Great power

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A great power is a state that has a significant geopolitical influence.

term

Definition

The Brockhaus defines the term “great power” as a designation “for a state whose position in international life (diplomacy, peace agreements, congresses) had to be taken into account because it was able to assert itself in terms of power even in struggles with the majority of the other great powers”.

According to Erich Bayer, those states are called great powers that have "a decisive influence on world politics ". At the end of the 18th century (after the departure of Sweden and Spain) these were Great Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria. The USA and Japan were added in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The criterion for the term is often cited as the fact that a major defensive power can stand alone militarily against any other state. An offensive great power, on the other hand, must be able to exert military influence worldwide. "However, there is no clear and generally accepted definition, so that in individual cases it can be disputed whether a state can be considered a great power."

The term came up in the early 19th century when the hegemony of France was replaced by the pentarchy at the end of Napoleonic rule , a limited cooperation between the victorious powers Russia, Austria, Great Britain and Prussia with the defeated France, which emerged at the Congress of Vienna . At first only these five powers were so named.

The term is not precisely defined, but has also been used since then to characterize earlier and later power constellations.

Definition of terms

In German, words ending in -macht are mainly used to denote a great power position , including great power , world power and superpower , with the first part of the word roughly describing the size of the sphere of interest and the attributed state influence .

The terms great power and world power have taken the place of the older term empire , such as in the Roman Empire . The term superpower refers exclusively to the bipolar world order during the so-called Cold War with the two overwhelming competitors, the USA and the Soviet Union , or only to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union .

Application of the term

A distinction between big powers and smaller balls in world politics began as early as the end of the 5th century BC. BC Thucydides in his Melier dialogue by putting the sentence in the mouths of the Athenians : "The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they have to!"

The concept of great power remains reserved for modern times and is therefore only rarely used to characterize the weighting of power in ancient times and the Middle Ages, where one speaks more of the great empires. Thus, in the historical literature, the ancient Egypt , Babylon , the Assyrian Empire , the Hittite Empire , the old or New Persian Empire , Carthage , Athens , Sparta , Macedonia or the empire of Alexander , the Seleucid Empire , the Roman Empire and the Empire China referred to as great empires or as great powers.

The "Great Powers" of the early Middle Ages were the Roman Empire, which was transformed into the Byzantine Empire , the Franconian Empire , the Islamic Caliphate and China . In the High Middle Ages , the Holy Roman Empire and France emerged from the Franconian Empire . The Ottoman Empire replaced the Byzantine Empire as a great power. During the period of their heyday, the two northern Italian city republics of Genoa and Venice had a dominant position in the Mediterranean , Egypt attained a great power position during the Ayyubid and Mamluk era, and the Mongolian empires even held hegemony in Central and East Asia for a short time. In the 15th century, the Inca and Aztec empires established themselves on the American double continent .

Great powers in the modern era

In the early modern period, because of their colonies , Spain and Portugal also had global influence, later the Netherlands , Russia , Sweden , Poland-Lithuania , Austria , France, England and, after the Seven Years' War , Prussia also gained a great power position. With the loss of some of their colonies and areas in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Iberian countries and the Netherlands lost this status again, and Sweden was pushed back in the Great Northern War by the new great power Russia. Poland-Lithuania disappeared from the map after the three partitions of Poland . The Mughal Empire established itself as a regional power on the Indian subcontinent in the 16th century .

Since the end of the Seven Years' War , the European pentarchy of the five great powers, so-called for the first time at the time of the Congress of Vienna, determined : "The most important decisions [at the Congress of Vienna] were made in the Committee of the Five Great Powers": Great Britain , Austria , Prussia, Russia and France .

In addition, Spain, Portugal and Sweden sat in the European Committee of the eight signatory powers of the 1st Peace of Paris. The once so powerful Ottoman Empire was only considered a regional power ( Sick Man on the Bosporus ).

In the epoch of imperialism, two non-European states were added to the previous five European great powers, which acquired great power status due to their early industrialization: the United States of America and Japan .

