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Threat, status disequilibrium, and national power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Charles F. Doran ,
Kim Quaile Hill  and
Kenneth Mladenka
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Extract

Associated with the concept of the nation state and system is a latent threat structure which this article seeks to delineate and to explore empirically. Why do the Japanese perceive the Russians as a serious political threat while discounting the potential military impact of the Chinese? Why did the United States consider the threat to its interests sufficiently grave in Indochina to fight a 10-year war against communism there while virtually ignoring the Castro regime less than 100 miles off the Florida coast ? What combination of German attributes and behaviour convinced France and Britain in the presence of aggresssive capability that they could disregard the threat posed to Czechoslovakia by Hitler in 1938? The latent threat structure of the nation state is neither obvious nor of trivial importance to global security and peace.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 1979 , pp. 37 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1979

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References

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Page 42 note 1 See Doran, Kim Q, Charles F.,. Hill, , Mladenka, Kenneth R., and Wakata, Kyoji, ‘Perceptions of National Power and Threat: Japan, Finland and the United States,’ International Journal of Group Tensions, 4 (1974), pp. 431—453Google Scholar, where this relationship is pirically observed for three nation samples.

Page 43 note 1. The respondents to our attitude questionnaire were non-randomly selected university students in each of the three nations. Despite relatively small sample sizes and the selected nature of the samples, extensive analysis of these data gave us considerable confidence in the reliability and validity. For details of this prior analysis, see Charles F. Doran, Kim Q,. Hill, Kenneth R. Mladenka, and Kyoji Wakata, ‘Perceptions of National Power and Threat: Japan, Finland and the United States’, op. cit.

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Page 43 note 3. As a test of the validity of indexing ascribed power via diplomatic representation, we were able to compare the ordering of nations on that variable with those where our respondents ranked nations in terms of their perceptions of national power. First, we should note that the intercorrelations of the three perceived power rankings for our sets of Finnish, Japanese, and American respondents were all above 0.90. Thus, across all three cultural perspectives, national power rankings were perceived quite commonly. Having demonstrated the validity of the perceived power scores, we correlated one of those rankings with the diplomatic representation index. The resultant Pearsonian r was —0.65, indicating moderate association in the appropriate direction (more diplomatic representation associated with a smaller score — meaning greater power — on the perceived power index). Examination of the scatterplot between these two variables revealed several significant outliers with high perceived power and abnormally low diplomatic representation. These outliers tended to be communist states or widely sanctioned members of the international system like Rhodesia and South Africa. Elimination of the six most extreme of these outliers boosted the r to —0–76.

These results represent satisfactory association in the appropriate direction to validate the use of the diplomatic representation variable to index ascribed status. In fact, diplomatic, representation is probably a better measure on conceptual grounds than would be our perceived power rankings. Discrepancies between diplomatic status and indicators of achieved power might reasonably be expected to result in nation hostility. On the other hand, discrepancies between publicly perceived power and achieved power more likely reflect the recognition of existing hostile behaviour.

Page 44 note 1. Loadings on the first factor were as follows: population (0–93), military expenditures (0.89), armed forces (0.90), GNP (0.84), GNP/population (0.14), and population density (0.20). The standardized regression equation had the following form: power = (0·774) Factor I + (0·492) Factor II + (0·076) Factor III p<o·ooi p<o·ooi p = 0·039 See Doran et al. op.cit. pp. 439–441.

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Page 44 note 3. We demonstrated empirically that proper operationalization is critical when attempting test the status or power discrepancy concept. The alternative model employs an absolute value difference score obtained by comparing the diplomatic representation index and our factor scoie index of objective power. The gap, whether positive or negative, between the indices was taken to mean status discrepancy. Regardless of whether we used the Singer-Small diplomatic index or the index derived from perceived power, the absolute value calculation failed to correlate with the index of power for any of the nation samples.

Page 45 note 1. Doran et al., op. cit.

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