Advance Praise for Why Nations Rise

“Manjari Chatterjee Miller tells a sophisticated story about why some rising
powers like China become great powers, while others like India do not. She
maintains that how a state thinks about its role in the world matters as much
as its material capabilities. This book is essential reading for anyone
interested in understanding the dynamics of the emerging multipolar
international system.”
—John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of
Political Science, University of Chicago

“In Why Nations Rise, Miller explores how rising powers become great
ones. Armed with a provocative argument and comparative case studies,
this book makes the case for the critical role of the narratives that states
hold about what it means to be a great power and the proactive steps they
take to become one. Anyone interested in power transitions should read this
book.”
—M. Taylor Fravel, Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, Director,
Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Manjari Miller’s comparison of national narratives throughout history

provides unique context for the contrast of Chinese great power ambitions
and Indian reticence. For scholars the inclusion of national narratives in the
determination of state power is a significant contribution. For policymakers
the lesson is clear: the ‘India card’ that matters most in the larger
geopolitical equilibrium of Asia is for India to succeed on its own terms.”
—Michael J. Green, Senior Vice President for Asia and Japan Chair, Center for
Strategic and International Studies

[Link]
 Why Nations Rise

Narratives and the Path to

Great Power

MANJARI CHATTERJEE MILLER

[Link]
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s
objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a
registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any
acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Manjari Chatterjee, 1976– author.
Title: Why nations rise : narratives and the path to great power /
by Manjari Chatterjee Miller.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents: Why nations rise…or remain reticent—
The active rise of the United States—The reticence
of the Netherlands—Meiji Japan and Cold War Japan : a vignette of
rise and reticence—The active rise of China—The reticence of India—
Thoughts on power transitions, past and future.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037918 (print) | LCCN 2020037919 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190639938 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197558935 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780190639969 (oso) | ISBN 9780190639952 (epub) | ISBN 9780190639945 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Great powers—History. | World politics—19th century. |
World politics—20th century. | World politics—21st century.
Classification: LCC JZ1310 .M55 2021 (print) |
LCC JZ1310 (ebook) | DDC 327.1/12—dc23
LC record available at [Link]
LC ebook record available at [Link]

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190639938.001.0001

[Link]
For Jeff, my best friend and biggest cheerleader. I love you.

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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1. Why Nations Rise . . . or Remain Reticent

2. The Active Rise of the United States
3. The Reticence of the Netherlands
4. Meiji Japan and Cold War Japan: A Vignette of Rise and Reticence
5. The Active Rise of China
6. The Reticence of India
7. Thoughts on Power Transitions, Past and Future

