Why Nations Rise
Narratives and the Path to Great Power
MANJARI CHATTERJEE MILLER
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Manjari Cha erjee, 1976– author.
Title: Why nations rise : narratives and the path to great power / by Manjari Cha erjee Miller.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Why nations rise...or remain reticent e active rise of the United States— e reticence of the Netherlands Meiji Japan and Cold War Japan : a vigne e of rise and reticence— e active rise of China— e reticence of India oughts on power transitions, past and future.
Identi ers: LCCN 2020037918 (print) | LCCN 2020037919 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190639938 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197558935 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190639969 (oso) | ISBN 9780190639952 (epub) | ISBN 9780190639945 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Great powers History. | World politics 19th century. | World politics 20th century. | World politics 21st century. Classi cation: LCC JZ1310 .M55 2021 (print) | LCC JZ1310 (ebook) | DDC 327.1/12 dc23
LC record available at h ps://lccn.loc.gov/2020037918
LC ebook record available at h ps://lccn.loc.gov/2020037919
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190639938.001.0001
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Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Je , my best iend and biggest cheerleader. I love you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Writing a book is lonely. No one writes a book alone.” ese words were wri en by the children’s author Kelly Barnhill in a book that my ten-year-old daughter insisted I read. It was a great story but it is this sentence, wri en in Barnhill’s acknowledgments, that resonated most with me as I nished my own manuscript. e research for this book took me nearly a decade. ere were days I was lonely as I holed myself up to write and think. ere were days I was obsessive when I couldn’t get the arguments to fall into clear pa erns. ere were days I was joyous as I discovered new nuggets of information. ere were also days I nearly gave up. But I didn’t. Because I had help from people generous with their time, their knowledge, their patience, and their love. Here they are, in no particular order:
• Renata Keller, Chris Dietrich, and Justin Hart for helping me discover American history.
• Kanti Bajpai, omas Christensen, Erez Manela, Steven Miller, Rajesh Basrur, Jia Qingguo, and Rohan Mukherjee for inviting me to air my thoughts at various stages of the manuscript. Michael La an, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Maier for their time, and fascinating conversations. Paul, thank you for the word “reticent!”
• Dick Samuels for encouraging me to study Japan and providing many suggestions of how to start. Mike Green and Dave Leheny for listening and providing further input.
• Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch for directing me to an obscure paper with one extremely interesting line about the Netherlands which sparked my research. Henk te Velde for helping me discover the Netherlands, and introducing me to many colleagues, including my fantastic research assistant Corné Smit. Corné for your patient work and translations. e many Dutch academics who
generously shared their time and knowledge particularly, Ben Schoenmaker, Maartje Jense, James Kennedy, and Vincent Kuitenbrouwer.
• Stacie Goddard, omas Berger, Henk te Velde, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Josh Shifrinson, Andrew May, and Jorge Heine among others for an incredibly important and useful book conference which re ned my thinking. Kate for also being an amazing friend and gnome-maker-in-arms.
• My posse of fabulous female colleagues at Pardee Kaija, Shamiran, Jay, R1 (Rachel Nolan), R2 (Rachel Brulé), and Noora for helping me with wine zooms, crazy group chats, and all-round support which enabled me to nish the book in the middle of a pandemic. Goats all the way ladies!
• Kevin Gallagher for being a rock star mentor, listening, and forwarding me pertinent articles.
• ink tankers and academics in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai for talking with me and helping me understand. Indian academics and government o cials, particularly IFS o cers, for sparing time for me in their busy schedules, and for their candidness. Chen Ting and Rishika Chauhan for helping me gather data.
• David Barboza for encouraging me to write a book that would bridge the academia-policy gap. Katie Bacon for forcing me to explain my writing even when I didn’t want to.
• Dave McBride for helping me work with OUP.
• e Smith Richardson Foundation for making the research for this book possible.
• My two children, Neer and Namya, for making me feel like the luckiest mom on the planet. (Look kids, mommy did get the book done!)
• My husband Je , for everything. Because that’s what he is to me.
Why Nations Rise . . . or Remain Reticent
What are rising powers? Why do some countries become rising powers, but not others? What does it mean for a country to rise? Today one can nd a thriving industry of newspapers, articles, and books on China and India, the two countries that are regularly referred to as “rising powers.” Yet when I recently asked a noted British journalist who had just published a book on India what he thought a rising power was and why India was one he seemed taken aback. He paused for a minute before o ering that it was “probably” a country with some mix of in uence and power both economic and military.1 But when I tried to pin him down on how much power and what kind of in uence, he couldn’t clarify. It seemed, as he acknowledged during the conversation, that one just simply knew when a country was rising. To be fair to him, these questions only occurred to me many years a er I rst began studying China and India. To show why, I’ll explain my early experience of studying these two countries.
Back then, in the early 2000s, most people I told about my research could not fathom my interest. Indians were ba ed that I wasn’t concentrating my energies solely on India, my country of birth, and even more puzzled why, if anyone were to pick another country to study at all, it would not be Japan or the United States clearly more important countries. Chinese friends and acquaintances were surprised because they were unaccustomed to an Indian studying Mandarin or taking an interest in modern China, and some politely indicated that they were not a ered by any comparison between the two. And Americans seemed bewildered on two fronts: that I was studying the two countries and that I was comparing them to each other; what, a er all, did the two have in common?
