REGIONAL GREAT POWERS in INTERNATIONAL POLITICS Regional Great Powers in International Politics

REGIONAL GREAT POWERS IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS Regional Great Powers in International Politics Edited by Iver B. Neumann Research Fellow, The Norwegian Institute ofInternational Affairs Oslo M St. Martin's Press Editorial matter and selection © Iver B. Neumann 1992 © Macmillan Press Lld 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1992 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written pemlission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written pernlission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1992 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-12663-7 ISBN 978-1-349-12661-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12661-3 I1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 95 First published in the United States of America 1992 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-08090-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Regional great powers in international politics / edited by Iver B. Neumann. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-08090-7 I. Middle powers. 2. International relations. 3. World politics-20th century. I. NClImann, Iver B. JX1395.R37 1992 327.1'I-<lc20 92-3798 CIP In memoriam Professor John Vincent (1943-90) Contents Preface viii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction Iver B. Neumann xi 1 Regional Great Powers ({Jyvind ({Jsterud 2 Brazil as a Regional Great Power: a Study in Ambivalence Andrew Hurrell 16 3 India as a Regional Great Power: in Pursuit of Shakti Veena Gill 49 4 Indonesia as a Regional Great Power Amfinn Jf/Jrgensen-Dahl 70 5 Israel as a Regional Great Power: Paradoxes of Regional Alienation Nits Butenschf/Jn 95 6 Poland as a Regional Great Power: the Inter-war Heritage Iver B. Neumann 121 7 South Africa as a Regional Great Power Samuel Makinda 151 8 Vietnam as a Regional Great Power: a Study in Failure Stein Tf/Jnnesson 179 Conclusion Iver B. Neumann and ({Jyvind ({Jsterud 204 Index 209 vii Preface This book is the fruit of a common effort over four years. We have incurred the usual debts of gratitude along the way. The Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and The Fridtjof Nansen Institute provided facilities. The Norwegian Research Council gave us some initial funding, and The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs provided a generous grant. Tore Gustavsen, Dagfrid Hermansen and Ann Skarstad were of great help. However, our main debt is to our faithful critics, professors Olav Fagelund Knudsen, Geir Lundestad, and R. J. Vincent. The idea of addressing a book to the structural similarities of regional great powers active in international politics came to me during a course in classical theories of international relations conducted by that great inspirer of students and colleagues, John Vincent. When the project was well under way, he participated in two project workshops, and also agreed to write a piece. It was not to be. He died on 2 November 1990. We lost a source of inspiration and a contributor; the field of international relations lost one of its central thinkers. The book is dedicated to the memory of Professor John Vincent. IVER B. NEUMANN viii Notes on the Contributors Nils A. Butensch0n is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of a monograph on the historical and ideological preconditions of the State of Israel (Dr~mmen om Israel, 1984). Veena Gill is Assistant Professor in the Department for Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway. She was Lecturer at St Stephen's College, New Delhi, and is a graduate of the Jawaharlal Nehru and The Australian National Universities. She has written extensively on military-political relations in developing countries. Andrew Hurrell, D. P'hil. (Oxon) is University Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University and fellow of Nuffield College. Formerly Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy, he is the author of The U.s.-Brazilian Informatics Dispute (1988) and is currently finishing a study of post-war Brazilian foreign policy, The Quest for Autonomy. Arnfinn J0rgensen-Dahl, Ph.D., is Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway, where he is heading the Polar Programme. He has taught at several universities in Australia and at the National University of Singapore, and is the author of Regional Organization and Order in South-East Asia (Macmillan, 1982) and The Antarctic Treaty System in World Politics (Macmillan, 1991). Samuel M. Makinda, Ph.D., is Lecturer in International Politics, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He was a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London in 1989-90, and is the author of Superpower Diplomacy in the Horn of Africa (1987). Iver B. Neumann is Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, and a doctoral student at St Antony's College, Oxford, where he is finishing a thesis on Russian perceptions of West European cooperation. He is the author of a monograph on the postwar European order (Splittelse og samling, 1991). Stein T0nnesson is Research Fellow at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, Norway. He is the author of 1946: Declenchement de ix x Notes on the Contributors la guerre d'lndochine (1987) and The Vietnamese Revolution of 1945: Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle in a World at War (1991). 0yvind 0sterud is Professor in International Conflict Studies in the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of a number of monographs in Norwegian as well as of Agrarian Structure and Peasant Politics (I978) and editor of Studies of War and Peace (1986). Introduction Iver B. Neumann Contemporary sensibilities question the validity of all-encompassing systems theories, but also show growing impatience with idiographic empiricism. Theories of the middle range are very much in vogue. For the student of international relations, this is a theoretical climate conducive to the study of regions. Empirically, the end of the cold war may open up new regional space for regional great powers to exploit. These powers may to a greater extent provide for regional order. In that case, analyses which add the regional focus to the systemwide one may be especially timely. A region consisting of a contiguous cluster of states is, on the one hand, an isomorphic subsystem of the international system. On the other hand, the lesser scale of the region combines with its defining geopolitical and cultural traits to make it a specific analytical concern. The region occupies the middle ground between bilateral relations on the one hand, and system-wide relations on the other. The inequality of states is evident on the regional level of international relations, as it is on the global level. The empirical focus of the present book is regional great powers, which, as a category of states between great powers with systemwide interests and the all and sundry small states, are to be found somewhere in the middle of the hierarchy of states. The term regional great power, although widely used, is not an analytical category devoid of problems. Since this is the subject of Chapter I, a preliminary remark bearing on the choice of cases will have to· do here. Someone who wants to carve up the world into regions is faced with a plethora of criteria. Although the standard work on the use of the term region in international relations does conclude that 'there is indeed, for each major aggregate, a core, a limited number of states found in each of the clusters', it stands to reason that different analytical needs make for different definitions of region. l Indeed, some students of international relations have suggested that we do away with the concept of region in favour of the concept of what they call 'security complexes'. Starting from the observation that 'the security implications of the anarchic structure do not spread uniformly throughout the system', Barry Buzan defined a security complex as 'a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their national securities xi xii Introduction cannot realistically be considered apart from one another. '2 Although all the usual problems of delimitations remain, the major novelty of the concept is, arguably, to loosen the grip of territoriality. Whereas regions are invariably territorially contiguous, security complexes are not. Thus, the concept of security complexes would allow the analyst to treat for example the 1980s interstate dynamics on the ground in Southern Africa in terms of one security complex consisting of the same states as the traditional Southern African region, and one security complex consisting of the Soviet Union and the United States. The loss in territorial contiguity is compensated for by a gain in analytical contiguity. The major theoretical aim of this book, which is to find out how the systemic position of regional great powers make for similarities in policy problems and policy choices which cut across regional specifics, is not contingent on a detailed delimitation of specific regions.

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