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The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/book/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-great-powers/
By Paul Kennedy, Review by Matthew (Ancient and Modern History)
Superpowers come, superpowers go. But ever wondered why? History abounds with stories of great empires whose economic and military might powered them to a position of dominance. Yet each, at some point, after burning like a bright firework, loses energy, tumbles from their peak, their glorious achievements to become, well… history. Think of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Spanish conquistadors, and the other European powers of France, Germany and Great Britain, each taking their turn at the top table. What does this revolving door mean for the current set of global “galacticos” – the USA, China and Russia? After all, this is important to know as a changing of the superpower guard is often accompanied by conflict – no superpower willingly gives up their pre-eminence.
The author covers a lot of ground but broadly splits his work into two areas of focus Firstly, a look backwards at 500 years of history tracking the rise and subsequent fall of dominant empires. Secondly, application of this knowledge to predict what could happen if current superpowers, in particular the USA, do not manage the risks identified. While long, the book can be accessed in piecemeal fashion to understand more about your superpower of choice. This is one of the books great achievements – the breadth is impressive, yet Kennedy is skilled in extracting key themes.
Kennedy argues that superpowers, in order to remain “super”, must constantly manage the tension between economic investment (creating resources), economic consumption (consuming resources) and military spending. Getting the balance wrong can be terminal. Too little military spending leaves your economy vulnerable to predators, as seen in the inward looking 18th century China. Too much military spending leaves no economic fuel left to grow your economy, as witnessed in the 20th century Soviet Union. For superpowers to sustain themselves, they must avoid what Kennedy calls “imperialist overreach”, an obsession with global influence which diverts vital resources away from economic development towards ever increasing military spend.
This book, written in 1987, is best remembered for an additional chapter added at the last minute. This chapter foresaw the potential decline of the USA unless they managed the tension between economic investment and defence spending effectively. What the author was unaware of at the time was the impending demise of the Soviet Union and the end of a Cold War rivalry that had driven mammoth USA military spend. Yet, as Russia regains confidence and influence in the modern world, and the Chinese economic tiger tests the pre-eminence of the American economy, the dangers that Kennedy identifies seem as relevant as ever. A thought-provoking read that brilliantly shows the relevance of history to our modern day decision makers.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy; ISBN-10: 0006860524
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/840043
by Paul Kennedy January 15, 1989
Paul Michael Kennedy is a British historian specialising in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy. He has published prominent books on the history of British foreign policy and Great Power struggles.
Summary
Kennedy argues that the strength of a Great Power can be properly measured only relative to other powers, and he provides a straightforward thesis: Great Power ascendancy (over the long term or in specific conflicts) correlates strongly to available resources and economic durability; military overstretch and a concomitant relative decline are the consistent threats facing powers whose ambitions and security requirements are greater than their resource base can provide for.
Throughout the book he reiterates his early statement (page 71): "Military and naval endeavors may not always have been the raison d'être of the new nations-states, but it certainly was their most expensive and pressing activity", and it remains such until the power's decline. He concludes that declining countries can experience greater difficulties in balancing their preferences for guns, butter and investments.
Kennedy states his theory in the second paragraph of the introduction as follows:
The "military conflict" referred to in the book's subtitle is therefore always examined in the context of "economic change". The triumph of any one Great Power in this period, or the collapse of another, has usually been the consequence of lengthy fighting by its armed forces; but it has also been the consequences of the more or less efficient utilization of the state's productive economic resources in wartime, and, further in the background, of the way in which that state's economy had been rising or falling, relative to the other leading nations, in the decades preceding the actual conflict. For that reason, how a Great Power's position steadily alters in peacetime, is as important to this study as how it fights in wartime.[4]
Kennedy adds on the same page:
The relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies and of the technological and organizational breakthroughs which bring a greater advantage to one society than to another.[5]
Early modern era
The book starts at the dividing line between the Renaissance and early modern history—1500 (chapter 1). It briefly discusses the Ming (page 4) and Muslim worlds (page 9) of the time and the rise of the western powers relative to them (page 16). The book then proceeds chronologically, looking at each of the power shifts over time and the effect on other Great Powers and the "Middle Powers".
Kennedy uses a number of measures to indicate real, relative and potential strength of nations throughout the book. He changes the metric of power based on the point in time. Chapter 2, "The Habsburg Bid for Mastery, 1519–1659" emphasizes the role of the "manpower revolution" in changing the way Europeans fought wars (see military revolution). This chapter also emphasizes the importance of Europe's political boundaries in shaping a political balance of power.