But by 2012, when I was on the cusp of nishing a book about both countries and their curiously similar response to the historical legacy of colonialism (Wronged by Empire), people’s a itudes toward my research had changed
radically. Far from bewilderment and questions, I now began to receive hearty congratulations from Americans, Indians, and Chinese, who commended my study of a “hot” topic. And indeed comparing the two had, by this time, become fashionable: not only were both countries now being studied, contrasted, and compared in the West, but they were also being studied, contrasted, and compared as rising powers. Moreover, they were treated as a special category of actors the United States and the world feared China’s rise, while wondering how to use India’s rise to counter the coming Pax Sinica.
Yet I had this nagging suspicion that, despite the a ention to both as rising powers, they were di erent China was embracing its rise in a way that India was not. Recently, I looked back through my notes and documents to understand exactly when I came to this idea that China and India were very different kinds of rising powers. I eventually found a short outline from 2009. It consisted of notes for a précis I had been invited to present at a conference titled “Rising States and Global Order” at the Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) at Princeton University. e outline had some very preliminary thoughts based on peripheral data I had gathered in the course of conducting eldwork for Wronged by Empire. In it, I had wri en, “India’s current ideological chaos (which nearly shut down the nuclear deal) makes for striking contrast with China. Unlike India, China is acutely conscious of its international position, and has made a strategic e ort to formulate and reformulate a ‘grand ideology’ that outlines its international image. Although India says it is a rising power it is [sic] yet to believe it.” My commentator at that conference was the political scientist John Mearsheimer. He asked me, if what I was implying was correct, what could this tell us about rising powers and their international strategy or behavior? In other words, why did this di erence between China and India, if it existed, ma er? I did not have an answer for him at that conference, but I’m still grateful for his question, because it sent me on the intellectual journey that led to this book.
In 2013, having nished my rst book, and now bombarded with references to the rise of China and India, I acted on my nagging thoughts. I began scanning Chinese and Indian newspapers. Narratives of China as a rising power were also re ected in Chinese newspapers which, like Western newspapers, were full of articles and op-eds with references to China’s rise, and what it meant for China to rise. ese narratives discussed what kind of great power China would become, how it should respond to its changing environment, what its relationship with the status quo power, the United States, should be like, and whether China’s rise would be contested. In short, they were chock-full of stories about the story of China’s rise. On the other hand, when I turned to read Indian newspapers I found no such stories. ere were very few narratives that asked or answered these questions.
I was deeply puzzled by this. e world now habitually referred to both as rising powers; therefore, shouldn’t they both also think of themselves as rising powers? A er all, I knew from my past research that it was not that Indians did not think of themselves as a great country and a great civilization. But, I also noticed, India consistently faced complaints that it didn’t act as a great power.2 Instead, it was always “emerging but never arriving.”3
I took a trip to India that summer to explore a li le more and to ask government o cials what they thought of India as a rising power. My interviews some conducted at the highest levels of Indian foreign-policy decision-making amazed me. Indian o cials I spoke with were deeply uncomfortable with the label “rising power,” and seemed to engage in li le strategizing about how to respond to India’s changing environment or to deal with the consequences of its rise. In short, I found that although India was rapidly increasing in both military and economic strength, Indian o cials did not seem to have consistent and concrete narratives about what that could mean, how India could use its rise for leverage, or what kind of great power India could become. Moreover, I found foreign policy o cials in other countries deeply frustrated by India’s behavior on the international stage. Although dubbed a rising power, India seemed to have a reputation of not living up to the role.4 Meanwhile, China’s behavior alarmed these same o cials, who were convinced of the coming China threat and the challenge it posed to the liberal order.
ese di erences raised a whole host of questions. Was China unique, I wondered? Was it, in fact, unusual for rising powers to both believe and behave as if they were rising? Was India’s path actually the normal road for a rising power? And what did it really mean to behave like a rising power or to have narratives about that rise? Contemporary sources in both academia and the media were of limited help. “Rising power” was an o -used term, but no one could really identify exactly which country today was indisputably a rising power, and why. Only one fact was agreed upon: some amount of increasing military and economic power was indeed important. is made sense; how, a er all, could a country be a rising power if the component of “power” was missing? But beyond that, there was li le agreement. Particularly confusing, the very element that identi ed them as rising powers increasing military and economic power relative to the established great power of the day was also used to identify their behavior as rising powers. us, a country was a rising power if we observed that it had increasing economic and military power, and it behaved as a rising power if it increased its economic and military power, resulting in an unhelpful tautology. So I decided to look to history to see if with the bene t of hindsight I could be er understand our expectations of China and India, and in doing so, clarify what we mean by and should expect of rising powers. ere are deep divisions among international relations scholars, but even the most argumentative of them
would agree that rising powers are a category of actors that can tip the world toward war or toward peace. What could we learn from historical cases of countries that possessed this quality and others that we associate with rising powers today? What pa erns could we nd? Also, and crucially, how did we come to think of a rising power as a special, and o en dangerous, kind of actor in international relations? While this thought has long historical roots thousands of years ago, ucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War declared, “it was the rise of Athens, and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable” it also has modern theoretical roots. To understand the rising powers of China and India and why we think of them as rising powers grasping this theoretical foundation (and its problems) is essential.
What Do We Know of Rising Powers?
e phrase “rising power” is, today, a ubiquitous term. It is used indiscriminately by academics, policymakers, and the media to describe not just China and India, but countries as disparate as South Africa,5 Turkey,6 Brazil,7 Iran,8 and Russia.9 Despite the popularity of the concept, however, research on understanding rising powers as a category of actors is sparse: why we perceive some countries but not others to be rising is unclear, and sometimes contradictory.
