EL PODER se ha definido de muchas maneras. En política casi siempre se ha identificado con la fuerza militar, económica o social. Karl Deutsch lo define como «la capacidad de imponerse en un conflicto y de superar obstáculos» . Keoane y Nye ven en el poder «la capacidad… para lograr que otros hagan lo que, de otro modo, no harían» .
Pero la capacidad no lo es todo. Si no hay motivación para imponerse, se neutraliza. Si no se corresponde a los objetivos, sirve de poco o se infrautiliza. Si el poder, como señala Ortega en La rebelión de las masas, no se fundamenta en la fuerza moral y no es aceptado por la opinión pública, siempre será frágil .
¿Cómo medir el poder en un mundo cambiante, en una sociedad internacional en transición acelerada como la actual?
EL PODER EN EL SIGLO XXI (PDF)
Wealth and power are shifting from the West to the rising economies of the East. But in a world of complex interdependence, who wields power, to what end and with what consequences is far from clear. Joseph Nye is distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School.
Joseph Nye at LSE on May 8, 2013
What is power? This is the definition included in Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newnham’s Dictionary of International Ralations (Penguin Books 1998)
Is America the world’s last empire? ByTom Engelhardt
It stretched from the Caspian to the Baltic Sea, from the middle of Europe to the Kurile Islands in the Pacific, from Siberia to Central Asia. Its nuclear arsenal held 45,000 warheads, and its military had five million troops under arms. There had been nothing like it in Eurasia since the Mongols conquered China, took parts of Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, and rode into the Middle East, looting Baghdad. Yet when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, by far the poorer, weaker imperial power disappeared.
And then there was one. There had never been such a moment: a single nation astride the globe without a competitor in sight. There wasn’t even a name for such a state (or state of mind). «Superpower» had already been used when there were two of them. «Hyperpower» was tried briefly but didn’t stick. «Sole superpower» stood in for a while but didn’t satisfy. «Great Power,» once the zenith of appellations, was by then a lesser phrase, left over from the centuries when various European nations and Japan were expanding their empires. Some started speaking about a «unipolar» world in which all roads led… well, to Washington.
To this day, we’ve never quite taken in that moment when Soviet imperial rot unexpectedly-above all, to Washington-became imperial crash-and-burn. Left standing, the Cold War’s victor seemed, then, like an empire of everything under the sun. It was as if humanity had always been traveling toward this spot. It seemed like the end of the line…MORE
Joseph Nye: Too much use of drones (Duration: 02:21) This clip is from
Joseph Nye is one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers in the United States.
He argues that «smart» foreign policy requires the soft power of persuasion to be married to the hard reality of military strength.
He told Stephen Sackur the Obama administration had made too much use of drones.
He believed the weapons would be more effective if they were targeted at those who had committed acts of violence against the US or its allies rather than wider signature groups.
The Montréal Review, May 2012
As authoritarian regimes like Syria struggle with Twitter and Al Jazeera inflamed insurrections; Iran tries to cope with the cyber sabotage of its nuclear enrichment program; Russia witnesses demonstrations against Vladimir Putin; and China creates a great firewall to filter the internet, it is clear that smart policy in an information age requires a better understanding of power. America is wrestling with the implications of revolutions in the Middle East, as well as the rise of China in Asia, and the decline of Russia. We all need a better understanding of what it means to have power in world politics, and how that is shifting. Traditionally, the mark of a great power was the ability to prevail in war. But in an information age, success depends not just on whose army wins, but also on whose story wins.
That is the argument of my new book The Future of Power. Two types of power shifts are occurring in this century – power transition and power diffusion. Power transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical event, but power diffusion is a more novel process. The problem for all states in today’s global information age is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful states. In the words of Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, «the proliferation of information is as much a cause of non-polarity as is the proliferation of weaponry.» The problem for all states in today’s global information age — democratic or authoritarian — is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful governments.
Information revolutions are not new in history, but the current revolution is based on rapid technological advances that have dramatically decreased the cost of creating, finding and transmitting information. Computing power doubled every 18 months for 30 years, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century it cost one-thousandth of what it did in the early 1970s. If the price of automobiles had fallen as quickly as the price of semiconductors, a car would cost five dollars. The key characteristic of this current information revolution is not just the speed of communications, but the enormous reduction in the cost of transmitting information that has reduced the barriers to entry.