With the establishment of the German Confederation , according to contemporary judgment, Germany reappeared as a “total power in the ranks of the powers”, which as main powers, as grandes puissances or as European powers were raised from the states of the second order. In the second half of the 19th century Italy rose to the rank of great powers, Austria changed to Austria-Hungary and Prussia became part of the German Empire . Outside Europe, the United States gained great power after the Civil War and Japan after the Russo-Japanese War .

Before the start of the Second World War , the German Empire , France , Great Britain , Italy , Japan, the Soviet Union and the USA were considered great powers. The victorious powers retained this status after the end of the war. The possession of nuclear weapons was a very important criterion superpower next to the status as a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations . After 1945 this was held by the USA, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China and so nominally formed the new “world pentarchy”. Since the Cold War , the USA and the Soviet Union were the dominant great powers, which is why they were also referred to as superpowers . Sometimes Russia is still viewed as a superpower today, primarily because it still has the largest nuclear arsenal alongside the United States .

Todays situation

The possession of nuclear weapons alone is not a criterion for a great power. In contrast, a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council confers a privileged status because of the right of veto. Therefore, the reform plan of the G4 countries Japan , India , Brazil and Germany , which provides for a permanent seat, can be understood as a claim to a great power position.

Similar terms

Hyperpower is a term created in 1999 by the then French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine to criticize the current dominant position of the USA in politics , economy , culture , in the mass media and in the military .

See also

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Great power  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brockhaus Encyclopedia in 20 volumes. 17., completely reworked. Ed., Volume 7, FA Brockhaus, Wiesbaden 1969, p. 711.
  2. ↑ Erich Bayer (ed.): Dictionary of history. Terms and technical terms (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 289). Kröner, Stuttgart 1960, p. 185.
  3. ^ Frank Schimmelfennig : International Politics (=  basic political science course , volume 3107). UTB, Paderborn 2008 ISBN 978-3-506-76581-9 , p. 74.
  4. ↑ While Adelung International Dictionary of the High German dialect the keyword in the edition of 1811 major power not quotes, but only large powerful and large thickness , writes Joseph Gorres (in the Rheinische Merkur of 23 September 1815) in the comments on the mutual relations of France and of the allies : “From France's point of view, Prussia is a brand new, but not yet firmly established, great power.” That is “a formulation in which the word great power clearly no longer denotes great power, but a powerful state.” (Walter Böhme: Zur Entwicklung des Conceptual Great Power , September 2011). There is also a reference to Adelungs Lexicon.
  5. ↑ An early document can be found in the Brockhaus Encyclopedia of 1823 under the heading Congreß , referring to the Peace Congress of Munster and Osnabrück of 1648: “England, which had just become throneless, took no part in it, and Spain no longer appeared to be decisive Great power next to Austria, France and Sweden. ”( General Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts edited by Johann Samuelansch, Johann Gottfried Gruber and others. Part 22, Brockhaus Verlag 1832 p. 105)
  6. ↑ Thucydides : The Peloponnesian War. V 89.
  7. ↑ Geiss, Imanuel: History at a Glance. Dates and connections in world history. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, p. 404.
  8. ↑ Imanuel Geiss: History at a Glance. Dates and connections in world history. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, p. 437: "In the age of imperialism, two overseas great powers with wars as new dynamically expanding centers of power in the Far East and the Far West joined the major European powers - Japan and the USA."
  9. ↑ Art. 2 of the Vienna Final Act of 1820.
  10. ↑ Arnold Heeren : The German Bund in its relationship to the European State System at the opening of the Bundestag. 1817, p. 430.
  11. ↑ Faber p. 931.
  12. ↑ In 1971 joined the People's Republic of China in the place of Taiwan (see. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 )
  13. ↑ Former German Foreign Minister Fischer, who himself represented the reform plan, considers the claim for Germany, but also for the current permanent Security Council members France and Great Britain, to be excessive: “And so the rest of the world will one day have to make it clear to Europeans that the 19th century and also the first half of the 20th century are long gone and the global distribution of power can no longer be determined by European Central Powers , as in the past . ”(Joschka Fischer: I'm not convinced - The Iraq War and the red-green years. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2010, ISBN 3-462-04081-2 , p. 299). He therefore takes the position that of the European states apart from Russia, only the European Union should have a permanent seat on the Security Council.