Engaging China

The Management of an Emerging Power

Alastair Iain Johnston, Robert S. Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134619399
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging China is one of the first books to look at the responses of major international powers to the recent economic growth of China. Anyone interested in the financial fortunes of the Asia-Pacific region cannot afford to ignore the rise of China as an economic power since the 1970s. Economic growth coupled with increased military capability and spreading nationalism have gradually enhanced Chinas international profile. In an interesting mix of the empirical and theoretical, case studies from United States, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia illustrate Chinas developing position in the Asia-Pacific.

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MANAGING THE RISE OF GREAT POWERS

History and theory

Randall L.Schweller

The history of world politics is commonly told as a story of the rise and decline of different countries and regions. At times, the tempo of these shifts in fortune resembles a carousel spinning at dizzying speed. This motion was evident among the Greek city-states during the time of Herodotus, who observed that “the cities that were formerly great, have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in olden time.”¹ It also describes the period between the congress of Westphalia in 1648 and the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, when Spain, the Netherlands, and Sweden fell from the top tier of powers (Poland was wiped off the map!), and France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia emerged as great powers.

No such wheel of fortune existed during the nineteenth century, which saw Britain, Prussia/Germany, France, Russia, and Austria hold on to their exclusive status as great powers. By the century’s end, however, America, Japan, and Italy were all knocking at the great power door. Since 1945, no new power has been able to vault into the great power category, though one fell from the ranks.

Whether structural transformation is dramatic or barely perceptible, turbulent or smooth, the important point is that the pecking order of states continually changes. As Paul Kennedy puts it, the “relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another.”² Recognizing that this is so, this chapter addresses the question: How has the international system adjusted to the rise of new powers? More specifically, how successful have the established great powers been in managing and peacefully assimilating rising, dissatisfied challengers into the existing international order?

Great power transitions are never easy, but it is better when they happen slowly, surely and, in any event, not in an atmosphere of general crisis. A cursory glance at the historical record reveals that the nature and success of the established powers’ responses to rising powers has varied not only from one historical epoch to another but on a case-by-case basis within the same era. As is true for most explanations of history, this variance is a function of both situational factors (e.g. the structural characteristics of the international system) and dispositional ones. With regard to the latter causes, the key questions are: How dissatisfied, if at all, is the rising power with the existing order and its place within that order? What is the extent and nature of its revisionist demands? How are its demands and intentions perceived by the established powers? Can the rising power acquire the requisite strength (either through internal or external means) to change the system by force of arms? How, if at all, will the desired changes affect the interests of the other great powers?

The chapter begins by addressing the questions of why and when rising powers are dangerous. The next section lays out the various policies available to the established powers in response to a rising power. This is followed by a typology of rising powers according to their goals and risk propensity. In the final section, the nature of the rising power (discussed in the prior section) is linked to the choice and success of the established powers’ policy responses.

The dangers of rising powers

The question of how to manage a rising power presupposes that such a situation is dangerous and therefore requires a strategy or plan of action on the part of the established powers. This raises several questions: Why are rising powers dangerous? What are the causal links between national growth—which typically accounts for the rising power’s gain in relative strength—and international conflict and possibly war? When and why does an additional member of the great power club cause systemic instability?

Why rising powers are dangerous: the temptation to expand

According to Classical Realism, a nation’s interests are shaped in the first place by its power (measured in terms of material resources and political influence). Specifically, as Martin Wight puts it: “It is the nature of powers to expand. The energies of their members radiate culturally, economically and politically, and unless there are strong obstacles these tendencies will be summed up in territorial growth.”³ In this view, states expand when they can; that is, when they perceive relative increases in state power⁴ and when changes in the relative costs and benefits of expansion make it profitable for them to do so.⁵ Thus Gilpin writes: “a state will attempt to change the international system only if it has some relative advantage over other states, that is, if the balance of power in the system is to its advantage.”⁶

Acknowledging that political and military power must have an economic base, realists view economic prosperity as a preliminary to expansion and war; a full war chest and the ability to replenish it are essential prerequisites to support the costs of military build-ups, arms races, and massive and prolonged armed violence. Accordingly, realists predict that, as states grow wealthier and more powerful, they not only seek greater world-wide political influence (control over territory, the behavior of other states, and the world economy)⁷ commensurate with their new capabilities; they are also more capable of expanding their interests and, if necessary, of waging large-scale, hegemonic wars to revise drastically or overthrow entirely the established order. Simply put, the stronger and richer a state becomes, the more influence it wants and the more willing and able it will be to fight to further its interests.

The expansion of powers is a product not only of internal pressure but also of threats and opportunities in the external environment. The weakness of surrounding states, for instance, engenders both types of external compulsion. The powerful nation that finds itself bordering on a power vacuum feels compelled for reasons of appetite and temptation to fill the void with its own power.⁸ The danger of not expanding into the power vacuum is that other powerful states will not be equally restrained from doing so. Bandwagoning dynamics also dictate a policy of expansion. Because “a buffer state that lacks internal strength and stability will gravitate, irrespective of its own wishes, away from a declining power towards an expanding power,”⁹ it is doubly dangerous for a great power to appear weak and irresolute—in this case, by resisting the temptation to expand when the opportunity presents itself. Finally, because weakness implies political instability, the great power has to fill the power vacuum in order to prevent the threat of the region’s instability spilling across its own borders; that is, to innoculate itself against the contagious effects of war (interstate, civil, and ethnic) and revolutionary ideas.¹⁰

