The Development of the Small States Category
16 Jul 2012
By Iver B Neumann, Sieglinde Gstöhl
[...] Small states started life as a residual category and under a different name. Until well into the twentieth century, in all European languages states were routinely referred to as "powers" (French puissance, German Macht, Russian derzhava, Spanish/Portuguese poder, etc.). While this noun is still used for a different category of states, namely "great powers" (and, more rarely, also for "middle powers"), "small powers" are nowadays simply referred to as "small states". This usage certainly further underlines their presumed lack of power in a quantitative sense. Following the Napoleonic Wars, "the powers" met at the Congress of Vienna. Those powers that made up the winning quadruple alliance – Great Britain, Prussia, Russia and the Habsburg Empire – were soon convinced by the spokesman of vanquished France, Talleyrand, that questions of importance would have to be settled between these five powers. In today's parlance, we would say that they were to be settled "at five". However, some of the questions that were to be settled would directly concern powers that were deemed too important to be left out entirely. These powers were given access to certain meetings that were held "at six" or "at seven". As the century wore on, these powers sometimes came to be known, through processes that still await their researcher, as "middle powers" (but see external pageHolbraad 1984). Those powers that were deemed too inconsequential to be so included came to be known as "small states".
In this formative period of state categories, the dominant grouping of great powers took on a life in international law by dint of the institutionalizing move made by these five powers themselves. They decided on meeting as it were in concert on a regular basis, in order to discuss questions of concern and to draw up agreements and treaties. From this activity, documents with legal force evolved, and since they were underwritten by these five powers and not by others, the category of "great power" became a legal category. It has ever since cohabited uneasily with the principle of the sovereign equality of states. From a legal point of view, all sovereign states, great or small, are equal before the law. From a political stance, however, they are far from being equal. From the very beginning, the recognition of the great powers' special position in the international system at the Congress of Vienna coexisted uneasily with the system's major principle of the formal equality of sovereign states which was to prevent the great powers from formalizing their preponderance. In the narrow sense, what is still known as the Congress is taken to mean the meetings of those powers at Aix-laChapelle, Troppau, Laibach, and Verona in the period from 1815 to 1822. In the broader sense, congress diplomacy refers to the continued interaction between great powers with a view to managing the system. Such diplomacy was a dominant feature of European politics up to 1848, and was also highly relevant for the rest of the period up to the First World War (cf. external pageHolbraad 1970). As a result, in the nineteenth century – which to an IR scholar runs from 1815 to 1914 – small states were all those states that were not great powers. This was so because European empires had incorporated most other polities worldwide, and because there simply were not enough sovereign states around to make for a viable category of "middle powers". As external pageHinsley (1963: 250) reminds us, if there were six great powers at this time (Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy), of the rest there were only three that could even begin to claim a status as middle powers: Denmark, Sweden and Turkey.
In the twentieth century, as the number of states kept rising (as a result mainly of the break-up of the Habsburg Empire in 1919, then of the British, French and other European empires through decolonialization in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the Soviet Union in 1991), small states were all those states that were not great powers and that were not consistently insisting on being referred to as middle powers (Australia, Canada, also regionally dominant powers such as South Africa; cf. external pageNeumann 1992). We note that this definition is still residual; small states are defined by what they are not. We need not investigate the questions of which powers are great powers here, neither do we need to dwell on the conceptual history of "superpower" (basically a Cold War term) and the sundry terms for the United States (US) that have recently emerged to categorize what external pageKrauthammer (1991) baptized the "unipolar moment", such as "hyperpower". We may content ourselves with making the observation that, at present, certain tensions make themselves felt when it comes to classifying certain states as either small or medium.
In addition to the residual, negative way of defining small states as states that are not middle or great powers, small states have often been confused with weak states. Yet, the distinction between small and great does not coincide with the distinction between strong and weak.3 The former is a distinction of quantity, the latter of quality. external pageDurkheim (1992: 75) notes that "societies can have their pride, not in being the greatest or the wealthiest, but in being the most just, the best organized and in possessing the best moral constitution". The implication is that they may be strong in the sense of being a model for others to follow in this regard. Within IR, external pageKeohane and Nye (1977) have famously argued that the question of smallness and greatness is not necessarily all that useful on the aggregate level of the states system where we have usually studied it, but that it should rather be treated as a question of clout within what they refer to as specific "issue areas". That is, small states possessing great issue-specific power, for example the influence of Switzerland in the financial services sector or of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the oil sector.
