*** Joseph Nye – The Future of Power ***
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A second pitfall is to
confuse power with the resources that states possess and to limit our focus
solely to states. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the
largest military prevails, but in an information age it may be the states (or
non-states) with the best story that wins.
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Power is the capacity
to do things, and in social situations to affect others to get the outcomes we
want. Power is the ability to alter others’ behaviour to produce preferred
outcomes.
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There are three different aspects of relational
power – commanding change, controlling agendas, and
establishing preferences.
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Today, power in the
world is distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three dimensional
chessboard. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar and the
United States is likely to remain supreme for some time. But in the middle
chessboard, economic power has been multipolar for more than a decade with the
United States, Europe, Japan and China as the major players, and with others
gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational
relations that cross borders outside of government control, and it includes
non-state actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger
than most national budgets at one extreme and terrorists transferring weapons
or hackers threatening cyber-security at the other. This chessboard also
includes new transnational challenges such as climate change and pandemics. On
this bottom board, power is widely diffused and it makes no sense to speak of
unipolarity, multipolarity or hegemony.
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Smart power is the
combination of the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of
persuasion and attraction.
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The problem for all
states in the twenty first century is that there are more and more things
outside the control of even the most powerful states.
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Power is conveyed
through resources, whether tangible or intangible. People notice resources.
Power conversion – getting from resources to behavioural outcomes – is a
crucial intervening variable. Having the resources for power does not guarantee
that you will always get the outcome you want. Converting resources into
realized power in the sense of obtaining desired outcomes requires
well-designed strategies and skilful leadership- smart power. Yet strategies
are often inadequate and leaders frequently misjudge.
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As a first step in any game, it helps to start by figuring out who is holding the high
cards and how many chips that player has. Equally important, however, is that
policy-makers have the contextual intelligence to understand what game they are
playing.
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Power resources are
simply the tangible and intangible raw materials or vehicles that underlie
power relationships, and whether a given set of resources produces preferred
outcomes or not depends upon behaviour in context. The vehicle is not the power
relationship. Knowing the horsepower and mileage of a vehicle does not tell us
whether it will reach the preferred destination.
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If ideas and
institutions can be used to frame the agenda for action in a way that makes
others’ preferences seem irrelevant or out of bounds, then it may never be
necessary to push or shove them. In other words, it may be possible to shape
others’ preferences by affecting their expectations of what is legitimate or
feasible.
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Powerful actors can
make sure that the less powerful are never invited to the table, or if they get
there, the rules of the game have already been set by those who arrived first.
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If you can get others
to want the same outcomes that you want, it will not be necessary to override
their initial desires.
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States are caught in a zero-sum game where it is
rational to fend for themselves because they cannot trust others. If an actor
disarms and others do not, the actor is not likely to
survive in anarchic conditions. Those who are benevolent and trusting tend to
disappear over time. They are weeded out by the dynamics engendered by the
structure of the system. The path to security and survival for the actor is to
develop its own military resources through growth and to form alliances to
balance the power of others. In this world, gains relative to others are more
important than absolute gains.
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Occupation helps to unite what under other
circumstances would be disparate populations
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In general, threats
are costly when they fail, not only in encouraging resistance in the target,
but also in negatively influencing third parties observing the outcome.
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Being less dependent can be a source of power.
If two parties are interdependent but one is less so than the other, the less dependent party has a source of power as long as
both value the interdependent relationship. Manipulating the asymmetries of
interdependence is an important dimension of economic power. Perfect symmetry
is quite rare, so most cases of economic interdependence also involve a potential
power relationship.
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We live in an interdependent world, in which we will probably harm ourselves if we take
unilateral action aimed at harming another side.
