Political science has made valuable contributions to the progressive clarification of the concept of power since World War II. In view of the attention political scientists have traditionally lavished on the concept of power, it seems fitting that they should help clarify it. Thanks to the efforts of such men as Harold Lasswell and Robert Dahl, many political scientists today are keenly aware of the need to define power in relational terms, to distinguish power relations from power resources, to specify scope, weight, domain, and so on. There is, however, one distinction that is rarely considered by political scientists—that between positive and negative sanctions. The purpose of this paper is to clarify this distinction and show how and why it matters.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100001507

The Power of Positive Sanctions

Great wars, the rise and decline of empires, observed differences in the power and influence of nations, and in general the uneven levels of national achievement in international politics have inspired much speculation and hypothesis-building. Men have felt the need for satisfying explanations of past events and patterns, and even greater need for plausible hypotheses with which to approach the future. The last seventy-five years or so have witnessed a bumper crop of hypotheses designed to account for or to anticipate the ordering of political relationships in the society of nations. One characteristic of most of these activities has been a persistent search for the “master variable” that would provide a simple yet plausible and satisfying basis for explaining or predicting the ordering of political relationships among nations.

Geopolitical Hypotheses in Technological Perspective

The post-World War II world has seen the transformation of the international system from a configuration with several rival great powers into one with two superpowers and a set of lesser but still substantial powerssecond-tier states with democratic politics and mixed economies. One of the recurrent concerns of the latter has been to secure supplies of natural resources. We argue that postwar conditions point to eight elements of prudent resource policy for middle-level powers. Such states should: (i) avoid military means; (2) choose trade partners whose political interests overlap with their own and who enjoy political stability; (3) seek to create in supplier and transit countries a structure of economic interests that will make supply agreements self-enforcing; (4) diversify with respect to commodity dependence, supplier share, and transit bottlenecks; (5) tailor stockpiles to the urgency of demand; (6) exploit technology to reduce dependence and enhance bargaining advantages; (7) encourage the private sector and public enterprises to become intermediaries in the international resource trade; and (8) pursue strategic interdependence among consumer nations by creating multilateral stakes in the maintenance of normal commerce in resources. In this paper we develop a set of general prescriptions for the behavior of mid-level powers with small endowments of natural resources. We hold that states which follow these prescriptions will avoid endangering their economic performance. Indeed, they may outperform others that apparently hold an advantage in terms of greater resource endowments and military power. We use the case of Japanese energy policy to develop our prescriptions and to demonstrate their feasibility. The case has special interest because of the importance of energy resources in the world economy, Japan's extreme dependence on and thus policy efforts related to-imported energy, and the vigor of the Japanese economy.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0043887100014489

How Middle Powers Can Manage Resource Weakness: Japan and Energy

This thesis examines the argument that middle powers in their foreign policies are qualitatively different from other states. Over time, what started as a term referring to states of medium capabilities has come to imply a certain type of state behavior. In common language today, it is typical for a middle power to engage in mediating, peacekeeping, cooperation-building and the like. The aim is to perform a critical analysis of both the theoretical and empirical substances of such statements. Theoretically, this involves discussing how the argument of the qualitative difference is constructed. What exactly is a middle power, and what are the behavioral characteristics commonly ascribed to such states? Empirically, it involves using this theoretical structure to locate possible middle powers in the system, and to evaluate their behavior on a few variables against the performance of other states. The results indicate that the idea of the qualitatively different middle power can be subject to more theoretical rigor than has previously often been the case. When this framework is tested empirically, the results show a weak basis for some of the most commonly claimed examples of middle power behavior. Overall, this investigation finds little empirical support for the argument that middle powers are qualitatively different.

/pdf/does-size-really-matter-a-theoretical-and-empirical-analysis-1kg1ingwik.pdf

Does size really matter? : a theoretical and empirical analysis of the argument that middle powers are qualitatively different from other states in the system

“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”“Power” is one of the most central concepts in politics. For many years political scientists and sociologists have debated the term and tried to agree on its precise content. In a recent study about economic power concentrations in the Netherlands, Mokken and Stokman and their collaborators surveyed the theoretical position of the concepts “power” and “influence”. Most of the theoretical debates are held within the confines of American political science. A number of contributions in a recent issue of The American Political Science Review show that these debates have not yet come to an end. Most of these debates concern “community power”, that is power as it manifests itself within local communities. The most important contributions to this debate have been made by American and British political scientists.

Margaret Sprout

Papers

Foundations Of International Politics