CIAO DATE: 03/2015
Volume: 52, Issue: 2
February 2015
Contested leadership in international relations (PDF)
Daniel Flemes, Steven E. Lobell
The articles in this special issue examine the responses to the rise of new and emerging powers including Brazil, China, India and South Africa across different regions. Rather than focus on great powers and hegemons, the contributors address the contestation between regional powers, and secondary and tertiary states. The contributors address three questions: What are the drivers of different strategic responses? What are the different regional responses to shifts in the distribution of material capabilities? What is the influence of agency and structure in contested regional orders? To address these questions, different schools are employed including realism, institutionalism, and the English school to examine state characteristics, systemic, sub-systemic, domestic constraints and opportunities, the role of ideas and shared values, and different regional governance structures.
Why do secondary states choose to support, follow or challenge? (PDF)
Neal G. Jesse, Steven E. Lobell, Kristen P. Williams
In this article we examine when and why secondary and tertiary states select a strategy that does not entail following the lead of the rising states. To address these questions we outline a simple model that examines systemic and sub-systemic (regional) constraints on and opportunities for secondary and tertiary states: how engaged in the region is the global hegemon, how many rising (and extra-regional) states are in the region, and which states are waxing and waning and by how much. These three characteristics create different opportunities for and constraints on secondary and tertiary states, which in turn influence the set of strategy choices of these states as they respond to the regional hegemon. Our model cannot account for the specific foreign policy strategies that secondary and tertiary states select. Such a model would require domestic and individual level variables. We leave it to the area specialists and experts in the following articles in the volume to introduce these variables and explain the specific strategies used. Instead, based on our model we can explain general tendencies toward accommodative strategies, resistance strategies and neutral strategies. It is important to note that secondary and tertiary states can use a mix of different strategies toward regional and global hegemons, such as resisting primary threats and accommodating secondary threats. Moreover, secondary and tertiary states are often engaged in multiple games – a strategy might appear to be costly and suboptimal at one level but reasonable and optimal at another level. Finally, in selecting a strategy secondary and tertiary states factor the systemic, sub-systemic and domestic costs of the alternative strategies.
Drivers of strategic contestation: The case of South America FREE (PDF)
Daniel Flemes, Leslie Wehner
This article analyzes what the drivers of contestation of secondary powers vis-à-vis the regional power are, differentiating therein between structural, historical, behavioural and domestic such drivers. We argue that in regions characterized by relative stability where major interstate violent conflicts are unlikely, as is the case in South America, secondary powers rely mainly on soft-balancing mechanisms vis-à-vis the regional power. Whereas Brazil’s foreign policy behaviour is key to South American secondary powers being induced to contest the country’s powerhood, the choices that the foreign policy elites of those secondary powers make regarding what the specific expression of soft balancing is to be are influenced by certain domestic groups. Empirical examples are given of how Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela as secondary powers unfold these domestic drivers, which shape their different ways of soft balancing Brazil. The article thus explains why some secondary powers rely more on institutional binding, others on economic statecraft, or buffering, while others contest by offering and building alternative leadership proposals.
Neither balance nor bandwagon: South American international society meets Brazil's rising power (PDF)
Federico Merke
This article examines the strategic positioning of Brazil in South America and how South America relates to Brazil’s rising status both globally and regionally. It does so from the perspective of international society known as the English school. This perspective emphasizes how Brazil shares a number of values and institutions with its neighbors that offer the foundations for a distinct regional international society in South America. It thus challenges the materialist stance held by realism which envisages that secondary powers either balance or bandwagon the dominant pole and affirms instead that South America’s strategies towards Brazil are more complex and nuanced than a simple polarity standpoint suggests.
Revisiting consensual hegemony: Brazilian regional leadership in question (PDF)
Sean W. Burges
A central challenge confronting Brazilian foreign policy is its reluctance to accept measures that might restrict national autonomy. This limits the extent to which Brazil can lead and leverage the region, particularly in the face of competing visions such as ALBA and the Pacific Alliance. The issues is Brazil’s continued reliance on a consensual hegemony approach to regional relations after neighbouring countries opened space for a more assertive leadership closer to Pedersen’s model of cooperative hegemony. Although consensual hegemony allowed Brazil to establish its project in South America, by the end of Lula’s first presidential term more was being demanded and the failure to provide leadership goods weakened Brazil’s regional position. Current questioning of Brazilian leadership on the continent is found in an almost contradictory approach that sees Brazilian diplomats pushing away suggestions of assertive leadership while more concrete action is quietly taken by other regionally engaged sections of the Brazilian state.