Brie y, the theory of power transitions termed “one of the most successful structural theories in world politics”10 treats these countries as a distinct and special category of game-changing actors in the world. Power transition theorists argue that “the di erential growth in the power of various states in the system causes a fundamental redistribution of power in the system.”11 ey believe that in any international system that is, a world composed of great, middle, and small powers there eventually rises a challenger country. e challenger, or rising power, is dissatis ed with how “goods” are distributed in this system. (“Goods,” in this case, mean the acquisition of power along with the rules and regulations, both formal and informal, that govern our international order.) According to power transition theorists, a challenger country seeks not just to overturn how power is distributed, but also to create and impose its own rules instead of those that were imposed by the reigning great power. us, the rise of this challenger, more o en than not, results in con ict and even war with the established great power. is is called a “recurring pattern” in world politics.12 is school of thought seeks to answer meta-questions about war and peace, con ict and cooperation, stability and instability in the international system.13 Power transition theorists rarely take the time to examine the particularities of speci c rising powers, their speci c trajectories, and their propensity for con ict.14
A more in-depth scrutiny of rising powers and their behavior has been undertaken, although implicitly, by historians the classic example of this is Paul Kennedy’s e Rise and Fall of the Great Powers as well as political scientists who seek to understand great powers and great power behavior.15 Finally, there have been many books focused either on a single country that also happens to be a rising power, usually China or India,16 or on comparisons of the rises of India and China to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each and the obstacles faced by them as they gain power.17
is work on rising powers has relied on two fundamental assumptions about countries that are rising.
e rst is that rising powers can be identi ed and compared primarily by measuring their relative material capabilities.18 According to this assumption, countries rise because their economic and military power relative to that of the status quo power (the great power of the day) increases su ciently to pose a challenge to the la er. Power transition theorists emphasize that since it is the relative power of the challenger vis-à-vis the defender that determines the likelihood of war, increasing economic and military power is, therefore, the most important indication of a state emerging as a rising power. Sometimes, a rising power is also assumed to be a country that is increasing, or aspiring to increase, its “so ” co-optive power.19 Accordingly, discussions of rising powers will o en include so -power measures such as in uence in global a airs20 and visibility.21 On this premise, scholars have dissected, for example, whether or not China and India have been successful in wielding so power and how this advances or stymies each country’s rise.22
e second assumption is that a rising power is a country that is likely revisionist; that is, it is unwilling to accept a position of subordinate power in the way “goods are distributed in the international system”23 and will therefore eventually challenge the existing international order and the great powers who maintain it. War is likely when a power transition occurs, not just because a rising power gains approximate power parity with the great power defender, but also because a rising power is also a country that is dissatis ed with the status quo. us, the challenger or rising power is expected to increase its hard and so power relative to the status quo power, and almost by de nition to engage in revisionism, o en expressed as expansionism, as it rises.
Why Is What We Know about Rising Powers Problematic?
As it turns out, using these assumptions to identify when or why a state is rising is less useful in the real world than the theoretical one for a variety of
reasons. Let’s start by looking at relative material capabilities as a measure of which state is a bona de rising power. Some accounts today focus only on India and China as rising powers, while others focus on the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as a group. e BRICs acronym was created in 2001 by an analyst at Goldman Sachs.24 In doing so, Goldman Sachs, in e ect, concocted a group of rising powers, and di erentiated them from other states simply on the basis of their rapid economic growth and their exclusion from the governance structures of the world economy.25 But Brazil’s status as a rising power can be questioned, as can Russia’s. Brazil is not a nuclear weapons state, an arguably necessary precondition to be called a rising power today. Russia could reasonably be termed a declining rather than a rising power. e newer iteration of BRICS now includes South Africa. Yet, apart from its myriad other problems, South Africa was one of only eleven countries that actually saw a drop in its life expectancy between 1990 and 2013.26 Moreover, South Africa voluntarily relinquished its nuclear weapons program, weakening the claim that it could be termed a rising power. Even China’s rise, predicated on its military power relative to the United States, has been debated. China’s power as a proportion of US power is increasing, but the absolute advantage in capabilities continues to be in favor of the United States.27 While a recent ND report suggests that although China has improved its capabilities in many areas, it continues to trail the United States in both military hardware and operational skills.28
Neither is it clear that a rising power is always a country that is inevitably going to challenge the status quo power. A rising power is o en dubbed expansionist. Expansionism, typically understood as military and geographic encroachment29 (and less typically as the “expansion of political interests”30) is seen as both the natural outgrowth of the rising power’s increase in material power31 and as negative behavior reinforcing the general conviction that rising powers engage in revisionism. is is problematic for many reasons. e concept of expansionism as applied to rising powers is both narrow (military assertiveness and geographic conquest) and muddy (an “expansion of political interests” could also apply to the foreign policy behavior of many states in general, rather than to rising powers as a special category of actors). is concept does not allow us to capture the distinctiveness that should mark the behavior of a special category of actors, and it also does not allow us to distinguish between rising powers. And expecting expansionism because a rising power is increasing its capabilities does not tell us when it will expand, why it will do so, or why, if ever, it would refrain.
China, for example, has been shown to be both conformist as well as revisionist, depending on the issue area.32 Moreover, since both China and India are considered to be rising powers, they should have similar reputations for dissatisfaction with the current international system. But they do not. By and large, India is seen as a benign rising power, one whose rise is, unlike China’s, conforming
to the existing international order.33 Yet just as China can be conformist as well as revisionist, so can India, and they o en do not overlap in what areas of the international order they accept or reject China has changed its stance on climate change, embracing the Paris Agreement, and has made conciliatory noises on the norm of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), to cite two examples, while India is a reluctant signatory to the Paris Agreement, and u erly rejects R2P. When rising powers have been acknowledged to engage in “supportive” as well as “predatory” behavior in terms of the international order, this has been predicated on the waxing or waning capabilities of the status quo power that is, the rising power engages in behavior designed to strengthen rather than weaken the global position of the current great power.34 is provides a useful reading of the rising power’s strategy toward managing a great power, but does not speak to the general behavior of rising powers in the world order or why they rise.
