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Power in International Politics: Giulio M. Gallarotti, The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics (New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010), pp. 205. Price Rs. 795.
Yogesh Joshi International Studies 2010 47: 73 DOI: 10.1177/002088171104700105 The online version of this article can be found at: http://isq.sagepub.com/content/47/1/73.citation

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Book Reviews

International Studies 47(1) 7393 2010 JNU SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/002088171104700105 http://isq.sagepub.com

Power in International Politics

Giulio M. Gallarotti, The Power Curse: Influence and Illusion in World Politics (New Delhi: Viva Books, 2010), pp. 205. Price ` 795. The Athenians faced power in their failed conquest of Sicily; Napoleon Bonaparte in Russia; the British in the Boer wars and the Americans in Vietnam. History abounds with examples of power being a bane rather than a boon for the powerful. David Baldwin summarizes this tragedy, obviously with a Greek or an Athenian touch, in what he calls the paradoxes of power. What is the mechanism through which power becomes a curse? How does excessive power cut the veins of its own progenitor? The book under review seeks to explain the internal decay in national power, which manifests itself in the process of power enhancement. According to the author, the developments which lead nations to weaken themselves in attempting to augment their own power constitute the power curse (p. 9). The power curse generates illusions of power since it is in the nature of the power curse to disguise a nations real capabilities and interests. This miscalculation in needs and capacities of nations, in turn, enervates the existing resources of power a nation possesses. The greater the power, the greater will be the effect of power curse since the illusion of power will be greater. Hence, for the author, great powers are the principle victims of power curse. The power curse manifests itself in four different, yet interconnected, ways. First, cursed by the power illusion, states hardly discern the complexity of the system they are working in. In complex systems ceteris paribus assumptions do not work. Situations keep on evolving continuously and, therefore, the results are often in dissonance with the intentions. Feedback is another problem. Feedback represents reactions and consequences of the initial action and affect the action itself to produce complex results. This mechanism was most revealing in the Vietnam War. The power curse leads to an underestimation of the complexity of the system and hence, does not allow a holistic approach to emerge. US President Johnsons strategy of limited and gradual response was based on the American understanding of the working of deterrence during the Cold War: the enemy will become more reconciliatory with the prospect of an increase in the level of violence. This obviously did not happen. The strategy, in turn, emboldened the

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perception among adversaries that the United States resolve to continue fighting was weak. Moreover, the novelty of insurgency and asymmetrical war tactics was purposefully neglected. This was evident in the US militarys reliance on big weapons and big targets and their neglect of experiences of other great powers in insurgency situations (such as the British in Malaya and the French in Vietnam). Neglect of history accompanied, in Robert Jervis terminology, an over learning from history. Adverse public opinion had never been a concern for the US strategists in any of their previous military engagements and, therefore, it was never taken into account. Moreover, after the World War II, public perceptions in the US were attuned to only short conflicts owing to the preponderance of American power. Both these factors proved disastrous for US war efforts as public opinion became increasingly hostile during the course of the war. For Gallarotti, the US conducted the war with perceptions of preponderant asymmetries in power and owing to the complexity of the system, the great giant was slain by a cadre of revolutionaries. Moral hazard or what is called the seatbelt effect is the second mechanism through which the power curse is made effective. Great powers are insured against debacles, as compared to small powers, owing to their huge power resources. However, this sense of security or limited vulnerability may lead to development of two detrimental tendencies: first, it may increase the proclivity towards risk taking; second, it may also lead to complacency towards emerging threats. For Gallarotti, this symptom of the power curse was most conspicuous in the business of the Central Bank of England during the 19th century. British financial primacy in the world was absolute as London was the centre of global finance and the sterling became the de facto world currency. According to the author, this financial primacy made the managers of Bank of England as well as the British government extremely complacent. Rather than holding reserve gold as a safety net, which was an established norm worldwide, against rise and fall of global demands, the Central Bank of England used the fluctuation in discount rates as the principle mechanism to regulate finance, which led to instability in the financial markets. However, the colonial economies screened Britain from the ill-effects of its flawed financial practices. The two additional aspects of the power curse are overstretch and unilateralism. Imperial overstretch has now become, thanks to Paul Kennedy, a common parlance in international relations. Taking the Athenian example, Gallarotti argues that overstretch was the principal reason behind the fiasco that accompanied the Athenian conquest of the island of Sicily. Later, it led to the loss in the Peloponnesian wars. Unilateralism, on the other hand, for Gallarotti, does not allow optimal outcomes to emerge. This was manifested in the dealings of the British government to stabilize the value of silver in the second half of the 19th century. Instead of embracing multilateral efforts attempted by states such as the US and France to keep silver in circulation, Britain remained purposefully aloof because it was enamoured of her financial supremacy and the tradition of financial unilateralism. Owing to Britains pivotal position in the world economywithout International Studies, 47, 1 (2010): 7393

