematic. In the twentieth century, however, as the political importance of egalitarian norms grew, especially after decolonization, this tension became increasingly difficult to manage, and to this day, has not been satisfactorily resolved.

Looking Back Both at the time of the international conference, and in the histories that have been written subsequently, the gathering of statesmen and diplomats in Paris, in 1919, has been identified, alongside Westphalia, Utrecht, and Vienna, as one of the key moments in European diplomacy and indeed one of the punctuation marks of modern international history. The negotiations at Versailles are directly linked to those conferences, most obviously because they were each efforts to deal with the consequences of systemic war through inclusive congress diplomacy. But the question of lineage is of more than historical interest. Many of the diplomats from European states attending the Paris Peace Conference looked back to the Congress of Vienna for guidance, as it was the only real precedent for the kind of all-encompassing settlement to which the diplomats at Paris aspired.3 Webster’s influential history of that congress was commissioned by the British Foreign Office to prepare their diplomats for the negotiations. It was intended to provide the British with guidance about narrow questions of procedure as well as a broader set of insights into the requirements for lasting peace.4 Interest in Vienna was great both for the historical experiences it offered as an expansive example of conference diplomacy, as well as for the widely held perception that the congress system forged at the 1815 conference had successfully created the long-term foundations for a largely peaceful European international system. The ambition of the Paris negotiations was to establish the terms of the peace settlement as well as to devise the structural underpinnings of a stable and peaceful postwar order in the wake of the industrial slaughter of World War I. Vienna’s reputation on both fronts was thought to be excellent and its appeal to those in Paris was considerable. While Paris continued the European diplomatic practice of calling a systemwide congress after a major conflict, in many respects it broke with much of this tradition. While World War I had been primarily a dispute among Europe’s great powers, it had also been a war with genuinely global implications. Representatives from every continent gathered at Paris to participate in the settlement, including representatives not only from the European states and empires directly affected, but also Brazil, China, Japan, Siam, and many oth-

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ers. It was the first properly global congress, and as such held hints as to the challenges that the universal spread of sovereignty was going to produce for international diplomacy and institutions later in the century. This was most obvious in the demands for racial equality pressed by many, but most particularly the Japanese. It also meant that, as MacMillan shows, the task of the peacemakers was immeasurably more complex than it had been either in 1648 or 1815. But the Paris negotiations also broke with a central principle of conference diplomacy. The defeated powers were not invited to participate. Thus Germany and Turkey, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, were presented with a fait accompli, all of whose terms, from the most significant to the trivial, they had to accept. One of the reasons that the Vienna settlement had worked was the inclusion of the defeated power, France, not only in the negotiations but also in the management of the international order. France’s participation avoided the problem of a major power being humiliated and thus seeking to overturn what was perceived to be an order stacked against it. It was also fundamental to the whole point of the Vienna settlement: to ensure the protection of a nonrevolutionary European political order. While it is not entirely clear that the Versailles Treaty would necessarily have been more successful had German or Turkish representatives been present, it cannot be denied that the exclusion of two of Europe’s most important powers inevitably forged a distorted and unmanageable order, due to the grievances harbored by Germany and the manifest lack of consensus as to the purpose of Europe’s international society. Ambitions to create a lasting system to moderate Europe’s international relations, at least of the Viennese kind, to which they aspired, could not be realized without including all the dominant powers, regardless of their blame in the preceding conflict. But perhaps the greatest break with the past lay in the character of the challenges to orderly relations with which the representatives had to grapple. Not only was the scale of the war’s calamity unprecedented and the geographic reach of the settlement they were trying to create unparalleled, the nature of the ideas that challenged both domestic and international political systems, and their potency, were unlike any seen before. The delegates had to cope with powerful, crosscutting currents, such as national self-determination, and its confrere, nationalism; the revolutionary potential of communism, made real by the Bolshevik Revolution, not yet two years in power; along with radical ideas about gender relations, minority rights, and the place of colonized peoples. In short, unlike previous diplomatic congresses, where deals between elites, provided they were well crafted, could be relied upon to manage relations, the social context of the post–1918 world was an international political environment unlike any the diplomats had ever seen. The Vienna order had been constructed not just on the premise of great power management through cooperation, but also on the idea that the international order was intended to buttress the broader European political milieu;

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and that meant, most importantly, the protection of particular domestic political arrangements. The unified conception of international order, one that was essentially counterrevolutionary in orientation, was a source of great strength at its outset and a weakness at its conclusion. The inability of the system to accommodate the growing power of nationalism was a key source of its ultimate undoing. In 1919, the peacemakers once again had to confront the domestic sources of international stability. Once again, they had to make a determination as to the forces that should be given their head and those that should be ignored, or actively suppressed. Yet this time around, the ideas were greater in number, more potent in their capacity to make mischief, and ultimately proved beyond the ability of the diplomats to contain.

New Circumstances, Old Habits? The diplomats and statesmen assembled in the first half of 1919 sought to create an all-encompassing postwar order that had three central components. The first was to turn the armistice of 1918 into a viable peace settlement. This meant resolving the innumerable consequences of the war, such as the determination of borders, the return of prisoners, and the issue of whether and how much reparation the defeated would have to pay. The second aim was to establish a diplomatic infrastructure that could ensure the prevention of future conflicts of World War I’s scale and severity. The treaty that was signed is often caricatured for the utopian folly of trying to outlaw war, and yet while there were plenty of dreamers in Paris, at the heart of the negotiations was a realization that conflicts would occur and that differences in interests among powerful states would remain. They did not for one moment think that they were going to be able to banish war with the stroke of a pen; rather, they were trying to reduce the violent consequences of the diverging interests of the major powers and to prevent the recurrence of convulsive systemic conflict. The third aim followed on from the second, and that was to devise an international institutional framework to underpin orderly international relations. There was a widely supported view that the avoidance of a general war and the reduction in the incidence and violence of conflicts required not only agreed-upon principles and collective restraint, but also a legal edifice embodied in an institutional form. This was most famously articulated as the final of Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points” speech of January 8, 1918.5 It was a view that represented both a diagnosis of the causes of World War I as well as the broader liberal contention that if states had a mechanism to protect their independence, provide mutual guarantees, and promote a sense of common interest, then the incidence and severity of war would be greatly reduced. The support for institutional means to reduce international conflict, if not remove it altogether, was widespread in the final years of the war.6

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The aim of the conference was in some ways quite radical. Diplomats were trying to establish conditions that would prevent war and were not merely seeking to create circumstances to head off any particular crisis. Where in the past, interest might have been limited to defanging a potential aggressor, or creating a set of balancing coalitions to make the price of ambition too high, here they were attempting to create the conditions for an ongoing peace.7 Yet the diplomats of 1919 were not entirely revolutionary. Their efforts continued the formalization and legalization of international order that had become a central feature of the evolution of European diplomatic practice. This process of constitutionalization—whereby the workings of international order became increasingly formalized in institutions, treaties, and other instruments having a legal or quasilegalistic underpinning—is of particular interest because its development has carried with it a particular conception of the role of great powers in the workings of international order. The negotiations that led to the creation of the League of Nations reflected a strong faith in the power of law and institutions among many diplomats and policymakers. More particularly, it laid out a view, one continued in the UN Charter, that international order will not spontaneously emerge, but needs to be self-consciously and actively managed through legal and institutional means. States were not content to rely on the whims of the balance of power or some other impersonal force—life in international society had to be managed. The puzzle for diplomats at Paris was how to reconcile their desire for institutions and law with the power and diverging interests of the major states. Although the aims of the negotiations were clear and, at least at the broadest level, the subject of a general consensus, there was no agreement as to how these aims could be achieved. Indeed, it was obvious from the outset of the negotiations that there were very different views among great and small across the range of issues to be canvassed. While it is to be expected that states would have varying perspectives as to how postwar maps should be drawn, or even who should be sitting at the table, the differences in attitude on fundamental issues was a problem both for the workings of the peace settlement and for the design and functioning of the postwar order. As shown in the previous chapter, central to the success of the nineteenth-century European order was a consensus among the major powers on the character of the order and on the underlying principles and values on which it rested. The absence of such a consensus made Paris a particularly fraught set of negotiations and the Versailles order inherently problematic. While Woodrow Wilson was well known to be the most ardent supporter of a putative League, the other leaders and representatives of the major powers were lukewarm in their support for an international organization to provide broad-ranging political and security guarantees. At a basic level, Britain and France were uneasy about running their security policy through the League and, more particularly, did not think it was an especially effective way to man-

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age relations among the great powers.8 British prime minister David Lloyd George was doubtful that an institution could provide the kind of international guarantees that Wilson envisaged, or that it could provide the kind of information and trust in which states would have sufficient confidence to reduce their rivalry and lower the prospects of conflict. Georges Clemenceau concurred and expressed his doubt that a league would be able to temper the policies of the major powers.9 To that end, Lloyd George is thought to have preferred a postwar settlement akin to that which Castlereagh sought at Vienna: an institutionally light mechanism that kept Britain aloof from continental problems and maximized its autonomy and freedom of maneuver. Indeed, in early discussions, the British sought to create a League that was a somewhat more institutionalized version of Castlereagh’s vision of the concert system. Yet other differences of opinion among the great powers during the negotiations related to the nature of the crises to which the League should respond, the nature of the rules for collective decisionmaking, the way in which wars could be avoided, and the method for achieving disarmament.10 These differences, both large and small, reflected the underlying absence of consensus among even the victorious powers as to how to make an institutional mechanism for managing conflict function when the participating states wanted to retain key prerogatives for themselves. Ultimately, the widespread unease about the League as a security mechanism, and more particularly the doubts that many entertained about running their security policies through the League, were reflected in the vague and loophole-ridden text of the League Covenant, and most particularly in articles 10 and 12.11 Indeed, Wilson was acutely aware of the political problem he faced at home on precisely this point. Republican opponents in Washington felt that the League posed a basic threat to American sovereignty; and Wilson was characteristically incautious when responding to their criticisms, conceding in public on a number of occasions that American participation in the League would require the surrender of at least some of its sovereignty. As he put it in dealings with Republicans at a dinner in February 1919, how could efforts to banish conflict work “without some sacrifice . . . each nation yielding something to accomplish such an end.”12 Opposition within the United States as to what was thought to be the League’s threat to US sovereignty—and particularly to the way in which article 10 was perceived to constrain US autonomy in its foreign policy, or might ensnare it in conflicts it might otherwise have avoided— was crucial to the Senate’s rejection of the League. US reaction was only the strongest and most high-profile expression of a sentiment that was more widely shared than is often recognized. There was also concern among many, even within the US delegation, about the implications of a number of the ideas that Wilson held dear, particularly the principle of national self-determination. Wilson and many of his supporters believed that war was a function of elites moving too far away from

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popular opinion. If the populace at large were to be given a real stake in their political systems, then they would act as a powerful brake on risky foreign policy dealings whose price they would ultimately have to bear. By placing sovereignty in the hands of the population at large and ensuring the consent of the governed, so thought liberals, an important cause of war could be contained. Yet the implications of the idea of self-determination for the stability of the international system was profound. As Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state worried: When the President talks of “self-determination,” what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area or a community? . . . It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force.13

In many respects, this was the core problem that beset the negotiators from the outset: how to reconcile the liberal ambitions of the institution with the interests of the great powers, and more particularly with the belief that great powers were the ultimate guarantors of international order. Holsti points out that the liberal ideas behind the League assumed that conflict could be avoided by, firstly, reducing the basic ability of states to fight (through disarmament) and, secondly, transforming state attitudes and preferences. From this perspective, states could be made to change their behavior through a combination of domestic and international factors. At the domestic level, it was thought that given the high price for war, popular sentiment would act as a constraint on policy. As such, democratic principles of governance should be put in place as widely as possible. At the international level, states had to be made to feel more secure. This was to be done through an international institution that would provide comprehensive guarantees and act as a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes.14 The League would provide these international security goods, as well as resolve disputes, manage disarmament, and, most importantly, provide a collective security mechanism. The League’s covenant shows how these liberal ideas won out in the negotiations. The liberal order that the League was to oversee had essentially turned its back on the principles of great power management from the nineteenth century. Viewed from this perspective, it is not surprising that the powerful states did not want to bind themselves to this system: Why would a great power be willing to risk itself on questions that are of marginal importance to itself and indeed of marginal significance to the system as a whole? Yet almost everyone involved at Paris recognized the strength of the Vienna system and felt that even the management of international order through institutions still depended on those few states with significant concentrations of material power. Indeed, although he was a firm believer in the power of moral suasion to achieve

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appropriate behavior, Wilson said to the conference on May 31, 1919, “We must not close our eyes to the fact that in the last analysis the military and naval strength of the Great Powers will be the final guarantee of the peace of the world.”15 The question is how, in spite of this view, the League ended up with a covenant that did not incorporate these views, for this was crucial to the ultimate rejection of this order by the dominant powers. Despite the claims of many that the negotiations at Paris would dispense with the old aristocratic diplomacy and replace it with a liberal system that was open, transparent, and rational, critics have pointed out the striking degree to which the dealings at Paris were dominated by the great powers. The creation of the Council of Four, which made all the key decisions and controlled the agenda of the conference and ultimately the content of the peace settlement, has been seen as a continuation of the “old diplomacy.” At first glance it is reasonable to think that the Four represented great power domination of a peace settlement that was supposed to represent a more liberal and democratic age. Open covenants openly arrived at had been Wilson’s cry, yet closing off debate, first to the Council of Ten and then again to the Four, seemed to show that even World War I could not rid Europe of its diplomatic traditions. Moreover, it flew in the face of the key ideas of sovereign equality and national selfdetermination that were being proclaimed as the new order’s organizing principles. On closer inspection, however, the contents of the dealings of the Four, the ideas that they advocated and the agreements that they reached, revealed a considerable shift in attitudes toward the management of international order. While many looked back to Vienna for guidance, the reality was that diplomats and statesmen found little in post–Napoleonic Europe that appeared to be of use in a world that was scarred by industrial-scale warfare, shaken by nationalism, the stirrings of Europe’s subject populations, and the seismic shock of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Big Four did indeed dominate, but it was not entirely a reversion to the diplomacy of old. Because the principles at the center of the new order rested on ideas of self-determination and popular sovereignty, the ability of the powerful to govern the rest in the old way was becoming politically much harder to achieve, to say nothing of the absence of consensus among the major powers about fundamental issues and the absence of the defeated powers from the discussions altogether. Equally, the great powers wanted to protect their interests and avoid the possibility of being ensnared in conflicts that they would rather avoid. How to achieve all of these aims without creating a stillborn institution was an acute dilemma. The dilemma was resolved, at least partially, by adopting the unanimity principle of decisionmaking. This allowed the great powers to be able to claim that they were bowing to the new liberal ideas, confident in the knowledge that their core interests were being protected. To the outside world, it appeared as if the principles of sovereign equality had vanquished the old elite diplomacy. Power had been tamed by princi-

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ple. What had occurred in fact was that the powerful did not want to expose their interests to the new institution, yet did not wish to come away from Paris with no institution at all. Thus, the adoption of the unanimity principle was not the case of delusional liberals winning the argument, but the dominant powers insisting on specific rules to protect their interests. The problem, as many of them recognized, was that this would severely limit the capacity of the League, as unanimity meant that all of its decisions were subject to the veto of any member. Several basic assumptions about the international system and the place of the great powers within that system were evident in the discussions leading up to and during the negotiations at Paris. Perhaps the most basic idea animating these debates was the notion that the international system, and more particularly the problem of conflict, could be managed through institutional means. Equally, it was clear that many believed that institutional mechanisms were not only possible but indeed necessary to provide order. Yet the particularly liberal character of the institution they were trying to create produced a series of uneasy tensions. The central implication of the institutional approach was that sovereignty would have to be curtailed to some degree so as to achieve stability. But it also insisted that all states be represented equally and that the institution should protect this standing. Second, and most importantly for our concerns, the League was predicated on the tacit recognition that great powers had an important role to play underpinning the system; yet this was not formally acknowledged and indeed institutional design gave the League a stronger commitment to sovereign equality and transparency than it did to great power managerialism. The League ultimately failed to work out a political compromise that would facilitate great power responsibility in the face of a formal commitment to sovereign equality. This failing was not merely one of ideas but also led to the major powers being, in varying degrees, hesitant in their commitment to the organization. While there was recognition by many diplomats and statesmen that great powers were needed to make the institutionalization of international order work in the manner intended, these ideas did not win the day. Ultimately, the structure of the League set out in the covenant meant that the maintenance of order and the prevention of systemic war would depend on the international guarantees of collective security and on the exercise of selfrestraint at home imposed by the power of self-determination.

Great Powers and the League In spite of the differing attitudes toward the institution among many key states—the hesitancy of Great Britain, France, and the United States, as well as the tensions and risks evident in the principles at the heart of the

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organization—the League came into being upon the ratification of the Versailles Treaty. The Covenant of the League was comprised of the first twentysix articles of the treaty, and it established a remarkable development in international diplomacy, in spite of its shortcomings. Even if it was ultimately judged a failure, it represented huge ambition and, tellingly, its basic structure established a pattern that remains intact in the United Nations today.16 Yet for all its novelty, the League also represented some degree of continuity in the long-term trends in international society. As Alfred Zimmern observed: “The League of Nations was never intended to be, nor is it, a revolutionary organization. . . . It is not even revolutionary in the more limited sense of revolutionizing the methods for carrying on inter-state business. It does not supersede the older methods. It merely supplements them.”17 Central to this was the way in which the League attempted to develop ideas about the management of international order that had been evident throughout the previous century; in particular, the extent to which the League contributed to the development of thinking about the role of the great powers in managing international order. From one perspective, the League was an attempt to banish great power politics from international relations via the imposition of laws and rules to tame the exercise of raw power. From this point of view, the League is usually thought of as a failure, as the United States stayed away and the fascist powers were allowed to flex their muscles. This is perhaps the most common assessment of the League. A more measured analysis of the League’s contribution sees it as an effort to moderate the practices of great power diplomacy, or more precisely, to act as an institutional supplement to power politics. As Steiner puts it, the League “was not a substitute for great power politics as he [Woodrow Wilson] had intended, but rather an adjunct to it.”18 In this view, the League provided some services to smooth relations at the margins of international politics, but did little to shape either the policies of the great powers in general or their mutual relations in particular. As such, it played only a minor role in the broader functioning of international society. One might therefore be tempted to conclude that the League represents not a step in the path toward the increasing institutionalization of the great power role, but an aberration from this longer-term process, and perhaps a lesson to be learned as to the fate that befalls diplomats who stray too far from the requisites of power. Yet this view slightly misses the point. The League’s experiences are crucial to the story precisely because of the lessons that its ostensible failure had for the planners for a postwar organization in 1945. This will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. The League is generally thought to have had three core functions.19 The first, and best known, was to be an institution to provide security to its members through collective principles. The second was to promote functional cooperation among states. While not formally stipulated in the covenant, the League was intended, and did achieve, a degree of cooperation among states

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through its various technical commissions and functional bureaus, such as the refugee commission and the International Labour Organization (ILO). This was predicated on the liberal idea that conflict among states could be reduced by enhancing the socioeconomic welfare of peoples and by improving communication between states. While it was some way from the kind of cooperative endeavor imagined by David Mitrany and others in the interwar period, nonetheless the League made an important contribution to multilateral cooperation.20 Its third task was to be the main mechanism through which the post–World War I peace settlement was to be run. Taken together this was an expansive vision for the kind of role institutional mechanisms could play in helping create the conditions for peace after World War I and for managing international order. To advance these functions, the League structure was centered on a bicameral institution with a range of organizations and bureaus that were both directly and indirectly related to the core structure. The bodies were distinguished between the political entities (such as the Mandate Commission) and the technical organizations and commissions that were directly linked to the League, and the bodies that were part of the League edifice but not formally linked to the central bicameral structure (most notably the ILO and the International Court of Justice [ICJ]).21 The centerpiece of the institution consisted of the General Assembly and the Council. In principle, the Assembly was the representative organ at which all members had an equal say, while the Council was reserved for a limited number of members—the permanent Big Four plus a group of nonpermanent members—that would deal with pressing matters as they emerged. F. S. Northedge argues that this structure was a “fusion of the old exclusive Concert of Europe with the post–1918 theory that every nation-state, no matter how small, has a right to a say in world affairs.”22 The relationship between the two bodies, in contrast to the United Nations, was a hazy overlap of influence and power. Perhaps the most important feature of the League was that no decision, either of the Council or the Assembly, was binding on the members. Notwithstanding the potential advantage that permanency of membership might confer in some broad sense, then, the Council could not impose its will on the Assembly. The crucial other procedural point, one well recognized by critics of the League, was to be found in article 5, which stipulated that unanimity was required to make a decision at both Council and Assembly levels. This effective veto of all over all meant that, as Holsti observes, “the League thus became not an organization to enforce the terms of Article 10, but a set of procedures for resolving conflicts between parties that agreed or wished to resolve these conflicts short of conquest, that is, through compromise.”23 As such, the absence of a clear hierarchy between Council and Assembly, the nonbinding nature of decisions, and the unanimity principle all meant that the League was an international institution in which sovereign equality was in no way compromised.

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Ultimately, this meant that the creators of the League did not embrace the idea, so central to the Vienna settlement, that great powers should be accorded special treatment to ensure the effective functioning of the postwar order. Of course, great powers were accorded some formal recognition of their importance, most evident in the permanency of the League’s Council; however, this distinction was little more than categorical. It reflected the need to recognize the appearances of difference, but the procedural determination of the unanimity voting procedure meant that the distinction accorded to great powers was not reflected in the substantive structures of the League. Morgenthau puts it in typical fashion: “The inability of the League of Nations to maintain international order and peace, then, was the inevitable result of the ascendancy that the ethics and policies of sovereign nations were able to maintain over the moral and political objectives of the international government of the League of Nations.”24 This meant that the extent to which great power dominance of the international system continued, it occurred beyond the League and not within or through it. There were some structural settings that had been intended to give the Council a more authoritative position in the system, most notably article 4, whereby the Council reserved the right to deal with “any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world,” and in articles 11 through 17, which gave it a role in the settlement of disputes.25 But the overlapping lines of authority between the Assembly and the Council, the unanimity principle, and the fact that the Council merely recommended action and did not bind members meant that this distinction was little more than window dressing. When the Council did act to resolve a dispute (for example, the dispute between Poland and Lithuania over Memel), it required that the major powers, primarily the United Kingdom and France, be of one mind. The Council did, on occasion, produce a recommendation in spite of differences of opinion between the major powers (such as the 1922 arrangement over Upper Silesia), but this was rare and at the margins of importance. At its heart, the League’s procedures to prevent war reveal the limitations of a system that did not accord great powers a sufficient stake in the system. In essence, the League sought to reduce conflict through voluntary means, such as arms-reduction procedures, through moral suasion, and the promotion of a sense of security through mutual guarantees. For such a system to work required a strong degree of solidarity and sense of common cause among the members, a sense that experience showed did not exist to any great degree. The point of this is not to add to the chorus of voices decrying the League’s institutional weakness and hamstrung procedures, rather it is to draw attention to the way in which the great power role was embodied in the postwar order. While the major powers clearly dominated the negotiations around the structure of the League, it is notable that they decided not to recreate Vienna and suspend the universal application of the principle of sovereign

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equality. Their unease with the diplomatic and strategic consequences of so doing—that is to say, the absence of a sense not of trust but of basic common cause—meant that they were unwilling to bind their hands even in a way that limited the constraint on their action only to the very few. While they were, with the notable exception of the United States, not willing to scupper the central idea of an international institution designed to manage international order, they were not sufficiently motivated to organize their foreign and security policies through the institution, nor indeed to provide sufficient support for the mechanism. This meant that, up until 1945, the most important powers managed their own relations outside of the League framework. While it had a number of diplomatic successes and some conflicts were avoided, overall as a means of managing international order through the provision of mutual guarantees, the League failed. It failed precisely because it was unable to harness the interests of great powers to the requirements of systemic stability. It is unclear whether that was ever a plausible ambition at this time. In some respects, the tragedy of the League was the almost unstoppable sense that a new rule-governed institution was needed to deal with the horrors of industrial war, and yet the political circumstances were never going to be conducive to the effective function of such an institution. As Antoine Fleury points out, “The League of Nations can be said to have been the harbinger of a new world order based on international cooperation. It embodied the new ideas that characterized the twentieth century. But one must also recognize the precariousness of those ideas and acknowledge the provisional failure of the experience between 1930 and 1945.”26 It was the inability to strike a balance between the requirements of order and the principle of sovereign equality that lay at the heart of the dissension between the great powers and the institutional setting of the League. In summary, the League’s legacy for the constitutionalization of the great power role is several. First, and most obviously, the experiment with the League represented an underlying trend toward legalization and institutionalization of the mechanisms of international order more generally. Thus the role of the great powers was bound up inexorably in a process whereby formal procedures and institutional mechanisms were thought to be necessary to manage an increasingly complex international system in which the risks inherent in conflict had become so vertiginously high as to require a kind of management that had hitherto not been seen. It also reflected, though to a lesser degree, a confidence in the power of law and legal procedures to constrain state behavior. Following this point of view, some have argued that the path from the League to the United Nations was short and not especially complex: “The UN . . . is a revised League, no doubt improved in some respects, possibly weaker in others, but nonetheless a League, a voluntary association of nations, carrying on largely in the League tradition and by the League methods.”27 Second, and perhaps most importantly, the League was thought by many to show the

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dangers of letting international organizations get ahead of political reality. Put plainly, the isolation of the League from the diplomacy of the great powers was perceived to be central to its failure. This meant that when the planning began for the international organization that was thought to be necessary following World War II, first at the Atlantic Charter meeting and then at Dumbarton Oaks, those drawing up the plans for this new body felt that the League experience showed how getting the great power role wrong was not just bad for international institutions, it was catastrophic for the international system. Thus, the UN founders learned this lesson and took what was, for some liberals, a step back to a more nineteenth-century view of uneven treatment. The thinking was simple: great powers had to be inveigled to join the system because its management required their participation. The lesson of the League was, from this perspective, painfully obvious: without great powers, no institutional or legal management of international order was going to work. For great power managerialism to produce international order, nineteenth-century experience had shown, two conditions had to be met. First, great powers had to be given special rights, and second, a clear ideological consensus was needed among those states as to the moral purpose of the international order that they were managing. The League had neither. The problem, as we shall see, was that those planning the postwar order and the delegates at San Francisco recognized the first condition but entirely neglected the second. More broadly, if 1919 had shown how politically difficult it was to get diplomatic elites to reconcile great power privilege with sovereign equality, 1945 and after showed the practical problems of great power management in a world where the international system had become properly universal and the idea of sovereign equality and equal treatment had begun to exert an extremely powerful grip on the popular imagination.

Notes 1. He, “The Crucial Role of the United Nations in Maintaining International Peace and Security,” 81. 2. See, generally, Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics. 3. Keylor, “Versailles and International Diplomacy,” 473, detail of examples in footnote 6. 4. Webster, Congress of Vienna. Margaret MacMillan notes that Webster subsequently acknowledged that it had almost no impact. MacMillan, Paris, 1919, xviii. 5. For the complete text, see: http://avalon.law.yale.edu. 6. Holsti, Peace and War, 175–176. 7. Holsti, Peace and War, 180–196. 8. Steiner, Lights That Failed, 350. 9. MacMillan, Paris, 1919, 85.

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10. See, generally, Sharp, Versailles Settlement, 29–39; MacMillan, Paris, 1919, 83–97. 11. Covenant of the League of Nations, text available at http://www.yale.edu /lawweb/avalon/leagcov.htm. 12. Cited in Knock, To End All Wars, 232, see also discussion on pp. 240–241 and 266. 13. Cited in MacMillan, Paris, 1919, 11. 14. Holsti, Peace and War, 208–211. 15. Cited in Steiner, Lights That Failed, 351. 16. On the links between the UN and League, see Goodrich, “From League of Nations to United Nations.” 17. Zimmern, League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 4. 18. Steiner, Lights That Failed, 349. 19. A point famously made by William E. Rappard in International Relations as Viewed from Geneva. 20. Some have even argued that this was its greatest contribution; see Fleury, “League of Nations.” 21. On the League structure, see United Nations, League of Nations, 1920– 1946. 22. Northedge, League of Nations, 48–49. 23. Holsti, Peace and War, 210, italics in original. 24. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 477. 25. Covenant of the League of Nations, text available at http://www.yale .edu/lawweb/avalon/leagcov.htm. 26. Fleury, “League of Nations,” 516. 27. Goodrich, “From League of Nations to United Nations,” 21.

4 The Contradictions of the UN Order

If the League of Nations is generally regarded as a failure—at best, it never made good on the wide-ranging support for international cooperation that was evident after World War I; at worst, it was complicit in allowing the fascist powers their head—assessments of the United Nations are rather more mixed. It remains popular, as newly independent states clamor to join, and its numbers have swelled to 193 from its original membership of 51. It is widely regarded as the most important of the many international organizations that dot the international landscape, and it sits at the heart of a complex array of agencies, bureaus, and functional bodies that cover almost every aspect of human interaction, from trade to security, education to the environment. While the founders of the United Nations would doubtless be pleased with its longevity, prestige, and broad-ranging function, it is in the area of international peace and security—intended to be its core business and most important sphere—where judgment of the UN tends to be at its most critical and the founders would be perhaps most disappointed. When the diplomats commenced planning for the postwar world, and particularly when they began to devise ways in which a third global conflagration could be avoided, central to their thinking was the need to better incorporate the great powers into the institutional setting. The degree to which the participants fixated on the need to build great power managerialism into the system was remarkable. Peace and stability were thought to depend on institutionalizing the ideas of great power management. Yet many of the very real limitations of the current order, centered as it is on the United Nations, appear to derive from the way in which the great powers are given special treatment. The UN’s particular structure was a product of the machinations of power at the end of World War II and the jostling for influence in the postwar world; but it was

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also due to the way in which diplomats, politicians, and policymakers thought international order operated. In this chapter I examine the ways in which the development of the UN’s constitutional structure was strongly influenced by the ideas of great power managerialism and privilege, as well as by the desire of the delegates at the San Francisco conference to rectify the perceived failings of the League of Nations on this front. The chapter concludes with a short reflection on how the UN order functioned in practice and shows that while managerialism did not function quite as it was intended, the UN Security Council (UNSC) has nonetheless become an important component of international society.

Privilege at San Francisco Learning Lessons The planning for the organization that eventually became the United Nations began in February 1941 when Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state, created the Division of Special Research, whose main purpose was to devise plans for a future world assembly, something that was, in Hull’s words, “a future world order.”1 After much discussion and deliberation—including the famous Roosevelt and Churchill meeting off Newfoundland that produced the Atlantic Charter, which hinted vaguely in its eighth principle at a “permanent system of general security”—the State Department established an Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy in February 1942.2 Comprised of a range of subcommittees, the larger body was disbanded in June of that year, but the work of planning continued in the subcommittees, and it was under the auspices of these entities that the US vision for an international organization managing the postwar order took shape.3 Although the idea of an institutional mechanism to oversee postwar security resonated with the British, the particular vision, that of a legalistic institution facilitating the policing of order by the great powers, was conceived and executed by the United States. As Edward Luck makes clear, from the development of a broad set of principles to the ratification of the charter, the establishment of the institution was a very deliberate process. This began in 1942 with a range of bilateral meetings between the British and US representatives, followed by an approach to Stalin at Tehran in 1943. Once the “Big Three” agreed to the basic principles, more detailed diplomatic negotiation around the putative body’s structure was worked out at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944, where China was brought in as the fourth great power. A further meeting was held at Yalta later that year, where representatives finalized the way in which great power prerogatives were to be incorporated into the organization. The Four then invited the allied powers and a number of other states to San

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Francisco to gain their consent for the basic structure and to provide some scope to finesse aspects of the detail.4 As Andrew Boyd puts it, “the San Francisco ‘Founders’ were, in fact, summoned to that Californian city to approve a basic structure for the UN that had already been privately agreed between the Big Three.”5 In short, the UN Charter was explicitly a product of the major powers and reflected their interests as well as their understanding of the requirements of international order. The centrality of the great powers, and most particularly of the United States, to the creation of the United Nations should not be downplayed. However, a significant factor in the deliberations was the specter of the League. In the words of Alexander Cadogan, among the British representation to the San Francisco conference, the UN bore “a most embarrassing resemblance” to the League.6 One of the main aims of the participants, from the US diplomats working in 1942, through to the delegates at the 1945 conference, was to avoid the mistakes of the League. Of the many concerns about the League, two were of particular prominence: the place of the great powers and the unanimity principle. These were related in that the unanimity principle had led to the major powers distancing themselves from the organization and conducting their security and defense policies outside of the League. In the minds of those framing the postwar order, a better balance had to be struck between the need for great power management and the principle of sovereign equality. As Robert Hilderbrand puts it, “the Great Powers hoped that their understanding of the mistakes made at Paris in 1919 could prevent similar errors at Dumbarton Oaks in 1944 and might make it possible to create a world organization that would work.”7 A number of problems with the place of the great powers in the League were thought to be related to its failings. The most obvious was that any efforts to establish an ongoing mechanism to manage the peace and to foster the conditions in which major war was to be avoided required great power participation. As a French delegate to the San Francisco conference put it: “It seems to me that it was not this lack of unanimity, or rule of unanimity, which prevented the action of the League, but rather the absence from the very start of one of the great powers and then later the withdrawals of other great powers which alone could maintain the peace.”8 Thus, an overwhelming concern of those who sought to create the institution was simple: the major powers had to participate. Indeed, for Roosevelt, the primary aim in the creation of the UN, to which he was enormously committed, was that both the US and the USSR would participate.9 Any institution that was intended to help keep the peace after the defeat of the Axis powers simply had to have the US and the Soviet Union at the table. The second basic lesson that the planners and policymakers took from the League experience was functional. Given that the great powers had the preponderance of military capacity, they would by necessity be the major players in any practical efforts to maintain international peace and

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security. It followed that they must have a status commensurate with this reality. Cadogan expressed the logic clearly: We considered that these five named powers have suffered most, and striven most in this war in order to maintain Right and Justice and with success. And we further sought, considering the matter, that in regard to the future, these same powers expressed around the world would likely to be those— almost certain to be those to whom would fall the greatest share of responsibility for meeting any further future attempt on world peace.10

At the same meeting, the Mexican delegate argued that the clause in the charter spelling out the permanent members should be followed by the phrase “as states that have the greatest responsibility for the maintenance of peace.”11 The feeling was clear that the practical aspects of keeping the peace would rest with those who had the power to persuade and that their place in the coming system should reflect this circumstance. This gets to a central concern of the planners, that is, the perception that the League failed because it ultimately relied on moral suasion and lacked any coercive capacity. In their minds, and those of the politicians and diplomats, the new organization had to have “teeth.” At a meeting of Commission III/3 in San Francisco—the technical committee tasked with determining the enforcement arrangements under the Security Council—the Soviet representative pointed out that “the principle defect of the League of Nations was exactly that, it being powerless to take quick and effective measures to suppress aggression, and also the fact that the League was never concerned with the thought of preventing those aggressions.”12 A broader political lesson of the League had also been learned by the United States. If they wanted to create an institution of which they were a part, then careful consideration would have to be paid to the preferences of political constituencies at home, and most particularly the opinions of those in the Senate. US membership of the League had famously been voted down by Congress’s upper chamber. Thus, US efforts were fundamentally shaped by the experiences of the League’s failure in the Senate, and almost all moves were influenced, to some degree, by the recognition that the UN would stand or fall on the Senate’s willingness to support it. Lessons from the League related not just to these structural concerns but also to its procedures. The Security Council’s relations to the General Assembly, and its specific duties spelled out in article 24, were a response to the unclear division of labor that had been established in the League Covenant. That the Security Council should not attend to every minor matter and should have a clearly demarcated sphere of activity was directly derived from League experience. The lack of binding powers, the unclear focus of work, and being bogged down on relatively minor matters had been an obvious problem under the covenant. Likewise, the view that the Council should be small to allow more efficient activity was influenced by the League. In debates about the membership, the Greek delegate noted that “as

