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Power and Security
87
also have deleterious effects – the power of Osama Bin Laden to win
converts to his cause is comparable to or greater than Mandela’s in terms of
impact, but is being used exclusively to bring harm.
Before moving on to consider structural power there is one further
feature of relational power that needs to be addressed. Dahl’s definition of
power, cited above, was formulated in the context of American debates on
‘community power’, and one of the strongest criticisms of his approach
stressed the way in which his definition only allows us to see power in
operation when a decision is to be made; there may be, it was argued, cases
of ‘non-decision-making’ where power is more effectively exercised than in
the making of decisions (Bachrach and Baratz 1970). The ability to control
what gets on to the agenda is more important than the ability to determine
what happens when items are actually raised in discussion. This is widely
regarded as a valid criticism of Dahl’s definition of power in the context of
a governmental system – does it apply to international relations? Whereas
much of the earlier discussion of power could apply to many versions of
pluralism as well as to realist notions, we now reach a point at which paths
diverge. Clearly the power of non-decision-making is crucial to the analysis
of agenda-setting within regimes, and thus of great significance to all
versions of pluralism, including neoliberalism; however, for realists, neo-
or otherwise, non-decision is a ‘non-concept’. This is because, from a real-
ist perspective, it is not possible for a state to be prevented from placing an
item on the agenda, there being no agenda in any formal sense of the term.
The key issues in international relations at any particular time are the issues
that states with sufficient power to gain the attention of other states wish to
be the key issues. No powerful state can be prevented from raising an issue;
by definition, if an issue is not raised it is because the state that wished to
raise it had insufficient power to do so. From a realist point of view there is
no second meaning of power.
It might be that a similar point will emerge with respect to structural
power – but this requires a more extensive examination. So far in this chap-
ter, power has been treated as though it were something that is exercised by
actors whom realists presume to be states, but who might, in some circum-
stances, be other entities such as individuals or groups. This actor-oriented
approach is a necessary feature of the way in which the consideration of
power grew out of a consideration of foreign policy. We began with the
state, moved on to consider how states formulate policy, took a short detour
to examine the proposition that state action is determined by the interna-
tional system, concluded that we had reason to doubt that this was
entirely so, and then moved to the issue of foreign-policy implementation.
Consideration of implementation raised the issue of techniques of statecraft
and this led to a discussion of power, in which power has been seen as some-
thing that states either possess as an attribute or exercise in a relationship.
88
Understanding International Relations
This is a natural enough way to think of power if one’s starting-point is
the state – but there is another way of thinking of power which is not
actor-oriented.
If we think of power as something in social life that brings about states of
affairs, that instigates or prevents change – if, in other words, we take as our
starting-point outcomes – it rapidly becomes clear that not all states of
affairs come about because of the actions of individuals or groups or states
(including as ‘actions’ in this case the legitimate exercise of authority as well
as the exercise of influence). Some things happen without any apparent
human agency. A society or a system is structured in such a way as to bring
about certain kinds of outcomes independently of the will of any of its
component parts. It makes sense to talk about power existing in these
circumstances – powerful forces are at work, as it were – but it is structural
power that is involved.
A good way of making sense of the idea of structural power can be found
in the work of the Italian Marxian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci’s concern was to make the revolution and overthrow capitalism,
but he came to realize in the 1920s that overthrowing capitalism in Italy, a
relatively-developed bourgeois state, was a different, and certainly a more
difficult, task than that which had faced Lenin in 1917. In Russia, which had
been a very underdeveloped capitalist state, the power of capital was embod-
ied in particular institutions which could be identified and engaged with in
struggle – once defeated, capitalism was overthrown. In Italy, on the other
hand, capitalism was so well established that it permeated all aspects of soci-
ety; it controlled the ‘common sense’ of society, the ways in which ordinary
people thought about politics, economics and social life in general. The effect
of this capitalist ‘hegemony’ is that bringing about change becomes very
difficult – checking and overthrowing capitalist/bourgeois institutions such
as the firm or the liberal-democratic state is only a first step; the structural
power of capitalism would remain as a more formidable obstacle to revolu-
tion than the resources of the overtly capitalist institutions.
How does this notion of structural power work in international relations?
The direct application of notions of hegemony to international political
economy will be discussed in Chapter 9; here the focus will remain on
power understood more generally, and it will be noted that apparently
similar ideas have been encountered above in the neorealist account of the
international system; we now need to re-examine this account in the light of
this new focus. What we find is that, somewhat contrary to first impres-
sions, Waltz’s version of systemic power is only partly structural in the sense
outlined above. As we have seen, the international system allegedly sends
messages to its members which, if correctly interpreted, will tell them what
courses of action they should engage in – and Waltz assumes that since
states wish to survive, they will become quite skilled interpreters of the state
Power and Security
89
of the system. There is obviously an element of structural power in this. The
rules of the game – the ‘common-sense’ understanding of how one should
conduct international relations – stem from the imperatives of the system.
It is clearly not the case that these rules, in general, reflect the power of any
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