Power Transition Theory: Academic Bull in the China Shop?
Just as there are two ways of conceptualizing History in general, there are two ways of conceptualizing the history of warfare in particular: linear or cyclical.
In a cyclical conception, major wars are called "hegemonic wars," and considered a recurrent phenomenon of every power transition throughout history: the Greek Peloponnesian Wars, the Thirty Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the two World Wars which Churchill and De Gaulle, sharing the same cyclical conception of history, referred to as the "Second Thirty Years' War."
It is this cyclical conception of history which is at the base of Power Transition Theory (PTT) – a theory that has been all the rage in International Relations (IR) since the publication in 2000 of the collective manifesto Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century, and has become the
main lens through which to analyze the rising antagonism between America and China.
On the face of it, the allure of PTT rests on the promise of a policy-relevant "unified theory" of war in the context of power transitions: "Of all theories at the international level," its proponents claim, "Power Transition has the most tightly integrated and internally consistent explanation for why, how, and when war occurs. In addition, it provides evidence about the costs, intensity, duration, and consequences of war." Upon closer examination, though, the appeal of PTT rests less on its theoretical sophistication (more on that later) than on a compelling, and seemingly self-explanatory, historical narrative contrasting the Anglo-American and Anglo- German power transitions a century ago. In a nutshell:
"The key difference – from the perspective of power transition theory – is that the United States shared British political and economic institutions, liberal democratic culture, and the British version of the desirable political, economic, and legal international order. The U.S. was a satisfied state and believed that its interests could be served by a change in the hierarchy within that system rather than a replacement of that system with a new order. British leaders understood what kind of order the United States was likely to construct when it ultimately achieved a dominant position, and they were willing to accept a somewhat diminished role within that order. In the Anglo- German transition, however, Germany was politically, economically, and culturally different than Britain, and had a different conception of the desirable international order. Thus Germany was a dissatisfied state. British leaders understood this, and consequently they were willing to make fewer compromises and to accept greater risks of war rather than accept a peaceful t ransition to a different international order in which British interests would be poorly served."
Not only is this "tale of two power transitions" questionable in itself , but even more problematic are the two key variables said to determine the probability of major wars: "power parity" between the status quo hegemon and its revisionist challenger, and the latter's "degree of dissatisfaction" with the existing order.
The first problem is that, in the age of the declining fungibility of military power and of the rise of asymmetric strategies, measuring "power parity" has never been so problematic. Leaving aside the question of the lack of transparency of official statistics (China's real defense budget is
estimated to be three times the official budget), America and China have different ways (quantitatively and qualitatively) of assessing Comprehensive National Power (CNP). If anything, it is not power parity, but power incommensurability, which may increase the risk ofmiscalculation and, by the same token, the risk of war initiation on the part of either player.
The concept of "power" adopted by PTT is just as antiquated as that of "parity" itself. Though the theory pays lip service in one sentence to the modern, relational definition of power ("power is defined as the ability to impose on or persuade opponents to comply with demands"), it moves
on to assess power in the pre-modern sense of resources: "In the lexicon of Power Transition theory, power is a combination of three elements: the number of people who can work and fight, their economic productivity, and the effectiveness of the political system in extracting and pooling individuals'contributions to advance national goals." The net result is a bean-counter's version of Thucydides.
Military power? Unlike PTT theorists, China has not forgotten that the Soviet Union went bankrupt trying to keep up with Reagan's military build-up in the 1980s. In Deng Xiaoping's "four modernizations" program, military modernization therefore came explicitly last, behind agriculture, industry, and science and technology. More important still, "a key distinction between Wilhelmine Germany and [Hu's] China is that Germany was trying to develop a symmetric capability to deal with existent British power. China is going asymmetric." Rather than attempt to, e.g., reach power parity at sea by building eleven aircraft carriers, China prefers to focus (for now at least) on an anti-access strategy relying on a whole range of asymmetric means from satellite warfare to mine warfare, and from anti-ship ballistic missiles to "maritime lawfare."
Economic power? In this day and age, a theory focusing on the dynamics of power transition should logically drop any reference to "productivity" as such and take into account instead the radically different salience and dynamics of industry and finance. China still has a long way to go before reaching productivity parity with America; but with its estimated 2.4 trillion dollar reserves, China is already the main global financial player when it comes to determining the future of the dollar as a reserve currency – the very linchpin of America's global supremacy.
Soft power? There is curiously no attempt in PTT to take into account the "power shift" of the past two decades, and the increased salience of soft power – an omission all the more puzzling since the Chinese conception appears to be closer to the maximalist German concept of "civilian
power" than to the more minimalist American concept of "soft power." For the Chinese, "soft power means anything outside of the military and security realm, including not only popular culture and public diplomacy but also more coercive economic and diplomatic levers like aid and investment and participation in multilateral organizations"
Second, when it comes to defining the "degree of dissatisfaction" with the existing order, PTT is as impressionistic as it is materialistic when dealing with the question of "power parity." There is simply no way to assess the degree of dissatisfaction of any given power without a closer examination of both its "strategic culture" and "grand strategy" – two questions on which PTT has practically nothing to say.