Notes
Index

[Link]
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Writing a book is lonely. No one writes a book alone.” These words were
written by the children’s author Kelly Barnhill in a book that my ten-year-
old daughter insisted I read. It was a great story but it is this sentence,
written in Barnhill’s acknowledgments, that resonated most with me as I
finished my own manuscript. The research for this book took me nearly a
decade. There were days I was lonely as I holed myself up to write and
think. There were days I was obsessive when I couldn’t get the arguments
to fall into clear patterns. There were days I was joyous as I discovered new
nuggets of information. There were also days I nearly gave up. But I didn’t.
Because I had help—from people generous with their time, their
knowledge, their patience, and their love. Here they are, in no particular
order:
• Renata Keller, Chris Dietrich, and Justin Hart for helping me discover
American history.
• Kanti Bajpai, Thomas Christensen, Erez Manela, Steven Miller, Rajesh
Basrur, Jia Qingguo, and Rohan Mukherjee for inviting me to air my
thoughts at various stages of the manuscript. Michael Laffan, Paul
Kennedy, and Charles Maier for their time, and fascinating
conversations. Paul, thank you for the word “reticent!”
• Dick Samuels for encouraging me to study Japan and providing many
suggestions of how to start. Mike Green and Dave Leheny for listening
and providing further input.
• Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch for directing me to an obscure paper with one
extremely interesting line about the Netherlands which sparked my
research. Henk te Velde for helping me discover the Netherlands, and
introducing me to many colleagues, including my fantastic research
assistant Corné Smit. Corné for your patient work and translations. The
many Dutch academics who generously shared their time and
knowledge particularly, Ben Schoenmaker, Maartje Jense, James
Kennedy, and Vincent Kuitenbrouwer.
Stacie Goddard, Thomas Berger, Henk te Velde, Kate Sullivan de
• Estrada, Josh Shifrinson, Andrew May, and Jorge Heine among others
for an incredibly important and useful book conference which refined
my thinking. Kate for also being an amazing friend and gnome-maker-
in-arms.
• My posse of fabulous female colleagues at Pardee—Kaija, Shamiran,
Jay, R1 (Rachel Nolan), R2 (Rachel Brulé), and Noora—for helping me
with wine zooms, crazy group chats, and all-round support which
enabled me to finish the book in the middle of a pandemic. Goats all
the way ladies!
• Kevin Gallagher for being a rock star mentor, listening, and forwarding
me pertinent articles.
• Think tankers and academics in Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai for
talking with me and helping me understand. Indian academics and
government officials, particularly IFS officers, for sparing time for me
in their busy schedules, and for their candidness. Chen Ting and
Rishika Chauhan for helping me gather data.
• David Barboza for encouraging me to write a book that would bridge
the academia-policy gap. Katie Bacon for forcing me to explain my
 writing—even when I didn’t want to.
• Dave McBride for helping me work with OUP.
• The Smith Richardson Foundation for making the research for this
book possible.
• My two children, Neer and Namya, for making me feel like the luckiest
mom on the planet. (Look kids, mommy did get the book done!)
• My husband Jeff, for everything. Because that’s what he is to me.

