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SYMPOSIUM ON KNUTSEN, THE RISE AND FALL OF WORLD ORDERS

Other Bricks in the Wall: A Reply

TORBJØRN L. KNUTSEN

It is heady to note that three reviewers lavish praise on my book. It is

with apprehension I note that the three are all competent scholars who
have read the argument thoughtfully. Thus, they have no sooner
praised my argument before they expose its rafters and deftly seek to
dislodge them. Georg Sørensen devotes his attention to two, which he
singles out for special demolition: the notions of ‘overstretch’ and of
‘social capital’.

On Overstretch

The notion of overstretch was first made popular by Paul Kennedy’s

book on The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers over a decade ago.
Make no mistake about it, this is a wonderful book in many ways, yet
I remain critical of his arguments in two regards. First, Kennedy’s
notion of overstretch is not new. Second, the notion is not as uni-
versally applicable as Kennedy thinks.
The first point is not particularly important. To show that a concept
is old does not, of course, invalidate it. So, when I note that ‘over-
stretch’ is an old notion, I do not have invalidation in mind as much as
historical perspective and political context. By showing that the con-
cept of overstretch has a history, I suggest that this history obeys a
noteworthy rhythm of ebb and flow: discussions of overstretch are
largely absent in periods of order and calm, while they seem to appear
in the public debate when the hegemon’s primacy is under challenge.1
The second point of my criticism, more substantial, identifies two
important assumptions which support Kennedy’s overstretch argu-
ment. The first is a so-called ‘unequal-development thesis’, which holds
that different states develop at different paces. This causes no prob-
lems for my reviewers. The second assumption, involving a ‘zero-sum’

cooperation and conflict Copyright © 2001 NISA. SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), vol. 36(3): 315–326. ISBN:
0010–8367 [200109]36:3; 315–326; 016010
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316 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

thesis, causes Sørensen some disquiet. He finds that my discussion of

this is ‘plagued by some inconsistency’ — at one moment I claim a
zero-sum relationship between wealth and power, at the next I claim
a positive-sum relationship. Let me try to clarify my view.
Kennedy claims that if ‘too large a proportion of the state’s
resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to
military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national
power over the longer term’. This statement assumes that a zero-
sum relationship exists between a country’s military and its economic
capabilities. It assumes, in short, that military expenditures are un-
productive investments; that men and monies used for defence can
always be more productively employed elsewhere.
I do not reject the zero-sum notion out of hand. Common sense sug-
gests that military expenditures often represent horrible wastes of
good money. Also, I find (just like Kennedy) in many cases a clear
inverse relationship between military and economic capabilities. In
late sixteenth-century Spain, for example, the military expenditures
of the state increased over the long haul, and the country’s economic
productivity decreased.
My problem (or, rather, Kennedy’s problem) is that I also find
enough exceptions to this notion to doubt its general validity. In the
case of late eighteenth-century Britain, for example, I find no zero-
sum relationship; rather, I find positive-sum relations, i.e. I find that
military buildup and economic growth went hand in hand.2 Similarly,
in early sixteenth-century Spain I find a long-term military buildup
which went hand in hand with long-term economic growth (not
decline, as the overstretch hypothesis would lead us to expect). In
the mid-twentieth-century USA, high military expenditures coincided
with the beginning of an unprecedented and sustained rate of econ-
omic growth.3 In fact, all my hegemonic Powers — from Spain, via the
United Provinces and the United Kingdom, to the United States —
show a positive correlation between power and wealth at some point
or other.
This observation has several implications. Here are two of them. The
first is big and bound to attract controversy:4 viz., that the zero-sum
assumption (which is the main girder of Kennedy’s overstretch
hypothesis) is not generally valid. There are simply too many cases that
don’t fit it. In general, Kennedy’s zero-sum notion does not apply as
well to hegemonic powers in the initial phase of pre-eminence. It fares
far better in the final phase of hegemony.
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knutsen: symposium 317

