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Power, Order, and Change in World Politics
Are there recurring historical dynamics and patterns that can help us understand today's power transitions and struggles over international order? What can we learn from the past? Are the cycles of rise and decline of power and international order set to continue? Robert Gilpin's classic work, War and Change in World Politics offers a sweeping and influential account of the rise and decline of leading states and the international orders they create. Now, some thirty years on, this volume brings together an outstanding collection of scholars to reflect on Gilpin's grand themes of power and change in world politics. The chapters engage with theoretical ideas that shape the way we think about great powers, with the latest literature on the changing US position in the global system, and with the challenges to the existing order that are being generated by China and other rising non-Western states.
- GenresInternational Relations
306 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 4, 2014
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About the author
G. John Ikenberry
77 books53 followersGilford John Ikenberry (October 5, 1954) is a theorist of international relations and United States foreign policy, and a professor of Politics and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
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November 7, 2016
This volume is a collection of nine essays exploring grand questions of global order and change. The starting point for each essay is Robert Gilpin’s classic work “War and Change in World Politics.” Although published over three decades ago (1981) and written under the backdrop of the Cold War, Gilpin’s work profoundly shaped my own views on International Relations. While my understanding of International Relations has grown more nuanced (thanks in part to the arguments of Liberal IR scholars like Ikenberry) Gilpin’s Realist vision of global order continues to resonate with me and remains the foundation and point of departure for my other thoughts on International Relations theory. The essays in this volume examine different aspects of Gilpin’s theory in the light of 30+ years of new developments. What follows is a basic outline with some of the key points of each essay.
Introduction:
Power once concentrated in the hands of the U.S. is diffusing outward and, as a result, new struggles are emerging over global rules and institutions. Consequently, scholars have been asking basic questions about the logic and character of contemporary international order (pg 1). Realist tradition has been to think about order in terms of anarchy. Gilpin offered a different view, one in which powerful states rise up, create, and direct international order. Gilpin saw world politics as a succession of ordered systems created by hegemonic states (usually following victory in war (3)). Over time however, the distribution of power and wealth changes, driven by the diffusion of technology and production. This growing disequilibrium leads to the rise of challengers seeking to overturn or change the existing order to reflect their own interests (5). Ikenberry suggests that Gilpin’s theoretical vision provides a language and conceptual architecture with which scholars can compare notes and arguments across different historical eras even though many of them argue that the underlying logic no longer holds true.
Essay 1: Unpacking Hegemony: the social foundations of hierarchical order (Charles Kupchan)
Gilpin’s theory relies exclusively on material variables (i.e. instability and war come when changes in the distribution of power trigger rivalry). Kupchan argues that order (and change) involves not just shifts in material power but associated competing norms of order (i.e. the social and ideological proclivities of powerful states) (20). He explores four dimensions of hegemonic order (geopolitical logic, socioeconomic logic, cultural logic, and commercial logic). Exploring these logics in across four different hegemonic powers (Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and the US) he argues that as great powers rise they seek to extend the influence of their norms (that provide order) throughout their sphere of influence. Based on these different models of hegemonic order, he challenges the proposition that emerging powers like China will embrace the current liberal international order. Rather they will seek to craft hegemonic aspirations informed by their own history, culture, and social norms.
Essay 2: Dominance and subordination in world politics: authority, liberalism, and stability in modern international order (David Lake)
In this chapter, David Lake examines the role of authority and hierarchy in the creation and maintenance of international order. He does so to address three questions unanswered in Gilpin’s work: 1) why do states comply with biased international orders? 2) why are hegemons liberal, and 3) why is there so little war and change? His conclusions in summary are 1) that hegemons derive authority from the social contract wherein they provide order at great expense which the subordinate states benefit from, 2) If subordinates must “sell” their sovereignty, they will want to do so to the state offering the greatest order for the lowest price – in this case, the fewest constraints on their sovereignty (i.e. liberal states govern more lightly and have their own internal checks and balances against the abuse of power), and 3) there is so little war and change because political order is largely self-reinforcing as subordinate states become vested in the international order and the benefits it provides.
Essay 3: The logic of order: Westphalia, liberalism, and the evolution of international order in the modern era (G. John Ikenberry)
Gilpin sees cycles of order…a new challenger rises up and overturns the international order and starts one afresh in their own image. Ikenberry argues that order is not cyclical but evolutionary. Each new order does not take place in a vacuum but in the context of previous orders. Consequently, each new order learns from the history of previous ones. The American liberal order is not simply a creature of American power but a response to these deeper unfolding logics of order building. Consequently, it is more enduring than previous orders because it has avoided the key failings that doomed their predecessors. China may supplant the US as the preeminent global power. However, the order the US built attracted others for reasons beyond US military and economic preeminence. People tied themselves to the US because it was stable, open, and rule-based. If this is true, there will be limits on the ability of China to repeat the American experience (given that communism rarely has any of these features).
