Como sostuvo el Premio Nobel de economía,Thomas Schelling: "La diferencia entre una amenaza y una promesa, entre la coerción y la compensación, en ocasiones, depende en donde uno se tenga que poner la baselina."
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| El Pte "Teddy" Roosevelt arenga a los marineros del USS Connecticut. |
By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. | 08 Nov 2011
Power is the ability to affect others to obtain preferred outcomes, and that can be done through coercion and payment or attraction and persuasion. Generally, people associate coercion with military power resources, but that is too reductive. After all, economic power resources can also be used for coercion. Even in terms of what is considered "normal" economic behavior, the boundaries are not always so clear. As Thomas Schelling has argued, "The difference between a threat and a promise, between coercion and compensation, sometimes depends on where the baseline is located." After all, once compensation becomes an expectation, withholding it for nonperformance can be seen as a punishment -- and the threat to do so as coercion. Similarly, offering inadequate compensation to a starving man in desperate need of resources can be characterized as a bargain freely struck or as coercion. What is called coercion depends in part on the context of a power relationship.
Such contexts are changing in a global information age. Networks are becoming increasingly important, and positioning in social networks can be an important power resource. For example, in a hub-and-spokes network, power derives from being the hub of communications. If you communicate with your other friends through me, that gives me power. And if the points on the rim are not directly connected to each other, their dependence on communication through the hub can be used to shape their agenda. For example, even after independence, communications among France's former African colonies often ran through Paris, increasing France's power to shape their agenda. In other more complex network arrangements, theorists point to the importance of structural holes that prevent direct communication between certain parts of the network. Those who can bridge or exploit these structural holes can use their position as a source of coercive power by controlling communication between others.
This does not mean that the coercive role of military resources is no longer important in a global information age. Coercive diplomacy depends upon the same underlying resources as those that produce competence in kinetic fighting and destruction, but it also depends upon the credibility and cost of the threat. A threat of force can be used to compel or to deter, but the latter is often more credible. Credibility matters, for if a threat is not credible, it is unlikely to produce the desired outcome and could have an impact on the coercing state's reputation. In general, failed threats are costly, not only in terms of the target, but also in terms of third parties observing the outcome.
The deployment of ships and carrier-borne planes is a classic example of coercive diplomacy, largely because naval resources benefit from the flexibility of movement in the ocean commons. Force need not be threatened explicitly. The military can be used simply to "show the flag" or "swagger," because the underlying message is usually clear. At the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt sent his newly constructed "great white fleet" on an around-the-world cruise to signal the rise of American power. Some countries stage elaborate military parades on national holidays for the same purpose of creating a hint of potential coercive power to structure expectations.
When China destroyed one of its own satellites in low-earth orbit in 2007, many observers regarded it as a coercive reminder to Washington that the United States could not count on uncontested control of the space commons. And in the cyber age, coercive diplomacy can be practiced indirectly, with attribution left ambiguous. For instance, in 2008, when sporadic diplomatic spats over access to resources in the South China Sea became more serious, documents purported to be Chinese invasion plans for Vietnam were posted on major Chinese websites, including the market leader, sina.com. Because cyberattacks involve problems of attribution that blur the lines between state and nonstate actors, they offer prospects of "plausible deniability." For example, in 2007, after Estonia removed a monument honoring World War II-era Soviet soldiers, the country suffered distributed denial of service cyberattacks. Although many observers blamed Russia, the Russian government said that it was not responsible for the actions of "patriotic hackers." Nevertheless, the coercive effect of the incident remained intact.
At the end of the Cold War, some analysts proclaimed that "geo-economics" had replaced "geopolitics." Economic power would become the key to success in world politics. Carrots were becoming more important than sticks. In a similar vein, today some equate the rise in China's share of world product as a fundamental shift in the balance of global power. These analyses fail to consider other dimensions of power, while ignoring the role of symmetry in the creation of coercive power in economic interdependence.