The need to expand: national growth and colliding interests

In their study of the long-term causes of World War I, Nazli Choucri and Robert North developed the theory of lateral pressure to explain the dynamics of national growth and international competition and war.¹¹ The basic argument is that growth in a nation’s population density and advanced technology generates demands for larger amounts and a wider range of resources, which often cannot be met by the state’s domestic resource endowments. This domestic deficiency, in turn, generates lateral pressure, which refers to the tendency among rising powers to expand their external activities, whether for raw materials, markets, living space, religious converts, military or naval bases, or simply adventure.¹² When several states adopt expansionist policies, their external interests and commitments are increasingly likely to collide with each other. These clashes of interests increase the likelihood of war.

This theory is based on a positive feedback process, whereby rapid growth requires external expansion to sustain itself. Thus virtually every modern, industrialized country, they claim, has manifested strong, extensive lateral pressure in some form.¹³ Whether motivated by exploration, commerce, investment, or conquest, lateral pressure establishes extraterritorial national interests among the great powers. Depending on type, extent, and intensity, lateral pressure generally leads to major power conflict when the foreign activities and interests of two or more major powers collide. Choucri and North’s analysis of great power policies during the years between 1870 and 1914 revealed that:

expansionist activities are most likely to be associated with relatively highcapability countries, and to be closely linked with growth in population and advances in technology. Also, growth tends to be associated with intense competition among countries for resources and markets, military power, political influence, and prestige.¹⁴

A related problem is raised by the security dilemma: “many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the security of others.”¹⁵ The rise of new great powers, particularly when they have or seek to acquire empires and/or other less formal far-flung interests and commitments, will likely engender security dilemmas and/or intensify existing ones. As Jervis puts it: “Any state that has interests throughout the world cannot avoid possessing the power to menace others.”¹⁶ Thus, when the US emerged as a world power after the Spanish-American war, it found that its new Pacific possessions could not be protected without threatening the security of Japan’s home islands and insular colonies. Despairing over the US acquisition of the Philippines and the security dilemma it created with Japan, Theodore Roosevelt prophetically observed in 1907:

The Philippines form our heel of Achilles. They are all that makes the present situation with Japan dangerous…. To keep the islands without treating them generously and at the same time without adequately fortifying them and without building up a navy second only to that of Great Britain, would be disastrous in the extreme. Yet there is danger of just this being done.¹⁷

For its part, Japan’s quest for East Asian hegemony also could not be achieved without seriously compromising the security of the United States. Thus in vain President Wilson objected to the Council of Four’s decision on May 7, 1919 to mandate to Japan the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator. A.Whitney Griswold paraphrases Wilson’s concerns:

The Japanese mandate, [Wilson] confided to one of his closest advisers, lay athwart the path from Hawaii to the Philippines. The mandated islands were nearer Hawaii than was the California coast. They could easily be fortified; in fact he could conceive of no use for them except as naval bases…. The entire mandate…would, in the hands of a naval rival, menace the security of the Philippines.¹⁸

Colliding interests leading to war, however, do not always involve security. For example, following Elizabethan England’s surprising defeat of Spain’s “Invincible Armada,” the Stuart Navy found itself confronting the rise of a new, more formidable maritime and commercial rival, the Dutch Republic, which had been thriving (ironically, with Elizabeth’s aid) despite more than thirty years of continuous struggle to resist Spanish subjugation. The ensuing Anglo-Dutch rivalry and series of wars that ended in 1688 were fueled entirely by motives of prestige, power, and profit:

This basic cause of a long-lasting rivalry over trade and primacy at sea set the style of the Anglo-Dutch wars: more than any others fought by the British in the past four centuries, they were trade wars. Invasion was not really planned or attempted by either side (except in 1673), and if a threat to territorial security had been the main criterion for assessing potential foes, then both countries would have regarded France as a more likely danger. It was, instead, a quarrel about who should rule the waves and reap the commercial benefits of that privilege.¹⁹

The Anglo-Dutch rivalry was a classic case of two rising powers with expanding and overlapping non-security interests headed for an inevitable showdown. Because their national identity as trading powers depended, they believed, on maritime supremacy, because their coasts and respective naval forces were separated only by the Narrow Seas, and because their commercial and colonial interests brought them into collision in almost every part of the world, the English and Dutch were locked into a “rivalry which was unavoidable, inexorable, a rivalry which could eventually have only one of two issues, either the voluntary submission of one of the rivals to the other, or a trial of strength by ordeal of battle.”²⁰ The town, so to speak, simply wasn’t big enough for both of them.

The significance of the arguments summarized above is that they imply that a rising power need not be an aggressor to cause instability in the system. Because there is no Leviathon in world politics to enforce agreements made between, or to keep the peace among, nation-...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Managing the Rise of Great Powers
• 2 Engaging China
• 3 Terms of Engagement
• 4 Indonesia’s Encounters with China and the Dilemmas of Engagement
• 5 Singapore
• 6 Containment, Engagement, or Counter-Dominance?
• 7 Managing Chinese Power
• 8 Engagement in Us China Policy
• 9 The Major Multilateral Economic Institutions Engage China
• 10 China’s Engagement with Multilateral Security Institutions
• 11 Conclusion