I think that as we examine the idea of "coercion" it is important that we examine some of the assumptions we tend to make about hard power and how it works. RJ Art points out in "The Fungibiliy of Force" that when nations engage in "soft" negotiations or transactions, the "rules of the game" are held in place by underlying threats of hard power. I do not wish to dispute this argument. However, I think it is important that we recognize that "hard power" is similarly undergirded by forces of soft power.
I will try to explain this position by making a couple of conceptual points. I've also got some examples -- the liberation movement of India-Pakistan lead by Gandhi and the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. on Japan -- but I'll save those for another post so that it doesn't get too long and unwieldy....
As Art points out, hard power has more than one component. I broadly define these as the ability to “destroy” or “limit” and the ability to “intimidate” or “coerce.” Limiting or destructive power is power that does not require any human or rational interpretation to be effective. It is, in simple terms, the power to make certain things possible or impossible, regardless of what anyone would prefer or choose. For example, if I shoot down an enemy’s plane, that plane cannot be used against me as hard power because it cannot fly. Similarly, if I destroy the enemy’s manufacturing bases, it may not be able to produce weapons to use against me. Whether this enemy wishes to use these weapons or not is irrelevant, they are “destroyed” and the enemy’s options for action are thus limited. Limiting/destroying power thus acts on what is possible.
Intimidation or coercion power is different. Instead of working on what is possible, it works on what is preferable. Given a set of possible options, this power alters the preferential weight these options receive. For example, if I threaten to shoot down my neighbor’s planes if it attempts to fly them over my country, I am using coercive power. I am attempting to alter the relative attractiveness of flying over my country by adding the cost of lost lives and aircraft to that option.
Coercion power thus clearly has a “soft” component. How the threat is phrased, for example, can have a big impact on how it is interpreted, and since coercive power is predicated on interpretation, this can make a big difference. Our assumption about hard power, though, tends to be that coercion is reliable to the extent to which the threats it makes can be supported. Thus, the military builds its strength to destroy in the expectation that this will improve its strength to coerce.
But the power to destroy is fundamentally limited, not technologically but organizationally. In simple terms (and skipping a lot of detailed argument), it is not possible to create a military institution that does not, for the sake of its own survival, have "break" points. This is because of any institution's fundamental need for outside resources. An institution must find a way to acquire resources in order to perform its activities. Since the activity of hard power is destructive, it's fundamental resource-acquiring routine cannot employ hard power, i.e. it cannot burn the fields from which the army must eat. Or, in modern western democracies, it cannot violate the legitimating norms from which govern the flow of civilian support. Generals may claim that war is too important to be financed by civilians, but the fact is that regardless of war's importance, it must be financed by somebody who is not engaged in it. The destructive side of hard power does not "provide" anything that can be used.
This is all a long way of making a simple point -- because destructive power is limited, the strength of hard power relies fundamentally on coercion. This means, in essence, that hard power is really just a means of manipulating, but hardly a means of controlling, the minds of others by presenting them with different options.
Hard power relies, in other words, on the willingness of at least some people to “go along” with it. More importantly, hard power's effectiveness is largely determined by the number of people who "go along" with it. Or, in other words, hard power can only be effective where there is a reasonable assumption that a large number of people will draw desired conclusions about it -- that they will go along "en masse."
But what does it mean to “persuade large groups of people to go along?” What is this power? It is the power to organize.
Now here is the crucial point. Hard power is mediated by the power to organize -- it can only be effective, ultimately, if it can effect organizational changes. For example, an attack must ultimately create an organized response, i.e. a surrender -- a coordinated acquiescence. But hard power is not the only the component of the power to organize. In fact, hard power is not even a particularly salient power in the realm of organizing -- many people organize to do many things without coercion or fear of a destructive response.
Hard power may support the "rules of the game," but soft understandings support the effectiveness of hard power. As much as soft institutions are built on beliefs about hard power enforcement, hard power enforcement is built on ideas about the reach and scope of the soft power, the power to organize, embedded in the hard power apparatus.