Let me, before moving on to the second implication, put the point
more sharply than I have in the book: although Kennedy (and com-
mon sense) tells us differently, military expenditures do not always
represent a horrible waste of good money. Military expenditures are
sometimes made in order to boost the industrial infrastructure on
which the nation relies for the production of weapons systems. In
open economies, such expenditures are not always unproductive;
indeed, they sometimes involve economic investments which benefit
civil industry. There are, admittedly, many qualifications here — it
applies ‘sometimes’,5 the country must be ‘new’,6 its economy must be
open,7 expenditures must involve key industries or infrastructure, and
so on. Nevertheless, there is enough juice left in the argument to rock
many established theories. Kennedy’s overstretch theory is most
immediately rocked by it. In addition, theories upon which Kennedy
draws, are shaken — among these are the classic, liberal economic
arguments of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Cobden among
many others. Also challenged are contemporary theories which draw
on the same classic theories as Kennedy does; for example, many
pacifistic arguments as well as theories in Peace Research and Peace
Economics. If military expenditures cannot be trusted always to be
unproductive, then doubt is cast on the so-called military conversion
theories, which claim that society would always be wealthier if it
stopped wasting resources on building battleships and began building
factories, hospitals and schools instead.8
The observation that wealth and power are not always inversely
associated leads to a second conclusion as well: if military investments
are not strongly associated with the decline of great powers, what is?
My proposal here is: social capital. Against Kennedy’s famous claim
that the decline of the Great Powers is caused by declining capital
investments (which are in turn caused by increasing military expendi-
tures), I venture the competing claim that the decline of Great Powers
is a function of declining social capital.
Sørensen meets this proposal with some scepticism, as does Westad.

On Social Capital

Westad lauds my inclusion of ‘social capital’ in the discussion of the

rise and fall of Great Powers. But although he finds the concept
illuminating, he doesn’t find it illuminating enough.
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318 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

In what sense is it illuminating? First and foremost it is an illuminat-

ing compensation for a major shortcoming in Kennedy’s analysis: his
materialist emphasis. Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
focuses tightly on physical resources of power and wealth. His book
pays little or no attention to normative resources — such as ideas and
ideals, norms and rules, values and myths, friendships, enmities or col-
lective identities. This material perspective predisposes Kennedy to
portray the Cold War as a military–industrial contest between similar
and equipollent states. However, his analysis gives no clue as to why,
during the late 1980s (just as Kennedy’s book was published), it was
the USSR that unexpectedly fell, whereas the USA, in fact, launched
a new period of hegemonic dominance. If the normative aspects of
political power are included in the analysis, it becomes evident that the
USSR and the USA were not as alike as Kennedy assumed. And one
way of capturing the essential differences between them — and to
explain why one exhausted itself whereas the other did not — is by
using the concept of ‘social capital’. In brief, since the Soviet store of
social capital was steadily dwindling, the USSR ultimately fell; but as
the American store was steadily renewed, the USA rose.
What is social capital? Different authors answer the question differ-
ently. But in my mind the term ‘social capital’ was coined by econ-
omists who were searching for ways to complete traditional,
materialist-based explanations of market cooperation and economic
development with more specifically social or contextual variables.
Traditionally, economists have discussed three ‘factors of pro-
duction’ — land, labour and capital — as the basic, preconditioning
elements of an efficient economy. Radical (Polanyi, 1944) and con-
servative authors (like Schultz, 1971) agree that a society is unlikely to
produce and develop if it does not also possess a high degree of social
cohesion. Becker (1975) subsumed all the old factors of production
under the term ‘tangible’ or ‘physical capital’ and contrasted it with a
new concept of ‘human capital’. This he defined broadly as the knowl-
edge and skills of human beings. During the 1980s, several authors
pointed out that ‘human capital’ thus defined did not really capture the
notion of social cohesion which the old economists had sought.
Hirschman (1984: 56), for example, elaborated on the economic im-
portance of the long-forgotten concept of ‘moral resources’, such as
trust — resources whose supply increases rather than decreases
through use, and which become depleted if not used. Coleman (1990)
preferred the wider concept of ‘social capital’, which he defined as
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an all-important ability to associate. This ability, Coleman argued,

