The BRICs Superpower Challenge

Foreign and Security Policy Analysis

Kwang Ho Chun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138246355
• eBook ISBN: 9781317039969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In an imaginative and interesting way, Kwang Ho Chun seeks to capture the dynamics of the changing international system and the prospects for a change in the international distribution of power. The idea that new superpowers could rise and that some of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) could be such superpowers, is particularly intriguing and the main idea explored in this study. In line with neo-realist approaches, this book argues that in a unipolar world competitors will rise to challenge the global hegemon. As the power profiles of the BRICs rise and they gain greater control of geo-global politics, they are likely to attain significant regional dominance among other regional powers although their underdeveloped tradition of hard power and internal challenges could prevent them from gaining superpower status. This book captures the dynamics of the changing international system and the prospects for a change in the international distribution of power.

PART I

Background

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

Since the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, the United States has been enjoying a dominant position in the global power system as the sole superpower nation. However, there have been arguments by some international relations (IR) and political science academics and commentators to the effect that the US may not continue as the world’s sole superpower in the near future; rather, a power shift is likely to be witnessed as some of the contemporary major powers step up their resources and power games to become major forces in the global arena. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, some economic analysts, led by Goldman Sachs, noted the rapid pace with which the economies of the BRICs countries (an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China) were growing and noted that in the near future, their economies will have overtaken most of the current major world powers.¹ In particular, Goldman Sachs extrapolated figures predicting that China’s economy would be the largest globally, having far overtaken that of the US, and that India’s economy would be almost on a par with that of the US.² According to Goldman Sachs, the combined economies of the BRICs will also catch up with or overtake those of the six major economies combined (see Figure 1.1).³ In a 2003 paper, Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman predicted that within about half a century, the BRICs would be the world’s ‘engine of new demand growth and spending power’, which would be better placed to ‘offset the impact of graying populations and slower growth in the advanced economies’.⁴ This revelation heightened the debate that had been under way among IR academics and analysts about the future of the BRICs in the global power system, and in particular what the future might hold for them. It is a debate that remains highly controversial to date.

This book critically examines the BRICs countries’ potential, with a view to drawing conclusions about whether they have prospects of attaining world superpower status in the future, either individually or as a bloc.⁵ In exploring the research question, the author adopts June Dreyer’s concept of superpower: ‘a superpower must be able to project its power, soft and hard, globally’.⁶ Since superpower status hinges on global projection of power beyond the nation’s borders, the BRICs’ foreign policies and military power will be central points of focus, as these are the core tools for advancing a country’s power externally. While military power is a significant source of hard power, foreign policy may be used to exercise both the soft and hard power.⁷ A clear understanding of the concept of superpower and why some nations are or were once categorized as superpowers is also essential in developing some of the checklists used to assess whether or not the BRICs may assume superpower status. Finally, it is vital to assess the BRICs’ relationships with each other and with other major global power determinants and entities in order to understand their possible impact on the BRICs’ current and future global power status. Synchronizing and consolidating this analysis enables us to arrive at conclusions about the prospects of the BRICs becoming future superpowers.

Background of the Study

On the BRICs’ potential to become superpowers, Subhash Jain comments: ‘After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the lone superpower of the world. But it may not be able to hold this dominant position for long. … US companies must train their current and future managers to compete with firms in the BRICs.’⁸ An earlier article by Samuel Huntington accepted the dominance of the US in the world politics and IR, but argued that such dominance as a superpower state would be short-lived.⁹ He argued that the world was actually in a transitional stage, and there would soon be a power shift in the twenty-first century, with the US becoming an ordinary major power. He contended that the current global power system was a hybrid (uni-multipolar) system, with global power vested in the US as a lone superpower on one hand, and many other major powers acting jointly on the other. But according to Huntington, global politics would only support this hybrid system for one or two decades (from 1999, when he wrote his article) before the world became a fully fledged multipolar system. Although Huntington did not focus on the BRICs, the group’s relatively strong political-economic influence and its steady rise in global politics give it head start in future global governance.

