Have you ever noticed that people tend to follow trends? How many people conform to popular fashion trends and listen to popular music? The Asch paradigm is a classic set of experiments that showed people are willing to ignore reality and give an incorrect answer so they would fit into a group. Those in a group can easily influence a person’s opinion when the reward is considered greater. In the case of superpowers, political power influences people to conform to a set of beliefs and are a good way to become more powerful. Let's have a look at how this happens!
Political Power Definition
We talk lots about political power, especially when considering relationships between countries. But what does this actually mean?
Political power is the ability to influence the behaviour of people and valued resources to influence the policies, functions and culture of a society. Such methods include military power.
What Are The Types of Power in Politics?
Power has been classically viewed as informational or compliance-based. More recently, the three-process theory has been used to define types of power by the method of action.
Informational vs Compliance
Power is often either informational or compliance by nature. But what does this mean exactly?
Informational | Compliance |
This is also known as social reality testing. Power is shifted towards 'experts', which rewards the group by reducing uncertainty. | Acceptance of power based on emotional ties such as the powerless is shaped by the powerful; or the cooperation between positively interdependent countries such as trading partners due to globalisation. |
We are beginning to delve into the realms of sociology with examples of informational and compliance-based power. If you find this interesting, it is worthwhile to allocate examples of international relations with the concepts of conformity, group polarisation and minority influence.
Political Influence
Political influence is how political power is exerted across the world. That is, if someone can exert political influence, it suggests that they are politically powerful. One theory of how this influence is exerted is the Three-Process Theory:
Three-Process Theory
So, what is the three-process theory?
The three-process theory describes 3 interconnected processes to exert control (power) in politics. The three processes are persuasion, authority and coercion.
Authority
This is acceptance of the right to control based on group norms such as shared beliefs, attitudes or actions. Authority is legitimate if it is voluntary and not experienced as oppression of self or loss of power.
Persuasion
This is the capacity to persuade others that a judgment or opinion is correct, proper and valid. Any individual more influential than another will, over time, erode their authority.
Coercion
This is controlling others against their will, usually following unsuccessful attempts to exert influence or authority. Traditionally, clashes between coercion and authority have rapidly escalated into open conflict.
There are similarities between each process of power. The distinctions made by using the terms informational and compliance-based power are helpful here.
Military Power
Although we often associate political power with military power, they are not the same thing. An easy way to remember it is that military power can help political power, but political power isn't just military power.
Military power is the combined measurement of the armed forces of a nation. This includes traditional forces in the air, on land, and at sea.
While political power tends to be supported by strong military power, this is not always the case. For example, political power can also be gained through sharing cultures, media outputs and economic investments.
Military Power Rankings
It is challenging to calculate a true military power ranking as size and power do not always correlate. Furthermore, there are limitations on relying on public data. Global FirePower ranked countries based on total available active military manpower using the information on airpower, manpower, land forces, naval forces, natural resources, and logistics such as ports and terminals outside the nation’s own borders.1 Landlocked nations were penalised for lack of standing merchant marine force and lack of coastline coverage.
How is military power measured?
Traditionally, manpower, as in the number of troops or ships, was sufficient to determine the military power necessary for attack and defence from threats. This is now only referred to as a military size. Defence spending is a better indicator as complex and expensive military technology is increasingly important for new battles elsewhere. The United States currently spends the most on the military in the world.
What is Balance of Power Theory?
The idea suggests that nations are focused on preventing other states from amassing enough military power to dominate all others.
An increase in economic power is converted into military power (hard power) and the formation of counterbalancing alliances (soft power). We have seen alliances where regional powers (secondary and tertiary states) join more powerful superpowers rather than go against them.
Why is political and military power important for superpowers?
Political influence on a global stage (persuasion)
Alliances for mutual benefit
Trade blocs for economic benefits are a modern form of alliance resulting in a louder voice on the world stage. For example, the euro was stronger than the franc before France joined the EU.
Israel Military Power
Let's take about Israel! Case studies are great to use in your exams - be sure to use precise facts and figures to access those A*s.
Military Size
Israel is the regional military hegemony in the Middle East. According to Global FirePower, Israel has a military ranking of 20 out of 140.1. This is the result of a large military size and impressive military technology with adequate financial backing. The country has compulsory military service for all citizens following their 18th birthday. Israel is a key global supplier of advanced weaponry, including drones, missiles, radar technology and other weapons systems.
Financial funding largely originates from the United States from such schemes, including the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 to regularly discuss regional defence sales with Israel and help maintain military superiority over its neighbours. This would seemingly go against the US Leahy Law, which prohibits the export of US defence articles to military units complicit in human rights abuse. However, no Israeli unit has been penalised under this law.
Israel and Palestine
The West Bank and Gaza Strip are considered to be territories under the sovereign state of Palestine. 86% of Palestinians are Muslim. This dominant religious belief is thought to be one of the causes of tensions with Israel's Jewish population, as both religions place a huge amount of importance on the region, particularly on Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is located on the West Bank, whereas the rest of the city is located in Israel. Tensions have been rising between the two nations, with Israel annexing parts of Palestine.