[Link]
 1
Why Nations Rise . . . or Remain Reticent

What are rising powers? Why do some countries become rising powers, but
not others? What does it mean for a country to rise? Today one can find a
thriving industry of newspapers, articles, and books on China and India, the
two countries that are regularly referred to as “rising powers.” Yet when I
recently asked a noted British journalist who had just published a book on
India what he thought a rising power was—and why India was one—he
seemed taken aback. He paused for a minute before offering that it was
“probably” a country with some mix of influence and power—both
economic and military.1 But when I tried to pin him down on how much
power and what kind of influence, he couldn’t clarify. It seemed, as he
acknowledged during the conversation, that one just simply knew when a
country was rising. To be fair to him, these questions only occurred to me
many years after I first began studying China and India. To show why, I’ll
explain my early experience of studying these two countries.
Back then, in the early 2000s, most people I told about my research could
not fathom my interest. Indians were baffled that I wasn’t concentrating my
energies solely on India, my country of birth, and even more puzzled why,
if anyone were to pick another country to study at all, it would not be Japan
or the United States—clearly more important countries. Chinese friends and
acquaintances were surprised because they were unaccustomed to an Indian
studying Mandarin or taking an interest in modern China, and some politely
indicated that they were not flattered by any comparison between the two.
And Americans seemed bewildered on two fronts: that I was studying the
two countries and that I was comparing them to each other; what, after all,
did the two have in common?
But by 2012, when I was on the cusp of finishing a book about both
countries and their curiously similar response to the historical legacy of
colonialism (Wronged by Empire), people’s attitudes toward my research
had changed radically. Far from bewilderment and questions, I now began
to receive hearty congratulations from Americans, Indians, and Chinese,
who commended my study of a “hot” topic. And indeed comparing the two
had, by this time, become fashionable: not only were both countries now
being studied, contrasted, and compared in the West, but they were also
being studied, contrasted, and compared as rising powers. Moreover, they
were treated as a special category of actors—the United States and the
world feared China’s rise, while wondering how to use India’s rise to
counter the coming Pax Sinica.
Yet I had this nagging suspicion that, despite the attention to both as
rising powers, they were different—China was embracing its rise in a way
that India was not. Recently, I looked back through my notes and
documents to understand exactly when I came to this idea that China and
India were very different kinds of rising powers. I eventually found a short
outline from 2009. It consisted of notes for a précis I had been invited to
present at a conference titled “Rising States and Global Order” at the
Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) at
Princeton University. The outline had some very preliminary thoughts
based on peripheral data I had gathered in the course of conducting
fieldwork for Wronged by Empire. In it, I had written, “India’s current
ideological chaos (which nearly shut down the nuclear deal) makes for
striking contrast with China. Unlike India, China is acutely conscious of its
international position, and has made a strategic effort to formulate and
reformulate a ‘grand ideology’ that outlines its international image.
Although India says it is a rising power it is [sic] yet to believe it.” My
commentator at that conference was the political scientist John
Mearsheimer. He asked me, if what I was implying was correct, what could
this tell us about rising powers and their international strategy or behavior?
In other words, why did this difference between China and India, if it
existed, matter? I did not have an answer for him at that conference, but I’m
still grateful for his question, because it sent me on the intellectual journey
that led to this book.
In 2013, having finished my first book, and now bombarded with
references to the rise of China and India, I acted on my nagging thoughts. I
began scanning Chinese and Indian newspapers. Narratives of China as a
rising power were also reflected in Chinese newspapers which, like Western