Comments (3)
DM-
I like the distinction you make within hard power between acts of destruction, maybe the purest form of hard power, and the power to coerce, which you suggests contains elements of soft power because it involves negotiation.
Perhap some of it pertains to intention. In the Vietnam war President Nixon engaged in some of the heaviest bombing of the North to intimidate the enemy and force them to surrender. The bombing was not so much to deny them access to those physical assets.
I didn't quite get'organization' argument. Maybe there are underlying 'infrastructures' to power's exercise tha must be present to be effective, including 'organization'.
Posted by ernest | February 4, 2007 7:52 AM
Posted on February 4, 2007 07:52
Yes, you said it well -- an "underlying infrastructure" to hard power. I use the term "organization" because I am an organizational communication scholar, but that is just one way to think about it. Other ways, from a more military point of view, would be:
Clausewitz argues for the critical importance of "morale." This term, in contemporary usage, is misleading because it suggests that what is critical is a sense of "enthusiasm" for the cause or for the battle. But Clausewitz isn't really talking about something so purely emotional. What he is really referring to is the efficiency of the army "organizationally" (there's that term again). Things like -- do they obey orders swiftly or do they complain? What is the desertion rate? Do they stay focused on assigned goals or deviate/become distracted? Napoleon also talks extensively about the importance of morale in his writings.
Arquilla and Ronfeldt define this "infrastructure" in a different way. I think it is in their book on Swarming, they talk about how the goal is to "disrupt" the enemy's ability to resist. I think that is a really good way to think about it. Yes, destroying physical assets -- people, weapons and equipment -- can serve this purpose, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient, and in fact in some cases can be counter-productive.
The Vietnam example is a perfect one -- very similar to the India-Pakistan example. Basically, in both cases, the "resistors" identified the crucial infrastructure of the larger nation's hard power -- it's reliance on certain principles of legitimation for resources. In other words, the U.S. and the British military have access to hard power only insofar as they meet certain conditions. Those conditions are that the military be perceived by the general population as acting within certain moral boundaries. If these boundaries can be seen to be violated, the resources are withdrawn and the hard power infrastructure crumbles, and thus the hard power is diminished.
This is hard for us to see because, since our military is, generally, within these conditions, we take it as a kind of given that hard power is "theirs." But it is not. As Cimbala pointed out in the piece we read for this week, the military draws its authority from the people.
Now, the military may (and I don't want to speak for anyone here) feel like they shouldn't have to "answer to" the public. This is the "Colonel Jessup" position from "A Few Good Men." But this position is misguided. It is based on a philosophical objection -- that the military shouldn't "have to" be accountable. I agree, it doesn't "have to." But neither do I "have to" pledge resources to fund/support it.
Rather than seeing this as a metaphysical debate, it easier to understand as a practical deal. It is because the U.S. military pledges to be accountable to the people that it is outfitted with enormous resources -- resources that are largely only available from a civilian sector like inventive engineering and flexibly minded officer corps. Thus, it is because the military allows itself to be separate from and subservient to the populace that it gets all of the best gadgets and many of the most intelligent people working for it. And all we ask is that they stay within certain boundaries which, for the most part, they do.
The upside is an enormously powerful hard power apparatus -- the best in the world. The downside is that poorly justified missions, or tactics that are disproportionately destructive, undermine this very hard power. Thus, it is not always in the military's best interest to deploy its hard power to destroy, even though it can do so easily and efficiently, because it can inadvertently "disrupt" its own apparatus in doing so.
Posted by DM | February 4, 2007 12:25 PM
Posted on February 4, 2007 12:25
I especially like your analysis of the basis on which the US military gets its money - accountability. At the same time, I think civilians funding wars are also accountable - they are 'supposed' to make use of the 'indirect' (for the sake of impartiality *winks*) economic benefit from military intervention by efficiently utlizing the influx of new and in-demand rescources. This is what state power and its justifications (international 'liberty' and the ever-so-elusive concept of 'equality') are all about.
Posted by SK | February 5, 2007 9:06 AM
Posted on February 5, 2007 09:06