Middle Powers and the Rise of China

Bruce Gilley, Andrew O'Neil, Bruce Gilley, Andrew O'Neil

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626160859
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

China's rise is changing the dynamics of the international system. Middle Powers and the Rise of China is the first work to examine how the group of states referred to as "middle powers" are responding to China's growing economic, diplomatic, and military power. States with capabilities immediately below those of great powers, middle powers still exercise influence far above most other states. Their role as significant trading partners and allies or adversaries in matters of regional security, nuclear proliferation, and global governance issues such as human rights and climate change are reshaping international politics.

Contributors review middle-power relations with China in the cases of South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa, Turkey, and Brazil, addressing how these diverse nations are responding to a rising China, the impact of Chinese power on each, and whether these states are being attracted to China or deterred by its new power and assertiveness. Chapters also explore how much (or how little) China, and for comparison the US, value middle powers and examine whether or not middle powers can actually shape China's behavior. By bringing a new analytic approach to a key issue in international politics, this unique treatment of emerging middle powers and the rise of China will interest scholars and students of international relations, security studies, China, and the diverse countries covered in the book.

CHAPTER 1

China’s Rise through the Prism of Middle Powers

Bruce Gilley and Andrew O’Neil

Introduction

WHEN EGYPT’S newly elected president Mohammed Morsi made his first overseas trip outside of the Middle East in 2012, the destination was not Washington but Beijing. “International relations between all states are open and the basis for all relations is balance,” he said before leaving. “We are not against anyone but we are for achieving our interests.”¹ China’s top leader, Hu Jintao, hailed the decision as showing “that your country attaches great importance to the desire to develop relations with China.” China’s Global Times was more blunt, saying that the trip “signifies that there is a major shift in Egypt’s foreign policy, which used to be firmly in Washington’s camp, and that the nation is reasserting itself as a regional power.”² Indeed, US officials, noted the Wall Street Journal, “are finding themselves in the rare situation of vying with their Chinese counterparts for Cairo’s attention.”³

Morsi’s trip was not merely a tributary visit to a great power. While there, he discussed political developments in the Middle East, since China had disagreed with Egypt over the ongoing civil war in Syria. Egypt believed it could reshape China’s views on Middle East politics. “The friends of the Syrian people in China and Russia and other states,” Morsi said, needed to support “ordinary Syrians” rather than the Bashar al-Assad regime. China seemed more open to the views of the elected Egyptian regime than it had been to its US-backed predecessor. “China supports Egypt to play a bigger role on the international arena,” said China’s parliamentary chairman.⁴

The rise of China as an increasingly confident and powerful international actor presents a number of challenges for member states of the international system. From a systemic perspective, the ascent of great powers is never easy and has traditionally been characterized by increased potential for interstate conflict as emerging and existing great powers vie for influence. States are generally wary of the “unknown quantity” accompanying the rise of great powers: How will they seek to interact with other states as their power expands? Will they seek to dominate as their new-found status evolves? In the case of China, these questions have sparked an intense and wide-ranging debate. About the only point on which observers agree is that a system where China is a near equal to the United States will be very different from the US-led international order the world experienced for most of the post-1945 period.

Perhaps understandably in view of the central role of larger powers in shaping international relations, the lion’s share of research on responses to China’s rise has focused on the role of the United States. To the extent that analysis has looked beyond great powers, it has been concerned with China’s impact on specific regions in the international system, particularly Asia, but also Africa and Latin America, as well as China’s bilateral relationships with individual states.

Absent from these debates has been detailed analysis of the rise of China in relation to the group of states often referred to as “middle powers”—of which Egypt is a prime example. Middle powers are countries with capabilities immediately below those of great powers, but still far above most secondary states in the international system. Middle powers are missing in action in the study of China’s rise.

This book seeks to fill that void. It addresses how middle powers are both responding to, and endeavoring to reshape, a rising China. It argues both that the middle power concept is indispensable for understanding the rise of China and that actually existing middle powers are critical players in reshaping the international context that will determine the consequences of China’s rise. It finds that middle powers are experiencing similar economic, security, and political challenges as a result of the rise of China that are unique to them as a result of their status in the international system. The responses, far from being mere varieties of realignment, show a distinctive middle power propensity (and capacity) for autonomous and multipronged initiatives that seek, above all, to maintain an orderly international system. Moreover, these responses, while having little direct or measurable impact on China’s foreign policy, are shaping the regional contexts in which China’s rise is occurring. In short, this book both elucidates the nature of China’s rise as seen in its relationships with middle powers and affirms the utility of the middle power prism in understanding systemic transformation in the international system.

In this chapter we have two aims: first, to identify what middle powers are and how the concept generates testable hypotheses for international relations theory (a task elaborated by James Manicom and Jeffrey Reeves in chapter 2); and second, to link that theory to the study of China in the form of four key questions that can be taken up in case studies of China’s relations with different middle powers. The purpose of this chapter is to define, hypothesize, and then operationalize the key questions about middle powers and the rise of China.

