Economic Power: Primus Inter Pares?

• In Event: Change, Stability, and Hierarchy in International Orders

Abstract

Power remains one of the crucial and most studied concepts in International Relations. In recent decades a prevailing notion became present in the literature explaining that the economic power is the most fundamental type of power—a sort of a prerequisite for all other forms of power (military, political, cultural). Yet, such an assumption has never been properly tested. Therefore, to test this assumption, the paper introduces a new time-series method to Political Science—Global Vector Auto-regression. The method enables the researcher to perform big-n and big-t hypotheses tests. In this paper, we test if economic power is a prerequisite for military power. We use four variables from National Material Capabilities from the Correlates of War dataset, where two are used as proxies for measuring economic power, and two are used to measure military power. We run the analysis for two separate time-spends: first from 1871 through 1913, and from 1945 through today. Our inquiry suggests that the role of the economy has changed through history. Namely, in 19th century it was the military power that drove (Granger-caused) the economy; yet, since 1945 the roles are reversed. Finally, we identify future research projects how to test also the relations between the remaining two power factors (political and cultural).

Authors

• Igor Kovac, University of Cincinnati

• Hector Bahamonde, University of Turku