These are interesting ways of bracketing the issue under discussion here, which is what it entails for a state to think of itself as, and be thought of by others as being, generally "small". Asking such questions has led, and will lead, to new work and new insights, so should be condoned. The states system understood as a whole neither is nor should be the only focus of IR inquiry. Still, it is within this system that we can locate most of the talk about great powers and small states, and where these categories first and foremost are meaningful. And within this system, moral greatness, various kinds of perceived greatness in internal organization, or greatness in resources within one specific issue area have so far not been convertible into great-power status. Indeed, the category of middle power basically seems to serve the function of underlining that some small state has achieved greatness in one specific regard, while remaining hopelessly behind in others. Sweden is doubtlessly a strong state both in the sense that it has a high degree of internal cohesion, is able to project a persona externally, and (for these and other reasons) has a strong sense of self. But regardless of how strong it is or will become, its resources simply will not allow it to make itself felt in enough arenas and in a high enough degree for it to be recognized as a systems-wide great power. By the opposite token, Russia is doubtlessly weak in the sense that state-society relations make for a low administrative capacity. Still, and sustained denigration notwithstanding, it would hardly make sense to refer to it as a small state. The same holds for Japan and Germany which for a long time have been considered "economic giants", but "political dwarves".
If the small power category shades into a gelatinous category of "middle powers" on the one hand, on the other hand it comes up against an equally gelatinous category of "micro-states". The literature on micro-states seems to congeal around issues of sovereignty and action capacity – on how dependence on other polities in formulating and conducting policy impinges on that policy (cf. external pageReid 1974; external pagePlischke 1977; external pageHarden 1985; external pageDuursma 1996). In line with this, we suggest that it may be useful to think of micro-states as those states whose claim to maintain effective sovereignty on a territory is in some degree questioned by other states, and that cannot maintain what larger states at any one given time define as the minimum required presence in the international society of states (membership in international organizations, embassies in key capitals, etc.) because of a perceived lack of resources. For example, in 1920, Liechtenstein's application for membership in the League of Nations was rejected because it had "chosen to depute to others some of the attributes of sovereignty" and had no army (external pageGstöhl 2001: 106). As a result, San Marino and Monaco did not further pursue their applications even though the League offered limited forms of participation. The main problem in these cases was not so much the limited capacities but the contested sovereignty of those states, an issue that emerged again in the United Nations in the 1960s and 1970s. Many authors have pointed to the dilemma that the right to self-determination promoted by the UN has produced many new very small states whose influx into the world organization could cause significant problems (e.g., external pageBlair 1967; external pageHarris 1970; external pageGunter 1977). A vivid debate took place about how those micro-states would use their collective voting power in the General Assembly, who would finance their decisions dominated by Third World concerns, and whether they should be offered restricted membership. Since neither the anticipated proliferation of micro-states nor their capture of the UN happened, the dispute died (cf. external pageGstöhl 2001: 104-112; external pageDuursma 1996: 133-142). Nevertheless, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Andorra and other micro-states joined the UN only in the 1990s, when there was a turn towards more ready acceptance of micro-state claims to equal sovereignty within international society.
An example for a lack of capacity could be Costa Rica in the inter-war period. That state decided not to maintain its membership of the League of Nations because it did not think it could afford it, and so it went from being a small state to being a micro-state. By contrast, when, in the same period, the Norwegian state did not think it could afford sending its minister in Buenos Aires to the other three states to which he was side-accredited to present his credentials, this would not have an effect on Norway's standing as a small state, because the larger states did not really expect a small state to have a diplomatic presence in all the other states in the system. Lack of capacity means capacity that is seen to be beyond a minimum; what this minimum is, is a question of continuous negotiation. We stress that, for a state to be micro rather than small, absence from international society alone is not enough. The perceived reason has to be a lack of resources. Consider two small states such as Albania and Switzerland during the Cold War; in their various ways, they did not maintain what larger states saw as a minimum presence, but the reasons were to do with other things than a lack of resources, so did not threaten their standing as small states.
Overall, extant scholarship in the IR discipline has focused almost exclusively on great powers, while small states have been a residual category, defined by the alleged non-greatness of its members. It borders on two even more weakly defined sub-categories: middle powers, which may convincingly argue that they have achieved "greatness" in some other regard than in terms of systems-wide presence, and micro-states, which cannot participate fully in the institutions of that system due to a lack of administrative resources. [...]