The argument in this chapter is not, therefore, that the Habsburgs failed utterly to do what other powers achieved so brilliantly. There are no stunning contrasts in evidence here; success and failure are to be measured by very narrow differences. All states, even the United Provinces, were placed under severe strain by the constant drain of resources for military and naval campaigns... The victory of the anti-Habsburg forces was, then, a marginal and relative one. They had managed, but only just, to maintain the balance between their material base and their military power better than their Habsburg opponents. (page 72)
European imperialism
The Habsburg failure segues into the thesis of chapter 3, that financial power reigned between 1660 and 1815, using Britain, France, Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia to contrast between powers that could finance their wars (Britain and France) and powers that needed financial patronage to mobilize and maintain a major military force on the field. Kennedy presents a table (page 81, table 2) of "British Wartime Expenditures and Revenue"; between 1688 and 1815 is especially illustrative, showing that Britain was able to maintain loans at around one-third of British wartime expenditures throughout that period
- Total wartime expenditures, 1688–1815: £2,293,483,437[clarification needed]
- Total income: £1,622,924,377
- Balance raised by loans: £670,559,060
- Loans as per cent of expenditure: 33.3%
The chapter also argues that British financial strength was the single most decisive factor in its victories over France during the 18th century. This chapter ends on the Napoleonic Wars and the fusion of British financial strength with a newfound industrial strength.
Industrial Revolution[edit]
Kennedy's next two chapters depend greatly upon Bairoch's calculations of industrialization, measuring all nations by an index, where 100 is the British per capita industrialization rate in 1900. The United Kingdom grows from 10 in 1750, to 16 in 1800, 25 in 1830, 64 in 1860, 87 in 1880, to 100 in 1900 (page 149). In contrast, France's per capita industrialization was 9 in 1750, 9 in 1800, 12 in 1830, 20 in 1860, 28 in 1880, and 39 in 1900. Relative shares of world manufacturing output (also first appearing on page 149) are used to estimate the peaks and troughs of power for major states. China, for example, begins with 32.8% of global manufacturing in 1750 and plummets after the First Opium War, Second Opium War and Taiping Rebellion to 19.7% of global manufacturing in 1860, and 12.5% in 1880 (compared to the UK's 1.9% in 1750, growing to 19.9% in 1860, and 22.9% in 1880).
20th century[edit]
Measures of strength in the 20th century (pages 199–203) use population size, urbanization rates, Bairoch's per capita levels of industrialization, iron and steel production, energy consumption (measured in millions of metric tons of coal equivalent), and total industrial output of the powers (measured against Britain's 1900 figure of 100), to gauge the strength of the various great powers.
Kennedy also emphasizes productivity increase, based on systematic interventions, which led to economic growth and prosperity for great powers in the 20th century.
He compares the great powers at the close of the 20th century and predicts the decline of the Soviet Union, the rise of China and Japan, the struggles and potential for the European Economic Community (EEC), and the relative decline of the United States. He highlights the precedent of the "Four Modernizations" in Deng Xiaoping's plans for China—agriculture, industry, science and military—de-emphasizing military, while the United States and Soviet Union are emphasizing it. He predicts that continued deficit spending, especially on military build-up, will be the single most important reason for decline of any great power.
The United States[edit]
From the Civil War to the first half of the 20th century, the United States' economy benefited from high agricultural production, plentiful raw materials, technological advancements and financial inflows. During this time the U.S. did not have to contend with foreign dangers.[6] From 1860 to 1914, U.S. exports increased sevenfold, resulting in huge trade surpluses.[7] By 1945 the U.S. both enjoyed high productivity and was the only major industrialized nation intact after World War II. From the 1960s onward, the U.S. saw a relative decline in its share of world production and trade.[8] By the 1980s, the U.S. experienced declining exports of agricultural and manufactured goods. In the space of a few years, the U.S. went from being the largest creditor to the largest debtor nation.[9] At the same time, the federal debt was growing at an increasing pace.[10] This situation is typical of declining hegemons.[11]
The United States has the typical problems of a great power, which include balancing guns and butter and investments for economic growth.[12] The U.S.' growing military commitment to every continent (other than Antarctica) and the growing cost of military hardware severely limit available options.[13] Kennedy compares the U.S.' situation to Great Britain's prior to World War I. He comments that the map of U.S. bases is similar to Great Britain's before World War I.[14]
As military expenses grow, this reduces investments in economic growth, which eventually "leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense".[15] Kennedy's advice is as follows:
The task facing American statesmen over the next decades, therefore, is to recognize that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to "manage" affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States' position takes place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage.[16]
Table of contents[edit]
- Strategy and Economics in the Preindustrial World
- The Rise of the Western World
- The Habsburg Bid for Mastery, 1519–1659
- Finance, Geography, and the Winning of Wars, 1660–1815
- Strategy and Economics in the Industrial Era
- Industrialization and the Shifting Global Balances, 1815–1885
- The Coming of a Bipolar World and the Crisis of the "Middle Powers": Part One, 1885–1918
- The Coming of a Bipolar World and the Crisis of the "Middle Powers": Part Two, 1919–1942
- Strategy and Economics Today and Tomorrow
- Stability and Change in a Bipolar World, 1943–1980
- To the Twenty-first Century
Maps, tables and charts[edit]
The book has twelve maps, forty-nine tables and three charts to assist the reader in understanding the text.