Finally, equating a country’s status as a rising power with the possession of material resources, i.e., military and economic power, ignores the socialrelational aspect of a country’s status.35 If a state is seen to be rising, it is not just the increasing capabilities in of themselves that bestow that status. It is the recognition of those capabilities by external actors as a symbol of the state’s rising power status. One way to understand this in context is to compare military expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) for states. We can see from these expenditures that it is not simply the expenditure per se that ma ers; it is also which countries are being compared. For example, in 2015, India’s total military expenditure as a percentage of its GDP was 2.4% (a decrease from 3.6% in 1988). China’s was a comparable 2.0% in 2015. In the same year, Mali’s military expenditure was 2.4% (an increase from 2.2% in 1988), while Ecuador’s was 2.5% (an increase from 1.5% in 1988).36 Yet the la er countries are obviously not recognized as rising powers. For those who would argue this point and suggest that it is not percentage increases or decreases but rather the sum total of capabilities that ma er, consider this: as of 2016, Germany ranks in the top ten countries globally for military strength,37 yet it is rarely termed a rising power.
Either applying or adding the concept of “so power” is also problematic. So power is an ambiguous, unmeasurable concept, and there is no agreement on what constitutes “in uence” and how much of it a state needs to possess to be called a rising power. By some measures of so power, Brazil could be said to punch above its weight in international regimes. Brazil enjoys a prominent position in the World Trade Organization (WTO) because of its skills of coalition building, “insider activism,” and ability to manipulate the informal norms of the WTO, rather than because of its “commercial power.”38 Should this qualify it as a rising power, even though its military and economic power is not comparable to that of Russia, China, or India, let alone the status quo power, the United States?
China lacks so power, and is acutely conscious of this lack.39 Yet we accord it the status of a rising power. us, power, either hard or so , is an incomplete measure of a rising power. We are le , then, with “no commonly accepted de nition of what an emerging or rising power is,” and “no consistent indicators of what a rising state looks like.”40 What we can deduce from this established discussion on rising powers is that while power is a necessary condition for a country to rise, and to be perceived as a rising power, it is certainly not su cient. So what is a rising power, and what does it mean for some countries, but not others, to rise?
Rethinking Rising Powers: Why Nations Rise (or Stay Reticent)
What Is a Rising Power?
ere is a crucial fact that is assumed but le unstated when we talk of rising powers a rising power is a state that is rising to become, in the near future, a great power. A er all, the material capabilities of many countries are constantly increasing relative to others. Not all of these countries are dubbed rising powers, although they may indeed be rising within a regional or even international context. e term “rising power” is very speci cally intended to capture a special category of actors those who are in the near future expecting to join the ranks of the great powers and eventually determine, as great powers do, the structure, major processes, and general direction of the international system.41 Moreover, “rising power” is a modern term; a century ago, English-language newspapers referred not to “rising powers” but to countries that were becoming great powers.42 Consequently, we can say that rising powers are countries that should be rising to become great powers. And to understand them, we can rst establish our expectations of a great power. Fortunately, the international relations literature is proli c on the question of how we can recognize a great power. e most commonly accepted de nition of a great power utilizes military capabilities alone. A great power is one that holds at least 543 to 10 percent of global military power.44 e Correlates of War project, which is the data set most widely used to identify major powers, includes power capabilities measured in terms of total population, urban population, iron and steel production, fuel consumption, military personnel, and military expenditures.45 Yet because capabilities alone can result in mis-measurement of great powers,46 academics have added both the element of behavioral choice and external recognition to the de nition of a great power. us, in addition to possessing unusually high relative capabilities, a great power’s interests are global rather than regional,47 and it is recognized
both formally and informally by other states as a great power.48 But even within the category of great powers there are tiered di erences. Some countries are major powers, others are greater powers, and still others are superpowers. ese di erences can be a ributed not only to the distribution of material capabilities, relative to other powers in the system,49 but, because “statistics and military budgets aren’t everything,” also to their behavior in terms of projection of interests and reputation.50 Not every major power will become a greater power, and nor will every greater power become a superpower. ere are tiers of great powers.
us, we can logically juxtapose two important elements from the great power literature in order to construct an understanding of rising powers. A rising power, or a country that is rising to become a great power, should increase its relative military and economic power, begin to globalize its interests, and begin to gain recognition as a great power-to-be. ere can be di erences among rising powers; these di erences can be a ributed not just to capabilities, but also to the powers’ behavior; that is, some countries rise enough to be on the path to great power, while others may rise, but only in a material sense.