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the number of [League] Council members increased, the quality of the work performed by the Council diminished.”13 Finally, the most important procedural lesson of the League related to voting, and particularly to the problems that unanimity posed to effective action. In the debates about the veto power, the British delegate made plain that the sponsoring powers had explicitly sought to discard the League’s unanimity rule. “In practice it had to be recognized—or we thought it must be recognized—that it was not easy to expect that five great Powers—the five permanent members—could readily accept that they should be bound by a majority of a Council of eleven.” He went on to argue that the structure should be understood as a removal of the veto from the smaller powers (as they had had with the League Covenant).14 The sense among the major powers, and indeed among most at San Francisco, was that the unanimity principle, while strictly in keeping with the sovereign equality principle, compromised the League by making it hostage to the concerns of a single power, no matter how insignificant or dubious its claims. This provided a significant disincentive for major power participation. Unanimity had to go. Given that the great powers had, to a large degree, determined the core features of the system, there was little room for dissent as to who ought to be considered a great power or on what basis. Early on at San Francisco, there was some debate about the composition of the Council but this predictably went nowhere. Some called for an increase to seven permanent members, and nonpermanent members to eight, with these filled by a rotation system. The Cuban delegate pointed out that even in the past twenty years the character of the great powers had been variable and that the naming of powers in the charter was going to lead to inflexibility.15 However, as the report that was submitted to the conference’s final plenary meeting made clear, the “view was expressed that an axiom underlying the whole security system was the unanimity of the permanent members; that the importance of the nonpermanent members lay not in numbers but in their ability to influence the great Powers [sic] to maintain unanimity. This could not be achieved by increasing the number.”16 The Soviets had objected to France being given permanency both because of its inadequacies—in Stalin’s view France would make for a “charming but weak” power after the war—and because it was concerned about being outnumbered by Western powers. Interestingly, Roosevelt had been flirting with the idea of including Brazil as a permanent member (as it was the only Latin American state with troops fighting in Europe), but internal objections, as well as British and Soviet concerns, led Roosevelt to drop this more geographically expansive idea. Hilderbrand also reports that there were intentions to propose a Muslim country for permanent status at some point in the future.17 In the planning, negotiations, and conferences that determined the detail of the institutional basis for the postwar setting, one can see a number of key

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assumptions concerning the requirements of international order. At a very basic level, it was clear that, in spite of the widely recognized shortcomings of the League, large and small states alike felt that a multilateral institution with a broad-reaching functional scope and some kind of coercive capacity was necessary. The scale of the war, the destructive capacity of technology, and the horrors of genocide meant that no one was content to rely solely on the balance of power or some other mechanistic conception of order. It was thought that under these conditions international politics required an institutional framework to avoid conflict, to mitigate its consequences, and to underwrite international cooperation. Central to this view was the widespread belief that the major powers had to be part of this system. Where in Paris the major powers were always somewhat uneasy about cooperation and the institutional framework of the League, in 1945 they were not only happy to be part of the system, they were leading the charge. Of course, to some degree this was selfinterested and driven by the view that “if the UN was to succeed there must be a dominant place within it for the great powers.”18 But in spite of this obvious advantage, it is striking that the powerful felt the need to create a legal edifice that would, even in some small way, impose constraint on their action. There was recognition of both the practical and political necessity to do more than mouth platitudes to the idea of sovereign equality in the substance of the organization. But beyond the belief that order required great power management and that consequently these powers should be granted a special dominant place within the system, there was a widely articulated view that it also required a unity of purpose among the great powers. As Dwight Lee puts it, “The attitude toward the organization by the Sponsoring Governments [US, UK, China, and USSR] was that peace and security could only be achieved by the great powers acting as a unit.”19 In this sense, key aspects of the Vienna system were written into the charter: great power management in the form of permanent membership of the most important part of the system; special treatment in the form of the veto; and consensus among the great powers as to the purpose of the system and their place within it. For the great powers, this meant that at San Francisco’s negotiations there were certain aspects of the proposed charter that were essentially nonnegotiable. These included (1) that the Security Council be superior to the other organs and that its decisions be binding on all members; (2) that great powers would have permanent membership of this superior body; and (3) that the Yalta determination on the veto would not be diluted. The Yalta determination involved the Big Three agreeing that each Security Council member would have one vote, that decisions on procedural matters required seven of eleven votes, and that decisions on all other matters required seven of eleven votes, including all of the permanent members.20

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The Making of Privilege The international conference held in San Francisco, among much pomp and media attention, was intended to establish the fine constitutional detail of the international organization that was to be at the center of the postwar order and to broker broad-ranging diplomatic assent for that order. It was at once concerned with microlevel questions of structure, organization, and procedure as well as with the larger concern as to how best to manage the world to come after the war. Delegates were concerned not only with voting procedures in the putative general assembly but also with whether the wartime alliance might be managed without the fascist threat, and how the broader social and economic conditions for peace might be achieved. At the conclusion of the conference, the agreed-to charter was signed by all the delegations at a closely choreographed signing ceremony that lasted over seven hours.21 The scale of the conference was matched to some degree by the rhetoric at the closing plenary session—Hiss declared that history would honor the delegates for writing the UN Charter, and Truman declared that had the charter existed several years earlier, millions of deaths would have been avoided—sentiments entirely understandable given that many had been pessimistic as to the prospects of achieving what was ultimately unanimous support for the constitutional structure of the postwar international order. The creation of the United Nations and the achievements of the conference at San Francisco should not be downplayed; however, one must recognize that the making of the UN was largely a function of the efforts of the major powers. They had thrashed out the basic terms in the postwar planning, had devised a draft charter at Dumbarton Oaks, and made clear that at San Francisco they were not willing to countenance any changes to the core features of the Dumbarton proposal. In this sense, the driving force behind the creation of the UN Charter, and hence the constitutional framework for the postwar order, was the great powers, and particularly the United States. Yet while the sponsoring powers would not accept any major changes at San Francisco, it is not quite right to describe the charter as lacking legitimacy because of this, nor to think that the San Francisco conference was a sham because of an unwillingness by the major powers to accept structural changes. It is important to emphasize that, in essence, the basic features of the Dumbarton Oaks proposal were accepted by most; even the most contentious aspect, the powers and prerogatives of the great powers in the Security Council, was widely supported. The medium and minor powers broadly concurred with the view that a small Council would have to act on behalf of the entire membership to promote peaceful dispute settlement and peace enforcement. As Ruth Russell puts it, the proposal’s essence was that “the major powers would be conceded a preferential position in return for their burden of special responsibilities.”22 While accepted in the main,

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there were critics of the proposal, and their criticisms, predictably enough, related to the perception that the organization was going to create an international oligarchy of the great powers. This sentiment was colorfully articulated by a group of Protestant clergy who criticized the proposal as “mere camouflage for the continuation of imperialistic policies and the exercise of arbitrary power by the Big Three for the domination of other nations.”23 Although the Dumbarton Oaks proposal formed the starting point for the negotiations at San Francisco, in principle, the conference allowed for the participants not merely to rubber stamp the proposal but to make substantive changes as well. Delegates were able to propose amendments between the April 25 opening and May 4. Any changes to the charter at the conference would require the agreement of the four sponsoring powers since the committee structure of the conference allowed them the ability to veto any amendments.24 While they were unwilling to move on big issues, they were at pains not to abuse their position of advantage, and the fact that they felt that it was politically important to avoid being seen to be so acting gives some indication of the value they placed in the institution itself. Although it is tempting to see the organization as little more than a reflection of the verities of power politics, these efforts tell a more subtle story. They gave the leadership of each of the technical committees to small powers; they also subjected their own amendments to the standard procedure whereby any change required a twothirds vote for approval of substantive change and one-half for procedural changes. While there was broad acceptance of the basic thrust of the charter, those who were asked to sign up to the postwar international constitution had, at times, quite different views as to the details of how it was to be played out, and this produced some dispute at the conference. These included conflicting views as to the relationship of regional and other special security arrangements to the organization and how membership of the UN might infringe on preexisting approaches to security policy. There were also differences of opinion as to the membership of the Council and voting procedures, as well as short-lived efforts to change the relationship of the Council to the Assembly. But without question, the dispute that caused the greatest tension at San Francisco, and which is most revealing about the thinking that lay behind the UN and the workings of international order, was in the question of the veto. Some states were unhappy with the permanent members having a veto at all, while others wanted to constrain the circumstances under which the veto could be used, a case most notably put by the Australian representative, H. V. Evatt.25 The debates about the veto are particularly telling because they illustrate the tensions evident between the belief that the system required great powers to be given certain dispensations to allow for the functional efficacy of the putative order and the principles of sovereign equality on which the international system was ostensibly predicated. This tension was particularly acute given the

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efforts to make the United Nations a system for managing the international rule of law in which contradictory principles are more difficult to reconcile. Equally, the way in which the powers defended their position illustrates the thinking of the great powers and their understanding of the requirements of international order. Those critical of the Dumbarton Oaks formulation of the veto made a number of distinct arguments, the most common of which was the basic point that endowing a small number of states with such a prerogative was in breach of the organization’s most basic principle of sovereign equality, and more generally not in keeping with the democratic ideals with which the charter was supposed to be imbued. This was both a principled concern—the idea that the charter protects the sovereign rights of states but at the same time treats certain states differently sat, and for many still sits, uneasily—and a concern that the workings of the Council and the UN more generally should not be hostage to a single state, no matter how powerful. The second and related criticism was the fear that the veto would be abused. The kinds of abuse that were imagined varied from the stymieing of the actions of others through to the paralysis of the organization as a whole. The third concern was the view that the veto was not necessary. In essence, this was a response to the great power claim that the veto was required to ensure that great power unity was maintained. In an exchange on June 12, the Colombian delegate made the point that while great power unity was indeed necessary, the veto was not the best means for achieving this. More particularly, and presciently, he argued that the interests of the great powers would be subject to the will of one. In response, the US representative argued that support should be given to the draft proposals because it was anticipated, quite wrongly, that the veto would seldom be used. The US representative, Senator Tom Connally, reiterated the need for unanimity and assured delegates that the veto “would be rarely exercised; seldom exercised.” As he put it, “You trusted her to win the peace. Why can’t you trust her to keep the peace now that we have won it?” In this sense, the major powers were acting in what they believed to be good faith.26 The fourth main criticism was that the scope for the veto was too broad, a point made most clearly by Evatt, who asserted that it should not pertain to the pacific settlement of disputes. Evatt made a range of criticisms of the veto, but the most influential was the view that the balance struck in the Dumbarton proposal between great power interests and sovereign equality was too heavily tilted in favor of the former. He argued that there was no particular need for the veto in nonmilitary questions and that there was a good deal of support for the position. As we know, the efforts came to naught, but the debate it sparked revealed concerns at the outset as to where the limits of the privilege granted to the major powers should lie. The sponsoring powers presented three main justifications for the privileged position of the great powers that was set out in the Dumbarton proposal.

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The first was the claim that special treatment of the great powers was not a blank check, but rather entailed a rights-responsibilities trade-off. Great powers were given a privileged place in the system in return for the responsibility to carry a disproportionate burden in managing the postwar order and most particularly keeping the peace. In debate, the Soviet delegate argued that granting the right of veto to the permanent members of the Council put them into a special position. This is true. The position of permanent members of the Council will differ to some extent from the positions of non-permanent members but it does correspond to that responsibility and those duties which will be imposed upon these powers by the charter of the International Organization.27

Equally, Connally reiterated this sentiment, although perhaps overdoing the appearance of magnanimity of the major powers, and it is worth quoting at length: They [great powers] have, of course, because of their resources and their manpower and their military power and authority a larger degree of responsibility for the maintenance of peace than other powers, but that is not a responsibility that they crave. This is not a responsibility that they will try to reach out to gather in. . . . They are trying to preserve the peace of the world, because when the peace of the world is preserved they, as well as all of the other powers, are the gainers.28

The second justification for great power privilege was the claim that the maintenance of the postwar order required that the great powers act in unison and that the veto was necessary to achieve this goal. As Andrei Gromyko, a Soviet representative, put it, “If the problem of peace is to be solved, there must be mutual trust and harmony among the greatest world powers, and they must act in harmony.”29 In the debates, great power privilege was presented as the best means to continue to manage the wartime alliance. The veto gave each great power the opportunity to protect its interests and allowed them to resist being forced down a path they did not wish to travel by one of the other powers. In so doing, it provided an incentive for the great powers to work in unison, at least that was the claim made by their representatives at San Francisco. The USSR felt particularly threatened by the others, given that, at the time, all of the other putative permanent members were on one side of the ideological divide and their fear of encirclement was often palpable. The Soviet Union’s concern with being perpetually outvoted led it not only to insist on the broadest possible interpretation of the veto but also to gain admission for both Ukraine and Belarus alongside the USSR, as well as to push for separate membership in the organization of all of the constituent republics of the USSR. Perhaps more importantly, the veto was said to be necessary to ensure that the broader system could survive when the interests of the key powers

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diverged. As Luck puts it, “Unanimity would be superfluous when their views converged. When they did not, however, it served both to preserve the institution and to insure that it could not be turned against one of its principal founders.”30 This would provide the requisite levels of trust to ensure the continuity of the alliance framework. Yet in reality during the debates, the idea of “unity” was ultimately a kind of code for participation. The major powers were acutely aware of how their actions were perceived and were at pains to avoid being seen as blackmailing the participants. Yet, as many were all too aware, the organization would rise or fall on the participation of the major powers, most particularly the US and the USSR. Thus the language of unity, and hence of the veto as the key to achieving that unity, was a thinly veiled way of saying that the veto was the price for admission of the major powers. The final justification was a pragmatic one; the great powers should not be compelled to act without their explicit consent. It was strongly felt that the League had made the mistake of relying on states acting when it may not be in their interest to do so, and that this had led the large powers to remain outside the system. It was clear at Dumbarton Oaks and at San Francisco that the major powers would reserve for themselves the final right to act, and as such, the new organization had to recognize this, and the organizational structure of the Dumbarton proposal reflected this view. The question of the veto came to a head in late May. In response to the submission of a series of twenty-three questions by the critics in Committee III/1, the sponsoring powers prepared what proved to be the final word on the matter. In the “Statement by the Delegations of the Four Sponsoring Governments on Voting Procedure in the Security Council” of June 7, 1945, they made the distinction between executive actions (such as determination of threats to the peace, removal of these threats, and suppression of breaches to the peace) and other actions (“decisions which do not involve the taking of such measures”). In the case of the former, the veto would hold, but in the case of the latter, it would not. They made specific reference to the experiences of the League’s Council, in which the Council was depicted as being subjected to the “unanimous vote of all,” and contrasted this with the “qualified majority” voting of the proposed Security Council. They also pointed out that the permanent members cannot act on their own, given that they need at least two other nonpermanent nations to agree (the failure to get nonpermanent nations to agree is sometimes referred to as the “sixth veto”). Then they put it bluntly: “In view of the primary responsibilities of the permanent members, they could not be expected, in the present condition of the world, to assume the obligation to act in so serious a matter as the maintenance of international peace and security in consequence of a decision in which they had not concurred.”31 In many respects, the speech that US secretary of state Edward Stettinius gave in response to the Evatt-led efforts to constrain the veto conveys the thinking of the major powers: “It is not a question of privilege, but of using

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the present distribution of military and industrial power in the world for the maintenance of peace . . . without their [P5] strength and their unanimous will to peace the Council would be helpless to enforce its decisions.”32 It is important to emphasize that the special place reserved for the great powers within the UN order entails more than a legal-institutional veneer over unreconstructed power politics. That the powers felt the need to operate within an institutional framework, and that they went through considerable effort to gain genuine diplomatic support for the charter, reveals the extent to which they felt there was a utility (and more than a public relations one) in acting in this way. As Connally made clear in one of his more exasperated moments: “These little countries are going to bellyache and raise hell no matter what you do about it. We’re doing all this for them. We could make an alliance with Great Britain and Russia and be done with it.”33 The rapporteur’s report of these discussions to the plenary session of the conference articulates very clearly the set of ideas that had led to the granting of great power privilege, and as such, are worth quoting at some length. He points out that the committee’s determinations represent an attempt to harmonize power with responsibility, recognizing that certain states must, by virtue of their immense strength, necessarily bear a predominant share of the responsibility for the enforcement of the future peace. At the same time, care has been taken to provide for the fullest possible participation of all members, great and small, in the task of preventing or repressing future threats to peace. An attempt has been made to provide the maximum possible guarantee of effectiveness without impairing the sovereignty of the members of the Organization.34

While the summary of the voting procedure debate is described as having involved “intensive discussion,” it notes that the committee agreed to the Dumbarton Oaks formulation, while it further notes that the expectation of the unanimity of the great powers, which will bear the brunt of future enforcement action, but that no action can be undertaken by them unless at least two of the non-permanent members of the Council concur in the proposal. The guiding principle is that, within a framework of common obligations and stated principles, the various members will assume those responsibilities which they are respectively best fitted to discharge in the common cause.35

Yet even while Evatt’s motions to limit aspects of the veto had been defeated, many states made clear that they were not entirely content with the decision. They did this by issuing statements articulating this dissatisfaction while also recognizing that rejecting the veto meant rejecting the organization in its entirety which was, for all concerned, too high a price to pay. A nonetoo-thinly veiled way of saying that their hands had, to some degree, been

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forced by the major powers. Some conceded that the charter was imperfect but that a flawed organization was better than no organization; their way of squaring this with the basic idealism that they were trying to retain was to say that they were signing on the assumption that the great powers would continue to be peace loving. The Indian delegate emphasized that the charter provisions were intended to stop wars between lesser powers, as the veto represented the idea that it would stop great power war: “It seems to me that we are really asked to do an act of faith in signing this Charter. It begins with a faith that the permanent members [are] peace loving and will continue to be peace loving. It is only on that faith we can proceed in establishing this charter.”36 The representative from Cuba stated: Cuba is opposed to the system of voting in the Security Council, as set forth in the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, because it gives its permanent Members a veto right which, apart from constituting a privilege that is contrary to the sovereign equality of states and to the basic principles of democracy, is a dangerous weapon with which a single one of the said members can paralyze the action of all the UN in the maintenance of the Peace, which is the prime objective of the Organization.

But he went on to vote with the majority as an act of goodwill. This was a sentiment echoed almost to the word by Evatt.37 The granting of the veto to the permanent members was an unambiguous statement of the uneven treatment of the great powers, formalized in legal terms and explicitly placed as a central foundation of the postwar international order. The veto was an expression of the need to harness power to provide stability to an anarchical system built on the principle of sovereign equality, even while it sat uncomfortably with the principle. Of course, the challenge was, and remains, ensuring that the great power cooperation continued. In rhetoric and in substance, the kind of international order that the delegates were trying to create required that the states with the legal right and military power to manage the system be of one mind on key issues. The compromise between the requirements for order and the principle of sovereign equality that the veto represented meant that the kind of order they were constructing “could not deal with threats to peace emanating from superpowers or affecting their vital interests.”38 The most obvious situation that could stymie the system— challenges to security that derived from permanent members or disputes between them—of course came to be the dominant theme for the bulk of the postwar period. By the close of the conference, the delegates had committed themselves and the international system to a new order. While maintaining some lines of continuity with both the League and long-term trends in European diplomacy, the organization was novel in a number of important ways. The conference established that the centerpiece of the postwar order would be a multilateral

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institution with codified powers that sought to enshrine, to the extent possible, the international rule of law. It explicitly circumscribed the use of force in international affairs, sanctioning it only in very specific circumstances: selfdefense and with the approval of an executive committee. In this sense, the UN order marks a distinct break with the past. More generally, for the first time the core principles of the system were written down and given the status of law and placed in an institutional context in which there was scope for diplomatic and coercive action in case members breached the rules of the game. Fundamental to this political and diplomatic process, as well as to the long-term functioning of the system, was the creation of a special category of membership in the organization. The establishment of an executive council that had clear jurisdiction over matters of war and peace, and in which the major powers had a veto over decisionmaking, was vital to ensuring that the organization came into being and was thought to be of central importance to its basic ongoing function. But it was a situation with which many were uneasy from the outset and whose application appeared to be problematic even before the Council had convened for the first time.

The Cold War and the UN Order The delegates at San Francisco had agreed to a system that took the principles of the Congress of Vienna and put them in a twentieth-century diplomatic context. The postwar planners, as well as the delegates to the conference, had consciously learned the lessons of the League; that is, that it had put too much weight on the principle of sovereign equality and that not enough attention had been paid to ensuring that the great powers conceived of their interests in ways that supported underlying systemic stability. The participants at San Francisco believed they had struck the best possible balance between the requirements of order and the rights of sovereignty and equality. Yet as the delegates were all aware, the charter was a document fraught with uncertainty. For one thing, the tension between the conception of order that the UN Charter represented and the core principles of the organization were evident from the outset. As decolonization began to increase the number of states participating in the system, it also increased the political pressure on the inequalities represented in the great power role. Equally, ideological tensions in the broader circumstances of world politics questioned the core assumption of the great power role—that order can be managed by the powers acting in unison and with a shared sense of the underlying purpose of that order. Finally, as experience with the UN-centered order began to show, the founders of the United Nations had, in their understanding of the workings of international order, learned the wrong lessons from history. In recognizing the need to include the great powers to ensure management of the system, they appeared

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to assume that power, when judiciously exercised by an elite club at the international level, would suffice to produce order. But the experience of the Vienna system was that orderly international relations managed by great powers had less to do with institutional structure, voting procedures, and a recognition of rights than it did to the way in which international society was built on a consensus among the major powers about the fundamental elements of that society. The Vienna order depended on a consensus among the great powers about the particular role that they played in the system, as well as the character of and value in a particular conception of international society. In other words, there was consensus as to the underlying moral and political purpose of international society and agreement as to its domestic political and economic foundations. The final part of this chapter will consider how the order that was crafted at Yalta and Dumbarton Oaks (and fine-tuned at San Francisco) operated and the extent to which the principles of great power management spelled out in the charter worked in the complex setting of postwar world politics. The creation of the United Nations and the institutionalization of the vision of great power management in the Security Council was intended to provide a foundation for an international order in which systemic conflict was avoided and interstate conflict kept to a minimum. While it did not attempt to recreate the European concert on a global scale, it nonetheless represented a significant development, as both a formalization of the principles on which international relations ought to be conducted and an articulation of the particular role the great powers were thought to play in maintaining international order. Rather than rely on great powers making order in a piecemeal fashion, by trying to achieve a strategic balance or to maintain their spheres of influence, the Security Council formalized their participation in a system that embodied the international rule of law. The great powers would act as the enforcers of last resort, as well as guarantors of the underlying order, and their collective actions would embody the core principles of the system of peace and security. On this last point, in their own actions they would show restraint, consult one another regularly, and act cooperatively. Yet the system of international relations that unfolded in the postwar world did not at all follow the script anticipated at San Francisco. Among the most important features of the international system after 1945 was the gap between what the founders of the United Nations had anticipated the great power function to be and the actual workings of the system. Experience showed that the key reason for this gap was a fundamental misunderstanding of how a properly universal system of sovereignty can be managed, both functionally and politically. The point of the great power management of order was to maintain international peace and security in a more effective manner, particularly given the huge increase in the costs and risks of war that had occurred in the twentieth century. Although the drafters of the charter clearly recognized that the broad

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parameters of a stable international system required a focus on economic and social matters, as well as geopolitical concerns, the maintenance of international peace and security was conceived of as a strictly strategic question to be managed by the powerful states. The system as designed provided for a number of interrelated mechanisms through which this would be achieved. First, member states were to adhere to the legal restraints on the use of force set out in chapter 7 whereby, with the exception of self-defense (fairly narrowly understood), the Council was to be the sole body able to authorize the legitimate use of force. When those restraints were not recognized, the Council would be able to act, with a range of means at its disposal. The most important, as spelled out in the charter, was the UN standing army described in article 43.39 Thus, the legal proscriptions in the charter were matched with a guarantee that if a threat to the peace emerged, the Council would act politically, diplomatically, and, ultimately, with armed force to protect the interests of the members. Indeed, article 51, which enshrines the right to self-defense, requires members to report action to the Council and to limit that right “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”40 On paper, then, the Council was located at the center of a universal international organization that was to back the legalization of international relations with the power of the most important members of international society. Yet as Christine Gray laments, “Over the last sixty years, the Charter scheme has never been implemented in the manner that a literal reading of the text might suggest.”41 Nor was it implemented, for that matter, in the manner envisaged by those present at San Francisco. It did not become the centerpiece of a great power system of management, but equally it did not become a husk. In its functioning, it resembles neither the European concert nor the League, to take the extremes of diplomatic experience of order management, and over time, it has developed a distinctive and distinctively important role in international politics. It is widely recognized that the vision for international order imagined at San Francisco was not realized. During the postwar period, the great powers did not manage a version of collective security, and the constitutional conception for a great power–managed order did not materialize. In many respects, the reasons that it did not are obvious. The Grand Alliance broke down and in its stead came nearly forty years of ideological acrimony and geopolitical hostility, tinged with the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Without a consensus among the great powers, the system was never going to operate as intended, and Cold War conflict destroyed any hopes of such a consensus. If the UNSC was not the cockpit of a managerial international order, what became of the great power role? What also became of the Council? To be clear, this section is not intended to evaluate the UNSC in its entirety, but rather to reach some conclusions about how the international order that was designed at San Francisco played out in practice and what that can tell us about the status of the great power role in contemporary international society.

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Barely three years had passed since the San Francisco conference and it was already clear that the central assumption on which the UN vision for a great power–managed order rested was proving to be deeply problematic. Indeed, the UNSC was the venue for the first hint of the great power rivalry that was to dominate world politics for the following sixty years. The Iranian crisis of 1946, first placed on the UNSC agenda on January 28 of that year, almost instantaneously dissolved the notion of great power unity. The Berlin Blockade, widely regarded as the first contest of the Cold War, made clear that the Grand Alliance of 1941–1945 had not only collapsed, but that it had been replaced with outright military competition. The premise on which the idea of great power management of the broader system rested was the common purpose and concerted action of the most powerful states. With the emergence of the Cold War, the most powerful not only no longer saw their interests as best served through common action, they saw each other as existential threats. As discussed above, the idea of great power unity was, when used in relation to the justification for the veto, code for great power participation. The Cold War appeared in the first instance not only to question the efficacy of the UN vision for a great power–managed order, but indeed challenged the very existence of the Security Council. In hindsight, it is easy to forget that the Soviet Union regularly walked out of UNSC deliberations; and in the early years of the bipolar conflict, there remained a distinct possibility that the divisions among the great powers could lead to the organization having the same fate as the League. One of the most important developments during this period was the determination by the United States and the Soviet Union to manage their broader strategic relations outside the UNSC. Driven by a range of factors, most importantly the logic of strategic nuclear competition, the two central players in the Cold War essentially bypassed the institution that had been established to manage international peace and security.42 As a result, the most important relationship in postwar international security was not part of the UNSC’s business. But it was not only their bilateral relations that were so affected. The management of their respective groupings, or blocs, in the Cold War parlance, equally was not subject to UNSC oversight. The maintenance of stability within each other’s spheres did not become an issue for the Council. Neither the Hungarian Uprising nor the Suez Crisis was resolved through the Council. Rather, the respective great powers shaped the outcome each in its own way. Thus the management of relations between East and West, such as the conflicts in Angola or Vietnam, as well as the management of disputes or problems, such as they were, within each of the groups, was not subject to the management of the Council.43 Where the issues that were of particular concern to the parties did wind up on the Council agenda, one can discern quite clearly in the application of the veto both the contours of the rivalry as well as the desire to keep the UNSC out of management of their relations.44 Due to the bilateralism of the Soviet Union and the United States, and what might be called a policy

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of bloc management, the most important members of that body ensured that the main concerns in international security during the Cold War were not subject to Council management, or even its deliberation. Given the extent of great power reticence, the version of collective security that the charter describes, and which had been seen as the central means for the maintenance of peace and security, became a nonstarter. The two most important players not only excised their vital interests from the Council, they also made it very clear that they did not intend to play the sort of role that the language of the debates at San Francisco had implied. Indeed, even after the thaw in Cold War relations that energized the council in the 1990s and beyond, it has become clear that there are legal, political, and strategic impediments to the basic assumptions behind the concerted management of security by the great powers that mean that the kind of policing action that was imagined (and of which the response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 remains the sole example) is unlikely to occur. Thus, the Council was not, and is probably unlikely ever to be, a body capable of managing international peace and security through the coordinated actions of the powerful. While the two most important members determined that they were not content to run their mutual relations through the Council, nor allow any aspect of their vital security and defense policies to be subject to the influence of the body, they did nonetheless commit to the Council as a broader institution in international society, albeit one at the margins of the core business of peace and security as they conceived it to be. Perhaps one of the most notable developments during the UN’s existence has been the widespread acceptance of the principle that the use of force against other states is essentially illegitimate. The proscriptions set out in the charter have, since its signature in 1945, become accepted by the vast majority of states.45 Of course, this should not be misunderstood. War has not been outlawed, however much the increasingly low incidence of traditional interstate conflict, aggression, and state-on-state threats to the peace may support this. More broadly, the Council has been able to carve out a role for itself in spite of the suffocation that the Cold War rivalry of the great powers might have appeared to bring about. Thus, while incapable of shaping international order at the level of the great powers themselves, the Council became a means to deal with crises that none of the major powers felt was of vital interest. It has taken on new and unanticipated functions, such as peacekeeping and humanitarian operations; it has been an important venue for the conciliation of disputes, for preventive diplomacy, the management of sanction regimes, and more broadly, a body that articulates the sentiment of international society, as well as a host of other functions.46 In spite of what some might consider to be a relatively marginal role in the international security life of world politics during the Cold War, and manifest problems due to the veto and major power rivalry, the UNSC has become

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a key forum in international society, even while falling short of the managerial role for which it was originally intended. Membership of the Council is regarded as a symbol of status and, in spite of its many shortcomings, is something that no current permanent member would be prepared to give up. Equally, every year many of the UN’s member states spend considerable amounts of their scarce bureaucratic resources on the campaign to hold one of the rotating seats on the Council. This is in some small way a testimony to the power of the idea of the UNSC. But beyond the prestige and symbolism, there are a number of broader ways in which the Council is thought to be useful to the major powers in particular, and in which it contributes to the current order in world politics more generally. As a number of scholars point out, the Council is seen as an important source of legitimacy for collective action at the international level.47 More broadly, Richard Price argues that the United Nations is the “best arbiter we have for acceptable conduct for the global community . . . a standard setter for the tolerable use of force.”48 From this perspective, the value of the Council is to place an international stamp of approval on particular actions, which in turn helps those actions achieve their policy objectives. This is a view that argues that the situation in Iraq would have played out very differently had the United States secured UNSC approval for the 2003 invasion. Mats Berdal also points out that the permanent members have more particular interests in the Council; for example, using it to manage the domestic politics of security policy as a means of leveraging their influence and reducing the costs of their policy preferences.49 This gets at a second important contribution that the Council makes: it acts to constrain to some degree the behavior of the powerful. While the privileges of permanency sit uncomfortably with the idea of sovereign equality, the Council can be a brake on great power ambition. As the US experience in Iraq shows, at the very least there are political costs to be borne if the Council is flaunted. More generally, the Council makes the major powers more accountable in their actions and subject to some limitations.50 Thus, even in the most minimal reading, the Council is a point of reference in relation to which all must position themselves politically. It imposes some form of political cost, along with real consequences, that will be paid by those who do not feel bound by its rules and principles. This does not prevent them from acting, but it does clearly shape the preferences and policies of members of international society. The vision for an international order in which questions of peace and security were managed by the powerful in a coordinated fashion did not come to pass. Yet neither did the UN system suffer the fate of the League, as it developed a limited but nonetheless distinctive place for itself in world politics. That its failure to live up to the founders’ ambitions did not cause an existential crisis tells us a number of things about postwar international politics. First, it demonstrates the growing acceptance of a legal-procedural

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means of managing international relations and an increasing perception by states that multilateral and institutional mechanisms have an important part to play in the international landscape. Second, although committed to a constitutional setting for international politics that is legal-procedural in manner, the determinants of international order remain political. The fate of the Council reveals the limits of legalistic approaches to international order and the primacy of politics in the postwar order. Where constraints on power exist, they are negotiated politically, not legally. Of course, the parameters of these negotiations are heavily shaped by laws and legal concepts, but the determination of those negotiations are a result of political forces. The value of the Council to the P5 (the five permanent members of the UNSC) and to the rest of the member states of the United Nations comes from the opportunity it presents to provide a formal structure against which political deals can be struck. Its regulations and procedures either cannot provide the firm certainty in particular circumstances without political intervention, or the states will not accept any determination that does not have a political dimension. Third, the gap that emerged between the planned purpose for the Council as a great power concert and its development tell us a number of things about the role that great powers play in the international system. The traditional view was that the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union prevented the Council being able to take on the life imagined for it. Yet it is not clear, as experiences since 1991 have shown, that had there not been contestation in the postwar period the Council would have become the organization the delegates at San Francisco hoped that it would. Clearly, there is no appetite or capacity for the strict application of the nineteenth-century ideal to manage international affairs in a post–Cold War world. Indeed, it is not clear that there ever really was a genuine desire to run things in the manner that was discussed at Yalta and San Francisco. Those states that have the predominance of power plainly are the most important players in the international game, yet their role does not square with the idea of great power managerialism that emerged in the nineteenth century and to which the delegates to the San Francisco conference were so committed. We have an international order that has a highly legalistic flavor, but that also has a number of important tensions at its heart. One of the most obvious is the special treatment meted out to the great powers in the face of the idea of sovereign equality. The justification for this was always spurious, but the underlying belief, one that was at the time quite genuine, that the powerful deserve this treatment in return for a responsibility to manage, seems in hindsight to have been an unrealistic ambition. The creation of the United Nations is often considered a forward-looking project, at least when considering its attempt to manage international security. Rather than trying to settle the terms of the preceding conflict or to prevent a

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specific set of tensions from escalating, the United Nations was an effort to reduce the likelihood of war in general through institutional and legal means. Yet in its structure, it was entirely backward looking. It was designed to make good the flaws of the League and, more broadly, to take the idea of great power management and responsibility founded at Vienna and apply it to a post-1945 world. In this it succeeded. However, the negotiators at San Francisco did not seem to realize that the world had changed rather considerably since 1815. They may not have realized that they were incorporating early nineteenth-century ideas about how the international system operates, but that is precisely what they did. As such, when distinctly twentieth-century challenges appeared, the system of management on which the UN was built was poorly positioned to respond. Whether in the form of a universal system of sovereign states, decolonization, a global intersystemic conflict, or nuclear weapons—to say nothing of the more recent transnational problems associated with globalization—the UN system of order and of great power management did not fare well at all. Indeed, as I will argue in the next chapter, if the basic premises underlying the creation of the system were flawed in 1945, in the twenty-first century they are nothing short of anachronistic. Notes 1. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 37. 2. For full text, see http://avalon.law.yale.edu. 3. For details, see Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 38–47. 4. Luck, “Council for All Seasons,” 77–78. 5. Boyd, Fifteen Men on a Powder Keg, 61. 6. Cited in Armstrong, Lloyd, and Redmond, International Organisation in World Politics, 37. 7. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 2. 8. UNCIO archive box S-1018-012, file 6, Seventeenth Meeting Commission III/1 11, June 1945, record number 23. 9. See Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN; and Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 71–72. 10. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 9, Seventh Meeting Commission III/1 14, May 1945, record number 7–8. 11. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 9, Seventh Meeting Commission III/1 14, May 1945. 12. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0015, file 5, Fifth Meeting Commission III/3 11, May 1945. 13. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 5, Third Meeting Commission III/1 9, May 1945. 14. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 11, Ninth Meeting Commission III/1 17, May 1945. 15. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 5, Third Meeting Commission III/1 9, May 1945.

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16. Summary Report of the Third Meeting of Committee III/1, UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 5, Third Meeting Commission III/1 9, May 1945. 17. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 126–128. 18. Luard, History of the United Nations, 18–19. 19. Lee, “Genesis of the Veto,” 38. 20. On this more broadly, see Russell, History of the United Nations Charter, chapter 28. 21. Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 254–255. 22. Russell, History of the United Nations Charter, 646. 23. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 68. 24. For details on the committee structure, see Russell, History of the United Nations Charter, chapters 25 and 26. 25. See Hudson, “Australia and the New World Order.” 26. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 8, Nineteenth Meeting Commission III/1 12, June 1945. 27. File 11, Ninth Meeting III/1 17, May 1945, p. 2 of summary report. 28. File 5, Sixteenth Meeting III/1 9, June 1945. 29. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 201. 30. Luck, “Council for All Seasons,” 81. 31. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0013, file 6, Meeting of III/1/B, “Statement by the Delegations of the Four Sponsoring Governments on Voting Procedure in the Security Council,” June 7, 1945. 32. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 201, emphasis added. 33. Cited in Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 171. 34. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 2, Report of the Rapportuer of Commission III to the Plenary Session Rapporteur: Celso R. Velazquez (Paraguay), 2–3. 35. UNCIO archive box S-1018-0011, file 2, Report of the Rapportuer of Commission III to the Plenary Session Rapporteur: Celso R. Velazquez (Paraguay), 8. 36. File 5, Fifth Meeting III/3 11, May 1945. 37. Box S-1018-0019, file 14, June 8, 1945 [incomplete record in box]. 38. Hurrell, “Collective Security and International Order Revisited,” 41. 39. On which, see Roberts, “Proposals for UN Standing Forces,” chapter 4. 40. Charter of the United Nations, article 51, http://www.un.org/en/documents /charter. 41. Gray, “Charter Limitations on the Use of Force,” 91. 42. On which, see Freedman, “Great Powers, Vital Interests, and Nuclear Weapons.” 43. See White, United Nations and the Maintenance of International Peace and Security, see particularly chapter 1, pp. 7–31. 44. On the veto pattern, see Schindlmayr, “Obstructing the Security Council.” 45. See Finnemore, Purpose of Intervention. 46. For the best overview of this, see Malone, ed., UN Security Council. 47. Berdal, “UN Security Council.” 48. Price, “League of Nations Redux?” 264. 49. Berdal, “UN Security Council.” 50. Krisch, “Security Council and the Great Powers.”