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the collaboration of which any attempt to stabilize silver was doomed from the startsilver went out of circulation from the global economy. As a result, a partial gold standard had to be imposed in India, which the Indian economy was never prepared for. For intellectual clarity and methodological convenience, the book seeks to identify one facet of the power curse with one particular case study; in reality, all these facets interact to produce the effects of the power curse. The US under President George Bush was a classic example where all the above four factors collaborated to emasculate its imperial hubris. The Bush period reveals moral hazard in the form of excessively militaristic response to threats of terrorism; overstretch in the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; unilateralism in boycotting instruments of international legitimacy such as the United Nations and International Court of Justice, and international cooperation agreements such as arms control treaties, and finally the underestimation of complex systems where issues are interlinked and the results are uncertain. In fact, complexity of international system is evident in the fact that the US lost on all its perceived objectivesnon-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, spread of democracy and fight against terrorism. Gallarottis arguments are important for the power debate in the discipline of International Relations. First, it provides some sense of the mechanisms that make power effective. The gap between power resources and influence it generates has been one of the most intractable puzzles in the scholarly investigations of the concept of power. By underlining the importance of the power curse and its four facets, the author provides some answers in this regard. The second strong point of the discussion on the power curse is that it highlights the complex interaction between hard power and soft power. The power curse makes a nation excessively reliant on its hard power sources. However, the most pernicious effect of the power curse is that it only augments the tendency to use hard power, but in doing so, it crowds out all possible sources of soft power of the nation. Third, the discussion on the power curse may provide some traction to those seeking a common understanding of power to develop across theoretical boundaries in International Relations. For example, if lessons of the power curse are learned, then soft power which has otherwise been a strong turf of Neoliberal and Constructivist scholars can go well with Realist assumptions of power accumulation and optimization. Like hard power, soft power can be equally efficient in realizing the interests of the states. Similarly, the idea of development of institutions and norms, considered as soft power resources, is not in conflict with Realist assumptions of security maximization as a primary motivation of states in an anarchical system. In fact, soft power may augment security much more than the application of hard power, as power curse makes the later highly inefficient. However, the problem with the power curse, as with all phenomena whose proof lies in hindsight, is that often such concepts appear to be tautological: the power curse is operational only if there is a gap between power resources and the results produced by their application. It is synonymous with the problem International Studies, 47, 1 (2010): 7393

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which accompanied Robert Dhals definition of powerA has power over B, if B is made to do something which it would not have otherwise donewhere outcome decides whether the cause, power in this case, is in fact operational or not. This greatly reduces the explanatory capacity of the theory as well as its predictive power. Also, to measure the true extent of the power curse, an analyst needs to involve himself in a counter-factual exercise: What would have been the result if the power curse was not operational? Lastly, sometimes the power curse appears to be a structural phenomenon as is clearly the case with complex systems, and sometimes it appears to be driven by the characteristics of actors or agents actions as in the case of unilateralism. If so, a discussion on the interaction between structure and agency in the phenomena of the power curse is warranted. Gallarotti is completely silent on the issue. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship in the discipline of International Relations. Yogesh Joshi Research Scholar Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament School of International Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi

The Holocaust
Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 256. Price $35. DOI: 10.1177/002088171104700106 Several generations of post-war historians have striven to make sense of the gruesome events that struck the European Jewry with the advent of Nazism in Germany and the Nazi occupation of Europe. It is indisputable that the historiography of the Holocaust is colossal and that Professor Dan Stone of Royal Holloway has undertaken the mammoth task of making an assessment of the prevailing trends of Holocaust historiography is in itself very commendable. In a continent, where neo-Nazi groups are increasingly augmenting their strength today, it is enormously important to look back in time at the gory set of events that not merely crashed the living worlds for the Jews in Europe but also altered the map of the Middle East forever. Stone clarifies from the very onset that he would focus not on the victims but instead on the perpetrators of the Holocaust. He pursues this tterforschung (perpetrator research) while discussing the decision-making process during the Holocaust. He equally clarifies that he would not touch upon the phenomenon of International Studies, 47, 1 (2010): 7393