Essay 4: Hegemonic decline and hegemonic war revisited (William Wohlforth)
Gilpin argued that overextension on the part of the hegemon was a key factor in their inevitable decline. Wolforth argues that the factors exogenous to hegemony and not those causally connected to hegemony are the key to their decline. He further argues that a hegemon is uniquely situated and able to manipulate and slow their own decline. If this is indeed true, then the implication for US grand strategy are straightforward: think long and hard before giving up hard-won positions of systemic leadership.
Essay 5: Gilpin Approaches War and Change: A Classical Realist in Structural Drag (Jonathan Kirshner)
Kirshner offers high praise for Gilpin’s work noting it offers enduring, theoretical insights that are immediately relevant for understanding contemporary international relations. His critique of Gilpin’s work is principally over his deviation from classical realism into structural realism. Structural realism relies on states acting rationally, which is not always true because they don’t process info perfectly and thus make mistakes. Specifically propositions 3 (states expand until costs exceed benefits) and 4 (Once costs equal benefits, the costs begin to rise faster than the capacity to support the status quo). Kirshner argues that states expand until they are clearly beyond the point that costs exceed benefits (data and evidence are all too often noisy and lagged). He further argues that proposition 3 is inconsistent with expectations of state behavior and that proposition 4 can only be understood by resorting to explanations inconsistent structuralism. As an example, the Vietnam War was not a case of increasing costs to defend the status quo but a strategic blunder, throwing good money after bad long past the point that a state with real security concerns possibly could. The US emerged from the Cold War more powerful than ever. The fact that the US afterward was bloodied, overextended, debt-ridden, and exhausted in the Middle East did not come about because the US expanded until benefits touched up against costs…it occurred once again due to hubris. A classical realist approach expects hubris where the structural realist approach doesn’t.
Essay 6: Order and Change in World Politics: the Financial Crisis and the Breakdown of the US-China Grand Bargain (Michael Mastanduno)
Mastanduno explores the “grand bargain” technique of hegemonic management. Hegemonic states need supporters. While more supporters are better, hegemons rely most heavily on a small number of critical supporters (especially those who could potentially challenge for leadership). Hegemonic states strike deals or bargains with these states that serve the economic and security interests of both sides. During the Cold War, these allies were NATO and Japan. After the Cold War, the US struck a grand bargain with China. This bargain allowed both sides to delay tradeoffs and adjustments to their economies that they otherwise would have had to make (The US continued to borrow and spend while China could remain addicted to lending and exporting). The author argues that the economic crisis of 2008 undermined the foundations of this relationship. The crisis damaged US prestige and altered perceptions of China’s rise (China became more confident in their own status and methods of leadership, no longer content to take a back seat to the US). For the US, the economic crisis is likely to produce greater political opposition to many of the advantages China enjoyed during their great bargain but even if that doesn’t come to pass, the US is no longer in the economic position to continue to be China’s market of last resort. These structural changes will likely produce a more “normal” great-power relationship characterized by more competition and friction than cooperation.
Essay 7: Hegemony, nuclear weapons, and liberal hegemony (Daniel Deudney)
Liberal scholars (such as Ikenberry) argue that the current international order is stable and self-reinforcing due to its liberal character, institutions, and norms. Deudney makes the argument that the nuclear revolution is really responsible for the stable international order. To state it another way, the durability of American hegemony is likely to be much higher than theorists believe not because of any liberal feature of this order but rather due to the simple historical accident that the US achieved hegemony just as nuclear weapons came on the scene. His argument is as follows: 1) Nuclear weapons profoundly altered power and what it can accomplish. This has far reaching implications for hegemonic political orders that rest on concentrations of power. 2) Nuclear weapons as war deterrents greatly decrease the likelihood of several well-known syndromes of hegemonic power concentration (counterbalancing, overextension, and hegemonic transition). The author goes so far as to imply that the current liberal international order (with its emphasis on soft power) was made possible only by the existence of nuclear weapons and the stability they bring.
Essay 8: Brilliant but Now Wrong: A sociological and historical assessment of Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (Barry Buzan).
Essentially, Buzan’s argument is that industrial capitalism and “the long nineteenth century” have altered the state system and the cycles of hegemonic rise and fall. Modernity has transformed all aspects of the human condition. The system is not cyclical but an evolving and transforming socio-political whole. Gilpin’s conceptualization of change is too narrow and superficial to capture something as structurally deep as the transformation in the dominant mode of production. Gilpin’s conceptualization of war fails to register the full significance of the large changes in the reasons for war, the constraints against war, the means by which war is fought, and its consequences.
