Rising Powers and System Stability: The Determinants of Peaceful versus Conflictual Rise.

Current events have caused many security theorists of late to focus their attention on unconventional warfare, state-building, democratization and legitimacy in the Middle east. While worthy topics all, this situation has left the other great security issue of our era, the eventual rise of rival powers to US dominance, less studied than it might otherwise have been. To be sure there is still much analysis of rising China, but too much is focused on how to ?manage? that rise. This terminology gives us false confidence that the determinants of a peaceful or conflictual rise lie in the hands of the diplomats and policies of the dominant state or states. A reasonable reading of history can be said to show that effects of the rise of new powers in an international system, while somewhat manipulable by actors, often hinge on less fluid factors. A Bismarck may have been able to temporarily ameliorate the effects of the rise of Germany through skillful diplomacy and moderate policies, but ultimately the size, location and implication of a rising Germany in the midst of the continental powers proved unmanageable and resulted in systemic upheaval. This project seeks to locate the causes of peaceful versus conflictual rise by looking at the nexus between systemic factors that form the environmental conditions of those instances of rising power, and the aggregate effects of political consequences of the multiple dyadic interactions between rising and existing great powers which constitute interaction of interests necessary to account for outcomes.This project will examine several previously ignored or understudied factors that play a roll in the peaceful or conflictual rise of powers. Most works examining this phenomena utilize models that assume one rising power versus one dominant power. Historically, this situation is rare. Take, for example, the international system of the late 19th century and early 20th century. In this system, there are several declining powers (France, U.K., Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire) and several rising powers (Germany, Japan, the U.S.). The implications of this are significant. With multiple rising powers, the one or two deemed most threatening are likely to face the brunt of great power efforts to prevent, diminish or contain their rise. The peaceful rise of the U.S. is the result of more than just an ideological affinity between the UK and a rising U.S. With so much focus on a rising Germany, the U.S. and Japan were largely unmolested in their respective rises during this period. The preceding situation also shows the importance of the geographic location of rising powers. With Germany emerging in the midst of the core while the US and Japan were expanding in the periphery, again, it is not surprising that more attention and effort were focused on Germany. Even states with interests in the same peripheral areas as the rising powers, such as the U.K. still faced greater concerns in the core.The number of existing powers is also important. One can easily deduce that with one or two polar powers, the rise of new powers is most disruptive. Transitions from hegemony are often conflictual. Potentially even more conflictual is the move from Bipolarity to Tripolarity. As any parent with three children can attest, the two versus one divides that are endemic to three player situations are maddeningly immune to resolution. In global politics, adding another power to a fairly balanced bipolar system can create fears of being overwhelmed. Greater numbers of powers, however, should be more fluid in their relations. For many years the European state systems of the 17th through early 20th century contained six or more powers. The distributional effects of one or two more should logically be much diminished in such a system... ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]