Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War
By W. Wohlforth. 2009
304 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Most scholars hold that the consequences of unipolarity for great power conflict are indeterminate and that a power shift resulting in a return to bipolarity or multipolarity will not raise the specter of great power war. This article calls into question the core assumptions underlying the consensus: (1) that people are mainly motivated by the instrumental pursuit of tangible ends such as physical security and material prosperity and (2) that major powers’ satisfaction with the status quo is relatively independent of the distribution of capabilities. In fact, it is known that people are motivated powerfully by a noninstrumental concern for relative status, and there is strong empirical evidence linking the salience of those concerns to distributions of resources. If the status of states depends in some measure on their relative capabilities and if states derive utility from status, then different distributions of capabilities may affect levels of satisfaction, just as different income distributions may affect levels of status competition in domestic settings. Building on research in psychology and sociology, the author argues that even capabilities distributions among major powers foster ambiguous status hierarchies, which generate more dissatisfaction and clashes over the status quo. And the more stratified the distribution of capabilities, the less likely such status competition is. Unipolarity thus augurs for great power peace, and a shift back to bipolarity or multipolarity raises the probability of war even among great powers with little material cause to fight.
Subfields: Demography, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/139a03fe451e0697d26ba69473f317803fe00bdf
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Citations in the corpus
- Reputation and Status as Motives for War (2014, background): “This is extremely valuable insofar as it focuses our attention on the importance of social comparison, although it has proven difficult to systematically explain “which of many possible identity-maintenance strategies [states] will choose” (Wohlforth 2009, p. 36).”
- Threat Perception in International Relations (2013, background): “And so the spiral begins (Lebow, 2010; Wohlforth, 2009).”