Daniel Starr: China is Not a Generic Great Power

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May 17, 2005

China is Not a Generic Great Power

"Rising powers always make trouble, so war with China is unavoidable" -- that's the atmosphere of half of all op-eds on China these days, as in this Washington Post column by Robert Kagan and this essay from the American naval hub at Honolulu by Robert Kaplan. The other half of the time you're told, "War among successful nations is stupid and archaic, so war with China is inconceivable," as in this scathing reply by Barnett skewering Kaplan and Kagan. What gets left out of both of these arguments is any discussion of China itself. Different countries behave differently, even when handed the same menu of opportunities to use their power. Some great powers show a taste for confrontation, while others are always the last to pick a fight. China as a leading power won't be a generic cookie-cutter replica of some kind of "average historical great power" or "average 21st-century great power"; it'll have its own distinctive pattern.

Nine nations acted as "Great Powers" for a substantial amount of time in Western history from 1500 to 2000: the Ottoman Empire, Hapsburg Spain, Hapsburg Austria, France, Great Britain, Russia, Prussia/Germany, and (in the later global years) America and Japan.1 Germany and Hapsburg Spain were far more eager than the other seven to get into great-power wars. Each spent nearly all of its history as a leading power as the most belligerent country in Europe; both sought war with great powers even sometimes when there were weaker countries to fight; both ruined themselves more than once with foolishly chosen wars. Less consistently violent were the Ottoman Empire, Japan and Russia: those three were quick to swallow weaker countries as protectorates or conquests, but were much slower than Germany or Spain to wage total war with other great powers. Then come France and Imperial Austria, which went through both aggressive and conservative phases. And the most retiring of the nine were Britain and twentieth-century America, who both tended to "underuse" their potential military power and shy off even moderately challenging fights; they both threw out too-aggressive governments, and were usually among the last powers to get involved in a great-power war.

Now, you can come up with lots of reasons for why each of these countries was comparatively aggressive or peaceful as a great power, but it's impossible to argue they were all somehow the same. Some of them overused their military potential, even by the standards of their time; some of them underused it, even by the standards of our time. Some of them had a habit of making war even when it was obviously stupid, and some of them had a habit of declining war even when it would have been obviously profitable. Their internal histories, their geography, and their forms of government all made a difference. No iron law exists for "what great powers do". Each of modern history's great powers has had its own fairly consistent pattern of behavior. We should think twice before making predictions about China as a great power that ignore all details about China as a nation.

What do we know about China's "national preferences" in foreign policy? We've touched on the influence of China's domestic political factors in this earlier article. I'll talk about China's past and present tendencies in foreign policy later on. But if you want to know what to think about the odds of war with China, study war -- but also study China.

[E1] Yes, I'm leaving out the Italians, the Dutch, and the Swedes.

Posted by danielstarr at May 17, 2005 02:24 AM

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