5 The Anachronism of the Great Powers

While every year in world politics is unique, some years tell students of world politics more than others. One such year was 2009. While of course notable as the anniversary of so many world historical events—twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or thirty years since the Islamists seized power in Iran—a number of key developments in that year relate directly to the issues raised in this book. After his landslide election in 2008, newly inaugurated US president Barack Obama made the war in Afghanistan his foreign policy priority.1 In this, he broke with the Bush administration’s approach to the conflict in that country as well as its emphasis on Iraq.2 Nearly nine months later, after what appeared to be a considerable period of indecision, the president ordered a surge of troops to combat Taliban advances and shore up the weakened government of Hamid Karzai.3 However the surge may play out, and many strategic analysts are pessimistic as to the long-term prospects for US policy in Afghanistan, over eight years after invading the country and toppling the Taliban, the world’s most powerful state remained a long way from achieving its policy goals.4 In 2009 the effects of the banking collapse that began in 2008, and which morphed into a systemwide financial crisis in the real economy, became clear. Virtually all of the participant economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) fell into recession, and unemployment rates in the world’s leading economies jumped dramatically. In the United States, the rate more than doubled from 4.8 percent in April of 2008 to 9.7 percent in December 2009.5 Over a similar period, rates in Britain leapt from 5.5 percent to 7.8 percent.6 In spite of the Obama administration’s expectations, the US rate stubbornly refused to decline in 2010 or 2011 and was a key factor behind the electoral hammering received by Democrats in the midterm elections in 2010. The value of investments in pension schemes crumbled and 85

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all developed economies experienced a profound loss in economic confidence. Notwithstanding the efforts to use the G-20 forum to coordinate international responses, throughout 2009 there was a pervading sense that policymakers the world over not only had little control over financial affairs but also no real idea as to how to get out of the mess. Complex and deregulated financial markets had humbled the world’s richest countries, thrown millions out of work, and left many bewildered as to how events could have gotten so beyond the control of governments. In mid-December of 2009, representatives of all the UN member states met alongside thousands of representatives from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), business groups, and other civil society representatives to try to craft a global agreement to coordinate national responses to the challenge of climate change. Not only did representatives fail to agree to a binding framework to follow on from the Kyoto Protocol, efforts to save political face through the formulation of a chair’s statement also collapsed, leaving a limp and largely aspirational accord to be signed by only a few of the participating states. Given that virtually all governments agree on the scientific fact of human-induced climate change and, at least rhetorically, insist that collective action is of the highest priority, the political failings of the Copenhagen Summit are stark. The inability to reach agreement was not just a result of the complexities of conference diplomacy, but seemed to show that the inherent nature of the problem was almost incommensurable with the structure and distribution of political and economic power in the world today. While the events of 2009 may have lacked the world historical moments of Berlin 1989 or Tehran 1979, the character of key international developments in that year are vivid reminders of the very real strategic, economic, and environmental limits to the exercise of power by major states in the twentyfirst century. The notion that great powers have a key role to play in managing order in international society rests on the obvious assumption that order can be managed by the powerful. Yet in many respects, circumstances in contemporary world politics seem almost to ridicule this premise. From the global problems of the environment through changing attitudes toward the use of force, the material as well as normative conditions of the contemporary world appear to be out of step with the traditional idea that great powers could be active managers of international order. Indeed, the world’s most powerful state often seems barely capable of managing its own affairs, let alone cooperating with a club of like-minded elites to shape the broader conditions of world politics. In previous chapters I have discussed how circumstances were not propitious for instituting great power management into the constitutional structures of international order in 1945. The gap that existed even then between the idea of great power managerialism and social, political, and economic practice has now widened to an unbridgeable chasm.

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In this chapter I will assess the extent to which the traditional idea of the great powers, a managerial elite operating under different rules and obligations than the rest, is anachronistic. To begin, I set out the constituent elements of the traditional great power role, the ideas it represents and assumptions on which it relies, and summarize the argument made thus far about how it has been constitutionalized in the legal structures of the contemporary order. I will then explore the limits to great power managerialism. Here, attention will be paid both to the basic structural problems of great power management, that is, those problems that were inherent from the beginning of the current order, as well as to the more recent developments that make the exercise of great power managerialism increasingly problematic. My aim here is not to argue that powerful states do not matter to world politics. Rather it is to explore the limits of the specifically managerial conception of the great powers that is central to the operating principles of the UN-centered order.

The Great Power Role At this stage, it is useful to draw together the various strands of argument made in the preceding chapters. A key claim is that the constitutional structure of the contemporary international order, the order established at the end of World War II, has a distinctly managerial conception of the role played by a nominated group of great powers as a central component. The idea that great powers would collectively manage the postwar peace, as well as its constitutionalization, in a politico-legal institutional setting, did not emerge spontaneously in 1945, but was the product of much longer-term developments that go back directly to the Vienna settlement of 1815, and indirectly to the international congresses of early modern European history. As Chapter 4 makes clear, the order did not play out in the way in which it was intended; nonetheless, the idea of great power privilege, which rests on an assumption of active managerialism, is a key part of the existing order, articulated in the structure and procedures of the UN Security Council. During the negotiations to establish the United Nations, the primary tasks that the great powers were expected to perform related to the maintenance of international peace and security. While there was a realization that the postwar world required socioeconomic stabilization, as well as military security, the latter was seen as the most important concern for the great power role. Beyond the broader implications of some kind of managerial leadership, the precise expectations of the sort of oversight that great powers are expected to provide were never made explicit when the order was first established. In spite of this lack of precision, one can discern that great power managerialism entails four core contributions to international order. First, the great powers will manage

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their mutual relations in a responsible fashion. As the most significant powers, and those with the greatest obligation to the system, their first and perhaps most important function is to exercise restraint in their policies toward one another. In Hedley Bull’s formulation, they are to manage crises among themselves and limit wherever possible great power conflict.7 This first element, one of restraint and mutual crisis management, can be thought of as a minimalist or more passive form of managerialism, but this was only one aspect of the kind of management that UN planners expected the great powers to provide. Their vision was of a more active or maximalist kind of managerialism, which entails three further contributions, and which, I will argue, is ill suited to current circumstances. The first of these further contributions is that they will ensure that crises and conflicts at the margins do not escalate to destabilize the system. This derives from the experience of the Vienna system, which was remarkably effective at preventing smaller disputes from spiraling out of control and engulfing the system as a whole. The way in which the relatively minor crises of 1914 turned into systemic conflagration due to complex alliance commitments is a singular example of what can happen when great power management fails. Crucially, great power management can only work effectively if the powers protect the foundations of the order and the values it represents. The second element of this more active conception is that the powerful are not only to police shifting geopolitical configurations, but they are to act to protect the particular values that international society advances. This goes beyond the broader sense in which the powers protect the underlying system of sovereign states, the value of sovereignty, and the mechanisms ensuring its reproduction; it also entails the promotion of more particular values, such as a liberal conception of rights vested in the individual or the maintenance of illiberal political systems. Third, the powers coordinate their policies and through concerted action work to achieve these broader functions. This depiction of the great power function does not include the more traditional idea that the powers manage their spheres of influence and respect each other’s spheres. During the Cold War, bloc management or bloc discipline was an important part of the geopolitical contest, yet it was neither anticipated at San Francisco (or Dumbarton Oaks before it) nor was it seen by diplomats and statesmen as a central part of the great power role.8 Rather, the expectation was of concerted global action by the great powers operating in and through the UN Security Council. This set of expectations requires an activist foreign policy from the great powers, one that imposes considerable costs on those powers and that attempts to harness their interests to the broader value of systemic stability. Great power management was thought to be isolated from the economic realm; it focused on geopolitical and strategic matters and saw the two spheres, while linked, as functionally separate. Importantly, it also saw international policy as a distinct

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arena clearly marked off from the domestic political, economic, and social context of states and societies. It is important to emphasize that there is no one inherent or natural role played by powerful states that is valid in all historical circumstances; indeed, one of the problems with the UN order lies precisely in the belief that nineteenth-century diplomatic mechanisms can be made to work in twentieth- and twenty-first-century circumstances. Rather, the role that has been built into the constitutional structures of the current international system reflects a particular view held by scholars and practitioners in the mid-twentieth century, a view of international order that was influenced by a particular understanding of international history and most specifically of the experiences of the Vienna settlement and Europe’s subsequent international history. But what is meant by the constitutional structures of the current setting? This term refers to the range of organizing principles of contemporary international politics in which relations between states are organized through a legalinstitutional setting. This setting is described as constitutional because it attempts to provide an impersonal and legalistic blueprint for action through formal international institutions whereby the laws attempt to constrain the raw exercise of power and impose limits on state behavior.9 International politics has traditionally been seen as operating under conditions of anarchy, that is to say, there is no center of political, social, or moral authority above states. Instead, these states are seen as legally and morally equal and as such are answerable to no one. The constitutional structure of the current order is an attempt to limit the consequences of this anarchy by codifying permissible action and proscribing sanctioned behavior. The idea of constitutionalization is simply the process through which this has become an increasingly entrenched part of modern international relations. This observation does not imply that the institutional and legal framing of international politics is a preferred development; indeed, as some have pointed out, the increasingly legalistic flavor of much international relations has not led to improved cooperation or the resolution of key common problems.10 Nonetheless, within this political-legal and institutional setting is embedded a strongly managerial conception of the great power role and one that is clearly at odds with the sovereign equality principle on which the legal edifice is supposed to rest. Having set out the expectations of great power managerialism, it is important to underline the assumptions that underpin the foundational components of the great power role and the conditions needed to facilitate its operation. The most basic assumption is that the orderly relations of states under conditions of anarchy, even those tempered by a politico-legal constitutional process, require a managerial contribution by the great powers. Relying on impersonal forces such as the balance of power is thought to be insufficient to maintain systemic stability under contemporary conditions. The destructive force of modern military technology means that the human cost of disorder is

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so catastrophically high that it is irresponsible not to manage interstate relations. Naturally, goes this line of thinking, great powers are the only states able to carry out this role. The second assumption is that great powers need to be given certain dispensations from the requirements of the constitutional setting (great power privilege), in return for which they are expected to shoulder this managerial burden. Great powers are given an incentive to think of the system’s interests as their own in ways that go beyond the narrow support for a setting in which they hold a dominant position. This incentive is based upon a rights-responsibilities trade-off in which the interests of the most powerful states are harnessed to the requirements of the system. Without this incentive, they will not participate, and disorder will follow. The third assumption of the great power role relates to the question of inclusion: Who is a great power? Clearly, material attributes are a vital consideration and inclusion in the great power club is, to a large degree, a result of military and economic prowess. But there is no objective measure of what might be sufficient to be included in this elite group. The imprecise and indeterminate nature of military power militates against the creation of a clear line or even of minimal objective criteria (such as a second strike nuclear capability, for example). As the discussion in Chapter 2 showed, efforts to develop purely material conceptions of great power status are fraught with this indeterminism. The most important factor for inclusion in the great power elite is political. Great powers are those that are recognized by other members of international society as having that status. The two examples in history whereby great powers have been almost literally named as such, Vienna and the UNSC, have included states that were obviously not at the top of the military pile but who were, for political reasons, included in the group. What makes a great power, then, as understood in the managerial sense of the current order, is a combination of military, economic, and, above all, political attributes. Related to the question of political recognition, the idea of great power managerialism depends upon the acceptance of this dominance by the rest. Coercion is not the central mechanism of great power management, although it is important. Rather, it is the consent, not necessarily enthusiastic, of the other members of international society for the position of privilege, and the benefits they perceive that it brings, that is necessary for this kind of system to work effectively. It may not be the order that they themselves would have constructed, but it is one with which, at the very least, they are willing to live. Such a system requires not only acquiescence but an acceptance of the order by the rest of international society. At a more basic level, there needs also to be a consensus among the great powers themselves as to the kind of role that they are to play. The systemic function that is implied by this idea rests on the notion that the powers have a common view as to what it means to be a great power in international society.

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Being a great power means more than having a top-class military force; it implies a particular diplomatic function that serves to advance common basic goals, from the avoidance of systemic conflict to the promotion and protection of core values and interests. Following from this more basic point, the final and perhaps most important assumption, and one that is most often neglected, is the existence of a consensus among those powers as to the purpose of international society. While this point may appear prosaic, it relates to the more practical concern of how the powers’ interests are harnessed to systemic stability. In a minimal sense, the convergence of interests between the powerful and the system may be thought to be sufficient to ensure that the great powers act in the necessary fashion. The system of states provides the powerful with their position of advantage, and they thus have an appropriate incentive to work in ways that reinforce this position and, indirectly, underpin order in the system as a whole. The problem is that states may not perceive their interests in this instrumentally rational manner. As happened in the interwar period, they may pursue short-term interests in ways that have catastrophic consequences for the system as a whole. That period also showed just how high the costs can be when the most powerful members of the system act in destabilizing ways. Even in circumstances that are not as disastrous, it would be a risky proposition to depend entirely on this convergence of interests to mobilize action. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine powerful states taking the costly and dangerous steps of military mobilization to defend the abstract proposition of system stability. The key lies in getting powerful states to conceive of their interests in ways that promote rather than undermine stability. As Vienna showed, a system of great power management works not only because the powers have their interests linked to particular conditions of the system (such as stability), but also because the powers consider the moral purpose of the system itself of sufficient importance. Great power management is not an automatic function; rather, it occurs because of the active maintenance by the diplomats of those powers. For it to work, these representatives must conceive of their state interests as necessarily bound up in both a narrow conception of value as well as a broader ethic of duty to the system as a whole. That ethic of duty only makes sense when anchored to an underlying moral purpose. In the case of the Vienna settlement, order was managed to ensure the great powers their dominance as well as to protect a specific set of political values. The common desire to ensure that revolution did not recur and that a conservative political order was maintained led diplomats to believe that the careful management of geopolitical circumstances was vital to these ultimately domestic ambitions. Thus, under the Vienna settlement the binding of great power interests to the system’s was made effective by the underlying set of values that the settlement sought to protect. These values were not the abstractions of system, sovereignty, and state, but tangible ideas tied to material interests such as aristocratic privilege and monarchism that elites sought

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to protect, for these were principles in which they had an interest and, most crucially, which they believed provided the best prospects for stability and security in the future.11 The idea of great power management that is part of the current order is thus the product of the exigencies of postwar planning, the integration of pragmatic realism in light of the failings of the League of Nations, and a particular understanding of how international systems operate. The great powers are, in this view, the only states positioned to provide a broader sense of direction and purpose to international society, and this had to be reflected in the institutional setting of that society. That is, great powers should be given special dispensations to best facilitate this action. This approach was not just the result of diplomats learning the lessons of the interwar period, but was also the result of widespread acceptance of a particular reading of the evolution of European international history, and particularly the congress system, as illustrative of these truths. To be clear, great power management alone is not the only mechanism thought to impart international order; rather, it is one part of a broader set of processes.12 But the idea set out in the UN Charter builds a very particular understanding of how great powers act into the constitutional structure of the contemporary international system. Yet it is not clear that the architects of the charter recognized just how unusually demanding the social and political circumstances were that would allow great power managerialism to function. For it to work the system needs (1) a set of powers that are accepted by others as fit for this purpose; (2) those powers must see themselves as having a shared role in the system; and (3) they must share the fundamental values and interests that the system seeks to protect. The creation of the United Nations was an act of towering ambition. International peace and security in the atomic age was to be managed by the most powerful states acting collectively under the rule of law—a breathtaking departure from history, notwithstanding the privileges granted the few. While some realized that the political circumstances that had brought the powerful together were not going to last, few recognized just how demanding the social conditions necessary for great power management to function had become. From its inception, the great power role was always fraught with difficulties. Yet as the years have passed, to these initial structural challenges have been added a raft of developments that increasingly limit the extent to which great power managerialism can help bring about orderly relations in contemporary world politics.

The Limits to Managerialism Hedley Bull was one of the clearest advocates of the managerial notion of the great power role in international society. Writing in 1977, he noted somewhat

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pessimistically that “the traditional idea of a great power has only a precarious foothold in international politics at the present time, like the wider idea of an international society which it presupposes.”13 In spite of this, the bulk of the chapter of his Anarchical Society devoted to this particular institution of international society is brimming with confidence as to the order-inducing aspects of great power managerialism. This doubt, prompted by the ideological gulf between the US and the USSR having splintered the shared values of international society, emphasizes that the material and ideological circumstances of world politics are not necessarily always conducive to the managerial conception of the great power role. The conditions needed to allow great power managerialism to maintain order in an effective fashion are not always in existence; indeed, there is a temptation to conclude that they have only very rarely existed. A decade into the twenty-first century, it appears that contemporary circumstances are not at all conducive to the traditional notion of great power managerialism. Whether this is driven by changes in military technology, such as the existence of nuclear weapons, shifts in the form or distribution of power, or in the principles of legitimacy on which effective great power managerialism depends, the possibilities of the role contributing to order maintenance seem increasingly limited by the material and normative realities of the twenty-first-century world. At a basic level, the idea of a small club of great powers managing spheres of influence to the benefit of international society has a distinctly anachronistic feel. In a world overlaid by the complex network of transnational linkages that constitute globalization, where the universal spread of sovereignty has strengthened egalitarian norms in international politics, and where power seems more diffuse and more variegated than ever, the traditional role of the great power seems out of step with the times. Visions of a concert of great powers managing relations, ideas of a Big Three or Big Four, have a distinctly sepia hue. This sentiment is given its most concrete manifestation in the identities of the great powers given special status in the UN Charter. The group reflects a now antiquated diplomatic settlement; those granted distinct privileges and influence bear only a slight relation to where substantive power lies today. Beyond the basic problems of legitimacy that this creates, the justification for special treatment had been that the most powerful would have the most responsibility for the new order. While having a named set of great powers who are clearly not the most important participants in international society presents challenges for the institution of the United Nations, it also poses more fundamental questions of the function of great power managerialism on which the UNSC is predicated. There are a number of normative, material, and structural developments in world politics that present a series of substantive challenges to the great power role and that, together, present an insurmountable barrier to a reconfiguration of the traditional great power role for twenty-first-century circum-

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stances. The shifts in the context of world politics make attempting some kind of constitutional linkage between great power interests and systemic interests unsustainable. This does not mean that states with considerable power resources do not matter; they will continue to be hugely significant. Rather, it is the idea of great power managerialism, and the conception of international society on which it relies, that needs to be consigned to history. The Utility of Power Of the many challenges to the idea of active great power managerialism, perhaps the most significant relate to questions of power. Changes in the form and function of power are acting to limit if not curtail entirely the functional utility of traditional notions of greatness in world politics. At a basic level, great power management depends on the effective deployment of power to achieve systemic goals. The question many ask is whether even the most powerful states have the capacity to exercise power in this fashion; it is not clear that the fit between the traditional capacities that are associated with great powers and the ability to achieve systemic outcomes is appropriate any longer. The development of nuclear weapons marked a revolution in the strategic landscape of world politics. From the tactics of warfare through to the activities of peace movements, the ferocity of these weapons have had a profound effect on the strategic environment. Such is their power that many believed these weapons to be the ultimate symbols of great power status. Yet while the symbolism is heavy, the development of nuclear weapons has, somewhat counterintuitively, helped further limit the efficacy of great power managerialism. After a period of relative stability, nuclear proliferation is again a prominent issue in world politics. India and Pakistan became members of the nuclear club in May 1998, North Korea successfully tested a nuclear device in May 2009 (although it has yet to show that it can deliver a nuclear device with any precision), and Iran seems intent to defy much international criticism and develop its own nuclear capability. The actions of these new and aspirant nuclear powers are driven to some degree by traditional security concerns. For example, Iran has nuclear powers on several borders and is in one of the world’s most geopolitically volatile regions, so its government perceives considerable security advantages from developing nuclear weapons. But these alone are not the only motives. Equally, India and Pakistan had a mixed set of motives in acquiring nuclear weapons. While security considerations played a role—most obviously, in the security dilemma faced by Pakistan, once India had successfully detonated its device—symbolism mattered as well. For decisionmakers in India and Pakistan, and for many in the general populace, the acquisition of nuclear weapons would reflect their coming of age and their accession to the top table of geopolitics, an unmistakable symbol of international prestige and thus of great power status. While nuclear weapons have a

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clear and instinctive association with great power status—not unreasonable given their destructive force—their strategic and political significance is less clear-cut than many often assume. Even when they are in the hands of states that are unmistakably of the first order, their impact upon strategic behavior is open to considerable debate. For example, it is still not a settled issue whether nuclear weapons were a cause of conflict or a source of strategic restraint in the Cold War.14 Meanwhile, John Mueller goes further and argues that nuclear weapons have been, at best, marginal players.15 More importantly, as strategic analysts point out, with the singular exception of the rather unlikely event that a state could achieve genuine nuclear hegemony, nuclear weapons do not ultimately assuage state security concerns. While they do make states more cautious about military action, they are by no means a security trump card. Conventional military power retains its centrality both to the provision of security and to the broader question of great power status. John Mearsheimer goes so far as to argue that it is not only conventional strength that matters most, it is the ability to fight and win wars on land that matters most of all.16 Without getting into the debate about air versus land power, it is clear that, at best, nuclear weapons have an uncertain strategic effect and as such do not warrant the assumption that their possession should equate to a membership badge of the great power club. Thus, for a state to be taken seriously as a nuclear power, it also needs to acquire, at the least, a second-strike capability, along with the wherewithal to develop, maintain, and protect a substantial arsenal. But even then, the severe strategic constraints brought about by their colossal destructiveness mean that they have only a very limited strategic utility. They do increase the potential costs of conflict and as such mean that nuclear-armed states will be considered differently from others, but they do not of themselves make a state truly great. We are thus in the odd situation in which nuclear weapons appear to provide a fast-track to great power status, but the strategic reality of the weapons does not in fact support this perception. This is in part because nuclear weapons do not always provide decisive military advantage. Indeed, they are in many ways cumbersome and imprecise elements of a strategic arsenal. The acquisition of nuclear weapons is, beyond its strictly military motivation, a powerful way of sending political and diplomatic signals. One signal is, of course, to international society, in order to signify a state’s strategic ambition as well as its intention to be treated differently from nonnuclear states. The other, and often ignored, message is domestic. The choice to nuclearize is often driven more by calculations of the state’s needs at home, such as advancing the claims of a nationalist political party or reinforcing the grip of an authoritarian elite, than by international strategic necessity. The sheer power of nuclear weapons is not to be downplayed, but the political aspects of these weapons have to be recognized, as well as their strategic limits.

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If nuclear weapons have an ambiguous relation to status, and an even more uncertain strategic utility—at least in the way they relate to the majority of international peace and security concerns—they have also eroded the managerial role that great powers were intended to play through the UN-centered constitutional order. This has two dimensions. First, the destructiveness of these weapons significantly diminishes the political effectiveness of the projection of great power. Nuclear weapons are thought by many to have a stabilizing effect on interstate relations by ratcheting up the costs of conflict to such high levels that states have a huge incentive to manage crises.17 By focusing the minds of decisionmakers with the threat of massive devastation, so supporters argue, nuclear weapons make the world a safer place. That the US-Soviet rivalry of the Cold War never became an outright conflict between the two is often credited to the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, critics argue that it is precisely the scale of destruction of nuclear weapons that means states are loath to use them, and hence they have only a marginal moderating impact. Those with nuclear weapons cannot threaten their use all of the time; it lacks credibility. Moreover, it limits the range of strategic maneuvering that nuclear states have because of nuclear restraint. For example, weaker powers know that they are very unlikely to be subjected to nuclear attack—as is the case with the insurgent campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Equally, US involvement in Vietnam was shaped by nuclear constraints, as the United States sought to avoid involving China in a nuclear crisis, and the North Vietnamese were confident that a nuclear strike was not going to occur.18 In a similar fashion, the capacity of great powers to back up their managerialism with force is limited by the power of nuclear weapons. This is not to say that they have been neutered, rather that the scale of the destruction is such that the political efficacy of exercising great power has been reduced. Great power managerialism requires that they are able to exercise force to protect the order. Nuclear weapons are of no use in this process. The second way in which nuclear weapons undermined great power managerialism was to force powerful states to operate outside the structures of the UNSC. The creation of a constitutional structure to manage the international order always ran the risk that the great powers would, as they did in the League, remain aloof from the process. The creation of the veto was intended to bring them in, and it certainly worked to ensure political commitment to the broader idea of a UN-centered international order. However, the two most important powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, spent most of the time vetoing decisions at the Council that they perceived challenged their respective interests.19 More importantly, nuclear weapons led the two most powerful states to manage their mutual relations entirely outside the institution intended to oversee the vital aspects of international security. This served to undermine the political utility of the Council as a mechanism of order, at least as originally intended, and made the judicious exercise of power

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to maintain systemic interests very challenging. As Lawrence Freedman puts it, “Rather than reinforce power politics as usual, nuclear weapons in fact confirm a tendency towards the fragmentation of the international system in which the erstwhile great powers play a reduced role.”20 The point is that nuclear weapons make management of the system in the traditional way much more complex. Instead of being the ultimate guarantor of autonomy, nuclear weapons show how intertwined national interests are. War becomes much less effective as an institution, the incentives of the great powers to conceive of their interests in a manner sufficient to play the traditional role are significantly reduced, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by lesser powers, while not making them great, acts to undermine the strategic effectiveness of the major players. Nuclear weapons have not made the powerful less important to the broader patterns of international order, but they do challenge the underlying political and strategic logic of the traditional managerial role of great powers. They do so because the link between the character of power and its effective application to advance the interests of international order is so much more difficult to sustain. The technological developments of the twentieth century do not provide the only challenge to great power managerialism. The distribution of power in world politics, whereby the United States has been the overwhelmingly predominant state for at least the past twenty years, makes this traditional conception of the great power role problematic. As many have pointed out, in almost every conceivable metric, the United States tops the international league table and is without question the world’s paramount power.21 It has the largest, technologically sophisticated military force, capable of projecting more power than any other state, and to any corner of the globe.22 Russia and China have large and powerful military forces, but they are incapable of operating in any size for much duration beyond their immediate neighborhood. Britain and France, while major forces, pale into insignificance in comparison with the United States. Matching this strategic weight is a diplomatic and political might that is unparalleled. No country has the size, efficacy, or reach of the US diplomatic corps. In spite of its manifest problems stemming from the 2008 financial crisis, the United States has not only the largest economy in the world, its enterprises continue to dominate global business and finance, and, crucially, US firms are at the forefront of high-technology industries. This predominance in traditional measures of power and influence is matched in other areas, such as scientific research and the entertainment industry, and the United States has a virtual monopoly on the world’s best universities. The United States is not just on top of the international ladder; the gap between it and everyone else is massive and shows no sign, in the medium term, of being bridged. It is also a situation that is unique in modern history. Never has one state so utterly dominated all facets of power and influence.

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It is, however, precisely this unique quality—there are no powers in the current system that could reasonably be said to be of equivalent status and stature—that presents an important challenge to the practice of great power managerialism. For some, the fact of unipolarity undermines the very idea of the great powers as distinctive members of international society. For Bull, the idea of great powers is necessarily multiple.23 The passive conception of the great power role is premised on the belief that they constrain one another and they rein in each other’s broader ambitions. In the more active view, that on which the UNSC is predicated, a group of roughly equal powers would act cooperatively to manage the order. But no one gave thought to what might happen if the group of substantively powerful states had a membership of one. If great powers lack peers—a situation of unipolarity—the tendency for these powers to act in an order-promoting way, due to peer-group influence on their interests and cooperative endeavor, would disappear. It would also imperil the justification for special treatment of the great powers. The implications of US primacy for the question of the great power role in contemporary world politics will be examined in more detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the structural conditions of unipolarity challenge important foundational assumptions of great power managerialism. Finally, it is not simply the vagaries of history that have created the position of US predominance. There is no appetite among the wealthy states to play a traditional great power role. The current situation of unipolarity is not only the result of American abilities and ambition, it is also a result of the simple fact that no other country is at all interested in taking on the expense and risk of being a classical great power. While Britain and France are formally accorded the status in the current order, few think of them as truly powers of the first rank. Indeed both see their P5 status not as reflecting power, but as giving them a diplomatic leverage they would otherwise not have. Russia, India, and China are the only states in the current setting that have the potential to take on the traditional role, although India is, of course, not a member of the UNSC. But, and I will return to this in Chapter 7, while all are highly ambitious and seek to be of global significance, none of them is interested in playing the traditional role, and certainly they do not think of their foreign and security policies in ways that are compatible with classical great power thinking. Behind what might be thought of as a lack of sufficient ambition is the basic point that states think about their interests and their international security environment in a rather different way than in the past. While many may feel that contemporary world politics needs what might be called a global policeman enforcing the will of international society, or at least providing some global public goods, particularly within the United States, there is simply no interest in old-fashioned great power approaches to international order.24 States have different interests, they perceive their security environments in very different ways, and their domestic constituencies are not willing to bear the financial, political, and human costs of being an old-style great

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power in the contemporary world. Yet this should not be confused with an argument that says that power no longer matters. Power is clearly of fundamental importance; what has changed is the way in which this power can be deployed to achieve systemic ends. Mechanisms of Order If the managerial conception of the great power role is troubled by the changing forms and distribution of power, the basic mechanisms through which order is thought to be managed by the powers are also being questioned by contemporary circumstances. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the lack of fit that exists between the location of substantive power in world politics and those states identified as great powers in the UN Charter. For a system of great power management to work, those powers with the responsibility to act need to be those most able to shape state behavior. Of course, the identity of the P5 was shaped much more heavily by political considerations in 1945 than by any clear-headed assessment of power and capacity over the longer term. Moreover, as some pointed out at San Francisco, the locus of international power has always shifted, and the granting of permanence was a recipe for a limited shelf-life of the system. In today’s world, the five powers are by no means the most influential states in the contemporary system. China and the United States are, by most accounts, rightly there; however, questions hover above the other three. Notwithstanding its nuclear power or energy reserves, Russia’s political, military, and social problems severely constrain its international capacity. Britain and France are at best senior members of the middle rank. So where does power and influence lie? First, one must recognize the very real shortage of powers that are of genuinely global influence. As noted above, the United States is alone at the top, and perhaps only China has anything that resembles a similar global influence, though even that is highly qualified. Diplomatically and politically, it is of global weight, but militarily and economically, China faces significant constraints.25 If one were to consider those powers that are regionally dominant but lack global influence, that is, they are capable of exerting regional leadership and containing regional strategic crises, then candidates would include India, Brazil, South Africa, and possibly Japan. If the judicious application of power is central to the great power role, then the great powers have to be those states with the greatest levels of political and military influence. The P5 are not those states. This reinforces the earlier point that the nature, form, and distribution of power in the contemporary world challenges the working assumptions of the classical conception of the role great powers play in managing international society. This gets to a broader point. There is a strong case for questioning the extent to which order in the contemporary world is manageable at all. The world has never had so many sovereign states, and the societies over which

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they govern have equally never been so large. In both the scale of the human population and the complexity of interests represented by over 190 sovereign states, the practicalities of great power management are frankly daunting. More importantly, the range of issues that are considered of sufficient importance to constitute vital national interests has broadened considerably over the past fifty years. Where in the past great power managerialism was only concerned with geopolitical and strategic concerns understood in a narrow military sense, today a raft of concerns ranging from investment and trade to the environment and health are, for many states, fundamental concerns. As such, the basic practicalities of managerialism would test the capacities of even the most well-endowed states. Equally, in the constitutional structure of the current order, the mechanism manifesting the great power role (the UNSC), in spite of the broadening of areas it considers within its remit, is still limited to managing questions of international peace and security.26 While major powers do carry considerable influence in the various mechanisms set up to provide some form of authority over international economic relations, it is some way from the kind of role that is entailed in the classical notion of great power managerialism. Moreover, many of these bodies, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), are themselves increasingly shown to be of limited utility to contemporary economic circumstances.27 This gets to a more basic problem, that is, the extent to which many of the most pressing challenges to human societies, and the international society of states that overlay these communities, seem increasingly to resist state efforts to control them. From climate change to financial crises, transnational criminal groups to pandemic disease, many of the world’s most pressing threats not only resist any one state’s capacity to resolve them, they seem to resist even some of the most concerted efforts by groups of states to impose authority over them. This is not to say states have been entirely emasculated, but it is increasingly clear that any institution of international society that rests on the assumption that states are capable of dealing with all of the vital challenges to their interests is of limited use in the contemporary world. A second problem of manageability is the extent to which the rest of the members of international society are content to accept the unequal treatment on which great power managerialism relies. Since the formation of the current order, sovereignty has become a properly universal system; it is not partially respected, as it was under the period of European colonialism, and its universality is highly valued in the contemporary order. The traditional great power role relies on the system being seen not necessarily as just, but as providing an order with which most are willing to live. It is not clear that states in the contemporary setting see great power managerialism either as legitimate or as providing a broader good whose price they are willing to pay. Even the limited management of the UNSC is under regular criticism for the often-narrow conception of interests revealed by the exercise of the veto and actions to keep issues off the Council agenda.28 The tensions that exist between the more egal-

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itarian tendencies of contemporary world politics and the aristocratic principles of great power management question the sustainability of a classical great power role in the long term and also limit the political utility of the system in an immediate sense. If unequal treatment was thought to be the price to be paid to achieve order, then in the current setting many states are beginning to question the extent to which this payment helps them advance their interests in world politics. Perhaps the strongest challenge to the basic mechanisms of great power management come from a more fundamental fact: there is no clear consensus among the great powers as to the political or moral purpose of international society. Great power management of the kind practiced under the Vienna settlement, and which the UN system attempts to replicate, worked not because the powers were seeking to create and maintain a minimalist conception of international society but because they had very clear political aims in mind. It was not only about protecting the basic geopolitical map drawn at Vienna, important though that was, but about maintaining the political equilibrium of the ancien régimes in the face of the revolutionary threats of liberalism, nationalism, and a nascent communism. In the current order, there is no clear purpose that collaborative action is seeking to achieve. As Edward Keene points out, the order that has predominated since the end of World War II has within it a profound tension as to its purpose.29 On the one hand, international society has a minimal statist conception of purpose whereby order is intended to protect and advance the interests of states. On the other hand, it also represents efforts to protect the interests and rights of individuals through an extensive range of mechanisms, rules, and norms. When there are clashes between the claims of these two—that is, whether a state or individual should prevail— international society is often ambiguous as to who ought to prevail. In such an uncertain environment—one in which the purpose of international society is unclear and in which tensions exist not only between states and peoples, but also between competing values and principles—great power managerialism is impossible to achieve. To be clear, there are aspects of the current global order on which there is consensus among states. For example, most accept the basic capitalist structure of the global economic system, and there is no meaningful challenge to the idea of the sovereign state as the focus of political life. Most also agree that the use of force should largely be avoided, and aggression is deemed to be illegitimate (even if there is dispute as to just what it is that constitutes aggression). This should not, however, be confused with the idea that there is consensus as to the purpose of international society. Indeed aspects of the principles competing for influence, such as those promoting individual rights, positively fly in the face of the idea of great power management. The lack of consensus about the purpose of international society is matched by the absence of a common view as to what it means to be a great power. If management by the great powers requires the acquiescence if not

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consent of the lesser powers, it also requires the powers themselves to share a common, basic view of their role. The rights-responsibility trade-off at the heart of the process can only operate if the major powers think of themselves as playing this kind of role. It is not at all clear that, at least since the collapse of the USSR, if not well before, such a view exists. Increasingly, there appears to be a wide diversity of views among the emerging powers, such as China, India, and Brazil, as well as Russia and Japan, as to what it means to be a member of the top table in international society. Some contest US dominance, others disavow the military dimension, and none seek to collaborate in a concert-style system with the United States and the others. This will be further explored in Chapters 6 and 7, but my purpose here is simply to note that the lack of consensus among the major powers as to what constitutes a great power role makes the traditional great power role practically unviable at present. Globalization Although the transformative power of globalization has often been overstated in the scholarly literature, nonetheless, the very real changes in world politics brought about by this complex social phenomenon further contribute to the sense that the traditional conception of great power managerialism is not appropriate in contemporary circumstances. Globalization here refers to the way in which the increased quantity and speed of movement of goods, people, capital, and information around the planet is forging denser transnational networks of economic, political, and cultural relationships. These linkages are in turn leading to a subtle, but nevertheless significant, reconfiguring of the way states and societies perceive their interests and the policies they choose to advance and protect these interests.30 In the way it is changing the strategic landscape, the way it is narrowing the gap between the powerful and the less well endowed, and the way it is leading states to focus on cooperative endeavors, often at a local and regional level, globalization limits the efficacy and practicality of great power management. Drawing on the arguments of Hardt and Negri, Chris Brown argues that the complexities of globalization and its networks of market power so severely limit the agential capacity of great powers as to undermine their ability, collectively or individually, to exercise their traditional responsibilities.31 This argument relates to a broader proposition—that is, the extent to which the traditional forms of power that states have relied on in the past can be applied at the international level to decisively shape social outcomes. It is not that states are utterly powerless—clearly, they retain considerable power and influence— rather, the dispersal of power caused by globalization and its complex networks of trade, investment, and production limit the ability of the powerful to be able to make determinative moves. In an era of complex financial and trade

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interdependence, the idea that a coterie of powers can move borders around like so many pieces on a chessboard does not reflect where and how power functions. The point here should not be confused with an argument that says that the powerful are irrelevant to the contours of international society; rather, it is to emphasize that members of international society should not have confidence in the small number of the most powerful being able to act in the manner in which it is assumed they are capable. A second way in which globalization is shifting the terrain of world politics lies in the changes it has wrought on the strategic environment. Here, the networks of communication, trade, and finance, which have provided so much opportunity for so many, have also opened states and societies up to a range of new vulnerabilities. From the risks posed by transnational terrorists through to the increased incidence and impact of financial crises and the increased exposure to infectious diseases, the range and source of threats to the security and well-being of states and societies has been dramatically widened by the processes of globalization. This new world of nontraditional security challenges is only one part of the changes globalization is bringing to the international strategic context. These vulnerabilities, as well as the opportunities afforded by global networks, have provided a stage on which a growing number of state actors, often tiny in size, have dramatically increased prospects for meaningful strategic effect. As experience with terrorism has shown, globalization allows small groups increased geographic reach, greater lethality, and improved strategic impact.32 This opening up of the menu of threats has demanded new responses from states. The sorts of security guarantees that great powers can provide, as traditionally practiced, are of little utility in the face of these new challenges. Of course, those with great power and influence will be key to combating transnational crime, terrorism, and the like, but the tools of statecraft to achieve this will be very different from the sorts of approaches on which great power management has historically relied. More broadly, globalization has increased the number, character, and potential influence of strategic actors on the stage of world politics. This makes life for the powerful more complex: they have more demands on their time, they must work in cooperation with the less powerful, and their capacity to manage effectively is limited. This relates to a third change introduced by globalization—the narrowing of the functional gap between the powerful and the weak. A bedrock assumption of the great power role is that power can be harnessed by the major players in the system to achieve a stabilizing influence on an anarchic political setting. By shifting the relativities of power, globalization challenges this basic assumption. The ability of those states with a preponderance of resources to marshal this power to achieve their own preferred outcomes, let alone provide the kind of system-stabilizing effects of the past, is reduced by the networks of opportunity and constraint established by globalization.33 This is evident

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across a range of spheres but is perhaps most obvious in the difficulty that the most powerful military the world has ever seen has had in converting its overwhelming strength into its preferred policy outcomes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asymmetric tactics have demonstrated a remarkable ability to undermine the strategic utility of massive firepower. Some have gone so far as to argue that globalization, and the technological, social, and economic networks of which it is constituted, requires a radical transformation in the way states use military power to achieve their goals.34 From this perspective, the massive application of force, even when technologically sophisticated, “smart,” and networked, will not achieve desired policy outcomes because opponents may use network opportunities and asymmetric tactics to resist the will of the powerful. Globalization has not made the powerful less important; rather, it has changed the way traditional forms of state power—military might, diplomatic heft, and economic clout—can be used to achieve desired goals. For a system of international order in which great power management is a key load-bearing component, such changes have profound implications. Globalization has brought into sharp relief the contradictions that exist in today’s global setting. Despite a universal political system of sovereignty predicated on a statist conception of purpose, a growing set of rules and institutions seek to impose limits on what states can do. The contest between states and people as to where authority should lie, and what states and peoples should and should not be free to do, has been made more complex by globalization. While it does not provide an alternative cosmopolitan basis for international order nor fundamentally undermine the old order, it is exacerbating the contradictions between the competing principles and practices of international relations. Indeed, it may be helping to create the social conditions that lead to these contradictions becoming unmanageable. The system of states run for and by states can only withstand so much political pressure from those who are increasingly aware and increasingly empowered by the processes of globalization. Whether in the resonance of the claims made by Al-Qaida about Western perfidy in the minds of many outside the West or the demands by developing countries that the rich have to pay to deal with climate change, one sees examples of these tensions that cannot forever be sustained. The system of great power management requires a unified sense of purpose among the powerful—one built on a robust domestic social foundation. Since 1945, this has not existed, but a fig leaf of sufficient size could be devised to cover up this shortcoming. Globalization makes the pretense of a shared purpose to international order that is being collectively managed increasingly difficult to sustain. Globalization is a social process of contradictory and often counterintuitive developments. Many felt that the global scale and transnational character of its connections would naturally lead to greater and more effective global institutions to manage the shared interests of the world’s states and societies.

