Tag Archives: Middle Powers

Continuing the Middle Power Narrative

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In early February CWD highlighted, and I described in the Post at Alan’s Newsletter, “Are They All Middle Powers? Or, Are There None!” this emerging Middle Power narrative:

We hoped this session would be an opportunity to examine and critique “Asia’s Future at a crossroads: A Japanese strategy for peace and sustainable prosperity.” This very valuable Report was the outcome of years of work by the ‘Asia Future’ Research Group (Research Group)  co-convened by Yoshihide Soeya, Professor Emeritus of Keio University and Mike Mochizuki of the Elliott School of International Affairs of George Washington University. … The Research Group urged that Japanese policy not be reshaped by the rise in US-China rivalry and the growing geopolitical tensions in the international system generally and in the Indo-Pacific specifically. Alas, that may prove to be quite difficult.

The story of emerging Middle Powers is about to continue with a new Report, this by the Körber Foundation. As noted by Colin Bradford our lead co-chair at CWD in his invitation to CWD participants to join a coming session on March 28th:

Driven by demographic and economic factors and an increasingly self-confident presence on the world stage, emerging middle powers (such as Brazil, India and South Africa) are gaining international influence.

  • ​What foreign policy challenges do emerging middle powers face?  How do they position themselves vis-à-vis China and the war in Ukraine?    And, where do they find common ground with the West, particularly on reforming the international system?

The Report is, “Listening Beyond the Echo Chamber: Emerging Middle Powers Report 2024”. This Report, front and centre in our coming CWD session, presents an intriguing survey and various findings from the following:

The first Emerging Middle Powers Survey polled nearly 1,000 politicians, diplomats, journalists, researchers and private-sector representatives from

India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) as well as from Germany.

The CWD gathering has the good fortune of welcoming Julia Ganter, Programme Director Körber Emerging Middle Powers Initiative to introduce the Report to CWD. In addition we have remarks from:

  • Steven Gruzd, Head, African Governance and Diplomacy Programme, South African Institute for International Affairs (SAIIA), Johannesburg,
  • Manjeet Kripalani, Executive Director, Gateway House Indian Council on Global Relations, Mumbai, and
  • Paulo Esteves, Researcher & fmr. Director, BRICS Policy Center, Rio de Janeiro

The Report identifies the purpose of this research initiative on the part of the Korber:

The aim of our Körber Emerging Middle Powers Initiative (KEMP) is to promote dialogue between Germany and emerging middle powers, such as Brazil, India, and South Africa. With their growing political, economic and demographic weight they are key players for global problem solving and also form the G20 troika in 2024. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown that in Germany, among other places, geopolitical perspectives, foreign policy traditions, and national interests of emerging middle powers

are often not assessed in a realistic manner. To address this, the Körber initiative conducts an annual expert survey and facilitates various dialogue formats in cooperation with Gateway House India, the Brazilian BRICS Policy Centre and the South African Institute of International Affairs.

The initiative is valuable in part because it targets three quite important Middle Powers – India, Brazil and South Africa – all large democratic emerging market powers –  that formed IBSA with the Brasilia Declaration in 2003. While overshadowed by the BRICS and now BRICS+, IBSA remains a useful gathering of key EM powers. Moreover, India, last year, Brazil this year, and South Africa in 2025 will each host the G20 Summit. With the troika mechanism these three countries will be influencing the organization and policy initiatives of the G20.

Back to the current Körber Report. The Report opens with a rather surprising conclusion in its Executive Summary:

despite differences among the four countries, there is a common basis for more meaningful engagement and joint approaches for international reform.

The survey findings are varied and interesting.The broad conclusions:

respondents in India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) identify a different foreign policy challenge as most important for each country – climate change for Brazil, relations with China for India, the war in Ukraine and the Middle East for South Africa – as well as international trade for all three. These are global concerns and respondents in Germany share them.

The Report is particularly interesting in highlighting differences of view between IBSA experts and German ones.

These aspects divide [Germany] them from the IBSA respondents, who perceive international trade as a foreign policy challenge, prefer to mediate between Russia and Ukraine instead of supporting either, view the dollar’s dominance unfavourably and are optimistic about BRICS+. But even in IBSA, some are critical of the group’s expansion to include the likes of Iran.

