It is difficult to find a more confusing term in the field of economics and politics than this one: power.

            Some of the usually quoted approaches to the concept of power are those of “relational power” and “power as a resource”.[1] Even an apparently clear vocable as “resource” leads to a wide scale of scholar discussions; for example, it is possible to understand it as outputs, military capability, population, etc. What these diverse appraisals have in common is the understanding of power as a properly measurable item. In other words, they are able to elaborate a comparative study of power in different  states or ages, someway discerning the causes of the decline and growth of civilisation and societies. However, it is advisable to analyse the term to find that it includes, at least, three general categories.

            These three general categories are able to bracket, at the same time, those particular and plain items that it is inevitable to think about when the word “power” is pronounced (for example, military capabilities). They are domain, range and scope.[2] Domain refers to the entities or items over which the power is exercised. Range is “the difference between the highest reward and the worst punishment”[3] that a country is able to confer. Scope signifies, finally, the variety of subjects over which the state exercise whatever sort of control.

            On the other hand, as we stated at the beginning, it exists an alternative notion of power: the relational one. Relational power would be the ability of one state to force to another one to do something it would not probably do in normal circumstances.

            Both relational power and power as a resource are based in the verifiable behaviour of states. Nonetheless, it would be unjustifiable not to agree with an indisputable truth: sometimes power lies in the shadows of publicly unknown reasons; sometimes there is no correspondence between expressed fulfilling targets and the real ambition of a government. Sociologist Stephen Lukes explains that the absence of evident conflict does not mean that power is not exercised in a given relationship. He adds that powerful lobbies have much to do with apparently incongruous turns of states’ policies and, therefore, these lobbies shape political agendas. Luke goes further away when he admits that there are even situations in which neither the powerful entity nor the entity over which this power is exerted realise that it is power what links them together.

            Obviously, these theories about power offer limited views as realistic and unquestionable. That is the origin of the confusion which surrounds the understanding of  such a main issue in International Political Economy.  Anyway, it is necessary to quote, briefly, the specific manners in which the three dominant theories of International Relations assume power in their structures.

            Realism regards power as military power. To this conservative and scarcely updated notion, Liberal-Pluralism brings some other unavoidable aspects as economical capabilities and a lot of relationed forces necessarily weave due to the essential interdependence of the international order. All the same, the most interesting and probably deepest appraisal to power is that of Structuralism. Maybe one of its stronger appeals is the very radical way in which structuralists describe the contemporary preponderance  of an international system: the liberal one. According to them, the actual order is supposed to have no alternatives, even though it is plainly unjust and largely improvable.[4] Among these three theories, Structuralism shifts from the problem-solving aim to the critical appraisal of considering possible and advisable to change the system (not to make changes in the system, but to make a change of system).

            All those considerations about power become even more complicated if a simple question is brought into reflection: who plays the role of  “actor” in international relations? For decades it was always clear that states had the exclusive right and duty to develop international bargaining. In spite of that, contemporary scholars as Susan Strange and specially those related to LIberal-Pluralism argue that it is convenient to perceive states as a concrete kind of international actor among a myriad of different ones. Susan Strange explains why the typical and traditional vision of Realism is son narrow and almost useless: transnational corporations are lately reaching almost the same status of the states. She describes this recent phenomenon as a new diplomacy which involves three main processes of international bargaining: the well-known state-to-state relationship, the relatively new diplomacy between states and transnational firms and, finally, the firm-to-firm diplomacy.

            Another conflictive point related to power is its links with hegemony. Although both terms seem to express almost the same, it is essential not to forget that power is one of the multiple components of an hegemonic order. In other words, power sprouts from the very hegemonic equilibrium but, at the same time, power is able to alter and finally destroy a given status quo.

