The Hierarchy of Powers

Abstract

The small number of books and articles about the role of middle powers that in recent decades appeared in various parts of the world were not the last fruits of a long tradition of scholarly interest in the subject. The work on this class of powers done by European writers in earlier times had never amounted to a continuous tradition and, in any case, had petered out in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the result that the insights it had presented had been all but forgotten. Nor did the recent writings stem from the controversies in the early years of the League of Nations and the United Nations, when certain secondary powers had pressed for intermediate status in the various organs of the new institutions. The fate of these efforts, which had been no more than partially successful in the case of the League and largely unsuccessful in that of the United Nations, had become a matter of mainly historical interest. Contemporary concern with middle powers goes back only to the early 1960s, when signs of a détente in East-West relations and hints of a transformation of the dualistic system seemed to open possibilities for a growing number of secondary powers to pursue new and more independent policies, whether in global or in regional affairs. In the course of the 1960s, developments of this nature in the international political system encouraged writers in Canada, Western Europe, India and elsewhere to take up again the subject of the nature and role of middle powers, which in the years of the Cold War had been largely neglected.