THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS

ECONOMIC CHANGE AND MILITARY CONFLICT FROM 1500 TO 2000

PAUL KENNEDY

RANDOM HOUSE              1987

PART 2

 

Introduction (Cont.)

The Great Power struggles which took place between 1660 and 1815, and are covered in Chapter 3, cannot be so easily summarized as a contest between one large bloc and its many rivals. It was in this complicated period that while certain former Great Powers like Spain and the Netherlands were falling into the second rank, there steadily emerged five major states (France, Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia) which came to dominate the diplomacy of 18^th  century Europe, and to engage in a series of lengthy coalition wars punctuated by swiftly changing alliances. This was an age in which France, first under Louis XIV and then later under Napoleon, came closer to controlling Europe than at any time before or since; but its endeavors were always held in check, in the last resort at least, by combination of the other Great Powers. Since the cost of standing armies and national fleets had become horrendously great by the early 18^th century, a country which could create an advanced system of banking and credit (as Britain did) enjoyed many advantages over financially backward rivals. But the factor of geographical position was also of great importance in deciding the fate of the Powers in their many, and frequently changing, contests – which help to explain why the two “flank” nations of Russia and Britain had become much more important by 1815.

• Both expanded into the extra-European world as the 18^th century unfolded, even as they were ensuring that the continental balance of power was upheld.
• By the later decades of the century, the Industrial Revolution was under way in Britain, which was to give that state an enhanced capacity both to colonize overseas and to frustrate the Napoleonic bid for European mastery.
• For an entire century after 1815 there was a remarkable absence of lengthy coalition wars. No single nation was either able or willing to make a bid for dominance.
• This relatively stable international scene allowed the British Empire to rise to its zenith as a global power, in naval and colonial and commercial terms, and also interacted favorably with its virtual monopoly of steam-driven industrial production.
• As the 20^th century approached the pace of technological change and uneven growth rates made the international system much more unstable and complex than it had been 50 years earlier, manifested in the frantic post-1880 jostling by the Great Powers for additional colonial territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, partly for gain, partly out of fear of being eclipsed.
• It also manifested itself in the increasing number of arms races, both on land and at sea, and in the creation of fixed military alliances, even in peacetime, as the various governments sought out partners for a possible future war.

Behind the frequent colonial quarrels and international crises of the pre-1914 period, however, the decade-by-decade indices of economic power were pointing to even more fundamental shifts in the global balances – indeed, to the eclipse of what had been, for over three centuries, essentially a Eurocentric world system. Despite their best efforts, traditional European Great Powers like France and Austria-Hungary, and a recently united one like Italy, were falling out of the race. By contrast, the enormous, continent-wide states of the United States and Russia were moving to the forefront, and this despite the inefficiencies of the czarist state. Among the western European nations only Germany, possibly, had the muscle to force its way into the select league of the future world Powers. Japan, on the other hand, was intent upon being dominant in East Asia, but not farther afield. Inevitably, then, all these changes posed considerable, and ultimately insuperable, problems for a British Empire which now found it much more difficult to defend its global interests than it had a half-century earlier.

• The grinding, bloody mass battles of the First World War, by placing a premium upon industrial organization and national efficiency, gave imperial Germany certain advantages over the swiftly modernizing but still backward czarist Russia.

Because of the late addition of American military and especially economic aid, the western alliance finally had the resources to prevail over its rival coalition. But it had been an exhausting struggle for all the original belligerents. Austria-Hungary was gone, Russia in revolution, Germany defeated; yet France, Italy, and even Britain itself had also suffered heavily in their victory. The only exceptions were Japan, which further augmented its position in the Pacific; and, of course, the United States, which by 1918 was indisputably the strongest Power in the world.