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In some respects, one might have expected that globalization would act to reinforce at least some basic aspects of great power management by forcing states and societies to realize the limits of domestic capacity and the need for global bodies to manage shared interests and common concerns. Yet far from strengthening the hand of international institutions, it is revealing their weaknesses. From the WTO to the United Nations, there are few multilateral bodies navigating globalization with much success.35 States seem to have found better solutions to common problems and concerns at the regional rather than the global level. From the explosion of regional trading agreements through to efforts to promote economic integration among geographically proximate states, in seeking to meet the challenges of globalization states are not turning to the global level; they are looking to their more immediate neighborhoods to try to resolve these concerns. While the incentives to cooperate among states are greater due to globalization, it does not follow that this cooperation will be at the global level. The traditional great power role requires that the lesser powers buy into the process of management that applies across the system as a whole. Under globalization, their interest in these kinds of processes has been significantly reduced. While globalization has not fundamentally recast international relations, its attendant processes challenge important components of active great power managerialism. The notion of a small group of the powerful managing the ambitions of the less powerful seems out of place in a world in which complex global networks have diffused power away from the old centers. The functional utility of traditional forms of power to be able to generate a stable international order, and indeed the very idea of an international order, seems open to question. The powerful have become less influential in ways that question the basic assumptions of great power management. States and societies are seeking to advance and protect their interests in ways that do not give succor to the traditional role. Globalization makes plain that it is not just the identity of the P5 that seems anachronistic. It has both reduced demand for great power management and at the same time has undermined the capacity of the most important states to supply a managerial good to international society. Normative Shifts The final broad change in the circumstances of world politics that undermines great power managerialism results from shifts in the international order that have emerged over the past sixty years or so. This relates particularly to the expansion of a strong egalitarianism within international society and changes in attitude toward the use of force. Sovereign equality has been a bedrock principle of modern international relations. Yet during the high period of European colonialism, this principle was not universally practiced. In their dealings with one another, Europe’s

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powers treated one another with the dignity that this norm demanded, but in their dealings with non-European powers, their attitudes varied considerably. In practice, the international system was governed by two organizing principles: sovereign equality among the wealthy Western states, and a hierarchical structure between the West and non-European states that was taken to the limits that morality and technology would allow.36 Since the rolling back of European colonialism, the sovereign equality principle has become universal in its applicability and, because of the often brutal and arbitrary behavior of so many colonial powers, political support for it is very robust. In the face of this strong egalitarianism at the heart of contemporary international society, the continued dominance of a small managerial elite through the recognition of differential treatment is becoming very hard to justify. The question of justification matters in more than an academic sense as the great power role requires the consent of the lesser powers; egalitarianism puts increasing strain on the political support of the traditional role. Great power managerialism relies on the acceptance of the rights and privileges of the powerful by the rest of international society but also on their cooperation in the maintenance of order. Whether this cooperation manifests itself in the acceptance of great powers resolving disputes over territory, active assistance in maintaining spheres of influence, or in forging alliances with the major powers, this kind of international order requires that states accept and to some degree participate in its management. While the lesser powers may not especially like such a setting, their acceptance of uneven treatment once reflected an acceptance that the reality of power inequalities could be harnessed in ways that maintained an orderly system, a system in which they could advance their interests to the best of their abilities. Egalitarianism casts doubt on this proposition. Lesser powers will always have to accept their lot in international society, and it is not the case that their mere desire to have the letter of international law respected will make them more influential. Today, however, the formal inequalities required for great power management are politically much less palatable than in the past, which in turn makes the practice of such a system increasingly problematic. The politico-legal character of the order exacerbates this because it is not well equipped to cope with inconsistencies or outright hypocrisies. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine in the contemporary system that any state would openly accept the traditional idea of the great power role in international society. Few would question the reality that the powerful matter a great deal, but the normative dominance of egalitarianism in international society is such that the classical idea of a managerial elite is unacceptable to almost all. One of the greatest normative transformations in international relations has been the change in attitudes toward the use of force, which developed in the twentieth century. During this time, force has moved from being an acceptable, if not almost virtuous, act of statecraft to something that is legally cir-

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cumscribed. This constraint is almost universally accepted.37 In a basic sense, the narrowing of the circumstances within which force can be used limits the range of options for great power management. Under current conditions, the use of force is acceptable only when it is clearly in self-defense or when the UNSC gives its approval. Thus, great power management is merely redefined within a more legalistic setting. But it is the impulse behind the normative shift that is of greater significance for great power managerialism. That is, that states, particularly rich developed democracies, have lost their political ability to put up with the costs imposed by the use of force. As Gil Merom shows, democracies, which constitute the wealthiest states, are increasingly constrained in the ways in which they can use force and in many respects have lost their stomach for more traditional forms of coercive statecraft.38 For a system of great power management, shifting attitudes to the use of force make the application of power in the service of order much more politically complex. An international order that is intended to be managed to some degree by the great powers, but in which those states are hamstrung by domestic interests that will not accept the human or economic costs of conflict, has significant limitations. Of course, this does not mean conflict does not occur nor that the powerful cry off all fights—the US invasion of Iraq is testimony to this— however, it does significantly increase the political cost of great power management for those powers and poses hard questions for the durability of that kind of order. Lesser powers know there are lines that the powerful democracies cannot or will not cross and have the potential to leverage this knowledge to their advantage. Two sets of challenges confront the great power role in international society when a few well-endowed states command a special status as a function of their responsibilities to maintain order. In the first instance, there are basic structural and functional challenges that relate to the practical requirements of management. These have been present since the great power role was first devised in the early nineteenth century. These include developing a consensus on the purpose that the order serves, maintaining a common view among the great powers as to their role in the system, and ensuring the acceptance of the lesser powers. What are ultimately functional issues underline the political contingency of the traditional notion. There is no “true” or perennial role of great powers in international relations, but many believe that the particular path taken by international history in nineteenth-century Europe shows that creating institutions to manage international society provides the best chance for order and that great power management has a central role to play. The maintenance of the system, through ensuring that these structural prerequisites are met, is the constant challenge of the diplomat. The second set of challenges is more contextual. These relate to the broader question of whether circumstances in world politics are in fact conducive to the classical conception of how international society ought to function. This chapter has made clear in

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both the contextual and the structural senses that the traditional idea of the great power role is badly out of place. From the absence of a sense of common purpose among the powerful, to the uncertainty as to the ends to which international order is oriented, and from the transformation in the forms and utility of state power to the important shifts associated with globalization, the circumstances of contemporary world politics present a set of fundamental challenges to the traditional idea of great power managerialism.

An Unsustainable Order The idea that great powers are worthy of special status in international society rests on the belief that only they could impart order in an anarchic international system, and it emerged as a particular understanding of how international systems operate. In the efforts first at Versailles and then in the planning for the postwar world at the end of World War II, attempts were made to institutionalize this idea into a concrete politico-legal mechanism that would create a peaceful international system. The constitutional settlement of the current order in many ways reflects this basic assumption. Yet the idea itself, which first the League and then the United Nations sought to embody, was born of a specific diplomatic period when a very different material and normative framework in international affairs operated. The mistake in 1945 was to try to replicate the logic of the congress system in a twentieth-century world. Not only had technology fundamentally changed the forms and utility of power, the political circumstances of international relations had been utterly transformed. The classical conception of the great power role overlooks the historical specificity of the congress and accepts (wittingly or not) the view that it was central to the long peace of nineteenth-century Europe. Following from this has come the view that the managerial aspirations of nineteenth-century diplomacy are somehow a perennial logic of international order. There can be no doubt that a vitally important role will continue to be played by the most powerful states in any international order, but the specifically managerial idea did not get the world right in 1945, and in today’s world it is badly out of place. There are two important conclusions that follow from the points made in this chapter. First, the effort to forge an institutional and legal framework to link great power interests and systemic ones is unsustainable. To some extent, experience with the UNSC has borne this out. While the Cold War is usually given as the reason for the Council’s many initial problems, the problematic assumptions of great power managerialism and their growing disconnection from the substantive conditions of world politics are as much to blame. This is not to say that we should jettison institutional frameworks that seek to manage

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international relations. Rather, we should recognize clearly the practical and political shortcomings of the idea that great powers can and should manage modern international relations. It is time to rethink how to advance the cause of systemic stability in a way that better suits the material, ideological, and political realities of the current era. Second, even in a world beset with the rich and complex networks of globalization, concentrations of power matter. Whether working out an international agreement to respond to climate change or in the maintenance of conditions conducive to international trade, who has power and in what form matters greatly. It does not follow, however, that because of the perennial importance of power to developments in an anarchic realm that the creation of a managerial elite capable of maintaining systemic stability is always appropriate. How to harness the uneven distribution of wealth and influence in world politics in a way that is most conducive to orderly conduct is a vital challenge in the contemporary setting. This requires us to come to terms with the forms and function of power in the international system in an era of globalization. In spite of the importance and indeed the popularity of the notion of great powers in the international relations literature and diplomatic discourse, the term has no clear and settled meaning. From a short hand used to refer to the most militarily powerful to a much more precise idea of a distinct member of international society, the literature includes a rich if frustrating diversity of definitions. Among this array, one notion in particular, one of great power managerialism, has become embedded in the current order. Yet as this chapter has pointed out, there are extensive problems with this idea as a depiction of the realities of contemporary international society. Order imposed by the concerted action of an aristocratic group of states is not how world politics works today, and it is not an apt description of how the most powerful states see their role nor of how others understand the place of the powerful. If the idea of a great power as part of a specifically managerial elite is no longer valid (and crude material measures of power are of limited utility), what are we to make of the category of a great power in twenty-first-century world politics? What does it mean to be a state of the first rank? And what role in international society do the powerful play in a world of globalization? It is to these questions that the next two chapters turn.

Notes 1. Beardon, “Obama’s War.” 2. White House, “Remarks by the President for a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan,” March 27, 2009, text available at http://www.whitehouse .gov.

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3. White House, “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” December 1, 2009, text available at http://www.whitehouse.gov. 4. For example, Jones, In the Graveyard of Empires. 5. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, data from http://www.bls.gov. 6. HM Government, Office for National Statistics, http://www.statistics .gov.uk. 7. Bull, Anarchical Society, 201–202. 8. While there may be a temptation to see in bloc discipline a continuation of the nineteenth-century practice of great power management, it should be resisted as both the geopolitical and ideological aspects of the Cold War make the drawing of such parallels of highly limited utility. 9. See generally Reus-Smit, ed., Politics of International Law. 10. For example, Posner, Perils of Global Legalism. 11. See Chapman, Congress of Vienna. 12. Bull famously depicts diplomacy, international law, the balance of power, and war as the other mechanisms, what he calls institutions, supporting order in world politics. 13. Bull, Anarchical Society, 199. 14. Lebow and Stein, “Nuclear Lessons of the Cold War.” 15. Mueller, Atomic Obsession. 16. For example, Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 128–133. 17. A case most famously put by Kenneth N. Waltz; see his Spread of Nuclear Weapons. 18. Berman, Planning a Tragedy. 19. See Wallensteen and Johansson, “Security Council Decisions in Perspective.” 20. Freedman, “Great Powers, Vital Interests, and Nuclear Weapons,” 37. 21. On this and its implications, see Kennedy, “Greatest Superpower”; Jervis, “Remaking of a Unipolar World”; and Brooks and Wohlforth, World Out of Balance. 22. For details on spending and capabilities, see International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Military Balance, 2010, 21–52. 23. Bull, Anarchical Society. 24. For example, Gray, Sheriff. 25. For a discussion of these, see Shirk, China. 26. See, generally, Malone, ed., UN Security Council, particularly chapters 3–8. 27. See Thirlwell, “Second Thoughts on Globalisation.” 28. For a discussion of this, see Caron, “Legitimacy of the Collective Authority of the Security Council.” For a measured assessment of challenges to which the Council should respond, see United Nations, More Secure World, UN Document A/59/565, available on the Internet at http://www.un.org. 29. Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, 142–143. 30. For further details on globalization and its implications for the structures and processes of world politics, see Bisley, Rethinking Globalization. 31. Chris Brown, “Do Great Powers Have Great Responsibilities?” 15–16. 32. See Cronin, “Behind the Curve.” 33. Haass, “Age of Nonpolarity?”

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34. For example, Arquila, “New Rules of War.” 35. For an example of an official view on this challenge from the WTO, see Sutherland et al., Future of the WTO, and for a more broad-ranging critical perspective, see Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work. 36. See Gong, Standard of “Civilization” in International Society. 37. Finnemore, Purpose of Intervention. 38. Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars.

6 The Greatest Power?

That the United States is the world’s preeminent power is conventional wisdom in IR scholarship as well as in broader public discourse. While disputes may abound as to the character of that power, its desirability, or its longevity, few would contest that the United States is the most powerful and most influential state in the current system, if not the most powerful entity ever seen. Imperial Rome, Ming Dynasty China, Victorian Britain, or Suleiman the Magnificent’s Ottoman Empire all pale in comparison with the early twentyfirst century United States. For scholars of international relations, and many policymakers as well, the question of US power is of particular interest not just because of the remarkable concentration of assets in US hands, but because of its singularity. In the modern era, never has the highest echelon of international affairs been a club with only one member. As discussed in Chapter 2, the development of modern international relations in Europe, thought by many to be axiomatic of the conditions of international relations more generally, involved a pentarchy of great powers. The primary lesson of international history, at least for European states, has been the belief that no one power can dominate the system. Even when Britain’s empire made it the greatest of the powers, there was a strong sense that it was primus inter pares, with Germany ultimately contesting Britain’s systemic position in general war. For most of the twentieth century, the high table of world politics involved, at the very least, two powers dominating, as in the Cold War, while the interwar period witnessed at least four powers of the highest rank. International systems have not, hitherto, come in a unipolar guise; bipolarity and multipolarity were thought to be the only possibilities.

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With the sudden and unexpected collapse of the USSR, the United States was rather abruptly left alone atop the international league table, and there it has remained for nearly a quarter of a century. This condition is of considerable interest to scholars of international relations because what the United States does matters. As John Ikenberry points out, the “United States is not just a superpower pursuing its interests, it is a producer of world order.”1 It is of particular interest to those IR theorists who emphasize the structure of the international system as a key explanatory factor in international outcomes, while it is also of particular pertinence for the issues raised in this book.2 A reflection on the most important state in the system is necessary if one is to make sense of what it means to be a great power in the twenty-first century and whether the classical idea of the great powers has any salience in contemporary world politics. Equally, it is necessary to grapple with the challenge of singularity, as for many scholars the idea of a singular great power is, by definition, a conceptual nonstarter. Up to this point in the book, I have been concerned with tracing the origins, consolidation, and recent problems faced by the idea of great power managerialism. In the remaining chapters I turn my attention to the current behavior of powerful states with a view to making sense of what remains of great power managerialism and what it means to be a great power in the current setting. To that end, I will consider the place of the United States in the international system in order to reflect on the contemporary character of great power managerialism. I begin by providing a detailed overview of the US global role and the extent to which it dominates contemporary world politics. The purpose of this is to provide a basis for the assessment in the second section in which, contrary to the recent literature that argues that US dominance reflects a hegemonic or imperial role for the United States, I argue that the current US role is in keeping with its long-term grand strategy of the post-1945 period. That is, the United States continues to maintain a great power grand strategy in which its foreign and security policy is in keeping with key assumptions of great power managerialism. This inflection of the classical role, however, is made distinct by the properly global nature of the international system in which it is engaged and the absence of peers with which it can manage the system. In the third section I examine one part of this circumstance, that is, the problem of singularity and its implications for international order. Here I argue that recent experiences of US foreign policy have shown that, while unipolarity and great power managerialism are not a logical impossibility, they have thus far produced diminishing returns for the United States. I will underscore the point made in the previous chapter, that circumstances in contemporary world politics argue for a pressing need to rethink what it means to be a great power in contemporary international society and how great concentrations of power can be harnessed to promote order in world politics.

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The Global Role of the United States By almost any measure—whether military, economic, diplomatic, or cultural— the United States is at the top of the international league table, and, due to the Soviet collapse, it has been in this position for over twenty years. While many, including within the United States, may not have realized this, it had probably been in that position for some years prior to the fall of the USSR. The Soviet economy had stagnated, if not begun to shrink, since the mid-1970s. With Gorbachev’s foreign policy reform program, whereby the USSR essentially gave up the ideological and systemic contest with the United States in order to focus on internal reform, the United States in effect became the world’s most powerful state, beginning at least some time in 1987.3 In some quarters within the United States, this prompted an almost triumphal sense of US power, prestige, and virtue.4 But for others, the end of the Cold War led to calls for a significant reduction in the international presence of the United States and the domestic investment of a “peace dividend.”5 From this latter perspective, the Cold War had drawn the United States out to defend its interests and values, and with its cessation, the United States should return to the comfort of its continental protection. Yet after a brief flirtation with isolationism, perhaps most evident during the 1992 presidential election, US policymakers clearly turned their backs on this position and continued with an activist and global approach to the advancement of US interests. Without the global challenge of Soviet-led communism, policymakers determined that the broad trajectory of US strategy, which had, after all, won the Cold War, would remain in place. Senior officials took pains not to gloat about the Soviet collapse, and indeed, President George H. W. Bush made it clear that the United States should not be seen to be “dancing on the wall.”6 The United States did not, as Stephen Walt puts it, “sit back and savor its privileged position”; rather, it sought to reinforce and perpetuate its place in the world and the values and institutions on which it stood.7 And it did so across the broad spectrum of policy spheres. From hard military power to international economic governance, US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been characterized by a wide-ranging commitment to global leadership and to the active protection of its position in the international system. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the United States is now into its fourth post–Cold War presidential administration. By the end of 2012, the presidency will have been shared evenly between Democrats and Republicans, each side holding office for twelve years. During this period, US foreign policy is often thought to have changed, sometimes quite dramatically, reflecting the differing preferences, values, and circumstances of the incumbent. George H. W. Bush pursued an old-fashioned Republican-realist policy, using interests

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and not ideals as his lodestar. His successor, Bill Clinton, is often depicted as advancing a Wilsonian liberal internationalism with the ideas of multilateralism and international law as central principles and human rights advancement and democratization as core policy objectives. George W. Bush is said to have brought about a radical departure not just from his predecessor, about which much was made for domestic electoral purposes, but from the broader traditions of US foreign policy. Dispensing with alliances, institutions, and indeed international law, say some, the Bush revolution in foreign policy represented a necessary break with the past due to the purportedly paradigm-shifting threat of transnational terrorism.8 The Obama administration has, in turn, made much of the extent to which it seeks to distance itself from the policies of Bush, shifting the strategic emphasis away from Iraq and toward Afghanistan, putting much greater store in diplomacy, and undertaking a strong rhetorical commitment to international agreements such as nuclear arms reduction.9 Yet notwithstanding the very real policy differences between the administrations—one cannot imagine Clinton undertaking the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example—the United States has maintained a remarkably consistent set of core priorities in its foreign policy since the collapse of Soviet power. From the early 1990s, US policy has been characterized by an active, well-resourced, and properly global approach to advancing its interests and values. I will return to the problem of how best to describe this broad approach—is it imperial, hegemonic, or something else?—later in the chapter. For the moment, however, it is necessary to discuss the ways in which the United States has advanced this global posture. There are three broad components of this approach that, in spite of variation in style, emphasis, and application at different points, have been and remain at the heart of the US role in the international system. First, the United States has maintained preeminent global strategic weight through the forward projection of power in all of the regions that it perceives to be vital to its interests: Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. US military force is organized primarily around a set of alliances in which it is by far the senior party. Second, it seeks to ensure that a liberal capitalist world economy with relatively low barriers to trade and finance is maintained and, where possible, expanded. US elites believe that this global setting is most conducive to its domestic economic prosperity even though the United States is a much more domestically self-reliant economy than most other developed economies. Third, US policy has been marked by efforts to project its own values, where possible, upon states and societies the world over. This last aspect has been the most variable, both in terms of the consistency with which it has been applied and the tools through which it is advanced, due mainly to the fact that it is subservient to the requirements of the preceding priorities. The almost evangelical belief that US values are necessarily universal, and that the social institutions that flow from those values, such as democracy and the rule of law, are necessarily improvements upon

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local circumstances, has been a strong theme in US foreign policy, but its progression has almost always been tailored to fit the requirements of US interests. If a conflict between values and interests arose, the latter has usually prevailed. It is widely recognized that the United States is the world’s preeminent military power. It not only has the world’s most technologically sophisticated defense force, it is also the only state that is capable of projecting significant conventional armed force anywhere on the planet. In 2008, its defense expenditure was a little under half that of the global total defense spending.10 In other words, the amount the United States spends on its armed forces is a little under the total of every other country in the world combined. The United States has over 1.5 million active members of its armed forces—all of whom are volunteers—with just over 850,000 reservists. This compares with China’s defense force of 2.28 million active service personnel—the vast bulk of whom are conscripts—India’s 1.325 million, and Russia’s 1.02 million-strong defense force (largely conscripts).11 While it is not strictly the largest, it is the biggest professional armed force, it has the most sophisticated weapons systems, and, unlike the other million-plus militaries, it is the only one that is able to undertake high-intensity warfare literally anywhere on the planet. The current military predominance of the United States is not new. While defense spending did drop in the immediate post–Cold War years, it was not reduced significantly. More importantly, the more significant cuts, especially from former Soviet states as well as allies, served to accentuate the military gap between it and the rest. Through the 1990s, Russian military spending dropped most dramatically, with defense expenditure accounting for around 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the immediate post-Soviet period to 3.4 percent by decade’s end; given the shrinking national output, this meant that real defense spending in 1999 was less than one-third what it had been in 1992. Similarly, the United Kingdom reduced defense expenditure from around 4 percent of GDP to around 2.5 percent during the decade, although this only resulted in a 19 percent reduction in real terms. Meanwhile France went from 3.4 percent of GDP to 2.7 percent, resulting in a similar decline in real spending as for the UK. China’s spending was fairly stable for most of the decade with a slight decline in the proportion of GDP allocated to defense, translating into a gentle increase in real terms.12 From 1998 onward, however, China began a period of dramatic increases in defense expenditure. In keeping with the broader trends in world politics, US defense expenditure as a proportion of GDP slowly declined in the 1990s, bottoming out at around 3 percent in 1999 and climbing thereafter, with significant increases in 2003 and 2004.13 Since 2006, it has hovered between 4.5 and 4.9 percent, and this is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.14 In real terms, this meant that at the end of a decade of general defense retrenchment the United States was spending over 600 percent more on defense than the next highest spender (France), which

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happened to be an ally, and that it spent more than the next ten highest-spending countries combined.15 This was the narrowest that the military gap has been since the Soviet collapse. Whether dollars spent, missiles deployed, or boots on the ground, the impressive advantages of the United States over the rest only tell us part of the story. US global strategic significance is underpinned by the location and purpose of its military force. While the bulk of its defense force is stationed on US soil, it is the very substantial and ongoing forward deployment of US forces around the world that makes it so influential. There are active-duty military personnel stationed in over 140 countries, while the US maintains hundreds of military bases around the world. In 2009, the US had over 280,000 uniformed defense personnel deployed outside the United States, not including those involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.16 Of this deployment, there are fourteen countries in which the United States has more than four hundred troops, and nine countries with over nine hundred. This global presence is particularly concentrated in the regions the US has identified as of particular importance to its interests, that is, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.17 These deployments mean that the United States can respond rapidly to crises that may destabilize these regions and in turn challenge US interests. But this global presence is intended primarily to serve an ongoing purpose beyond crisis response. The most important role that it plays is to underwrite the strategic balance in each of the three key regions. Here one sees most clearly the lines of continuity between the current posture of the United States and that of the Cold War—although, since 2003, its presence in Southwest Asia breaks with this tradition. Its strategic interests in Africa and South America are significantly lower, and consequently its military presence is similarly low.18 In both Europe and East Asia, US military presence has kept the strategic status quo for at least a generation, if not longer. In both regions, the withdrawal of its presence would presage a significant change to the underlying strategic dynamics; although, in Europe, with the buttress of the EU, this would be less destabilizing than in Asia. In that most dynamic region, the United States presently retains its position as the least distrusted power. While few admit it publicly, all states in the region recognize that they benefit from the US presence and particularly its maritime hegemony.19 Since its occupation of Japan, the US military has helped keep the region stable by keeping Japan in check and thus ensuring that dangerous arms races and other manifestations of security dilemmas were avoided. In a region rich in the volatile mix of nationalism, historical animosity, and newly found wealth, this is of particular importance. While often accused of seeing itself as the world’s police force, the United States is, in its forward deployments, in the main, a keeper of the peace—at least in a large-scale interstate sense—in three key regions. It does this through the deployment of military force, which acts to

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deter regional powers from taking action that would disturb regional stability through the credible threat of the use of force. Beyond attempting to maintain the broader balance of influence in selected corners of the globe, the global military presence of the United States provides key public goods, the most important of which is ensuring that sea lanes of communication remain open. Trade is the lifeblood of the global economy. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reports that more than 80 percent of international trade in goods, by volume, is transported by sea.20 Crucially, most developed economies are net energy importers and they rely heavily on sea-based modes of transport for these imports. This is particularly acute in East Asia where the key economies of China, South Korea, and Japan depend on a huge proportion of their energy requirements traveling through the Straits of Malacca.21 US maritime hegemony has been a crucial if underappreciated component of the recent phase of globalization. It is not overstating things to say that many of the economic advances of globalization have been made possible by the US global military posture. The United States maintains its global position through an array of alliance and quasi-alliance relationships with key partners. In Europe this occurs on a multilateral basis through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), while elsewhere it is arranged bilaterally. Although NATO is an alliance of equals, like the broader international system, this equality is formal and not substantive. The United States is not just the primary source of the organization’s military muscle, it also provides the military commander of the organization’s entire European force.22 Although alliances normally involve interaction of unequal partners, it is important to recognize the reciprocal character of these relationships. Alliances are, to some extent, about assisting the United States to advance its goals. NATO is, in this sense, a framework for the forward projection of US power. The US-Japan alliance gives the United States, in Japanese prime minister Nakasone’s memorable phrase, the unusual geopolitical advantage of an unsinkable aircraft carrier in East Asia.23 But in return for the provision of basing, intelligence, or crucial satellite communication access by its partners, the United States provides vital security guarantees. The North Atlantic Treaty spells out plainly in article 5 that an attack on one member state will be considered an attack on all, a classic statement of collective security principles.24 Based on the alliance commitments made by the United States, Western European states organized their defense and security arrangements—during and after the Cold War—on the expectation that the United States would come to their defense. Likewise, the Asian alliance partners of the United States, most notably Australia, Japan, and South Korea, all structure their defense and security arrangements around the US guarantee. As a result, all junior partners tend to suffer, in varying degrees, from doubts as

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to the credibility of this guarantee. Would the United States really defend Australia if it were attacked? Would a nuclear strike on Osaka really be treated as if it were an attack on San Francisco? Yet, in spite of these worries, alliance partners the world over expect that the United States will underwrite their defense and they organize their own security arrangements accordingly. The United States has had a significant and ongoing deployment in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East since 1945. This originated in the strategic imperatives of the Cold War, but after the comprehensive defeat of the Soviet Union, the US has maintained this broader disposition. These deployments now serve a number of functions including the maintenance of regional stability and security, the provision of public goods, and security guarantees for key partners. But to describe this as simply the maintenance of a basic Cold War approach is somewhat misleading. Apart from the obvious point that during the Cold War the strategic purpose of deployment was to contain Soviet influence in key areas, US strategic policy has begun to reconfigure its global strategic posture to reflect changing circumstances. This broadly travels under the rubric of the Pentagon’s strategic transformation.25 This approach aims to incorporate cutting-edge technology so as to reduce the size of US military deployment without reducing its “strategic footprint”—that is, its ability to use force to achieve its policy goals. It is also intended to make the US military more agile and more responsive to crises. In short, the United States is seeking to make its international military presence more appropriate to the strategic landscape of the twenty-first century without changing its underlying function. The final strand of US global influence in the political and strategic realm lies in its diplomacy and intelligence. Not only is the US State Department the largest foreign ministry in the world, its foreign-service officers are the most widely distributed on the planet and, taken as a whole, probably the most influential. The United States has 260 diplomatic missions abroad, including embassies or other senior representation in 170 states.26 This is twenty-three short of complete representation in all UN member states, a remarkable degree of coverage. Moreover, it has extensive consular networks in many key countries, and in just about any given capital the US ambassador is the most important member of the diplomatic community.27 The United States is actively involved in all the key multilateral institutions, including permanent membership of the UNSC, as well as in all the key international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, G8, G-20, and the Bank of International Settlements. This remarkable distribution reflects not just the diversity of US interests, both public and private, but also its desire to advance these interests on a global scale. US intelligence agencies are the best resourced and most wide-ranging in their ambit of all the world’s entities. While the official budget for national intelligence remains classified, it is generally thought to sit between US$40 and US$70 billion, with one offi-

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cial indicating that, in 2005, it was around US$44 billion.28 This figure exceeds most countries’ total defense spending.29 US perception of the global nature of its interests is reflected in its desire to acquire and utilize information on such a scale. A crucial part of this, linking with the broader military posture, is the use of Internet technology to acquire information and defend interests. Combating cyber threats, both state and nonstate, has become an increasing priority for the US and other states.30 And it is a realm in which US global strategic ambition is evident and where again it leads global efforts, notwithstanding the recent embarrassment caused by the publication of diplomatic cables by the website Wikileaks. Despite the range of policy priorities seen in the differing occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, there has been broad support for the underlying objective of the United States to maintain its position of strategic predominance through these policy tools. From sustained comparative advantages in military spending to the political commitment of alliances, US elites have consistently reiterated their commitment to this posture and have signaled their intent to maintain this over the medium- to long-term future.31 While, as Stephen Walt shows, there have been degrees of difference in the modalities of this policy—from the more rhetorically understated approach of the Clinton administration to the self-conscious pursuit of security through perpetual military primacy of the George W. Bush presidency—overall, the United States has sought to reinforce the global position of strategic preeminence that it achieved with the collapse of the USSR.32 The strategic predominance of the US is the most visible and most important component of its broader role in world politics. The second key element of US foreign policy is the protection and expansion of a broadly liberal-capitalist world economy. The United States is the world’s largest, most technologically sophisticated, and most important economy. While the aggregate GDP of the EU economies just shades it, the total GDP of around US$14 trillion is by some way the largest of any state, even in spite of its present economic woes. But it is not only sheer size that gives it such a decisive advantage, it is the attributes of the US economy that matter most. Beyond being the hub of the global financial services industry, US firms are world leaders in high-technology industries—such as information technology, medical, and aeronautical engineering—they invest more in research and development, and broader market conditions provide US firms with much greater flexibility to invest, hire, and fire than in most other countries. It is also the consumer market on which the entire world depends. Indeed, while the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 was most acute in the United States, the extent to which the world was dragged down by what were in essence largely domestic problems graphically illustrated just how vital the US economy is to the broader global system. In contrast to the strategic realm, US economic ascendancy is presently much less clear-cut than it has been in the postwar period. After