Publication data[edit]
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is the eighth and best-known book by historian Paul Kennedy. It reached number six on the list of best-selling hardcover books for 1988.[17] In 1988 the author was awarded the Wolfson History Prize for this work.
Republished: January 1989
Was Paul Kennedy Right? American Decline 30 Years On
The Offshore Balancer
Editor’s Note: It is with great pride that I announce Patrick Porter joining WOTR’s stable of regular contributors. He will be writing a monthly column for us titled “Offshore Balancer.” – RE
Almost 30 years ago, Yale historian Paul Kennedy touched an American nerve. His study, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, argued for a broad historical pattern. Great powers, in order to remain great powers, had a task that was simple to understand but difficult to execute: to balance wealth and their economic base with their military power and strategic commitments. These states therefore faced a constant triple tension between investment, defense and consumption. Failure to get this balance right risked overextension as a large economy vulnerable to predators like nineteenth century China, as a stagnating over-militarized power like the Soviet Union, or as a credit-addicted, inflexible failure like Phillip II’s Spain.
In its coverage, Kennedy’s book was not primarily about the United States of 1987. It was a comparative analysis of historical polities from Habsburg Spain to Bourbon France to the British Empire. But one 38-page section towards the end of the 698-page argument, added in by Kennedy at the publisher’s request, attracted the most debate. This brief reflection on what it all meant for the United States led to the book getting translated into 23 languages, and got Kennedy invited to testify before Congress. In that section, Kennedy warned that a set of familiar historical pressures, poorly managed, would erode America’s relative power-position in the world. America’s relative power would wane over time — the choice, he argued, was to manage this process prudently, making it as undisruptive and as painless as possible, or to deny it and thereby accelerate it.
The salience of this argument for an anxious superpower was strong. Kennedy’s book spoke to an audience that did not know of America’s imminent and peaceful Cold War victory. It spoke to an audience fretting about America’s place in the pecking order, in an era of high deficits, high defense spending, and perceived market threat from West Germany and Japan.
Kennedy’s prophecies of rise and fall, like all visions of decline, also attracted the interest of those who positively yearn for America’s fall. As we now know, the book found its way onto the shelf of Osama Bin Laden, whose self-appointed historical mission was to bait the “far enemy” into exhaustion and collapse.
And that, right there, is the problem. To forecast decline is to risk the charge of wanting decline, an unjust charge in Kennedy’s case. To warn of decline is to be branded a “declinist,” eliding the important difference between identifying and embracing negative change. It is to risk being hastily associated with some bad company. After all, radical Islamists, totalitarians, and European imperialists have all obsessively desired the failure of the American project. Anti-Americanism in truth is a complex and contradictory thing, and is pronounced among those who crave what America produces. But if the concept of decline, as one former U.S. ambassador to China and presidential candidate once claimed, is considered “un-American,” debating it becomes difficult.
While no sane critic suggests Kennedy is on a par with Bin Laden, Nikita Khrushchev, or Hugo Chavez, they do allege that Kennedy’s stance was not primarily a work of detached judgement, but a suspect ideological commitment. That Kennedy is British, and a pre-eminent student of British maritime and imperial history, prompted the charge most notably from former mandarin Walt Rostow that he was foisting a false analogy and a British historical template onto a distinctive American case.
Most of all, Kennedy’s case was provocative because it offended the very notion of American singularity. In offering a skeptical appraisal of the long-term prospects of the United States as a global hegemon, Kennedy effectively argued that America is not exempt from familiar historical dilemmas, that for all its uniqueness it is ultimately one more great power, whose domination is finite and who is subject to similar dilemmas and constraining forces that burdened the Ottoman, Spanish, Napoleonic or Victorian empires. Nothing is forever, not even the Pax Americana.
