Abstract
How do rising regional powers translate regional military dominance or economic superiority into political leadership, and how do secondary regional powers respond? The chapter addresses these questions in four steps. First, it discusses the evolving International Relations (IR) Security Studies scholarship on contested leadership and identifies the research gaps of regional void, conceptual ambiguity, structural bias, and inattention to change in this literature. Second, it defines primary and secondary regional powers and develops a concept of contested leadership. Third, it outlines how the volume’s individual chapters address the research gaps. Finally, it compares their findings and joint contributions to the broader study of contested leadership in IR.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of the debates on global power shifts and the emerging order, see Ikenberry (2014). For popular views on the post-US, multipolar order, see Zakaria (2008) and Khanna (2009). For views opposing the assumption that the United States would lose its position as the sole pole of the current international system in the near future, see Layne (2012), Cox (2012), Nye (2015), and Brooks and Wohlforth (2016). Often, these scholarly analyses draw on economic forecasts by private sector actors such at the investment bank Goldman Sachs (2007) or by government agencies such as the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) (2008).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
For an introduction of the evolution of international Security Studies, see Hansen and Buzan (2009).
- 5.
This group of scholars was mainly situated in the International Political Economy (IPE) camp and interested in evolving power politics dynamics in the world economy. Later, a group of scholars picked up on these studies and focused on US global hegemonic strategies in the post-Cold War period (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990; Wohlforth 1999; Lobell 2003; Posen 2003; Hurrell 2006).
- 6.
These scholars also developed the hegemonic stability theory , which contends that hegemonic distributions of power and the hegemon’s provision of public goods (such as the maintenance of a legitimate trade or security order) increase stability (and thus reduce the incentives for contestation) (Krasner 1976; Gilpin 1981, 1988; Kindleberger 1981). For conceptual and empirical criticisms, see Snidal (1985) and Monteiro (2012). The theory has later been applied to regional orders (Lemke 2002). For an overview of definitions of hegemony , including dimensions of capability concentration, political domination, cultural, and social control , see Prys (2010). Jesse et al. (2012, 7) define a hegemons as states that are ‘(a) significantly stronger than other states in the system on both economic and military dimensions; (b) aware of its power preponderance and willing to use it to shape its international environment according to its interests and values; and (c) active in the building, developing, and sustaining of various international institutions, which reflect the negotiation and renegotiation of hegemonic bargains with other states in the system (…). Thus while unipolarity refers more narrowly to the nature of systemic power distribution, hegemony by definition implies a type of relationship between states’. For a definition of the related concepts of ‘leadership’ and ‘international primacy’, see Schirm (2010, 200) and Jervis (1993, 53).
- 7.
- 8.
According to these scholars, the dominant response to the post-1991 US hegemony is not ‘hard balancing’ through military build-ups and alliances but rather ‘soft balancing ’ as an attempt to constraint dominance through economic statecraft, diplomacy, and international institutions and law (Pape 2005; Paul 2005). For opponents of the empirical observation or the concept of ‘soft balancing’, see Lieber and Alexander (2005) and Brooks and Wohlforth (2005).
- 9.
- 10.
This turn included the study of concepts such as regionalism, regionalization, regional governance, regional society, and regional political economy. This literature also involved a broadening of the definition of what constitutes a ‘region’. Beyond geographical factors, authors argued that ‘regions’ are constructed also by cultural, economic, political, or social processes . For an overview, see Fawn (2009).
- 11.
- 12.
For an earlier treatment of leadership-followership dynamics at the global level, see Cooper et al. (1991).
- 13.
- 14.
This review does not provide an exhaustive overview of all Security Studies approaches potentially relevant to examining regional contestation. Alternative explanations include Buzan and Waever (2003)’s regional security complex theory, which combines Neorealist and Constructivist reasoning, or Liberal scholarship by, for example, Moravcsik (1997). Instead, this review focuses on the four overriding explanatory frameworks explicitly applied to study secondary regional power contestation in regions of contemporary power transitions.
- 15.
