Emerging Powers: what power?
(2015) Studia Diplomatica — Vol. LXVIII-1 (2015), n° 1, p. 95-107 (2015)
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- For a long time, the question of the nature of power has been subject to debate between the various trends of theories of international relations. Such a question was not only limited to the field of international relations. It was and still is a fundamental paradigm of political science (see f.eg Heywood, 1997). However, in the field of international relations the debate was most often presented as a confrontation between the realist school of theories of international relations, advocating the principle of power mainly defined in terms of constraint and military force (Morgenthau, 1993), and the liberal school supporting the idea of a more diverse nature of power (more specifically based on economic resources …)(Keohane and Nye, 2001). The end of the cold war opened the hypothesis that such a debate was obsolescent, considering that economic relations became the dominating issue in a world rid of great powers rivalry. Nevertheless the evolution of the international system since then reveals a growingly complex picture of what is going on in the contemporary world. The international system is torn between simultaneous and contradictory trends and aspirations : the reality of anarchy and a aspiration to order, growing pressure between global issues (economic, energy, environmental…) and challenges on the one hand and persisting disagreements on the needed solutions, tensions between integration in an international regime (Krassner, 1983 ) and sovereignty reflexes, the fragmegration phenomenon underlined by James Rosenau (Rosenau, 2003) , the ambiguity in State’s relationship with governance (Vercauteren, 2014)… Such a context seems to reinvigorate the debate on the nature of power in today’s world. According to Stephen Walt in a recent article in Foreign Policy (Walt, 2014), “great power politics still matters a lot”. This assertion raises a question: what power? In another article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, George Parker seems to provide an answer when he defines power as: “ability of control events – willingness and ability to project (military) force, the attractive power of liberal democracy as a counterweight to authoritarianism and extremism.” (Parker, 2014) In this context, the appearance of emerging powers seems to bring a new element in the debate as it seems to express a redistribution of power in the international system. The aim of this paper is to assess how the question of the nature of power has been affected by the phenomenon of Emerging Countries, especially through their strategies vis-à-vis global governance.
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Vercauteren, P. (2015). Emerging Powers: what power? Studia Diplomatica, LXVIII-1 (2015)(1), 95-107. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/189919 (Original work published 2015)