Beware of Historians Bearing False Analogies

Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

Author Paul Kennedy

Publisher Random House

Year 1987

Pages 678 pp.

Price $24.95

Professor Kennedy, a British scholar translated to New Haven, has written a massive book around a grand theme: the relation between the rise and fall of major powers over the past five centuries and the shifts in their relative economic strength and technological virtuosity. It is both a work of historical analysis, in which the author seeks to discern recurrent patterns upon which to base defensible generalizations, and a policy prescription, notably for the United States. Understandably, it is the latter strand that is receiving current attention; but before examining Kennedy's advice it is worth surveying briefly the other dimensions of his work.

First comes a survey of the world scene circa 1500, with quick portraits of Ming China, the Muslim world including Mogul India, pre-Tokugawa and Tokugawa Japan, pre-Petrine Russia, and Europe before the rise of the modern nation-states. Kennedy then brings to the stage his succession of quasi-Wagnerian melodramas of rise and fall: the Hapsburgs (1519-1659), the Anglo-French struggle in the wake of brief Dutch primacy (1660-1815), post-Napoleonic British primacy (1815-1885) and its erosion (1885-1918), the rise of the United States and the U.S.S.R. at the expense of the middle powers (1919-1942), the bipolar world and the beginning of its erosion (1943-1980). (My own opinion is that the erosion of the bipolar world began as early as 1948, when the U.S. Congress passed the Marshall Plan legislation and Tito successfully broke with Stalin.)

This survey involves the mobilization of a large volume of evidence, much of it not directly related to Kennedy's central theme. Sensing the diffuse character of his exposition, he provides a terse ten-page introduction. There he confronts two of the major unresolved analytic problems that run through his study, and there he fails to confront a third.

First, he asks, how much generalization is justified by this tale of battle and blood and wasted resources? The evidence, he finds, is too conflicting for any tidy laws of history. He limits himself to three unsurprising propositions:

—There is a causal link between economic strength and the power position of states in the international system.

—In the long run, the rise and fall of states reflects their relative economic position in the world economy.

—There is a time lag between the trajectory of a nation's relative economic strength and its relative military-territorial influence.

Second, Kennedy draws back a bit even from this degree of "crude economic determinism." He lists other factors that have affected relative national success and failure in the arena of power: geography, military organization, national morale and alliance systems, among others. These are, however, not pursued systematically in the analyses that follow.

Third is his missing insight: he fails to distinguish sharply those states which pursued policies of regional hegemony from those content with a balance-of-power policy (that is, a policy which aimed to prevent the hegemony of any other power in their region). In the post-1500 era—marked, above all, by the triumph of nationalism—it has made quite a difference whether a power set out to suppress the nationalism of others or rather to help mobilize the nationalism of allies to resist suppression by a third party. It is a distinction worth making.

The central problem of Kennedy's analysis and, later, prescription concerns his treatment of Great Britain in relation to the other cases of rise and decline. There is a subsection in Kennedy's book whose title poses a good question: "Britain as Hegemon?" It evokes Britain at the height of its power, with Europe in reasonable diplomatic equilibrium aided notably by Bismarck's restraint. It was an equilibrium about to break down, but it represented a technique for exercising power in a multipolar arena quite different from that of Britain's predecessors or would-be hegemonic successors in Europe. A balance-of-power state may not be liked, but it is almost certain to find allies when it confronts another power intent on regional hegemony.

The British decline thus differs from the others. Britain's relative role in fending off attempts by a succession of powers to gain hegemony in Europe was, indeed, reduced by the progressive industrialization of other states. But its relative decline as a European and Atlantic power is not the result of pursuing a hegemonic dream in Europe. It did exercise hegemonic powers in the Empire, despite the recognition after the American Revolution that such powers would progressively wane as nationalism gathered strength. While the end of the British imperial dream was psychologically and politically traumatic, it saved money.

Nevertheless, the trauma of imperial decline postponed Britain's recognition that its destiny lay primarily with the European continent. The problem that had to be overcome was captured in Dean Acheson's somewhat cruel analysis and challenge late in 1962; namely, that Great Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role.

The most obvious generalization from Kennedy's saga is political rather than economic: the pursuit of hegemony strengthens nationalist resistance, renders the expansionist effort increasingly costly, and out of its own dynamics may drive a state to extend its exertions to a point where failure is inevitable, as the hegemonic power reaches beyond its relative economic capacity. A state pursuing a balance-of-power policy may find its relative status shifting due to the spread of industrial innovations, but it is not destined to repeat the fate of Hapsburg Spain, Napoleonic France, imperial and Hitlerite Germany, or militarized Japan.