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States struggle to shape the structure of
markets to their advantage by manipulating market access with tariffs, quotas and licenses; diversifying supply chains; pursuing
equity shares in companies; and using aid to gain special concessions. P62
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Even where natural
resources are scarce within a nation’s borders, their absence is not an index
of low economic power. Much depends on a country’s vulnerability, and that
depends on whether substitutes are available and whether there are diverse
sources of supply. P63
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It turns out that oil
is the exception, not the rule, in judgements about economic power derived from
natural resources. P64
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When a transnational
corporation goes into a resource-rich country with a new investment, it can
strike a bargain in which the multinational gets a large part of the joint
gains. From the point of view of the poor country, having a multinational come
in to develop its resources will make the country better off. At the early
stages when the multinational has a monopoly on capital, technology and access
to international markets, it strikes a bargain with the poor country in which
the multinational gets the lion’s share. But over time, the multinational
inadvertently transfers resources to the poor country and trains locals, not
out of charity but out of the normal process of doing business. Eventually, the
poor country wants a better division of the profits. The multinational could
threaten to pull out, but now the poor country can threaten to run the
operation by itself. So over time, the power of the transnational company to
structure a market, particularly in raw materials, diminishes in terms of its
bargaining with the host county. P65
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Information creates power, and today a much
larger part of the world’s population has access to that power. Technological
advancements have led to a dramatic reduction in the costs of processing and
transmitting information. The result is an explosion of information, and that
has produced a paradox of plenty. Plentiful information leads to scarcity of
attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information
confronting them, they have difficulty knowing what to focus on. Attention,
rather than information, becomes the scarce resource, and those who can
distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power.
Cue-givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who
can tell us where to focus our attention. P103
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Two types of power shifts are occurring in this
century; power transition and power diffusion. Power
transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical event,
but power diffusion is a more novel process. The problem for all states in
today’s global information age is that more things are happening outside the
control of even the most powerful states. We have not so much a multi-polar
world as a no-polar world. P113
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States will remain the
dominant actor on the world stage, but they will find the stage far more
crowded and difficult to control. A much larger part of the population both
within and among countries has access to the power that comes from information.
P114
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In principle, as costs
and barriers of entry into markets diminish, the Information Revolution should
reduce the power of large states and enhance the power of small sates and
non-state actors. But in practise, international relations are more complex
than such technological determinism implies. Some aspects of the information
revolution help the small, but some help the already large and powerful. Size
still matters. Economies of scale still remain in some of the aspects of power
that are related to information. P117
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No matter how power is
measured, an equal distribution of power among states is relatively rare. More
often the processes of uneven growth means that some states will be rising and
others declining. P153
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British columnist Martin Wolf calls India a ‘premature
superpower’, meaning a country with low living
standards but a huge economy. P173
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China is another of
Wolf’s premature superpowers. China’s current reputation for power benefits
from projections about the future. P178
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China does have
impressive power resources, but we should be sceptical about projections based
primarily on current growth rates and political rhetoric. P179
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Moreover, linear
projections of economic growth trends can be misleading. Countries tend to pick
the low-hanging fruit as they benefit from imported technologies sin the early
stages of economic take-off, and growth rates generally slow as economies reach
higher levels of development. P181
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The power paradox – The fact that power is given
to those individuals, groups, or states that advance
the interests of the greater good in a socially intelligent fashion, but what
people want from leaders – social intelligence – is what is damaged by the
possession of power. P207
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Noble causes can have
terrible consequences if they are accompanied by excessive optimism or wilful
blindness about the probabilities of success. P209
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Empires are easier to
rule when they rest on the soft power of attraction as well as the hard power
of coercion. P212
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The world is neither
uni-polar, nor multi-polar, nor chaotic – it is all three at the same time.
Thus a smart grand strategy must be able to handle very different distributions
of power in different domains and understand the trade-offs among them. It
makes no more sense to see the world through a purely realist lens that focuses
only on the top chess-board or a liberal institutional lens that looks
primarily at the other boards. Contextual intelligence today requires a new
synthesis of ‘liberal realism’ that looks at all three boards at the same time.
After all, in a three-level game, a player who focuses on only one board is
bound to lose in the long run. P213
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Global government is unlikely in the
twenty-first century, but degrees of global
governance already exist. The world has hundreds of treaties, institutions, and
regimes for governing areas of interstate behaviour ranging from
telecommunications, civil aviation, ocean dumping, trade and even the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. But such institutions are rarely
self-sufficient. They still benefit from the leadership of great powers. And it
remains to be seen whether the largest countries in the twenty-first century
will live up to this role. P215
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One of the dilemmas of
multilateral diplomacy is how to get everyone into the act and still get
action. The answer is likely to lie in what Europeans have dubbed ‘variable
geometry’. There will be many multilateralisms that will vary with the
distribution of power resources in different issues. P216
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Centrality in networks can be a source of
power, but the power that flows from this kind of connectivity is not the power
to impose outcomes. Networks are not directed and controlled as much as they
are managed and orchestrated. Multiple players are integrated into a whole that
is greater than the sum of its parts – in other words, the network provides
power to achieve preferred outcomes with other players rather than over them.
P217
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