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World War II had destroyed the economies of the other industrial powers, the United States accounted for around a third of global GDP and about half of global production. But even after the rapid recovery of the war-torn economies of Europe and Japan, the United States has maintained a disproportionate share of global wealth and prosperity. Even though the global financial crisis has seriously affected US economic standing (in 2009, GDP shrunk by 2.9 percent), dented confidence in the consumer market, and has led to fiscal deficits that will take nearly a generation to rectify, the United States remains the world’s most important and most powerful economy. It should not be in the least surprising that US policymakers would want to protect the basic structures of a global system that has served its interests so well to date. The end of the Cold War coincided with the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system. The most important element of the Round was the creation of the World Trade Organization, which was to be the key mechanism to buttress and expand a liberal international trading order. The United States was and remains a vital supporter of the organization and carries particular influence within the parts of the organization devoted to further liberalization. US support of a liberal trading system is informed by a broader belief in the global benefits of a liberal approach to trade, and the structural advantages that the US enjoys are reinforced through its mechanisms. This enthusiasm is not divorced from US interests, and in keeping agriculture and textiles largely out of the remit of the WTO, the United States has managed to ensure it accrues the benefits of liberalization without the pain of removing key forms of domestic protection. The current liberalization negotiations, the Doha Round, are stalled and little progress has been made since being launched in 1999. One important result of the Doha stagnation has been a turn among developed economies to preferential trade agreements (PTAs), usually negotiated on a bilateral basis. The United States was a leader in the proliferation of PTAs with the conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and it has since entered into a wide range of agreements, including those with Australia, Singapore, Chile, and a range of economies in the Middle East and Latin America. It has also concluded negotiations with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, although at the time of writing these have not been approved by Congress.33 The United States is also seeking to participate in the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations and was strongly supportive of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. These agreements are intended to achieve a number of specific US economic aims. First, they aim to advance US economic interests by removing barriers to trade in these markets while at the same time providing a broader spur to global liberalization.34 As the larger partner in all of these agreements, the United States has considerable leverage and is able to conclude agreements that come at a relatively low domestic cost. The agreements also usually include items that are considered “WTO-Plus,” in

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the sense that they cover areas not yet part of the multilateral system, such as investment, labor rights, and environmental standards, and that facilitate the exportation of what are in essence US standards for which foreign markets have to pay considerable adjustment costs. Beyond trade, the United States has sought to ensure that the global financial system remains liberal and that capital can move as easily as possible around the world. A liberal international financial system is thought by US policymakers to be in its interest both because of a broader belief in the global efficiency gains it is thought to produce, but also because, even after the global financial crisis, the United States houses the world’s most important financial services institutions. It is telling that, in spite of the obvious pain that the crisis has inflicted on the United States, it is unlikely to generate any significant increase in international oversight over financial markets. US policymakers retain the precrisis levels of commitment to a largely unregulated global financial system due to the continuation of the view that, in the question of efficiency versus stability through regulation, the former is thought to be of greater importance than the latter. While broadly supportive of efforts to improve transfer of information about financial vulnerabilities at the international level, on questions of regulation, the United States has primarily backed reform at the domestic level.35 Finally, the United States continues to support the expansion of a liberal global economy through the international financial institutions that provide aid and loans to developing economies. In its institutional influence at the IMF and the World Bank, US preferences about domestic economic arrangements in developing economies are reinforced. By ensuring that developing economies adopt broadly liberal paths to growth, the existing structures of the global economy—and with them the inbuilt structural advantages of the United States—are also reinforced. Of course in recent years, the ability to sell this model, which travels under the label of the Washington Consensus, has become increasingly challenged by the success of many Asian economies that have not accepted these principles, as well as the difficulties faced by most developed liberal economies.36 We tend to think of the US global military and economic role as having a much longer lineage than the promotion of democracy and human rights as a key policy objective. Only after the Cold War’s end, so the thinking goes, did this become an important dimension of US foreign policy. But as Tony Smith points out, the promotion of democracy and efforts to advance liberal values and structures of domestic governance have a longer history than is often recognized.37 Made most famous by Woodrow Wilson’s ultimately failed aim to make the world safe for democracy, US policy has long had a normative dimension, indeed one that could at times be described as evangelical. The promotion of democracy was used to fend off European imperialism, it was a key part of the conflict against fascism, and it was a central component of the Cold War contest with Soviet-led communism.38 However, following what

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Samuel Huntington has described as the “third wave” of democratization that began in Portugal in 1974, and rolled around the developing world culminating in the democratic transitions in the former Warsaw Pact states and the Soviet Union, international circumstances became more conducive to the promotion of democracy and the prosecution of liberal human rights regimes.39 In the post–Cold War period, US policymakers have sought to place the expansion of democracy and the broader pursuit of a liberal basis for international society at the center of their foreign policy.40 This has included efforts to increase the number of countries under broadly liberal democratic systems of government and to reinforce and support fledgling democracies, as well as the active advancement of liberal principles of human rights. Perhaps the most notable feature of this strand of US foreign policy is the way in which elites clearly see the promotion of rights as not only about high-minded ideals, but about core interests. The view that the expansion of a liberal order, both domestically and internationally, is seen as simultaneously serving US ideals and its interests is shared by elites in both political parties as well as in the bureaucracies. It is clearly expressed by Madeleine Albright, who described the promotion of trade, investment, and human rights in Africa as “not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”41 Likewise, it is reflected by George W. Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy, which was to be “based on a distinctly American internationalism that reflects the union of our values and our national interests.”42 For some, the active advancement of democracy in the post–Cold War period was seen to be a grand strategic idea, akin to containment, around which foreign policy could be organized, given the sudden removal of the Soviet threat.43 While democracy promotion did not become such a fundamental organizing principle, it has nonetheless been seen as a core aim of every administration since the end of the Cold War. Indeed, in each National Security Strategy published by successive administrations, the expansion of democracy and the defense of human rights has been unequivocally presented as a core national interest and a vital means for the United States to achieve its security goals. In 1996 the Clinton administration made the expansion of democracy a fundamental security objective. The National Security Strategy report clearly states that “all of America’s strategic interests . . . are served by enlarging the community of democratic and free-market nations.”44 George W. Bush’s statement of 2002 reiterated this core aim: “We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world.”45 The Obama administration’s statement of 2010 declares: “The United States supports the expansion of democracy and human rights abroad because governments that respect these values are more just, peaceful, and legitimate. We also do so because their success abroad fosters an environment that supports America’s national interests.”46 This represents a strong degree of continuity, at least in underlying intentions, across a substan-

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tial period. While perhaps not pursued as thoroughly as the other two strands, it is not just overblown rhetoric. The bureaucratic and diplomatic advancement of democracy and human rights is coordinated by the Department of State, presently in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, under the supervision of the undersecretary for Democracy and Global Affairs. Here democracy promotion involves a range of activities, from the production of democracy and human rights reports intended to put pressure on countries that fall short of US standards to the support of new democracies through training, aid, and confidence building through election monitoring, and bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. It also includes the use of economic sanctions. Of course, this is by no means the only sphere of democracy promotion, with covert action as well as military force used to advance and protect democratic processes, most obviously in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a number of cases during the post–Cold War period, the United States has used force to try to prevent gross human rights violations. Military interventions in Haiti, Somalia, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia were driven, in the main, by this goal, and it was crucial to the diplomacy surrounding it and to the logistics of the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) mission. The new interventionism of the 1990s was in many respects a US project, both in the sense that it was the only military force practically capable of undertaking such actions, but also in the sense that the United States played the decisive diplomatic role in almost every case. Yet as many critics point out, the United States has regularly failed to live up to its rhetorical commitment to democracy promotion and the support of human rights. Whether in turning a blind eye to human rights abuses in China or actively supporting authoritarian regimes, such as in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, US policy in this strand is at its most variable in the location and consistency of application. US involvement in humanitarian intervention was never motivated purely by the desire to protect human rights; a broader set of strategic interests were always bound up in the decision. The failure of the United States to act in reaction to the genocide in Rwanda because of an absence of strategic imperative was an infamous example of this. Equally, US intolerance of the democratic election of Hamas in Palestinian elections in 2006, as well as its willingness to prop up the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the early part of this decade, are only the most obvious examples of what the critics call inconsistent application of principles—or what could be more accurately described as the lesser premium put on principle when weighed against other considerations. Of the three main strands of US policy, this latter is the lowest priority in the sense that if it conflicts with the aims of the other two, then the requirements of those goals will prevail. In the three main strands of its foreign policy, the strategic, the economic, and the normative, the United States has sought to underline and reinforce its advantages in the international system. Its approach to doing so, in many

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ways, was at the heart of the Cold War, and yet in the absence of a Soviet menace, or indeed any other menace, these foundational components of US policy have, in essence, been continued. Global military superiority, the advancement of economic predominance and its structural preconditions, and the expansion of a liberal basis to international order have been the core hallmarks of the US global role. In short, as Walt puts it, “the central focus of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been to consolidate and where possible to enhance its pre-eminent position.”47 US determination to advance its global interests in this way (and not, for example, to dramatically reduce its military spending or trim its ideological sails) has had important implications for international order. Yet in the academic literature, there is no consensus as to how best to characterize this role and what it means for the international system. Has the US global posture turned it into some kind of postmodern empire, or has the US pursuit of a self-conscious policy of primacy produced a unipolar world? For the concerns of this book, what does the conduct of the United States tell us about being a great power and the character of great power managerialism in contemporary world politics?

What Kind of Power? What we call the United States matters. Not only because of the rhetorical use to which terms can be put—many clearly relish associating the United States with the idea of empire because of its unpleasant connotations—but because the various attributes that are collectively brought together under the chosen label say important things not only about the United States as an international actor but also about the nature of the international system. If one were to conclude that the United States is some kind of postmodern empire, then it would follow that the basic structure of the international system is not that which it is usually thought to be. Equally, it follows that understanding the particular character of this most important power is vital because its behavior is of consequence to all the members of international society, and how they understand the United States to be behaving will shape their strategic choices. For the purposes of this book, characterizing US behavior is important because it can inform our sense of what remains of great power managerialism, given the difficulties with which it is confronted, and more broadly what it means to be powerful in the current order. It is not surprising that the unparalleled concentration of economic wealth and the bristling expanse of military might and diplomatic heft enjoyed by the United States have generated a considerable debate as to how to make sense of US circumstances and what it might mean for the rest of the world. While this debate is wide-ranging and involves everything from detailed scholarly assessments in book-length monographs to op-eds in magazines and newspa-

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pers, the argument can appear to lack shape. In broad terms, however, the argument turns around three basic concepts: Is the current position of the United States best understood as a form of empire, hegemony, or some form of hitherto unexperienced unipolarity? These will be considered in turn. Calling the United States an empire has a long history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States had an unarguably imperial foreign policy that was most obvious in the Pacific. It forced open Japan and seized the Philippines in 1898 (which remained a US colony until 1945) as well as a swag of other islands including the Hawaiian chain. Following the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, however, US foreign policy turned its back on explicit forms of imperialism, actively supporting the breakup of European empires in the wake of World War II. During the Cold War, however, left-wing critics saw US action in Vietnam, Central America, or the Middle East as evidence of an imperialism starkly at odds with US policymakers’ selfimage of a valiant republic fighting against a totalitarian menace. The US global military role and its predominant place in the international economy during the Cold War was seen by some as a kind of empire, though subtle and perhaps even more pernicious precisely because it did not involve the formal trappings of nineteenth-century direct imperial domination. In recent years, the idea that the current US condition can or should be described as empire has become an important part of the debate about US foreign policy and the broader structures of the international system. It is particularly notable that this discussion is not only the purview of the usual left-wing suspects but involves scholars and pundits from across the analytic and political spectrum. Arguments about the United States and empire became sharpened under the George W. Bush presidency and most particularly as a result of the foreign policy of his first term. This period prompted a wide range of debates in scholarly journals and the popular press due, in the main, to the quite remarkable degree of self-confidence that the administration exuded about its ability to wield US power to reorganize the world for the better.48 One strand of the debate argued that the United States had become an empire and that this was of benefit both to US interests and the world more generally.49 Using a rather rose-tinted interpretation of British imperialism as an analogy, Niall Ferguson argues that the international system and indeed the plight of peoples around the world would be improved if the United States explicitly advanced an imperial foreign policy.50 For him, it is the unwillingness to embrace this approach, essentially a kind of denial, that has led to current US global difficulties. A second group also supports the idea of US empire but from a rather different political perspective. Here neoconservatives argue that an imperial foreign policy is the only means by which the United States and the world can be made safe from the complex transnational challenges of the twenty-first century.51 From this perspective, only a confident and assertive expansion of US military power across the globe can deal with the profound problems of domestic gov-

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ernance in so many states and societies that are the source of threats to the peace. A confident expression of US power will make the world a safer place, argue these writers. Then there are those whom Paul MacDonald describes as imperial critics.52 This group asserts that the United States is behaving like a modern empire and that this is of considerable detriment to the world, as well as to US interests. This includes both Marxists, who argue that the United States represents a new form of capitalist-fueled imperialism using military force to consolidate economic power, as well as more historically and sociologically minded critics.53 Michael Mann argues that US policy is unquestionably imperial in its attempt to exert force to advance its goals. But in so doing, he argues, it has misunderstood what made empires possible in the past and failed to realize that imperial strategies will not work in the twenty-first century.54 In a different vein, Andrew Bacevich argues that the policies of the Bush administration have not significantly broken with their predecessors in substance. He claims that the central purpose of US policy since 1990 has been “to preserve, and where feasible and conducive to American interests, to expand an American imperium.”55 The empire is an attempt to make the world in the image of the United States. It is of course an empire of openness—one of open markets, borders, and financial systems—but an empire, nonetheless, and one that rests on US military dominion and ideational hegemony. Then there are those who turn to empire not out of positive or negative political or strategic assessment but because they argue that nothing else quite captures the character of US power in the current order. Michael Cox argues that ideas like hegemony or superpower do not convey the extent to which the United States is able to “fashion outcomes to its own liking under contemporary conditions.”56 From this point of view, US military, cultural, and economic predominance, the policies it deploys to advance its interests, and its sheer weight make it an imperial power. It is an empire made possible by the construction of a set of informal relations that extend its influence across the international system. Yet while arguments about empire have much to recommend them—they force us to grapple with the structural implications of the global imbalance of power and remind us that ideas about the forms of power matter—ultimately, the notion of the United States as empire is unsatisfactory. This derives from the analytic looseness of the idea of empire used in much of the literature, the lack of fit between the category of empire and forms of US power, and the way in which the capacity of the United States to shape outcomes is often overstated by those who describe it in these terms. The problem of category is significant, and it is telling that those who seek to describe the United States as an empire have to qualify the historical experience quite significantly to overcome the clear absence of territorial control that the US exerts and the (at best) informal nature of its influence. For the notion of empire to have analytic salience, the label needs to convey particular political characteristics that go

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beyond the vagaries of dominance or influence. Notwithstanding MacDonald’s point that, historically, European empires exercised control with quite different levels of formality and with wildly differing degrees of success, empires, as distinct political forms, involve a range of attributes that the United States palpably does not have.57 As Jack Donnelly notes, an empire is “an extensive polity incorporating previously independent units ruled by a dominant central authority.”58 When using the term empire one is indicating the integration of once-distinct political bodies, whether tribes, kingdoms, or city-states, into a single political space over which authority is formally exercised by a single, often physically distant, entity. Empire entails the explicit domination of peoples by a centralized foreign entity. As Raymond Aron puts it, the idea of empire “places the emphasis either on territorial extent or moral dimension or else on the diversity of the persons or groups of persons subject to one and the same rule.”59 The informal exercise of influence through practices such as free trade or norms of human rights that are said to be signs of US imperium, however influential they may be on other states and societies, is not empire. Indeed, the very different ways in which such ideas are exercised, even by those very closely associated with the United States, is testimony to the shallowness of purported imperial dominance. The other significant problem with the description of the United States as an empire is that it assumes a far greater ability to exercise power and authority than the United States in fact enjoys. All states face limits, and the United States, while having fewer limits than most, clearly has very distinct constraints on its ability to shape outcomes in its favor.60 Whether one looks to the strategic realm and the clear difficulties the United States has and continues to face in achieving its desired policy goals in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, or Israel, or the fact that the United States depends on Japan and China to fund its very substantial deficits, it is hard to square the notion of domination and the exercise of authority of an empire with the contemporary US global role. Clearly, the United States is not a nation-state like any other; but an empire— understood as a political form that integrates once-distinct polities under the banner of a central authority with a disproportionate ability to get its own way—it most clearly is not. Other scholars avoid the idea of empire and instead argue that US global predominance is that of a hegemonic power. The notion of hegemony in international relations scholarship covers a range of different formulations, from the neo-Gramscian approach pioneered by Robert Cox to the liberal variant of Keohane’s liberal institutionalism. In trying to capture the structural characteristics of the United States, it is appealing because it is a concept that draws together both military and economic forms of power, as well as other ideational and normative dimensions, to explain the way in which outcomes in international relations are driven. Michael Mastanduno argues that a hegemonic power is one that has preponderant military power, one that can shape

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outcomes related to its core interests, and is able to act largely with the consent of the lesser powers in the system.61 In a slight variation, one that focuses primarily on the US role in East Asia, Peter Van Ness argues that US military and economic power have produced a hegemonic order in which anarchy is not the dominant structural feature. Hegemony is a function of economic and political primacy that is managed through a combination of military force and softer forms of state power.62 A third view sees hegemony as the use of preponderant military and economic power in indirect ways to shape specific outcomes, as well as the broader system, in one’s favor.63 While from time to time military power is necessary to back up a claim, hegemony depicts the circumstances in which the preponderant power is able to get what it wants without having to deploy explicitly coercive means. The depiction of hegemony shares a key problem with claims about empire, that is, that US concentrations of political, economic, and cultural power do not lead to preferred outcomes on a consistent basis and particularly not in areas of high priority (such as North Korea, Israel, or Afghanistan). If hegemony is defined by a capacity to shape outcomes in one’s favor, then the argument is hard to sustain in the light of recent events. Moreover, the indeterminacy of “shaping” events is rather underwhelming given the weighty expectations of hegemony. If the United States were a hegemon, surely it would be able to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of one of the poorest countries in the world. Furthermore, a hegemonic power would surely not be as dependent on foreign credit and cheap manufactured goods as the United States is today. An international system dominated by a hegemonic power would not have had its financial networks virtually frozen by dubious banking behavior within the hegemon itself. In spite of its manifest military power and continued economic clout, the idea that the contemporary international system entails an imperial dominance or even hegemonic influence of the United States rings increasingly hollow. Picking up on this theme, Ikenberry argues that the current order “is not empire, it is an American-led democratic political order that has no name or historical antecedent.”64 If empire and hegemony are ultimately unsatisfactory, what is the best way to characterize US power in contemporary international society? Instead of the somewhat unsatisfying ideas of empire and hegemony, there is a third way of characterizing the kind of global role that the United States has played, and which is of particular relevance to the ideas explored in this book. Since 1945 US grand strategy has not been imperial or hegemonic but rather it has shown all the hallmarks of pursuing a policy in line with the precepts of great power managerialism. It is of the highest military and economic standing, it has formally and substantively arrogated to itself special responsibilities, it thinks of its interests and those of the liberal international order as coterminous, and it is recognized (if often begrudgingly) as having a special place in the system by virtually every member of international society.

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Indeed, much of the criticism about US foreign policy, whether from left or right, reveals this sentiment. Many criticize the United States for being, variously, too interventionist, too hypocritical, too unresponsive, or insufficiently focused on its own concerns. Few contest the idea that the United States has a special role to play in the world; rather, argument primarily turns on how it is that the United States ought to behave. For most of the twentieth century, the United States provided diplomatic and strategic leadership to the international system, it provided order by managing relations with other major powers, it created and underwrote a raft of institutional mechanisms intended to stabilize international economic relations, and it maintained the strategic balance in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Whether self-conscious of the idea of great power management or not, it is clear that in substance, US grand strategy was informed by the view that it had to underwrite the international order, otherwise it would pay a very heavy price. Indeed, an axiom among foreign policy elites in Washington is that the period between the two world wars was so unstable precisely because the United States was unwilling to shoulder such a burden. During the Cold War, while the great power managerialism envisioned by the United Nations did not transpire, the United States carried out an orderproducing role nonetheless. It managed its spheres of influence—providing leadership and discipline within its bloc—it largely respected the Soviet sphere, and it established mechanisms to manage its relations with the Soviet Union so as to avoid systemic crises. These mechanisms included a wide array of measures such as nuclear discipline, arms inspection regimes, codes of conduct, and crisis management processes that all derived from the recognition of the necessity of managing great power relations. This was not only because of the terrifying prospect of nuclear war, but also because of the broader systemic benefits that derived from generally stable great power relations. Problems emerged in this system, however, not only due to its inherent complexities, but also because of its scale. The prototypical order, Europe’s international system of the nineteenth century, had only operated among European states. As European empires unraveled, sovereignty and statehood were taken up with great enthusiasm, and the modern international system became properly global. This meant that, for the first time, the mechanisms of international order were operating on the largest possible stage. Being a great power in the twentieth century gave greater influence than ever before, but it had become significantly more expensive and much more complex than in the past. Describing the United States as a classical great power during the Cold War period should not be especially controversial. But after the Soviet collapse, things became rather less clear. The defeat of its rival and its rapid disappearance from the international stage left the United States alone. Many thought that in such circumstances the United States might once again turn inward and, in the grip of a nasty recession in the early 1990s, a rapid decline

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in influence appeared to be a real prospect. Through that decade, however, the US economy underwent a remarkable period of expansion and, by the turn of the century, the United States was alone atop the summit of global influence, leaving scholars and pundits to ponder the possibilities of empire and hegemony. Yet, as detailed above, the US global role after the Cold War essentially continued many of the basic features of the post-1945 approach to its role in the international system. That is, the United States continued to see itself as playing an order-creating role. In each of the three main strands of its foreign policy—military predominance, the support for a relatively open capitalist economic system, and the promotion of liberal values of democracy and human rights—one can discern not just the advance of a narrow conception of US interests but a broader ambition to foster a particular conception of international order. The United States sought to do so not only because it is a political and economic setting that serves its interests well, but because the United States perceives that the stability of the system is intimately bound up with its own interests. In this sense US policy is, wittingly or not, closely following the core principles of great power managerialism. What are the implications of characterizing the United States as having a great power grand strategy? First, while the US clearly benefits from its global role, it contributes disproportionately to the price of maintaining international order, while others, especially wealthy Western states and societies, benefit at much lower cost to themselves. This means that the current order is contingent on US willingness to continue to pay this price. Given the long-term economic problems of the United States—the fiscal deficit is thought by most economists to be unsustainable without significant changes to taxation and expenditure practices—one cannot assume that this willingness to underwrite international order will remain indefinitely. Second, in any system in which great powers promote order, the rest of international society is highly dependent on the domestic circumstances within the great powers. It has become particularly clear since the end of the Cold War just how dependent the rest of the world is on the domestic political and economic circumstances of the United States. Whether it is the global interest in US elections or the hyperactivity of foreign lobbyists seeking to shape US thinking and policy, one can observe just some of the ways in which the rest of the world responds to these circumstances. Third, historically, the order produced by great powers has generally been a function not only of the broader public goods that great powers provide through, for example, crisis management and the control of spheres of influence, but also of the stabilizing effect that great powers have on one another. It is here that US maintenance of a great power grand strategy is particularly intriguing. Since 1991, the United States has lacked any peers in international society. Central to the way great powers have stabilized the international system was forging a basic consensus among the group as to the minimal values that the international order should protect and advance. Without peer, a great

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power has considerable temptation to try to make more of the world more like itself and to try, alone, to foster values that the international order reflects and sustains. In a global international system, this is no small task. The current standing of the United States in the international system is unusual. It is a great power understood as one that is the militarily most important as well as one that underwrites international public goods, that protects core values of the system, and that thinks of its interests and the system’s as fundamentally linked. It is in many ways the greatest great power ever seen. But it is also alone. While other powers have the trappings of greatness— Great Britain is a member of the UNSC and Russia has a substantial nuclear arsenal—neither they nor any other power is in a position to undertake the provision of such public goods (either materially or politically), and none thinks of its interests in the global terms necessary to be a great power in the current era. For a lone great power, life is necessarily complex. On the one hand, there is considerable opportunity to expand one’s influence, advance one’s interests, and more broadly shape international life in one’s favor. On the other, life is lonely at the top. No other powers are able to share or interested in sharing the burden of leadership, and the political, strategic, and economic cost of great power policies is immense. Indeed, the price is proving almost too high for even the richest and most powerful entity the world has ever seen. The selfimposed challenges for the United States are underwriting international economic institutions, keeping the arteries of international trade open, maintaining strategic balances in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and dealing with crises such as the Arab-Israeli dispute, nuclear proliferation, or the Haiti earthquake, all at the same time. While the Bush administration actively sought to ensure no other power was a peer to the United States, there must be moments when US diplomats and politicians wish that other states could carry at least some of the burden. In the grumbling about NATO’s inability to prosecute the 2011 intervention in Libya without very substantial US input, one sees only the most recent expression of this.65

Singularity and the Great Power Role That the international system only has one state that is of the highest standing is clear. What this means, however, for the structure and context of world politics is anything but. In this final section of the chapter, I assesses what a world of one great power means for the circumstances of world politics, what it means for the great power role, and in particular the proposition that great power managerialism is not possible when the world has only one such entity. The idea of a single great power is, for some, a definitional nonstarter. Writing in the dying days of détente, Hedley Bull considered the possibility of

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the United States as a lone great power and quickly dismissed it: “If the US were indeed the single dominant power, it could no longer be called a great power or superpower.”66 He does so because from his perspective the concept is necessarily plural. For Bull, a great power is a member of a group of equals, and one cannot have a group of one. The point is not only a semantic one. Rather, it relates to the functional role played by these kinds of states, and that is something that historically requires multiples, since in the minimalist conception, they impart order by managing their own relations. They cannot do this if there is no “they.” But for the more active conception of great power managerialism, does a unipolar system automatically make this approach to fostering order impossible? To begin, it is useful to consider the broader structural circumstances of a world in which power is highly concentrated in one place. The United States appears to pursue a role in the world that is in keeping with the broader conception of the great power. It seeks to protect and advance a set of values in the system, it conceives of its interests and the system as intimately bound together, and it acts globally on this belief. Yet this approach has only been thought to be capable of producing order in the system when it is conducted by a group of great powers. The provision of order by the great powers is based on three foundations. First, there is a shared view among the group as to the values that the system protects. This enhances the prospects that the values will be accepted and enhances the legitimacy of the order. Even if the order reflects an oligopoly, this is politically more reliable than monopoly provision. Second, the great powers force a degree of mutual restraint on one another. Of course, this restraint is not universally effective, but it increases the care with which the powerful exercise their influence. Third, the burden of managing order is shared across the group, reducing the costs of providing international order to any one state. When there is only one great power, then these foundational propositions are called into question. Without multiple great powers, there are serious questions about the viability of the great power role being able to provide order to the system more generally. More directly, for the lone great power there is a risk that by failing to recognize the structural changes wrought by the absence of peers, policy choices in this new context can produce unexpected outcomes. There is the risk that the lone great power acts in ways that are not order promoting due to a misplaced belief about the fit between that power’s interests and those of the system. The current order is organized around the principle of great power management, and the constitutional structure of the system spells this out. It was premised on the belief that the great powers would manage the system by creating a context in which there was consensus on forms of legitimate and illegitimate action and that the great powers would act cooperatively to manage disputes when they arose. Central to this idea was the belief that the group would keep one another in check. While this would not rule out conflict, it put

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a high price on moving outside the consensus. Without multiple great powers, the price for not building consensus and for advancing a narrower conception of interests and values internationally is greatly reduced. This is not necessarily destabilizing; if the lone power is well resourced, diplomatically adept, and knows how to sell such activity, then there is no inherent reason why a dominant power’s efforts to advance its interests and values across the system would undermine order. But it is much more difficult to accomplish than if it is part of a larger endeavor. Equally, it is also possible that the preeminent power can convince lesser powers to buy into aspects of managerialism, using them to help defray the cost of maintaining and advancing order. This would entail an extra diplomatic imposition on the lone power; it would also be more costly than traditional great power managerialism and less likely to produce a stable order. While it appears possible for great power managerialism to function under conditions of unipolarity, it is not necessarily the case that it is plausible. Indeed, it would appear to be rather difficult to achieve. Great power managerialism depends on the powers thinking of their interests and the system’s as intimately linked. When there is only one power, then politically managing the consequences of this relationship becomes very difficult. It is difficult because not only is the burden of underwriting the order unsustainable, but when a single great power thinks of its interests and the system’s as fused, this has the potential to be destabilizing because it becomes politically difficult to separate great power action in the name of the system from action in pursuit of its own narrow interests. Such a circumstance is likely to prompt genuine grievances among the lesser powers, to say nothing of the resentment and resistance bred by its position of unrivaled dominance. In short, a singular great power can have, with great diplomatic skill and considerable investment, the potential to make managerialism work. However, when this difficulty is added to the range of other challenges to the principle detailed in the previous chapter, the likelihood of practically making this function is vanishingly small. One of the most striking features of the current order is the absence of a significant ideological or geopolitical challenge to the new position of the United States as a sole great power. It is not only those who put a particular emphasis on the classical notion of the order-producing role of the great powers who feel that the current distribution of power in the international system represents a significant change to the basic setting of world politics, one that is potentially less stable than the previous setting. For example, Robert Jervis argues that the condition of unipolarity dramatically changes the structural setting in world politics by recalibrating the policy landscape and thus changing the returns that states can expect on particular policy choices. This goes both for the dominant power and the rest.67 He notes that “regime and leadership characteristics are likely to matter more in unipolarity than other systems because of the weakness of external constraints.”68 In short, what goes on

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within the dominant power matters enormously for the rest. Other scholars support this view, pointing out that, in the absence of strategic constraint, not only is ideology allowed a freer rein in foreign policy making, in the United States it has increased the executive’s freedom of action.69 The international context reduces the constraints on US foreign policy making. It also increases the international influence of US domestic politics. In an obvious sense, this means that US elections and other developments in US society are of great importance to the rest of the world. But it also reminds us that US predominance is a function of specific domestic choices, choices that could change in the future. Contrary to those who feel that there is some internationalist evangelical streak in the US psyche, there is nothing inevitable about the international system having a dominant power, nor that the United States will always be compelled to make the world in its own image. The international system provides the context, but domestic circumstances and the nature and character of its elites and their perceptions are crucial to determining the precise way in which dominance emerges and is played out. In many respects, the global role of the United States since the collapse of the Soviet Union confirms the view sketched out in the previous chapter, that great power management is not especially good at providing order to a highly complex international system. Moreover, it gives good reason to think that, by pursuing a great power approach in the absence of peers, the United States is causing itself and the system considerable difficulties. While its pursuit of a global great power role has varied in application over the past twenty years, the explicit attempt by the United States to make the world more like itself (as carried out by the George W. Bush administration), both to secure its own interests and to improve the world, was the consequence of a great power strategy being pursued without the constraints of peers. One can begin to draw a number of tentative conclusions about the implications of following a great power grand strategy under contemporary circumstances. First, the fiscal and political costs of the great power role are very high, and not only because of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the returns, in terms of influence and outcomes that favor US preferences, have recently begun to diminish. Whether in the diplomatic humiliation at Copenhagen, the strategic impasse in Afghanistan, the creation of an Iranian proxy in Iraq, or the inability to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of North Korea, the return on the great power grand strategy seems often to be fairly meager. This is both a function of specific policy choices—invading Iraq was, in hindsight, a poor decision—but also the increasingly bad fit between a great power grand strategy and many of the social, economic, and material challenges of contemporary world politics. For example, if democracy is seen as a core security interest to the United States, it is not clear how the great power strategy, with its very strong emphasis on military forms of power, can advance this goal in any meaningful sense. Second, the global great power role

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adopted by the United States will continue to breed resentment and grievance against it. Demagogues like Chavez and Ahmadinejad find US strategy of particular utility, and such sentiments not only make achieving US goals through a great power approach more difficult, they are likely to constrain the orderproducing benefits of its global role as well. For example, the US military presence in South Korea has been vital to maintaining East Asia’s strategic balance, yet growing resentment against US bases is contributing to a slight reduction in the confidence regional powers take from its forward military presence. Third, as the limits to US power and influence become clear, and as emerging powers become more confident and assertive, the international order is becoming somewhat less stable than in the past. The instability and broader perception that world politics is in a state of flux is testimony not only to the changing times, but also to the inability of US predominance to maintain a stable international order under contemporary conditions. That said, one must leaven this pessimistic analysis with the recognition that while the US solo attempt to make great power managerialism work faces very real problems, the system is not on the verge of collapse. Moreover, there are no meaningful challengers to the current order. Even aspirant major powers such as China are largely content with the structural status quo. As such, provided the United States is able to recruit lesser powers to help cover aspects of the management function, while its actions will produce a suboptimal outcome, there is little reason to think that it will degenerate to the point of systemic breakdown. Nonetheless, the approach to its global role is beginning to show the diminishing returns of a great power grand strategy for the United States. The declining utility of a great power approach is in part the consequence of there being no other great powers to help sustain the order. But it is also because the circumstances of contemporary world politics are increasingly out of step with the statist conception of power and influence, which lies at the heart of the great power role. Indeed, even in the unlikely event that new great powers emerge with whom the United States can make common cause, the judicious management by the powerful is unlikely to produce order in the twenty-first century. For the United States, there is a pressing need to recognize that the current difficulties it faces will pertain not only because of bad decisions by the Bush administration but because of changes in the structural circumstances of world politics. Domestically, this means that the United States needs to trim its sails in accordance with these conditions; internationally, it means that the institutional setting of world politics needs to be dramatically overhauled. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the current era is that in spite of the declining salience of the traditional great power role, emerging states are particularly interested in being recognized as having great power status. There is, however, no consensus as to what it means to be a great power, what that status implies, and how to have it recognized. If anything, the emerging

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powers each have very different views as to the sort of role to which they aspire, the extent to which they will help underwrite international order, and indeed, whether the United States will still have a part to play in the emerging world order. While US power has been the defining feature of contemporary international relations, it is plain that both the location and forms of power are changing. As such it is necessary to consider the range of emerging powers extant in the system and to assess what their development and behavior can tell us about the future prospects of great power managerialism.

Notes 1. Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire,” 609. 2. For example, see Jervis, “Unipolarity”; Donnelly, “Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy”; and Layne, “Unipolar Illusion.” 3. On the transformation of Soviet foreign policy, see Bisley, End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse, 74–104. 4. See, for example, Krauthammer, “Unipolar Moment.” 5. Markusen, “Dismantling the Cold War Economy.” 6. Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, 148–151. 7. Walt, Taming American Power, 29. 8. For example, Daalder and Lindsay, America Unbound. 9. This is most clearly illustrated in White House, National Security Strategy, 2010. 10. US expenditure was US$696.3 billion, while the global total was US$1,547.8 billion. US expenditure is just under 45 percent of the total. International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Military Balance, 2010, 22. 11. IISS, Military Balance, 2010: p. 31 (US); p. 399 (PRC); p. 359 (IND); and p. 222 (RUS). 12. All preceding data drawn from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, 2010. 13. Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Table 3.2 Outlays by Function and Subfunction, 1962–2015, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov /sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2011/assets. 14. IISS, Military Balance, 2010, 22. 15. Data drawn from SIPRI, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, 2010. 16. In 2009 there were around 170,000 involved in the Iraq theater and 59,000 in Afghanistan. Department of Defense, Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths. 17. There are approximately 80,000 troops regularly based in Europe, and around 60,000 in Asia. 18. With around 3,500 troops in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa combined. Department of Defense, Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths. 19. For a sophisticated articulation of this, see Goh, “Hierarchy and the Role of the United States in the East Asian Security Order.” 20. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Review of Maritime Transport, 2009.

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21. On this, see Pardesi et al., Energy and Security. 22. There are two supreme commanders in NATO, one in Europe and the other in the United States. Both are from the United States. 23. Smith, McGeary, and Reingold, “Diplomacy.” 24. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, North Atlantic Treaty. 25. For official information about this, see http://www.defense.gov /transformation/about_transformation.html. For an early assessment of this process, see Henry, “Defense Transformation and the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review.” 26. Such as the US interests section in Cuba. Information from the US State Department is available at http://www.usembassy.gov. 27. In addition to its embassy, the United States has three or more consulates in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Pakistan, Japan, and Russia. 28. Shane, “Official Reveals Budget for US Intelligence.” 29. Only France, Britain, Germany, China, and Russia spend this amount or more on their defense. 30. “War in the Fifth Domain,” The Economist. 31. This is clearly articulated in the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 2010, see particularly pp. 57–71. 32. Walt, Taming American Power, 40–61. 33. United States Trade Representative (USTR), 2010 Trade Policy Agenda and 2009 Annual Report, 123–135. 34. On contemporary PTA objectives of the United States, see USTR, 2010 Trade Policy Agenda, 1–15, especially pp. 10–11. 35. For example, see “G20 Statement on Strengthening Financial System,” Financial Times, September 5, 2009, http://www.ft.com/. 36. On this generally, see Beeson, “There Are Alternatives.” 37. Smith, America’s Mission. 38. Smith, “National Security Liberalism and American Foreign Policy.” 39. Huntington, Third Wave. 40. For a reflection on this in the 1990s, see Cox, Inoguchi, and Ikenberry, eds., American Democracy Promotion. 41. Cited in Smith, “National Security Liberalism and American Foreign Policy,” 85. 42. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 1. 43. See, generally, Cox, US Foreign Policy After the Cold War. 44. White House, National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, text available online at http://www.fas.org. 45. White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, ii. 46. White House, National Security Strategy, 2010, 37. 47. Walt, Taming American Power, 40. 48. For examples of scholarly debates, see exchanges in Security Dialogue 35, no. 2 (2004); Review of International Studies 30, no. 4 (2004); and Millennium: Journal of International Studies 32, no. 1 (2003). 49. For a discussion of liberal views of empire, see Purdy, “Liberal Empire.” 50. Ferguson, Colossus.

