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This chapter analyzes the institutional setting of the United Nations. The underlying assumption is that the Security Council can best be described as a Janus-faced structure of both an open system and a closed shop. This notion reflects the Council’s sensitivity towards external change, while the restrictive provisions of the Charter constrain the possibilities of formal adaptation. The chapter examines: (1) the role of great powers in international organizations, (2) the role and function of the Security Council according to the Charter of the United Nations, and (3) the ‘constitutional practice’ of the Council, elaborating on certain variants of the collective security scheme as envisioned in the Charter.

This chapter examines the question of what triggered the emergence of informal groups of states in the form of the advisory committees in the 1950s, and argues that their establishment has to be seen against the background of great power tensions in the Security Council. The early stages of UN peacekeeping saw a shift of governance from the Security Council to the Secretary-General and the General Assembly, which fostered the emergence of informal ad hoc groupings of states. The formation of advisory committees reflected the desire of the Secretary-General to strengthen his voice vis-á-vis the Security Council. When the lack of unanimity of the permanent members prevented the Council from assuming its responsibilities, the General Assembly took charge by recommending collective measures. However, when the Security Council was able to act, its resolutions and mandates entrusted to the Secretary-General often reflected a political compromise based on the lowest common denominator among its members. The workings of the two advisory committees established in the context of crises at the Suez Canal (1956-67) and in the Congo (1960-4) illustrate these points further.

The League/Locarno system provided the basis for European stability for the rest of the 1920s. Useful parallels can be drawn with the policy of containment of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. Up until the onset of the Great Depression the underlying problems of reconciling the French demand for security with the German demand for equality were successfully managed. Chamberlain's policy was one of adjusting relations between the great powers. This was in line with official British ideas of how the League should work, but disappointed those who wanted it to reflect ‘world public opinion’ and the views of the minor powers.

This chapter explores the forty-five-year period after the Crimean War when great powers of all stripes fell into an intense competition for formal political control over third-party territories. The competition greatly increased the level of tension in the system, even if most of the struggles stopped short of a direct great power war. Most significantly, of course, France, Britain, and Germany dove into a scramble for colonial territory after 1880 that drew most of Africa and large parts of Asia into the European orbit. On two particular occasions—the Austro-Prussian “Seven Weeks' War” of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—large-scale war between two great powers did break out. The purpose of the chapter is to uncover to what extent and in what manner economic interdependence shaped the struggles and wars of this almost-half-century period.

This chapter establishes the key working concept of hegemony: its adaptation of English School thinking to present it as a possible institution of international society. It reviews the unsystematic writings of Hedley Bull, Adam Watson, and Martin Wight on hegemony. It then tries to excavate a coherent concept from their other writings, mainly on the balance of power and the role of the great powers. Key to this approach is its acceptance of the role of recognition in the status of the great powers. By analogy, it suggests that hegemony might become a recognized status in conditions of primacy. The English School approach abounds in paradoxes, such as its treatment of war. An English School theory of hegemony is no more paradoxical because it views hegemony both as a threat to international society, but also as a potential instrument for securing its own ends.

Hegemony is normally considered to take a singular form. However, historians of the Concert of Europe have made the case for regarding it as a collective hegemony, on the part of the great powers in combination. This argument is made in relation to their role in the post-Napoleonic settlement at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (and the admission of France), and subsequently to the management of the Eastern question at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The distinctive characteristic of a collective hegemony is that it possesses two axes of legitimacy. The first is the vertical one between the great powers combined, and the remainder of international society. In addition, a horizontal axis operates amongst the great powers themselves, and this serves as an extra legitimacy constituency. A collective hegemony may be more readily entrusted by the lesser states, because of the equilibrium built into the horizontal axis. However, its provision of public goods may not be as effective, because of the compromises that this necessarily entails.

This chapter explores the relative importance of economic interdependence and trade expectations on the policies of the European great powers from 1790 to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853–54. Since there are many cases where commerce had little or nothing to do with the outbreak of crisis or war, this chapter covers such cases briefly, highlighting their basic causes only to provide a complete survey of the origins of modern conflict and avoid charges of selection bias. Yet as the chapter shows, economic interdependence and trade expectations played a far more significant role in the dynamics of nineteenth-century geopolitics than has been previously recognized.

