Great Power as Narrative Contestation

As scholars have long tussled over, the designation of being a great power in international affairs—and the pathway to achieving such a status—is dependent on myriad factors. Many observers maintain that it is those elements that are hard, tangible, measurable, and objective that are the most pertinent and meaningful. Analyzing these gives us the ability to cast a relative assessment of those states that are rising and those that are falling. Others seek to complement these perspectives by including factors that are softer, less obvious, more social, and subjective. Such notions serve to provide more specific insights concerning how history, memory, and identity impact how states rise and the motivations, goals, and ambitions underpinning such trajectories. Key to these understandings are the stories that states tell about themselves—who they were, who they are and who they want to be—through often selective renditions of the past and aspirant tales of the future. Within these assessments, it is importantly the narratives that states tell that are decisive, and this is the theme that Manjari Chatterjee Miller tackles in the geographically and historically wide-ranging (albeit slim) volume Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power.

The most relevant contemporary case studies in this regard are the Asian behemoths of China and India, whose twin ascents look set to be the most consequential phenomena for the field of international relations (IR) in the 21st century. Both countries seek to re-establish their lost statuses as great powers, which were besmirched by external aggression after centuries as "natural" power-centers in the international system as investigated in Miller's earlier book Wronged by Empire. Both also seek to do so via strategies designed to augment their domestic development and modernization, which frequently place them into the central vortexes of the international system and pull other major states and actors toward them. Understanding how China and India perceive themselves, and the rhetoric and narratives framing their re-emergence, has thus never been so critical. These stories underpin a process of mutual socialization between those states aspiring to be great powers and those that have already attained such a position, which involves the former group adhering to the criteria and standards set by the latter group. As Miller fittingly states, "a rising power is not revisionist (at least initially). It is, instead, accommodational. It has to accept and conform to the current international order before it can reject it" (pp. 9–10, italics in the original).

Miller makes a largely convincing case for understanding why some states achieve the status of great power and others do not by drawing our attention to the need to acquire material power (be it economic and/or military) in conjunction with having national narratives that adhere to current global norms concerning great-power conduct. It is the marrying of these narratives with capabilities and behavior that allows would-be great powers to become active ones that are welcomed into the great-power concert. At its core, such contentions point to the importance of a process of almost auto-socialization by states that rests upon the need for accurate knowledge and a willingness to replicate existing behaviors, whereby a rising power must recognize, learn, and then mimic the accepted conduct of contemporary great power. It is only once a contender state has been let into the great-power club that they can then alter the prevailing norms.

Following this logic, those states that are unwilling to play the current "great-power game" will be unable to gain access and the enshrining of great-power status that such entry brings. It is for these reasons that Miller cast China as an "active" state that has played by the rules and is thus a great power, and identified India as a "reticent" state that refuses to adhere to the current conventions and thus is not—nor appears likely to become—a great power (chapters 5 and 6). In these ways, becoming a great power is accurately portrayed as a process within which Miller places a special emphasis upon "idea advocacy," whereby it is imperative to have...