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51. See, for example, Boot, “Case for American Empire”; and Kagan, “Benevolent Empire.” 52. MacDonald, “Those Who Forget Historiography Are Doomed to Republish It,” 49. 53. See, for example, Harvey, New Imperialism; and Callinicos, New Mandarins of American Power. For a broader discussion of these processes, see Colas and Saull, eds., War on Terror and the American “Empire” After the Cold War. 54. Mann, Incoherent Empire; see also Mann, “First Failed Empire of the Twenty-First Century.” Other critics include Kolko, Another Century of War; and Chalmers Johnston, Sorrows of Empire. 55. Bacevich, American Empire, 3. 56. Cox, “Empire’s Back in Town?” 57. MacDonald, “Those Who Forget Historiography Are Doomed to Republish It.” 58. Donnelly, “Sovereign Inequalities and Hierarchy in Anarchy,” 140. 59. Aron, Imperial Republic, 254. 60. For a discussion of this, see Halliday, World at 2000, 104–107. 61. Mastanduno, “Hegemonic Order, September 11, and the Consequences of the Bush Revolution.” 62. Van Ness, “Hegemony, Not Anarchy.” 63. For example, Nuechterlein, Defiant Superpower. 64. Ikenberry, “Liberalism and Empire,” 611. 65. “On Target,” The Economist, 59. 66. Bull, Anarchical Society, 194–195. 67. Jervis, “Unipolarity.” 68. Jervis, “Unipolarity,” 204. 69. Snyder, Shapiro, and Bloch-Elkon, “Free Hand Abroad, Divide and Rule at Home.”

7 The Impact of the Emerging Powers

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when the international system was unambiguously unipolar, debate among IR scholars, policymakers, and pundits raged as to the extent to which those circumstances would last, whether such conditions were liable to be peaceful, and whether the United States ought to try to sustain its predominance as a long-term strategy.1 At the time, the arguments between traditionalists, who saw the washout of the Cold War as a brief pause in the playing out of timeless patterns of great power rivalries, and those who perceived a new structure emerging in world politics were cast in hypothetical terms. Russia might get back on its feet; China’s economic reforms may allow for great power potential to be realized; if India would put its house in order, it might become a significant player. Nearly twenty years on from this debate, even though we still cannot say with any certainty what the structure of the international system in the twenty-first century will be, the distribution, and indeed the character, of power in world politics has changed sufficiently that the subjunctive seems increasingly unnecessary. In this final substantive chapter of the book, I will examine the emergence of new powers of global weight and the implications of this process for the preceding arguments. I will first consider the extent to which the growth in economic, military, and diplomatic influence of the emerging powers has affected the existing setting of world politics. I argue that the emerging powers have already had a discernible impact on the pattern of relations in spite of the fact that they all have a considerable way to travel to be considered states of the first rank. I then examine the prospects of the emerging powers and the likelihood that they will ever become great powers, considering the reasons for their growing international heft and the many internal weaknesses that present 141

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significant challenges for their development, as well as for their emerging international ambitions. While countries like India, China, and Russia are not short of ambition, they are unlikely to become great powers understood in the managerial sense that has been central to recent experience in international society. Finally, I assess the status of the great power role in light of these experiences. There is a temptation to think that the rise of emerging powers might signal the end of the anomaly of a unipolar international system and usher in circumstances in which the great power role may become more effective. I argue that this is unlikely to occur. The absence of new great powers is as much a result of the changed context of world politics as it is the domestic challenges of China, India, and the other emerging powers. Moreover, the absence of new great powers speaks to the problematic character of great power managerialism and the pressing need to rethink the constitutional structure of international society. There is a growing sense among scholars and policymakers that world politics is undergoing a profound shift in its structural circumstances. In public debate as well as in more scholarly reflection, many argue that Asia is becoming the center stage of international relations.2 With the epoch-shaping growth of China and India, as well as the success of the tiger economies, many believe that Asia will become the “epicenter of international affairs.”3 Russia’s hydrocarbon-fueled economic revival has emboldened its foreign policy, and the efforts of Brazil, South Africa, and even Turkey to play a leadership role on the international stage appears to further support the view that power and influence in international relations is moving away from its North Atlantic base. It thus seems increasingly unlikely that the historically unprecedented circumstance of US global predominance will last over the longer run. Indeed, an important source of this sense of change is the perception of its decline. The much-publicized story of President Obama’s embarrassment at Copenhagen, where the leaders of India, China, Brazil, and South Africa clubbed together (including a finger wagging by a Chinese official) to stymie an agreement, is thought by some to be only the most obvious sign of fading US power.4 Its declining share of global GDP, the recent recession, as well as problems in Afghanistan and Iraq are all symptoms of this long-term process. While US decline in absolute terms is likely to have been overstated—as it almost always has been in times of stress—the relative gap between it and the rest, and particularly the geographically and demographically well-endowed powers, does appear to be narrowing distinctly. Periods of power transition have historically been rather dangerous times. As realist scholars point out, international history can be written as a story of declining and emerging powers whose phases of predominance are punctuated by systemic conflict.5 The rivalry between Britain and Germany in the nineteenth century, and between Japan and Germany and the Allied powers, are thought to be typical of this trend. The astonishing rise of China presents a

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possible risk of this nasty historical trend being repeated on a devastating scale. Liberals argue, however, that if China can be integrated into a rulesbased, institution-managed international system, the worst outcomes can be avoided. However viewed, the international system and the broader circumstances of world politics are clearly in a period of transition. New centers of power are emerging, creating new networks of influence and new patterns of trade. Investment and aid are adding further complexity to many existing issues, such as Iran’s nuclear ambitions, development in Africa, and the Korean Peninsula. Countries like Brazil and India matter in shaping outcomes in world politics in ways that would have been almost unimaginable twenty years ago. What are the implications of these changes for the existing structures of the international system? And are circumstances likely to be more or less orderly as a result of power transition?

Unsettling the Old Order Although the end of the Cold War led to a set of geopolitical and ideological transformations, from the rewriting of maps to the discrediting of Soviet-style communism, the passing of that conflict did not bring about a new institutional setting for the international system. As detailed in Chapters 2 and 3, the process whereby the great power role became increasingly institutionalized was made possible by the broader trend in which the settlement of major international conflicts involved a substantive transformation of the constitutional structure of international society. This did not happen after 1991. While the Cold War lacked the visceral horrors of great power war, it was nonetheless the century’s third most significant conflict. Societies were on permanent war footings, military power hitherto unimagined was developed and stockpiled, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation scarred the psyches of people the world over, and its various conflicts took countless millions of lives. Yet unlike previous conflicts, there was no significant call to change the international setting in its aftermath. The victors appeared to think that the liberal order that had prevailed was universally appropriate and thus little needed to be changed in the institutions and organizing principles of international relations: the vanquished simply had to accept the terms of the dominant order, as they were not in a position to offer plausible alternatives. More broadly, there was no consideration that the radically changed circumstances of world politics in the 1990s, its geopolitics, most obviously, but also the economic context of accelerating globalization, might warrant something different from what had been created in 1945. Thus, the essential structure of the Western side of international society, and the institutions established to manage international order after World War II, persisted. The United Nations continued to sit at the center of a complex web of institutions and processes. The Bretton

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Woods institutions, albeit in somewhat retooled guise, retained their centrality to international economic relations and, as discussed in the previous chapter, the patterns of US power projection maintained their Cold War structure. Of course, there were some changes: NATO was expanded, and its organizational function changed in response to new circumstances; the UNSC began to broaden the kinds of crises to which it responded, and it expanded the range of issues that were thought to pose threats to international peace and stability; the long-running Uruguay Round finally gave birth to the WTO; and the European states consolidated their process of regional integration. But the basic institutional structure of international relations did not change to reflect the substantial social, political, and economic transformation brought about by the end of the Cold War. In the emergence of the new powers, and most particularly with the economic rise of China and India, we are beginning to see a series of developments that, while not utterly unseating the existing framework, present challenges to certain aspects of the dominant order. To be clear, the emergence of new powers does not, as yet, radically reconfigure world politics. The United States retains its position as the predominant power, the OECD states are still disproportionately affluent, and the United Nations, with its formalized system of great power management, is still at the center of a complex institutional effort to provide governance to the system of states. Yet their increased weight, as well as newfound confidence and affluence, are straining existing institutions, questioning established norms, and creating new networks of relations and new patterns of trade, investment, and aid. This is an important source of the sense of strategic flux in contemporary world politics and provides a glimpse of what the patterns of relations that will shape the coming century will look like. It also speaks directly to the question of the current and future prospects of great power managerialism as a load-bearing component of the international order. The Limits of the Old The emergence of a series of large and dynamic non-Western powers has served to highlight the anachronistic character of many key institutions in world politics. While non-Western states and societies have always been somewhat uncertain about the extent to which the post-1945 international order served their interests, in recent years the emerging powers’ growing confidence has shined a bright light on many of the creaking institutions of a North Atlantic–dominated international system. At the very least, the newly emerging powers are increasingly questioning the idea that an international order crafted by the Western powers is able to resolve long-standing problems of particular importance to these states. Indeed, there is a sense among many

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outside the West that the legacy of its dominance of the international system has a range of significant shortcomings. This is perhaps most obvious, and most particularly acute, in the area of climate change. The emerging powers, as well as the poorest states and societies, will feel the effects of climate change more acutely than will the rich, and they believe that the problem is largely a result of Western economic development. Emerging powers equally feel that those most responsible for climate change, and those most capable of paying to deal with the problem, are unwilling to meet their obligations.6 But climate change is only the most obvious example of the shortcomings of the existing order. There are other highprofile examples of how the current institutional order has failed: the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, with its obvious hypocrisies; the unwillingness of Europe and the United States to liberalize their agricultural markets; the skewed nature of the decisionmaking processes of the World Bank and other international financial institutions; the disproportionate influence of Western principles; and the inability of the UNSC to cope with any number of problems, most obviously the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.7 The emerging powers have not created these failures; instead, their rise has made the shortcomings of the existing order more plainly visible. The question of representation is central to the outdated character of many principal international institutions. Those present in key decisionmaking bodies reflect pivotal players of the old order, while the interests served by those organizations are likewise from another era. Participation in central decisionmaking bodies (such as the UNSC, the IMF, and World Bank boards) and the dominance of the EU and the US in the WTO and membership of the G7 (ostensibly the steering group of the global economy) are almost entirely the purview of the North Atlantic world. Of course, China is part of the UNSC, but that is all. The lack of representation means not simply that the legitimacy of these entities is increasingly undermined, it has also meant increasing difficulty in coping with the shifting interests, priorities, and challenges that emerging powers present. Whether it is the largely empty rhetoric of G7 pronouncements about fiscal imbalances or energy security, the ongoing failure of the WTO to conclude the current round of negotiations (it is sobering to reflect that there has been only one multilateral round of negotiations concluded in twenty-five years), or the IMF’s inability to define a clear role for itself (to say nothing of its credibility problems), unrepresentative institutions are clearly becoming less influential and thus less effective at providing order to the international system.8 There have been efforts to rectify aspects of this by, for example, changing the quota formula at the IMF and making the G-20 take on the old G7 steering committee function, but this remains in its infancy. In recent years, the problems in the institutional framework of international order have become clear in a number of forums. Perhaps the most glar-

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ing was the way in which the emerging powers clubbed together to prevent even a face-saving statement by the US president at the Copenhagen climate change summit. This represented both the newly found diplomatic confidence of countries like China, India, and Brazil as well as the manifest limits of multilateral frameworks dealing with complex transnational problems. If collective state action is required, a larger number of powerful and confident states that perceive of their interests in very different ways is only going to make this process harder. If one adds to this the historic sense of grievance that the emerging powers retain toward their experiences of Western domination, then using a multilateral process to resolve common problems becomes harder still. This basic problem—diverging interests, growing confidence, and competing conceptions of interests caused by the successes of emerging powers—is clearly evident in a range of forums, including key bodies such as the WTO and the IMF. It is not surprising, therefore, that in response to these problems some states are beginning to create new institutions and networks of influence. New Networks Efforts to reform aspects of the current order are under way—these include modifying IFI voting procedures, the creation of the G-20, and even discussion about expanding the membership of the UNSC—all of which reflect a realization of the broader need for change in the institutional setting of world politics.9 But more importantly, the emerging powers have already begun to create new diplomatic networks of influence, forging new institutions and more generally getting on with the business of advancing their interests in spite of the constraints imposed by the existing arrangements. BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) was a term coined originally within a Goldman Sachs report of 2001, but it referred to the four large emerging economies as a collective entity only for the purposes of economic analysis.10 Yet since first meeting regularly at the foreign minister level in 2006, the BRIC grouping appears intent on turning a neat acronym into genuine diplomatic clout. Following the regular foreign minister–level meetings, since 2009, leaders’ summits have been held, first in Yekaterinburg in Russia, and then in Brasilia in 2010.11 As holders of nearly 40 percent of the world’s foreign currency reserves, producers of nearly 20 percent of global GDP (and rising), responsible for around a third of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the home of a massive pool of relatively low-cost labor, the BRIC grouping has considerable collective weight. While the grouping has yet to determine its primary purpose—it is not intended to be a body for specific functional forms of cooperation, such as trade liberalization or standards harmonization—it is nonetheless a means for the four to coordinate foreign policy moves, to represent their interests more effectively at the international level, and where possible, use their collective weight to exert leverage. The body has considerable potential

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if coordination could improve—for example, its foreign exchange reserves could be parlayed into an alternative IMF at relatively low cost—and it has already begun advocating further IFI reform. The BRIC grouping is the best known of the emerging powers’ new networks and institutions, but it is by no means the only such entity. On the day before the BRIC summit of 2010, a second grouping, IBSA, held its fourth summit. India, Brazil, and South Africa created the grouping in 2003 and began to hold leaders’ summits in 2006 to advance South-South cooperation. The immediate impetus was to better reflect the interests of increasingly sophisticated emerging market economies at the multilateral level, in particular at WTO negotiations.12 The move reflected a degree of skepticism toward existing mechanisms, as well as the common interests that the three have as significant regional powers. They are all rapidly developing democracies, with significant natural and human resources and a demographic advantage of relatively youthful societies; but they also all struggle with longer-term social problems and a common history on the receiving end of European colonialism. The grouping is intended to foster ties between the three as well as to leverage their relations to common advantage at the global level. For example, at the 2010 summit, the leaders canvassed a vast array of issues, from support for reform of international governance mechanisms to the problems in Afghanistan, and even included a commitment to establish an IBSA satellite program.13 IBSA has diplomatic momentum and appears entrenched in the bureaucratic structures of the three powers. Moreover, the common domestic settings and shared interests at the global level give reason to think this grouping has significant potential over the long term. Another four-power grouping, but one with less internal coherence, fewer regular meetings, and only ad hoc coordination, is the BASIC grouping of China, Brazil, India, and South Africa—the four who flexed their diplomatic muscles at Copenhagen.14 BASIC has thus far proven to be an arrangement only for the purposes of multilateral negotiations and has not taken on an institutional form as IBSA has done. IBSA has wide-ranging initiatives (such as a development fund), working groups on areas of sectoral cooperation, and various forums promoting the exchange of ideas and broad-based societal cooperation. While BASIC may not have institutional or social depth, its diplomatic potential should not be overlooked, as the experience at Copenhagen made clear. In Asia there is a ferment of activity attempting to establish institutional mechanisms to advance a range of forms of cooperation, covering everything from free trade agreements and security to embryonic efforts to create an Asian community.15 Some of the existing bodies directly reflect the interests of non-Western emerging powers, most obviously the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its various offshoots.16 Others incorporate both developed and emerging powers, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic

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Cooperation (APEC).17 The emerging powers are creating mechanisms to advance their interests by means of other entities as well. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was established in 2001 as a successor to the Shanghai Five grouping. Led by China, it is intended to provide stability to China’s West Asian borderlands and more generally geopolitically to stabilize the former Soviet Central Asian regions. The entity is, in public, intended primarily to focus on combating the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. More recently, the members have sought to develop cooperation to try to fight terrorism and drug smuggling and to promote improved economic interaction. The SCO also represents something of a strategic gambit, especially by Russia and China, to reduce US influence in the region and to increase their collective global strategic weight.18 In recent summits, the SCO has presented common positions on a range of broader international issues, such as UN reform and economic development priorities.19 Moreover, given the extent of the hydrocarbon deposits belonging to the member nations, some in the West fear that it may transform itself into an OPEC-like cartel. While the SCO’s geopolitical potential can be overstated, especially by conservatives who see the specter of a new Warsaw Pact, the body has considerable diplomatic and strategic potential.20 Other interesting developments of this kind include the annual China-Africa summits, which were first held in October 2006, the G-20 developing-country grouping at the WTO, efforts by Turkey and Brazil to broker a deal on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and a host of bilateral arrangements among emerging powers, such as the Venezuela-Iran trade deals. In short, the emerging powers are not waiting for the world to come to them. They are taking advantage of the opportunities of globalization not only to improve their domestic circumstances but also to advance their interests in international society. Where the institutions of that society do not suit them, or are thought to be unhelpful or limiting, they are beginning to forge new networks of relations. While it may be premature to declare that this is making the West irrelevant or redundant, there is clearly an indication of a reconfiguration of the patterns of influence within international society.21 The forces driving these trends have been in train for some time. However, they have become much more apparent, and indeed more necessary, due to the ways in which the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 has undermined the dominant powers and revealed the limits of the current institutional setting. Norms and Modes of Governance The impact of new powers upon the normative framework of world politics has been mixed. On the one hand, these states greatly value some of the key existing norms, most particularly sovereignty; on the other hand, they are actively questioning some influential ideas such as the universality of liberal principles. Following the pattern established during postwar decolonization,

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the emerging powers have found core norms of international politics particularly amenable. That countries like India, China, Brazil, and Russia would be protective of the idea of sovereignty is hardly surprising, guaranteeing as it does their independence to chart their own course. Following from this, emerging powers strongly support the existing framework of international law, which puts states and sovereignty—and not peoples and their rights—at the center of proceedings, notwithstanding efforts by some to expand the moral content of sovereignty and aspects of law to make states more accountable. It is notable that in recent SCO declarations, for example, there is repeated insistence that international law be protected, that sovereignty be respected, and that interference in the internal affairs of states should be resisted.22 Indeed, the emerging states seem to be at the forefront of what might be described as a sovereignty revival. In the 1990s, when globalization seemed to have the inevitability of a force of nature, many scholars and pundits felt that sovereignty was on its last legs, unsuited as it was to a tightly interconnected world of transnational capital, goods, and information flows.23 Yet world politics has not played out as many had anticipated. While globalization shows no sign of ebbing as a social phenomenon, our understanding of what it is, and more precisely its implications for international relations, is becoming more nuanced.24 Rather than doing away with sovereignty, states, and nationalism, the processes driving globalization are often strengthening those very forces they had been thought naturally to undermine. States are reacting to transnational threats posed by terrorists by closing down some of the avenues that globalization had opened up; they are getting larger, taxing more, and intervening in the social affairs of citizens to a larger degree than in the past; and the social dislocation that these economic and political forces have brought about have stoked nationalism and xenophobia. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the emerging powers. Nationalism, state power, and a strong protection of sovereignty have been central to the domestic success of each key power. From China to Brazil, India, and Russia, the emerging powers are reinforcing central facets of a very traditional state-focused understanding of international relations. Just as thinking in the 1990s assumed that globalization was inevitable, there was a similarly complacent sentiment accepted by many that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the embrace of capitalism by China, as well as virtually all the rest of the former Soviet bloc economies, had irreversibly secured a liberal future for the world. With the flood of new democracies and the global spread of economic liberalism, many in the 1990s assumed that the future lay inevitably with the inherently superior social model of democratic systems of government and capitalist economic relations. But the experiences of the emerging powers during that time tell a rather different story. Many of the emerging powers have shown scant regard for the liberal nostrums that capitalism requires entirely free markets, utter deregulation, near total privati-

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zation, and open societies. Many, although not all, are authoritarian capitalist societies whose success presents a significant challenge to assumptions about social, political, and economic development. While capitalism, broadly construed, seems to be safely ensconced, democracy and liberal notions of human rights seem rather less secure. With the success of openly authoritarian states, the poor social and economic performance of many new democracies, and the practice of electoral authoritarianism—where often-sophisticated means are used to undermine democratic processes in spite of regular elections—the appeal and credibility of democracy is being challenged.25 This is particularly evident in China, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Russia, and Thailand. As Azar Gat points out, “Authoritarian capitalist states, today exemplified by China and Russia, appear to represent a viable alternative path to modernity, which in turn suggests that there is nothing inevitable about liberal democracy’s ultimate victory—or future dominance.”26 This is not to say that liberal democracy is in its death throes, but rather to emphasize that the increasing power and influence of non-Western (and most particularly non-democratic) states challenge the triumphalist sense of the universality of liberal systems of government.27 The success of these powers presents an alternative and distinctly illiberal model that other developing states may choose to follow. It also poses serious questions about efforts to inject international institutions with more liberal and democratic values. Of course, not all of the emerging powers are authoritarian; Brazil, India, and South Africa are democracies that greatly value the social function that elections, free association, free expression, and the rule of law perform at home and abroad. But one aspect that all the emerging powers share is a skepticism toward neoliberal prescriptions for economic governance. From the mid-1990s until quite recently, the World Bank, the IMF, and many developed economies’ aid agencies had adopted strongly liberal prescriptions for development—generally known by the shorthand Washington Consensus. The only way out of the economic mire, so this wisdom went, was to reduce government interference in the economy through liberalization, get the government out of the economy through deregulation and privatization, attract foreign investment with low taxes and a regulatory “light touch,” reduce the fiscal burden of government by reducing social spending, and orient the economy toward export promotion. All of this would harness the natural efficiencies of the economy and provide the best opportunity to plug it into the global economy. Yet while Western donors and IFIs insisted that those receiving their aid adopt these policies, China, India, and Brazil, as well as a host of smaller economies such as Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore, demonstrated that successful economic development could occur when states adopted rather different approaches. The experiences of these countries showed that, while interaction with the global economy has been vital, active state intervention in economic development has been crucial to domestic success.28 For example,

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China has very strict regulations on capital flows; significant tariff and nontariff barriers in key goods markets, including agriculture; and services are highly protected. Moreover, the state is a significant economic player through the control of large state-owned enterprises, as well as having huge influence over the banking sector. In short, China represents an economic success story that is the result of selective integration with the global economy, a large role for the state in the domestic economy, and heavy intervention in markets. India, Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Russia also show the effectiveness of not following the Washington Consensus, as did the Asian tigers, whose growth in the 1970s and 1980s was dependent on strong states playing a decisive role in economic activity. This sentiment has only been enhanced by the severe dent to the credibility of Western powers caused by the global financial crisis. While it may be too early to talk about a Beijing Consensus replacing the liberal principles of the 1990s, the success of China, India, Brazil, and others makes plain that free-market liberalism and democratic values will not go uncontested in the emerging world. One interesting development that illustrates these points, and provides some sense of the broader political and economic implications of the emergence of a new set of non-Western powers, lies in the realm of development assistance. Aid has traditionally been the preserve of the wealthy. Either in the individual policies of rich countries or in the development programs of the IFIs, wealthy and largely Western states dictated the terms on which development occurred. Recent years have witnessed an important new force in development whereby the emerging powers, and most particularly China, are now active participants in the development assistance game. Even India, for so long the world’s largest recipient of aid, is in the process of establishing an agency to distribute development aid.29 While it is not of the same scale as that of the largest donors, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, in 2007, China’s official development assistance (ODA) was thought to be around US$3 billion.30 This is similar to the amounts provided by mid-sized wealthy countries such as Australia and Denmark.31 In providing this level of assistance, China is not only demonstrating its growing economic and political influence, it is challenging how aid occurs and potentially undermining some of the political ambitions of existing aid programs. As James Reilly shows, while China adheres to some international practices in this area, it is also changing aspects of the development landscape by promoting new norms and approaches, particularly by emphasizing statist approaches to economic growth, demonstrating a priority on infrastructure investment, and promoting Chinese economic practices more generally. It is explicitly seeking to spread Chinese perspectives on development; it is unconcerned with questions of regime type, political conditionality, or governance measures; and it sees no problem with explicitly linking aid to strategic objectives.32 While this has been most widely observed in Africa, with high-profile aid programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, it is also occurring in

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the Asia-Pacific region with around half of its ODA going to Asian and Pacific countries. China’s aid policy is not yet turning the aid world entirely on its head; however, it is a snapshot of the ways in which emerging powers with different interests and values are not only beginning to change basic questions of power and strategic influence, but are also influencing developments on the ground in many countries and, albeit quietly, having an impact on the broader normative framework of world politics. The growth in economic and political influence of a set of large and increasingly confident powers is of considerable importance to the international system. We have not yet entered a properly multipolar world, nor have we fully left a world of US primacy, but the period of transition from the dominant order to something new is in train. In the unsettling of existing patterns of relations and institutions one can discern this transitory phase. For the purposes of this book, this process raises an important question: Are the emerging powers presently or likely ever to become great powers?

Becoming Great Powers? How Great? To begin, it is worth considering briefly the reasons why many observers and scholars feel that China, India, and Russia, as well as several other powers, are contenders for great power status. Material factors—most particularly the striking size, dynamism, and growth rates of their economies—provide the primary reasons for such speculation. While many were curious about the prospects of the emerging powers in the 1990s, most notably China, the now famous BRICs report issued by investment bank Goldman Sachs was crucial in catalyzing the sense that something quite substantial was afoot.33 It identified Brazil, Russia, India, and China as holding the key to the future prosperity of the global economy. In the report, the bank predicted that by 2035 they would collectively have a higher GDP than the G7.34 Although it was not the first piece of research pointing out that the global economic future was likely to dilute Western influence, it conveyed the scale and dynamism of these economies, and, perhaps most importantly, underlined the extent to which economic success in the developing world was a wide-ranging phenomenon. The future was no longer just going to be a Chinese story, events in world politics were going to be driven by the simultaneous economic growth of a number of large, complex, and strategically located economies. For market economists, this is thought to be an almost unarguably good thing: more markets, more consumers, and more investment opportunities due to astonishing growth rates. For students of world politics, however, the prospect of a number of powers of size and ambition, who also nurse historical grievances, emerging

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at roughly the same time, is seen as a rather more worrying proposition, as these are circumstances that have been extremely dangerous in the past. As many scholars have pointed out, the dominance of the West, and particularly the United States, is historically quite recent and relatively shortlived. For the majority of the past two thousand years of human history, the non-West, and particularly Asia, has accounted for around 60 percent of global wealth.35 The narrowing of the unusual gap that had opened up between the West and the rest is seen by some as the most important force driving changes in the structure of world politics.36 Certainly, the most striking feature of the emerging powers has been their economic performance. The most commonly cited factor here is the persistently higher GDP growth rates of the emerging powers, which has led to a steady increase in their share of total wealth. In 2008 emerging economies grew by 6.1 percent, while the advanced economies accounted for 0.5 percent; and in 2009, when the worst effects of the global financial crisis were being felt, emerging economies grew by 2.4 percent, while the advanced economies shrank by 3.2 percent.37 Nowhere has this been more evident than in the growth of the Chinese economy. The “four modernizations” launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 have created one of the most remarkable periods of economic growth in human history.38 Between 1975 and the turn of the millennium, China’s economic growth rate averaged just over 8 percent.39 By the early years of the twenty-first century, the Chinese economy had quadrupled in size during the preceding thirty years, and the government has made clear that it intends to quadruple it again by 2020.40 China is presently the world’s second largest economy; it is the world’s leading manufacturer of goods, manufacturing around two-thirds of the world’s electronic goods; and it produces more steel and cement than anyone else.41 China is now at the center of global supply chains and is fundamental to the economic prosperity of states and societies the world over. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009, it has become the key engine of growth in the global economy. The transformation from a badly underdeveloped, insular, and isolated society barely a generation ago to the wealthy and highly globalized society one sees in the wealthy seaboard cities could hardly be more striking. But it is not only the speed of China’s success that is remarkable, it is also the astonishing scale on which economic growth is occurring. Never before have so many people been moved out of poverty so rapidly. In many ways, China’s economic rise is the most successful example of human development in history.42 China’s economic growth has been the biggest story in the global economy and has tended to draw attention away from the other dramatic economic advances experienced outside the West. Although not yet of the same duration as China’s, India’s economic expansion since the late 1980s has shown that massive, complex societies with widespread poverty can nonetheless be transformed very rapidly. Since the early 1990s, the Indian economy has grown at

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around 6 percent each year.43 From 2003, this average has increased to around 8 percent as the reform process has continued.44 India has become a global player in service industry exports and is a key part of the global information technology industry. It is increasing its stock of inward foreign direct investments (FDI) and is experiencing striking productivity growth, most particularly in manufacturing.45 Indeed, analysts feel that India’s future economic prospects are almost as good as China’s, with some predicting that it will outstrip the GDP of most developed economies within a generation and that it is likely to become the world’s second largest economy by around 2050, relegating the United States to third place under this projection.46 Through the economic reforms of China and India, the life prospects of more than one-third of humanity have been dramatically improved. The economic success of China and India has prompted a global commodities boom that is most evident in the sustained high prices of oil and gas. This has in turn given opportunities to other emerging economies. The exploitation of its massive hydrocarbon deposits is the centerpiece of Russia’s economic revitalization. After a sustained period of decline following the Soviet collapse, GDP growth since 2000 has averaged 6.8 percent each year, with a peak growth rate of 8.1 percent in 2007.47 Russia has the world’s largest known and proven hydrocarbon reserves, as well as a host of other valuable commodities, such as gold and diamonds, which will help underpin strong economic growth over the longer term. The government maintains significant foreign currency reserves and has channeled oil revenues into a substantial sovereign wealth fund. The oil price boom has also dramatically increased the economic prospects of a number of other countries around the world, most notably the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf as well as Venezuela, Sudan, and Nigeria. Although these are not in the same league as the major emerging powers, their growth further fuels the sense of a widespread redistribution of power in world politics. Of the four BRIC economies, Brazil has been the least dynamic in its growth, with trade restrictions, infrastructure constraints, and education continuing to hamper the potential development of this South American giant. While growth has been strong, it remains well below the emerging-power norm, with levels of around 2.5 percent in the first term of President Lula da Silva and with the country cracking the 5 percent level only in 2008 (and then sliding back due to the broader financial crisis).48 But analysts remain cautiously optimistic that Brazil will make substantial economic strides.49 It will not be an Amazonian China, but its commodities, strong labor market, and returns on FDI, along with continued economic growth, make Brazil’s economic prospects very good. Increased prosperity is of course the central component, but it is by no means the only material factor increasing the importance of the emerging powers. Perhaps the most significant aspect has been the marked rise in defense

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expenditure undertaken by these powers as they have become more affluent. As with matters economic, it is China’s defense modernization program that has garnered the most attention. There is a good deal of uncertainty as to the PRC’s exact expenditure, due to the opacity of China’s defense budge and obscurity of useful comparative values due to currency difficulties.50 It is nonetheless clear that China is investing substantial amounts with a view to modernizing its military and increasing its ability to project force. This includes modernizing and expanding its missile fleet, including its strategic nuclear weapons; acquiring latest-generation supersonic jet fighters; modernizing and expanding its navy with a view to developing a “blue water” fleet complete with aircraft carriers; and moving the armed forces from a conscription basis to a volunteer-only service.51 That said, aggregate Chinese defense spending, even using the most expansive methods, is a small fraction of US spending and this is especially so when it is calculated on a per capita basis.52 So although China accounts for a growing proportion of Asia’s military spending, in 2008 it had the second largest (accounting for around 7 to 8 percent of the regional total), while spending by the United States was on the order of 77 percent.53 Like many other powers in Asia, India has been undertaking a long-term defense modernization and expansion program. Between 2000 and 2009, the Indian defense budget increased by 50 percent, and in response to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, this has been bolstered by a further 21 percent increase.54 This has been prompted by the immediate security challenges India faces, including terrorist threats, internal conflicts, and border disputes, but also by its longer-term strategic ambitions. The acquisition of nuclear weapons in the late 1990s marked the beginning of this process but has recently included force modernization as well as a marked effort to expand the strategic influence of the Indian navy. This latter emphasis is a direct response to China’s efforts to protect its maritime interests in the Indian Ocean. While again some way from the levels of US spending, India has the third largest defense budget in Asia after China and Japan. Similarly, the economic revitalization of Russia under the Putin presidency has led to significant increases in defense spending, with expenditure nearly doubling between 1998 and 2007.55 As part of a broader effort to restore Russian power and prestige, Russia has embarked upon a modernization program to professionalize the armed forces and to improve its strategic weight. As the emerging powers have become economically better off, they have started significantly to increase defense expenditure. These developments lead to growing uncertainty and further contribute to the broader sense of change in the global strategic balance. The absolute increase in economic wealth and military power of these states is in itself less important than the question of their relative positions in the global hierarchy. After all a 100 percent increase in military spending or GDP means very little if the starting point is extremely low or if, in compari-

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son to competitors, it is of little consequence. As realists are right to remind us, the consequences of power redistribution hinge crucially on the question of relative gains and most directly on the perception of relative change. The rise of China, India, and the rest is given particular salience by the longer-term decline of the dominant Western powers. Although the developed Western world accounts for the bulk of global GDP, its share of global output is declining and looks set to continue to do so for some time. For as long as the growth rates of the emerging powers outpace those of the developed economies, this trend will continue. Although European economies have had rather poor levels of growth for some time, the sharpest declines are evident with the United States. As Richard Pape points out, between 1990 and 2008, the US contribution to global GDP dropped by around 12 percent; in contrast, China’s share increased by 300 percent.56 Shrinking economic growth and the broader sense of geopolitical decline has been reinforced by the global financial crisis of 2008 to 2009. Former deputy secretary of the US Treasury Roger Altman argues that the crisis will accentuate these longer-term trends and allow emerging powers to cement their new position due to US weakness.57 Whether this forecast comes to pass is hard to determine, yet it is unarguable that the position of the emerging powers has been greatly strengthened by the crisis and this in turn has significantly increased their diplomatic confidence. More broadly, the United States and the developed economies are swamped with historically unprecedented levels of debt. All of the major developed economies, including the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are running very substantial fiscal deficits. This is largely funded by the savings of the emerging powers, particularly those in Asia. In the United States, the problem is not simply large government debt caused by stimulus spending and the costs of its Southwest Asian conflicts, but also by substantial levels of private debt. Debt in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; its quality depends entirely on how it is employed. The problem faced by many Western powers is that it has often been used to finance consumption and not investment. But Western standards of living are not only supported by emergingmarket savings in the form of credit, but also by the cheap manufactured goods that Western markets consume, which allow resources to be freed up from production to be deployed elsewhere in their economies. Western societies have also benefited by essentially exporting the environmental problems associated with industrialization through the relocation of many polluting industries to the emerging economies. Finally, as has become more apparent, Western economic success has been built on cheap, plentiful, and reliably supplied energy. As demand has increased and supplies have become increasingly constrained, the costs of energy have gone up, which in turn has acted as a brake on economic activity. Until renewable or alternative sources of energy are discovered, this brake will be a long-term problem for Western economies. More-