Increasing relative military and economic power is observable. But how do we perceive a rising power globalizing its interests and gaining recognition? When a rising power perceives its interests to be globalizing, it a empts to acquire global authority. at is, when a rising power perceives its self-de ned national interests to be increasing in scope (expanding beyond the regional or local) and depth (in complexity and breadth of a ected issues), we can observe it taking on more global authority and responsibility suited to its changing interests. But the notion of “authority and responsibility” is not one that is de ned by the rising power. Rather, it is set by the established great power norms of the day. In any given time period, global society has an example of great power behavior in the status quo power(s) of the day, as well as in norms and institutions (or international order) established by that great power. Early 19th-century Russia gives us an example of a rising power that did not meet the great power norms of the day. Russia had the material capabilities to be recognized as a great power. However, its illiberal system of governance and resulting modus operandi in international politics marked it as glaringly di erent from the “ rst-class powers.”51 As such, European states continued to harbor doubts about its entry into the ranks of the great powers. In order to gain this recognition, Russia a empted to adopt European great power behaviors “having ambassadors plenipotentiary, being a guarantor power, participating in conferences, gaining a droit de regard . . . that were explicitly associated with great powers” of the time.52 us, a country that is rising to be a great power a empts to take on authority, and actively tries to shape its role in the international system in the fashion of the current great powers. is suggests, crucially, that a rising power is not revisionist
(at least initially). It is, instead, accommodational. It has to accept and conform to the current international order before it can reject it.53
e acquisition of global authority is intricately linked to the rising power’s quest for recognition. Only when a rising power conforms to great power norms will it be able to shape recognition both internally and externally of it as a country that is on the path to become a great power. us, a rising power also actively a empts to shape both domestic and international perceptions of its position as a great power-to-be. External recognition, a key feature of great powers, is an element that is bestowed by international society, contingent on both established capabilities and proven global interests. Without these two, external recognition would presumably be nonexistent. In e ect, we know a great power when we see one. But not only is external recognition, as we have seen, more ambiguous (predicated on material capabilities) and risky (assumptions of revisionism) for rising powers, in e ect necessitating a response,54 but we can also posit that internal recognition is just as important as external recognition for these countries to gain domestic support as their international position changes.
But here is the nub: just as there are di erences between great powers, there are di erences between rising powers. If a country seeks to increase its relative material power without a empting either to acquire global authority or to court both external and internal recognition of itself as a great power in the making, it is unlikely to become a great power. Countries that engage in all of these behaviors are active rising powers they are actively rising to become great powers. Countries that engage only in increasing their material power are reticent powers they will not rise to become great powers unless they engage in the other two behaviors.
us, a country rising to be a great power an active power not only begins to acquire relative military and economic power, but also begins to actively acquire global authority by acting in accordance with great power norms, and, simultaneously, begins to actively court internal and external recognition as a great power-to-be. It is consequently an accommodational power.
Active powers may eventually become activist powers, that is, what we think of as revisionist powers, but they need to rst acknowledge, show themselves to play by, and master the rules before they can gainsay them. And reticent powers need not stay reticent. If they eventually acquire the other two behaviors, they will become active powers. And activist powers are not born of military and economic power, they are made. As we will see in this book, some countries may indeed have the material strength to both globalize authority and shape recognition, according to the great power norms of the day, but may still not display the will to do so. Reticent powers do not suddenly embark on the path to become active powers.
So we come to a very important question: why do some countries actively rise while others remain reticent? Because rising to become a great power is a process. is process encompasses not simply material might that is, the requisite military and economic power or geopolitics or opportunity, but also a particular type of narratives, narratives about how to become a great power according to the prevalent norms. ese narratives are as integral as material power to the process of active rising. Countries that undergo this process are both active and accommodational. Countries that do not complete this process stay reticent. To understand where these narratives come from and why they ma er for rising powers, we need to look at a concept that I call “idea advocacy.”
Idea Advocacy: A Marketplace of Narratives
As we will eventually see through cases in this book, rising to become a great power is a process active powers develop, in addition to their material power, “idea advocacy” or narratives about how to become a great power. A reticent power does not, and may even reject such notions. ese narratives or the lack thereof are a key di erence in the behavior between active and reticent powers.
Idea advocacy can be understood as the generation of new ideas and recombination of existing ideas by the elites in a rising power to form new narratives about the country’s appropriate behavior as a great power-to-be. ese new narratives, in conjunction with a rising power’s increasing capabilities, drive the power to acquire global authority and shape recognition of its rise. e philosopher Max Weber once said of great powers, “At a minimum, in order to be a great power, a power has to think of itself in terms of being great, of having an historical task.”55 A country rising to become a great power has to think of itself as a great power-to-be, has to display awareness that its position in international politics is changing, and yes, has to set itself a historical task. e concept of idea advocacy itself is deeply rooted in international relations, and can be traced to a theoretical concept called “idea entrepreneurship.” To understand the concept, we need to break apart the phrase and understand each component separately.
In international relations, ideas can be beliefs that are held and expressed by individuals and groups or beliefs that are embraced by institutions, in uencing their a itudes and behaviors.56 Ideas can also be beliefs about correct standards of behavior that are held by international society at large.57 A set of beliefs (I will use ideas and beliefs interchangeably) can in uence how a country behaves on the world stage by serving as “road maps” or “world views.” ese “maps” help a country make sense of the world and guide it in forming policy,58 and can
be expressed as important narratives. International relations experts continue to debate whether the material goals, or interests, of a state are distinct from its beliefs, or whether the beliefs themselves constitute the interests. One school of thought suggests that since foreign policy actors o en have incomplete information and the absence of certainty about the consequence of their actions, they can rely on ideas to help choose strategies to further their goals.59 In this mode of thinking, ideas impact which foreign policy interests are prioritized by actors. But there are others who argue that “interests cannot be separated from ideas about interests.”60 In other words, ideas can be causal, but can also be the foundation of interests in a variety of ways. is does not mean, however, that ideas themselves are simply static entities that a ect the choices of actors. Ideas can change and can be a ected not just by the political and economic conditions in which they operate, but even by the strategies and goals of the actors a “feedback” e ect as it were.61 In fact, it is the very dynamic nature of ideas that can enable actors to conceptualize and reconceptualize the world.62
Entrepreneurship broadly, the creation of a new or innovative venture by risk takers who achieve their goals in a new environment and destroy the status quo63 has rarely been studied in the context of the foreign policy or security of countries.64 Instead theorists, particularly international political economists and institutionalists, have drawn connections between ideas and entrepreneurship to show how they can in uence a country to institute reform. ey have o ered the concept of “political/ideational entrepreneurs” or agents who either institutionalize new ideas or recombine existing ideas to in uence the political leadership.65 Such agents are a source of innovation in that they put forward new or creative ideas, and seek to build support for those ideas.66 ere is a consensus that these idea entrepreneurs tend to be elites, i.e., those who can shape the political debate by framing issues, outlining problems, and ultimately in uencing political agendas.67 Foreign policy ideas are also o en associated with elite individuals who emerge from formal and informal epistemic communities or bodies of experts or “knowledge regimes” and individual leadership.68 e direction of entrepreneurial ideas can be top-down, where policymakers construct and communicate ideas and then mediate the public debates that ensue from these ideas, or bo om-up, where the interactions of activists and experts can produce ideas that are selected by policymakers.69 Either way, a virtual marketplace of ideas70 becomes crucial for policymaking. is is because as actors think about, discuss, and exchange their ideas about political action, countries learn from their rich discourse.71 Particularly, this exchange of ideas leads them to interpret the available information, reinvent ideologies and identities, and even construct new institutions.72
We can take away from such theories three important elements: beliefs ma er for the behavior of countries in the world; beliefs about world behavior
predominantly come from entrepreneurial elites in the country; and beliefs are pluralistic and dynamic.
