As Americans wrestle with the
implications of revolutions in the
Middle East as well as the rise of
China in Asia, we need a better understanding
of what it means to have power
in world politics. Traditionally, the mark
of a great power was its ability to prevail
in war. But in an information age, success
depends not just on whose army wins but
also on whose story wins.
Americans need to cope with two
types of historical power shifts that are
occurring in this century: power transition
and power diffusion. Power transition,
from one dominant state to another,
is a familiar historical event, but power
diffusion is a more novel process and
more difficult to manage. The problem
for all states in today’s global information
age is that more things are occurring
outside the control of even the most
powerful states.
Information revolutions have happened
before, but the current revolution
is based on rapid technological advances
that have dramatically decreased the cost
of creating, finding and transmitting
information. Computing power doubled
every 18 months for 30 years, and by the
beginning of the 21st century it cost one thousandth
of what it did in the early
1970s. The key characteristic of this revolution
is not just the speed of communications
but also the enormous reduction
in the cost of transmitting information,
which has reduced the barriers to entry into the information marketplace.
What this means is that world politics
will no longer be the sole province of
governments. Individuals and private
organizations — ranging from WikiLeaks
to corporations to NGOs to terrorists to
spontaneous societal movements — are all
empowered to play direct roles in world
politics. The spread of information means that power will be more widely distributed
and informal networks will undercut
the monopoly of traditional bureaucracy.
The speed of Internet time means all governments
have less control of their agendas.
Political leaders enjoy fewer degrees
of freedom before they must respond to
events, and then they must communicate
not only with other governments but
with those in civil society too: witness the
difficulties of the Obama Administration in trying to fine-tune its responses in the
Middle East. The Administration had to
use its hard power of military aid to the
army in Egypt while simultaneously
promoting a soft-power narrative that
appealed to the information-empowered
generation of civil society. And next door,
in Libya, it used hard, military power
to generate a humanitarian narrative of
protecting
civilians.
When it comes to power transition —the other great historical shift — we have
been misled by traditional narratives of a
supposed U.S. decline and facile historical
analogies to Britain and Rome. But
Rome remained dominant for more than three centuries after the apogee of Roman
power, and even then, it did not succumb
to the rise of another state but died a death
of a thousand cuts inflicted by various barbarian
tribes. Indeed, for all the fashionable
predictions that China, India or Brazil
will surpass the U.S. in the next few decades,
the greater threats may come from
modern barbarians and nonstate actors.
Today it is far from clear how we measure
a balance of power, much less how
to develop successful strategies to survive
in this new world. Most current projections
of a shift in the global balance of
power to China are based primarily on
one factor: linear projections of growth
in China’s gross national product. They
ignore the military and soft dimensions
of power, not to mention the policy
difficulties of combining them into
smart strategies. For example, while
Hu Jintao told the 17th Congress of
the Chinese Communist Party that
China needs to invest more in its
soft power, such power is limited
by a domestic authoritarian regime
that puts people like the dissident
Liu Xiaobo in jail. In an information
age, the ability to mobilize networks
of others through soft power will
be as important as mobilizing them
through hard power. One cannot
manage cybercrime or climate
change with military means.
In the years to come, states will
remain the dominant actors on
the world stage, but they will find the
stage far more crowded and difficult
to control. A much larger part of the
population both within and among
countries has access to the power that
comes from information.
It is true that China is growing rapidly,
but the diffusion of power may be
as consequential as power transitions between
major states. America’s soft power
and its open society may give the U.S.
new power advantages.
Nye is a University Distinguished Service
Professor at Harvard and the author of
The Future of Power
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