Home > Power (international)
In the context of international relations and diplomacy, power (sometimes clarified as international power, national power, or state power) is the ability of one state to influence or control other states. States with this ability are called powers, middle powers, regional powers, great powers (sometimes capitalized), superpowers, and hyperpowers.Recently, entities other than states has acquired the same ability to influence and control other states, most often these are multinational corporations with financial assets surpassing smaller states, but also organisations such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank show that they have international power.
1 Recent history
The Great Powers are often taken to be those nations or political entities that, through their great economic and military strength, are the arbiters of world diplomacy, and whose opinions must be taken into account by other nations before effecting initiatives. Characteristically, they have the ability to intervene militarily almost anywhere, and they also have softSoft power is a concept within international relations that refers to power which comes from economic or cultural means. Also referred to as cooptive power it allows nations to exert their influence without using military means. An example of this would b, cultural power, often in the form of economic investment in less developed portions of the world.
Different sets of Great Powers have existed in historyHistory is often used as a generic term for information about the past, such as in "geologic history of the Earth". When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human societies. The term histor, but after 1815Events January 3 Austria, Britain, and France form a secret defensive alliance treaty against Prussia and Russia. January 8 War of 1812: Battle of New Orleans February 3 The first commercial cheese factory is founded in Switzerland February 6 New Jersey g, the Concert of EuropeThe Concert of Europe describes the broad co-operation between Europe's great powers after 1815. Its purpose was to maintain the peace settlement concluded at the Congress of Vienna following the defeat of Napoleonic France. Centred on the 1815 Quadruple formalised FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents., the United KingdomThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a state in Western Europe, usually known simply as the United Kingdom the UK Britain or less accurately as Great Britain . The UK was formed by a series of Acts of Union which united the formerly, RussiaThe Russian Federation ( Russian: , transliteration: Rossiyskaya Federatsiya or Rossijskaja Federacija , or Russia (Russian: , transliteration: Rossiya or Rossija , is a country that stretches over a vast expanse of eastern Europe and northern Asia. With, AustriaAustria is a landlocked country in Central Europe, a federation of nine states. Austria is bordered by Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the, and Prussia as the five powers. Again, after 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, China, and the United Kingdom were formalised as the five powers with permanent seats and veto power in the UN Security Council. Clearly, shifts in great power status tend to follow wars. Great powers are also often associated with a particular military technology, such as dreadnoughts or nuclear weapons.
Arguably, at the start of the twenty-first century, the USA was the unique Great Power. There is in any case a great contrast with the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when the number of candidate and actual Great Powers was closer to ten.