Kennedy’s arguments met with analytical rebuttals, from critics such as Samuel Huntington and Joseph S. Nye Jr. who countered that decline arguments were an old school with a poor record of prediction. They pointed out that defence spending is not necessarily an unproductive drain on an economy. If America is an empire, its mode of empire is fundamentally different from past empires with their land hunger and exploitation. Washington integrates willing peoples into an enduring and more liberating system of alliances and markets. Kennedy’s broad brush strokes, they suggested, were ultimately a work of determinism, losing sight of the vital role of choice and chance in the story.
Most of all, they point out that Kennedy had misidentified his target. While Kennedy’s audience was wringing its hands in Washington, it was the Soviet Union, not the United States, that then fell prey to imperial overstretch, while the United States was poised for a post-Cold War moment of economic expansion and the consolidation of its position as sole global leader, with the world’s population seeking out its markets and its patronage.
The gravest charge levelled at Kennedy was a political one. His warnings, they argued, placed him in the broader school of reactionary cultural pessimism. He was afflicted with same intellectual disease that struck Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher who argued, as the Kaiserreich immolated itself in the Great War, that civilizations were organic life forms doomed to go through cycles of growth and decay. Intellectual historian Arthur Hermann acknowledged that Kennedy dreaded collapse rather than looking forward to it — but found that his diagnosis made him sound like Spengler and other “gloomy prognosticators,” a tradition that can trace its descent to Nietzsche.
This matters, because dressing Kennedy up as a reincarnation of Spenglerian determinism makes him easier to dismiss. But can Kennedy be so easily branded as the mouthpiece of an older, cyclical declinism? It is worth revisiting what, in fact, he actually said. From his 38 page diagnosis, we can extract the following claims:
- In appraising America’s position, he noted two caveats: that while its share of world power has been declining, its problems are “probably nowhere near as great as those of its Soviet rival,” and that the unstructured nature of its society gives it a “better chance of readjusting” to changing circumstances, provided there is a judicious national leadership.
- The longevity of U.S. power faces two challenges: preserving a balance between its defense commitments and the means to sustain them, and preserving the economic base of its power against shifting patterns of production.
- America’s aggregation of interests and obligations exceeds the country’s power to defend them all at once. This scale of security obligations was acquired at a time when America’s shares of world gross domestic product, industrial production, and military power were considerably larger, its balance of payments healthier, and its level of indebtedness lower.
- Elements of America’s constitutional system of government and political culture impede the reformulation of grand strategy, from domestic lobbies to the electoral system.
- No society remains permanently ahead of others, as patterns of growth rates, technological advance or military power do not freeze, but the United States is not destined to shrink to the “relative obscurity” of former leading powers like Spain or the Netherlands, or to disintegrate like the Roman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is too large and too homogenous for that. America’s relative share of wealth and power will ebb away, but it will long remain “a very significant power in a multipolar world.”
- Therefore, the task of American statesmen is to manage these trends so that the erosion takes place “slowly and smoothly.” This decline is relative, not absolute, and the only serious threat will come from failure to adjust sensibly, and America’s problems are less daunting than European powers of the past confronting an array of enemies.
This is notably mild, and not the dramatic declinist argument Kennedy’s opponents seem to portray.
Looking back, Kennedy’s warnings were imperfect. He did not foresee the Asian financial crisis, and it turned out that the future did not yet speak with a Japanese accent. He failed to anticipate America’s resurgence in the dot-com boom, and the swiftness of the Soviet Union’s collapse. But as an account of gradual falling away from unipolar levels of dominance, over decades, it is remarkably insightful. We see evidence of it in the shift of economic weight from West to East. This does not mean a rising China is destined to ascend inexorably at prodigious levels, an improbable scenario that some on Kennedy’s side too quickly entertain. |Like Kennedy’s Soviet Union, its future problems may be worse than America’s, and there is no viable candidate poised to step in and replace the United States. But it does signal that the scale and quality of economic pre-eminence the United States enjoyed may be hard to claw back.
In other fields, we see evidence of this shift in the diffusion of military capabilities, with the spread of anti-access and area denial military technologies that would make it harder for the United States to impose its will at acceptable cost in a crisis in East Asia. And if Kennedy is right that great powers must struggle in balancing investment, consumption, and military spending, the mounting debt-deficit burden, the strains on social welfare, the problem of the lack of savings, and the pressures this could put on “guns versus butter” is already exerting its strain on the American political system.
