Description
How do great powers behave externally when in relative decline? Hegemonic stability theory predicts preventive war, neorealism expects the adoption of conservative strategies of retrenchment while innenpolitik theories point to policies, reflecting the preferences of domestic coalitions. But as per modern history, declining powers have seldom waged preventive wars, or retrenched nor have they aligned their behaviour systematically with sectional interests. In response to this issue of explanatory power this paper develops a theory of grand strategic adjustment which attempts to address the former through the following two tasks. First, by constructing a positional account of state preferences, which discounts the risky option of war or the counterintuitive option of renouncing what one has or wants through retrenchment. Second, by considering the different incentive structures and abilities of different types of decliners as determined by their varied power positions (first and second tier decliners) and the different degrees of decline they experience (acute and mild decline). Accordingly, great powers are expected to demonstrate a richer set of behavioural tendencies than the war/retrenchment dilemma. To test the theory, the cases of Britain's and France's grand strategy from 1879 to 1914 and from 1919 to 1939 are respectively analysed.