Contested regional orders and institutional balancing in the Asia Pacific (PDF)
Kai He
The rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is gradually transforming the international system from a unipolar world toward multipolarity. China’s ascent not only challenges US domination, but also intensifies the institutionalization of security in the Asia Pacific. On the basis of institutional balancing theory, I argue that (i) China’s rise has led to a competition among different regional orders, that is, the US-led bilateralism versus ASEAN-centered and China-supported multilateralism. However, conflicts or wars are not inevitable since the contested regional orders can coexist in the Asia Pacific. (ii) The deepening economic interdependence has encouraged regional powers, including the United States, China and ASEAN, to rely on different institutional balancing strategies to pursue security after the Cold War.
Explaining the evolution of contestation in South Asia (PDF)
Hannes Ebert, Nicolas Blarel
India’s claims for regional hegemony have regularly been contested since its independence in 1947. The self-proclaimed emerging power is locked in an enduring rivalry with the South Asian secondary power, Pakistan. This article outlines the evolution of Pakistan’s contestation since independence and seeks to demonstrate how, when and why Pakistan adapted its foreign policy toward India. While the goals of Pakistan’s contestation remained constant, its means varied at two points in post-independence history. From 1947 to 1971, territorial disputes combined with a nascent nationalism drove the secondary power’s foreign policy elite to engage in war and open resistance, and the divergent domestic political ideologies of both countries complicated conflict resolution. With Pakistan’s devastating war defeat in 1971, direct means of contestation were no longer an immediate option, and a period of reluctant acquiescence ensued. The alleged involvement of Pakistani intelligence proxies in a crisis in Jammu and Kashmir in 1987 marked the beginning of a renewed phase of resistance, though now through indirect means of nuclear coercion and subconventional warfare. This form of contestation has increasingly manifested itself in bilateral crises with high potential of escalation and primarily targeted symbols of India’s South Asian hegemony, including its political and commercial centres in Delhi and Mumbai in 2001 and 2008 respectively or India’s diplomatic representations in Afghanistan. The article concludes that the current conditions of regional contestation in South Asia, most importantly the persistent revisionist versus status-quo domestic agendas, the presence of growing nuclear arsenals, and multi-tiered Asian rivalry constellations, undermine prospects for conflict resolution and complicate modelling future strategic behaviour in the region.
South Africa's symbolic hegemony in Africa (PDF)
Chris Alden, Maxi Schoeman
South Africa’s position on the African continent is widely seen to be one of dominance and leadership. No longer subject to the international opprobrium, post-apartheid South Africa launched a visionary campaign built around the notion of an ‘African Renaissance’ to restructure continental institutions in line with its interests. This state-led effort was complemented by an aggressive commercial expansion by well-financed South African corporations to break into previously inaccessible markets across the continent. This populist depiction of South Africa is largely echoed in the scholarly literature on South African foreign policy towards Africa. But careful analysis of the South African foreign policy experience both in Africa and more broadly, suggests that these images are only partially realised at best and that they ignore a host of structural problems and outcomes. In particular, the case for South African hegemonic dominance over the continent is challenged by its material weakness and uneven record of foreign policy successes. Despite this, Pretoria is continually ‘rewarded’ with leadership positions in international groupings, such as BRICS, G20 and nearly consecutive terms on the UN Security Council. We argue that this constitutes symbolic representivity and poses a continuing set of foreign policy dilemmas for South Africa and an international community as South Africa struggles to fulfil its hegemonic role in Africa.
African agency? Africa, South Africa and the BRICS (PDF)
Timothy M. Shaw
African states, economies and societies are increasingly ambivalent about Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICS), especially their latest, fifth member, South Africa, as economic growth comes with costs, shorter- and longer-term, from social to ecological. ‘Emerging’ economies, powers and societies may claim to be ‘developmental’ but they still confront challenges of governance, especially of their non-renewable natural resources. Symbolic of the price of growth is continuing migration into South Africa, uneven scores on a range of indicators – African Capacity Building Indicators (ACBI), Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), Human Development Index (HDI), Fragile States, Ibrahim Index and so on – and the West African Commission on Drugs (WACD). The African Mining Vision (AMV) remains problematic despite or because of the BRICS.