However, in the IR literature, countries’ (including the BRICs’) potential global power is not essentially a result of their rapid growth rate, projected economic might and size; rather, it stems from the fact that economic power is a powerful tool that can be used to advance other aspects of power (politics, military, foreign policy and diplomacy, and cultural factors). As will be shown in Chapter 2, a strong economy and economic power have always played a principal role in attaining and maintaining superpower status. Thus, there is more to being a superpower that merely being an economically mighty nation. A country also needs to be able to command dominant influence in IR and diplomatic relations, and attain overwhelming hard and soft power on a global scale.¹⁰ Thus, it is essential to look beyond the speculated economic dynamism and the countries’ economic size in answering the question of whether the BRICs will become future world superpowers.

The ongoing debates about the possibility of the BRICs attaining superpower status attract significant academic interest. On the one hand, the BRICs countries’ prospects appear promising, particularly in terms of their economic performance. Economic power is a useful tool in advancing other forms of power, like boosting the military capacity to promote dominance in international military operations and other conventional wars, implementing foreign policies and establishing empowered and well-equipped diplomatic relations. On the other hand, massive economic development alone does not necessarily lead to proportional influence on the global order and international relations, otherwise a country like Japan, owing to its economic strength,¹¹ would now be dominant in world politics – which is not the case. A deeper, more qualitative study of the BRICs countries is therefore essential, with a major focus on those factors which would significantly boost their image and project their influence globally, especially the impact of their foreign policies and military power on their foreign relations.

Overview of the Concept of Power and Superpower

Although power is a central concept in IR academic discourse, there is no uncontested or straightforward definition of it, which in turn makes it difficult to define the concept of ‘superpower’. Some IR scholars view power in terms of relationships between or among actors (essentially states), and as entailing the extent of influence wielded by one actor over the other.¹² Thus, whenever one talks of a powerful nation, a great power, a major power or a superpower, it will always involve a relationship where one state is more influential (powerful) relative to the other(s). The more powerful entity is able to utilize its influence to advance its interests over the less powerful entity or entities, or even to manipulate their behaviour.¹³ An alternative view is that power has to do with control of resources, and in particular military resources. In this view, states that have strong military forces or which have the greatest say in the control of global resources would be the most powerful.¹⁴ However, other IR scholars assert that power is determined by productive ability¹⁵ – what an entity or a state is able to or deliver – while some believe that it basically connotes authority.¹⁶ This book will use the term ‘power’ in an integrated sense, incorporating all these perspectives, but with a bias towards the first perspective – viewing power as a relationship between two or more entities where one entity exerts influence over the other(s). This view is preferred as it seems to implicitly incorporate the other perspectives, or their eventual outcomes. Since this research essentially analyses diplomatic relationships and the relations between countries in global politics, it is interesting to focus on how the states analysed have performed in terms of their diplomatic and IR influence.

IR academics have categorized countries into a power hierarchy depending on their influence and political-economic, diplomatic and military might. Again, there is no consensus on the architecture of global power, which leads to controversy over the analytical dimensions. One popular classification is to group the states deemed as powerful (world powers)¹⁷ in the following order, on a descending scale: superpowers, great powers/major powers and middle powers.¹⁸ According to this analytical framework, a superpower is leading nation in the international power system that is able to project its soft and hard power globally. ‘Power system’ in this sense encompasses power in economic, military, political, cultural and diplomatic terms. Great or major powers, on the other hand, are countries which, though they command significant hard and soft power in international relations, rank second to superpowers in the global power system. They wield massive diplomatic, military, economic and political influence on the global stage, but not as much as the superpowers.