newspapers, were full of articles and op-eds with references to China’s rise,
and what it meant for China to rise. These narratives discussed what kind of
great power China would become, how it should respond to its changing
environment, what its relationship with the status quo power, the United
States, should be like, and whether China’s rise would be contested. In
short, they were chock-full of stories about the story of China’s rise. On the
other hand, when I turned to read Indian newspapers I found no such
stories. There were very few narratives that asked or answered these
questions.
I was deeply puzzled by this. The world now habitually referred to both
as rising powers; therefore, shouldn’t they both also think of themselves as
rising powers? After all, I knew from my past research that it was not that
Indians did not think of themselves as a great country and a great
civilization. But, I also noticed, India consistently faced complaints that it
didn’t act as a great power.2 Instead, it was always “emerging but never
arriving.”3
I took a trip to India that summer to explore a little more and to ask
government officials what they thought of India as a rising power. My
interviews—some conducted at the highest levels of Indian foreign-policy
decision-making—amazed me. Indian officials I spoke with were deeply
uncomfortable with the label “rising power,” and seemed to engage in little
strategizing about how to respond to India’s changing environment or to
deal with the consequences of its rise. In short, I found that although India
was rapidly increasing in both military and economic strength, Indian
officials did not seem to have consistent and concrete narratives about what
that could mean, how India could use its rise for leverage, or what kind of
great power India could become. Moreover, I found foreign policy officials
in other countries deeply frustrated by India’s behavior on the international
stage. Although dubbed a rising power, India seemed to have a reputation of
not living up to the role.4 Meanwhile, China’s behavior alarmed these same
officials, who were convinced of the coming China threat and the challenge
it posed to the liberal order.
These differences raised a whole host of questions. Was China unique, I
wondered? Was it, in fact, unusual for rising powers to both believe and
behave as if they were rising? Was India’s path actually the normal road for
a rising power? And what did it really mean to behave like a rising power or
to have narratives about that rise? Contemporary sources in both academia
and the media were of limited help. “Rising power” was an oft-used term,
but no one could really identify exactly which country today was
indisputably a rising power, and why. Only one fact was agreed upon: some
amount of increasing military and economic power was indeed important.
This made sense; how, after all, could a country be a rising power if the
component of “power” was missing? But beyond that, there was little
agreement. Particularly confusing, the very element that identified them as
rising powers—increasing military and economic power relative to the
established great power of the day—was also used to identify their behavior
as rising powers. Thus, a country was a rising power if we observed that it
had increasing economic and military power, and it behaved as a rising
power if it increased its economic and military power, resulting in an
unhelpful tautology.
So I decided to look to history to see if with the benefit of hindsight I
could better understand our expectations of China and India, and in doing
so, clarify what we mean by and should expect of rising powers. There are
deep divisions among international relations scholars, but even the most
argumentative of them would agree that rising powers are a category of
actors that can tip the world toward war or toward peace. What could we
learn from historical cases of countries that possessed this quality and
others that we associate with rising powers today? What patterns could we
find? Also, and crucially, how did we come to think of a rising power as a
special, and often dangerous, kind of actor in international relations? While
this thought has long historical roots—thousands of years ago,
Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War declared, “it was the rise of
Athens, and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”—it
also has modern theoretical roots. To understand the rising powers of China
and India—and why we think of them as rising powers—grasping this
theoretical foundation (and its problems) is essential.