Symmetry refers to the relative balance in dependence between two parties. Being less dependent can be a source of coercive power, as long as both sides value the interdependent relationship, and manipulating the asymmetries of interdependence is an important dimension of coercive economic power. Perfect symmetry is quite rare, so most cases of economic interdependence also involve a potential power relationship.
Take, for example, the economic relationship today between the United States and China. America accepts Chinese imports and pays China in dollars, while China holds American dollars and bonds, in effect making a loan to the United States. China has amassed more than $3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves, much of it held in U.S. Treasury securities. Some observers have described this as a great shift in the global balance of power because China could bring the United States to its knees by threatening to sell its dollars. But in doing so, China would not only reduce the value of its reserves as the price of the dollar fell, but it would jeopardize American willingness to continue to import cheap Chinese goods, resulting in job loss and instability in China. If it dumped its dollars, China would bring the U.S. to its knees, but might also bring itself to its ankles.
Judging whether economic interdependence produces coercive power requires looking at the balance of asymmetries, not just at one side of the equation. In the case of the U.S. and China, the balance of asymmetries resembles a "balance of financial terror" analogous to the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, whereby the U.S. and Soviet Union's ability to destroy each other in a nuclear exchange helped deter leaders on both sides from ever triggering one. In February 2010, angered over American arms sales to Taiwan, a group of senior military officers called for the Chinese government to sell off U.S. government bonds in retaliation, but their suggestion was not heeded. Instead, Yi Gang, China's director of state administration of foreign exchange, explained that "Chinese investments in U.S. Treasuries are market investment behavior, and we don't wish to politicize them." If China ever did so, the pain would be mutual. Thus the coercive power of China's holdings of U.S. debt is limited.
Nonetheless, this balance does not guarantee stability. Not only is there a danger of miscalculation with unintended consequences, but one would expect both countries to maneuver to change the framework and reduce their vulnerabilities. After the 2008 financial crisis, the United States pressed China to let its currency float upward as a means of reducing the American trade deficit and the dollar imbalance. At the same time, officials from China's central bank began making statements about America's need to increase its savings, reduce its deficits and move toward a long-term future in which the dollar would be supplemented by IMF-issued special drawing rights as a reserve currency.
But despite dire predictions about the power of creditors, China's growl was louder than its bite. Its increased financial power may have strengthened its ability to resist American entreaties, but it has had little effect on China's ability to coerce the United States to change its own policies. While China took minor measures to reduce the increase in its holdings of dollars, for domestic political reasons it was not willing to take the risks of making its currency fully convertible. Thus the yuan is unlikely to challenge the dollar's role as the largest component of world reserves -- currently more than 60 percent -- in the next decade. Nonetheless, if China significantly increases domestic consumption rather than relying on exports as its engine of economic growth, Chinese leaders may begin to feel less dependent than they do now on access to the American market, thereby potentially increasing China's coercive power.
States struggle to shape the structure of markets to their advantage and develop coercive power by manipulating market access with tariffs, quotas and licenses; by diversifying supply chains; by pursuing equity shares in companies; and by using aid to gain special concessions. Success varies according to the asymmetries in particular markets. Even where natural resources are scarce within a nation's borders, their absence is not an index of low economic power. Much depends on a country's vulnerability, and that depends on whether substitutes are available and whether there are diverse sources of supply. For example, in the 1970s some analysts expressed alarm about the United States' increasing dependence on imported raw materials, which they saw as a dangerous vulnerability. Of 13 basic industrial raw materials, the United States was dependent on imports for nearly 90 percent of aluminum, chromium, manganese and nickel, at a time when the ability of oil producers to form a cartel -- the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries -- was taken as a harbinger for other commodities. Coercive power was seen as shifting to the producers of natural resources.
But over the next decade, raw materials prices went down, not up. What happened to the prediction? In judging vulnerability, the analysts failed to consider the alternative sources of raw materials and the diversity of sources of supply that prevented producers from jacking up prices artificially. Moreover, technology improves over time. Projections of U.S. vulnerability to shortages of raw materials were inaccurate because technology and alternatives were not adequately considered.
