Small States in International Relations

2. Lilliputians’ Dilemmas: Small States in International Politics

2 LILLIPUTIANS’ DILEMMAS Small States in International Politics ROBERT O. KEOHANE One of the most striking features of contemporary international politics has been the conspicuousness of small states in an era marked by increasing military disparity between Great and Small. Using the United Nations asaforumandaforceandclaiming“nonalignment”asanimportantdiplomatic innovation, small states have risen to prominence if not to power. With their emergence nonalignment has become a serious focus of scholarly research; some writers have considered it an institution of great importance .1 Yet with the exception of Annette Baker Fox’s pioneering work on five small states in World War II,2 very little systematic work has been done on small states’ foreign policies. The discussion of nonalignment has sometimes seemed to be a substitute for the comparative analysis of specific policies and dilemmas of small powers. If the books here reviewed do not provide the systematic comparative analysis for which we may eventually hope, they have escaped from the “nonalignment trap”—the tendency to study a vague category, used by policymakers for their own purposes, rather than to analyze the policies and decisions themselves.3 Not only have these authors studied problems rather than a cliché; they have often considered the same problems. All are interested in alliances and nonalignment as foreign policy alternatives; all deal with nuclear proliferation, three of them at length. Vital and Rothstein contend with the problem of defining small states and determining whether they behave in distinctive ways; Osgood, Liska, and Rothstein all write extensively on the functions of alliances. This convergence of concerns makes a topically organized review article possible. We will begin with the problem of definition. 55 RobertO.Keohane(1969),“Lilliputians’Dilemmas:SmallStatesinInternational Politics.” International Organization 23(2): 291–310. Reprinted with permission of the World Peace Foundation. I Robert Rothstein is concerned only with a limited category of small powers : those that “feel that they are potentially or actually threatened by the policies of the Great Powers” (p. 4). For these states he seeks to establish “one central proposition: that Small Powers are something more than or diªerent from Great Powers writ small” (p. 1). This leads him (p. 23) to reject a definition of “small power” based purely on “objective or tangible criteria” since such a definition ends by aligning states along an extended power spectrum so that it can only be said that B is stronger than A but weaker than C. The result is that the significance of the categories “Great” and “Small” is eªectually denied. Yet, if there is a unique category of states called Small Powers, which possess distinct patterns of behavior, then it is clearly inadequate to describe them merely in terms of being less powerful (p. 23). Thus,Rothsteinisquiteawarethatif heistoargue(pp.23–24)thatGreat Powersandsmallpowers“developbehavioralpatternswhichdecisivelyseparate them from non-group members,” he must provide a clear definition bywhichstatescanbecategorized.Rothsteinthereforedevelopsadefinition (p. 29) with a psychological as well as a material dimension: A Small Power is a state which recognizes that it can not obtain security primarily by use of its own capabilities, and that it must rely fundamentally on the aid of other states, institutions, processes, or developments to do so; the Small Power’s belief in its inability to rely on its own means must also be recognized by the other states involved in international politics. Rothstein illustrates the distinction he is drawing by contrasting the situations of Great Powers and small powers in otherwise similar situations of threat. Rothstein points to three unique aspects of the small power’s situation: 1) Outside help is required; 2) the state has a narrow margin of safety, with little time for correcting mistakes; 3) the state’s leaders see its weakness as essentially unalterable. Rothstein does not specify which states in the contemporary world would not be small powers under this definition, but it would seem that only the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the People’s Republic of China could possibly qualify. Certainly, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan all rely ROBERT O. KEOHANE 56 primarily on American protection for their security; for all four outside help is required when they are threatened by a Great Power and the margin of safety is narrow. And except for proponents of nuclear egalitarianism such as General Pierre Gallois few believe that any but the superpowers...