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over, it has and will continue to lead to a significant transfer of wealth to those non-Western states that are fortunate enough to sit on energy reserves. While one should not overstate the extent to which the emerging powers are outstripping the wealthy states, it is nonetheless clear that the gap between the two groups is narrowing. Moreover, the source of many of the problems faced by the wealthy countries are long term—dependence on imported energy and credit, and low levels of growth—and show little sign of being ameliorated any time soon. Where the wealthy are faced with these long-term, slow-to-resolve structural problems, the prosperity of the emerging powers is the result of the speed and possibilities of globalization. The emerging powers remained poor when they were not plugged into the global economy, and their success (and indeed the variation among the experiences of their powers) has depended upon the way in which they have taken advantage of the dramatic expansion of networks of finance, trade, and communication that globalization has wrought. In the absence of global markets for commodities, manufactured goods, and capital, the economic prosperity of Bangalore, Beijing, and Brasilia would have been impossible. But it is not just the basic possibility of wealth, it is the speed with which globalization has delivered growth that has led to such a relatively rapid narrowing of the gap between the existing and emerging powers. While their physical size, large populations, and rapidly growing wealth and militaries have given scholars and analysts reason to consider that the emerging powers are verging on greatness, often left out of the analytical equation is a vitally important political factor: ambition. The emerging powers are unambiguously seeking to be international actors of the highest rank. While many underplay the extent of this ambition—China is, in public at least, trying to maintain Deng Xiaoping’s recommendation to keep a low international profile—in China’s expansive diplomacy, growing influence, and its internal debate, it is plain that China seeks to have an international standing commensurate with its population and its own sense of history.58 India is likewise publicly modest about its ambitions, although this sits rather uneasily with its nuclear status, its international engagement, and its growing global interests.59 Russia is perhaps the least coy, with the Putin-Medvedev administrations making the return to greatness a key foreign policy priority. The growth in power has produced an increased confidence among the emerging powers not only in their ability to shape events in their favor but to do so better than those who have predominated in the recent past. In typically ebullient fashion, Kishore Mahbubani captures this sentiment well: “Any lingering Western assumption that the developed Western countries will naturally do a better job in managing global challenges than any of their Asian counterparts will have to be rethought. An objective assessment would show that Asians are proving to be capable of delivering a more stable world order.”60

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What Kinds of Powers Will They Become? The success of the emerging powers, alongside the relative decline in the United States and the West’s economic fortunes, has led many to reflect on whether or not the emerging powers will become great powers. The expansion in their material attributes is the source of much speculation about the potential for the creation of new great powers and a consequent shift in world politics.61 For example, the declining US proportion of global GDP and the growing share of the Asian powers’ GDP, caused by the sustained gap in growth rates between the United States and the rest, are said to be evidence of the ascent of new great powers. This is typical of an essentially realist understanding of what great powers are. From this perspective, great powers are defined by their material attributes and most particularly their military capability, and the structure of the international system is determined by the identity of the militarily most powerful states. The logic of this thinking is clear; economic prosperity leads naturally to expanded military capacity, which in turn prompts security dilemmas, competition, rivalry, and ultimately, if not managed carefully, great power war. In this view, the keen interest in the GDP growth rates of China and India and their military modernization programs, as well as the development of other large and dynamic societies, makes a certain kind of sense. At the very least, periods of power redistribution have historically been unstable periods. The time to which most turn as typical of these risks is the rise of Wilhelmine Germany in the late nineteenth century, its rivalry with Britain, and the eventual descent into total war.62 As such, the economic growth of China, its dynamics, and future prospects require careful examination, as it is from these processes that the next systemic war is likely to come. This realist perspective, however, is built on a limited understanding of what it means to be a great power and the broader role that great powers play in managing the international system. The approach presents a relatively simple picture: great powers are made (or not) by military capacity. Thus, emerging powers either will or will not become great based on the size and efficacy of their militaries, which is, in turn, a function of their domestic economic success. When dominant powers are faced with rising great powers and the question of how best to manage these circumstances, this perspective is similarly straightforward: the only way in which the system can be managed—and conflict avoided or minimized—is through the military strategies of other great powers. But as preceding chapters have shown, in practice, great powers have been more than just those with significant military arsenals. They are particular members of international society with certain rights to act in ways that normal members may not and with responsibilities to provide order to the system as a whole. Military power matters, but it is only one part of the story. When trying to ascertain the likelihood of the emergence of new great powers, and in turn the implications of this for world politics, one needs a better understanding of what constitutes a great power so that the claims for greatness can

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be judged and, more importantly, the consequences of this for the international system better understood. As detailed in earlier chapters, the conception of the great powers that is incorporated into the constitutional structure of the current order is based on the diplomatic experiences of nineteenth-century Europe and, particularly, on the idea of great power managerialism that lay at the heart of the congress system. To reiterate, great powers have interests that shape the international system and they actively participate in the management of international order through a range of policy tools. Great powers are self-conscious of their position and they identify with these broader aims. They seek to maintain stability in the system not simply for the selfish reason that the existing order serves their interests, but because they believe in the underlying values that the system serves to advance and protect. In short, great powers think of themselves as having obligations to the broader international system. Having substantial military power is a minimum criterion to becoming a great power but, in addition to this, states must also undertake an active role in managing international order through diplomatic and other means. It is not possible to be a civilian great power, but you cannot be truly great by force of arms alone. Three main criteria determine whether a state is a great power or not, understood in this sense. First, it must have material capabilities of the first order, including an economy in the top ten in the world and a military that is capable of defending its fundamental interests to the extent that other major powers will take considerable steps to avoid conflict over these interests. This is necessarily broad as there are no hard measures of military or economic influence that are unarguable; like many key features of international relations, such questions are ultimately about relative attributes as they are perceived by others. Second, it must conceive of its interests and those of the international system as intimately connected. Without such an expansive view, states are not likely to take on the international load-bearing role that is expected of a great power. Third, it must be recognized by others as having great power status commensurate with this order-promoting role in international society. What then are the prospects of the emerging powers becoming great powers in this sense in the near to medium-term future? Is the United States likely to have assistance as the provider of global public goods underwriting the current liberal international order any time soon? The short answer is no. Due primarily to their significant internal challenges, it is unlikely that the emerging powers will materially be in a position to join the United States as preeminent powers in world politics. Also they are unlikely to change the way they think about their interests in the fashion necessary to make them willing to participate in a system of great power managerialism. To be clear, this does not mean that China or India will not have considerable economic and strategic weight, or that they will operate outside the current order. The emerging powers are clamoring to be part of the existing institutional setting; all are keen to join the WTO, for example, and participation in the G-20 is highly prized. Indeed

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some scholars have pointed out important ways in which institutions have helped to socialize the behavior of emerging powers into the norms of the liberal order.63 But there is a considerable difference between taking part in the existing system and underwriting the costs of international order by paying for global public goods. They are not likely to do this in the short to medium term for two main reasons. First, even with best-case development scenarios, they will all face extensive domestic problems that will materially limit their capacity to be at the top table and will, in turn, prevent an expansive international role. Second, their ongoing domestic problems will mean that they will not think of their interests as fundamentally bound up in those of the system and thus will not take on the great power role. As discussed in Chapter 5, the emerging powers are particularly strong supporters of traditional conceptions of sovereignty and, having all been on the receiving end of European imperialism, are particularly uneasy with the idea of a small group of powers cooperating to manage an international order. As strong advocates of the egalitarianism that is such a powerful force in the current order, the move to become active great power managers is both politically and materially unlikely. Even by the most optimistic of forecasts, the emerging powers have a long way to travel before they can be said to be on a par with the United States or even other developed economies like Britain or France. The year 2030 is a widely cited date when the size of China’s economy is likely to exceed that of the United States. Yet even under that fairly rosy scenario, as Chinese officials are fond of pointing out, GDP per capita will still be a long way behind that of the United States and of the other advanced industrial societies. While the size of these economies matters a great deal, the concentrations of wealth will still be extremely uneven. Collectively, the four most significant of the emerging powers—China, India, Russia, and Brazil—are thought to be likely to match the total GDP of the G7 sometime between 2040 and 2050.64 But it is by no means certain that each of these states and societies will be able to make good on these projections. Each faces a range of considerable obstacles that will have to be overcome if they are to continue on their current path of prosperity and growth. China has a host of significant problems ranging from social dislocation and unrest—the number of mass protests topped 90,000 in 2008—to environmental constraints, demography, and, perhaps most challenging of all, the move from a low-labor-cost economy to becoming a more complex economic entity, all while retaining the political monopoly of the Communist Party.65 As Joseph Nye has recently pointed out, even if China does become the world’s largest economy in the next twenty years, in per capita terms China would still be fifty years behind the United States.66 Equally, the composition of the economy is skewed toward export production, with weak financial institutions and a badly underdeveloped hinterland likely to remain in place for a long time. Environmental problems, from inadequate resource endowments to the degradation of natural systems, are creating significant social and economic chal-

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lenges.67 Unsurprisingly, internal instability is increasing by the year. According to a report by the Social Development Research Group at Tsinghua University, spending on internal security in 2009 topped CNY514 billion—in the same league as its national defense spending—and doubts now exist as to the viability of China’s model of increasing aggregate economic output while managing the social disorder caused by such rapid change.68 China also faces two significant demographic problems. First, its population is set to decline at around the year 2050, setting in train a historically unparalleled situation in which its population will begin to age before it has reached an affluent level of economic development. What the consequences of this will be for health care, pensions, and the like is impossible to predict, but it is unlikely to provide circumstances conducive to rapid growth. Second and more immediately, China’s population is heading toward a significant gender imbalance, creating the condition of significant numbers of surplus men. Many argue that this is likely to contribute to social instability and possibly even international security problems.69 More directly, it is further reason for China to remain heavily domestically focused. While Chinese foreign ministry denials of international ambition seem to be somewhat disingenuous, China’s primary concern for at least the next two generations will remain domestic growth and stability.70 This will mean that China’s capacity to play a great power role will be materially constrained. More importantly, its international role will be dedicated to advancing its domestic priorities. Great powers need to think that the system’s fundamental interests are its own, and the PRC does not and will not perceive of its interests in this way in the foreseeable future. Equally, uninterrupted Indian growth cannot be taken for granted. Ongoing difficulties due to the fragmented political system will hinder development, as will domestic security problems, including terrorism and protracted low-intensity conflicts such as those involving the Naxalites in central India and the Nagas in the Northeast.71 Already marked inequalities between rich and poor are likely to be exacerbated and become the source of significant political discontent. Bureaucratic inefficiencies, underinvestment in infrastructure, and environmental problems also present risks to current levels of prosperity as well as constraints on India’s longer-term economic prospects. Equally, as Evan Feigenbaum points out, even if India is able to continue to advance its economic growth, it still has a considerable way to go to be able to leverage its economic prosperity into global strategic weight.72 And like China, India shares the surplus male population problem with its attendant social and security difficulties.73 A principal issue is the ongoing bureaucratic weakness of the state institutions devoted to advancing India’s international ambition, especially relating to resources and education.74 Like China, India will continue to be heavily focused on its internal challenges for some time. Russia’s material claims to great power status have always been the most mixed. On the one hand, it is the only other nuclear power on a par with the

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United States, and it has a substantial conventional military; but on the other hand, this power is decaying and the economic underpinnings of the state are overly dependent on hydrocarbon exports. Russia also faces a daunting set of problems that need to be resolved if it is to establish a sustainable economic foundation for great power status. The most important of these are its dependence on energy exports, lack of economic diversity, and the prospects of a catastrophic demographic decline.75 These issues—alongside decaying infrastructure, a poor health-care system, and a weak banking system, one that was very badly battered by the 2008–2009 financial crisis—mean that Russia’s economic climb will be steep indeed. That said, it is the only emerging power that thinks of itself as having interests that are global and that actively wants to be in a position to promote those interests. The material constraints on this ambition, however, are significant. The most likely scenario over the coming thirty to fifty years is that the emerging powers, and particularly China and India, will become important players in world politics, but they will continue to be significantly constrained by domestic circumstances. Goldman Sachs, the firm famed for its optimistic assessments of the BRICs’ prospects, has predicted that China will likely be a developed economy by 2050, but one that is poorer than many of the other rich economies.76 In a similar vein, a number of influential scholars have argued that China is not likely to become another United States or Germany; rather, its fate is likely to be closer to that of the Latin American polities—rich in potential but beset by significant ongoing political, social, and environmental constraints.77 This is a fate that is likely to be experienced by India and Brazil as well. Over this time, China and India are likely to develop significantly greater military power and be able to project force much farther than they presently can. They are also likely to have a diplomatic influence commensurate with their place in the world. But they will not have the wherewithal nor conception of their interests to undertake the kind of international loadbearing role that great powers have historically played. It is an expensive and demanding role and one that, in a globalized international system, has become even more so, adding further disincentive for emerging powers to take on this mantle. There is little indication in any of the emerging powers (nor indeed in any of the existing developed economies for that matter) of a desire to take on such a fiscally and politically demanding international role. To be very clear, there is no shortage of ambition in New Delhi, Beijing, Brasilia, and elsewhere, and there is a palpable sense that in the washout of the global financial crisis their relative positions have been distinctly advanced. But this ambition is tempered by an awareness of just how far they have to travel and how difficult carrying a significant international burden will be. Policymakers in emerging capitals frequently complain that they are unfairly described as new great powers and insist that they are nothing of the sort and have no desire so to be. They do not

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see their interests as fundamentally linked to those of the international system. Over the next forty to fifty years, these powers will continue to view their international role and foreign policy priorities through the prism of their domestic priorities. This will mean an active international role for emerging powers, but not that of the great power who pays a disproportionate price for international order. Even if the challenges of their domestic social and economic circumstances could be overcome and they were materially capable of becoming great powers, every indication thus far is that India, Russia, China, and Brazil do not have the desire to participate in a system of great power managerialism. In part this reflects a rejection of the origins of great power managerialism and the long shadow that European imperialism cast in these countries. Since 1945, sovereignty has become a universally recognized principle, and this universality is highly valued in the contemporary order. For the emerging powers, who embody and have actively championed the more egalitarian tendencies of contemporary world politics, the aristocratic principles of great power management have little appeal. But this normative unease with the great power role is only part of the reason why the emerging powers will not become great powers. While they all recognize that international engagement is vital to their continuing development, they are not prepared to make the financial investment that is necessary to move from being a participant in forums that seek to provide governance to becoming a provider of global public goods. This presents something of a puzzle for students of the international system. It is clear that the emerging powers want to be players of the first rank, yet they do not want to play the role associated with the traditional great power. It appears that, in contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there is no consensus in the international system as to what it means to be (or to become) a great power in the twenty-first century. The great power provision of order requires, at a minimum, that the powerful have a common view as to their place in the system. This means more than simply a mutual recognition of one’s relative position in the international pecking order, but a consensus as to what it is that the powerful do, what privileges they enjoy, and what their duties ought to be. There is no such consensus presently, and current trends suggest that one is unlikely to develop anytime soon. The increased international friction that is already evident and is likely to increase, caused by the growing number of powerful states with contiguous and overlapping interests, is in turn likely to be exacerbated by the differing expectations the powerful will have as to their respective roles in the system and the uncertainty as to the underlying values that international order should be advancing. The United States is unlikely to be joined by new great powers in the next fifty years. Due to questions of material capacity and the domestic focus of their interests, the emerging powers will not be providers of international public goods nor will they have a global presence of the kind that the United States

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has now and that, to some extent, the Soviet Union had in the twentieth century. This does not mean that there will not be powerful states in the emerging order, nor that the system will continue to be unipolar. Rather, the emerging powers would be better understood as regional powers with global influence, for they will have a global weight due to their economic, diplomatic, and strategic interests, but crucially they will not play a load-bearing role in the international system in the way that great powers in the past have done. The United States cannot expect to have its solitude spoiled any time soon. Some have speculated that the United States may be joined, if not surpassed, as a great power in world politics not by China and India but by the European Union.78 Representing the world’s largest single market, accounting for about one-fifth of global output as well as around five hundred million inhabitants, the European Union is a considerable geopolitical fact and an important actor on the global stage. In trade negotiations, development assistance, environmental policy, and global security concerns, the Union has a considerable presence.79 But is it, or can it be, a great power in the classical sense? Apart from the considerable economic challenges the European Union is presently facing, whereby the global financial crisis has put extraordinary strain on the process of European monetary union, it is difficult to see the EU being able to play an order-creating role in the emerging world. There are several key reasons for this. First, the European Union remains a weak force in foreign policy. In spite of the creation of the EU diplomatic corps, the member states continue to retain a strongly statist focus on the formulation and implementation of their foreign policy. The intention to keep the Union constrained in this sector was made clear with the selection of two deliberately low-profile political figures as the first EU president and foreign minister in Herman von Rompuy and Baroness Ashton. The other main reason relates to defense and military matters. The European Union has considerable ambition to be a global security actor, articulated most clearly in the Common Security and Defence Policy. Yet the European Union does not currently have the capacity for such a role, and defense remains a policy area conceived and organized in national and not European terms. Institutional, fiscal, and military weakness mean that the EU’s capacity to play an order-creating role are negligible and, importantly, unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

Great Power in the Twenty-First Century The place of great powers in international history reflects the importance of material factors, such as economic prowess and military power, in shaping international life, as well as the significance of the ideas with which those material elements are animated. The values of the system, the prestige and status of the great, and the ambitions of the weak to rise and have their say are

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fundamental determinants in world politics, although they sit uncomfortably within the rationalist frameworks of many theories. The experiences of the twenty-first century, thus far, show that an important feature of these ideas is the very different understandings of greatness extant in the contemporary system. It is clear that few aspire to, or indeed accept, the classical idea of a great power and the attributes of greatness with which it has been traditionally associated. But perhaps more importantly, there is no alternative notion of greatness to supplant it in the minds of elites in the rising dominant powers. In China, perhaps more than in any other rising power, there is an extensive debate as to the kind of power to which it aspires and, more broadly, what it means to be great within a changing international system.80 Even within that one state there are different views as to how a great power comports itself, the level of responsibility great powers should take on, the kinds of values great powers should advance and protect, and the balance that should be struck between recognizing multilateral institutions and great power prerogatives. In the system as a whole, there is clearly no appetite for a return to a concert of the great powers as they were conceived in the nineteenth century and an equally strong rejection of pure power politics as the basis for order. This presents something of a conundrum. How should international order be built in the twenty-first century? It would be unrealistic to expect states to forgo their ambition and their desire to play a greater role in the world. But in the absence of a consensus as to the requirements for order, states are essentially groping in the dark for ways to conduct their international policy. States are thus taking steps to fulfill ambition in ways that may well be contradictory to the requirements of order. The lack of consensus as to what it means to be great may reduce the chances of a directorate of the powerful dictating terms to the rest, but it does not follow that the international system will therefore be more orderly. Instead, competing conceptions of greatness and the expectation of obligations that follow from this may have outcomes that are decidedly disorderly. This is perhaps most obvious in areas where the emerging powers have existing disputes, such as China and India’s ongoing unresolved border disputes, or China’s claims to the South China Sea. In the theory and practice of international relations, the challenge of harnessing discrepancies of power to produce orderly relations in an anarchic international system has long been a fundamental concern. All theories of substance make claims as to how this can be achieved, from the balance of power to the formation of multilateral institutions. The institution of the great powers managing international order through an exchange of rights and responsibilities was a working system in the nineteenth century that showed how, under very particular conditions, this could be achieved. It was perhaps one of the great errors of international policy to think that, given the right institutional setting, the underlying principles of great power management could work in the properly global and egalitarian international system created out of the

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ashes of World War II. Without a clear moral consensus as to the purpose of international society, and in the absence of a domestic social and political foundation for international society—that is, the values that the domestic political structure of each member of that society are advancing and protecting—great power management was a problematic endeavor. A set of new powers of size, substance, and ambition has emerged, which represents very different cultural and moral perspectives than have hitherto been the norm in world politics. Alongside the broader transformations in world politics— relating to the normative context, the strategic landscape, and the networks of globalization—the problems of great power management as a path to order have become acute. Indeed, the emergence of these powers makes increasingly clear that the way in which power is harnessed to create order needs to be rethought. As power changes, both in its location as well as in its modalities, as the diverse views as to what it means to be great proliferate, and as there are doubts about the moral purpose of international order (Whose interests should it serve, that of states or peoples? What values should it reflect, liberalism or something else?) devising ways of linking power to an orderly international system becomes increasingly complex. Of course, powerful states will continue to provide a minimalist version of order by managing their mutual relations and keeping crises amongst themselves to a minimum. Under contemporary circumstances, a kind of basic managerialism is possible. But the active concerted management by powerful states of a global international system is at present becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible. The emergence of a set of large, ambitious non-Western states serves to underscore not simply the problems of great power managerialism but the broader shortcomings of the existing mechanisms established to provide order in world politics. The experiences of the great power role make a clear case for beginning to rethink the structural foundations of contemporary international society. The place of the great powers is in many ways illustrative of the broader challenges faced by the international system. In an obvious way, many of the key institutions need to be reconfigured to reflect the changing location of power. This includes revisiting the membership of key institutions such as the UNSC or the IMF, as well as devising novel mechanisms that reflect new modalities of power. One of the problems faced by international society is that it is a society of states, and it serves their interests first. States are less important than they were (although they remain of considerable influence), and the forms of social power that they embody are not always well suited to many of the challenges faced by societies and people. NGOs, firms, and other transnational as well as substate actors are able to exercise power and influence to shape international outcomes—whether positive or negative—and these entities need to be incorporated into the structures that attempt to provide order in twentyfirst-century world politics. Moreover, there is a growing sense that interna-

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tional society should serve the interests of more than just states. The most immediate claimant on this are the rights of individuals, but others are beginning to be heard, including the environment and minority groups. Scholars of international relations tend to forget that, in the abstractions of states, power, markets, and international institutions, theirs is a social science—social in the sense that it is about the study of human society and interaction. International systems, even though they may appear to operate at some remove, are ultimately rooted in the social relations operating in daily lives. The great strength of the Concert of Europe was that it was built on a shared consensus among the states as to the value of aristocratic principles of rule at home and a shared belief that international order had to be managed to protect those principles. In the twenty-first century, there is but a minimal and thinly supported set of liberal values that international society can be said to be trying to advance. But these are not only in conflict with other values of that society, most obviously sovereignty, they are contested by many members, some of whom are increasingly powerful and increasingly confident. The institution of the great powers is in no way equipped to deal with these divisions; indeed, international society more generally lacks appropriate means to respond to these challenges. This assessment of the great power role illustrates many of the challenges of creating order in twenty-first-century world politics, and in the concluding chapter of the book, I set out a number of ways in which we can begin to think about how they can be resolved.

Notes 1. See, for example, Layne, “Unipolar Illusion”; Jervis, “International Primacy?”; Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters”; Krauthammer, “Unipolar Moment”; George, “Of Incarceration and Closure”; and Waltz, “Emerging Structure of International Politics.” 2. For illustrative examples of this, see Bandow, “Asian Century”; Mahbubani, New Asian Hemisphere; Bell, “End of the Vasco da Gama Era”; Bisley, “Global Power Shift?” 3. See, for example, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s address to the Asia Pacific Community Conference, Sydney, Australia, December 4, 2009, available at http://pmrudd.archive.dpmc.gov. 4. “China’s Thing About Numbers,” The Economist. 5. For example, Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics. 6. Nelson, “Sacrifice Your Luxuries, India Tells West.” 7. For a discussion of some of these, see Mahbubani, New Asian Hemisphere. 8. For a discussion of some of these, see Thirlwell, “Second Thoughts on Globalisation.” 9. In his 2005 report, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out two different routes to expanding UNSC membership, neither of which, it must be said, looks likely to be adopted in the short to medium term. See his In Larger Freedom.

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10. Goldman Sachs, Building Better Global Economic BRICs. 11. “Trillion Dollar Club,” The Economist. 12. See Chakraborty and Sengupta, “IBSAC (India, Brazil, South Africa, China).” 13. IBSA Trilateral Dialogue Forum, Fourth Summit of Heads of State/ Government Brasilia Declaration. 14. Sometimes referred to as IBSAC. 15. See Green and Gill, eds., Asia’s New Multilateralism. 16. Including the ASEAN+1 (China) and ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, and South Korea). 17. APEC member economies: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong SAR, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam. 18. On the SCO, see Bisley, Building Asia’s Security, 40–43. 19. Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, “Declaration of the Tenth Meeting of the Council of the Heads of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation,” Tashkent, June 11, 2010, http://www.sectsco.org. 20. For example, Liu, “Most Dangerous Unknown Pact.” 21. For example, Barma, Ratner, and Weber, “World Without the West.” 22. For example, see Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, “Dushanbe Declaration of SCO Member States,” August 28, 2008, http://www.sectsco.org. 23. For examples, see Camilleri and Falk, End of Sovereignty?; and Ohmae, Borderless World. 24. On this, see Bisley, Rethinking Globalization. 25. See Diamond’s “Democratic Rollback,” and Spirit of Democracy, chapter 3. 26. Gat, “Return of Authoritarian Great Powers,” 60. 27. For a strident argument about immediate challenges facing democracy, see John Keene, Life and Death of Democracy. 28. See Beeson, “There Are Alternatives.” 29. “Aid 2.0,” The Economist, August 13, 2011. 30. Brautigam, Dragon’s Gift, 317. 31. OECD, “Debt Relief Is Down: Other ODA Rises Slightly,” April 4, 2008, data available at http://www.oecd.org. 32. Reilly, “Norm-Taker or a Norm-Maker?” 33. For example, Overholt, Rise of China; and Harris and Klintworth, China as a Great Power. 34. Goldman Sachs, Building Better Global Economic BRICs. 35. Maddison, World Economy. 36. For example, Sachs, “User’s Guide to the Coming Century.” 37. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, 2010, 2. 38. Lardy, China’s Unfinished Economic Revolution. 39. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, 179. 40. Hu, “China to Quadruple GDP by 2020 to $4 Trillion.” 41. Under the purchasing power parity measure, China’s economy has been the second largest since around 2001, but in 2010 China surpassed Japan in aggregate terms for the first time. Hosaka, “China Surpasses Japan as World’s No. 2 Economy.”

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42. For example, Zakaria, Post-American World, 89. 43. Panagariya, India, 6. 44. Goldman Sachs, BRICS and Beyond, 13. 45. See, generally, Panagariya, India. 46. Goldman Sachs, BRICS and Beyond, 11. 47. Goldman Sachs, BRICS and Beyond, 75; and World Bank, Russian Economic Report, 4. 48. International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook, 2010, July Update. 49. Goldman Sachs, BRICS and Beyond, 75. 50. On this, see International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Military Balance, 2010, 392–393. 51. For discussion on China’s military modernization and its aims, see Fravel, “China’s Search for Military Power”; and Fisher, China’s Military Modernization. 52. See IISS, Military Balance, 2010, 398. 53. Cook, Heinrichs, Medcalf, and Shearer, Power and Choice, 18, 81. 54. IISS, Military Balance, 2010, 349. 55. IISS, Military Balance, 2010, 216. 56. Pape, “Empire Falls,” 23. 57. Altman, “Great Crash of 2008.” 58. For an assessment of the subtle changes to China’s ambition, see Zhao, “What Kind of Great Power Is China Rising to Become?” 59. On which, see Hall, “Other Exception?” 60. Mahbubani, New Asian Hemisphere, 234. 61. For some examples of this, see Emmott, Rivals; Pape, “Empire Falls”; and Bell, “End of the Vasco da Gama Era.” 62. An example of this is Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry.” 63. Alastair Iain Johnston, Social States. 64. Goldman Sachs, BRICS and Beyond, 11. 65. Yu, “Maintaining a Baseline of Social Stability.” 66. Nye, “China’s Century Is Not Yet upon Us.” 67. Economy, River Runs Black. 68. Kelly, “Costs of Maintaining Security in China.” Kelly’s paper draws on the study from the Social Development Research Group, Tsinghua University Department of Sociology, entitled New Thinking on Stability Maintenance. 69. Hudson and Den Boer, Bare Branches. 70. The famous piece by senior Chinese Communist Party official Zheng Bijian is illustrative of this slightly disingenuous tone but does include a discussion of the significant economic steps that China still has to take. See Zheng, “China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’ to Great Power Status.” 71. See, generally, Chadha, Low Intensity Conflicts in India. For a discussion of internal problems in the northeast of India, see Das, Conflict and Peace in India’s Northeast. 72. Feigenbaum, “India’s Rise.” 73. Hudson and Den Boer, Bare Branches. 74. See Markey, “Developing India’s Foreign Policy ‘Software.’” 75. “Incredible Shrinking People,” The Economist. 76. Goldman Sachs, BRICs and Beyond, 55.

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77. See, for example, Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party, 7; and Gilboy and Heginbotham, “Latin Americanization of China?” 78. For example, Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the Twenty-First Century. 79. See, generally, Giegerich, ed., Europe and Global Security. 80. See the discussion in Shambaugh, “Coping with a Conflicted China,” and Shambaugh, “China’s Identity as a Major Power.”

8 Power and Order in Contemporary World Politics

The founders of the United Nations intended the organization to be the centerpiece of a new international order. It was to be an institutional mechanism that would allow states to avoid conflict by recognizing the extent to which they shared interests and by providing a more peaceful means of resolving their differences. It was not only there to improve information flows and help states see how irrational conflict was, it was to be a body that exemplified the international rule of law, and these laws would reflect and reinforce a liberal world order. At the heart of the organization the founders placed the Security Council, a body comprised of five great powers, as well as a regular rotation of lesser powers, that would be the ultimate arbiters of international peace and security. They believed that an institution to manage a world of law required the active management of the powerful. The Security Council became the clearest and most influential embodiment of an important idea in international thought: great powers play a vital managerial function in international order. In his 2005 report, In Larger Freedom, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan made an explicit plea to reform the Security Council and, most particularly, to expand its membership.1 He did so based on the need for the Council to be more representative, and hence more legitimate, but he also emphasized that reform must lead to a greater willingness of the Council to act. In essence, the Secretary-General felt that the Council needed to change its membership to respond to the shifting location of power and the changing interests of peoples. The Council was last changed in 1963 to increase the number of rotating members to ten, making a total membership of fifteen. But Annan also felt that any reform should not undermine the efficacy of the Council, and it is here that the immediate tensions in UN reform arise: Surely more members 171

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would increase the prospects of indecision? As skeptics have long argued, the UNSC is far from perfect in its constitution, but any change is likely to make action even harder to achieve. Reform of the Council is the hardest element of any broad-ranging renovation program at the United Nations and as such is the least likely to occur. But even if one were to increase the number of members and get the Council to accept a more comprehensive conception of security than it currently does, it would not improve the Council’s ability to manage questions of international peace and security. The reason is that the fundamental assumptions behind the Council are ill suited to the circumstances of contemporary world politics. The concert-style managerialism that informed the foundation of the institution, and continues to animate much current thinking, is badly out of date. The UNSC reflected a particular understanding of how power can be harnessed to generate order in an anarchic system. We now live in a world of globalization, however, characterized by changing forms and locations of power, one in which the normative underpinnings of international society are complex and at times contradictory. The most important challenges faced by states and peoples require cooperative multifaceted action by networks not only of states but also of nonstate actors such as firms, NGOs, and the like. Within such an international context, the relationship between power and order, and most particularly its institutional manifestation, needs to be fundamentally rethought. In my examination of the origins, contemporary challenges, and emerging prospects of great power managerialism, I have described how some of the bedrock foundations of the postwar international order are increasingly unstable. For this reason, there is an urgent need to recognize the structural nature of the challenges facing the multilateral mechanisms that were created to try to stabilize the international system. In this final chapter, I will first sketch out the main lines of argument put forward in the book. Second, I will underline the main conclusions reached. (In Chapter 1, I set out to answer four main questions, and in the second section of the chapter, I will provide succinct answers to these questions.) Finally, I will reflect on what this tells us about the nature of contemporary international society and some of the broader challenges this study has uncovered. To begin, however, it is important to reiterate one main point: this book does not argue that power does not matter nor that powerful states are irrelevant in an era of globalization. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, we need to rethink how it is that power matters. Indeed, IR scholars need to think very hard about the nature of power in modern systems, as it seems to resist much traditional conceptualization, and how the inevitable inequalities of that power in world politics can be harnessed to provide order in a complex world.

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Great Powers in International Relations I began this book by considering the many different ideas associated with great powers in the scholarly literature. Across the field of international relations, there is no clear consensus as to how great powers should be defined nor what their function in the international system entails. Authors from different perspectives and with differing theoretical orientations have generated an array of competing views. For example, realists tend to identify great powers by their material attributes, that is, they are that small group of states that have the preponderance of military power and they are the key determinants of the international system. On the whole, they take the view that great power rivalry is an inevitable feature of an anarchic international system whose basic parameters are set by these interactions. In the timeless rise and fall of great powers, realists believe, one has the basic pendulum force of international relations. Liberal IR scholarship, however, takes a somewhat different perspective. While a diverse tradition, many liberals take the view that great powers are essentially those dominant powers that provide international public goods. This is most clearly seen, for example, in the underwriting of international institutions whereby the great powers pay a disproportionate cost for the creation and maintenance of entities that provide benefits to the system as a whole. Here great powers are not identified strictly by their military abilities, but by their function, that is, the provision of public goods to an anarchic system. A third main perspective on great powers comes from the English School tradition. Here, scholars have taken a more historically informed view and take the position that great powers are identified both by their material attributes (their military and economic power) as well as by the managerial role they play. The position is put most clearly by Hedley Bull, who argues that the great powers are one of the five institutions, or pillars, that create and maintain an international society of states. From this perspective, the institution of the great powers imparts order to the system not merely by force of will but also because they are recognized by other members of international society as having a special status. This status involves according special rights to the great powers, in return for which they have a responsibility to the system more generally. Great powers are thought to hold the key to international order for two main reasons: they maintain their own relations by checking one another’s ambition and they collectively manage the relations of the lesser members of the system. This third perspective is the richest theoretical account of the great powers and is also the idea that is most closely associated with actual practice in world politics, for it is this idea that lies at the center of the constitutional structure of the current order. In the membership and voting procedures of the

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UN Security Council, one sees a clear example of precisely the kind of rightsresponsibilities trade-off that English School scholars have identified as well as the institutionalization of a legalistic understanding of how power inequalities can be harnessed to produce orderly international relations. The incorporation of the special prerogatives of the great powers into the UN Charter is usually portrayed as institutions and law accepting the requirements of power. While there is an element of truth to this depiction, I have shown that when the United Nations was being established there was rather more at work than simply power trumping law. Positioning five states above all others, those who drafted the Charter, as well as those debating the fine points for its realization in San Francisco, sought to incorporate a very specific set of assumptions about how international order functions into the bedrock of the postwar system. The United Nations represents the culmination of a longterm process whereby great powers have been increasingly and formally recognized as having a particular managerial function to fulfill. But it also represents a specific understanding of the unfolding of European international history, and most especially a view of what it was that made Europe’s nineteenth century so remarkably peaceful—the view that the key to managing international order lies in formally instituting great power management. But I have argued that the postwar planners misunderstood just what it was that made the European concert system work. In classical accounts of nineteenth-century international history, Europe’s long peace is usually attributed to the concert system, established in its first instance at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Between 1648 and 1914, Europe’s international system had evolved from its premodern mélange of overlapping loyalties and tiny kingdoms to the famed pentarchy of great powers. From this view, the international history of Europe involved an unfolding of the timeless logic of international systems, and thus to discern the finer aspects of such systems requires an understanding of that period. Of course up until 1815, a central element of this evolution was war, often astonishingly violent and of dramatically increasing cost. By the time Napoleon was finally defeated, European states had been almost permanently at war for nearly fifteen years, costing countless millions of lives. Thus, when the diplomats and statesmen met in Vienna to try to sort out the peace, they were acutely focused on the massive price tag with which European war was now associated. Led primarily by Metternich, they devised a system that came to be known as the Concert of Europe, in which the great powers would manage their relations and coordinate their actions to regulate conflicts between lesser powers, adjust the postwar settlement, and more broadly manage the business of Europe’s international relations with a view to avoiding systemic conflagration. The 100 years or so that followed were peaceful, on the European continent at least—there were no systemwide great power wars—and the basic geopolitical settlement of 1815 remained largely intact. This stood in stark

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contrast to the preceding 150 years, when war and not peace had largely been the order of the day. The reason, so classical international history goes, was due to the concert system. European diplomats had devised a remarkable mechanism, more effective than the balance of power, yet for many, just as timeless. By creating a mechanism in which the great powers are given special treatment, in the form of a geopolitical prerogative and special dispensation from the norms of international relations, they have incentive to think about their interests in ways that align with the requirements of system stability. Unlike the balance of power, great power management requires careful, consistent, and judicious diplomacy. It is something that is made, it does not spontaneously occur. Thus, in the views of one of its most famous historians and advocates, Henry Kissinger, the European system of diplomacy worked so well because it tied an ethic of duty of the diplomat to a geopolitical equilibrium. The Europeans appeared to have worked out how to harness the inevitable inequalities of power among states that exist in a system of formal procedural equality to produce orderly relations. Most crucially, it has since been seen to apply not only to the particular circumstances of post-Napoleonic Europe, but to all international systems. As a result of this thinking, orderly international relations has come, for many, to be thought to require the special treatment of the powerful. Given its purported success, it is not surprising that scholars and diplomats are fond of the European concert system. Equally, as the modern international system has become properly universal in its application, many believe that insights into its operation can be found in its early history. Twentiethcentury international history has been punctuated by two efforts to institutionalize diplomatic mechanisms to manage order. At Versailles, the ultimately illfated League of Nations was created and represented the first effort since 1815 to devise a new basis on which international order could be built. Where, in the past, the constitutionalization of the great power role had been largely informal—it was a practice of diplomats, and it was not codified in treaties nor institutionalized in formal multilateral mechanisms—in 1919, the management of international order became bound up in institutions, laws, treaties, and the formal articulation of procedures and principles. The League’s demise reflected, for many, not simply bad institutional design or the failure of Wilson to get the US Senate to ratify the treaty, but the failure to give power its due. More precisely, many felt that the League had not learned the lesson of the preceding century: it had not adequately incorporated the principles of great power management into its legal-institutional edifice. No matter the legal niceties, order in an anarchic international system seemed to require the concerted management of the powerful. Thus at the end of the second catastrophic war experienced within a generation, planners and diplomats worked extremely hard to incorporate this lesson into the putative United Nations. The planners not only sought to ensure

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that the powerful states would participate by not binding their hands, they also sought to establish an entity that formalized concert-style managerialism into a legal-political order that was truly global in its scale. The extent to which those who drafted the Charter and those present at the San Francisco conference sought to rectify the shortcomings of the League by building great power responsibility into the foundations of the system is striking. They believed that the League had erred in overemphasizing sovereign equality; the United Nations would correct this fault and provide a setting in which the powerful would have more than a minimal incentive to join, but, through participation, would think of their interests as fundamentally bound up in systemic stability. While they thought they had struck the right balance between sovereign rights and the requirements of order, they were unaware of two profound problems with the institution they were creating. First, in accepting the classical history of the concert system, they failed to recognize the social basis on which Europe’s nineteenth century had rested and on which orderly relations depended. In short, they learned the wrong lessons of history. Second, they did not realize just how much the context of world politics had changed due to the war and how much more it was going to be transformed. While the creation of the United Nations was no small achievement, and its longevity and support suggests that the states and peoples of the world value the organization, the primary means through which it sought to maintain international peace and security—its core function—was, even in 1945, unsuited to the context of the international system. As the century wore on, this became increasingly the case, although the ideological freezing of the Council due to the Cold War served to mask the extent to which the basic assumptions about power, order, and the normative purpose of international society on which the Council was built had diverged from those that actually operate. It is only in the twenty-first century that the globalized networks of interconnectedness, the emergence of a range of non-Western powers, and changing forms of power are making unambiguous the extent to which the centerpiece of the current international order is unsuited to its basic task. Surely, a diplomatic formula that saved the continent from a hundred years of war was of great use in the aftermath of World War II? What aspects of Europe’s international order did they fail to grasp? There were two important components of the nineteenth-century system of great power management that were vital to its success, which those establishing the UN overlooked and indeed that proponents of other forms of concerts tend to forget today as well. The first was that there was a clear consensus as to the moral purpose of the international order. A range of factors underpinned the concert system as an effective mechanism. Scholars and policymakers focus heavily on the balance of forces and the shrewd isolation of minor disputes from broader forms of rivalry. But they tend to forget that the great powers all agreed on not only the geopolitical terms of the Vienna settlement but also on its ideological purpose.