The swift post-1919 American withdrawal from foreign engagements, and the parallel Russian isolationism under the Bolshevik regime, left an international system which was more out of joint with the fundamental economic realities than perhaps at any time in the five centuries covered in this book. Britain and France, although weakened, were still at the center of the diplomatic stage, but by the 1930s their position was being challenged by the militarized, revisionist states of Italy, Japan, and Germany – the last intent upon a much more deliberate bid for European hegemony than even in 1914. In the background, however, the United States remained by far the mightiest manufacturing nation in the world, and Stalin’s Russia was quickly transforming itself into an industrial superpower.

• The dilemma for the “middle” Powers was that in fighting off the German and Japanese challenges, they would most likely weaken themselves as well.
• The Second World War, for all its ups and downs, essentially confirmed those apprehensions of decline.
• Despite spectacular early victories, the Axis nations could not in the end succeed against an imbalance of productive resources which was far greater than that of the 1914-1918 war.
• What they did achieve was the eclipse of France and the irretrievable weakening of Britain – before they themselves were overwhelmed by superior force.
• By 1943, the bipolar world forecast decades earlier had finally arrived, and the military balance had once again caught up with the global distribution of economic resources.
• The last two chapters of this book examine the years in which a bipolar world did indeed seem to exist, economically, militarily, and ideologically – and was reflected at the political level by the many crises of the Cold War.
• Since the scope of this book is so large, it is clear that it will be read by different people for different purposes.
• It is clear that some generally valid conclusions can be drawn.
• There is detectable a causal relationship between the shifts which have occurred over time in the general economic and productive balances and the position occupied by individual Power in the international system.
• Economic shifts heralded the rise of new Great Powers which would one day have a decisive impact upon the military/territorial order.
• This is why the move in the global productive balances toward the “Pacific rim” which has taken place over the past few decades cannot be of interest merely to economists alone.
• The historical record suggests that there is a very clear connection in the long run between an individual Great Power’s economic rise and fall and its growth and decline as an important military power (or world empire).
• Economic resources are necessary to support a large-scale military establishment.
• Both wealth and power are always relative and should be seen as such.
• Most of the historical examples covered here suggest that there is a noticeable “lag time” between the trajectory of a state’s relative economic strength and the trajectory of its military /territorial influence.
• An economically expanding Power – Britain in the 1860s, the United States in the 1890s, Japan today – may well prefer to become rich rather than to spend heavily on armaments. A half-century later, priorities may well have altered.
• The earlier economic expansion has brought with it overseas obligations (dependence upon foreign markets and raw materials, military alliances, perhaps bases and colonies).
• Other, rival Powers are now economically expanding at a faster rate, and wish in their turn to extend their influence abroad.
• The world has become a more competitive place, and the markets shares are being eroded. Pessimistic observers talk of decline; patriotic statesmen call for “renewal.”

In these more troubled circumstances, the Great Power is likely to find itself spending much more on defense than it did two generations earlier, and yet still discover that the world is a less secure environment – simply because other Powers have grown faster, and are becoming stronger. Imperial Spain spent much more on its army in the troubled 1630s and 1640s than it did in the 1580s, when the Castilian economy was healthier. Edwardian Britain’s defense expenditures were far greater in 1910 than they were at, say, the time of Palmerston’s death in 1865, when the British economy was relatively at its peak; but which Britons by the later date felt more secure? The same problem, it will be argued below, appears to be facing both the United States and the USSR today. Great Powers in relative decline instinctively respond by spending more on “security,” thereby divert potential resources from “investment” and compound their long-term dilemma.

Another general conclusion which can be drawn from the 500-year record presented here is that there is a very strong correlation between the eventual outcome of the major coalition wars for European or global mastery, and the amount of productive resources mobilized by each side. This was true of the struggles waged against the Spanish-Austrian Habsburgs; of the great 18^th century contests like the War of Spanish Succession, the Seven Years War, and the Napoleonic War; and of the two world wars of this century. A lengthy, grinding war eventually turns into a test of relative capacities of each coalition. Whether one side has “more … of it” or “less of it” becomes increasingly significant as the struggle lengthens.