What Do We Know of Rising Powers?

The phrase “rising power” is, today, a ubiquitous term. It is used
indiscriminately by academics, policymakers, and the media to describe not
just China and India, but countries as disparate as South Africa,5 Turkey,6
Brazil,7 Iran,8 and Russia.9 Despite the popularity of the concept, however,
research on understanding rising powers as a category of actors is sparse:
why we perceive some countries but not others to be rising is unclear, and
sometimes contradictory.
Briefly, the theory of power transitions—termed “one of the most
successful structural theories in world politics”10—treats these countries as
a distinct and special category of game-changing actors in the world. Power
transition theorists argue that “the differential growth in the power of
various states in the system causes a fundamental redistribution of power in
the system.”11 They believe that in any international system—that is, a
world composed of great, middle, and small powers—there eventually rises
a challenger country. The challenger, or rising power, is dissatisfied with
how “goods” are distributed in this system. (“Goods,” in this case, mean the
acquisition of power along with the rules and regulations, both formal and
informal, that govern our international order.) According to power transition
theorists, a challenger country seeks not just to overturn how power is
distributed, but also to create and impose its own rules instead of those that
were imposed by the reigning great power. Thus, the rise of this challenger,
more often than not, results in conflict and even war with the established
great power. This is called a “recurring pattern” in world politics.12 This
school of thought seeks to answer meta-questions about war and peace,
conflict and cooperation, stability and instability in the international
system.13 Power transition theorists rarely take the time to examine the
particularities of specific rising powers, their specific trajectories, and their
propensity for conflict.14
A more in-depth scrutiny of rising powers and their behavior has been
undertaken, although implicitly, by historians—the classic example of this
is Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers—as well as
political scientists who seek to understand great powers and great power
behavior.15 Finally, there have been many books focused either on a single
country that also happens to be a rising power, usually China or India,16 or
on comparisons of the rises of India and China to assess the strengths and
weaknesses of each and the obstacles faced by them as they gain power.17
This work on rising powers has relied on two fundamental assumptions
about countries that are rising.
The first is that rising powers can be identified and compared primarily
by measuring their relative material capabilities.18 According to this
assumption, countries rise because their economic and military power
relative to that of the status quo power (the great power of the day)
increases sufficiently to pose a challenge to the latter. Power transition
theorists emphasize that since it is the relative power of the challenger vis-
à-vis the defender that determines the likelihood of war, increasing
economic and military power is, therefore, the most important indication of
a state emerging as a rising power. Sometimes, a rising power is also
assumed to be a country that is increasing, or aspiring to increase, its “soft”
co-optive power.19 Accordingly, discussions of rising powers will often
include soft-power measures such as influence in global affairs20 and
visibility.21 On this premise, scholars have dissected, for example, whether
or not China and India have been successful in wielding soft power and
how this advances or stymies each country’s rise.22
The second assumption is that a rising power is a country that is likely
revisionist; that is, it is unwilling to accept a position of subordinate power
in the way “goods are distributed in the international system”23 and will
therefore eventually challenge the existing international order—and the
great powers who maintain it. War is likely when a power transition occurs,
not just because a rising power gains approximate power parity with the
great power defender, but also because a rising power is also a country that
is dissatisfied with the status quo. Thus, the challenger or rising power is
expected to increase its hard and soft power relative to the status quo power,
and almost by definition to engage in revisionism, often expressed as
expansionism, as it rises.

