In Conversation with Dr Rohan Mukherjee
12 July 2023
9DASHLINE recently sat down with Dr Rohan Mukherjee to talk about his fascinating book Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions.
Using original and robust archival evidence, the book offers the first comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena, showing that the future of the contemporary international order depends on the ability of international institutions to address the status ambitions of rising powers such as China and India.
Your book introduces a new theory — Institutional Status Theory (IST) — to explain why a rising power might accept or challenge the international order. You argue that a rising power’s aspirations are not just related to its security and economic interests but also its desired status as a major power. How can the concept of status help us better understand the trajectory of rising powers?
RM: Existing research has shown that social groups of all shapes and sizes — including states — care about status, or their position in a hierarchy. They seek to improve their status in the eyes of ‘significant others’, or audiences they view as relevant to their status aspirations. The drive for status is a basic social need, even if the specific symbols and trappings of status change across historical eras.
Rising powers are a particularly important group of states that seek global status and can do something about it. As they rise, they are recognised as potentially significant global actors by other states, and this makes them desire even more status. Their rising capabilities also enable them to actively pursue status through diplomacy, war, international institutions, and other means.
Status can help explain seemingly counterintuitive behaviours of rising powers. Traditional approaches to global power shifts suggest that as they rise, these powers become quickly dissatisfied with the international order — the settled rules and institutions that regulate international relations. They begin resisting the order with increasing force until they come into direct conflict with dominant great powers. Scholars such as Graham Allison thus argue that dominant and rising powers are ‘destined for war’.
This view leaves an important question unanswered: why would a rising power be dissatisfied with an order which is benefiting it more than everyone else? It is, after all, growing more powerful relative to other states over time. The answer lies in the fact that rising powers seek equal status with the great powers that dominate the international order. They are frequently dissatisfied because great powers typically do not recognise rising powers as their equals. At the same time, conflict is not inevitable because great powers have on occasion recognised the status claims of rising powers, such as Britain recognising the United States in the late 19th century.
A status-based approach shows that states strive for more than just security or survival and that rising powers are often willing to sacrifice security or material well-being to improve or maintain their position in the global hierarchy.
A rising power’s status, you write, can be conferred or denied by the international order, producing incentives for cooperative or conflictual behaviour. China is often said to be the biggest challenger to the existing international order, but it is at the same time highly involved and invested in its core institutions. Is the current international order incentivising Beijing to challenge it, or can China gain more status by cooperation?
RM: While past international orders almost exclusively focused on preventing and regulating military conflict, the post-1945 US-led international order operated in several areas such as trade, finance, economic development, environment, and human rights. After the Cold War, this order went global, encompassing more states, non-state actors, and issues than ever before.
There is no singular way in which China is cooperating with or challenging this diverse and complex order. Rather, China’s approach varies across issues according to factors that other scholars have noted, such as the extent of outside options available, the domestic salience of an issue, and, of course, China’s material interests. While these explanations are valid, they tend to ignore the role of China’s status ambitions.
China’s situation is interesting because it has been a rising power for some decades and is now arguably a ‘risen’ power, or a rising great power. Put simply, China is on the threshold of projecting power and wielding influence globally, just as the US does. Yet, there is significant disagreement among observers as to whether China is still a rising power or has already become a great power. Indeed, Chinese leaders and analysts still see the US as the sole global hegemon. And this is precisely the point: despite its incredible rise, China’s status vis-à-vis the great power club remains unsettled.
All else being equal, China is more likely to cooperate with parts of the international order that treat it as an equal of the Western great powers, such as the UN Security Council and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) where China is part of the elite group of great powers, the UN General Assembly (which operates on a ‘one country, one vote’ principle), and the G20 where China’s economic weight makes it a highly valued member.
By contrast, China has sought reform of institutions that allow only partial equality. Among these are the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The rules and procedures of these institutions do treat China as a high-status actor but still tend to favour the US and its great power allies. Finally, there are areas such as the law of the sea and human rights that deny Beijing equal treatment from its perspective. In these areas, China has sought to delegitimise and undermine dominant frameworks.
Ultimately, some parts of the order incentivise China to cooperate, and other parts do not. The challenge from the perspective of other stakeholders is to develop workable bargains with Beijing that can increase China’s status in relevant places in exchange for cooperation that upholds and maintains the order and its institutions in good working condition.
You explain that in the past, India’s challenge to the international (nuclear) order was driven by its desire to be recognised as a major power. Given its relative material weakness and on the back of its nonviolent freedom struggle, India has for decades sought to position itself as a moral leader and criticised the international order as unfair. How do you view India’s stance towards the present international order? What kind of leadership is India trying to provide today?
RM: India has moved on from being what C. Raja Mohan calls ‘the trade union leader of the Third World’. Since the end of the Cold War, India has shied away from moralising about the international order and inequalities between the West and non-West, developed and developing world, Global North and South, etc. Yet, India’s critique of the order’s unfairness has remained intact and is centred on the double standards of the great powers.