While these differ greatly in many aspects, their proponents commonly assume that the international system is anarchic, state centered, and driven by variation in the distribution of capabilities and that states following an instrumental rationality pursue either power (classical or defensive realism) or security (defensive realism). For an overview of Realist theories in IR, see Wohlforth (2008).
- 16.
Building on Kenneth Waltz’s (1979, 2000) systems theory of IR, Neorealists posit that system-level distributions of power and associated factors rather than human nature emphasized in classical realism (Morgenthau 1948, 1977; Williams 2007) or domestic politics incorporated in neoclassical realist models (Lobell et al. 2009) explain most of the observable variation in international politics and foreign policy. While Waltz argues the nature of the international structure explains causal patterns of state behavior in international systems (such as recurrent balancing alliances), John Mearsheimer (2001) contends that it also explains particular state foreign policies. Both, however, focus on long-range probabilistic forecasting.
- 17.
This is what Wohlforth et al. (2007, 157) identify as the balance-of-power theory’s ‘core proposition’. A more recent intra-realist debate involves the question of how much power states seek to guarantee their security. ‘Offensive realists ’ (similar to classical realists) argue that states seek to maximize relative powers and ultimately attain hegemony or domination as a guarantee for security (Mearsheimer 2001, 22), while according to ‘defensive realists ’ (which is closer to Waltz’s balance-of-power theory) states are satisfied with the status quo of power distribution as long as shifts in the latter do not compromise their security (Snyder 1991).
- 18.
- 19.
Stephen Walt (1987, 2008) proposed the balance-of-threat theory as a Neorealist alternative to the balance-of-power theory, arguing that states primarily balance against proximate threats rather than against power concentration (Walt 1987, 5). Power concentration constitutes only one source of threat. Others include the non-hegemonic state’s perception of malign intentions by the hegemon, the hegemon’s offensive capabilities, and both states’ geographic proximity. As states balance against the most proximate and primary threats, they might align with extra-regional hegemons against their regional dominant neighbor or against an imminent domestic threat. These factors help to explain the United States’ success in creating and sustaining a global alliance during the Cold War , Walt argues. On the study of threat perception, see Jervis (1976) and Stein (2013).
- 20.
Interpretations of the theory widely diverge . For reviews of the extensive literature on the balance-of-power theory, see Paul et al. (2004), Levy and Thompson (2005), Little (2007), and Lobell (2014). From the beginning, the literature has associated various meaning with ‘balance-of-power’, namely as a policy, as an actual state of affairs, as a roughly equal distribution of power, and as any distribution of power (Morgenthau 1985, 187).
- 21.
- 22.
In comparison, the balance-of-power theory focused much less on post-Cold War Europe, where a security community emerged, or on South America, and sub-Saharan Africa, where significant steps toward collective security and conflict management were taken.
- 23.
Another explanatory framework that has often been associated with Realist balancing scholarship is the Power Transition theory, initially drafted by Organski (1958), revised by Tammen et al. (2000), tested by Bussmann and Oneal (2007), and reviewed by Tammen et al. (2012). In fact, Lemke (2002, 2010) provided statistical evidence supporting the power transition theory at the regional level across different indicators of capabilities and different types of regions and notes that regional hierarchies function equivalently to the overall international power hierarchy. However, the theory focuses on the consequences of declining instead of rising asymmetries in the distribution of power capabilities and the rise of the secondary regional power and is thus less relevant for this study.
- 24.
According to one major variant, functional regime theory, world regions’ growing economic interdependence increases the demand for institutions which enable larger absolute gains than ones that could be acquired through unilateral action and sanction non-compliance (Rosecrance 1986; Keohane and Nye 2001). Institutions reduce the pressures for contestation amidst regional power shifts just as these contributed to the peaceful management of the transition from bipolarity to unipolarity following the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s (Ruggie 1992, 561). While leading states often played a role in creating the international institutions, secondary powers could later exploit these to lobby for their cause and at times change the leading state’s behavior (Ikenberry 2001, 51–57).