depended on the degree to which individual citizens abided by com-
mon social norms and values. During the 1990s, this discussion has
been extended by for example Putnam (1993) and Fukuyama (1995),
both of whom experienced how critics’ early praise soon soured and,
in turn, compelled them (Fukuyama, 1999; Putnam, 2000) to refine
their reasoning.

On ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Power

‘Social capital’, then, is a fairly new concept. But it signifies an old

phenomenon. Westad agrees that the phenomenon is important and
deserves investigation. Yet he has some reservations about the way the
concept of ‘social capital’ captures it. He seems more partial to Joseph
Nye’s (1990) notion of ‘soft power’.
Westad finds it convincing that my hegemonic cases (Spain, the
United Provinces, the United Kingdom and the United States) all built
their greatness on something more than just ‘hard’ power; they built it
also on their values, their norms and the attractiveness of their ideas.
In addition, he finds merit in the ways I seek to uncover the inter-
connections between the ‘hard’ and the ‘soft’ power of these states.
Yet, he would have liked to see more systematic, comparable discus-
sions of other states — notably of the hegemons’ main challengers.
After all, he intimates, both France and the Soviet Union benefited
more ‘from the attractiveness of their ideas than from their military
prowess, especially during their formative periods as “new” states’.
I agree. And a discussion of France and Revolutionary Russia could
easily have been added to my analysis.
All hegemons have been founded in ‘revolutions’. Indeed, their
revolutionary past helps account for the tightness of their collective
identity, the progressive nature of their policies and for the general
attractiveness of their ideals. France and the Soviet Union, too,
emerged from revolutions, and their ideals, too, exerted a great appeal
on others — France in the 1790s, the Soviet Union during the second
quarter of the twentieth century. But why did France and the USSR
not become hegemons?
One answer flows naturally from the larger logic of my argument —
from the normative aspects of state power and from the nature of the
hegemonic condition: neither France nor the USSR was recognized by
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320 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

other powers as hegemons. Neither was seen as wanting to protect an

order which other great powers would find compatible with their own
interests. In fact, when push came to shove, the major statesmen of the
times agreed that the intentions of revolutionary France and revolu-
tionary Russia were to bury the established order rather than to praise
it.9 In short, other great powers did not consider the revolutionary
states legitimate enough to allow them to assume a leading position.
There are other answers to the question,10 but suffice it to say that
the more promising arguments concern state legitimacy and states-
men’s perceptions of legitimacy. It also concerns state interests, and
through interests it concerns state identities.11 Again, the answer falls
back on the normative aspects of political power.
Westad probes this point when he wonders about the relationship
between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power. To what degree must traditional ‘hard
power’ conditions be present for a power to become ‘great’, if not
dominant? To this question I can only repeat the answers which
Westad has already found evasive: ‘less than we think’12 and ‘to a
steadily diminishing degree’.

On the Mechanism of Soft Power

In contemporary politics, ‘hard’ power seems to matter less than it did

in the past, whereas ‘soft’ power seems to matter more. This is the
argument of Joseph Nye (1990), to which I agree, but I find support for
it in Fernand Braudel’s concept of ‘everyday life’.13 Deiniol Jones also
agrees with it, but he finds support in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of
‘everyday life’. And in explaining his reasoning Jones also suggests a
valuable way in which Westad’s plea can be met for a closer look at the
connections between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ power: It can be met by way of
Habermas’s theory of Communicative Action, because it precisely
seeks to (re)connect the (‘soft’) socio-cultural ‘lifeworld’ with the
(‘hard’) material ‘system’ of money and might.
On the surface, Habermas and Nye appear to have much in com-
mon. Both draw on culture and ideology in explaining social influence
and soft power.14 On a deeper level, however, there is a decisive dif-
ference between the two: Habermas seeks to encase his argument in a
solid social philosophy. Nye does not. Where Nye quietly accepts the
old assumption that language is a transparent medium through which
ideas and arguments can be smoothly communicated, Habermas does
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not. He disputes it and claims that language is a formative force in

