Great Power Drives Great-Power Narratives

Blood and iron," Otto von Bismarck argued to the Prussian parliament, would create national greatness. Japan's leaders in the nineteenth century pushed for a "rich nation, strong army." Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong both vowed their countries would catch up with the United States. Such narratives inevitably accompany the rise of a great power, but international relations theory has emphasized material power while paying little attention to how countries describe their ascent.¹ In Why Nations Rise, Manjari Chatterjee Miller shines welcome light on this neglected subject.

Why do nations rise to great power? Miller agrees with other scholars who define great powers as having strong material capabilities, ambitious interests, and status. Yet she sees a puzzle: of the countries that possess strong capabilities, only some ("active") rising powers seek to become great powers, whereas other ("reticent") rising powers do not. What sets the two kinds of rising powers apart are their stories. Miller argues that "a country rising to become a great power has to think of itself in terms of being great"—that is, as having what Max Weber called a "historical task" (p. 11, italics in the original).

Why Nations Rise explores fascinating cases of leaders articulating their sense of national power and purpose. Yet the book leaves readers with two nagging questions: Do material capabilities more compellingly explain a country's decision to pursue "active" rise, and what factors determine whether a country adopts an active versus a reticent narrative?

Those Who Can, Do

Miller argues that some countries with growing material capabilities seek great power, while others ("who also had increasing material power") hold back (p. 15). Chapter 2 focuses on the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Miller argues that its high per capita GDP and extensive colonial holdings qualified the Netherlands as a potential great power. Its reticence to seek great power is thus a puzzle (one explained by, she argues, its lack of a great-power narrative). However, when measuring national power, as several scholars have noted, GDP per capita cannot be considered independent of population.² There were limits to what the Netherlands could accomplish then, just as there are limits to what Dubai can do today. In this view, Dutch reticence is not a puzzle: the Netherlands simply did not have the juice to compete with the rising powers of that era.

In fact, the characterization of the Netherlands as a rising power overlooks the fundamental transformation of geopolitics at the end of the nineteenth century. Before the development of the railroad (as Alfred Thayer Mahan argued), small countries with a powerful navy, commercial shipping, and a maritime geographic position could dominate geopolitics. In this era, the Netherlands (and other small maritime countries) fanned out around the globe, seizing colonies and accessing markets. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the Mahanian era was ending. As Halford Mackinder famously argued, the railroad enabled countries with large land masses and populations to dominate international politics.³ In an era in which the large land powers could bring their population and resources to bear on global trade and military competition, countries such as the tiny Netherlands could no longer compete.

Indeed, population and economic data show what the Netherlands was up against. As Figures 1 and 2 depict, despite a high GDP per capita, the country was outclassed in population and thus in overall economic size.

World leaders recognized this power disparity. "In spite of their wealth they have fallen from their high estate," noted Joseph Chamberlain of the Netherlands in 1904. "The scepter they once wielded so proudly has passed into other hands and can never return to them. They may be richer, but they are poorer in what constitutes the greatness of a nation, and they count for nothing in the future opinion of the world."⁴ Miller's quotes from Dutch leaders show that they understood their situation too. The Netherlands' self-perception as "a colonial giant but a political dwarf" (pp. 56–57) displays

Figure 1.

Population, 1890

Source: Angus Maddison, The...