This chapter explores the origins of three of the four most important wars of the first half of the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, World War I, and World War II in Europe. These three wars had more than just a chronological connection to one another. The Russo-Japanese War helped solidify the diplomatic and economic alignments of the great powers in the decade before 1914, while the disaster of the First World War clearly set the stage for the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of yet another global war a generation later. This chapter focuses on providing a fairly comprehensive account of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War, confining the discussion of the world wars to the economic determinants of those conflicts.

This introductory chapter lays out the basic dimensions of the trade expectations approach and how it can be applied to the history of the modern great power system since 1790. The trade expectations theory fuses the liberal insight that commercial ties can give actors a large material incentive to avoid war with the realist insight that such ties also create vulnerabilities that can push leaders into war. Liberals are right to assert that trade and investment flows can raise the opportunity cost of going to war, since war leads to a severing of valuable commerce. But realists are also correct in their claim that commercial ties make states vulnerable to cutoffs. To determine whether the liberal prediction or realist prediction will prevail, the chapter then introduces an additional causal variable—namely, a state's expectations of the future trade and investment environment.

This chapter considers the origins and conduct of the 1826–8 Russo-Persian War. While the actions of certain individuals were responsible for the outbreak of war, more profound causes were also at work. These were to be found in recent international history and the sudden entrance of Persia into the orbit of Great Power diplomacy. The discussion considers the Russo-Persian relations under Ermolov from 1817 to 1823; the origins of the 1826–8 Russo-Persian war; the campaign of 1826; the developments over the winter of 1826–7 and the controversy between Ermolov, Paskevich and Diebitsch; the occupation and liberation of Armenia; the 1828 Treaty of Turkomanchai; the conclusion on the war of 1826–8; and the Great Game in Asia.

The Introduction explains the tension between resistance to a concentration of power and the normal role of the great powers. How is international order then to be managed in a sole great-power world? It then introduces the distinction between primacy and hegemony, with the latter's emphasis on legitimacy. It sets out the book's revisionist approach to the historical work on British and American hegemony, and explains how this will set up a new typology of forms of hegemony.

This chapter examines the Russian foreign policy discourse. For the purposes of discussion, the leading schools of thought and policy practitioners in Russia in 1992–2011 are categorized into three groups: pro-Western Liberals; Great Power balancers; and Nationalists. It is shown that the main magnetic pole in Russian debates over identity and foreign policy orientation is the status of the Western democratic market development model as well as the role of the United States and the West more broadly in international relations. The three categories of pro-Western Liberals, Great Power balancers, and Nationalists can be approximately correlated to pro-Western, neutral toward the West, and anti-Western. The main axis of debate revolves around the first two categories of liberals and Great Power balancers. The most significant factor with the potential to push the needle in one direction or the other is the world economy and how it affects the oil price. The lower price environment favors liberals who call for deeper structural reform of the Russian economic and political system to increase efficiency, while the higher price environment discourages reform and fuels greater assertiveness.

This chapter discusses the centres of Anglo-Russian relations in the first two years of Nicholas II's reign. The first was Sino-Japanese War; the second was the Armenian crisis. The Sino-Japanese War was one of the first manifestations of the effect of the emergence of Germany and Japan as Great Powers had on Anglo-Russian relations. The second centre of Anglo-Russian relations — Armenia — was a traditional one and representative of the fact that the British and Russian imperial interests were worldwide and often in competition with each other.

This chapter considers various accounts offered for the challenges confronting liberal international order today, and finds them wanting. It is argued that the most militarily aggressive and revisionist states over the thirty years since the end of the Cold War have been the status quo states of the West, not ‘emerging powers’ such as Russia or China. It is Western states that have repeatedly used force to reshape the international order as well as adapting international organisation to suit their new humanitarian outlook. This cuts against the expectations of International Relations theory regarding the origin of revisionist challenges to international order, and requires explanation. As this new form of liberal revisionism arises from the status quo states rather than outside them, this type of behaviour is called ‘inverted revisionism’.

