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Power and Influence in International Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2009

Peter R. Baehr
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Extract

“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power. Whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim.”

“Power” is one of the most central concepts in politics. For many years political scientists and sociologists have debated the term and tried to agree on its precise content. In a recent study about economic power concentrations in the Netherlands, Mokken and Stokman and their collaborators surveyed the theoretical position of the concepts “power” and “influence”. Most of the theoretical debates are held within the confines of American political science. A number of contributions in a recent issue of The American Political Science Review show that these debates have not yet come to an end. Most of these debates concern “community power”, that is power as it manifests itself within local communities. The most important contributions to this debate have been made by American and British political scientists.

Type
Articles
Information
Netherlands International Law Review , Volume 24 , Issue 1-2 , May 1977 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © T.M.C. Asser Press 1977

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References

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6. With the exception of the imperialism debates mentioned in note 3 supra.

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9. The withdrawal of previously announced positive sanctions may be considered a mixture of positive and negative sanctions.

10. van Doorn, J.J.A., Organisatie en Maatschappij [Organization and Society] (Leiden: Stenfert Kroese, 1966), p. 5.Google Scholar The author of this paper does not accept the view of Mokken en Stokman, who consider power and influence as fundamentally different phenomena. They define power as “the capacity of actors (persons, groups or institutions) to determine or to alter totally or partly a structure of alternatives in behaviour or choice”. They consider influence as the “capacity of actors to determine (partly) the behaviour or choice of other actors within the structure of alternatives in behaviour or choice that is available to them”. (Helmers, op cit., p. 37Google Scholar). They admit, however, that both concepts in social reality are closely intertwined. One stays closer to the traditional literature and common parlance by not adopting such a sharp, fundamental difference between the concepts of power and influence.

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20. For similar observations on the importance of making military threats credible to the opponent, the “art of commitment”, see Schelling, Thomas C., Arms and Influence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 35–91.Google Scholar

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32. Supra, p. 4.

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36. Holsti uses the rather unlikely illustration that Albania and Belgium both would ask the British government to lower tariffs on the import of bicycles; the British government would have a greater “responsiveness” to accept the Belgian request.

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38. This relates to the important problem of opportunity costs that the exercise of power involves.

39. Reacting to a remark by a member of parliament that he would have said that the Netherlands was only a small, puny country, Mr. Luns exclaimed: “That has never been said by me – never, never, never. I have never said that the Netherlands is a small, puny country. The Netherlands is a very important country.” (Hand. II 1970/71 p. 1658).

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