- 25.
For an overview of the discussions on regional international institutions, see Acharya and Johnston (2007).
- 26.
The paradigm challenges some of the rationalist epistemological and ontological premises on which both the Realist and Liberal Institutionalist paradigms are based. Institutions are understood as relatively stable sets of interests and identities based on actors’ ideas about international politics. For a key text, see Wendt (1992). He claims that ‘self-help and power politics are institutions, not essential features of anarchy’ (Wendt 1992, 394).
- 27.
The latter three perspectives are ‘systemic’ in the sense that Liberal Institutionalists examine the impact of institutions on the system, Constructivists explore how norms embedded in domestic interactions shape the meaning of the international structure, and English School theory studies large-scale historical trends.
- 28.
As Jesse et al. note, ‘the question of the viability of a regional level of analysis, and our ability to apply to it similar structural arguments, is a broad and important question’ (2012, 8).
- 29.
Kenneth Waltz (1979) distinguished only between ‘great’ and ‘secondary’ powers, focusing on the former and dismissing other states’ impact on the system.
- 30.
Due to geographic proximity, for example, secondary regional powers are more immediately and negatively affected by regional powers’ growing capabilities (Schirm 2010).
- 31.
For rare studies on this aspect, see Merom (2003), who provides a distinction between different ideal-typical types of great power involvement and Buzan and Waever (2003, 46–49), whose theory of regional security complexes provides a conceptualization of types of great power involvement in regional systems, ranging from penetration in the form of security alignments to overlay in the form of great power domination of regional systems (e.g. colonization).
- 32.
Dale Copeland (2012, 51) notices that ‘the most difficult theoretical task in applying realism at the regional level is figuring out, through a stand-alone deductive logic, what impact the external great powers should likely have on the interactions of the important states within the subsystem. Any realist theory designed to work at the systemic level cannot be applied lock, stock, and barrel at the regional level. This is for one simple reason: realist theories have been formulated for situations of pure anarchy where no larger actors exist to enforce agreements and protect them from attack (Waltz 1979). In regional subsystems, however, there are indeed “higher” actors with significant power—namely, the greater powers external to the subsystem’.
- 33.
Some scholars argued that regions constituted relatively autonomous and hierarchical realms of power politics and thus a distinguished level of analysis to which the logic of hierarchy operating at the global level could also be applied and that therefore regional hegemons tend to behave similarly in regional unipolar systems as global hegemons do in global unipolar systems. David Lake , for example, argues that analogous to the stabilizing effect of hegemony at the global level, ‘regions characterized by the hierarchy of single dominant states will possess more peaceful regional orders’ (Lake 2009, 35). In contrast, several comparative empirical analyses noted that many regional hegemons neither provide goods such as stability or order nor exert significant influence on their regional neighbors as expected from traditional hegemons (Prys 2010, 479) and that the great degree of overlay between regional and global power politics constrains the validity of structural arguments successfully tested at the global level (Jesse et al. 2012, 2, 9).
- 34.
IR scholars distinguish three ‘images’ or levels of analysis: the individual, domestic, and international system level (or first, second [and second reversed], and third image) (Waltz 1959; Gourevitch 1978; Buzan 1995). Neorealist, Neoliberal Institutionalist, and Social Constructivist IR theories are located in the third image. For a discussion on different types of the structural bias inherent in some IR theories, see He (2015, 210–212). To illustrate the role of agency, he also provides several historical examples in which secondary powers acted contrary to what the propositions discussed would predict.
- 35.