What this means is that world politics will not be the sole province of governments. Individuals and private organizations, ranging from hackers to corporations to NGOs to terrorists to spontaneous societal movements are all empowered to play direct roles in world politics. The spread of information means that power will be more widely distributed and informal networks will undercut the monopoly of traditional bureaucracy. The speed of Internet time means all governments have less control of their agendas. Political leaders enjoy fewer degrees of freedom before they must respond to events, and then must communicate not only with other governments but with civil societies as well – witness the difficulties of the Obama Administration trying to fine tune its responses in the Middle East.
It might seem that the tasks of authoritarian governments are easier, but this is an illusion. Syria has learned to use Facebook to track and attack dissidents, but there is still plenty of outside information reaching people in Homs and Hama through cable tv as well as the internet. Even the great firewall of China leaks. Yes, the government can censor and arrest people, but at a cost. As the dissident artist Ai Wei Wei recently said, if China wants to be in the business of inventing the i-phone rather than just providing labor in its assembly, it will have to realize that censorship inhibits the creativity that is necessary for the next stages of China’s development.
Regarding power transition, the other great historical shift, we have been misled by traditional narratives of a supposed American decline, and facile historical analogies to Britain and Rome. But Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman power, and even then, it did not succumb to the rise of another state, but died a death of a thousand cuts inflicted by various barbarian tribes. Indeed for all the fashionable predictions of China, India or Brazil surpassing the United States in the next decades, the greater threats may come from modern barbarians and non-state actors. China has had remarkable and worthy economic success in the past three decades and in the years since the global economic meltdown of 2008, but that success plus a belief that the United States was in decline emboldened China to pursue an overly assertive foreign policy that resulted in worsened relations with nearly all its major neighbors over the past few years.
Today, it is far from clear how we measure a balance of power, much less how to develop successful strategies to survive in this new world. Most current projections of a shift in the global balance of power to China are based primarily on one factor – linear projections of growth in China’s gross national product. They ignore the other dimensions of power that are discussed in my book, not to mention the policy difficulties of combining them into smart strategies. For example, while Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needs to invest more in its soft power, polls show that China’s soft power is limited by a domestic authoritarian regime that arrests people like Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo and the blind lawyer, Chen Guangcheng. In an information age, the ability to mobilize networks of others through soft power will be as important as hard power. It is true that China is growing rapidly, but the diffusion of power may be as consequential as power transitions between major states. Foreign and domestic policy become difficult to disentangle. Contrary to the current conventional wisdom about the advantages of authoritarian states, American soft power and its open society may actually give the country new power advantages in the twenty-first century.
On May 14, 2013 Foreign Policy at Brookings hosted Vali Nasr for a discussion on the state of U.S. power globally and whether American foreign policy under the Obama administration is in retreat.
Martin S. Indyk, Robert Kagan and Vali Nasr
For the past decade, a debate has raged about the future of American power and foreign policy engagement. In his new book, The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2013), Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Vali Nasr questions America’s choice to lessen its foreign policy engagement around the world. Nasr argues that after taking office in 2009, the Obama administration let fears of terrorism and political backlash confine its policies to that of the previous administration, instead of seizing the opportunity to fundamentally reshape American foreign policy over the past four years. Meanwhile, China and Russia – rivals to American influence globally – were quietly expanding their influence in places where the U.S. has long held sway. Nasr argues that the Obama administration’s foreign policy decision making could have potentially dangerous outcomes, and, what’s more, sells short America’s power and role in the world.
The keynote lecture of the Harvard Luksic Fellowship 5th Anniversary Celebration, delivered by Niall Ferguson in Zagreb, Croatia on July 5th, 2011. (Uploaded 31/08/2011) Ferguson’s presentation starts at 23:00, but I recommend, specially for students, to listen also the introduction by a Harvard student from Croatia. (Ferguson’s presentation startd at 24:00)
Hard power has not been in vogue since the Iraq War turned badly in about 2004. In foreign policy journals and at elite conferences, the talk for years has been about «soft power,» «the power of persuasion» and the need to revitalize the U.S. State Department as opposed to the Pentagon: didn’t you know, it’s about diplomacy, not military might! Except when it isn’t; except when members of this same elite argue for humanitarian intervention in places like Libya and Syria. Then soft power be damned.
The fact is that hard power is supremely necessary in today‘s world, for reasons having nothing to do with humanitarian intervention. Indeed, the Harvard professor and former government official, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., who, in 2004, actually coined the term «soft power» in an eponymous book, has always been subtle enough in his own thinking to realize how relevant hard power remains… MORE
U.S. Military Dominance Timelin: View Full Timeline
The Bottom Line: Information is Power; Sharing Makes It Powerful
The power of nations... By Klaus Knorr, 1975
What to Read on American Primacy By Peter LibermanAn annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on American primacy.