Essay 9: Nations, States, and Empires (John A. Hall).
I found this last article a bit tedious and had a hard time trying to grasp what exactly he is arguing…consequently, I didn’t take many notes on this section. Hall discusses his understanding of the world historical transition from empire to nation state within the context of Gilpin’s work. How imperial forms of rule gave way to the Westphalian state system due to their ability to harness the abilities of states (nationalism) to compete first within Europe and later the world.
Introduction:
Power once concentrated in the hands of the U.S. is diffusing outward and, as a result, new struggles are emerging over global rules and institutions. Consequently, scholars have been asking basic questions about the logic and character of contemporary international order (pg 1). Realist tradition has been to think about order in terms of anarchy. Gilpin offered a different view, one in which powerful states rise up, create, and direct international order. Gilpin saw world politics as a succession of ordered systems created by hegemonic states (usually following victory in war (3)). Over time however, the distribution of power and wealth changes, driven by the diffusion of technology and production. This growing disequilibrium leads to the rise of challengers seeking to overturn or change the existing order to reflect their own interests (5). Ikenberry suggests that Gilpin’s theoretical vision provides a language and conceptual architecture with which scholars can compare notes and arguments across different historical eras even though many of them argue that the underlying logic no longer holds true.
Essay 1: Unpacking Hegemony: the social foundations of hierarchical order (Charles Kupchan)
Gilpin’s theory relies exclusively on material variables (i.e. instability and war come when changes in the distribution of power trigger rivalry). Kupchan argues that order (and change) involves not just shifts in material power but associated competing norms of order (i.e. the social and ideological proclivities of powerful states) (20). He explores four dimensions of hegemonic order (geopolitical logic, socioeconomic logic, cultural logic, and commercial logic). Exploring these logics in across four different hegemonic powers (Ottoman Empire, Imperial China, Great Britain, and the US) he argues that as great powers rise they seek to extend the influence of their norms (that provide order) throughout their sphere of influence. Based on these different models of hegemonic order, he challenges the proposition that emerging powers like China will embrace the current liberal international order. Rather they will seek to craft hegemonic aspirations informed by their own history, culture, and social norms.
Essay 2: Dominance and subordination in world politics: authority, liberalism, and stability in modern international order (David Lake)
In this chapter, David Lake examines the role of authority and hierarchy in the creation and maintenance of international order. He does so to address three questions unanswered in Gilpin’s work: 1) why do states comply with biased international orders? 2) why are hegemons liberal, and 3) why is there so little war and change? His conclusions in summary are 1) that hegemons derive authority from the social contract wherein they provide order at great expense which the subordinate states benefit from, 2) If subordinates must “sell” their sovereignty, they will want to do so to the state offering the greatest order for the lowest price – in this case, the fewest constraints on their sovereignty (i.e. liberal states govern more lightly and have their own internal checks and balances against the abuse of power), and 3) there is so little war and change because political order is largely self-reinforcing as subordinate states become vested in the international order and the benefits it provides.
Essay 3: The logic of order: Westphalia, liberalism, and the evolution of international order in the modern era (G. John Ikenberry)
Gilpin sees cycles of order…a new challenger rises up and overturns the international order and starts one afresh in their own image. Ikenberry argues that order is not cyclical but evolutionary. Each new order does not take place in a vacuum but in the context of previous orders. Consequently, each new order learns from the history of previous ones. The American liberal order is not simply a creature of American power but a response to these deeper unfolding logics of order building. Consequently, it is more enduring than previous orders because it has avoided the key failings that doomed their predecessors. China may supplant the US as the preeminent global power. However, the order the US built attracted others for reasons beyond US military and economic preeminence. People tied themselves to the US because it was stable, open, and rule-based. If this is true, there will be limits on the ability of China to repeat the American experience (given that communism rarely has any of these features).
Essay 4: Hegemonic decline and hegemonic war revisited (William Wohlforth)
Gilpin argued that overextension on the part of the hegemon was a key factor in their inevitable decline. Wolforth argues that the factors exogenous to hegemony and not those causally connected to hegemony are the key to their decline. He further argues that a hegemon is uniquely situated and able to manipulate and slow their own decline. If this is indeed true, then the implication for US grand strategy are straightforward: think long and hard before giving up hard-won positions of systemic leadership.
