The potentially system-defining attacks of September 11, the war on
terrorism, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have caused
scholars and practitioners to refocus attention on a central concept in
international politics: power. If the past is a good predictor of the
future, however, debate is likely to be limited conceptually, informed
primarily by a realist conception of power—the ability of states
to use material resources to get others to do what they otherwise would
not. Indeed, this is already happening. Much of the conversation triggered
by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for instance, has focused on unipolarity,
the ability of the United States to use its military and economic resources
to overcome resistance by states and nonstate actors, and whether other
states will balance against or bandwagon with U.S. power. Certainly, any
consideration of power in international politics must include such
questions. But, Mae West's views notwithstanding, too much of a
good thing is not always wonderful. Instead, it can produce theoretical
tunnel vision that causes scholars to overlook others forms and effects
of power. In this essay we argue that scholars of international
relations must work with multiple conceptions of power, suggest how
they can accomplish this task, and demonstrate how a consideration of
power's polymorphous character will enhance and deepen theoretic
understanding of international politics.
Ever since Carr delivered his devastating rhetorical blow against the
“utopians” and claimed power for “realism,” the
discipline of international relations has tended to treat power as the
exclusive province of realism.1
Accordingly, a concern with
power in international politics is frequently interpreted as a
disciplinary attachment to realism. Associated with this tendency,
there is a widely accepted conceptualization that is viewed as the only
way to understand power: how one state uses its material resources to
compel another state to do something it does not want to do. Most
introductory texts to international relations cleave to this
formulation. Attempts by scholars to operationalize power follow from
this definition.
2 The substantial
literature on the “paradoxes of power” revolves around the
disconnect between capabilities and outcomes.
3 The disciplinary tendency to associate power with realism and to work
primarily with the realist conceptualization partly owes to the fact
that rivals to realism typically distance themselves from
“power” considerations.4
We
recognize this narrative of the discipline necessarily overlooks other
contributions that never pivoted around realism. Later in the article
we introduce some of these alternative perspectives.
This
feature has been especially visible in recent years, as neoliberal
institutionalists, liberals, and constructivists have attempted to
demonstrate their theoretical salience by demonstrating how
“power” variables are not causally consequential in their
explanation of empirical outcomes. Neoliberals have argued how states
with convergent interests create international institutions and
arrangements that effectively tame (state) power, highlighting
processes of social choice and leaving the impression that institutions
are the antidote to power.
5 Scholars of liberal international
relations theory typically stress that many important international
outcomes cannot be adequately explained with reference to power, but
instead are better understood by the salutary presence of democracy,
particular configurations of domestic interests, liberal values,
economic interdependence, or international institutions.
6 Mainstream
constructivists, too, have pitted themselves against explanations in
terms of power as they have attempted to demonstrate the causal
significance of normative structures and processes of learning and
persuasion.
7 Because these rivals to realism have juxtaposed their arguments to
realism's emphasis on power, they have neglected to develop how
power is conceptualized and operates within their theories. It could
have been otherwise. These theoretical approaches draw from distinct
social theoretic traditions that offer critical insights into the forms
and effects of power. Although neoliberal institutionalists have tended
to highlight how international institutions produce cooperation, they
could just as easily have emphasized how institutions shape the
bargaining advantage of actors, freeze asymmetries, and establish
parameters for change that benefit some at the expense of others.
Although liberals have tended to limit their claims to the liberalism
of “progress,” they could have developed the liberalism of
“fear” that is more centrally concerned with power.8
Although constructivists have emphasized how
underlying normative structures constitute actors' identities and
interests, they have rarely treated these normative structures
themselves as defined and infused by power, or emphasized how
constitutive effects also are expressions of power. A consequence of
this failure to develop alternative conceptualizations of power has
been to reinforce the discipline's gravitation toward the default
conception as defined by realism. Yet, as famously noted by Gallie, and
as repeated by social theorists ever since, power is an essentially
contested concept.
9 Its status owes not only to
the desire by scholars to agree to disagree, but also to their
awareness that power works in various forms and has various expressions
that cannot be captured by a single formulation.
The failure to develop alternative conceptualizations of power limits
the ability of international relations scholars to understand how
global outcomes are produced and how actors are differentially enabled
and constrained to determine their fates. One certainly needs to know
about the ability of actors to use resources to control the behavior of
others. The United States is able to use its military power to compel
others to change their foreign policies, and in the contemporary period
transnational activists have been able to shame multinational
corporations and abusive governments to alter their economic and human
rights policies, respectively. Any discussion of power in international
politics, then, must include a consideration of how, why, and when some
actors have “power over” others. Yet one also needs to
consider the enduring structures and processes of global life that
enable and constrain the ability of actors to shape their fates and
their futures. The extension of sovereignty from the West to the
developing world gave decolonized states the authority to voice their
interests and represent themselves, and the emergence of a human rights
discourse helped to make possible the very category of human rights
activists who give voice to human rights norms. Analysis of power in
international relations, then, must include a consideration of how
social structures and processes generate differential social capacities
for actors to define and pursue their interests and ideals.10
The starting point for opening the conceptual aperture is to identify
the critical dimensions that generate different conceptualizations of
power. In general terms, power is the production, in and through social
relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine
their circumstances and fate.11
This
definition slightly amends Scott 2001,
1–2, by pointing explicitly to the operation of power through
social relations.
The general concept of power that we employ
is restricted to the production of particular kinds of effects, namely
those on the capacities of actors to determine the conditions of their
existence. There is an alternative tradition that sees power as the
production of any and all effects and thus as nearly synonymous with
causality.
12 What does this alternative tradition keep in that
we leave out? It includes social relations of joint action through
mutual agreement and interactions in which one actor is able to
convince another actor to alter voluntarily and freely its beliefs,
interests, or action. Persuasion, then, is social causation but falls
outside of our concept of power. So, too, do processes of collective
choice that produce joint action. We believe that our circumscribed
conception is preferable for two reasons. It better reflects
conventional understandings insofar as most scholars interested in
power are concerned not simply with how effects are produced, but
rather with how these effects work to the advantage of some and the
disadvantage of others. We also believe that a focus on differential
effects on actor capacities is, empirically, closer to the mark in most
social relations. There are moments of completely voluntary persuasion
and collective choice, but they are certainly rare and, on close
inspection, likely to have uneven effects.
This definition informs our argument that conceptual distinctions of
power should be represented in terms of two analytical dimensions that
are at the core of the general concept: the kinds of social relations
through which power works; and the specificity of social relations
through which effects on actors' capacities are produced. The
first dimension—kinds—refers to the polar positions of
social relations of interaction and social relations of constitution.
Accordingly, power is either an attribute of particular actors and
their interactions or a social process of constituting what actors are
as social beings, that is, their social identities and capacities. It
can operate, for example, by pointing a gun and issuing commands, or in
underlying social structures and systems of knowledge that advantage
some and disadvantage others. The second
dimension—specificity—concerns the degree to which the
social relations through which power works are direct and socially
specific or indirect and socially diffuse. It can operate, for example,
at the very instant when the gun is brandished, or through diffuse
processes embedded in international institutions that establish rules
determining who gets to participate in debates and make decisions.
These two dimensions generate our taxonomy of four types of
power.13
Our taxonomy bears some
resemblance to, but is distinct from, the conventional “four
faces” approach to power because, we contend, ours is
analytically more systematic and precise, and conceptually more
general. Digeser nicely summarizes the differences among the four faces
in the following way: “Under the first face of power the central
question is, ‘Who, if anyone, is exercising power?’ Under
the second face, ‘What issues have been mobilized off the agenda
and by whom?’ Under the radical conception, ‘Whose
objective interests are being harmed?’ Under the fourth face of
power the critical issue is, ‘What kind of subject is being
produced?’” Digeser 1992, 980.