Strategic culture: if, as the foundational narrative of PTT puts it, the problem with the Anglo-German transition was due to the fact that "Germany was politically, economically, and culturally different than Britain," then one would expect PTT to highlight the fact that China is even more politically, economically, and culturally different than America. While the Anglo- German antagonism, to a certain extent, did take the form of a "clash of cultures" , the two countries nonetheless belonged to the same civilization. By contrast, China and America represent to two distinct civilizations, and one can only assume that PTT's silence on this civilizational difference is motivated mostly by the desire to avoid having to confront that much-dreaded thesis in academe: Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations."
In that respect, missing from Power Transition theory are two key elements. First, the realization that, in contrast to previous power transitions, the transition currently happening at the national level (America vs. China) takes place against the backdrop of a broader civilizational transition (from the Atlantic to the Pacific in geopolitical terms, or from the West to the Rest in both geo- economic and geo-cultural terms). Second, the realization that the traditional Asian state-system, unlike its European counterpart, favored a logic of hierarchy (tribute system) over a logic of anarchy (balance-of-power), and that the 64-million dollar question today is to what extent will China's neighbors favor "balancing" (as expected by the euro-centric IR theory) over "bandwagoning."
Grand strategy: Logically and chronologically, the first priority of any self-respecting power transition theory should be to assess what kind of revisionist Grand Strategy increases or decreases the risk of major wars, hastens or delays their outbreak and their termination, with what consequences for the parties engaged. From such a study, the theory could then try to advance general propositions regarding timing, duration, severity, and consequences of major wars. But there is no room for the concept of grand strategy in PTT (by "political capacity," PTT means the ability to mobilize resources at home, not the ability to devise and implement a grand strategy abroad). What PTT proponents fail to realize is that, all things (population, production and "political capacity") being equal, the timing, severity, duration, and even outcome of both the Anglo-German and American-German transitions would have been much different, had Germany's Grand Strategy not been such a colossal "comedy of errors."
Finally, PTT is as long on measuring "power" as it is short on assessing "purpose." Based on PTT, you would never know that, far from being interested in competing with America for the title of global hegemon, China is in fact more interested in riding the global wave in favor of multipolarity – an "indirect approach" of sorts which, more than anything else, makes the prospect of a "hegemonic war" unlikely.
Where, then, is the much-touted policy relevance of PTT?
At best, the theory offers time-tested truisms presented as profound insights, like "War is most likely, of longest duration, and greatest magnitude, when a challenger to the dominant power enters into approximate parity with the dominant state and is dissatisfied with the existing system" - the kind of banality that has led diplomatic practitioners for the past thirty years to dismiss much IR theory with a derisive "tell me something I don't know."
When warning about the possibility of major conflict, PTT proponents can only conceive of "war" as a transhistorical category. In the Power Transition manifesto published in 2000, there is no evidence that PTT theorists are aware of the evolution of the debate over "war" in the past
twenty years, nor is there any hint that, in the post-modern age, a "major war" could actually take the form outlined in Unrestricted Warfare a year earlier.
In fairness, when it came out a decade ago, the main virtue of the PTT manifesto resided in the fact that, in arguing for the distinct possibility of a "hegemonic war," the theory provided a cautionary tale for those Western observers only too willing to believe in an "end of history," or in a pre-existing "harmony of interest" which could lead, over time, to the rise of a peaceful condominium (G-2 or "Chimerica").
While conceding the obvious point that the nuclear era has radically altered the costs and benefits of "major wars," PTT proponents rightly warn that there is no absolute guarantee that major wars won't happen among nuclear powers. But it is a right warning issued mostly for allthe wrong reasons ("the choice for war will relate to the twin pillars of power parity –determined by a nation's population, economic development, and political capacity – and opportunity for redress of grievance."
Because PTT gives no thought to the importance of strategic cultures, grand strategies, the waning of major wars, the declining utility of force, and the transformation of war itself, the theory has only the crudest explanatory power. Because it does not take into account the different dynamics of industry and finance, PTT is dangerously misleading as a predictive theory. Last but not least, because it overestimates the possibility of major wars, its prescriptive value is even more dubious.
For the ultimate irony of PTT is that an excessive awareness of previous "hegemonic wars" leads its proponents today to advocate peaceful change a outrance to the point where"engagement" becomes synonymous with "appeasement." At times, the policy recommendations put forward by PTT proponents border on sheer lunacy:
"In the case of China, an expansion of NATO to include this nation may help in creating the conditions for a peaceful overtaking, should that occur, thus reducing the possibility of global war."
China in NATO, or else Global War? Hel-lo?
A decade ago, at the peak of the "unipolar moment," it was not unreasonable to examine the rise of China in the context of a bilateral power transition. A decade later, though, it should be clear that the Post-American World (Zakaria) is upon us, that the evolution of China will be shaped by ASEAN, Russia, and the EU as much as by the U.S. itself, and that the PTT framework has essentially lost its relevance.
There is nothing inherently wrong in a cyclical conception of History, and the Chinese themselves, in recent years, have been carefully studying the rise and fall of the great powers. What is wrong is the Western social scientists' use of History as a mere "arsenal of arguments," their infatuation with pseudo-scientific methods, and their concomitant neglect of area studies . That a new generation of theorists is willing to "bring policy relevance back in" is a welcome development. But if IR academics want to regain among diplomatic practitioners the credibility they lost a generation ago, they will have to do better than use half- baked historical analogies to deliver goofy policy prescriptions.