Essay 5: Gilpin Approaches War and Change: A Classical Realist in Structural Drag (Jonathan Kirshner)
Kirshner offers high praise for Gilpin’s work noting it offers enduring, theoretical insights that are immediately relevant for understanding contemporary international relations. His critique of Gilpin’s work is principally over his deviation from classical realism into structural realism. Structural realism relies on states acting rationally, which is not always true because they don’t process info perfectly and thus make mistakes. Specifically propositions 3 (states expand until costs exceed benefits) and 4 (Once costs equal benefits, the costs begin to rise faster than the capacity to support the status quo). Kirshner argues that states expand until they are clearly beyond the point that costs exceed benefits (data and evidence are all too often noisy and lagged). He further argues that proposition 3 is inconsistent with expectations of state behavior and that proposition 4 can only be understood by resorting to explanations inconsistent structuralism. As an example, the Vietnam War was not a case of increasing costs to defend the status quo but a strategic blunder, throwing good money after bad long past the point that a state with real security concerns possibly could. The US emerged from the Cold War more powerful than ever. The fact that the US afterward was bloodied, overextended, debt-ridden, and exhausted in the Middle East did not come about because the US expanded until benefits touched up against costs…it occurred once again due to hubris. A classical realist approach expects hubris where the structural realist approach doesn’t.
Essay 6: Order and Change in World Politics: the Financial Crisis and the Breakdown of the US-China Grand Bargain (Michael Mastanduno)
Mastanduno explores the “grand bargain” technique of hegemonic management. Hegemonic states need supporters. While more supporters are better, hegemons rely most heavily on a small number of critical supporters (especially those who could potentially challenge for leadership). Hegemonic states strike deals or bargains with these states that serve the economic and security interests of both sides. During the Cold War, these allies were NATO and Japan. After the Cold War, the US struck a grand bargain with China. This bargain allowed both sides to delay tradeoffs and adjustments to their economies that they otherwise would have had to make (The US continued to borrow and spend while China could remain addicted to lending and exporting). The author argues that the economic crisis of 2008 undermined the foundations of this relationship. The crisis damaged US prestige and altered perceptions of China’s rise (China became more confident in their own status and methods of leadership, no longer content to take a back seat to the US). For the US, the economic crisis is likely to produce greater political opposition to many of the advantages China enjoyed during their great bargain but even if that doesn’t come to pass, the US is no longer in the economic position to continue to be China’s market of last resort. These structural changes will likely produce a more “normal” great-power relationship characterized by more competition and friction than cooperation.
Essay 7: Hegemony, nuclear weapons, and liberal hegemony (Daniel Deudney)
Liberal scholars (such as Ikenberry) argue that the current international order is stable and self-reinforcing due to its liberal character, institutions, and norms. Deudney makes the argument that the nuclear revolution is really responsible for the stable international order. To state it another way, the durability of American hegemony is likely to be much higher than theorists believe not because of any liberal feature of this order but rather due to the simple historical accident that the US achieved hegemony just as nuclear weapons came on the scene. His argument is as follows: 1) Nuclear weapons profoundly altered power and what it can accomplish. This has far reaching implications for hegemonic political orders that rest on concentrations of power. 2) Nuclear weapons as war deterrents greatly decrease the likelihood of several well-known syndromes of hegemonic power concentration (counterbalancing, overextension, and hegemonic transition). The author goes so far as to imply that the current liberal international order (with its emphasis on soft power) was made possible only by the existence of nuclear weapons and the stability they bring.
Essay 8: Brilliant but Now Wrong: A sociological and historical assessment of Gilpin’s War and Change in World Politics (Barry Buzan).
Essentially, Buzan’s argument is that industrial capitalism and “the long nineteenth century” have altered the state system and the cycles of hegemonic rise and fall. Modernity has transformed all aspects of the human condition. The system is not cyclical but an evolving and transforming socio-political whole. Gilpin’s conceptualization of change is too narrow and superficial to capture something as structurally deep as the transformation in the dominant mode of production. Gilpin’s conceptualization of war fails to register the full significance of the large changes in the reasons for war, the constraints against war, the means by which war is fought, and its consequences.
Essay 9: Nations, States, and Empires (John A. Hall).
I found this last article a bit tedious and had a hard time trying to grasp what exactly he is arguing…consequently, I didn’t take many notes on this section. Hall discusses his understanding of the world historical transition from empire to nation state within the context of Gilpin’s work. How imperial forms of rule gave way to the Westphalian state system due to their ability to harness the abilities of states (nationalism) to compete first within Europe and later the world.
August 11, 2015
A very solid edited volume. Some essays are considerably better than others, but overall, it is very well worth reading for anyone interested in Gilpin's legacy in IR.
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