If we think back to power transition theories and the assumptions made about rising powers, we can see why idea advocacy expressed as narratives about how to become a great power would be particularly important. e root of power transition theories, as we have seen, is the dissatisfaction of rising powers with the distribution of goods in the international system. Crucially, though, this dissatisfaction has more to do with the domestic beliefs of the rising power about the distribution of goods in the international system than the distribution of goods itself. at is, it is not necessarily how the goods are actually distributed but rather how the rising power believes they are distributed that ma ers for power transitions, and possible future con ict with the status quo power. us, just as international society feels the need to “manage” a rising power and assess its satisfaction/dissatisfaction, a rising power manages its own rise through its beliefs about its changing status (including how to undertake “long-range planning” and form “a coherent strategic program”73). Rising powers, who are by de nition in a precarious position in the international system o en seen as revisionist and as potential threats are compelled to de ne their national and international priorities, and manage external and internal perceptions about them. External perceptions ma er because great powers closely observe rising powers, and particularly their “legitimation strategies” (or explanations of their aims and motives), to assess threat.74 And internal perceptions ma er because rising powers need to satisfy domestic audiences.75
Narratives about a aining great power are not the same as grand strategies, although they are related to them.76 Grand strategies are important for great powers77 as they help them assess the limits of their capabilities, the prioritization of goals, and the most e ective long-term pursuit of their interests. Similarly, actively rising powers or countries that are becoming great powers also develop grand strategies as they seek to change their status and gain power parity with the status quo power;78 elites in rising powers care deeply about status as a moniker of great power, and develop strategies to a ain it.79 But grand strategies themselves are underpinned by ideas it is either composed of core ideas80 or in uenced by them,81 or both.82 us, this is another reason that narratives of elite entrepreneurs about great power are important they can contribute to the formulation of the grand strategies of a rising power.83
What kinds of beliefs about how the active rising power should behave comprise these narratives of elite entrepreneurs? Active powers have narratives that contain three distinct kinds of beliefs about how to a ain great power.
First, the beliefs reconcile the material capability of the rising power with the constraints of the international order. In other words, as the material capabilities of a rising power increase, the beliefs focus a ention on those goals that are now
perceived to be materially a ainable within the constraints set by the current order. Second, and related to the rst, the beliefs acknowledge the current norms of great power, outline the rising power’s acquiring of global authority/responsibility in that context, and outline its relationship with the status quo power(s), and the current international order. In this way, beliefs help the rising power actively shape its role in the international system and act like a great power-to-be in order to expand its in uence.
e beliefs acknowledge, therefore, what great power currently looks like, what the norms of the international order are, and the rising power’s responsibilities in the context of that international order to eventually be recognized as a great power. And nally, the beliefs explain the purpose and goals of a rising power’s increasing international involvement, helping to build support for that involvement both domestically and internationally.
e narratives of these beliefs can emanate from a set of elite individuals belonging to a formal or informal expert community or from a single in uential leader.84 us, the narratives may be initiated by leader elites and taken up by elites in expert communities, or they may be initiated by expert communities and taken up by individual leaders. It is important to emphasize here that this means that idea advocacy (or the advocacy of beliefs) is a marketplace of narratives about great power behavior rather than one single narrative about how to be a great power; that is, there may be di ering, sometimes even contradictory, narratives about how to a ain great power. But even di ering narratives would recognize what the current norm of great power is, whether they advocated, modi ed, or rejected conformance with it. Eventually, as some narratives become more important than others, there may emerge a consensus among the elites about the rising power’s behavior.
Reticent powers, on the other hand, do not have idea advocacy or these narratives about how to a ain great power. ey may, and o en do, have beliefs about the world, their foreign policy, and their behavior. But these beliefs are not about becoming a great power. Lacking such narratives, these powers, even while increasing their economic and military power, remain reticent about their role on the world stage they neither acquire global authority, nor do they actively seek to shape either internal or external perceptions about their role as a great power-to-be.
