The meaningless middle powers

Academics are the weather vane to what constitutes a middle power

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 …