It is interesting today to watch Russia's efforts to gain coercive power by structuring market asymmetries in the area of natural gas. Unlike oil, which is a relatively fungible commodity with multiple sources of supply and relative ease of transport, until recently gas has been regarded as scarce and more dependent upon fixed pipelines for supply. While this may change in the future because of liquefied natural gas shipments and new technologies for producing gas from plentiful fields of shale rock, for now Russia remains the major supplier of natural gas to Europe. The Russian government has consolidated ownership of gas fields and pipelines in one company, Gazprom, and used it to structure markets in Russia's favor. When it had disputes with neighbors such as Ukraine over gas prices, Russia did not hesitate to cut off gas supplies as a form of coercive economic power.
But the dynamic extends to Western Europe as well. Germany, for instance, depends on Russia for one-third of its natural gas, almost all of which transits through Ukraine. In the past, Ukraine's ability to stop gas flowing through pipelines that crossed its territory increased its bargaining power in gas disputes with Russia, because the pain this caused in Germany added German pressure to Ukraine's bargaining position. While the European Union's response has been to try to stimulate interest in a pipeline to route Caspian gas to Europe without crossing Russian territory, Germany instead supported a pipeline under the North Sea that will allow Russian gas to bypass Ukraine and Poland. The German government claims not to be overly concerned by the fact that the move will also increase its dependence on Russian supply, because it regards the interdependence as symmetrical (.pdf). For German policymakers, Russian income depends on the security of German demand just as much as German customers depend upon the security of Russian supply.
Russia does have an incentive to keep its promise to be a reliable supplier to large customers like Germany, but it can wield its asymmetrical advantage to gain coercive power over smaller customers such as the Baltic states, Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine in what Russia sees as its sphere of influence. In short, Russia has used its pipeline diplomacy to increase its coercive economic power.
Similarly, Russia has tried to lock down contracts with Central Asian republics to route the region's gas to Europe through Russian pipelines. But this market-structuring effort is being countered by Chinese efforts to construct pipelines eastward from Central Asia. Even more important is the recent discovery and exploitation of technologies to unlock the massive amounts of gas trapped in shale rock in the United States and elsewhere, which has made liquefied natural gas shipments from Persian Gulf states uncompetitive in American markets. As a result, this gas has begun to be redirected to European markets, where it reduces the coercive power that Russia could develop through its pipeline diplomacy. Coercive economic power is highly contingent on the particular market context, and at times it drives changes in the market context that impact its own effectiveness.
Meanwhile, power struggles occur not only among states, but also among private corporations and hybrids of the two. As the Economist's Schumpeter column put it in 2009:
Wherever you look you can see the proliferation
of hybrid organizations that blur the line between the public and private
sector. These are neither old-fashioned nationalized companies, designed to
manage chunks of the economy, nor classic private-sector firms that sink or swim
according to their own strength. Instead they are confusing entities that seem
to flit between one world and another to suit their own
purposes.
Russian firms like Gazprom, Chinese state-owned enterprises, and sovereign wealth funds like Dubai World complicate market behavior and increase the opportunities for coercive manipulation.
Economic tools such as sanctions and aid will be crucial in this century because they are often the most efficient instruments of coercion in terms of relative costs. But it is a mistake to argue that the 21st century will be the age of geo-economics. The diffusion of power to nonstate actors, including transnational corporations, sets limits on state strategies to use economic instruments. States will often find economic power difficult to wield, both because market actors are difficult to control and because of the variability of market conditions. Structuring markets is more important than sanctions and aid. Very often, policies that promote open market structures and diversification of sources of supply will turn out to be more effective in denying coercive power to suppliers than mercantilist efforts to lock up supplies through ownership. Coercion remains an important aspect of power in this global information age, but policy answers will often depend on the context of each market and its asymmetries of vulnerability.
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and author of "The Future of Power."
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