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The congress system was designed to prevent another catastrophic war by stopping conflict at its source. The focus for the diplomats was not only on preventing one power gaining a preponderant advantage, but preventing dangerous ideas and ideologies from turning the settlement on its head. The destruction that France wrought derived from the efficacy of its strategy and mastery of modern forms of war combined with the revolutionary character of its politics. To prevent future conflict, one had to deal with both the material basis of war and its ideological roots. More specifically, the Vienna settlement was designed to protect ancien régime Europe from the threats of revolutionary ideas, most particularly democracy and nationalism. Europe’s international society thus had a clear moral purpose: the protection of a specific conception of domestic political order. Great power management worked because the powers were of one mind as to the underlying social purpose of the order. It was a system that was intended to underwrite Europe’s social order: its international borders, the distribution of power, and the domestic political foundations on which these lay. There were many advantages of the concert system in nineteenth-century Europe. It was inclusive of all the key powers, France was brought into the system, not excluded or punished; it was flexible, the powers could respond to circumstances, such as independence movements or the need to adjust borders; it was supported by all; and, most importantly, it had a clear set of aims. Whatever one may think about the normative content of that order, the Vienna settlement demonstrated unambiguously the diplomatic importance of having resolved the question of the purpose that international society serves. English School scholars such as Wight and Bull rightly point out that the minimum condition necessary to say that an international society, as opposed to an international system, exists is a set of common values and interests. Europe’s international society in the post-Napoleonic period was notable for a more maximalist conception of the purpose of international society—that is, the protection of a particular view of how domestic social relations should be arranged and the international requirements to protect that conception. This was crucial to the Vienna system functioning so well. The second component of the system that was neglected by postwar planners was the extent to which its success depended on seeing Europe’s social order as a whole. Rather than seeing international relations as a realm clearly separate from domestic social, political, and economic forces, the concert system was premised on a unified understanding of Europe’s social order. Crucially, domestic politics was not seen as a discrete field in which developments were of little or no importance to the international realm. Instead, the concert system was predicated on an awareness of the importance of international factors to domestic stability and the maintenance of domestic arrangements, most importantly in the key powers, in ways that did not unsettle the international balance. To be clear, this did not mean an empire of the great powers whereby

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the elite dictated social terms across the continent. Far from it. But in one sense, the Vienna system operated on the basis of a kind of constrained or limited sovereignty. Not only would the great powers determine where borders ought to be drawn, or manage the process of secession, they would intervene in domestic affairs if circumstances warranted. Metternich styled himself as the “doctor of revolution,” and the Vienna system was, in a way, his hypodermic needle. Great power management was effective for these two reasons: it was built on a consensus among the powerful as to the social purpose of the international order and it saw the international order as firmly rooted in domestic social circumstances. The failure to recognize the importance of these components to the concert system has led to problems when trying to incorporate concert-style systems of order. The mechanisms established by the United Nations suffer from the absence of a consensus as to its moral purpose not only among the powerful but across international society. While there is scant rejection of the idea of the international system itself, there are a multiplicity of views as to just who and what international society should be serving. Meanwhile, the Cold War divisions were an acute example of the problems that emerge when the powerful assume radically different views as to how fundamental questions of social life should be answered. That conflict’s conclusion did not, however, lead to the emergence of a consensus about the purpose of international society. If anything the challenge has become even greater as liberal and cosmopolitan conceptions of individual rights and purpose jostle with more traditional ideas such as sovereignty and the protection of the state. This absence of consensus makes concerted management by the powerful extremely challenging, even in otherwise conducive circumstances. The other important problem was that the founders of the United Nations essentially fell for the idea that there is an international realm—something that is clearly distinct from its constituent social parts. By placing a traditional idea of sovereignty as the building block of the institution, and noninterference as a central norm, the founders of the UN essentially created a system for the management of international peace and security that cauterized the international realm from the domestic. In recent years, the UNSC has sought to rectify this, as contemporary circumstances make glaringly clear that what goes on within one state can be a matter of fundamental importance not only for other states but also for the system as a whole. The problem, however, is that there is no agreement as to how to bridge the gap between these two political spheres. How this is done matters profoundly for the system as a whole. For example, one obvious way would be to make a universal conception of human rights the basis for international society. This would have enormous knock-on effects, however, for the UN order and its system of great power management. By failing to recognize that the concert system was more than just a complex diplomatic arrangement concerned only with balances of power and was

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instead a mechanism to manage Europe’s social order, understood in the broadest possible sense, the founders of the United Nations have bequeathed to the contemporary system a severely hamstrung mechanism. Beyond these structural problems, the UN order and great power management also face challenges stemming from the contextual transformation of the international system. These changes have made almost impossible the kind of concerted great power management of international order that was envisaged by the founders. Of the many changes to the international system that have occurred since the constitutionalization of the current order, there are several that stand out as particularly challenging to the underlying assumptions about great power managerialism. The first, at least chronologically speaking, was the globalization of the state system. Up until World War II, the international system retained what were in effect two systems of international relations. There was the system governed by principles of sovereignty, equal treatment, and the like, which involved the wealthy and largely North Atlantic powers, and then there was the imperial manner in which the participants in the first system conducted their relations with everyone else. To put it in the language of IR theory, there was a system defined by a formal anarchy among one set of states and peoples and a system defined by hierarchy among empires and other peoples. World War II had made imperialism both economically and politically untenable, and while some powers tried to hang on longer than others, ultimately, decolonization created a properly universal international system. At a basic level, this made the scale and complexity of the international system unimaginably vast, and, as a practical question of management, made the idea of a great power–determined order a rather difficult proposition. But the challenge was more than a question of scale, reach, and logistics—after all, Britain had run India for nearly two hundred years—it was ultimately political. There were several immediate problems brought about by decolonization, beyond the dramatic expansion in the numbers of states. First, the order established by the United Nations was built on a minimalist notion of the moral purpose of the order. It was, in essence, about the maintenance of the system of sovereign states in spite of the unequal distribution of power among those states and the very different values of those societies. The purpose of the UN order was to sustain the system of states in the age of total war and to tolerate differences between societies. Decolonization made thickening this rather thin conception of the purpose of international society extremely difficult, as the value placed on pluralism by newly independent states was very high indeed. And great power managerialism requires rather more than this kind of minimalism. Add to that the Cold War contestation over strategic interests and also social systems, and the order of great power management in which the founders had invested so much became simply impossible to achieve. Of course, the United Nations itself did not collapse. Indeed, it seemed to thrive precisely because of the political support it afforded new states. Yet as

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the organization grew, it began to expand, and under its auspices, moves to enrich and in some ways profoundly transform the purpose of international society were growing. It established codes of conduct that were universal in their expectation and that began to gnaw away at the edges of sovereignty; it formally adopted charters of rights that made individuals, and not only states, the focal points of international concern; and it began to present states as having obligations in relation to these new principles and rights. This has led to the conclusion that some of these new ideas relate to questions of international peace and security (and hence within the purview of great power management). As such, the UN-centered order began to take on multiple and at times contradictory claims as to its purpose, a purpose that great power management was ostensibly supposed to advance. But great power concerts require not only a consensus on moral purpose, they also require the acceptance of the rest of international society. While formally all are equal, great power concerts need the minor powers to accept the system; they cannot rest alone on the perpetual threat of coercion by the powerful. The expansion of the international system undermined political support for the aristocratic principles of great power managerialism and strengthened the position of egalitarian ideas of international society. The UNSC is seen increasingly as less legitimate both because the permanent members reflect an outdated distribution of power, but also because concentrations of power are no longer thought to be acceptable to determine status. To increase the legitimacy of the Council, say many, one must not include the five most powerful states, but rather ensure that it is representative of the states and peoples of the world. This is a subtle but significant shift. The language of San Francisco was an echo of Vienna—the powerful have the responsibility for order and thus deserve special privilege—and calls for reform today are cast in rather different terms: special rights are a function of responsibility but these derive from representation and not power alone. For a system intended to harness power to promote order, this is a significant challenge. Other important contextual changes in the substance of world politics have exacerbated these underlying problems. More broadly, changing forms of power, from the complex networks of the global economy to the shifting attitudes in wealthy states toward the use of force—as well as the emergence of nuclear weapons, which has fundamentally transformed the strategic utility of military force—have together posed very serious questions over the ability of a group of states collectively to marshal power to produce orderly international relations. In a related fashion, globalization’s networks have served to provide contextual challenges to the prospects of great powers managing the international system by decreasing the utility of force, swiftly narrowing the gaps that exist between states, providing the weak with opportunities to leverage force with great effect, and—by transforming the character of economic interests—challenging state authority and capacity. As discussed in Chapter 5,

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globalization has helped undermine the efficacy of the great powers as an institution to manage international society and it has also helped lower the demand for such service provision. Finally, in the behavior of the dominant and the emerging powers there is further reason to think that the idea of the great powers, as classically understood, is increasingly a museum piece. While many have sought to make sense of the current global role of the United States, with particular interest in ideas of empire and hegemony, its grand strategy is largely in keeping with the conduct of a great power. That is, it thinks of its interests and those of the system as coterminous, it arrogates to itself special privileges but believes it also has responsibilities that derive from its particular place, and it is prepared to bear a significant cost in undertaking policies that benefit not only itself but the system more broadly. It is the post–Cold War context of this policy that is unusual. It is without peers. As such, its capacity to generate this kind of return—to itself and the system as a whole—is not as it anticipates. In part, this relates to the increasing unmanageability of world politics, and it relates also to the political difficulties that emerge when there is only one great power. It is unconstrained in both its immediate policy choices and more broadly in trying to impose its view of what the purpose of international society should be. Some of the most important challenges that the United States faces, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, are a function of the limits of pursuing a great power policy without peers in a material and normative context that is far from conducive to such approaches. And what of the emerging powers? Are they likely to become great? I argued in Chapter 7 that while it is impossible to determine exactly what will transpire, it is unlikely that the emerging powers, most particularly China and India, will become great powers in the sense discussed in this book. These states are materially unlikely to be in a position to do so due to the considerable domestic challenges they face; and they are, more importantly, politically unlikely to want either to take on the burden of global public-good provision that goes with being a great power or to reinforce an aristocratic conception of how international order should be managed. In short, the emerging powers seem to have worked out the main argument of this book, that great power approaches to the management of order are unsuited to circumstances of world politics in the twenty-first century.

Power and Order The argument presented in this book leads to a number of important conclusions that are of significance for the scholarly literature on international order and that also have broader policy implications, particularly relating to the debates about increasing the efficacy of multilateral institutions. First, and

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most obviously, the classical conception of the great powers as an ordercreating and order-enforcing category of state in international society is badly out of date. Not only are those states identified by the UN Charter as having this status not representative of where power lies in the current order, the assumptions of great power managerialism are severely challenged by contemporary circumstances. Both the material and normative requirements for great power management are becoming untenable. The idea of an elite group of states managing relations is not seen as acceptable in an egalitarian world order. It is not simply that we do not like the aristocratic ideas of the great powers; rather, it is that great power management depends upon states accepting the terms of the game. And it is this that sits so uneasily in the current order, an order that is marked by the growing wealth, power, and confidence of states that have hitherto been at the margins of the system. But perhaps more importantly, changes in forms of power, both in terms of military technology and attitudes to the use of force, as well as in the transformation of relational power caused by globalization, limit the capacity of a small group of powerful states to manage world order. This refers to the immediate inability of great powers to arrange international relations in ways that they prefer, as well as to the broader sense that powerful states find acting in concert only of limited utility in dealing with the complex challenges that face states and societies today. Whether in containing the nuclear ambitions of North Korea, trying to limit the incidence and consequences of financial crises, or dealing with the broader slow-moving challenges of climate change, concerted great power management is poorly suited to many of the contemporary era’s preeminent challenges. This relates to the second broader conclusion: state-based systems of power management, indeed of efforts to impose governance more broadly, are at best limited in their efficacy in the current order. The thinking about great powers and their role in international society has historically assumed that states are the most important repositories of power and that the interstate system managing the relations among those entities was the key to fostering world order. That assumption was always tenuous. Bull noted the very real limitations that a statist path to world order entailed. It is increasingly clear, however, that the interstate elements are only one part of a broader set of processes needed to produce world order. Within international society, great power management is increasingly ineffective if not almost impossible to achieve, and international society, as traditionally understood, is itself increasingly limited in its capacity to achieve the practical and normative goals of world order. As Andrew Hurrell writes, “The changes associated with globalization and the increased interaction and connectedness across global society have therefore undermined both the practical viability and the moral acceptability of a traditional state-based pluralism.”2 The limits of great power man-

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agerialism are related directly to the limits of narrowly statist conceptions of power and order. In response to the emerging powers and the perceived decline of the United States, many have begun to debate how world politics may be changing.3 One increasingly common refrain is to call for the revival of great power concerts to manage the emerging order. This has been particularly clear in Asia where some scholars argue that, in the absence of concerted great power management, the rivalry between China and the United States will have extremely bad consequences.4 The broad view is that US predominance is unlikely to last and that the best way to manage this decline and avoid the fate predicted by structural realists—hegemonic war—is to create a concert of major powers to share leadership and to promote order. Experience with the concert-style approach embodied in the United Nations shows that such efforts need to recognize what is required to make concerts work: a consensus among the powers as to the social purpose that the concert serves and the need to recognize the interrelated character of domestic and international realms. This has implications for the ongoing efforts to reform the United Nations: if the Council is to work as intended, then a much richer social basis for concerted management is required. If that is not possible—and politically, it is hard to imagine the circumstances under which this could occur—then the kind of steering role that the UNSC is expected to play should change. The unequal treatment of the P5 is predicated on a rights-responsibilities trade-off with an expectation that the powers shoulder the burden of order provision. Without order provision, the justification for privilege becomes unsustainable. But it is not only at the level of principle; in practice, the management of order through the concerted leadership of the Council has been an almost entirely unrealized ambition. That is not to say the Council has not made important contributions to an international legal order, but it has not functioned as intended. Reform needs firstly to recalibrate the fit between the practical function of the Council with the status and privileges of the members, and it needs to be much more explicitly linked to the underlying purpose of international society. The Council has very real problems of legitimacy that derive, in part, from this disconnection. As the great power role no longer has purchase in world politics, the structural circumstances of the Council, and the UN order over which it ostensibly presides, needs to change. Finally, the arguments elaborated in this book raise a number of questions that demand further research. Perhaps the issue most central to the book’s argument is the political importance of the purpose that international society serves. Since 1945, as order has become increasingly constitutionalized in political-legal structures, the purpose of international society has become increasingly unclear. From the question of individual rights to the attempts to invest responsibility into the idea of sovereignty, international society is being

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pushed in multiple directions, and this is of tangible political consequence. For organizations like the United Nations and other multilateral entities to function more effectively, at least in their current mode, the question of for whom and for what international society exists must be addressed. In the problems faced by the institution of the great powers, one sees an example of the consequences of this uncertainty. Second, I have argued that there is no consensus at present among either scholars or practitioners as to what it means to be a powerful state. Does international power imply responsibility—and if so, to whom? The traditional great power role answered this question unambiguously, yet in the current order only one powerful state feels this way and many resent it for thinking about itself in such a fashion. Third, how can power be harnessed to promote order? The old ways of capturing power inequalities through the institution of the great powers to produce aggregate systemic benefits does not work. Power clearly matters and will continue to be of salience (even as its forms and location change). It is equally clear that it will continue to be unevenly distributed in a globalized international system. But there is no obvious sense as to how these inequalities among states can be corralled in ways that reduce the prospects for conflict. The classical conception of the great powers was devised as one way of resolving this long-standing problem in international relations. But the circumstances that have brought great power managerialism to an end resist a mere reformulation of existing practice—they demand a wholesale rethinking of how international order can be fostered under conditions of globalization.

Notes 1. Annan, In Larger Freedom. 2. Hurrell, On Global Order, 297. 3. For a survey, see Bisley, “Global Power Shift.” 4. For two quite different versions of this argument, see Hugh White, “Power Shift,” and Acharya, “Concert of Asia?”

Acronyms

APEC ASEAN BASIC BRIC BRICS EU FDI G7 G8 G-20 GATT GDP IBSA ICJ IFIs ILO IMF IR NAFTA NATO NGO ODA OECD OPEC P5 PRC PTA

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Association of Southeast Asian Nations Brazil, India, China, and South Africa grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China grouping Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa grouping European Union foreign direct investment Group of Seven Group of Eight Group of Twenty General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade gross domestic product India, Brazil, South Africa grouping International Court of Justice international financial institutions International Labour Organization International Monetary Fund international relations North American Free Trade Agreement North Atlantic Treaty Organization nongovernmental organization official development assistance Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries permanent five members of the UN Security Council People’s Republic of China preferential trade agreement 185

186

Acronyms

SCO SIPRI UK UN UNCIO UNCTAD UNSC US USSR USTR WTO

Shanghai Cooperation Organization Stockholm International Peace Research Institute United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland United Nations United Nations Conference on Organization United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Security Council United States of America Union of Soviet Socialist Republics United States Trade Representative World Trade Organization

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Index

Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy (of the US State Department), 64 Afghanistan, 147; insurgent campaigns 96, 104; US foreign policy in, 85, 116, 118, 125, 129–130, 136, 142, 181 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 137. See also Iran Aix-la-Chapelle: Congress of, 20 Albright, Madeleine, 124 Alexander I of Russia, Csar, 15, 24, 28, 36 Allied powers, 1, 64, 142 Al-Qaida, 104 Altman, Roger, 156 Angola, 79 Annan, Kofi, 171 Aron, Raymond, 129 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), 147–148 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 147 Atlantic Charter, 61, 64 Augsburg, Peace of (1555), 18–19 Australia, 119–120, 122, 151 Austria, 13, 20–23, 32, 37, 39. See also Hapsburgs Austrian-British relations, 32 Austro-Hungarian empire. See Habsburgs

balance-of-power, 33–34, 39–40 Bacevich, Andrew, 128 Bank of International Settlements, 120 BASIC (Brazil, India, China, South Africa), 147 Beijing Consensus, 151 Belarus, 72 Belgium, 36 Berdal, Mats, 81 Berlin Blockade, 79 Berlin Wall, 85 Big Three. See Grand Alliance (World War II) Bismarck, Otto von, 33 Blanning, Tim, 23, 34 Bolshevik Revolution, 50, 55 Boyd, Andrew, 65 Brandenburg, 40 Brazil, 49, 67, 99; democracy in, 150; emerging power, 6, 106, 142–143, 146–160, 162–163. See also BRIC; da Silva Bretton Woods’s institutions, 1, 143–144. See also World Bank BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), 146–147, 152, 154, 162 Brown, Chris, 102 Bull, Hedley, 9, 88, 98, 133–134, 173, 177, 182; Anarchical Society, 92–93

201

202

Index

Burke, Edmund, 29 Bush, George H. W. (president), 115; Bush administration, 128. See also United States Bush, George W. (president), 116, 121, 124, 127, 136; Bush administration, 6, 85, 128, 133, 137. See also United States Cadogan, Alexander, 65–66. See also United Kingdom Castlereagh, Viscount, 10, 17, 28–29, 31–32, 36, 53; great power management, 13 Cecil, Lord Robert, 47 Chavez, Hugo, 137. See also Venezuela Chile, 122 China, 49, 64, 68, 96–99, 102, 117–119, 129; Communist Party, 160; emerging power, 6, 137, 141–166, 181, 183; human rights, 125; Ming Dynasty; 113, Tsinghua University, 161 Clark, Ian, 10 Clemenceau, Georges, 53 Clinton, Bill, 116, 121, 124 Cold War, 4, 76–82 Colombia, 71, 122 Commission III/3 (UN Conference subcommittee in 1945), 66 Common Security and Defence Policy (of the EU), 164 Concert of Europe (European concert system), 32, 58, 167, 174 “concert theory,” 27 Congress of Vienna (“Vienna settlement”). See Vienna “Congress system,” 25, 32, 49, 92, 108, 159, 177; definition of, 27–30 Connally, Senator Tom (US), 71–72, 74 Copenhagen Summit (on climate change), 86 Council (of the League of Nations), 3, 12, 47–61, 63–68, 73–83;

Covenant of the League, 48, 57 Council of Four (the Four; the Big Four), 22, 55, 64, 70, 73 Council of Ten, 55 Cox, Michael, 128 Cox, Robert, 129 Crimean War, 32–33, 36 Cuba, 67, 75 Czartoryski, Adam, 27 da Silva, Lula, 154. See also Brazil Democratic Party (United States), 85, 115 Deng Xiaoping, 153, 157. See also China Division of Special Research, 64 Doha Round (of the GATT), 122 Donnelly, Jack, 129 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, 61, 64–65, 69–71, 73–75, 77, 88 East Timor, 125 Egypt, 125 English School (tradition of international relations), 173– 174, 177 environment, 63, 86, 100, 123, 156; emerging economies, 160–162, 164, 167 European Union (the Union), 6, 164 Evatt, H. V., 2, 70–71, 73–75 Feigenbaum, Evan, 161 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz. See Sarajevo Fleury, Antoine, 60 Franco-Prussian conflict, 36 Frederick the Great (Frederick II), 8, 23 Freedman, Lawrence, 97 Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, 122 Gat, Azar, 150

Index

GATT. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 122. See also World Trade Organization General Assembly (of the League of Nations), 47, 58–59, 64, 66, 69–70. See also Council (of the League of Nations) Gentili, Alberico, 15 Gentz, Friedrich von, 37 George, David Lloyd (British prime minister), 53 Germany, 23, 50, 113, 142, 156, 162; rise of Wilhelmine, 158 global financial crisis of 2008–2009, 85, 121–123, 148, 151, 153–156, 162, 164; United States, 6, 97, 121–123 Goldman Sachs, 146, 152, 162 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich, 115 globalization, 4, 12, 83, 93, 172, 179–182, 184; definition of, 102–108; great powers, 6–7 Gramsci, Antonio (neo-Gramscian approach), 129 Grand Alliance (World War II), 64–65, 68, 70, 78–79, 93 Gray, Christine, 78 Great Britain. See United Kingdom great powers: concepts of, 11, 15–17, 19, 20–35; emerging powers as great powers, 141–144, 152–153, 158–167; globalization, 4, 6–7, 12, 83, 93, 102–105; great power managerialism, 7–11; theory of, 5–6; use of force, 5, 76, 78, 80–81, 86, 96–97, 101, 104–106, 116–120, 125, 128, 180, 182. See also managerialism Greece, 36 Gromyko, Andrei, 72 Grotius, Hugo, 15 Group of Eight (G8), 120 Group of Seven (G7), 145, 152, 160 Group of Twenty (G-20), 86, 120, 145–146, 148

203

Habsburgs, 18–22, 26 Haiti, 125, 133 Hardt, Michael, 102 hegemony, 20, 30, 37, 118–119, 127–132, 181; international law of, 9; nuclear hegemony, 95 High Middle Ages, 18 Hilderbrand, Robert, 65, 67 Hiss, Alger, 69 Holbraad, Carsten, 32 Holsti, K. J., 22, 35, 54, 58 Holy Roman Empire, 18–19, 40; Holy Roman emperor, 18. See also religion Hull, Cordell, 64 “Hundred Days” (battle of), 28 Hungary, 35, 79 Huntington, Samuel, 124 Hurrell, Andrew, 182 IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa), 147 Ikenberry, G. John, 114, 130 Imperial Rome, 113 India, 75, 98–99, 179; defense, 155, 117; emerging power, 6, 102, 141–144, 146–147, 149–165, 181; internal conflict, 161; nuclear power, 94 INTERFET (International Force for East Timor), 125 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 58 international financial institutions (IFIs), 120, 123, 145 International Labour Organization (ILO), 58 Internet, 121 Iran, 64, 79, 85–86, 129, 136; nuclear weapons, 94, 143, 148 Iraq, 80–81, 85, 104, 125, 142, 181; invasion of Kuwait, 80; insurgent campaigns, 96; US-led invasion of, 107, 116, 118, 136 Israel, 129, 130, 133, 145 Italy, 15, 36, 39, 156

204

Index

Japan, 49–50, 99, 118–119, 122, 127, 129, 142; defense, 155; emerging power, 102 Jervis, Robert, 8, 135 Karzai, Hamid, 85 Keohane, Robert O., 129 Kissinger, Henry, 175 Kyoto Protocol, 86 Lansing, Robert, 54 Lawrence, T. J., 26, 97 League of Nations, the League. See Council (of the League of Nations) Lee, Dwight, 68 Louis XIV of France (Louis the Great), 21–22, 26 Luck, Edward, 64, 73 MacDonald, Paul, 128–129 MacMillan, Margaret, 50 Mahbubani, Kishore, 157 managerialism, great power: definition, 7–11; environment, 86, 100, 167; ethic of duty, 37, 91, 175; globalization, 93, 102–105, 172; normative change, 86, 93, 105–108, 148, 152, 166, 172, 176, 182; use of force, 86, 89–91, 94–99, 105–107, 173, 180, 182. See also great powers Mandates Commission (Permanent), 58. See also Council (of the League of Nations) Mann, Michael, 128 manufacturing, 130, 153–154, 156, 157 Mastanduno, Michael, 129 Mearsheimer, John, 6, 95 Medvedev, Dmitry, 157. See also Russia Merom, Gil, 107 Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 17, 28–29, 31, 37, 174, 178 military intervention, 125 Ming Dynasty, China, 113 Mitrany, David, 58 Molotov, Vycheslav, 2

Montenegro, 36 Morgenthau, Hans, 10, 17, 59 Mueller, John, 95 Mumbai terrorist attacks (2008), 155 Münster, Treaty of, 16 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 119. See also Japan Napoleon Bonaparte, 15, 24–29, 34, 174; defeat of, 15, 26, 174; Napoleon’s abdication, 28; Napoleonic age, 28–29, 34; Napoleonic France, 24; Napoleonic Wars, 16–17, 20, 24–26, 28, 35, 37; post– Napoleonic Europe, 17, 26, 35, 47, 55, 174–175, 177 nationalism, 1, 50–51, 55, 101, 118, 149; great power management, 35, 38–39, 51, 177 National Security Strategy (United States), 124. See also Bush, George W. Negri, Antonio, 102, Netherlands, 21, 24, 36 Nine Years’ War. See War of the League of Augsburg nonnuclear states, 95 non-power-related factors, 5 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 122, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 24, 119, 133, 144 Northedge, F. S., 58 North Korea, 94, 129–130, 136, 182 Novosiltsov, Nikolai, 27 nuclear weapons, 83, 93–97, 130, 136, 155, 180 Nye, Joseph, 160 Nystad (Great Northern War), 20 Obama, Barack, 85, 115–116, 124, 142 official development assistance (ODA), 151–152 oil, 154 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 85, 144

Index

Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 148 Ösnabruck: Congress, 18; Treaty of, 16 Ottoman Empire, 22, 35–36, 50, 113 Pakistan, 94, 125 Palestine, 125, 145 Panama, 122 Pape, Richard, 156 Paris: Peace of (1919), 34, 42, 48–56, 65, 68; Treaty of (1814), 28; Treaty of (1856), 32. See also Quadruple Alliance peacemaking, 19 Peace of Augsburg. See Augsburg Peace of Westphalia. See Westphalia pentarchy, 20–23, 133, 174 Persian Gulf, 154 Poland, 27, 28, 35–36, 59 Portugal, 124 preferential trade agreements (PTAs), 122 Price, Richard, 81 Prussia, 8, 20, 23, 28, 33, 35–39 Pufendorf, Samuel von, 15; Pufendorfian, 26 Putin, Vladimir, 155, 157. See also Russia Quadruple Alliance, Treaty of (1815), 28, 33 raison de système, 39 Ranke, Leopold von, 7, 17, 23–24 Rastatt, Congress of, 21 Reilly, James, 151 religion: Calvinists, 18; Christendom, 18; Islamists, 85; the Pope, 18; Protestants, 18, 70 Republican Party (United States), 53, 115 Richardson, Louise, 30, 40 Romania, 36 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 64–65, 67 Russell, Ruth, 69

205

Russia: democracy in, 150; economy, 6; emerging power, 102, 117–118, 141–142, 146–157, 160–163; military in, 97; pre-1917, 20, 22–23, 27–28, 35, 37, 39; UNSC, 74, 98–99, 133. See also BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China); Soviet Union Rwanda, 125 Ryswick, Congress of, 20–22 San Francisco conference. See UN Conference on International Organization Sarajevo (assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand), 38 Saudi Arabia, 125 Schroeder, Paul, 29, 34, 37 Second Treaty of Paris. See Quadruple Alliance, Treaty of seigneurial relations, 17 self-determination, 50, 53–56 Serbia, 36 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), 148–149 Shanghai Five (grouping), 148 Simpson, Gerry, 9 Singapore, 122, 150 “sixth veto,” 73 Somalia, 125 South Africa, 6, 99, 142, 147, 150. See also BASIC; IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) South Korea, 119, 122, 137, 150 Sovereignty, 178; American, 53–54; Augsburgian confirmation, 19; international law, 149; international system, 9; interwar years, 3, 56, 74; norms, 148–149, 167; pre–World War I, 13, 19, 50; self-determination and popular, 55; United Nations, 76–77, 88; universal system, 93, 100, 104, 131, 163; Vienna settlement, 91, 178 Soviet Union (USSR), 65–67, 72, 79, 82, 96, 123, 164; collapse of, 102, 114–121, 131, 136, 149, 154;

206

Index

transition and post-Soviet sphere, 124, 148–149; United Nations, 2, 65, 68, 72–73, 93, 101. See also Russia Spain, 23–24, 36, Stalin, Joseph, 2, 64, 67 statecraft, 23–24, 33, 38, 103, 106–107 Steiner, Zara, 57 Stettinius, Edward, 2, 73 Sweden, 19, 20–22 Taliban, 85 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de (Talleyrand), 36 Thailand, 49, 150. See also AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (APEC); Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Thirty Years’ War, 15, 18, 21 total war, 1, 158, 179. See also World War I; World War II Toynbee, Arnold, 8 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 122 Truman, Harry S., 69 Treaty of Münster. See Münster Treaty of Ösnabruck. See Ösnabruck Treaty of Paris. See Paris Treaty of the Quadruple Alliance. See Quadruple Alliance Treaty of Rastatt. See Rastatt Treaty of Ryswick. See Ryswick Treaty of Utrecht. See Utrecht Treaty of Westphalia. See Westphalia Treitschke, Heinrich von, 33 Turkey, 50, 142, 148 Ukraine, 72 United Nations (UN): UN Charter and UN Conference on International Organization (the San Francisco conference), 1, 61, 64–83, 88, 99, 174, 176, 180; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 119; UN Secretary-General, 171; UN standing army, 78. See also UN Security Council

UN Security Council (UNSC), 3–4, 6, 87–88, 90, 171- 172, 174; development of, 64, 66–69, 73, 75, 77–82 United Kingdom: colonialization of India, 179; defense, 97; economy of, 85, 117, 151, 156, 160; imperialism, 127; League of Nations, 47, 49, 52–53, 56–57, 59; pre-1919, 20–23, 27–29, 32, 37, 40, 113, 142, 148; UN, 64–68, 74, 98–99, 133; Victorian Britain, 113 Uruguay Round (of the GATT), 122, 144. See also General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); World Trade Organization (WTO) United States, 6, 12, 64, 85, 96–98, 102, 141; Congress, 66, 122; financial crisis of 2008, 97, 121–122, 156; as a great power, 113–138; League of Nations, 3, 53, 56–60; Pentagon, 120; Senate, 3, 53, 66, 175; State Department, 64, 120; United Nations, 3, 65–69, 79–82, 99 Utrecht: Congress of (1713), 20–22, 49; Treaty of, 5, 22 Vandenberg, Arthur, 2–3 Van Ness, Peter, 130 Vasquez, John A., 30 Vattel, Emerich de, 15, Venezuela, 148, 154. See also Chavez, Hugo Versailles Treaty, 49–50, 52, 57, 108, 175 “Vienna settlement”: Congress of Vienna (1815), 15–16, 20, 25–42, 48–49; great power management, 49–50, 59, 76, 87–91, 101, 174–177 Vietnam, 8, 79, 96, 127 Walt, Stephen, 115, 121, 126 Waltz, Kenneth, 5, 8 War of the Austrian Succession, 20, 23

Index

War of the League of Augsburg, 20 War of the Spanish Succession, 20– 22 Warsaw Pact, 124; new Warsaw Pact, 148 Washington Consensus, 123, 150–151 Watson, Adam, 35 Webster, Charles K., 49 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 5–6, 15–22, 26, 41, 46 Wight, Martin, 8, 10, 177 Wikileaks (website), 121 Wilhelmine Germany, 158 Wilson, Woodrow, 51–55, 57, 116, 123, 127, 175; “Fourteen Points” speech, 51

207

World Bank (WB), 100, 120, 123, 145, 150 World Trade Organization (WTO), 100, 105, 122–123, 144–148, 159. See also General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade World War I (the Great War), 51, 55, 58 World War II, 1, 13, WTO. See World Trade Organization Yalta Conference, 64, 68, 77, 82 Yugoslavia, 125 Zimmern, Alfred, 57

About the Book

What does it mean to be a great power? What role do great powers have in managing international order, and is that role still relevant in a globalizing world? Are new great powers likely to emerge? If so, to what effect? Addressing this set of questions, Nick Bisley provides a historically informed and theoretically grounded analysis of the part that great powers play in contemporary world politics. Bisley traces the idea of great power management from its origins in European history to the present day. Arguing that the idea that great powers have a special responsibility for maintaining international order is badly out of step with contemporary circumstances, he offers an intriguing conclusion about the nature of the international system. Nick Bisley is professor of international relations at La Trobe University. His publications include Rethinking Globalization and The End of the Cold War and the Causes of Soviet Collapse.

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