Rising to Become a Great Power: A Story about Stories
Before moving on to speci c cases, let’s take stock of what we’ve learned. Active rising powers are countries that increase their military and economic power and also change their behavior on the world stage they globalize their authority by conforming to great power norms, and try to shape both internal and external
recognition of their rise. ey do so because they are going through a process of rising that includes not just material indicators but also narratives about great power. Reticent rising powers are countries that may increase their military and economic power but do not globalize their authority or try to shape recognition of the material change in their status. is is because the process of their (material) rise is incomplete it includes material power, but does not include narratives about great power. Where narratives about becoming a great power come from and why some countries develop them at all and others do not is an interesting question which I will discuss brie y in the conclusion of this book. But for the purposes of the story here, which is to show how some countries begin taking on global authority and shaping recognition of their rise while others do not, we can look to history and nd some fascinating pa erns. What we nd is that the elites in some countries at di erent periods of time had narratives about themselves as great powers-to-be. Because the narratives accompanied rising military and economic power, they were neither wishful thinking nor suicidal; in fact, they were o en strategic they took into account material and geopolitical constraints and were cognizant of the dangers of overexpansion.85 ey also took into account the current notion of what it meant to be a great power, and conformed to that notion.
But the narratives were not the inevitable consequence of a country’s rising military and economic power. Because what we nd is that in the same time periods there were other countries who also had increasing material power but they did not develop these narratives. e former the active rising powers pushed to acquire global authority and shape recognition of their rise, and this behavior accompanied these narratives. Eventually, these active powers were also activist powers and became great powers. e la er reticent powers did not acquire global authority and seemed indi erent to pushing for internal and external recognition of their role. ey also had very di erent narratives about their international role, o en even rejecting the current norms of great power. We can turn now to three di erent time periods, and six very di erent cases of active and reticent powers to illustrate these pa erns. Classic theories of power transitions tell us that rising powers change as they become stronger.86 is is a story about the process of change, and how material strength needs to be accompanied by narratives. My goal is to tell a story about the stories these countries tell, or fail to tell, about themselves.
Ideas of Great Power in the Late 19th Century
International relations has always been characterized by competition between powerful political entities. e mid- to late 19th century was no di erent in that respect. It was an era of European great power competition. e United
Kingdom, France, Spain, Austria-Hungary, and Russia all jockeyed for power and in uence. Yet it was also an era like no other. e global economy was interconnected on an unprecedented scale, leading to an economic boom in Europe.
ere now existed a transoceanic and transcontinental trading and nancial system that was based in western Europe. is, combined with the spread of free trade, faster transfers of technology, explosive growth in manufacturing, and be er modes of transport, created a di erent kind of international order.87 Moreover, the Industrial Revolution had led to technological changes which, in turn, powered a new kind of military and naval strength. Not only did European powers have greatly improved repower (the advent of the breechloader, Gatling guns, Maxims, and light eld artillery, for example), but their naval sea power was now extended from domination of the open seas to even inland waters, including major waterways.88
But perhaps most importantly, this era was distinct from any other before it because all of this great economic and military power and in uence was anchored in place with a di erent kind of territorial conquest colonies. Great powers in the 19th century were not just great powers. ey were colonial great powers. A tiny percentage of the world’s countries controlled a huge percentage of the world’s territory and population. By 1878, European countries controlled 67 percent of global territory; by 1914, this had risen to 84 percent.89 In the center of this colonial universe, Britain was the undisputed superpower. In 1830, the United Kingdom accounted for two-thirds of Europe’s industrial growth and 9.5 percent of the world’s manufacturing. By 1860, it produced 53 percent of the world’s iron, and 50 percent of the world’s coal and lignite. It consumed 50 percent of the world’s raw co on. Its energy consumption was ve times that of either the United States or Prussia/Germany, and 155 times that of Russia. It accounted for one- h of the world’s commerce and two- hs of the manufactured goods trade.90 Britain’s jaw-dropping strength was in no small part due to its control over its colonies. Britain ruled over a full quarter of the land on Earth.91
It is important to understand that Britain and the other European countries of the time were great powers because they held colonies. To be a great power meant owning overseas colonies and having subsequent sway over the lives and deaths of millions of people. Industrialized Europe and the non-industrialized territories they controlled did not just have vast disparities between them in economic and military power. When a European country owned colonies, it also meant the establishment and maintenance of unequal economic relationships, bloody wars with and plunder of native populations, the introduction of diseases that decimated those populations, and the constant use of brutal force to retain the territories. As eodore Roosevelt put it, colonization was “not merely a political but an ethnic conquest.”92 us, such conquest was accompanied by
unabashed jingoism, proselytization, and a conviction of ethnic, cultural, and moral superiority the idea that European civilization was civilization itself. Great power norms meant controlling colonies, and this was the accepted and acceptable idea of the day.
In this competitive world of great power jockeying and colonial acquisition, some countries by the late 19th century were indisputably rising to join the ranks of the great powers. In 1898, Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, famously remarked that the world was now divided into “living” and “dying” powers.93 ese “living” powers Japan and the United States, for example were all rising powers, on the cusp of joining the ranks of the great powers. Not only were they rising in material terms, industrializing and growing their economies, investing in their navies, and modernizing their standing armies, relative to the established great powers of the day,94 but they were beginning to take on more global authority and responsibility according to the current norms of great power, and to shape recognition of their rise. ey were active powers. What did it mean to act according to the prevalent norms of great power? Again, great powers in the late 19th century were not simply great powers: they were colonial great powers because they had “impulses to emulate the established powers.”95 No wonder, then, that in the late 19th century the United States and Japan not only went to war (the United States with Spain; Japan with China and Russia), but also acquired colonies, and used the ownership of those colonies to shape internal and external recognition of their rise.