For other summaries of these faces, see Hayward
2000, chap. 1; and Hay 1997. Because
the four faces developed sequentially through a progressive debate
about gaps and absences in prior conceptions, they are not elements in
a systematic typology. There are no analytical dimensions that
distinguish across all four faces, and the faces overlap and blur into
one another.
Effective taxonomic exercises must try to
“carve nature at its joints” to derive critical, mutually
exclusive, and exhaustive distinctions.
14 Toward this end, in the first
section below we present our attempt to carve power at its joints. The
first type is power as relations of interaction of direct control by
one actor over another—Compulsory Power; the second is the
control actors exercise indirectly over others through diffuse
relations of interaction—Institutional Power; the third is the
constitution of subjects' capacities in direct structural relation
to one another—Structural Power; and the fourth is the socially
diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and
signification—Productive Power. These different
conceptualizations provide distinct answers to the fundamental
question: in what respects are actors able to determine their fate, and
how is that ability limited or enhanced through social relations with
others?
Our taxonomy of power offers several advantages for scholars of
international relations theory. First, because it is founded on an
explicit and logically systematic decomposition of the general concept
of power, it is able to detach discussions of power from the
limitations of realism and to encourage scholars to see power's
multiple forms. Realism's prominence has contributed to a
situation in which scholars are often asked to choose a realist
formulation to the neglect of an alternative, or vice versa.15
Those who want to expand the
conceptualization of power frequently pose theirs as a supplement or an
alternative to the realist benchmark. Nye, for example, offers his
concept of “soft power” as a counterpoint to the realist
emphasis on “hard power.”
16 Gruber's concept of
“go-it-alone power” is a modification of realist-influenced
approaches.
17 Although these statements usefully expand the
scope of the concept, their posing as an alternative to a realist
formulation presumes that scholars must choose sides. Because our
taxonomy alerts scholars to the fact that multiple forms of power are
simultaneously present in international politics, it discourages a
presumptive dismissal of other conceptual forms.
Second, our approach provides a framework for integration. Taxonomies
not only highlight distinct types but also point to connections between
them. In other words, the different types should not be seen as
necessarily competing concepts, but rather as different forms in which
power works in international politics. Our framework, therefore,
suggests how scholars might consider how productive power makes some
instances of compulsory power possible and legitimate, and, in turn,
how compulsory power shapes the terms of meaning that influence how
actors see what is possible and desirable.
Third, our approach represents a decisive advantage over recent
contributions to the debate about power in international relations
because it incorporates both social relations of interaction and
constitution, that is, both “power over” and “power
to.” Baldwin's influential contributions have relied heavily
on a Dahlian formulation—in which A exercises influence over
B—and then attempt to incorporate a variety of concerns,
including unintended effects and nonmaterial means of influence.18
Although we agree with him on many
points, a fundamental problem is that his actor-oriented approach is
incapable of recognizing social relations of constitution and how power
inheres in structures and discourses that are not possessed or
controlled by any single actor. In a series of important articles,
Guzzini has urged international relations scholars to expand their
understanding of power.
19 Although our approaches
overlap, they nevertheless differ in two important respects. First, he
insists that power be reserved for moments when an actor intentionally
produces effects, and that constitutive arguments be understood as
“governance.”
20 We believe that by limiting
power to those effects that are intentionally produced, he
unnecessarily overlooks the important ways in which effects on the
capacities and courses of action available to actors are
unintentionally produced through social relations. Also, by treating
power as an “agent concept” and creating a new concept,
“governance,” for those “effects not due to a
particular agent,” he establishes a false dichotomy.
21 Governance necessarily
entails power; the two are not in conceptual opposition. Our taxonomy,
therefore, provides a systematic way of thinking about power in terms
of both agency and structure, and thus allows us to incorporate the two
elements of his argument in a single integrated conceptual
framework.
Last, but hardly least, our taxonomy does not map precisely onto
different theories of international relations. To be sure, each
theoretical tradition does favor an understanding of power that
corresponds to one or another of the concepts distinguished by our
taxonomy. For instance, as noted above, realists work with versions
that correspond to compulsory power, and critical theorists typically
work with versions that correspond to structural or productive power.
But, as we show, it need not be this way. Scholars can and should draw
from various conceptualizations of power that are associated with other
theoretical schools. We believe that such poaching and
cross-fertilization is healthy, needed, and might, in a small way, help
scholars move away from perpetual rivalry in disciplinary
“ism” wars and toward dialogue across theoretical
perspectives.
In the second section we briefly illustrate why attention to the
multiple forms of power affects empirical research through reference to
two domains of contemporary theoretical significance—global
governance and the debate over American empire. As scholars continue to
consider power in international politics, they would do well not to
fixate on a single rendition but instead to appreciate how the range of
conceptualizations provides the basis for a better, richer, and fuller
understanding of the workings of world politics. We conclude on this
theme, briefly discussing how such cross-fertilization builds bridges
between these concepts, and how scholars might think about the possible
relationships.
Conceptualizing Power
Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects
on actors that shape their capacity to control their fate. This concept
has two dimensions at its core: (1) the kinds of social relations
through which actors' capacities are affected (and effected); and,
(2) the specificity of those social relations. Conventionally for
social theorists, social relations can be viewed as being broadly of
two kinds: relations of interaction among previously constituted social
actors; or relations of constitution of actors as particular kinds of
social beings. For the second dimension, the crucial distinction is
whether the social relations of interaction or constitution through
which power works are direct and specific, or indirect and socially
diffuse. Below we explore each dimension, then show how the polar
positions within each dimension combine to generate our taxonomy of
power.
How Power Is Expressed: Interaction or Constitution
The first dimension concerns whether power works in interactions or
social constitution. One position on this dimension treats social
relations as comprised of the actions of preconstituted social actors
toward one another. Here, power works through behavioral relations or
interactions, which, in turn, affect the ability of others to control
the circumstances of their existence. In these conceptions, power
nearly becomes an attribute that an actor possesses and may use
knowingly as a resource to shape the actions or conditions of action of
others.
The other position consists of social relations of constitution.
Here, power works through social relations that analytically precede
the social or subject positions of actors and that constitute them as
social beings with their respective capacities and interests.
Constitutive relations cannot be reduced to the attributes, actions, or
interactions of pregiven actors. Power, accordingly, is irreducibly
social. In other words, constitutive arguments examine how particular
social relations are responsible for producing particular kinds of
actors. As Wendt puts it, “Constitutive theories … account
for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue
of which they exist.”22
Because these social
relations, in effect, generate different social kinds that have
different self- (and other-) understandings and capacities, they have
real consequences for an actor's ability to shape the conditions
and processes of its existence.
This conceptual distinction between power working through social
relations of interaction or in social relations of constitution tracks
fairly closely with a distinction that frequents the literature on
power: “power over” and “power to.” Concepts of
power rooted in behavior and interaction point to actors' exercise
of control over others; they are, then, “power over”
concepts. Concepts of power tied to social relations of constitution,
in contrast, consider how social relations define who the actors are
and what capacities and practices they are socially empowered to
undertake; these concepts are, then, focused on the social production
of actors' “power to.” Some scholars, who examine how
constitutive relations make possible certain types of action, focus on
how community or collective action are facilitated, while others stress
how the social relations of constitution can have a disciplining effect
and therefore lead to self-regulation and internalized constraints.23
In
either case, though, the concern is with the effect of social relations
of constitution on human capacity.
This interaction/constitutive distinction also foregrounds
particular features of the effects of power. Because power is a
property of actors' actions and interactions in behavioral
conceptions, there is a strong tendency to see its effects primarily in
terms of the behavior of the object of power. In contrast, constitutive
power is generally seen as producing effects only in terms of the
identities of the occupants of social positions. We want to stress,
though, that there is no ontological or epistemological reason why
scholars working with one of those concepts need exclude the effects
identified by the other. If power works through the actions of specific
actors in shaping the ways and the extent to which other actors
exercise control over their fate, it can have a variety of effects,
ranging from directly affecting the behavior of others to setting the
terms of their very self-understandings; behavioral power, then, can
have effects on actors' subjectivities and self-understandings.
