5 - The strength of states

Summary

In the conventional international relations literature, states are primarily characterized in terms of power, that is, in their capacity to achieve and defend their purposes either through persuasion or coercion and, if necessary, to defeat their adversaries in war. Histories of international politics as well as their theoretical renderings in neorealism thus concentrate on the activities of the “powers” which are usually defined as the great powers of a particular era. There is a strong correlation between the status of a great power and its immediately available military resources. The concept of a “power” thus traditionally has been linked closely to the phenomenon of war.

But war in the second half of the twentieth century has not been predominantly a great power activity. As the tables in chapter 2 demonstrate, most war since 1945 has occurred in the Middle East, Africa, Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, and more recently in the Balkans and the Central Asian former Soviet republics. If war is the topic of contemporary analysis, then academic analysts' long love affair with the great powers will have to change. Since 1945, the great powers have primarily responded to the problem of war in and between weak states. They have not themselves been the sources of war, as they had been between the seventeenth century and 1945. To study war, then, the new focus will have to be on states other than the “powers.” Theories of international relations will have to veer away from Rousseau's insights and recognize that anarchy within states rather than between states is the fundamental condition that explains the prevalence of war since 1945.