Hidden Power

            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)