Strategies of Suppression: Great Powers and Attempts to Forestall Power Shifts

• In Event: Power Shifts: Strategies, Responses, and Consequences for International Politics

Abstract

When and why are rising states able to enter the great power ranks? Over the last several decades, a widespread research program has sought to examine how existing great powers can “manage” the rise of new great powers in more or less peaceful form. Lost in this discussion, however, is recognition that existing great powers face incentives not only to manage the rise of other capable actors, but equally to suppress the emergence of prospective rivals – far in advance of their emergence even as a “rising state” – in the first place. The latter behavior, for instance, drove French, Austrian, and Russian efforts for decades in forestalling the rise of a unified state in “the Germanies” before the 1860s-1870s, and influenced American efforts to block the European Union’s security consolidation after the Cold War. Suppression, in short, can block power shifts from even occurring. Accordingly, this paper lays out the logic of great power suppression, the means by which states engage in suppression, the conditions under suppression occurs, and uses evidence from modern great power politics to test the argument. The results carry implications for IR theory, historiography, and contemporary policy debates.

Author

• Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson, Boston University