human society. Far from being a neutral medium, language reproduces
the ideas, thoughts and reasonings of men and women in their every-
day life. Thus, the Lifeworld is not just transmitted by culture, it is also
conditioned by language.
The linguistic turn to which Jones invites us offers an interesting
promise of gaining more insight into the connection between ‘hard’
power and ‘soft’ power.

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made On

How far can Habermas bring us? Further than Nye can, I think. But
how much further?
Habermas observes that the modern state has fractured, and that
two realms have emerged in opposition to the modern state (the econ-
omy and civil society). He distinguishes between the logics of the
political and the economic systems (regulated respectively by admin-
istrative power and money) on the one hand and civil society on the
other. This view, however, is vulnerable to the criticism that civil
society is defined too narrowly. Habermas sees civil society as the
realm of [potential] freedom; it is from within civil society that the
impetus to change the political and economic systems might come. The
problem is that Habermas has placed the major resources of practical
politics — such as wealth, property and expertise — in the economy
rather than in civil society. Thus he has, almost by definition, deprived
civil society of the major resources which would enable it to defend
and expand the power of anti-systemic groups and thus affect real
social change.
Perhaps this criticism may be deflected, and the argument furthered,
by the concept of ‘social capital’. This concept forces us to see the
system — the political and economic institutions of society — as
embedded in a wider civil society that harbours social interaction
based on values and norms such as reliability, punctuality, honesty,
friendship, trust and the capacity for group commitment and non-
violent mutual recognition. That is to say, wherever economic and
political actors are active they must draw upon endogenous sources of
social capital.
To this must be added a point which I assume is Habermasian in
spirit, and which is central to my book’s analysis of contemporary
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322 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

international affairs: social capital is today a transnational phenom-

enon. A common set of values, attitudes, rules and laws now affect so
many nations and nationals that politicians and citizens in different
states are induced to behave in similar ways. This set of common values
and norms is Anglo-American in origin — it has evolved from two
waves of British hegemony, was adjusted by the American hegemony
after World War II, and has been reinforced by America’s post-Cold
War preponderance. A major consequence of this set of common
norms is that a zone of peace has evolved in the Western world. In tra-
ditional literature, this consequence has popularly been referred to as
the ‘Democratic Peace’. This is a problematic label.
Sørensen claims that I portray this popular thesis in simplistic ways.
To this charge I must plead guilty. I really only offer one argument
against it. However, the presence of this one, uncluttered argument
brings out sharply the major problem with the traditional theory of
the Democratic Peace, viz., it can easily be exploited by international
leaders. In fact, the claim that liberal democracy causes peace has been
repeatedly used by presidents (Reagan, Bush and Clinton) and prime
ministers (Thatcher) to justify expansionist Western policies. It was
most recently used during NATO’s bombing of Kosovo.
My explanation of the so-called ‘Democratic Peace’ does not lend
itself so easily to such exploitation. It is not so easily included in the
West’s arsenal of soft power because it encourages self-consciousness
about its own mechanisms. It claims that Western citizens are increas-
ingly informed by a shared set of norms, and abide by a shared set of
rules for social conduct that marks the ‘second American hegemony’.
It argues that this instils in most Western citizens and statesmen com-
mon subjective judgements about the liberal status of potential allies
or adversaries. It opens up for speculations about whether this set of
values, norms and rules is now so tightly embraced by Western coun-
tries that the West forms a common front against states which hold
other, more traditional codes of political conduct. Indeed, it asks
whether recent US-led interventions into Bosnia and Kosovo can be
understood as wars against states which explicitly violated the (hege-
monic) values which Western states now see as natural and universal.
It suggests that if these wars cannot be fully explained in traditional
terms, this does not mean that the West was driven simply by a dis-
interested duty to further humanitarian aims and universal values.
Rather, it may mean that these wars were not fought to defend what
we have, but to protect who we are.
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Notes

