Superpower

Superpower, a state of the first rank in the international system, with interests and capabilities of global extent. The term is a relatively new one, coined in a book entitled The Superpowers, written by the American W. T. R. Fox in 1943. By this word Fox identified a new category of power able to occupy the highest status in a world in which, as the war then raging demonstrated, states could challenge and fight each other on a global scale.

While the imperial powers of Europe, later joined by the United States, had for several centuries traded and seized territorial possessions all over the world, often fighting each other in remote places as well as nearer home, by the middle of the 20th century such interaction was clearly achieving a new intensity and immediacy. In the decades since that time air power, telecommunications, and the globalization of the world economy have taken the trend even further.

When politics can take place on such a scale it requires immense resources to be an effective global player. The exact requirements and criteria for playing the role of superpower are difficult to establish. When Fox wrote, he conferred the title on three states, the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Great Britain with its empire. But while Great Britain was indeed mounting a remarkable war effort, effective in all theatres of World War II, it soon became clear in the post-war period that it was much inferior to the other two. Much of its apparent global status rested on possession of an empire that was on the point of collapse, more of a weakness than an asset, and the strain of the war had also gravely damaged its economy.

Another example of miscalculation was the inclusion of France and China as permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations when it was founded at the end of the war in 1945. France was a defeated power with an empire even more decayed than the British, while China was a highly underdeveloped country in a state of civil war. Nevertheless both powers retain their seats as two of the five permanent, veto-wielding members, with the Communist regime in Beijing having replaced the former Nationalist or Kuomintang government, now confined to Taiwan. Some regard permanent membership of the Security Council as itself a recognition of superpower status, and consequently would regard the perpetuation of the 1945 make-up as anachronistic (though less so than before in the case of China). Nevertheless, so long as a country retains such formal status, it enjoys what is in itself a significant additional element of power.

Traditionally the status of “Great Power” was conferred by observers of the international scene primarily with reference to military capability, the ultima ratio of political struggles. A Great Power was sometimes defined as a state that could defend itself against any other, unaided. In practice, the matter was always more complicated: Great Britain, for instance, was primarily a sea-power and could only fight the Great Powers of the Continent if provided with allies. It was, however, the power of armies that above all decided the issue in most cases, and for a long time this depended chiefly on manpower. Another ingredient was access to food supplies, which rendered agriculture important. Later, as war became dependent on heavier, more complicated weapons, the newly emerging industrial factors came into play. At the end of the 20th century this remained true, but the significant industrial capabilities had shifted from the crudest indices of iron and steel to electronics, chemistry, and other sophisticated activities. As always, to mobilize these elements, administrative skill is essential and, over and above that, the strategic abilities of national leadership.

The rise and fall of such factors leads in any age to quite rapid changes in the identity of the most powerful nations. Dominant in the 17th century, Sweden and Poland were unimportant by the end of the 18th and the latter had ceased to exist. Such rankings are dependent upon both reality and perception. Thus in 1943 the Soviet Union was accorded, and its Russian successor still retained 50 years later, the generally conceded rank of superpower above all because of its military strength. At its peak it had a global reach with a powerful ocean-going navy and a kind of empire of Communist states distributed worldwide in such places as Cuba and Vietnam. Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s revealed that much of its supposed power had been built on flimsy bases, with a decayed industrial structure and a discredited, inefficient political system. Even its military machine, though powerful because of its sheer size and its technical prowess in some fields as a result of highly preferential treatment within the creaking Soviet industrial base, was deficient in many respects. Soviet claims to superpower status proved to be much shallower than those of the United States.

The Soviet Union and Russia did and do possess one very special attribute widely associated with superpower rank: nuclear weapons. If such weapons do not offer the positive power to dictate political results, they do at least make it very doubtful whether any other power would dare push one possessing nuclear weapons into a desperate corner. Thus nuclear weapons partly fulfil one of the classic criteria for being a great power: the ability to stand alone militarily. While it is more by coincidence than inevitability that the original permanent members of the Security Council have become nuclear powers—the only ones formally recognized as such under the Non-Proliferation Treaty—that coincidence has given rise to the belief in some quarters that only a nuclear power can be regarded as a superpower.

On the other hand, if one turns to the underlying economic bases of power, readily turned into military power if so desired, then there are contenders much more plausible than several of the nuclear powers: notably Germany and Japan. Japan has sometimes been called a “civilianized” superpower and it, like Germany, enjoys some recognition of that status, analogous to a seat on the Security Council, by being a member of the so-called G7, a grouping of the leading economic powers that acts in many respects as a global economic directorate.

A very important question for the future of world politics is therefore how these two categories of nuclear/military and economic great powers will develop and interact, and which of them may so organize itself and play a global role as to deserve the title of Superpower. On a longer timescale the sheer size of such a country as India, once it is matched by economic success, may produce new contenders for the title. An even deeper question, however, is whether the pattern of global politics will retain enough of the characteristics of an interstate system to maintain the validity and relevance of such rankings.