Power is one of the most important concepts in International Relations. It is, unfortunately, also likely the least clearly defined and nebulous concept. Most definitions for power are qualitative, which is probably the best starting point for it. In IR, power is seen as some combination of A: being able to obtain things you want, and B: the ability to make others do your will. I am going to put these together, power, to me, is the ability to achieve goals. However, this definition tells us nothing, really. We have a concept, and outcomes, but not how one achieves the other. There is a black box, a collection of things that make up "power" that we can then use to achieve goals.
X + Y + Z = level of power = goals that can be achieved.
Without knowing how much power you have, you can never know what sort of goals you are actually capable of striving for. This is known as absolute power. Do we have the power to send a man to the moon, to feed our hungry and heal our sick?
Power is not just absolute, however. Though it does matter how much power you have, it also matters how much power everyone else has. (Realists and Liberals disagree on which does or should matter more. As a Realist, I am going to act as though, for a state, relative power is more important.) Many goals a state wants to achieve are dependent not on how much power it has, but how much power it has *relative to another state*. Can State A defend itself from an attack by State B? Can State X compel State Y to do its will? To a state, answering these questions may well be more important than its absolute power level. I imagine that, at the height of the Roman Empire, Caesar would have been perfectly happy to never increase the empire's level of power again, if he could guarantee that no other state would be able to do so either. (I could be wrong, of course, a Liberal would disagree with me on this point, and legitimately so. I would like to think that a state would improve its level of power even without an outside need to do so if that would improve the lives of its citizens, but…perhaps not. There are counterexamples.)
In either case, it is imperative to know how much power the state, and other states, have, otherwise there can be huge errors. World War II is an excellent example of this. Germany, Japan, and Italy dramatically overestimated their relative power, and it cost them. Japan was perhaps the clearest example of all, obviously overestimating their power relative to the United States.
So how do we measure state power? A fairly well accepted method was created by the Correlates of War project, called the Composite Index of National Capability (CINC). This index averages ratios, state divided by world, in six measures: total population of country, urban population, iron and steel production, energy consumption, military expenditures and military personnel. It's a little confusing, let me try and explain this.
State A has 1% of the total world population, 2% of it's urban population, 3% of its iron and steel production, 4% of its energy consumption, 5%of its military expenditures and 6% of its military personnel. You just add these together and divide by six, so this fictional state's CINC score would be 21% / 6 = .035. You can then compare these scores and make a claim that one state is more powerful than another. In 2007, the top five most powerful states by CINC were:
1. China (.199)
2. United States (.142)
3. India (.073)
4. Japan (.427)
5. Russia (.392)
Right off the bat, I can identify some major problems with this methodology. Does population matter to power as much as military expenditures? How about expenditures and troops? Does spending the most in the world matter if you have no troops to use it? How about the reverse, where a state has a huge army but no money (the North Korea situation)? How can all these very different measures be weighted the same? The CINC score does give some rather strange results. Syria more powerful than Israel. North Korea more powerful than Australia?
China more powerful than the US?
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