I am grateful to Iver B. Neumann, the editor of Cooperation and Conflict, for

offering me this opportunity to present my views; my thanks, also, to the three
reviewers who have forced me to reconsider my arguments.

1. Thus, discussions of imperial overstretch were apparent in Spain in the

1590s (as exemplified by Martin Gonzàlez de Cellorigo and the arbitristas),
in Holland in the 1660s (exemplified by de la Court and the free-trade
merchants), in England in the 1770s (exemplied, for example, by Adam
Smith and the free-trade liberal economists) and in the 1890s (exemplified
by Jeremy Bentham and the liberal idealists). Kennedy’s book, in other words,
can be read as a symptom of decline as well as an argument about its
causes. This point could, perhaps, have been made more explicit in my book:
the fact that there is a widespread discussion about overstretch is itself a
symptom of a hegemon in trouble. This may, in turn, shed some light on
the runaway success of Kennedy’s 1987 book and provide some historical
context to the trite claim of a puzzled press: that ‘this is a book whose time has
come’.
2. Late seventeenth-century Britain is a case which I think closely resembles the
case of late twentieth-century USA, as Sørensen correctly observes.
3. The United States allocated some 85% of its federal budget to military pur-
poses during World War II (or 39% of its GNP); yet the country enjoyed an
increase in its GNP of around 50% during the duration of the war. When
Kennedy in the late 1980s criticized the Reagan government for increasing
its military expenditures to dangerous levels, the US military expenditures
hovered around 26% of the federal budget (around 6% of GNP) — below the
levels of the prosperous 1950s (around 9% of GNP), 1960s (around 8% of
GNP) and 1970s (around 7% of GNP) — well below the 10% that Kennedy
had defined as a critical point.
4. Some of the implications are drawn by Richard Falk (2000), who also points
out their controversial nature.
5. In the book I try to narrow down ‘sometimes’ by identifying the specific con-
ditions under which military expenditures have generally productive effects. It
seems to me that such a key condition is present whenever the world economy
is on an upswing (as defined by long-wave theorists) and the new hegemon is
an innovator and a leader in a decisive technology cluster (as defined for
example by Schumpeter).
6. It is indicated in my book that ‘new’ can be understood in two ways: as rising
out of a relatively recent social upheaval (e.g. a ‘revolution’ of some kind),
attended by a new-found collective identity, and as involving ‘new’ means of
production, characterized by ‘clusters of innovation’ (in terms argued by
Schumpeterian economists).
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324 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