At the same time, India is now less careful to explicitly include the rest of the non-West or Global South as claimants. In contrast to Cold War references to Afro-Asian solidarity and the Third World, India now refers broadly to the need for ‘reformed multilateralism’ to better represent the reality of today’s world where there are many more sovereign states than at the international order’s point of origin in 1945.
India’s position has changed because as a much more powerful country today, India does not need to depend on other countries to stake its claim to global leadership and recognition. India’s leaders openly profess their desire to play the role of a ‘leading power’ in global affairs. Leading powers tend to maintain double standards and frequently trample on the interests of lesser powers for the sake of maintaining international order. India thus seeks the same privileges as the great power club and this does not leave much room for solidarity with other excluded countries.
India’s leaders have also professed a willingness to shoulder global responsibilities as part of their bid for membership in the great power club. This is more visible in some parts of the order than in others. On climate change, for example, India has shown diplomatic leadership in convening and speaking on behalf of island states and other nations on the frontlines of the global crisis. Similarly, in peacekeeping, India has historically been a major contributor and has sought greater leadership in defining the mandates and contours of UN missions.
In general, leadership means paying the costs of maintaining international order both in terms of financing global governance and the reputational cost of getting things wrong, which great powers frequently do. India does not yet seem to have the resources or willingness to pay these costs. New Delhi is often content to criticise the order without doing much to support it.
Of course, there is little rationale in supporting an order over which one does not have any ownership, and this is the crux of the problem regarding India and other rising powers today. The great powers expect them to support the order to ‘earn’ membership of the club, but they are unwilling to do so until the club recognises them as equals. Both positions are rational, but also not conducive to effective global governance.
What are some of the lessons of Japan's rise in the Washington System for Tokyo’s contemporary tentative remilitarisation?
RM: When the great powers treated Japan as an equal in the Washington Conference of 1921-22, Japan made significant military and economic concessions to maintain this status. However, the US subsequently passed a law adding Japan to the group of Asian countries from which immigration to the US was banned. This dealt a major blow to Japan’s status, leading Japanese elites to realise that they would never have a place of eminence in a racist international order. They eventually broke with the Washington System, setting off a chain of events that culminated in war.
These dynamics are largely absent today because Japan is not a rising power. Its relative power on the global scale has been gradually declining since the end of the Cold War. Japan’s drive for status is therefore not as strong as that of China and India who are ascendant. Tokyo is mostly willing to accept a subordinate position to Washington. In fact, this closeness to the US has partly enabled Japan to secure high status for itself within the international order. Japan is a member of the G7, has historically controlled the Asian Development Bank, and wields considerable influence at the UN. Japan can be described as a preferred partner of the Western great power club and therefore quite supportive of the current order in which it enjoys significant privileges.
If Japan’s economy started growing at a substantial and sustained rate, it might change its approach and begin demanding an even greater role within the international order. At that point, the US would likely be willing to create room for Japan in the club, given Tokyo’s strong support for the US and the international order writ large. We already see this in the United States’ strong support for a permanent seat for Japan on the UN Security Council. Therefore, the conflict-prone dynamics of the interwar period are unlikely to emerge again in Japan’s case.
As for remilitarisation, it should be noted that even if it is not a major military actor globally, Japan remains a formidable regional power with a large economy and a technically sophisticated military. In this sense, Japan is not ‘remilitarising’ per se — the ingredients of military power are built and already operational — but rather adopting a more assertive force posture over time. It is perhaps this aspect of Japan’s security policy that worries neighbouring countries such as Korea and China, though one must keep in mind that Japan’s emergence as a more ambitious security actor in the 21st century is largely a function of China’s rising power and assertiveness in Northeast Asia.
Beyond rising powers, what are status strategies of falling/stagnating powers?
RM: This is an important area for more systematic research across cases. For now, there is a substantial body of work on Russia showing what decline can do to the national preference for status. As we might expect, declining power produces anxiety about a country’s status in the international order and can convince a country’s leaders that they need to act like a high-status power to demonstrate their continued claim to that status.
In the context of power shifts, where there are dominant and rising powers, Tudor Onea has shown that dominant powers worry about losing their status and consequently try to block the path of rising powers, which ends up producing conflict. This might explain the more general finding that during power transitions, it is more often a dominant power that initiates a major war with a rising power. Indeed, rising powers have time on their side and should in theory not be in a hurry to pick fights. Dominant powers, however, face a closing window of opportunity to avoid losing their privileged position in the international order.
Relatively unexplored in all of this is the possibility of accommodation as a status-preserving strategy on the part of a dominant power. While various scholars have shown how great powers reduce their geopolitical footprint as they decline, few have looked at the causes and consequences of a great power accommodating the rise of a new power by recognising its status ambitions and creating space for it in the top ranks of the international order. Britain began doing so for the US from the early 1870s onward, essentially agreeing to resolve a set of deep differences that had festered for decades between the two countries and came to a head when Britain aided the Confederacy in the American Civil War. I am now working on a paper that investigates the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which settled many of these controversies between the two countries. I hope to have some answers soon.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr Rohan Mukherjee is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.