Similarly, if power is in social relations of constitution, it works in
fixing what actors are as social beings, which, in turn, defines the
meaningful practices in which they are disposed to engage as subjects;
constitutive power, then, has effects on behavioral tendencies. Thus
scholars examining power through social interaction can see effects on
social identities, and those examining power through constitutive
relations can see effects on action.
The Specificity of Social Relations of Power: Direct
or Diffuse
The second core analytical dimension concerns how
specific—direct and immediate—are the social relations
through which power works. Specific relations of power entail some
immediate and generally tangible causal or constitutive connection
between the subject and the object, or between two subjects. Scholars
working with this conception tend to presume that connections between
actors are mechanistic, flush with contact, direct, or logically
necessary. A consequence of this dependence on social proximity is that
it becomes more difficult to observe power in operation the greater is
the social distance, the lag between stimulus and effect, or the
absence of logical necessity, characterizing these connections.
This approach is nicely summarized by Dahl's famous claim that
there is “no action at a distance.”24
Although Dahl intentionally left vague both what counts as
“distance” and the meaning of “connection”
between two actors, he stressed that a relation of power is knowable if
and only if there is an observable and traceable connection between A
and B. Consequently, while his conceptualization did not preclude the
idea of power as spatially, temporally, or socially indirect or
diffuse, it did work against it. But it is not only Dahl's and
related behavioral conceptions that operate with a specific and direct
view of power. Some constitutive analyses do so as well. For example,
scholars such as Bhaskar, Giddens, and Wendt point to the structured
relationship of co-constitution between social roles or structural
positions (such as Marxian class categories), and how their social
capacities are defined in direct and specific relation to other roles
or positions.
25 In this
way, they identify a direct and specific relationship between the
social positions, which are jointly constituted structurally.
26 This is how Marxist approaches consider, for
instance, the co-constitutive social relations of capital and labor in
capitalism; the capitalist class structure generates distinctive social
capacities and interests of the social positions of capital and labor.
In general, specific relations concern the direct
causal/constitutive connection between actors that are in physical,
historical, or social positional proximity.
Other approaches see power in indirect and socially diffuse
relations. Instead of insisting that power work through an immediate,
direct, and specific relationship, these conceptions allow for the
possibility of power even if the connections are detached and mediated,
or operate at a physical, temporal, or social distance. Scholars that
locate power in the rules of institutions, whether formal or informal,
frequently trace its operation to such indirect mechanisms. Those
examining concrete institutions have shown how evolving rules and
decision-making procedures can shape outcomes in ways that favor some
groups over others; these effects can operate over time and at a
distance, and often in ways that were not intended or anticipated by
the architects of the institution.27
Similarly, scholars influenced by poststructuralism examine how
historically and contingently produced discourses shape the
subjectivities of actors; the very reason for genealogical and
discourse-analytic methods is to demonstrate how systems of knowledge
and discursive practices produce subjects through social relations that
are quite indirect, socially diffuse, and temporally distant.
28 For instance, students of gender, race, and
nation routinely recognize how socially diffuse discourses, and not
isolated, direct, and proximate actions, produce the subjects of the
modern world.
29 These two core dimensions—the kinds of social relations through
which power works, and the specificity of the social relations through
which power's effects are produced—generate a fourfold
taxonomy of power as illustrated in Figure 1.
Each cell in Figure 1 represents a different
conceptual type. Compulsory power exists in the direct control of one
actor over the conditions of existence and/or the actions of
another. Institutional power exists in actors' indirect control
over the conditions of action of socially distant others. Structural
power operates as the constitutive relations of a direct and
specific—hence, mutually constituting—kind. Productive
power works through diffuse constitutive relations to produce the
situated social capacities of actors.
Because concepts of power are partly distinguished by the
conceptualized relationship between agency and structure, our taxonomy
relates to the agent-structure duality to the extent that the generic
concern is with the relationship between social context and human
action. We want to stress, though, that because each type of power has
at least an implicit view of both agency and structure, none simply
reflects an entirely agentic or structural perspective (to the neglect
of the other). Nevertheless, they do vary in specific ways. Compulsory
(and, to a lesser degree, institutional) power emphasizes agency to the
point where structure becomes the context in which A's actions and
B's reactions are set and constrained, thereby leaning heavily on
agency and treating structure as constraint. In contrast, concepts of
structural and productive power emphasize structure relative to
purposeful agency, even while recognizing that meaningful practices,
and hence, human agency, are essential in producing, reproducing and
possibly transforming these structures.
Compulsory Power: Direct Control Over Another
This first concept of power focuses on a range of relations between
actors that allow one to shape directly the circumstances or actions of
another. Some of the most famous and widely used definitions of power
fall under this concept. Weber defined power as the “probability
that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to
carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on
which this probability exists.”30
Similarly, Blau defined it as the influence over behavior through
negative sanctions.
31 In terms of sheer influence, especially for scholars of international
relations, arguably no definition surpasses that of Dahl's
earliest formulation.32
For him, power is best understood as the ability
of A to get B to do what B otherwise would not do. Dahl's concept
has three defining features. One, there is intentionality on the part
of Actor A. What counts is that A wants B to alter its actions in a
particular direction. If B alters its actions under the mistaken
impression that A wants it to, then that would not count as power
because it was not A's intent that B do so. Two, there must be a
conflict of desires, to the extent that B now feels compelled to alter
its behavior. A and B want different outcomes, and B loses. Three, A is
successful because it has material and ideational resources at its
disposal that lead B to alter its actions. Although theorists have
debated whether the relevant resources are an intrinsic property of
actors or are better understood as part of a relationship of dependence
between two or more actors, the underlying claim is that identifiable
resources that are controlled and intentionally deployed by actors are
what counts for thinking about power.
33 Although Dahl's initial conceptualization usefully illustrates
the concept of compulsory power, our taxonomy highlights how compulsory
power need not hinge on intentionality.34
Compulsory power is present whenever A's
actions control B's actions or circumstances, even if
unintentionally. As Bachrach and Baratz argue, power still exists even
when those who dominate are not conscious of how their actions are
producing unintended effects.
35 The victims
of “collateral damage” of bombing campaigns certainly
experience the power of the deliverer even if it was not the
latter's intention to create such damage. Because power is the
production of effects, arguably compulsory power is best understood
from the perspective of the recipient, not the deliverer, of the direct
action.
Compulsory power has significantly influenced thinking about power in
international politics.36
Specifically, its emphasis on
control by identifiable actors over the objections of other actors
through deployment (even if only symbolically) of resources informs
much of realist thought. For many scholars—both realists and
their critics—to study power in international relations is to
consider how one state is able to use material resources to advance its
interests in direct opposition to the interests of another state. This
approach steers attention to the great powers. Yet major powers are not
alone in the ability to deploy resources to overcome the objections of
actors. Multinational corporations can use their control over capital
to shape the foreign economic policies of developing states, as well as
global economic policies. Nonstate networks and groups sometimes
conduct campaigns of unconventional warfare that terrorize entire
populations.
Compulsory power is not limited to material resources; it also
entails symbolic and normative resources.37
Nongovernmental organizations have deployed
normative resources to compel targeted states to alter their policies
through a strategy of shaming.
38 Drawing from the work
of Goffman and Bourdieu, Barnett argued that Arab states have used
symbolic sanctions to alter the behavior of other Arab states on a
range of issues.
39 Less powerful members of the
Security Council are able to use legal norms to constrain the actions
of the powerful.
40 International
organizations are able to use their expert, moral, delegated, and
rational-legal authority as a resource to compel state and nonstate
actors to change their behavior.