7. Since all my cases are relatively open, Atlantic, sea-faring trading states, I am
in no position to draw conclusions about the social consequences of military
expenditures in closed states with command economies. However, my hunch
is that the overstretch argument applies well in these cases — as indicated for
example by the case of the USSR.
8. But if military investments, under specified circumstances, represent capital
investments which strengthen the industrial infrastructures of a country, then
it is conceivable that this country could not afford to build good hospitals and
competitive schools without first establishing the economic infrastructure
which makes battleships possible. In this respect, early sixteenth-century Spain
is also a case in point. When the Spanish king invested heavily in a country-
wide system of shipyards, he did this for military purposes; it turned out, how-
ever, that these investments benefited Spanish shipbuilding generally, and had
important and lasting industrial spinoffs for civil society. A similar argument is
set out in Yergin (1977), who analyses the buildup of what he calls ‘the
national security state’ in the United States in terms of what he calls ‘its
Keynesian effects’. Obviously, military investment is hardly the most efficient
way to prime a country’s economic pump. However, to insist that military
expenditure is always wasteful is too simple a notion with which to approach
modern issues of war, wealth, peace and power.
9. My book notes how one of the curious properties of the hegemonic con-
dition is that it suspends the balance-of-power principle. According to realist
theories — whether they be of neo or of more orthodox persuasions — a
concentration of power in the hands of one state will produce an alliance
of other states bent on counterbalancing its pre-eminence. ‘Hegemony’ is a
constellation in which a concentration of power does not cause a signifi-
cant counterbalancing alliance to form. Indeed, rather than triggering a
reaction of ‘balancing’, the hegemonic condition involves a reaction of ‘band-
wagoning’, the reason for which is found primarily in the realm of norms and
ideas.
10. Efforts to answer them could well have been included in this book. But the
book would have been thicker as a consequence. For such an elaboration to be
done well, it would need a more complex design for comparative analysis. I
have used the fairly simple methods of agreement, of difference and of con-
comitant variation, with a little counterfactual method tossed in to clarify the
odd theoretical point. If Westad’s proposal were to be taken seriously it would
require an addition of the method of indirect difference. There is nothing to
prevent this from being done. In fact, a more systematic comparison along
these lines between the four hegemons on the one hand and the two revolu-
tionary challengers, France and the USSR, on the other, might greatly enrich
the argument.
11. Which is indicated in my book with states being defined largely in terms of the
historical evolution of their collective identities …
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12. Samuel Huntington (1997: 92) explains that ‘soft power is power only when
it rests on a foundation of hard power’. This, I think, robs the concept of its
usefulness. (And if Huntington actually believed this, he had no business
inflicting upon the world that big fat book on clashing civilizations …).
13. I find that Braudel offers a better supporting argument than Nye (1990: 188),
who simply claims that ‘various trends today are making cooptive behavior
and soft power resources more important’. Braudel tries to specify the kind of
trends we may be looking at.
14. Habermas (1987: 124 ff.) sees the Lifeworld in terms of culture and ‘patterns
of interpretation, valuation and expression’. Nye (1990: 188 ff.) sees ‘soft’
power as a product of culture, ideology and international instititions.

References

Becker, Gary S. (1975) Human Capital. New York: National Bureau of Economic
Research.
Coleman, James (1990) Foundations of Social Action. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
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Falk, Richard (2000) Book Review, Millennium 29 (1): 234–7.
Fukuyama, Frances (1995) Trust. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Fukuyama, Frances (1999) The Great Disruption. London: Profile Books.
Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hirschman, A. O. (1984) ‘Against Parsimony: Three Easy Ways of Complicating
Some Categories of Economic Discourse’, American Economic Review,
Proceedings, 74.
Huntington, Samuel P. (1997) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order. London: Simon & Schuster.
Kennedy, Paul (1987) The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Random
House.
Knutsen, Torbjørn L. (1999) The Rise and Fall of World Orders. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Moravcsik, Andrew (1996) ‘Federalism and Peace: A Structural Liberal
Perspective’, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen 3(1): 123–32.
Nye, Joseph S. (1990) Bound to Lead. New York: Basic Books.
Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation. New York: Rinehart and Co., Inc.
Putnam, Robert (1993) Making Democracy Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Putnam, Robert (2000) Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Schultz, Theodore W. (1971) Investment in Human Capital. New York: Free Press.
Yergin, Daniel (1977) Shattered Peace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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326 cooperation and conflict 36(3)

Torbjørn L. Knutsen is Professor at the University

of Trondheim (NTNU), Norway. He has also pub-
lished A History of International Relations Theory
(Manchester University Press, 1997).

Address: Department of Sociology and Politics, Uni-

versity of Trondheim (NTNU), NO-7055 Dragvoll,
Norway. [email: torbjorn.knutsen@svt.ntnu.no]