Hidden Power

            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.