41 In general, scholars should be attentive to a range of technologies
and mechanisms as they consider how one actor is able to directly
control the conditions of behavior of another actor. In fact, there is
a long pedigree for doing just that. Carr began this tradition when he
distinguished between military, economic, and propaganda power,
corresponding respectively to the threatened or actual deployment of
violence, nonviolent sanctions, and normative pressure.42
These distinctions do usefully refine one's
understanding of how compulsory power works, but from the perspective
of our taxonomy these are refinements of a specific concept of power,
compulsory power, and not distinct concepts, per se.
Institutional Power: Actors' Control Over
Socially Distant Others
Whereas compulsory power entails the direct control of one actor of
the conditions and actions of another, institutional power is
actors' control of others in indirect ways. Specifically, the
conceptual focus here is on the formal and informal institutions that
mediate between A and B, as A, working through the rules and procedures
that define those institutions, guides, steers, and constrains the
actions (or nonactions) and conditions of existence of others.43
We caution against two possible, but inapt,
connotations of institutional power: the power of institutions as
actors in their own right (for example, the World Bank's power
over borrowing countries); and the effect of institutions in
constituting social subjects (for example, the institution of
sovereignty affects the constitution of state subjects). The former is
best understood as compulsory power and the latter as either structural
or productive power. Institutional power, in other words, does not
include any and all aspects of power by, in, and through institutions.
Instead, it is preconstituted actors exercising control over others
indirectly through institutions.
Thus compulsory and institutional power differ in the following ways.
To begin, whereas compulsory power typically rests on the resources
that are deployed by A to exercise power directly over B, A cannot
necessarily be said to “possess” the institution that
constrains and shapes B. It is certainly possible that a dominant actor
maintains total control over an institution, which, in turn, lords over
other actors. If so, then it is arguably best to conceptualize the
institution as possessed by the actor, that is, as an instrument of
compulsory power. But rare is the institution that is completely
dominated by one actor. Instead, it is much more likely that an
institution has some independence from specific resource-laden
actors.44
This provides the principal analytical grounds
for making the move to the institutional context.
Second, the recognition of the importance of institutional
arrangements highlights that A and B are socially removed
from—only indirectly related to—one another. This distance
can be spatial or temporal. Spatially, A's actions affect the
behavior or conditions of others only through institutional
arrangements (such as decisional rules, formalized lines of
responsibility, divisions of labor, and structures of dispersed
dependence); power is no longer a matter of A's direct effect on
B, but works instead through socially extended, institutionally diffuse
relations. In other words, A does not “possess” the
resources of power, but because A stands in a particular relation to
the relevant institutional arrangements, its actions exercise power
over B. Temporally, institutions established at one point in time can
have ongoing and unintended effects at a later point. Long-standing
institutions represent frozen configurations of privilege and bias that
can continue to shape the future choices of actors. Third, analyses of
institutional power necessarily consider the decisions that were not
made (the proverbial dogs that do not bark) because of institutional
arrangements that limit some opportunities and bias directions,
particularly of collective action.45
Bachrach and Baratz 1962 and
1963. Compulsory power, too, can entail
“nondecision.” For example, failing even to consider the
possibility of distributing certain medications to populations in dire
need of them can be a form of direct control of A over B.
Institutional arrangements can shape the agenda-setting process in ways
that eliminate those very issues that are points of conflict.
International relations scholars have developed a range of arguments
that examine how formal and informal institutions enable some actors to
shape the behavior or circumstances of socially distant others. The
literature on formal and informal agenda setting focuses on who sets
the agenda and how that agenda omits certain possibilities.46
Also of relevance is the
literature that highlights traditional notions of dependence; that is,
how material processes limit the choices available to dependent actors.
Hirschman, for example, famously argued that market forces can create
dependent relationships that limit the weaker actor's choices.
47 Hirschman 1945.
Aspects of Hirschman's argument, of course, emphasize direct
relations of dependence between two countries, and hence, compulsory
power.
Along similar lines, Keohane and Nye considered how
enduring systems of exchange and interdependence can be media of
power.
48 Also prominent here are neoliberal institutional approaches that
focus on the behavioral constraints and governing biases of
institutions. The general concern is with durable solutions to games of
interdependent choice and how institutions help to solve coordination
and cooperation dilemmas. Yet the institutional rules that establish a
particular focal point also serve to generate unequal leverage in
determining collective outcomes. In short, the institutions that are
established to help actors achieve mutually acceptable, even
Pareto-superior, outcomes also create “winners” and
“losers,” to the extent that the ability to use the
institution and, accordingly, collective rewards—material and
normative—are unevenly distributed long into the future and
beyond the intentions of the creators.49
Indeed, many scholars examining how international
institutions look from the vantage point of the weak tend to stress
those very features.
50Structural Power: Direct and Mutual Constitution of
the Capacities of Actors
Structural power concerns the structures—or, more precisely,
the co-constitutive, internal relations of structural
positions—that define what kinds of social beings actors are. It
produces the very social capacities of structural, or subject,
positions in direct relation to one another, and the associated
interests, that underlie and dispose action. This makes this type of
power quite different from institutional power. Whereas institutional
power focuses on differential constraints on action, structural power
concerns the determination of social capacities and interests. This
important difference owes chiefly to their different theoretic
understandings of structure. Scholars focusing on institutional power
usually define institutions and structure in almost interchangeable
terms, as sets of rules, procedures, and norms that constrain the
action of already-constituted actors with fixed preferences. Scholars
focusing on structural power conceive structure as an internal
relation—that is, a direct constitutive relation such that the
structural position, A, exists only by virtue of its relation to
structural position, B. 51
The classic examples here are master-slave and
capital-labor relations. From this perspective, the kinds of social
beings that are mutually constituted are directly or internally
related; that is, the social relational capacities, subjectivities, and
interests of actors are directly shaped by the social positions that
they occupy.
Structural power shapes the fates and conditions of existence of
actors in two critical ways. One, structural positions do not
necessarily generate equal social privileges; instead structures
allocate differential capacities, and typically differential
advantages, to different positions. Capital-labor and master-slave
relations are obvious examples of how social structures constitute
unequal social privileges and capacities. Two, the social structure not
only constitutes actors and their capacities, it also shapes their
self-understanding and subjective interests. The consequence is that
structures that distribute asymmetric privileges also affect the
interests of actors, often leaving them willing to “accept their
role in the existing order of things.”52
In
other words, structural power can work to constrain some actors from
recognizing their own domination. To the degree that it does,
actors' self-understandings and dispositions for action serve to
reproduce, rather than to resist, the differential capacities and
privileges of structure. As Steven Lukes observed: “is it not the
supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to
whatever degree, from having grievances shaping their perceptions,
cognitions, and preferences in such a way that they accept their role
in the existing order of things?”
53 Ibid. It is possible to construct a compulsory power
answer to this question. For instance, A might act to alter the beliefs
of B, thereby making it easier to control B, as it is always easier to
maintain a social order through consent than through coercion. Baldwin 2002, 179, gives the example of
brainwashing. Related is Hurrell and Woods's 1995 concept of
coercive socialization and Ikenberry and Kupchan's 1990 notion of hegemonic power.
In this
way, structural power operates even when there are no instances of A
acting to exercise control over B.
54 This
approach relates to the distinction between objective and subjective
interests. See Benton 1981.
Various international relations scholars forward arguments that have
strong shades of structural power. Most obviously, Marxist-influenced
scholars gravitate toward this concept.55
Marxists are not alone in emphasizing structural power.
Bourdieu 2001 focuses on the global
importance of masculine domination produced through the structure of
patriarchy. Strange 1989 developed a
non-Marxian approach to what she calls structural power.
Explicitly following Lukes and Gramsci, Gill and Law argue that while
power exists in coercion and institutional arrangements, to understand
the workings of the global capitalist economy requires recognition of
global production relations as constitutive structure.