• This book is not arguing that economics determines every event, or is the sole reason for the success and failure of each nation.
• Geography, military organization, national morale, the alliance system, and many other factors can all affect the relative power of the members of the states system.
• In the 18^th century the United Provinces were the richest parts of Europe, and Russia the poorest – yet the Dutch fell, and the Russians rose.
• What does seem incontestable is that in a long-drawn-out Great Power (and usually coalition) war, victory has repeatedly gone to the side with the more flourishing productive base.

 

Epilogue

Whatever the likelihood of nuclear or conventional clashes between the major states, it is clear that important transformations in the balances are occurring, and will continue, probably at a faster pace than before. What is more, they are occurring at the two separate but interacting levels of economic production and strategic power. Unless the tends of the past two decades alter (but why should they?), the pattern of world politics looks roughly as follows:

First, there will be a shift, both in shares of total world product and total world military spending, from the five largest concentrations of strength to many more nations; but that will be a gradual process, and no other state is likely to join the present “pentarchy” of the United States, the USSR, China, Japan, and the EEC in the near future.

Secondly, the global productive balances between these five have already begun to tilt in certain directions: away from Russia and the United States, away also from the EEC, to Japan and China. This does not make for a balanced five-sided arrangement in economic terms, for the United States and the EEC have roughly the same productive and trading muscle (though the former gains immensely by being a military state); the USSR and Japan are also roughly equal (though Japan is growing the faster), with each having only around two-thirds of the productive power of the previous two; and the PRC is still a long way behind, but growing fastest of all.

Thirdly, in military terms there still exists a bipolar world, in that only the United States and the USSR have the capacity to ensure each other’s destruction – and the destruction of any other country. Nevertheless, that bipolarity may be being slowly eroded, both at the nuclear level, either because such weapons are unusable under most circumstances, or because China, France, and Britain are each acquiring massive additions to their own nuclear arsenals; and at the conventional level, because of the steady buildup of Chinese strength, plus the growing realization that a West German-French (with, possibly, British and Italian) agglomeration of land, sea, and air forces would be an extremely large combination of power, if those nations really could work together effectively. For domestic-political reasons, that is not likely to happen in the near future; but the very fact that such a potential exists places a further uncertainty over the “bipolar” system, at least at the conventional level. By contrast, no one is at present suggesting that Japan will transform itself into a great military Power; yet all acquainted with the pattern of “war and change in world politics” would find it unsurprising if, one day, a different political leadership in Tokyo decided to turn its economic strength into a larger degree of military strength.

• We therefore return to the conundrum which has exercised strategists and economists and political leaders from classical times onward.
• To be a Great Power – by definition, a state capable of holding its own against any other nation – demands a flourishing economic base.
• Yet by going to war, or by devoting a large share of the nation’s “manufacturing power” to expenditures upon “unproductive” armaments, one runs the risk of eroding the national economic base, especially vis-à-vis states which are concentrating a greater share of their income upon productive investment for long-term growth.

Each of today’s large Powers – the United States, the USSR, China, Japan, and (putatively) the EEC – is therefore left grappling with the age-old dilemmas of rise and fall, with the shifting pace of productive growth, with technological innovation, with changes in the international scene, with the spiraling cost of weapons, with alterations in the power balances. Those are not developments which can be controlled by any one state, or individual. To paraphrase Bismarck’s famous remark, all of these Powers are traveling on “the stream of Time,’ which they can “neither create nor direct,” but upon which they can “steer with more or less skill and experience.” How they emerge from that voyage depends to a large degree, upon the wisdom of the governments in Washington, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking, and the various European capitals. The above analysis has tried to suggest what the prospects are likely to be for each of those polities and, in consequence, for the Great Power system as a whole. But that still leaves an awful lot depending upon the “skill and experience” with which they manage to sail on “the stream of Time.”