            Consequently, the question of where and how power flows becomes rather important. Nevertheless, this question faces again the problematic measurability of power streams. Maybe the actual difficulty to describe a given state as an hegemon lies on the unusual fluency of those power streams. In former ages it was easier to distinguish an hegemon on considering a bunch of selected facts that indicated properly the richest and more powerful nations. For example, the enviable position of Britain along the nineteenth century or “Pax Britannica”; had its centre on the unbeatable efficiency of Britain’s naval capability, as well as on its superb industrially-based production and its colonial empire. We could even guess some other reasons like social cohesion, strategical alliances, etc. The results of Britain’s hegemony were evident: over 1850, one fifth of the world’s commerce passed through Britain; it was “the trading centre of the universe”, undoubtedly.[5]

            The slippery nature of power is brought into consideration in Keohane & Nye’s “Power and Interdependence”. They assume it is possible to understand power, from a typical liberal-pluralist perspective, as a double-sided reality composed of potential ability -resources, raw materials, population and related  items susceptible of mobilization- and actor’s actual influence over patterns of outcomes. Political bargaining appears in a middle position between them, able to translate one into the other.[6]

            According to Keohane and Nye, the proper interpretation of power in a world that they assume as "interdependent", lies in these two characteristics. In spite of that, regarding foreign policies and the very essence of interdependence, that double-sided power appears in two forms depending on the changing circumstances of economical order.

            These two forms are called sensitivity and vulnerability. The first is described as the degree of costly changes occurred in a nation because of the sudden changes in another one. On the other hand, vulnerability is the actor’s liability to avoid costs imposed from these external circumstances by means of adjustments and alterations of former policies. Vulnerability seems to be clearly more important than sensibility and almost a safe guide to the genuine power of an actor (states as well as firms or whichever similar organisations).

            Giving power an unusual importance, Hedley Bull regards the very international order as a complicated game of interconnected balances of power.[7] Returning to the traditional view of state-centred power, Bull distinguishes between simple and complex balances, depending on the number of components involved (two or more than two, respectively). A simple balance requires proportional powers and is usually less stable than the complex one. In a complex balance of power there is no need of equal powers, because the weaker countries are able to make alliances and keep themselves safe.

            Bull describes a larger variety of balances of power (local and general, fortuitous and contrived, etc.) and enumerates three positive functions:

            1. Preventing the system from being totally altered by conquest into a universal empire.

            2. In the specific case of a local balance of power, the independence of weaker lesser states lies on the existence of that local equilibrium.

            3. Balances of power along the history have provided conditions in which some organisations related to international order have been born.

            From all these perspectives mentioned, the one which appears as the most interesting is, in my opinion, the structuralist one. I think that its remarkableness resides in the critical approach to the inequity of the very international system. Susan Strange gives an account of the three basic tendencies that reinforce the international system in its actual shape: accelerating rate and cost of technological change, increased capital mobility and transnational communications. It is not difficult to conclude that maybe power, as a floid would, is filtering through old state’s frontiers to the enhancing liberal order around the world. It is not difficult to assert that the power structures of this liberal-international order are being strongly internalised by nations and, of course, transnational corporations. The structuralist view thus explains why in accepting some international adjustments as necessary for the whole world, weaker countries are actually accepting and perpetuating their comparative disadvantages. Power lies on the very system, more than in possibly changing hegemonies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

*     Strange, Susan: “Rethinking Structural Change in the International Political Economy: States, Firms, and Diplomacy”  (photocopies provided by the Department)

*     Bull, Hedley: "The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics” (Hong Kong, Macmillan, 1992)

*     Kennedy, Paul: “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers”  (London, Fontana Press, 1989)

*     Gilpin, Robert: "War and Change in World Politics” (USA, Cambridge University Press, 1981)

*     Poku, Nana & Pettiford, Lloyd: "Understanding International Relations” (Nottingham, Pokular Press-NTU, 1996)

*     Keohane, R & Nye, S. J.: "Power and Interdependence: World Order in Transition” (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1977)

*     Cox, Robert N.: “Production, Power and World Order. Social Forces in the Making of History”  (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987)

FOOTNOTES:

[1]  Poku, Nana & Pettiford, Lloyd: "Understanding International Relations”  (Nottingham, Pokular Press-NTU, 1996)

[2]  Ibid.

[3]  Ibid.

[4] Poku & Pettiford, op. cit. page 2

[5]  Kennedy, Paul: “The Rise and Fall ot the Great Powers " (London, Fontana Press, 1989)

[6]  Keohane, R. & Nye, S. J.: "Power and Interdependence: World Order in Transition ” (Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1977)

[7]  Bull, H.: “The Anarchichal Society: A Study of Order in World Politics"  (Hong Kong, MacMillan, 1992)