Why Is What We Know about Rising Powers Problematic?

As it turns out, using these assumptions to identify when or why a state is
rising is less useful in the real world than the theoretical one—for a variety
of reasons. Let’s start by looking at relative material capabilities as a
measure of which state is a bona fide rising power. Some accounts today
focus only on India and China as rising powers, while others focus on the
BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) as a group. The BRICs acronym was
created in 2001 by an analyst at Goldman Sachs.24 In doing so, Goldman
Sachs, in effect, concocted a group of rising powers, and differentiated them
from other states simply on the basis of their rapid economic growth and
their exclusion from the governance structures of the world economy.25 But
Brazil’s status as a rising power can be questioned, as can Russia’s. Brazil is
not a nuclear weapons state, an arguably necessary precondition to be called
a rising power today. Russia could reasonably be termed a declining rather
than a rising power. The newer iteration of BRICS now includes South
Africa. Yet, apart from its myriad other problems, South Africa was one of
only eleven countries that actually saw a drop in its life expectancy between
1990 and 2013.26 Moreover, South Africa voluntarily relinquished its
nuclear weapons program, weakening the claim that it could be termed a
rising power. Even China’s rise, predicated on its military power relative to
the United States, has been debated. China’s power as a proportion of US
power is increasing, but the absolute advantage in capabilities continues to
be in favor of the United States.27 While a recent RAND report suggests
that although China has improved its capabilities in many areas, it continues
to trail the United States in both military hardware and operational skills.28
Neither is it clear that a rising power is always a country that is inevitably
going to challenge the status quo power. A rising power is often dubbed
expansionist. Expansionism, typically understood as military and
geographic encroachment29 (and less typically as the “expansion of political
interests”30) is seen as both the natural outgrowth of the rising power’s
increase in material power31 and as negative behavior—reinforcing the
general conviction that rising powers engage in revisionism. This is
problematic for many reasons. The concept of expansionism as applied to
rising powers is both narrow (military assertiveness and geographic
conquest) and muddy (an “expansion of political interests” could also apply
to the foreign policy behavior of many states in general, rather than to rising
powers as a special category of actors). This concept does not allow us to
capture the distinctiveness that should mark the behavior of a special
category of actors, and it also does not allow us to distinguish between
rising powers. And expecting expansionism because a rising power is
increasing its capabilities does not tell us when it will expand, why it will
do so, or why, if ever, it would refrain.
China, for example, has been shown to be both conformist as well as
revisionist, depending on the issue area.32 Moreover, since both China and
India are considered to be rising powers, they should have similar
reputations for dissatisfaction with the current international system. But
they do not. By and large, India is seen as a benign rising power, one whose
rise is, unlike China’s, conforming to the existing international order.33 Yet
just as China can be conformist as well as revisionist, so can India, and they
often do not overlap in what areas of the international order they accept or
reject—China has changed its stance on climate change, embracing the
Paris Agreement, and has made conciliatory noises on the norm of
Responsibility to Protect (R2P), to cite two examples, while India is a
reluctant signatory to the Paris Agreement, and utterly rejects R2P. When
rising powers have been acknowledged to engage in “supportive” as well as
“predatory” behavior in terms of the international order, this has been
predicated on the waxing or waning capabilities of the status quo power—
that is, the rising power engages in behavior designed to strengthen rather
than weaken the global position of the current great power.34 This provides
a useful reading of the rising power’s strategy toward managing a great
power, but does not speak to the general behavior of rising powers in the
world order or why they rise.
Finally, equating a country’s status as a rising power with the possession
of material resources, i.e., military and economic power, ignores the social-
relational aspect of a country’s status.35 If a state is seen to be rising, it is
not just the increasing capabilities in of themselves that bestow that status.
It is the recognition of those capabilities by external actors as a symbol of
the state’s rising power status. One way to understand this in context is to
compare military expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product
(GDP) for states. We can see from these expenditures that it is not simply
the expenditure per se that matters; it is also which countries are being
compared. For example, in 2015, India’s total military expenditure as a
percentage of its GDP was 2.4% (a decrease from 3.6% in 1988). China’s
was a comparable 2.0% in 2015. In the same year, Mali’s military
expenditure was 2.4% (an increase from 2.2% in 1988), while Ecuador’s
was 2.5% (an increase from 1.5% in 1988).36 Yet the latter countries are
obviously not recognized as rising powers. For those who would argue this
point and suggest that it is not percentage increases or decreases but rather
the sum total of capabilities that matter, consider this: as of 2016, Germany
ranks in the top ten countries globally for military strength,37 yet it is rarely
termed a rising power.
Either applying or adding the concept of “soft power” is also
problematic. Soft power is an ambiguous, unmeasurable concept, and there
is no agreement on what constitutes “influence” and how much of it a state
needs to possess to be called a rising power. By some measures of soft
power, Brazil could be said to punch above its weight in international
regimes. Brazil enjoys a prominent position in the World Trade
Organization (WTO) because of its skills of coalition building, “insider
activism,” and ability to manipulate the informal norms of the WTO, rather
than because of its “commercial power.”38 Should this qualify it as a rising
power, even though its military and economic power is not comparable to
that of Russia, China, or India, let alone the status quo power, the United
States? China lacks soft power, and is acutely conscious of this lack.39 Yet
we accord it the status of a rising power.
Thus, power, either hard or soft, is an incomplete measure of a rising
power. We are left, then, with “no commonly accepted definition of what an
emerging or rising power is,” and “no consistent indicators of what a rising
state looks like.”40 What we can deduce from this established discussion on
rising powers is that while power is a necessary condition for a country to
rise, and to be perceived as a rising power, it is certainly not sufficient. So
what is a rising power, and what does it mean for some countries, but not
others, to rise?

