CHAPTER 1
Chinaâs Rise through the Prism of Middle Powers
Bruce Gilley and Andrew OâNeil
Introduction
WHEN EGYPTâS newly elected president Mohammed Morsi made his first overseas trip outside of the Middle East in 2012, the destination was not Washington but Beijing. âInternational relations between all states are open and the basis for all relations is balance,â he said before leaving. âWe are not against anyone but we are for achieving our interests.â1 Chinaâs top leader, Hu Jintao, hailed the decision as showing âthat your country attaches great importance to the desire to develop relations with China.â Chinaâs Global Times was more blunt, saying that the trip âsignifies that there is a major shift in Egyptâs foreign policy, which used to be firmly in Washingtonâs camp, and that the nation is reasserting itself as a regional power.â2 Indeed, US officials, noted the Wall Street Journal, âare finding themselves in the rare situation of vying with their Chinese counterparts for Cairoâs attention.â3
Morsiâs 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 Chinaâs views on Middle East politics. âThe friends of the Syrian people in China and Russia and other states,â Morsi said, needed to support âordinary Syriansâ 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. âChina supports Egypt to play a bigger role on the international arena,â said Chinaâs 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 âunknown quantityâ 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 lionâs share of research on responses to Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs impact on specific regions in the international system, particularly Asia, but also Africa and Latin America, as well as Chinaâs 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 âmiddle powersââof 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 Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs foreign policy, are shaping the regional contexts in which Chinaâs rise is occurring. In short, this book both elucidates the nature of Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs 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. Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs rise.
This book seeks also to refract Chinaâs rise through middle power theory to better understand the nature of Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs rise. As influential agents in international politics, they have the potential to reshape and redirect the way in which Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs preferences, but less able than great powers to balance Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs rise, and how China is rising.
Seeing Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs 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, Chinaâs 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 Chinaâs 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, âmany of the middle powers [will] ⊠rise above the line [of expected diplomatic influence] as both their hard and soft powers increase.â6
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: âHaving middling capabilities determines not what middle power states will do, but what, in principle, they can do.â8 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 powersâBritain, 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 âprimary statesâ in the world system when contrasted to the âsecondary statesâ 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 worldâs 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 âsofterâ measures of power that may be particularly pertinent to middle powers. Kim, for instance, has argued that ânetwork power,â 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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