56 For them, as well as other Gramscians and
historical materialists, the structure of global capitalism
substantially determines the capacities and resources of actors.
57 It also shapes their ideology—that is, the
interpretive system through which they understand their interests and
desires. This ideology, according to scholars like Gill and Law, is
hegemonic in that it serves the objective interests of the capitalists
and their fellow travelers at the direct expense of the objective (but
not, then, recognized) interests of the world's producing classes,
thereby disposing action toward the reproduction, rather than the
substantial transformation, of the structure and its relations of
domination. In the same spirit, Cox draws on Machiavelli's notion
of power as a centaur: it operates overtly to the extent that one actor
will manipulate strategic constraints for the purposes of controlling
the actions of actors (the beast of compulsory and institutional
power), and it operates covertly to the extent that it generates the
social powers, values, and interpretations of reality that deeply
structure internal control (the man that is structural power).
58 World-systems theorists also draw on this
conception of power to the extent that they argue that: structures of
production generate particular kinds of states identified as core,
semiperiphery, and periphery; the positions in the world-system
generate commensurate sets of identities and interests; and those in
the subordinate positions adopt (ideologically generated) conceptions
of interest that support their own domination and their lesser position
in that world-system.
59 Because many constructivists draw from structurally oriented theories
of sociology, they also are sometimes attentive to structural power.
Wendt, for instance, argues that “a key aspect of any cultural
form is its role structure, the configuration of subject positions that
shared ideas make available to its holders.”60
He
proceeds to note that the role structures can contain functional
differentiation and thus generate differential privileges and
capacities to the occupants of these roles.
61 Although constructivists who draw from
sociological institutionalism do not usually adopt a notion of
structure as a set of internal relations, they make a related
conceptual move, suggesting a hint of structural power, to the extent
that rules, which often are associated with and can generate roles,
produce the identities and interests of actors.
62 This
tendency is especially evident among those associated with the world
polity school. Boli and Thomas, for instance, argue that there is a
world authority structure, a set of fundamental principles, that
constitutes who are the actors of world politics, what are their
identities, what are their expressive purposes, and what are their
differential capacities. Consequently, they argue that the
institutionalization of a world authority structure that is organized
around rational-legal values increasingly privileges the voices of
international nongovernmental organizations.
63Productive Power: Production of Subjects Through
Diffuse Social Relations
Productive power and structural power overlap in several important
respects. Both are attentive to constitutive social processes that are,
themselves, not controlled by specific actors, but that are effected
only through the meaningful practices of actors. Both concern how the
social capacities of actors are socially produced, and how these
processes shape actors' self-understandings and perceived
interests. Additionally, neither concept of power depends on the
existence of expressed conflict (although resistance is at the heart of
the dynamics of change of them).
Yet structural and productive power differ in a critical respect:
whereas the former works through direct structural relations, the
latter entails more generalized and diffuse social processes.
Specifically, and at the risk of gross simplification, structural power
is structural constitution, that is, the production and reproduction of
internally related positions of super- and subordination, or
domination, that actors occupy. Productive power, by contrast, is the
constitution of all social subjects with various social powers through
systems of knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general
social scope. Conceptually, the move is away from structures, per se,
to systems of signification and meaning (which are structured, but not
themselves structures), and to networks of social forces perpetually
shaping one another. In that respect, attention to productive power
looks beyond (or is post-) structures.
This difference between direct and diffuse social relations of
constitution has two important implications for thinking about
productive power. First, productive power concerns discourse, the
social processes and the systems of knowledge through which meaning is
produced, fixed, lived, experienced, and transformed.64
Discourses are understood here not as dialogues
among specific actors or in terms of Habermasian notions of
communicative action. Instead, the concept refers to how
“microfields” or the quotidian “define the
(im)possible, the (im)probable, the natural, the normal, what counts as
a problem.”
65 In this way, discourses
are sites of social relations of power because they situate ordinary
practices of life and define the social fields of action that are
imaginable and possible.
66 Second, discursive processes and practices produce social identities
and capacities as they give meaning to them. In Foucault's
archetypical formulation, humans are not only power's intended
targets, but also its effects.67
Discourse, therefore,
is socially productive for all subjects, constituting the subjectivity
of all social beings of diverse kinds with their contingent, though not
entirely fluid, identities, practices, rights, responsibilities, and
social capacities.
68 Productive power, therefore,
differs from structural power in its approach to subjectivity. Because
structural power concerns the co-constitution of subjects, it typically
envisions hierarchical and binary relations of domination that work to
the advantage of those structurally empowered, to the disadvantage of
the socially weak. In contrast, productive power concerns the
boundaries of all social identity, and the capacity and inclination for
action for the socially advantaged and disadvantaged alike, as well as
the myriad social subjects that are not constituted in binary
hierarchical relationships.
69
Productive power, in this way, refuses
to assume that some essence is at the root of human subjectivity,
[and raises] the possibility that every ordering of social
relations, and every ordering of social selves (every inter- and
intrasubjective power relation) bears some cost in the form of violence it
does to “what it might be ‘in the self and in the social
world.’ ”70
In general, the bases and workings of productive power are the
socially existing and, hence, historically contingent and changing
understandings, meanings, norms, customs, and social identities that
make possible, limit, and are drawn on for action.71
Some of the best examples of the analysis of productive power in
international relations refer to the discursive production of the
subjects, the fixing of meanings, and the terms of action, of world
politics. One question concerns the kinds of subjects that are
produced. Basic categories of classification, like
“civilized,” “rogue,” “European,”
“unstable,” “Western,” and
“democratic” states, are representative of productive
power, as they generate asymmetries of social capacities.72
Even categories such as “weapons of mass destruction” can
evolve in unexpected ways and stabilize meanings that constrain
policy.
73 See Litwak
2002; and The New Republic, 7 October 2002,
22.
A related theme is how the “other” comes to be
defined and how that definition is associated with the practices and
policies that are possible, imaginable, permissible, and desirable.
74 Also, socially contested efforts to set and fix
meanings can be expressive of productive power.
75 A particular discourse of
development orients action in one direction and away from others.
76 The
gendered categories of “civilian” and
“combatant” in international humanitarian law have real
consequences for those on the ground, protecting some while putting
others at the risk of death.
77 Thus to attend to the analysis of productive
power is to focus on how diffuse and contingent social processes
produce particular kinds of subjects, fix meanings and categories, and
create what is taken for granted and the ordinary of world politics.
Governance and Empire
The four concepts of power offer distinctive views about how
actors' abilities to shape and set the conditions of their
existence and action are affected and effected in international
relations. Although each concept offers important insights into how
power operates, a full accounting of power requires a consideration of
its multiple forms operating in relation to each other. Our taxonomy
does more than alert scholars to the different forms of power, though,
for it also encourages a consideration of their conjunction. To
demonstrate the value of our taxonomy for seeing the distinctive forms
and the linkages between them, we consider two major issues in global
politics—global governance, and American empire.
Global Governance
Scholars of global governance often define it as the
institutionalized coordination or collaboration of people's and
states' activities in ways that achieve more
desirable—positive sum—outcomes.78
Because of
this tendency to tie global governance to institutionalized
cooperation, coordination of convergent interests, and the production
of collective goods, many scholars diminish or overlook the role of
power.
79 Yet governance is part
of a family of concepts, including control, guidance, and steering,
which are also elements of the family of “power” concepts.
Therefore, the scholarly tendency to slight how power operates in
global governance is conceptually and theoretically problematic. Power
is central to global governance, and our taxonomy highlights the
multiple and interconnected ways in which it operates.
International institutions, formal and informal, are often understood
to be at the heart of global governance. Relations of cooperation and
coordination, practices of international law, and the processes of
collective action that they entail, are effected in and through
institutions. Institutional power thus provides a reasonable conceptual
starting point for examining power in global governance, and shapes
global governance in at least three ways.