Empirical analyses of some of the core propositions of the balance-of-power theory in non-European regions generated skepticism about Realism’s generalizability. For example , the findings of Wohlforth et al.’s (2007, 156) systematic testing of the balancing proposition in eight cases, namely the Middle East, the Mediterranean region, South and East Asia, and Central and South America in different time periods, ‘directly contradict the core balance-of-power hypothesis that balancing behavior prevents systemic hegemony. In fact, sustained hegemonies routinely form, and balancing is relatively insignificant in explaining the emergence of non-hegemonic outcomes. This evidence fatally undermines the widespread belief that balancing is a universal empirical law in multi-state systems and the equally pervasive tendency to assign explanatory precedence to balance-of-power theory’. For a critical assessment of their critique of balance-of-power theory, see Eilstrup-Sangiovanni (2009). Applying the balance-of-power theory to East Asian states’ reactions to China’s rise, Steve Chan (2010) similarly concludes that neither have China’s neighbors balanced against it in previous long-time periods of hegemonic domination nor can balancing adequately describe the various responses to China’s current rise, including ‘conciliating, hedging, hiding, binding, diverting, free riding, and transcending (…), in addition to bandwagoning, buck-passing and balancing’ (Chan 2010, 407–408). For another skeptical view on East Asian balancing, see Shambaugh (2005).
- 36.
IR scholars developed a variation of domestic-level approaches, including Liberal and Neoclassical Realist analyses, which study factors such as regime type, veto players, and public opinion on the choice of strategic responses to power concentration, yet these have with very few exceptions not been applied to regional-level power politics. For a notable exception, see Kuik (2008), who argues that domestic processes of regime legitimation critically determine Southeast Asian responses to China’s rise.
- 37.
For a general critique of the inattention to change in neorealism, see Kratochwil (1993).
- 38.
Based on the assumption that ‘the regional hegemony game is a sub-game of the worldwide balance-of-power game’ (Mares 1988, 460), secondary powers’ responses to power concentration are largely dependent on great power involvement in the respective region. This understanding, while useful in the Cold War, fails to acknowledge the more complex regional and domestic sources of contestation.
- 39.
Constructivist scholars link change to imitation and social learning which, for example, can lead to shifts from one ‘culture of anarchy’ to another (Wendt 1992). However, social factors can be as persistent as material factors.
- 40.
For the seemingly contradictory presence of hierarchies in an anarchical international system, see Lake (1996). Kenneth Waltz (1979, 127), representative of the Neorealist paradigm of IR, recognized only two positions in the international system, namely great and secondary powers. In contrast , David Mares (1988, 455–456) argued for a more nuanced classification for analyzing non-great power behavior, because ‘simplifying to the extent that a Western Germany and a Tanzania are seen to confront the same opportunities and challenges in world politics seems too high a cost to pay for theoretical parsimony’.
- 41.
- 42.
Cp. Mearsheimer (2001, 5), who argues that ‘(g)reat powers are determined on the basis of their relative military capability. To qualify as a great power, a state must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the world’. Moreover, in his proposition of a theory of unipolar politics, Monteiro (2014) understands unipolarity in terms of the distribution of military capabilities.
- 43.
Huntington (1999) proposed a broader three-layered distinction between a ‘superpower’ or ‘hegemon’ with ‘pre-eminence in every domain of power—economic, military, diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural—with the reach and capabilities to promote interests in virtually all parts of the world’ as the top layer, ‘major regional powers’ as the second layer as those states ‘preeminent in areas of the world without being able to extend their interests and capabilities as globally’ as the respective superpower (listing examples such as India in South Asia, China in East Asia, Iran in Southwest Asia, Brazil in Latin America), and as the third layer ‘secondary regional powers’ as those states ‘whose interests often conflict with the more powerful regional states’ (including Pakistan in relation to India as one example).
- 44.
Cp . Prys (2012, 13–41).
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
- 48.
We also discuss the analytical ambiguities of IR interpretations of the concepts ‘revisionism’ and ‘status quo’ and the observation that a secondary power contestation strategy can entail both status quo and revisionist elements. For a similar discussion, see Johnston (2003, 6–12).
- 49.
Moreover, the ‘regional turn’ in IR progressed further; see most recently Börzel and Risse (2016).
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Ebert, H., Flemes, D. (2018). Regional Leadership and Contestation: Strategic Reactions to the Rise of the BRICS. In: Ebert, H., Flemes, D. (eds) Regional Powers and Contested Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73691-4_1
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