What if middle powers don't exist?
What if middle powers don’t actually exist? Not in the sense that there are no states between great and small powers, but because it's simply not a meaningful analytical category.
What if middle powers don’t actually exist? Not in the sense that there are no states between great and small powers, because clearly there are, but perhaps “middle power” is just simply not a meaningful analytical category.
States can be compared to biological entities, evolving in response to changes in their external environment. The way biologists classify living things offers a useful lesson for international relations.
No biologist would group whales, sharks and dolphins together simply because they all swim. No biologist would group bats, sparrows, bees and flying squirrels simply because they fly. In both cases, the similarities are real, but they tell us surprisingly little about how those organisms evolved or why they behave as they do. Their evolutionary histories, physiology and behavior are completely different.
Did international relations scholars make this mistake? Think about what we use to define middle powers.
One school defines middle powers by capacity. Countries that possess moderate economic and military resources—Australia, South Korea, Canada, Turkey, Indonesia and Iran, among many others—are grouped together because they occupy a similar position in the international hierarchy.
But why should similar capacity produce similar foreign policy? Australia is a maritime ally of the United States. Iran has spent decades resisting it. Switzerland remains neutral. Turkey balances between East and West. Indonesia prizes strategic autonomy. South Korea lives under the shadow of North Korea while remaining deeply embedded in the American alliance system. Their capabilities may be comparable. Their strategic circumstances are not.
Another school defines middle powers by function. States that bridge coalitions, mediate disputes or contribute to regional stability are treated as belonging to the same family. Again, why?
The functions performed by Singapore in Southeast Asia bear little resemblance to those performed by Türkiye in the Black Sea, Brazil in South America or Iran in the Persian Gulf. Similar functions emerge from entirely different historical experiences, regional environments and security challenges. Calling them all middle powers tells us remarkably little about why they behave as they do.
The behavioral school takes this one step further. Middle powers are supposedly countries that support multilateralism, practice good international citizenship and pursue coalition-building. This definition has always suffered from circular logic. States are middle powers because they behave like middle powers. And how do we know they behave like middle powers? Because they are middle powers. It is difficult to think of another concept in international relations that has been defined so thoroughly by its own conclusion.
The result has been decades spent arguing about membership rather than explanation. Does India qualify? Does Saudi Arabia? Does Iran? Does Vietnam? Every new geopolitical development simply produces another debate over whether a country should be admitted to the club. Perhaps, just perhaps, there should not be a category.
Humans are natural classifiers. Faced with an overwhelmingly complex world, the brain instinctively sorts people, objects and ideas into categories that make information easier to process, remember and communicate. Without this mental shortcut, every new encounter would have to be understood from first principles.
Categorization allows us to recognize patterns, make predictions and navigate uncertainty. But it also comes with a danger: categories can become so familiar that we mistake them for reality itself, overlooking important differences between the things we have grouped together.
This danger exists in international relations. States don’t make foreign policy because they belong to a particular class of countries. They respond to the strategic environments in which they exist. Geography, historical experience, culture, economic structure, domestic politics and immediate security threats exert a far greater influence on decision-making.
Two states separated by geography and history but sharing the same “middle power” label may have remarkably little in common, while states placed in entirely different categories may behave in strikingly similar ways because they share cultural and historical similarities, or because they confront comparable strategic circumstances.
Middle powers, often share only one characteristic—one that which is selected by the international relations scholar, often without the area studies scholar’s insight into what drives the nation’s decision-making.
This raises an uncomfortable possibility. The middle power category as it currently is, explains nothing!
Rather than asking whether Australia and Iran are both middle powers, we should ask whether their diplomats actually work in similar ways: whether they cultivate the same networks, use the same negotiating habits, rely on the same institutional channels, write the same kinds of cables, frame problems in the same language, and pursue influence through similar day-to-day practices. Clearly they do not.
Yet, if we contrast Australia with Sweden, similarities in diplomatic practice begin to emerge. Their diplomats often operate within a shared diplomatic culture: careful language, consensus-building, multilateral negotiation, committee work, briefing papers, coalition management and a preference for influence through procedure rather than coercion. These similarities matter, but they do not necessarily prove that both are “middle powers.” They may simply show that diplomats trained in broadly similar professional traditions often work in broadly similar ways.
In other words, scholars have taken a convenient label used by diplomats to secure greater influence in the mid-1940s and twisted it into analytical concept for the sole purpose of impressing other academics—and seventy years later it still says nothing about the states themselves!
The middle power concept is at a defining moment. Scholars know it’s broken, have tried to repair it, and have failed. The “middle power” is no more a coherent analytical category than “animals that swim” or “animals that fly.” Is it time to give up? No way.
Governments won’t stop calling themselves middle powers cos that identity puts them in a special club. Now if governments won’t stop calling themselves middle powers, they’ll keep funding the conferences and the 1.5 track dialogues—and that in turn will keep the scholars turning out pointless shite about middle powers. This my friends, is the perpetual motion machine that is international relations academia—but exposing that can wait till next time.
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