First, any concern with global governance must consider what issues
are of concern and which issues are not. For decades after World War
II, issues of human rights, women's rights, and children's
rights never made it on the UN agenda and thus were never discussed or
even deemed worthy of “governance.” That is no longer the
case.80
Today, issues of collective responsibility for
adequate employment or a livable wage for all people are
institutionally excluded. One major goal of proponents of the new
international economic order (NIEO) was to transform the issues that
were debated and regulated in the global economy.
81 Agendas enable some actors
to further their interests and ideals, to exercise control over others,
and to limit the abilities of actors to engage in effective collective
action.
Second, a consideration of institutional power also exposes the
governing biases of institutions. As we noted in the conceptual
discussion above, the institutional rules that establish a particular
focal point also serve to generate unequal leverage or influence in
determining collective outcomes.82
In short, the
institutions that are established to help actors achieve
pareto-superior outcomes also create “winners” and
“losers,” to the extent that the ability to use the
institution and, accordingly, collective rewards are unevenly
distributed.
83 This institutional context, moreover, lingers
into the future, thus constraining action in ways that might not have
been intended but nevertheless limit choice and shape action.
84 This is precisely the point of considerable
contemporary criticism of a number of formal organizations involved in
governing the global economy, such as the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
85 Recent analyses of the
international refugee regime also have noted how legal and normative
changes have potentially come at the expense of refugees.
86 Third, also consistent with the biases of institutions is the ability
of great powers to establish international institutions and
arrangements to further or preserve their interests and positions of
advantage into the future, even as they do not directly or fully
control those future arrangements. Gruber's concept and
application of “go-it-alone” power suggests how strong
states undertake a course of action that subsequently shapes future
outcomes for others, and that weak states go along with an agreement
that may actually leave them worse off, because to oppose the
inevitable will only cost them more in the long run.87
In short,
for Gruber, weaker states are damned if they do and doubly damned if
they do not. Significantly, it is less important that the outcome is
willfully intended than that it is an effect of asymmetrical ability to
shape the context of choice or decision.
Strange argued that
while American power as defined by material resources might be in
decline (at the time of her writing), the United States is the
epicenter of a transnational empire that gives it the ability to shape
security, financial, productive, and knowledge structures, which, in
turn, operate to U.S. advantage and foreclose opportunities to other
countries.
88 Ikenberry has argued that liberal great powers
have attempted to use their positions of power after war to establish
international governance mechanisms that simultaneously preserve and
diffuse their power.
89 In sum, the institutional
core of global governance, while seemingly resting on the production of
joint gains through cooperation or coordination, also entails the
substantial operation of institutional power.
But institutional power, alone, does not tell the whole story. The
example of great powers attempting to shape institutions suggests more
traditional senses of “power struggles,” which directs
attention to compulsory power. Here, most obviously, the concern is
with how states, and largely the great powers, are able to determine
the content and direction of global governance by using their decisive
material advantages not only to determine what areas are to be
governed, but also to directly “coordinate” the actions of
lesser powers so that they align with their interests.90
Other examples of this form of power include the
U.S. efforts to determine the terms of the International Criminal Court
by manipulating incentives for particular targeted states, and the
special relationship established between European states and some of
their former colonies with respect to international trade regime
provisions.
States, though, are not the only actors that have the ability to set
and enforce the rules of global governance in ways that directly
control the actions of others. International organizations sometimes do
too, as they can be not only sites of institutional power through which
other actors indirectly exercise control but also can exhibit
compulsory power.91
The World
Bank's considerable potential for compulsory power
vis-à-vis borrowing states with respect to “development
policy” is illustrative. The UN High Commission on Refugees
(UNHCR) can shape the life chances of refugees and other displaced
peoples.
92 It is partly because of
the recognition of the concentration of such resources for compulsory
power in international organizations that many scholars and
policymakers argue for a deconcentration of decisional authority, a
substantial democratization of the institutions of global governance,
or mechanisms of accountability.
93 Even some materially challenged actors are able to exercise
compulsory power in global governance processes. Transnational
activists, civil society organizations, and international
nongovernmental organizations have demonstrated the ability to use
rhetorical and symbolic tools, as well as shaming tactics, to get
states, multinational corporations, and others to comply with the
values and norms that they advance.94
Various transnational activists successfully used symbolic means to
press the Clinton administration to sign the landmine treaty.
95 Activists have formed associations and deployed
branding and certification techniques to try to use consumer power to
compel producers to comply with labor, environmental, and human rights
standards.
96 Analysis of global governance needs to be attentive not only to the
interactions of actors but also to the constitutive reproduction of the
subjects of global social life. Gramscians and historical materialists
have examined how global institutions help to stabilize and spread
global governance that has a markedly liberal and capitalist
character.97
Also prominent here are studies that
examine the mutually constituted structural relations of capital and
labor—and of core and periphery—in global activities of
material production, and how these structures generate a global
distribution of material well-being and organize the mechanisms that
facilitate, reproduce, regulate, and guard that distribution.
98 The actual workings of global governance, in this
view, are reflective of the underlying global class structure, and the
ideologies of global governance help to reproduce that structure by
fostering a worldview among the exploited classes that either there is
no alternative or the current social order is desirable.
99 The concept of productive power as applied to global governance
highlights how the discourses and institutions of international
relations contingently produce particular kinds of actors with
associated social powers, self-understandings, and performative
practices. Consider the Global Compact, which “engages the
private sector to work with the UN, in partnership with international
labor and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to identify,
disseminate, and promote good corporate practices based on nine
universal principles” that are found in various UN documents.100
Because this ambitious agenda is undertaken by a
slimly funded and staffed unit attached to the
secretariat-general's office, it is not an obvious place to look
for evidence of power, even if the goal is to alter corporate
practices.
Yet the architects of the Global Compact imagine two distinctive
mechanisms that might foster this development, and these mechanisms are
expressions of productive power. One, as multinational corporations
sign onto a set of (evolving) standards and practices, a discursive
space is opened in which various actors are produced as subjects
empowered legitimately to comment on their performance. Those actors
are thereby given social resources that enable them effectively to
exercise the compulsory power of shaming corporations into changing
their behavior. Additionally, the discourse of the Global Compact also
aspires to create a new kind of actor—the potentially
“socially responsible corporation”—that may adhere to
these best practices not because of the manipulation of incentives, but
rather because of a new self-understanding.101
In other
words, the discourse is intended to produce a new “social
kind” that will be self-regulating and self-disciplining. The
production of this new social kind is hypothesized to occur through
various mechanisms. To begin, they are expected to translate pertinent
UN principles, which are legitimated by the international community and
draw from broader discourses of liberalism, into lessons learned that
can be transformed into best practices. To encourage this process, the
Global Compact has created a learning network that, ultimately, is
“intended to stimulate the internationalization of UN principles
into companies' corporate cultures.”
102 This lengthy process will depend on the
willingness of corporations to adopt new texts, business models, and
practices that ultimately become internalized and identified with the
performance of this new social identity, the socially responsible
corporation. The Global Compact, therefore, illuminates the workings
of, and connections between, different forms of power: compulsory power
because of the ability of nonstate actors to deploy shaming techniques
to alter corporate practices; institutional power because of the role
of the UN in establishing new rules that can constrain the behavior of
corporations; and productive power because of the attempt to help
produce a new social kind of corporate actor.
The productive power of the Global Compact discourse, although
important in its own right, is merely illustrative of the broad
significance of productive power in global governance. Indeed, all
practices of guiding and steering collective outcomes in global social
life, with the possible and partial exception of instances of
compulsory power effected through relations of raw coercive force and
violence, derive from discourses that are productive of the social
identities of the actors engaged in them. The human rights regime, for
example, is an expression of a discursively constituted world populated
by subjects normalized as human rights victims, human rights monitors,
human rights violators, and human rights prosecutors. To analyze global
governance processes adequately, then, it is necessary to address
systematically the workings of productive power in setting the
conditions of meaningful collective action.
