categories this will generate are closely interrelated. Power is an
attribute – it
is something that people or groups or states possess or have access to, have
at hand to deploy in the world. Power is a
relationship – it is the ability that
people or groups or states have to exercise influence on others, to get their
way in the world. These two dimensions of power are clearly not separable,
and most realist accounts of international relations
have a story to tell
about them. A third dimension of power in which it is seen as a property of
a
structure is less easily incorporated into realist accounts of the world, at
least in so far as these accounts rely on the notion that power can only be
exercised by an actor or agent.
The idea that power is an
attribute of states is a very familiar notion to
traditional accounts of international relations. Most old textbooks, and
many new ones, offer a list of the components of national power, the
features of a country that entitle it to be regarded as a ‘great’ power, or a
‘middle’ power, or, more recently, a ‘superpower’. These lists generally iden-
tify a number of different kinds of attributes that a state might possess in
order to entitle it to claim its position in the world power rankings. These
might include: the size and
quality of its armed forces; its resource base,
measured in terms of raw materials; its geographical position and extent; its
productive base and infrastructure; the size and skills of its population; the
efficiency of its governmental institutions; and the quality of its leadership.
Some of these factors are immutable – geographical position and extent
would be the obvious examples (although the significance of geographical
features can change quite sharply over time). Others change only slowly
(size of the population, rates of economic growth) while yet others can
change quite rapidly (size of the armed forces).
These points allow us to
make a distinction between
actual power and
potential or
latent power –
the power that a state actually possesses at any one point in time as opposed
to the power it could generate in a given time period.
The significance of any one of these factors as against the others will change
over time. Population size and geographical extent can only add to the power
of a state to the extent that the administrative, communication and transport
infrastructure allows it to do so. For example, until the construction of
the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s, the quickest way to get from
St Petersburg or Moscow to Vladivostok was by sea via the Baltic and North
Seas and the Atlantic,
Indian and Pacific Oceans, which meant that Russian
land power in the East was at the mercy of British sea power, and in those
circumstances the great size of Russia could rarely be translated into a genuine
political asset. A relatively small country with a highly productive economy
may be more powerful than a much larger country with a less productive
economy – but there are limits. For example, no matter how economically
successful Singapore is it will never be major military power in the absence of
a sufficiently large population base. A culture that gives great respect to those
82
Understanding International Relations
who bear arms may be an important factor in
developing effective armed
forces, but the nature of modern mechanized warfare may mean that techni-
cally skilled civilians can be more effective than old-style warriors, always
presuming, that is, that such civilians are prepared to risk their own lives and
take those of others. Nuclear weapons may act as the great equalizers of mili-
tary power, and yet it may be that only those states which possess a very large
land mass and dispersed population are actually able to threaten to use them.
These sorts of propositions amount to the folk wisdom of power politics.
As with most examples of folk wisdom there are alternative and contradic-
tory versions of each proposition, and it is very difficult to think of ways of
validating them short of the exchange of anecdotes. In any event, most of
the time in international relations we are not actually
interested in power as
an attribute of states, but in power as a
relational concept. Indeed, all of
the attributes listed above only have meaning when placed in a relational
context – thus, for an obvious example, whether a country has a ‘large’ or
a ‘small’ population is a judgement that only makes sense in relation to
some other country. Relational power also, of course, takes us back to the
notion of influence.
The American political scientist Robert Dahl offered a classic formula-
tion of relational power when he suggested that power is the ability to get
another actor to do what it would not otherwise have done or not to do
what it would otherwise have done (Dahl 1970);
the first of these relation-
ships we could call ‘compellance’, the second ‘deterrence’. Either way, on
this count, power is not something that can be measured in terms of the
attributes of a state but only in action, in the effect one state has on another.
There is a real distinction being made here, even if the contrast between
power-as-attribute and power-as-influence-in-a-relationship is somewhat
obscured by the ambiguity of ordinary language, at least of the English
language, where ‘power’ can be synonymous with both ‘strength’ and
‘influence’ – unlike the French language, where
puissance (power, might)
and
pouvoir (capability) are more clearly delineated.
Of course, it might be the case that what we have here are simply two
different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. Some such argument
lies behind the
basic force model of power,
which suggests that it is a
reasonable assumption that the power an actor is able to exercise in a rela-
tionship is a direct reflection of the amount of power in the attribute sense
possessed by that actor. In other words, we can, in effect, pass over the rela-
tional aspect of power fairly quickly, because it is the resources that are
brought to the relationship that really count. The suggestion is that if
we wish to know whether in any particular situation one actor will actually
be able to exert power over another, the obvious method of answering this
question is to compare the resources that the two
actors bring to the rela-
tionship. As the folk wisdom has it, God is on the side of the big battalions.
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