Rethinking Rising Powers: Why Nations Rise (or Stay Reticent)

What Is a Rising Power?
There is a crucial fact that is assumed but left unstated when we talk of
rising powers—a rising power is a state that is rising to become, in the near
future, a great power. After all, the material capabilities of many countries
are constantly increasing relative to others. Not all of these countries are
dubbed rising powers, although they may indeed be rising within a regional
or even international context. The term “rising power” is very specifically
intended to capture a special category of actors—those who are in the near
future expecting to join the ranks of the great powers and eventually
determine, as great powers do, the structure, major processes, and general
direction of the international system.41 Moreover, “rising power” is a
modern term; a century ago, English-language newspapers referred not to
“rising powers” but to countries that were becoming great powers.42
 Consequently, we can say that rising powers are countries that should be
rising to become great powers. And to understand them, we can first
establish our expectations of a great power. Fortunately, the international
relations literature is prolific on the question of how we can recognize a
great power. The most commonly accepted definition of a great power
utilizes military capabilities alone. A great power is one that holds at least
543 to 10 percent of global military power.44 The Correlates of War project,
which is the data set most widely used to identify major powers, includes
power capabilities measured in terms of total population, urban population,
iron and steel production, fuel consumption, military personnel, and
military expenditures.45 Yet because capabilities alone can result in mis-
measurement of great powers,46 academics have added both the element of
behavioral choice and external recognition to the definition of a great
power. Thus, in addition to possessing unusually high relative capabilities, a
great power’s interests are global rather than regional,47 and it is recognized
both formally and informally by other states as a great power.48 But even
within the category of great powers there are tiered differences. Some
countries are major powers, others are greater powers, and still others are
superpowers. These differences can be attributed not only to the distribution
of material capabilities, relative to other powers in the system,49 but,
because “statistics and military budgets aren’t everything,” also to their
behavior in terms of projection of interests and reputation.50 Not every
major power will become a greater power, and nor will every greater power
become a superpower. There are tiers of great powers.
Thus, we can logically juxtapose two important elements from the great
power literature in order to construct an understanding of rising powers. A
rising power, or a country that is rising to become a great power, should
increase its relative military and economic power, begin to globalize its
interests, and begin to gain recognition as a great power-to-be. There can be
differences among rising powers; these differences can be attributed not just
to capabilities, but also to the powers’ behavior; that is, some countries rise
enough to be on the path to great power, while others may rise, but only in a
material sense.
Increasing relative military and economic power is observable. But how
do we perceive a rising power globalizing its interests and gaining
recognition? When a rising power perceives its interests to be globalizing, it
attempts to acquire global authority. That is, when a rising power perceives
its self-defined national interests to be increasing in scope (expanding
beyond the regional or local) and depth (in complexity and breadth of
affected issues), we can observe it taking on more global authority and
responsibility suited to its changing interests. But the notion of “authority
and responsibility” is not one that is defined by the rising power. Rather, it
is set by the established great power norms of the day. In any given time
period, global society has an example of great power behavior in the status
quo power(s) of the day, as well as in norms and institutions (or
international order) established by that great power. Early 19th-century
Russia gives us an example of a rising power that did not meet the great
power norms of the day. Russia had the material capabilities to be
recognized as a great power. However, its illiberal system of governance
and resulting modus operandi in international politics marked it as glaringly
different from the “first-class powers.”51 As such, European states
continued to harbor doubts about its entry into the ranks of the great
powers. In order to gain this recognition, Russia attempted to adopt
European great power behaviors—“having ambassadors plenipotentiary,
being a guarantor power, participating in conferences, gaining a droit de
regard . . . that were explicitly associated with great powers” of the time.52
Thus, a country that is rising to be a great power attempts to take on
authority, and actively tries to shape its role in the international system in
the fashion of the current great powers. This suggests, crucially, that a
rising power is not revisionist (at least initially). It is, instead,
accommodational. It has to accept and conform to the current international
order before it can reject it.53
The acquisition of global authority is intricately linked to the rising
power’s quest for recognition. Only when a rising power conforms to great
power norms will it be able to shape recognition—both internally and
externally—of it as a country that is on the path to become a great power.
Thus, a rising power also actively attempts to shape both domestic and
international perceptions of its position as a great power-to-be. External
recognition, a key feature of great powers, is an element that is bestowed by
international society, contingent on both established capabilities and proven
global interests. Without these two, external recognition would presumably
be nonexistent. In effect, we know a great power when we see one. But not
only is external recognition, as we have seen, more ambiguous (predicated
on material capabilities) and risky (assumptions of revisionism) for rising
powers, in effect necessitating a response,54 but we can also posit that
internal recognition is just as important as external recognition for these
countries to gain domestic support as their international position changes.
But here is the nub: just as there are differences between great powers,
there are differences between rising powers. If a country seeks to increase
its relative material power without attempting either to acquire global
authority or to court both external and internal recognition of itself as a
great power in the making, it is unlikely to become a great power. Countries
that engage in all of these behaviors are active rising powers—they are
actively rising to become great powers. Countries that engage only in
increasing their material power are reticent powers—they will not rise to
become great powers unless they engage in the other two behaviors.
Thus, a country rising to be a great power—an active power—not only
begins to acquire relative military and economic power, but also begins to
actively acquire global authority by acting in accordance with great power
norms, and, simultaneously, begins to actively court internal and external
recognition as a great power-to-be. It is consequently an accommodational
power.
Active powers may eventually become activist powers, that is, what we
think of as revisionist powers, but they need to first acknowledge, show
themselves to play by, and master the rules before they can gainsay them.
And reticent powers need not stay reticent. If they eventually acquire the
other two behaviors, they will become active powers. And activist powers
are not born of military and economic power, they are made. As we will see
in this book, some countries may indeed have the material strength to both
globalize authority and shape recognition, according to the great power
norms of the day, but may still not display the will to do so. Reticent powers
do not suddenly embark on the path to become active powers.
So we come to a very important question: why do some countries
actively rise while others remain reticent? Because rising to become a great
power is a process. This process encompasses not simply material might—
that is, the requisite military and economic power—or geopolitics or
opportunity, but also a particular type of narratives, narratives about how to
become a great power according to the prevalent norms. These narratives
are as integral as material power to the process of active rising. Countries
that undergo this process are both active and accommodational. Countries
that do not complete this process stay reticent. To understand where these
narratives come from and why they matter for rising powers, we need to
look at a concept that I call “idea advocacy.”

