Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

Chapter 5
Power and Security
Introduction: statecraft, influence and power
From a foreign-policy perspective, states attempt to change their environment
in accordance with aims and objectives they have set for themselves. From
a structural perspective, states attempt to adapt to their environment,
making the best of the cards the system has dealt them. Either way, states
act in the world. How? What is the nature of diplomacy or ‘statecraft’ – a
slightly old-world term that has recently been given a new lease of life? The
best discussion of this topic is that of David Baldwin, who produces a four-
way taxonomy of the techniques of statecraft which provides a useful starting-
point for this discussion. Propaganda he defines as ‘influence attempts
relying primarily on the deliberate manipulation of verbal symbols’;
diplomacy refers to ‘influence attempts relying primarily on negotiation’;
economic statecraft covers ‘influence attempts relying on resources which
have a reasonable semblance of a market price in terms of money’; and mil-
itary statecraft refers to ‘influence attempts relying primarily on violence,
weapons, or force’ (Baldwin 1985: 13). The rest of this chapter examines
the questions raised (or in some cases, avoided) by this classification.
A common feature of these techniques is that they are techniques of
‘influence’. The best way to think of influence is in terms of its two
antonyms – authority and control – and then to ask whether influence is
synonymous with power. States attempt to exert influence rather than
authority because authority is something that can only emerge in legitimate
relationships which do not exist between states. That is to say, it is an essen-
tial feature of the nature of authority that those over whom it is exercised
acknowledge that those exercising it have a right to do so – they are autho-
rized to act. In international relations there is no authority in this sense of the
term, or at least not with respect to issues of any real political significance.
The contrast between influence and control works rather differently. When
control is exercised, those who are controlled have lost all autonomy; they
have no decision-making capacity. From a realist perspective, states would
actually like to exercise control over their environment, but if any one state
ever actually was in a position to control another, the latter would cease to
be a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the term, and if any state were able
to control all other states, then the current international system would be
replaced by something else, namely an empire. Some contend that this
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process is already under way, with the establishment of an American Empire –
Chapter 12 examines the arguments for and against this thesis.
Recasting these points, the exercise of influence is the characteristic way in
which states relate to one another because we have neither a world
government (a world-wide source of legitimate authority) nor a world empire
(a world-wide source of effective control). In the absence of these two polar
positions, only relationships of influence remain. Of course, in actual prac-
tice, there may be some relationships which approach the two poles. In an
elaborate military alliance such as NATO, the governing council, the Supreme
Allied Military Commander in Europe (SACEUR), and, in some circum-
stances, the president of the United States, could be said to exercise a degree
of legitimate authority, having been authorized by the members of NATO
to act on their behalf. However, this authority is tenuous and could be
withdrawn at any time, albeit at some cost. Conversely, the degree of influ-
ence exercised by the former Soviet Union over some of its ‘allies’ in Eastern
Europe at times came close to actual control, although even at the height of
Stalinism the freedom of action of the weakest of the People’s Republics was
greater than that of the Baltic States which were incorporated into the Soviet
Union in 1940. Sometimes freedom of action may only mean the freedom to
give way to the inevitable, but even this can be meaningful; in the pre-war
crises of 1938 and 1939, neither Czechoslovakia nor Poland had any real
freedom, apart from that of determining the circumstances under which they
would fall into Nazi control, but the way in which they exercised this final
freedom had a real influence on the lives of their populations.
The relationship between influence and power is more complicated.
Power is one of those terms in political discourse that are so widely used as
to have become almost devoid of meaning; the suggestion that its use should
be banned is impracticable, but understandable. Common-sense usage of
the term power suggests that it is quite closely related to influence – a
‘powerful person’ is an influential person – but there are forms of influence
that do not seem to rely on power as the term is usually understood, and
there are forms of power that are only indirectly connected to influence. This
is a particularly important relationship for a state-centric, especially a real-
ist, view of the world, and, unlike the distinctions between influence and
authority or control, this matter is too sensitive to be determined by defini-
tion. It is only by generating a quite sophisticated understanding of power
that the realist view of the world can be comprehended – but, equally, such
an understanding is required if realism is to be transcended.