Power, Status, and International War

Abstract

Reference to the existence of a hierarchy or pecking order in the international system is a commonplace in the traditional literature of international relations and in the folklore of diplomacy. The widespread use of such terms as 'superpower', 'major power' or less flatteringly 'banana republic' reminds us that the society of nations is by no means classless. Even so self-consciously egalitarian a body as the United Nations makes a formal, constitutional distinction between ordinary state members and the privileged few the permanent members of the Security Council. Some scholars those whose major theoretical focus is the concept of power have attempted to specify the criteria which determine national placement on this rank-ordering, and to determine how this placement is related to national behavior.i Nonetheless, stratification and hierarchy in the international system have not received anything like the attention paid to the corresponding phenomena at the societal level of analysis. In recognition of this fact, a number of recent studies have attempted to draw upon the conceptual and empirical ricbness of the sociological literature on this subject to illuminate the situation at the international level. In particular, Galtung2 and others have focused attention on the concept of rank-disequilibrium or status inconsistency and its possible usefulness as an explanatory concept in the study of international conflict. Many sociological studies indicate that atti. tudes are affected not only by an individual's overall position in the social hierarchy, but also by the degree to which an individual's rankings on the major dimensions of his status set correspond. Individuals with inconsistent rankings for example, persons whose income and job status do not match up to their education and skills experience frustration in their social relationships and as a consequence manifest a greater degree of dissatisfaction and aggressiveness in their social and political behavior.3 Galtung has suggested that the relationship between status inconsistency and conflict behavior may be found in the international system as well. Nations which rank high on such 'achieved' statuses as economic and military capacity, yet are denied a correspondingly high rank on 'ascribed' ones such as recognition and prestige, appear to resent their lot. If this refusal to grant status is persistent and severe, the nation concerned can develop a good deal of generalized hostility towards its coevals as the example of presentday China seems to indicate. While the few empirical studies undertaken thus far lend some support to this hypothesis, they cannot be considered by any means conclusive. Fossum4 has discovered a relationship between national status inconsistency and military coups d'etat in Latin America, but did not examine the external conflict behavior of the nations in his study. Midlarsky5 addresses himself to inter-nation conflict, finding it to be associated with inconsistencies among the rates of change of a nation's various status positions over the period 1870-1945. He does not, however, examine the relationship of conflict behavior to status inconsistency per se. East6 undertakes such an examination, but it is based on only 17 annual observations within a time period (1948-1964) which can handly be considered representative of either the preceding or subsequent periods. It would seem, then,