Idea Advocacy: A Marketplace of Narratives

As we will eventually see through cases in this book, rising to become a

great power is a process—active powers develop, in addition to their
material power, “idea advocacy” or narratives about how to become a great
power. A reticent power does not, and may even reject such notions. These
narratives—or the lack thereof—are a key difference in the behavior
between active and reticent powers.
Idea advocacy can be understood as the generation of new ideas and
recombination of existing ideas by the elites in a rising power to form new
narratives about the country’s appropriate behavior as a great power-to-be.
These new narratives, in conjunction with a rising power’s increasing
capabilities, drive the power to acquire global authority and shape
recognition of its rise. The philosopher Max Weber once said of great
powers, “At a minimum, in order to be a great power, a power has to think
of itself in terms of being great, of having an historical task.”55 A country
rising to become a great power has to think of itself as a great power-to-be,
has to display awareness that its position in international politics is
changing, and yes, has to set itself a historical task.
The concept of idea advocacy itself is deeply rooted in international
relations, and can be traced to a theoretical concept called “idea
entrepreneurship.” To understand the concept, we need to break apart the
phrase and understand each component separately.
In international relations, ideas can be beliefs that are held and expressed
by individuals and groups or beliefs that are embraced by institutions,
influencing their attitudes and behaviors.56 Ideas can also be beliefs about
correct standards of behavior that are held by international society at
large.57 A set of beliefs (I will use ideas and beliefs interchangeably) can
influence how a country behaves on the world stage by serving as “road
maps” or “world views.” These “maps” help a country make sense of the
world and guide it in forming policy,58 and can be expressed as important
narratives. International relations experts continue to debate whether the
material goals, or interests, of a state are distinct from its beliefs, or whether
the beliefs themselves constitute the interests. One school of thought
suggests that since foreign policy actors often have incomplete information
and the absence of certainty about the consequence of their actions, they
can rely on ideas to help choose strategies to further their goals.59 In this
mode of thinking, ideas impact which foreign policy interests are prioritized
by actors. But there are others who argue that “interests cannot be separated
from ideas about interests.”60 In other words, ideas can be causal, but can
also be the foundation of interests in a variety of ways. This does not mean,
however, that ideas themselves are simply static entities that affect the
choices of actors. Ideas can change and can be affected not just by the
political and economic conditions in which they operate, but even by the
strategies and goals of the actors—a “feedback” effect as it were.61 In fact,
it is the very dynamic nature of ideas that can enable actors to conceptualize
and reconceptualize the world.62
Entrepreneurship—broadly, the creation of a new or innovative venture
by risk takers who achieve their goals in a new environment and destroy the
status quo63—has rarely been studied in the context of the foreign policy or
security of countries.64 Instead theorists, particularly international political
economists and institutionalists, have drawn connections between ideas and
entrepreneurship to show how they can influence a country to institute
reform. They have offered the concept of “political/ideational
entrepreneurs” or agents who either institutionalize new ideas or recombine
existing ideas to influence the political leadership.65 Such agents are a
source of innovation in that they put forward new or creative ideas, and
seek to build support for those ideas.66 There is a consensus that these idea
entrepreneurs tend to be elites, i.e., those who c