Chapter 4 examines the strategic evolution and dilemmas of Russia, the region's former imperial power and continued privileged partner. The chapter analyzes Moscow's broad range of levers of influence, and traces its efforts to lock in its dominance by creating new regional organizations such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC). At the same time, Moscow's regional policies and tactics have remained unstable and reactive, subject to Russia's self-image as a great power and its prevailing relations with the United States and China. An initial period of close U.S.-Russian cooperation immediately following 9/11 soon after deteriorated into a more competitive dynamic, fueled by the Western-backed Color Revolutions and Russian perceptions that U.S. military bases were becoming permanent. Despite its numerous instruments of influence, Moscow still must confront the political challenges of the region's intraregional tensions, the desire of states to pursue multidirectional foreign policies, and a rising China.

Empires are gained by force and need to be maintained by force, and it was ever so true with the British Empire. The term ‘Imperial defence’ gained a specific meaning in the last decades of the 19th century when it came to be applied to an integrated system of defence for the home islands, the overseas territories whether formally or informally held, and the commercial and strategic links between them. This chapter is concerned principally with the historiography of the military and the schemes and strategies devised between the 1880s and 1960s to defend an Empire that was often overstretched, under threat from foreign powers, and where alien British rule was increasingly challenged by unwilling subjects. In the late 19th century, ideas on Imperial defence were discussed in service and other journals intended to influence ministers and service chiefs. The debate over Imperial defence was included in most of the general histories of British Imperial relations of the time, often by enthusiastic proponents of colonial ideology. The debate over Britain’s decline from Imperial Great Power status seems set to continue as part of the broader debate on decolonization.

This book examines how leading states—great powers that occupy a unique position thanks to the sources of their wealth, the types of armed forces they build, and the responsibilities they assume—respond to power shifts in peripheral regions. More specifically, it considers how a leading state reacts when a rising power in the periphery challenges the prevailing regional order. Drawing on a theory that borrows insights from the two main schools of realist theory, balance-of-power realism and preponderance-of-power realism, the book explains why a leading state has accommodated some rising regional powers (RRPs) but opposed others, especially when local power shifts have led to war. It also employs qualitative case studies to elucidate how leading states in different historical eras have responded to RRPs across the globe, with particular emphasis on Great Britain and the United States.

Britain emerged from the First World War with her overall position in the East Asian structure of power diminished, but with the institutions of formal and informal empire in China unharmed. During 1929–30, two of the most profitable public utility companies in Shanghai passed from British into American ownership. Between 1911 and 1913, the Great Powers, acting in relative harmony, had seized the chance of a collapsing ancien régime to humiliate China in unprecedented ways. Until 1926, the British saw no need for a major revision of their China policy. The decentralization or even disappearance of state authority in China jeopardized the foundations of informal empire. Chinese nationalism had no coherent doctrine and no unified political movement. There were reasons to doubt the dogma that British well-being in China depended on extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction. Britain's Imperial retreat from China went through a number of stages. The temporary rescue of a late Imperial British position in China was mainly a result of the split of the Chinese revolutionary movement in 1927 and of the victory of moderate élite nationalism over radical mass nationalism.

Jordan's leaders considered Egypt an irresponsible ally in their intervention in Palestine. They found particularly reprehensible the refusal of Cairo to renew the first ceasefire, which expired in early July 1948. Britain, the United States, and the United Nations Security Council had all strongly urged the belligerents to prolong the truce; and Israel agreed to an extension. Thus, the Egyptian refusal both tested the goodwill of the Great Powers and ushered in a disastrous round of fighting. At the decisive meeting of the Arab League, Amman argued against resuming the war, pointing out that the Arab side was weaker than the Israelis and low on ammunition. Cairo, however, argued on the basis of unassailable nationalist principles that the battle must be resumed. In response to the Jordanian complaints regarding the weakness of the coalition and the lack of supplies, the proponents of war explained that, in light of their deficiencies, the Arab armies would simply have to remain on the defensive. The Jordanian prime minister, Tawfiq Abu'l-Huda, felt powerless to defy his allies.

This chapter elaborates on the core argument. After advancing a typology of rising state strategies, the chapter develops a theory of rising state strategy toward declining great powers. The theory – termed “predation theory” – proposes that rising state strategy depends on (1) whether a rising state can use a declining state to oppose other great powers, and (2) the military threat a declining state poses. All things being equal, the more a rising state can use a decliner against other great powers and the less threatening the declining state, the more likely a rising state is to support; conversely, the less useful a declining state in opposing other great powers, the more likely a rising state is to prey. The chapter concludes by discussing research design and justifying the cases examined in the rest of the volume.