Major Power Competition and the Internal Politics of Smaller State Alignment

• In Event: Major Power Competition and Internal Politics in Asia

Abstract

The rise of US-China competition and resurgence of Russia’s rivalry with the West have brought major power competition back to the center of 21st century politics. Policymakers and analysts are deeply interested in how these contests play out in the smaller states over which larger powers are trying to win power and influence. This project studies what happens inside these states – and the implications for external policy - as they try to navigate a world of major power rivalry.
External efforts to preserve or change a state’s foreign policy alignment can put extraordinary pressure on smaller countries’ political systems. Outside powers often try to tilt the domestic playing field within these systems by putting money, covert operations, and/or diplomatic support behind favored internal factions, while transnational flows of ideas, people, and resources cascade unpredictably into domestic politics. This can contribute to state collapse, escalating proxy wars, and/or enduring political instability.
Yet these competitions can provide valuable political and economic tools for domestic political players as well: both regimes and oppositions can paint their foes as tools of foreign powers while claiming to keep the country safe from external danger, outsiders’ money and support can be crucial resources in domestic battles for primacy, and transnational diffusion can reshape internal political competitions by inspiring new movements and redrawing political cleavages. Thus major power competition can instead bolsters governments.
And sometimes, none of this happens, as domestic political competition instead proceeds with limited or uneven reference to grand global or regional competitions, as in contemporary Nepal and Myanmar.
This project aims to offer a new way of thinking about outcomes and to deploy a simplifying theory that can help us identify recurrent trajectories. Major power competitions interact with dramatically different domestic-political configurations. These interactions create divergent trajectories in how third-party states relate to geopolitical rivalries; some become deeply enmeshed in a particular side, others are torn apart, some are able to insulate themselves, and in yet others, major power politics comes and goes as a political issue at home. The two key variables I focus on are the distribution of domestic political power and the potential and real linkages between a major power competition and the activated and latent domestic political cleavages in a smaller state.
This paper uses a systematic medium-N study of South and Southeast Asia states navigating major power competition during the Cold War and in the post-2005 period to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the argument, and then draws out implications for policy and future research.

Author

• Paul Staniland, University of Chicago