Understanding the operation of power in multiple forms makes it much
more difficult to approach global governance purely in terms of
cooperation, coordination, consensus, and normative progress.
Governance is also a matter of compulsion, institutional bias,
privilege, and unequal constraints on action. Although these different
concepts of power illuminate different ways in which power operates in
global governance, there is an important difference between the first
two and the last two that affects how we think about governance: the
first two concern who governs in global governance, whereas the latter
two concern not who governs, but instead how the governing capacities
of actors are produced, how those capacities shape governance processes
and outcomes, and how bodies of knowledge create subjects that are to
be, at least in part, self-regulating and disciplined.103
Our taxonomy does more than simply illuminate the
different ways power operates in global governance, for it also
encourages scholars to identify connections between these forms.
American Empire
If scholars of global governance have tended to underestimate the
role of power in any of its forms, there is no such danger regarding
the contemporary debate about the existence, nature, and consequences
of U.S. empire. The U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, President George W. Bush's 2002 National Security
Strategy, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq have caused scholars and
pundits to debate whether the United States is an empire.104
The generic concern is with the informal
or formal hierarchical arrangements that maintain the domination of one
actor over others. See Shaw 2002,
331–32, and Doyle 1986 for a general
discussion, and Rosen 2003 for application of
the concept to the contemporary United States.
Their
evaluations frequently turn on sometimes loose, but certainly varied,
usages of the concept. We do not intend to provide the definitive
concept of empire and then use that concept to determine whether or not
the label applies to the United States. Instead, our modest goal is to
demonstrate that any systematic discussion of empire must consider
power in multiple forms.
Much of the debate over the existence and nature of American empire
pivots off of what we have called compulsory power. It could hardly be
otherwise. A fundamental issue, after all, is the U.S.'s ability
and willingness to use its overwhelming concentration of resources to
shape directly the actions of others. For many observers, the decision
to designate the United States as an empire rests on its apparent quest
to use coercion and intimidation if and when necessary to develop and
sustain its supremacy over other regions and states. The emphasis on
direct control over others certainly corresponds to the concept of
compulsory power, but our concept does raise questions regarding
whether the designation of empire should be dependent on intentions and
brass-knuckle tactics.
Much of the recent discussion over the United States as an empire
revolves around its intentions. After all, although the U.S. global
share of material resources has not changed significantly during the
past decade, what has changed, according to many, is the Bush
administration's determination to use its unrivaled position to
strong-arm others and to scare away possible challengers. This is one
reason why much is made of the Bush administration's 2002 National
Security Strategy; it appears to announce loudly and boldly its goal of
maintaining an empire in form if not in name. But, should
intentionality be the metric for determining the existence of empire?
As we have shown, compulsory power does not hinge on intentionality; it
still operates even when those who directly dominate others are not
conscious of how their actions are producing unintended effects. A
state that has no intention of creating or maintaining an empire, per
se, might nevertheless exercise directly controlling effects that are
nearly identical to those who do. To the extent that compulsory power
is the key, then, evidence of empire may best be found not in the
intentions of the subject but instead in the consequences as viewed
from the objects of the empire.
The concept of compulsory power also questions whether the reliance
on coercive means is necessary for the designation of empire.
Compulsory power concerns the direct control of others, but admits for
a range of technologies that allow A to control the behavior and
circumstances of B. Consequently, although empires use military means,
they also can be expected to use less coercive tactics. Doing so might
not make them any less of an empire, a point emphasized by Carr in his
discussion of the colonial empires.105
The
relevance of thinking about noncoercive mechanisms is quite germane to
the tendency, among some scholars, to highlight the perceived
willingness of the Bush administration to forgo multilateral means in
favor of unilateral instruments as evidence of the bid for empire.
106 In other words, for such
analysts it is the shift from a grand strategy revolving around
institutional power to one founded primarily on compulsory power that
best signals the new status of the United States as empire.
The backdrop to this argument is an interpretation of what accounts
for the longevity of American hegemony after World War II and how it
differed from previous hegemonies, including the colonial empires it
supplanted. The genius of the post–World War II “wise
men,” in this way, was to recognize that global rule through
coercion was unsustainable, and that it was preferable to establish
global institutions that could further American interests and spread
American values.107
What generated consent for
American hegemony was not only agreement over the purpose of American
power, but also the construction of multilateral institutions that were
conferred legitimacy, constrained American power, and democratized the
decision-making process. Because these global institutions had some
autonomy from the United States and were partly controlled by other
states, the United States could not be said to possess them, even
though they reflected American interests. What separates American
hegemony from American empire in this view, therefore, is the
willingness to work jointly with others through multilateral
institutions and the consent that is attended to them.
108 The Bush administration's decision to shift
the weight of American foreign policy from multilateral to unilateral
mechanisms provides partial cause for observers to relabel the United
States an imperial power.
But it is important to recognize how American hegemony, even when run
through global institutions, still represented an exercise of
institutional power. The absence of overt conflict does not mean the
absence of power; institutions can mobilize bias to serve U.S. purposes
and eliminate points of potential opposition to serve U.S. concerns.
Moreover, global institutions created an asymmetrical distribution of
benefits, and the United States has been a prime beneficiary. It is
partly for this reason that Bacevich claims that the nature of the
American empire since World War II has revolved around global
institutions that create “open spaces” that the United
States can dominate.109
Finally, and most
importantly, the United States still exercises power, but now it is
indirect and mediated through institutions. Any consideration of the
American empire, in short, must be attentive to institutional power. In
this respect, perhaps at stake is not whether the United States is or
is not an empire, but rather whether the longevity of that empire is
dependent on the willingness to eschew unilateral means of control for
indirect institutional means—a point that echoes earlier debates
over the nature of informal empires.
110 Yet to what extent should the debate about the American empire focus
exclusively on the specificity of the United States as an actor?
Compulsory and institutional power directs attention to empire as an
extension of a centralized, territorial state that maintains control
over others, and thus focuses on the policies of the United States in
general and the Bush administration in particular. Structural and
productive power, however, shift the focus away from particular actors
that control, directly or indirectly, others to social relations of
constitution. In doing so, it directs attention to the underlying
social relations that make possible an assumption of imperial power,
give meaning to U.S. foreign policy practices, and imagine empire as
having a decentralized, even deterritorialized, form.
To consider structural power in debating the existence or
implications of U.S. empire means, first and foremost, exploring the
structural constitution of the United States as imperial center. This
has three interconnected aspects. First, the structure of social
relations of material production are transnational and create
functional and spatial differentiation between a world-economic core
and periphery. Along these lines, scholars influenced by Marxism and
world-system theory generally situate their discussions of U.S. foreign
policy in the context of how global capitalism generates a particular
set of social positions and practices for the United States in direct
relationship to the structurally disadvantaged.111
Such a consideration
frequently includes a claim that a partially deterritorialized global
capitalism constitutes the United States as a capitalist state that is
bound up with the authoritative rule of and for global capital.
112 This leads to a second observation: because
capitalism is global and deterritorialized, so, too, is global
rule.
113
Although the United States might play an important role in regulating
the world economy, opening up new territories, and ensuring that rogue
countries are disciplined, it works with other states and nonstate
actors to maintain and expand global capitalism.
114 Third, the regulation of the world economy is
accomplished through a mixture of coercion and consent. The United
States has demonstrated a willingness to use its military power to
maintain global economic (and associated sociopolitical) stability. It
also has worked hard to generate consent—that is, to get those
who are structurally disadvantaged because of their position in the
world political economy to accept the order of things. Accordingly,
entering into the debate on U.S. empire through the lens of structural
power leads one to a focus on the structural constitution of the
conditions of possibility for the Bush administration's policies
in relationship to the material, political, and ideological
contradictions of capitalism.
