Great-power rivalries and relations

Many people throughout the world habitually make comparisons of countries, asking which states are the biggest, strongest, wealthiest, and most militarily powerful and evaluating which states are rising and which are falling relative to one  another. When making such rankings, people are looking at world politics through the lens of realism. They see a globe of competitors, with winners and losers in an ancient contest for supremacy. And they look most closely at the shifting rankings at the very top of the international hierarchy of power—at the rivalry and struggle among the "great powers." Moreover, they picture this conflict as continual. As Arnold J. Toynbee's famous cyclical theory of history explains, “The most emphatic punctuation in a uniform series of events recurring in one repetitive cycle after another is the outbreak of a great war in which one power, that has forged ahead of all its rivals makes so formidable a bid for world domination that it evokes an opposing coalition of all the other powers."

Toynbee's conclusion lies at the centre of realism. The starting point for understanding world politics is to recognize that "All history shows that nations active in international politics are continuously preparing for, actively involved in, or recovering from organized violence in the form of war." Cycles of war and peace dominated twentieth-century world politics. World Wars I and II, which began in Europe and then spread, were fought by fire and blood. The Cold War was fought by different means but was no less intense. Each of these three global wars set in motion major transformations in world politics. In this chapter we explore the causes and consequences of these great-power rivalries. By examining their origins and impact, we can better anticipate the character of great-power relations in the twenty-first century.

The quest for great-power hegemony

Great-power war is not unique to the 20th century. Changes in the balance of power over the past five hundred years have regularly preceded war's outbreak. For this reason, the relationship between the great powers' rise and fall and global instability is a core concern in theories of world politics.

One viewpoint, long-cycle theory, seeks to explain why periods of war and peace are associated with shifts in the major states' relative power, and why each global war witnesses the emergence of a victorious hegemon, a dominant global leader capable of dictating the rules and arrangements by which international relations, political and economic, are conducted. With its acquisition of unrivaled power, the hegemon reshapes the existing system by creating and enforcing rules to preserve not only world order but also its own dominant position.

Hegemony characteristically imposes an extraordinary tax on the world leader, which must bear the costs of maintaining economic and political order while protecting its position and preserving its empire. In time, as the weight of global responsibilities takes its toll, new rivals rise to challenge the increasingly vulnerable world leader. Historically, this struggle for power has set the stage for another global war, the demise of one hegemon, and the ascent of another.

Long-cycle theory also draws attention to the fact that world politics has rarely been reordered without a major war. "Only after such a total breakdown has the international situation been sufficiently fluid to induce leaders and supporting publics of dominant nations to join seriously in the task of reorganizing international society to avoid a repetition of the terrible events just experienced" (Falk). Table1 summarizes the cyclical rise and fall of great powers, their global wars, and their subsequent efforts to restore order.

The central premise of long-cycle theory is disarmingly simple, and for this reason it is not without critics. Must great powers rise and fall as if by the law of gravity—what goes up must come down? There is something disturbingly deterministic in a proposition which implies that global destiny is beyond policymakers' control. Fundamental hypotheses drawn from long-cycle theory are difficult to confirm. Long-cycle theorists disagree on whether economic, military, or domestic factors produce these cycles, as well as about their comparative influence in different historical epochs. Still, long-cycle theory provides important insights into a fundamental continuity in world politics and provokes questions about whether this entrenched cycle can be broken. It also invites critical consideration of hegemonic stability theory, which assumes that a stable world order requires a single dominant leader to enforce peace and punish those who challenge the status quo. Thus it usefully orients us to a consideration of the three great-power wars of the twentieth-century and the lessons they suggest.

The First World war

World War I tumbled onto the world stage when a Serbian nationalist seeking to free Slavs from Austrian rule assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, at Sarajevo in June 1914. In the two months that followed, this event sparked a series of moves and countermoves by states and empires distrustful of each other's intentions, shattering world peace.

Before the assassination, two hostile alliances had already formed, pitting Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire against France, Britain, and Russia. The strategic choices of the two alliances culminated in World War 1. By the time the longest European war in a century had ended, nearly ten million people had died, empires had crumbled, new states had been born, and the world's geopolitical map had been redrawn.