Underpinning Kennedy’s argument was an astute observation that America’s global position arose in atypical, indeed extraordinary historical conditions, whereby the Old World of Europe shattered itself in World War Two, a war which strengthened America’s economic base and military power, making its relative position artificially strong, a state of affairs that could not go on indefinitely. Decline, in this context, meant not the melodrama of the Occident at sunset, falling into the sea, but a shift from a position of unipolar dominance to becoming a heavyweight in a more polycentric world.
This is a world away from Spengler. Decline to Spengler was a more apocalyptic and operatic thing, over which historical agents had little influence, and was a built-in part of the natural, biological cycle of civilizations, no more avoidable than the death of a plant. Over-expansion, or “imperial overstretch,” and the descent into Caesarism was not a flawed miscalculation but an inexorable consequence of a power’s growth. Each major civilization ended up turning to a man of blood and iron to extend its rule over others.
Kennedy, by contrast, counselled not despair but a series of pragmatic, material adjustments to the “guns versus butter” dilemma, to address the problem of the eroding foundations of power, to counter the difficulty of too much consumption and not enough savings, the problems of deindustrialization and shifting patterns of production, and the deteriorating eco-system of public infrastructure and skills needed to sustain productivity and progress. The United States, he argued, should avoid lapsing into protectionism or isolationism, but retract some commitments and shift some burdens. In other words, Kennedy was no Spenglerian. Quite simply, Spengler was a determinist and a fatalist, for whom decline meant the death of a civilization. Kennedy is not.
Ever since the Great Recession and financial meltdown of 2007-8, debate over the Kennedy thesis has taken on fresh life in new columns and books about the rise and fall of powers. And once again, even mentioning the possibility of decline, reversal, or undesired change is ridiculous in itself to some parties across the spectrum.
The idea that things can get worse, and fall rather than rise, and that structural conditions can make deterioration more likely than resurgence, amuses Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, for whom today’s declinists are haunted by Spengler’s ghost. Gopnik argues that theories of decline rest on predictions about the future, which is unwritten. They do, of course — but so do forecasts about growth or resurgence, and Kennedy gave weight to the importance of choices in handling whatever structural conditions handed down. A falling away from being number one is inevitable eventually — but the circumstances of that fall and its level of violence is where contingency, choices and strategy itself intervenes. Against the charge that he was preoccupied, deterministically, with the physical sinews of power and the economic base, at closer glance Kennedy assigned great importance to the quality of the choices America’s security elite would make.
More problematic is Gopnik’s treatment of decline as a mere intellectual fad. Declinism may be a recurrent intellectual impulse. But the experience of things getting worse against a backdrop of wider change can also be very real. For the West’s blue collar workforce, it is not absurd to suggest that life is harder, poorer, and often lonelier now than it was in decades past. The workforce in the 34 democracies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development today compared to 1945-1973 has less purchasing power and must work more hours to sustain their income levels, and increasingly resort to welfare, which is not adequately alleviated by cheaper goods from abroad.
This has consequences for a superpower, as the United States loses a large base of well-paying jobs that sustained working communities. Ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, against the immiseration and breaking up of the working class, creates increasing burdens for the state in the long run, and makes it harder to persuade people to accept any allocation of scarce resources abroad at the expense of rebuilding at home. The greater this problem grows at home, the harder it will be to address while sustaining hegemony.
From a different political direction, there is Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution. In a rebuke of what he sees as Obama’s turning away from America’s historical world mission, Kagan argues that “superpowers don’t get to retire.” It may be so, though retrenchment from some commitments is not the same as retirement from the world stage. But if they are not careful, superpowers can be placed into retirement involuntarily by others, or by their own imprudent choices, or both. And if they don’t carefully husband their resources and keep their power and commitment in balance, states can fall rather than peacefully retire. Kennedy’s opponents accuse him of ideological motives. But Kagan and other hawkish idealists also articulate an ideology of American power, as revivalists who believe it is America’s destiny forever to bounce back after a slump, or eternalists who believe that American market democracy represents the end of history as a coherent, evolutionary process.
Ultimately, America faces the problems of “rise and fall” from a historically better position than its predecessors in the “great power” story. Gradual, long-term erosion is probably a more fitting scenario than sudden collapse: The United States has a large population that is reproducing at a steady rate, a resource-rich landmass and a powerful military, and dominates the lists of Nobel Prizes. Whatever else happens, this is not a senior state likely to step down from the top table. Remaining at the head of the table is another matter. Adopting a more restrained grand strategy can be a prudent step in mitigating this possibility, and prolonging a state’s historical moment. This was Kennedy’s simple, mild and lasting observation. He was wrong on many things, but right on the main point.
Professor Patrick Porter is the academic director of the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Global Village Myth: Distance, War and the Limits of Power.