The middle power concept, which delinks middle power foreign policies from inevitable alignments with great powers, has never been popular with great powers (as David Cooper and Toshi Yoshihara in chapter 4 show is the case in the United States and as Gilley shows in chapter 3 may prove true in China as well). But the questions posed here matter for both China and the United States because middle powers are emerging as a new arena of rivalry for Sino-US relations. China’s ability to woo middle powers through deeper relationships, and, in some cases, an effective presentation of an alternative narrative of state-led capitalism, will continue to have an impact for as long as strong economic relations with China remain critical to the national development strategies of middle powers and others. For this reason, Washington needs to understand the contours of relations between middle powers and China in order to formulate a set of appropriate responses and to appreciate the nature of the challenges it faces in responding to China’s rise.

This book seeks also to refract China’s rise through middle power theory to better understand the nature of China’s rise and its future trajectory, as well as the structure of the international system itself. From this perspective, middle powers play a double role in China’s rise. As influential agents in international politics, they have the potential to reshape and redirect the way in which China’s ascent evolves. In addition, the foreign policy behavior of middle powers provides an important bellwether for charting the rise of China, just as middle powers have often been used as barometers to measure other changes in the international system.⁵ More able because of their material power capabilities to take issue with China’s preferences, but less able than great powers to balance China’s influence unilaterally, middle powers rely on adept diplomatic means, with an emphasis on building coalitions with like-minded powers, to differentiate their policy preferences from great powers. How middle powers use these means is thus a valuable indicator of how they perceive China’s rise, and how China is rising.

Seeing China’s rise through the prism of middle powers, in other words, provides a novel way to identify important research questions, organize descriptive information, and generate new insights. The utility of this approach goes beyond simply recounting and explaining China’s bilateral relationships with middle powers. There are examples in the literature where this has been undertaken, and this book does not purport to contribute to this body of scholarship. Rather, the focus of the chapters here is on understanding the middle power category, China’s rise, and the nature of the international system.

Traditional realist approaches to international relations often discount by omission the role of middle powers and instead categorize all nongreat power actors as secondary states. Traditional approaches to area studies, by contrast, focus on national and regional particularities while ignoring the commonalities of similar states. Middle power theory provides a third approach that may explain phenomena that other approaches cannot. In the process we hope to better understand China’s power and purpose in the early part of the twenty-first century.

Middle Power Capabilities

Like many important concepts in the social sciences, the idea of middle powers and middle power theory is contested. But its continued use in real-world political debates and diplomacy suggests that it has a relevance and utility grounded in some objective characteristics. The US National Intelligence Council, for instance, predicted in a 2012 report that in the period to 2030, “many of the middle powers [will] … rise above the line [of expected diplomatic influence] as both their hard and soft powers increase.”⁶

Middle powers have long been identified using one of two approaches: positional (the power they have) and behavioral (the policies they pursue).⁷ It is the former that will be taken to define the category here, while the latter will be treated as a set of hypotheses. Positional dimensions refer to the material power capabilities that middle powers possess relative to both great powers and the scores of average, small, and weak states. Positional, or material, capabilities approaches are the natural departure point for defining middle powers because they are the necessary condition for middle powers to be seen as objects of strategic diplomacy by great powers; to have sufficiently broad sets of interests at stake; and for their initiatives to be credible and thus feasible. As Denis Stairs has written: “Having middling capabilities determines not what middle power states will do, but what, in principle, they can do.”⁸ What distinguishes middle powers from other secondary states is their greater relative power that gives them a qualitatively greater degree of foreign policy capacity and autonomy.

On the positional approach, middle powers logically include that tier of countries that rank immediately below the eight countries generally acknowledged as established or emerging great powers; namely, the United States and China plus the six other great powers—Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and India. Assuming this tier is roughly two to three times as populous as the one above it, middle powers, then, should consist of those states with a ranking roughly in the tenth to thirtieth range across a range of capability indicators. Middle powers, in this view, belong to the set of all “primary states” in the world system when contrasted to the “secondary states” category to which all others belong.

A mean-based cluster analysis that divides the world into four main groups using economic size comes closest to generating what we expect to be a middle powers list, including many of the cases treated in this volume (see figure 1.1). The most contested state is Brazil, which we treat as a middle power here because of its tenth to thirtieth ranking in most material indicators other than economic size.

Several further capabilities-related indicators can be used to identify middle powers. In table 1.1 we can see that the nine countries included in this study generally map with the capabilities typology of middle powers quite well. Across a broad range of indicators, they generally fall into the tenth to thirtieth range out of the world’s 190-plus sovereign states.

Since this capabilities-based measure is global, it does not take into account the regional contexts that may magnify or diminish the power of a state at the regional level.⁹ Some middle powers are not regional powers (Poland and Canada, for example) whereas some regional powers are not middle powers (Nigeria and Ethiopia, for example). However, for the most part, middle powers play outsized roles in their regions. In addition, there are several “softer” measures of power that may be particularly pertinent to middle powers. Kim, for instance, has argued that “network power,” the strength of the position that a country enjoys within international networks of influence, is particularly important in the ranking of middle powers because of their reliance on coalitions of like-minded states to pursue their foreign policy aims.¹⁰

Figure 1.1. The Middle Power Level Using Cluster Analysis

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