Power Transition School of Hegemonic Studies
Discussion
Joshua Goldstein:
"The third major school of the current war/hegemony debate, which I call the power transition school, is descended from Organski's (1958) approach.
Charles DoranandWes Parsons(1980; Doran 1983) remain essentially within Organski's framework but add a cyclical component. They assume a regularity in the rise and fall of a nation's relative capabilities in the international system, which they call a "power cycle." Like Organski, they assume that a state's relative power position46affects the likelihood of war.47 As shown in figure 6.3, Doran and Parsons (1980:949–53) fit regularized curves to data for each of nine great powers, indicating each country's relative power (that is, share of total capability) for 1815–1975 (or however long the country was a "great power").
Countries seem to (more or less) follow logistic curves, gradually gaining or losing their share of world power.48Doran and Parsons conclude that "major powers pass through a cycle indexed by relative capability" (p. 952). They hypothesize that "at critical points during this cycle where change is most rapid and disruptive of past trends, namely, at the inflection and turning points, the probability is highest of major power initiation of extensive war" (p. 953), because "it is at these points that the government is most vulnerable to overreaction, misperception, or aggravated use of force which may generate massive war" (p. 949).49 Doran and Parsons analyze seventy-seven cases of war initiation by major powers. Using simple statistical groupings of wars by "critical periods" versus "remaining intervals, "they conclude that indeed "a major power is more prone to initiate a war that becomes extensive (i.e. escalates) during one of the critical periods on the cycle of relative power than at other times" (p. 960).
Further, they find that the inflection points (where the rate of growth or decline shifts rather suddenly) rather than the turning points (where the level of relative capability is maximum or minimum) were most conducive to war.50I am somewhat skeptical of these results because of ad hoc elements in the methodology.
Robert Gilpin (1981)also follows the main thrust of the power transition school, though not in a cyclical framework. He argues that war is a resolution of systemic disequilibrium resulting from a differential growth of power among the actors in the international system. Gilpin integrates this theory with that of another neorealist, Waltz(1979),who makes an analogy between international politics and microeconomics. According to this approach, states act like firms and the international system like a market, so the "rational actor" model of economists can be applied to world politics. The nation-state, according to Gilpin, behaves "rationally" and seeks to change the international system only when the perceived benefits of doing so exceed the costs (p. 11).
Hence the system is stable only when no actor thinks the benefits of change exceed the costs. The principle method of systemic change through history has been hegemonic war war to reorder the international system (p. 15).51Gilpin's theory suggests a "power transition" explanation of the hegemony cycles periodic hegemonic wars arising from (and correcting) systemic disequilibrium. But Gilpin's theory is not explicitly cyclical.
The distinctions between the three schools discussed in this chapter are captured by Modelski (1983:2), who distinguishes his approach from realist and neo-Marxist approaches as follows:
- "In contrast to realism,[it] strives not for universal generalizations about the behavior of states but only for propositions about time and space-bound system's. It represents politics not as something eternal or unchanging but subject to innovation and learning.... It also rejects the characterization of world politics as anarchical but is particularly sensitive to the role global wars have played in its organization. On the other hand, in contrast to the world-systems approach, [it] eschews economic determinism and has a fuller conception of the role of the political process, and in particular global war, in the shaping of the modern world. It does, however, share with it a systemic and evolutionary perspective, a concern for space and time, and attention to global economic processes."