Description
There is a widespread assumption in international relations theory that the pre-eminent status group in the international order is a club of ‘great powers’. This belief underpins numerous theories about ‘status disequilibrium’ and the struggle for recognition among rising and falling powers. It depends on the premise that international order is stratified by a ‘grading of powers’, where status follows the distribution of material capability among actors. I ask whether that is an inevitable feature of all international orders. I begin by noting that most scholarship on the history of the great power system sees it as having had a distinct point of origin, although there are different views about when that was. That suggests that the existence of a high-ranking status-group of great powers cannot be taken for granted as an ahistorical phenomenon. Drawing on a conceptual framework of alternative modes of international social stratification, I ask which best approximates to contemporary world order, and I argue that difficulties in defining who is, or is not, a great power, suggest that the grading of powers is no longer the principal mode of stratification in contemporary world politics.