Political scientists generally equate rising power behavior of this time with the phrase expansionism, 96 missing the point entirely that not only was it a particular kind of expansion colonial expansion, which meant taking on the “responsibility” of colonial territories and acquiring millions of overseas subjects but it was also accommodational, in that it was perceived as appropriate great power behavior. Political scientists also tend to a ribute expansionist behavior to opportunity acquired through material power. Some have argued that American expansionism heralded “an activist foreign policy,” because the United States had the capacity to do so, and it now had leaders who perceived the opportunity.97 Others have said that expansionist behavior was inevitable, the defensive consequence of a rising power’s need to shore up its security.98 However, the expansionist behavior at the turn of the 19th century that can be witnessed in countries like the United States and Japan was more complex than that. Both the United States and Japan chose to go down the path of colonial great power.
While the United States and Japan were certainly acquiring the capacity to globalize authority in the style of the great power du jour, not every country that increased its wealth in the late 19th century (and was provided opportunities to increase authority) did so. e case of the Netherlands provides us a different perspective. Post-1870, the Netherlands was becoming one of the richest
countries in Europe it industrialized later than the other European powers, but when it did, its economy boomed. Moreover, the Netherlands, which had acquired its colonies a century or more previously, was a colonial power, considered second only to Great Britain in its mastery of colonies. Indeed, its colonies were so immensely pro table that other countries, including France and even Britain, tried to emulate Dutch administration strategies in order to exploit their own colonies more e ciently. e Netherlands parlayed its wealth into expanding and improving its military and shoring up its defenses, both on land and at sea. But the Netherlands was surprisingly reticent. It was a power that was materially rising in important ways, but not an active power, as it passed up opportunities to expand its colonies further, bartered away existing colonial territories with li le gains, and instead focused on consolidating its holdings in its colony of Indonesia. And while certainly the Netherlands was constrained by geopolitical threats it feared rst France and then Prussia it was reticent even when compared to small and weaker European countries. In other words, despite having colonies and no small amount of economic wealth and some military power, and despite opportunity presenting itself for an active role within its geopolitical constraints, it shied away from acquiring authority, and made li le push to acquire internal or external recognition of its material achievements.
Why did countries like the United States and Japan take on global authority in the style of great powers of the day, while others like the Netherlands remained puzzlingly reticent even given their capacity? As historians who study these countries have comprehensively recorded, the United States and Japan both had extensive ideas on how to be a great power they had a plethora of narratives which would, in turn, not only push them to globalize but also shape internal and external recognition of their changing status. And these narratives meant that they tried to become great powers by imitating the established great power ideas of the day. e Netherlands did not have these narratives, and it even denied the label it could plausibly claim that of colonial power insisting not only that it was not an imperialist power but that to be an imperialist power was immoral.
e United States as a rising power had what historians have termed “visions of greatness.”99 A er 1870, America entered an era of astonishing wealth and prosperity with improvements in productivity and living standards. To recover from the decimation of the Civil War, it also invested heavily in its military and, crucially, in its navy; US o cials and naval experts worried that the American navy was no match for the powerful and global European navies, and pushed for naval expansion. And eventually, it would acquire colonies, the symbol of great power in the late 19th century world. Its narratives linked becoming a great power to conceptions of liberty and racial hierarchy.100 Some narratives advocated that liberty meant national greatness operationalized as territorial expansion. Others believed that becoming a great power meant refraining from
colonial ambitions abroad that could “betray” the cause of liberty at home and lead to the country’s downfall. Still others promoted the idea that becoming a great power meant conquest and colonization, racial tness and pride.101 Presidents such as Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and, later, Woodrow Wilson personally held strong ideas about anti-imperialism and great power that had to be balanced with elite ideas of becoming a great power in the style of the colonial Western powers of the day.102
In Japan’s case, the Meiji Restoration showed the country’s “determination to acquire the power to be the equal of the Western world, or even to overtake the Western world.”103 e Meiji Restoration was achieved by a section of the established ruling class young low-ranking samurai and was triggered by events that compelled Japan to enter the international system.104 e forcible opening of Japan to the West by Commodore Perry in 1854 foreshadowed an eventual military coup in 1867 by Japanese rebels that would sweep away the Tokugawa shogunate ruling Japan, and “restore” the young Emperor Meiji to the throne. e Japanese elite that eventually took control demolished the samurai warrior class, and wanted to convert the existing feudal society into a modern centralized states. ese elites became “obsessed with the goal of overtaking the West and doing whatever was necessary, even risking Japan’s very cultural identity, to achieve that goal.”105 Forced modernization, which spurred the economic and military revitalization of Japan, was accompanied by certain narratives that were “not only necessary to expansion” but also in uenced the way it was carried out.106 Many of these elite narratives centered on imitating the great powers of the day, Western powers, in order to become a great power; Japanese elites advocated learning Western methods, adopting them, and then besting them. e only way to make Japan a great nation, they argued, was to acquire the “spirit” of the West its self-reliance, its rationality, its technology.107 Other narratives advocated going further and wholeheartedly adopting the rules of the existing Western international order and Westernized legal codes,108 and using those rules to establish domination and bring countries under Japanese colonial protection.109 ese beliefs were countered by others who believed in preserving traditional Japanese values or, at the very most, combining these values with Western ideas.110
In each case though the two countries di ered geographically, politically, and culturally elites were using idea advocacy not only to generate new ideas but also to recombine existing ideas to form new narratives about the country’s appropriate behavior as a great power-to-be. Many of the divergent beliefs about America’s role in the world a er the war with Spain, for example, were not organic (that is, without historical roots) and can be traced back to earlier narratives about manifest destiny and racial superiority. But they crystallized into, as we will see, one of the “great debates”111 in US foreign policy and expansionism.
