Hasta no hace mucho hemos creido que solo el poder militar tenía capacidades coercitivas en la arena internacional. A partir del concepto de "soft power" de Joseph Nyle. Esta visión se ha ampliado bastante. Tal como lo explica esta artículo.
The Age of Economic Deterrence
Daniel W. Drezner | 22 Mar 2011
There is no popular or expert consensus about which actors possess economic power in the 21st century. Public uncertainty is reflected in the April 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, which reveals interesting cross-country discontinuities in the perception of power. When asked to identify "the world's leading economic power," a majority of respondents in a diverse array of developing countries -- including Brazil and India -- name the United States. On the other hand, in the developed world, the results look dramatically different, with strong pluralities in five of the original G-7 economies -- including the United States, Japan and Germany -- naming China as the world's leading economic power. In other words, the developing world still largely believes that the United States has retained its economic hegemony, while the developed world thinks that primacy has shifted to China. In the absence of an undisputed hegemon, contemporary debates about economic power reveal the ways in which the concept remains murky for political scientists.
The question of how to define power in political science stretches back to the very origins of the field, and it continues to animate international relations scholars. This literature started with a very narrow, coercive definition: Power is the ability of actor A to get actor B to do what B would otherwise not want to do. The power literature has since expanded beyond a focus on coercive action to consider the ways in which power can affect the preferences and assumptions of other actors. Joseph Nye's concept of "soft power," for example, focuses on how actor A can get actor B to want what actor A wants. Recent scholarship has also considered the power of discourse to socially construct common worldviews among actors.
Most of these treatments overlook a crucial dimension of economic power: whether the actor in question is trying to preserve or change the status quo. Economic power affects statecraft through two theoretical pathways: deterrence and compellence. In a deterrence scenario, countries use their economic resources to resist pressure from actors or market forces. In a compellence scenario, a powerful government threatens to use either economic statecraft to extract concessions from other actors or market power to alter the rules of the global game. Deterring economic pressure by others is different than applying such pressure, via the stick or the carrot, to others. As with military force, it is generally easier to defend than attack. Only after an actor has the ability to resist pressure from others will it contemplate generating pressure on others. Countries possessing sufficient reservoirs of economic power should therefore have both greater autonomy of action and be better placed to apply pressure on other actors.
With this economic dimension stressed, it is possible to examine how the financial crisis and its aftermath have altered the distribution of economic might. For example, the ability of Brazil, Russia, India and China -- known as the BRIC countries -- to deviate from Washington's preferred policies is a demonstration of their rising deterrent power. Despite repeated entreaties by Washington, Beijing has neither substantially revalued the yuan nor taken active steps to alter China's export-oriented growth model. Beijing also helped to scotch efforts in 2008 to conclude the Doha round of world trade talks, putting multilateral trade negotiations into a deep freeze. The other BRIC economies have also enjoyed increases in their autarkic power. For example, both India and Brazil were in the "green room" during the Doha round, effectively wielding veto power when necessary.
The financial crisis has rewarded countries with resilient economic profiles, regardless of their devotion to the Washington Consensus. Indeed, as capital has sought out greater rates of return, the entire developing world has been able to dictate terms to markets in a way that was unthinkable a decade ago. In the past two years alone, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Chile have all imposed capital controls of one kind or another, undercutting developed-country aims to keep capital markets unfettered. Spikes in commodity prices have also empowered commodity producers to ignore policy advice from the international financial institutions.
In contrast, much of the developed world -- particularly the eurozone economies and Japan -- has found itself more constrained than ever before, with sovereign debt crises in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain forcing dramatic changes in the European Union's coordinated market economy. As a result of bond market pressures, almost every government in Europe has shifted toward austerity as an economic policy, despite its unpopularity with the voting public. Similarly, Japan's ability to continue running large fiscal deficits is under greater pressure as its debt-to-GDP ratio escalates. To date, the United States' deterrent power appears to be largely unaffected, as it has been able to resist market pressure to pursue austerity policies. The future of American economic power is open to question, however. Credit ratings agencies have repeatedly warned the U.S. Treasury that its AAA rating will be increasingly vulnerable as its debt-to-GDP ratio continues to climb.
In other areas, America's deterrent power has actually increased in recent years. China and other G-20 countries have used both diplomatic and economic pressure to try to force the United States into pursuing more prudent fiscal and exchange rate policies, in order to keep the dollar relatively strong. U.S. monetary policy has remained unbowed in the face of this pressure, however.
Finally, some surprises emerge when analyzing shifts in the compellence power of the major economies. On the one hand, there is no question that China has increased its ability to coerce and induce other countries. It has used its capital surplus to influence small countries like Costa Rica on issues such as the recognition of Taiwan. Its foreign aid policies (.pdf) have secured significant reservoirs of goodwill in Africa and Central Asia. Beijing's unofficial embargo of rare earths also forced Japan to hand over a Chinese national after a clash over the disputed Senkaku Islands.
On the other hand, this increase has not been nearly as large as media reports suggest. China's coercive power derives primarily from its growing consumer market, not from its control over raw materials or its control over currency reserves (.pdf). Its recent effort to force other countries to boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, for example, had a minimal effect. Despite the long list of countries with strong economic ties with China, no democratic government followed Beijing's lead.
China's coercive power has grown with its market size. Concomitantly, countries with sluggish or no growth have seen their market power eroded. Again, the principal victims are Japan and the European Union, as their growth has stagnated. U.S. market power has been diluted somewhat, as its traditional allies in Latin America and elsewhere have found alternative export markets, particularly in Asia. Furthermore, capital has poured into the advanced developing economies since 2009, and long-term trends suggest that these private inflows (.pdf) will continue unabated. These nations are subsequently less dependent on official creditors and great power patrons for key development needs, with one consequence being the weakening of American economic leverage.
A few trends become clear from this analysis. First, China's power has undoubtedly increased. Second, the European Union and Japan have seen their power decline across a similar array of dimensions. The effects of the past decade on the United States have been more mixed, however. To be sure, American coercive power has waned, but its deterrent power persists. Meanwhile, the ability of the other BRIC economies to resist pressure from the developed world has unambiguously increased, but their ability to compel has not appreciably increased.
Stepping back, there has been a marked convergence in the ability to deter economic pressure: It has declined from a high baseline in many of the G-7 economies and increased from a low baseline in most of the other G-20 members. Meanwhile, the shifts in compellence capabilities have been far more muted than popular commentary suggests. In essence, the increase in deterrent power has given more countries in the world a veto in coordinating policy in the global political economy. Paradoxically, the diffusion of economic power across the globe will make the most overt displays of economic power increasingly ineffective, while making effective governance of the global economy more difficult to achieve.Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is a senior editor at the National Interest and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy, where he keeps a daily blog. His latest book, "Theories of International Politics and Zombies," was published by Princeton University Press earlier this year.
Fuente: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/8276/the-age-of-economic-deterrence
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