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 In the context of international relations and diplomacy, power (sometimes clarified as international power, national power, or state power) is the ability of one state to influence or control other states. States with this ability are called powers, middle powers, regional powers, great powers (sometimes capitalized), major powers, superpowers, and hyperpowers.
Entities other than states sometimes acquire a similar ability to influence and control states; most often, these are multinational corporations with financial assets surpassing those of smaller nations, but organisations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have also displayed international power. The Catholic Church and the Hanseatic League are well known historical examples.
Recent history
The Great Powers are usually taken to be those nations or political entities that, through their great economic and military strength, are the arbiters of world diplomacy, and whose opinions must be taken into account by other nations before effecting initiatives. Characteristically, they have the ability to intervene militarily almost anywhere, and they also have soft, cultural power, often in the form of economic investment in less developed portions of the world.
Different sets of Great Powers have existed in history, but after 1815, the Concert of Europe formalized France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, and Prussia as the five powers. Of these, the first three had colonial empires outside Europe. Austria was called an empire in a former sense, that of a monarch ruling over kings. Prussia was a newcomer, rising through Frederick the Great's militaristic grand strategy. After the First World War, at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 four Great Powers were readily recognised: the British Empire (including its Dominions), the United States, France and Italy. The status of Japan requires qualification. They were not part of the Big Four , but were accorded two votes like the Big Four. Their position was highlighted by their race equality proposal, which touched on a number of issues including their status as a Great Power. Although this proposal was defeated as first the British and then the Americans caved into the Australian defence of the White Australia Policy, their successful retention of Shandong and the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator indicated that they had attained the position of a non-white Great Power. Again, after the Second World War in 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China were formalised as the five powers with permanent seats and veto power in the UN Security Council. Clearly, shifts in great power status tend to follow wars.
Great powers are also often associated with the projection of military power through a particular technology, such as Dreadnoughts or nuclear weapons. A mere large, defensive infantry army, such as the Chinese would have been able to raise during the age of European dominance is not able to project power overseas. Even the US Army and its blockading navy during the Civil War was insufficient at a time when the United States did not have armored ocean-going battleships. Wealth could be a military factor. Britain could not raise a large army quickly, but was able to fund allies to raise them for it during the Napoleonic Wars.
The Congress of Berlin, a peace treaty to a comparatively minor war, included Turkey and Italy at the status of those mentioned in the Concert of Europe. International meetings, which developed during the second half of the nineteenth century, also serve to indicate Great Power status in the absence of peace treaties after wars, such as the different Berlin Conference.
By the end of the cold war and the era of globalization other nations began to attain international recognition as great power or future great powers. Brazil and India are examples of such nations.
Arguably, since the start of the twenty-first century, the USA has been the unique Great Power. There is in any case a great contrast with the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when the number of candidate and actual Great Powers was closer to ten.
Theory
In the field of political theory, Niccolò Machiavelli theorized early and influentially on the mechanisms of gaining and retaining political power in his work The Prince, published posthumously in 1532.
Power is usually defined as the ability to impose one's will on others, or to pursue one's goals at the expense of others' interests. Power can be exercised through violence or through coercion, the threat of force, or through treaties and diplomacy.
In Western thought, the power of a state is generally thought of in qualitative terms; however, in the current political thinking of the People's Republic of China, national power can be measured quantitatively using an index known as comprehensive national power.
State power is often divided into hard power (military power) and soft power (economic or cultural or persuasive power).
Foreign policy and power
In International Relations there are two types of diplomatic power; hard power and soft power. "The expression 'soft power' was coined by Joe Nye, a professor from Harvard. 'Soft power' or co-optive power means influencing political developments by means other than 'hard power' – i.e., through debates on cultural values, dialogues on ideology, the attempt to influence through good example and the appeal to commonly accepted human values." Soft power means using diplomacy, dissemination of information, analysis, propaganda and cultural programming to achieve political ends. On the other hand, the expression "hard power" or command power refers to war-ready armed forces or the ability to change what others do through coercion.
Other pertinent concepts include behavioural power, which is the ability of a nation to obtain favorable policy outcomes, and resource power, which is the possession of strategic resources.
Past Great powers throughout Modern History
(Dates of prominence of modern great powers - not to be taken too absolutely, but as mere guides to their most prominent periods - many of these states exercised near great power influence in periods outside of those shown)
- Poland-Lithuania 1386-1648
- Portugal 1415-1581
- Spain 1441-1800
- India 1556-1707
- Sweden 1611-1709
- Netherlands 1579-1697
- Ottoman Empire 1453-1880
- Habsburg Empire/Austria-Hungary 1526-1918
- Italy 1861-1945
Current Great Powers
- China 200BC-1842; 1945-present
- Japan 1898-1945; 1956-present
- Prussia/Germany 1740-1945; 1990-present
- France 1483-1944 ; 1956-present
- England/Great Britain/United Kingdom 1500s-present
- Republic of India 1990-present
- Imperial Russia/Soviet Union/Russia 1709-present
- United States 1899-present
Disputed Great Power
- Renaissance Italian city-states: Venice, Florence, Genoa, Milan
- Denmark/Denmark-Norway 15th-17th centuries
- Two Sicilies 19th century
Categories of powers
Political analysis often personifies nation states as powers, discussing superpowers, great powers, second-order powers and "European powers", for example, with convenient simplicity as manifestations of Realpolitik.
States have always had variable levels of powers and a number of terms have been developed to describe this continuum.
- A hyperpower is the dominating state in a unipolar world (e.g. The British Empire after 1815 and the United States today)
- A superpower is a state that is greatly more powerful than almost all other countries, especially in a bipolar world (for example, the US and USSR during the Cold War)
- A global power or Major power is a state that can influence nations around the globe, but does not necessarily have overwhelming military or economic dominance (e.g. The United States and Soviet Union in post world war to pre-cold war period) {Sometimes also used to describe a state that was a "superpower" before the term originated during the Cold War}
- A great power is a state that is one of the leading powers in the world, especially in a multi-polar world (for example, the United Kingdom, France and Japan today; Austria, Prussia and Russia during the 19th century)
- A regional power that dominates other states in its region. Examples of regional powers today would be India in South Asia and Brazil in South America.
- A middle power is a state that cannot dominate most other states, but does have some international influence (for example, Canada and Australia today). The term is, however, often used interchangeably with regional power.
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