Israel exerts military power through heavy patrols of land, sea and air blockades around Gaza and through drone attacks on Gaza itself. This has resulted in the deaths of over 100 people. Further fighting between Gazan guerrilla paramilitaries and Israelis has resulted in thousands more deaths and demonstrations of military power. You can read more about the situation between Israel and Palestine in our explanation of Recent Conflicts.
Flags of Israel (above) & Palestine (below), Justass/ CC-BY-SA-3.0-migrated commones.wikimedia.org
How Do Superpowers Use Political and Military Power?
Superpowers use political and military power in many different ways. Stable geopolitics, such as in the form of harmonious relationships between countries, allows for the steady development of the economy. Political alliances and strong military presences are possible strategies to ensure stable geopolitics. Economic and political alliances include the European Union and the United Nations Security Council. This can work to reduce global economic inequalities by encouraging the development of low-income countries.
As well as simply to benefit other countries, superpowers have historically used political and military power to expand their influence in the geopolitical sphere. For instance, the Cold War (1947-1991) was a series of tensions between a capitalist superpower (USA) and a communist superpower (Soviet Union). Although the Cold War has come to an end, the clash between the political beliefs of both superpowers is still evident today. So much so that both the USA and Russia have been seen to offer economic and military support to nations in proxy wars. The Syrian conflict is an example of this. Arguably, these proxy wars are merely a continuation of the geopolitical clash between capitalism and communism. Therefore, superpowers have also used political and military power to further their own political and military ambitions and agendas.
Future events in the fields of the space race, nuclear arms, and cyberwars will determine the strongest political and military powers in the 21st century.
Space race
Have you heard of the space race? The rush for countries to be the first to go to space and explore it? When did this all start? Let's take a look.
History
The Cold War was a tense global conflict in a bipolar world based on the ideologies of capitalism and communism, as demonstrated by a series of competitive technologies. It is widely concluded that the launch of NASA’s first Apollo astronauts into space ended the war with the United States’ victory. In the end, both sides cooperated in setting up the International Space Station in 1998.
New Contenders
There has been a recent re-emergence of space programs developed by new superpowers such as China, India, and Russia. The former United States Vice President Mike Pence suggested that there could be a new space race as the nations aim to develop their prowess in military and national prestige. On the other hand, others have disregarded a brewing space race between nations and instead focus on space as unmarked territory for billionaires’ latest capitalist ventures. For NASA contracts, we have seen Elon Musk’s SpaceX compete with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Brandon’s Virgin Galactic in 2021.
Nuclear power
Our case study on Pakistan’s nuclear arms highlights that nations see the possession of nuclear arms as essential to prevent dominance achieved by their neighbouring countries. The issue that not all countries holding nuclear arms agree to adhere to (or even sign) treaties to limit nuclear arms production suggests that this type of weapon is a continuous threat to everyone. Since the Cold War, we have understood that any war involving 2 nuclear-armed countries may result in mass destruction of the world.
Cyberwars
War is now not only a physical conflict fought between and within countries. It may be a contest between state-sponsored hackers capable of leapfrogging borders. The first-ever web war took place in Estonia in 2007 when ethnic-Russian Estonian citizens hacked into official Estonian websites through DDoS (Distributed Denial of service). Many Estonians were unable to access their bank accounts as a result.
This shows that cyberwars are a clear mechanism to display political power because they have the capacity to have significant and long-lasting impacts on the politics, economics and social aspects of countries. Due to the globalised nature of the planet, this could have massive influence over the entire geopolitical sphere.
The first national cyberattack
Further, progress was made in the field of cyberwar in 2010, when Stuxnet was the first piece of known malware to damage physical equipment directly. It is thought to be the creation of the NSA and Israeli intelligence, designed to destroy centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities.
NotPetya in 2017 took place in Ukraine, resulting in the infection of 10% of Ukraine’s computers and the paralysis of the country’s government agencies and infrastructure systems, resulting in millions of dollars in lost business and clean up costs. This is in the background of Russia’s attempt to take back Crimea. There is a question on whether we understand cyberwar's implications as Notpetya spread back to Russia, causing damage to the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Limitation treaties for nuclear arms may help, but US leaders (or any of the Five Eyes nations) do not want to impact its own NSA and cyber command services.
Five Eyes nations are an intelligence and espionage alliance between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand that began after World War II.
Political Power - Key Takeaways
- Political power is the control of people and resources to influence policies, functions and culture.
- Political power can be described as informational and compliance-based. Types of power can be divided into authority, persuasion, and coercion to gain control under the three process theory.
- Power theory is currently described under the recurrent equilibrium model, which describes that our current world is sustained by the prevention of dominance of a single military power. Additionally, the model highlights that other nations form alliances with superpowers rather than fight them, such as in the example of the United States' maintenance of Israel's regional military power.
- Historically, military power was an important part of achieving political power. Previous measures of military power in terms of troops and ships number are outdated. This is known now as military size.
- The United States has the largest military power, using defence spending as the measure.
- Future events may rebalance military power or add new articles for defence budgets. These events include the competition in space, nuclear weapons, and the internet.
References
- Global Firepower, 2022 Military Strength Ranking. https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-listing.php https://www.ceps.eu/tag/israel/
- Fig. 1: Israel & Palestine flags (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Israel-Palestine_flags.svg) by SpinnerLazers (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/SpinnerLaserz) licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)
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