Other scholars refute the concept of ‘superpower’, arguing that since the contemporary literature identifies the US as the only world superpower and the term is a legacy of the huge gap between the US and the former USSR and other major powers, ‘superpower’ is not best term to portray the gap between the US and other major world powers over the past decade.¹⁹ To these analysts, the term ‘superpower’ is a misnomer, and they prefer the term ‘hyperpower’ to refer to the US. This analysis would entail an extra rank above superpower status, and imply that there is a vacuum in the global power architecture with regard to superpower status. However, this book will assume that ‘superpower’ denotes the highest global power rank. Much of the debate over the term ‘superpower’ will be covered in Chapter 2.

Other analysts have also considered regional power relations, arguing that an analysis of power in geo-global politics cannot ignore power exerted by states at the regional level, especially in the past two decades when regional organizations have become very influential in the global arena.²⁰ This analysis adds to the power architecture another category, ‘regional powers’, referring to states that may be regarded as powerful in their regions even if they do not qualify as superpowers or great powers. However, it should be understood that this categorization first groups countries into regions, then examines power relations within those regions and not essentially at the global level, and is therefore not germane to the analysis employed in this book.

The BRICs

To avoid confusion, ‘BRICs’ in this book refers to four countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – and will be used interchangeable with ‘BRICs countries’. This section of the chapter will only offer a general overview of the BRICs, both individually and as a bloc. A more detailed analysis of the BRICs is presented in Parts II and III.

The BRICs, both individually and collectively, have a noteworthy demographic advantage. For instance, about 20 per cent of the world population is believed to be residing in China, while India accounts for about 17.5 per cent, making the two among the most populous countries in the world. The other two BRICs countries, though not as large in terms of percentage of the global population, are equally highly populated: Russia’s population accounts for about 2.2 per cent of the global population, while Brazil accounts for about 2.9 per cent. They are geographically extensive: Russia occupies 17 million square kilometres, China 9.3 million square kilometres, Brazil 8.5 million square kilometres and India 3.2 million square kilometres.²¹

The diversity among the BRICs also extends to their economic, cultural and political backgrounds (past and present), which presents technical problems in conducting an empirical and systematic study of the BRICs as a group. China has a rich cultural background, and is arguably among the most ancient nations in the world. It is a country that has undergone severe economic and political turmoil, attaining its current booming status only in the past decade or so. Some of the most regrettable historical events that have afflicted China include: the Chinese civil war which left so many dead and so much property damaged or lost; general political instability and the eventual secession of Taiwan from the Republic of China; the Japanese invasion that again led to many Chinese deaths and much damage to property, and political and economic decadence during the Maoist era that attached little value to positive economic and political reforms.²² These events led to economic and political deterioration of China, from which it took a long time to recover. A meaningful recovery was only achieved in the late 1990s and over the past decade.

Russia, as the legal successor to the former USSR, has also suffered significant challenges, some of which it is still enduring. The disintegration of the USSR superpower left Russia as the remnant of the formerly powerful Soviet Union, and Russia is still grappling with the challenge of rising to the high status of its predecessor. This is no easy task, and continually subjects the nation to a lot of power pressure and high public expectations. Having officially and legally taken over from the USSR, Russia had to meet all the obligations of the former Soviet Union even if they were not of Russia’s making (as the successor to the USSR, Russia had to take over all its predecessor’s rights and liabilities – including its debts). It also suffered a huge loss of technological, material and human resources as each of the component states sought to form their own sovereign territories and systems of government, thus withdrawing their people and input from the federal pool of resources, most of which were concentrated in Russia. It is a country renowned for its ancient traditions, from the Middle Ages through to the Soviet Empire, and has historically be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I BACKGROUND
• PART II THE BRICS: POLITICAL RELATIONS, FOREIGN POLICY AND MILITARY POWER
• PART III PROJECTING THE FUTURE: THE BRICs FACTOR AND FUTURE INTERNATIONAL POWER RELATIONS
• PART IV CONCLUsiONs
• Bibliography
• Index