115 Can the social relations of constitution that generate empire be
understood in the more diffuse terms of productive power? A most
influential, recent, attempt is Hardt and Negri's definition of
“empire,” which has been the subject of much critical
attention. Their argument is that transformative discursive and
material processes have produced “empire”: a
“decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that
progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,
expanding, frontiers.”116
What
has produced this new form of global rule? Although they join others in
identifying the expansion of global capital, they also locate an
important role for the development of Western-backed institutions that
maintain more consensual and participatory decision-making practices,
new discourses such as human rights, equality, and democracy, and
counterhegemonic struggles by labor and others that reflect the desire
for “liberation” from the “modern machines of
power.”
117
Empire, as they conceive it, is not a system in which tribute, power,
and resources flow from the outlying regions to a great metropolitan
center, but instead consists of more diffuse networks of hierarchy that
generate privilege for some and pacify the multitudes.
How does this deterritorialized empire constitute the United States?
Broadly, social discourses might be viewed as productive of the
specific subjectivity of the United States in relationship to imperial
subjects. Some circles, for example, exhibit a growing romantic
nostalgia for empire.118
It is
not uncommon to hear the United States being urged to accept the
responsibilities and burdens of empire in helping to bring progress to
others.
119 USA Today, 6 May
2003, A15.
This role is to be performed not only by the United
States. A multiplicity of actors and processes are partially
responsible for attempting to bring progress, development, human
rights, and the rule of law—in short, civilization—to the
non-Western world. Along these lines, Judis observed that while there
was the formal dismantling of the colonial empires that once played a
civilizing mission that stabilized the international order, that role
is now shouldered by international organizations.
120 New Republic, 9 June 2003, 19–23.
He proceeded to recommend that the United States continue to use
international organizations to perform this civilizing mission,
anticipating that they will be better able to bring into being new
kinds of actors in world politics. Productive power, in this way, works
to produce a particular identity for the United States—a
responsible and beneficent imperial actor in relation to others
(imperial subjects, themselves irresponsible and in need of such
help).
In general, any discussion of American empire should be attentive to
all forms of power. Certainly there is compulsory power, which is the
focus of much of the debate. Yet also present is institutional power
and how the United States might indirectly control the behavior of
others through global institutions. These first two approaches share,
therefore, a concern with how the United States is able to sustain
dominance in international affairs in ways that control, directly and
indirectly, the foreign policies and even domestic political
arrangements of other states. It is possible and desirable, though, to
see the American empire as constituted by global social relations.
Making this move requires a willingness to see the United States at the
imperial center, structurally constituted and discursively produced
through a complex of imperial relations that are not themselves fully
under the control of the U.S. state as actor. To fully appreciate how
power is embedded in empire, though, requires a willingness to see not
only the different forms of power, but also how they combine in
different ways to create structured and enduring hierarchies of control
and advantage.
Conclusion
Power is a complex and contested concept, in large part because there
are important but distinctive ways to understand how social relations
shape the fates and choices of actors. If international relations
scholars have erred in their past attempts to understand power, it is
by trying to identify and rely on a single conception. But no single
concept can capture the forms of power in international politics. In
order to better enable scholars to see the conceptual variety, we
constructed a taxonomy that systematically identifies the different
forms of power. We use that taxonomy to encourage scholars not to treat
these conceptual forms as competing or vying for recognition as the
important operation of power in a particular situation. Instead, we
urge scholars to see how the multiple concepts capture the different
and interrelated ways in which actors are enabled and constrained in
determining their circumstances.
The inevitable question, then, is how exactly should we think about
the relationship between these forms of power? During the past few
years, there have been several important statements regarding how
scholars should conceptualize the relationship between different
substantive theories of international relations, such as neoliberalism
and realism, and different social theories, such as constructivism and
rationalism.121
Jupille, Caporaso, and Checkel suggest several
possibilities: incommensurability; competitive testing; sequencing;
incorporation (or subsumption); and some type of addition.
122 With respect to analysis of power, we
reject the first four in favor of the last.
One line of argument is that because these different
conceptualizations of power derive, in important ways, from different
social theoretic commitments, they are incommensurable. Because the
theoretic foundations are in tension, the best that can be gotten among
concepts of power is some form of conceptual pluralism. We certainly do
not believe that a “master” theory of power is possible.
But there is no social theoretic reason why scholars should not look
for areas of connection. We also reject a gladiatorial competition
between these conceptions; after all, they capture the different ways
in which social relations shape and limit actors' ability to
determine their fates. To permanently reject one in favor of another,
therefore, would be to risk overlooking a fundamental dimension of
power (and therefore return discussions of power to a state of
conceptual myopia).
We also reject subsumption arguments, on the grounds that they
presuppose that there is a foundational element of power that is
generative of the other forms. We see ways in which compulsory power
shapes productive power, and vice-versa; how institutional power shapes
compulsory power, and vice-versa; how institutional power shapes
structural power, and vice-versa, and on and on. So, there is no most
basic form. On the same grounds, we reject the idea of sequencing
because we see no reason to presume that one form of power necessarily
and always precedes another. To the contrary, in most social contexts
all are operating simultaneously, intersecting with and reflecting off
of each other.
Because the taxonomy was designed to encourage scholars to see the
different forms of power in international politics and the connections
between them, we strongly encourage scholars to imagine how different
forms interact to sharpen empirical analysis. Different forms of power
have different domains of application to the extent that they
illuminate different ways in which social relations affect and effect
the ability of actors to control their fates.123
But, as we illustratively suggested in the
discussions of global governance and American empire, these different
conceptualizations are not only distinct, but also intertwined.
Although Carr is routinely considered to be the individual most
responsible for establishing the focal conceptualization of power and
associating that conceptualization with realism, in our view his work
in fact suggests what we are advocating.124
As expected
from someone deeply influenced by Mannheim and Marx, his
Twenty
Years' Crisis and his analysis of international order exhibit
a far-reaching understanding of what power does and how power works. He
certainly articulated various elements of compulsory power. His
explicit discussion of power was largely limited to its multiple
instruments (for him military force, economic wealth, and public
opinion or propaganda) that could be used to overcome resistance from
another “political society.” Yet he also attended to
features of institutional power as he saw how power works through
international institutions, including international law, which, in
turn, shape the policies of states and help to legitimate and sustain
international orders. In Carr's view, international organizations,
such as the League of Nations and emergent principles of international
law, institutionalize the interests of the powerful and work against
those of the weak. His critique of the League of Nations, therefore,
included more than the standard (but false) criticism that its
architects and advocates believed that somehow it would magically erase
the causes of war; it also included the claim that these international
institutions that embodied so-called universal principles, in fact,
maintain the international status quo at the expense of some in the
service of others. The hubris of idealists, Carr argued, is to believe
that somehow these international institutions are antidotes to power
and represent a positive-sum game. Indeed, for Carr, it was the very
fact that they mask relations of power that transforms them into
stealth weapons of domination.
As a student of Marx, Carr also saw power as structural—as
including social processes that define state interests themselves.
Drawing inspiration from Marxian theories of false consciousness, for
example, he claimed that ideologies such as free trade are part of
power politics precisely because they can lead indoctrinated states to
consent to new forms of economic relations that insert them into new
relations of dependence and exploitation. International orders are
easier to sustain for the powerful if the dominated submit to their own
domination, Carr acknowledged clearly and explicitly. Finally, as
someone who was influenced by Mannheim, he was keenly aware of how
broad discourses such as “progress,” carried by
intellectuals and established institutions, constitute what are
acceptable practices and goals (always trying but never quite
eradicating power) and shape broader categories of
“civilized” and “uncivilized” states. Carr
reminds us that power exists at the surface, and also well below; he
shows that to understand power means to understand its various forms.
As scholars of international relations continue to debate the nature,
role, and explanatory significance of power, they should recognize the
workings of multiple concepts and systematically employ them in their
research. After all, that is the way Carr would have wanted it.