Finally, the Report brings into focus  what Western interests, I suspect, need to understand and to advance more collaborative action:

Understanding the challenges of the West’s partners must begin with an examination of their specific concerns. Brazilian respondents most often cite climate change and the environment as the most challenging foreign policy issue for their country. Indian respondents see China, which their country has a ‘hot’ border with, as the biggest challenge. In South Africa, the most frequently cited issue is maintaining an autonomous foreign policy between the demands and pressures of different major powers, followed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. … Taking their ideas seriously would show that the West is ready to include them as equals at the new global high table. Ultimately, this shift in thinking will transform the Western echo chamber into a symphony of voices.

The Report is very revealing and I suspect the CWD session will be lively and likely to advance our Middle Power thinking between and among the participants at the CWD.

More on that later I anticipate.

This Post first appeared at my Substack, Alan’s Newsletter. Comments are welcome and feel free to subscribe to receive new posts and support my work.

Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 2

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The growing geopolitical tensions in the international system, in particular  between the United States and China and also with Russia, have led to a chorus of voices urging on middle powers to greater efforts in maintaining  and even strengthening a rules-based order. Roland Paris in a major Chatham House Brief titled: “Can Middle Powers Save the Liberal World Order?” pointed at various urgent calls from international experts:

Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times columnist, has proposed a ‘middle-powers alliance’ to ‘preserve a world based around rules and rights, rather than power and force’. Two eminent American foreign-policy experts, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, have also called on US allies to ‘leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order’.

The urgency and calls for middle power action rose perceptively, of course, with ‘America First’  from the Trump Presidency and from the failure of the leading powers – the United States and China – to organize global governance efforts to tackle the global pandemic. Indeed the global pandemic has seemingly ‘lit a fire’ under experts and officials issuing a rising chorus of calls for greater middle power action in the face of leading power failure. An  evident instance is a recent article from  Foreign Affairs from our colleague Bruce Jones from Brookings titled:“Can middle powers lead the world out of the pandemic? Because the United States and China have shown that they can’t”.

In Part 1 of this Post series we attempted to identify which states experts were referring to when they issued the call for middle power action. We ended up with a variety of categories. There were the traditional states, Canada, Australia and maybe South Korea and Singapore. There were states that fell within the top 20 economic powers  – way too many states but lots of familiar powers. And then there were all those states , identified by Jeffrey Robertson in his insightful article: “Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme” in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (2017. 71(4): 355-370, with an interest in and “capacity (material resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.)resources, diplomatic influence, creativity, etc.) to work proactively in concert with similar states to contribute to the development and strengthening of institutions for the governance of the global commons.” And in fact there seemed to be a bit of a marriage between middle powers and multilateralism in the newly created “Alliance for Multilateralism” created by the foreign ministers of France and Germany that umbrellaed at its creation some 40 states.

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Which Countries are Middle Powers – And Why are They Important to the Global Order? Part 1

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I had a debate very recently with my China-West Dialogue (CWD) colleague, Colin Bradford. In a memo we were working on for CWD, he described the two major trade agreements, CPTPP and RCEP. He then added:

 

These two trade agreements show that middle powers are able to take multilateral actions on their own that make an impact.(*)  

But which countries do we see achieving that? And behind that, why have analysts and policy makers become significantly more interested these middle powers in the Trump era recently past?

Counting the Middle Powers

The debate begins with the ‘Who’. Though Colin and I were generally agreed on the content of the article, we went around in circles over which countries we could, and should, identify as middle powers. Now, I was more than ready to forgive Colin his vague characterization of middle powers and then broad inclusion of the same – after all he is an economist – but soon thereafter I stumbled over a rather recent article by Bruce Jones, also of Brookings. and a well known international relations analyst. The article found in FA and titled, “Can Middle Powers Lead the World Out of the Pandemic? Because the United States and China Have Shown They Can’t” tackled the question of the current middle power membership. Given the subject matter of the article, Bruce was called upon to identify in some manner, the states that captured the current set of middle powers:

The concept of “middle powers” is imprecise and somewhat inchoate, but it generally refers to countries that are among the top 20 or so economies in the world, lack large-scale military power (or choose not to play a leading role in defense), and are energetic in diplomatic or multilateral affairs. These countries were seeking to fill part of the international leadership void even before the crisis, particularly when it came to buttressing the rickety multilateral system.

So, there we were. I had no difficulty acknowledging that the term was “imprecise and inchoate” but as for the rest of the features identified by Bruce, well, not so sure. Increasingly, I came to suspect that this was likely to be one of those classic international relations definitions – unclear and contested.

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