The meaningless middle powers

The term “middle power” is meaningless today - we desperately need a new, more meaningful vocabulary

The term “middle power” is meaningless today. It’s most often used to describe states within a broad band of nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ranking from 10 to 60. Sure around the edges there are some states that cross over the threshold now and again, and anomalies that sit below but claim to be above, and vice versa. The one certainty is, not everyone agrees that all of those states sitting at 10-60 should be called middle powers. 

Academics are the weather vane to what constitutes a middle power.. 

It started with a sprinkle. A sense of uncertainty amongst a small number of academics studying the category in the early 2000s. They held a vague sense that some states fitting into the category were just a little different from those they’d studied ten years earlier. An easy fix? Split the category in two and voilà, emerging middle powers for those that don’t fit so well, and traditional middle powers, for the ones we’ve always liked.

Then it started to pour. Academics left, right, and center rushed to find new ways to explain the muddled category. Constructivism, role theory, postmodernism, practice, imagination, and more. With it came new ways to describe them: awkward powers, pivotal powers, entrepreneurial states, regional states, neo-middle powers, creative powers, network powers, and more. Before you knew it, every academic had their finger in the holes, while the dam burst around them.

Then there was the flood. Any state could be labeled a middle power - from Albania to Zimbabwe. Even those that seem most unlikely, including China, Russia, Germany, and Japan. The sole country to escape the label of course, was the United States - because where would it be in the middle of, after all? As wryly noted by one commentator writing early in the flood, “everyone’s a middle power now”. 

The increasingly repetitive attempts to discover new ways to describe the 10-60 category demonstrate that academics are not fully satisfied with the term. Middle power definitions are weaker today than they were at the very beginning. Most know that not everyone is a middle power. 

The modern middle power was a term devised to capture a distinct category of states. It emerged in the post-WW2 period alongside a number of other new terms, such as super-power, non-aligned power, and third-world power. Importantly, each of these terms have been discarded. The term middle power conceptualized was a distinct category for a specific period in history - a neologism. The term no longer describes anything in our environment - but even worse, because of its historical usage the term often imputes incorrect information. 

We inherit rich traditions of middle power scholarship that inherently assumed the category of states held specific qualities. An entire wave of middle power scholarship bought into the idea so deeply that they began to define middle powers as states that behave like middle powers. 

The academic discipline of international relations desperately needs new ways of talking about the 10-60 states. 

For politicians, the best labels are those that frame the subject to suit political objectives. For journalists, the best definitions are those that are easily understood by the audience. Neither of them need to, nor want to give up the term middle power. Diplomats are even worse - in the case of the term middle power, ambiguity has always trumped accuracy. But academics should be held to a much higher standard.

My preference is to utilize the term primary, secondary, and tertiary states or entities. Simple, ahistorical, and meaningful - essentially a ranking of entities and their impact on the system which they inhabit. We have primary predators, languages, and  caregivers, which have a greater impact on the ecosystem, communication, and social communities. It’s scientific! But as one diplomat in Korea told me, it’ll never catch on - who wants to be secondary to your neighbor’s primary.

Without clarity in nomenclature, academics writing on the subject are destined to commence every paper by defining the term middle power, and then have Reviewer 1, 2, and 3 ask them to redefine it - each in a different way. 

I’m hoping that someone, anyone, comes up with a better way to define the category. Now what label could accurately describe the category of states sitting at 10-60?

Media: Wikimedia Commons