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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 01/04
Revisiting Responses To Power Preponderance: Going Beyond The Balancing-Bandwagoning Dichotomy
Chong Ja Ian
Paper #54
November 2003
Abstract
Since the 1990s, there has been a growing body of literature in international relations that looks at the unipolar world order that emerged from the ashes of the Cold War. Most of these works, however, tend to focus on describing the characteristics of this unipolar world or predicting its longevity. This working paper contends that such approaches do not pay adequate attention to how non-leading states in the international system are attempting to respond to American primacy of power in this age of unipolarity. The author argues that conventional conceptions of international politics that frame state reactions to superior power withing the bonds of balancing and bandwagoning are inadequate to understand how state actors are trying to advance and preserve interests in relation to preponderant American power.
As such this paper tries to argue that states try to forward and defend interests in relation to the system leader based on power relative to the pre-eminent state and integration in the world system. Power, on one hand, defines the capability of second-tier states to act, while integration, on the other, helps determine the incentives and costs of different actions. On the basis of relative power and integration, the paper identifies four possible aleterntive conceptualisations of alternative strategies to balancing and bandwagoning—buffering, bonding, binding, and beleaguering. It goes on to suggest that the tendency of states to pursue these various approaches to advancing and defending interests may have an impact on the nature and even duration of the current unipolar order.
Although this paper takes seriously the structural perspective in considering responses to dealing with the problem created by highly asymmetric power realities that lie beyond the balancing-bandwagoning dichotomy, it does not rule out the possibility that other factors may also affect state action. It accepts that a state's power and level of integration are highly dependent on prior decisions within the polity that may rest on ideational and contingent material realities. The argument of this paper also does not rule out the effects of path dependence from previous historical events specific to each state.
