Michael Leifer and the balance of power

Abstract

In the work of the late Professor Michael Leifer few concepts are invoked more often than the balance of power. It was due to his reliance on this concept that Michael Leifer came to be widely regarded as an exponent of realism and an advocate of countervailing balance of power practices. By reviewing Leifer's own writings, this article not only re-examines the now almost standard interpretation of his work, but also investigates the significance of the balance of power in his scholarship in new ways. The first section identifies the two key meanings Leifer explicitly imputed to the balance of power. It also examines Leifer's arguments relative to what he perceived as changes in the balance of power. This will be done with reference to his analyses of the international politics of Southeast and East Asia in the Cold War and post-Cold War period. The second section extends the discussion on the particularities of Leifer's writings on the balance of power, but relates it specifically to the question of what Leifer's writings suggest about his theoretical home. His ability to demonstrate the significance of the balance of power as a political factor in the foreign policies of individual Southeast Asian states is the focus of the third section. Finally, the article builds on Leifer's empirical writings on the importance of psychological factors in relation to the balance of power as policy to take up theoretically important questions that he himself did not pursue, particularly about the extent to which the balance of power is the product of struggles for security and recognition. The article draws three conclusions. First, Leifer should be thought of not as a diehard advocate of conventional balance of power practices, but rather as a scholar broadly working within English School parameters who was deeply wedded to the idea that the balance of power is necessary to uphold regional order in international society in the context of the rise of a potentially hegemonic power. Second, one of the finest aspects of Leifer's scholarly legacy is to be found in his discussion of the balance of power factor in the foreign policies of Southeast Asian states. Third, Leifer should also be an inspiration to those interested in empirical work underlining the importance of struggles for recognition in the formation and practice of the balance of power.

Keywords:

• Michael Leifer
• balance of power
• ASEAN
• English School
• struggle for recognition

Acknowledgements

This article was first presented at a conference on ‘The Unending Search for Regional Order: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer’, jointly organized in Singapore by the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies and the Asia Research Centre/Department of International Relations, LSE, on 13–14 May 2004. The author would in particular like to thank Michael Yahuda, Christopher R. Hughes and Cho-oon Khong for comments on the material.

Notes

1. Tan See Seng (2001: 34) has also introduced Leifer as ‘a prominent realist thinker of East Asian security’.

2. For such differentiation see, for instance, Claude (1965). See also Haas (1953) and Sheehan (1996).

3. For nine possible meanings of ‘balance’, see Wight (1966).

4. See Hay (2002: Ch. 5) for a very useful account of the faces of power debate.

5. See, for instance, Austin (1998), Gurtov and Hwang (1998), Wohlforth (1999) and Karmel (2000). See also Gurtov (2002). See Segal (1999) for the argument that China mattered less than was generally assumed.

6. For reviews of the China–ASEAN relationship, see Haacke (2002) and Ba (2003).

7. Notably, while for Leifer ASEAN thus played no major role in managing the regional balance of power, he did not say that ASEAN would not be able to make any contribution at all to regional order. In this context, he noted with some interest the political and security effects of ASEAN's practice of consultation and cooperation that avoided formal multilateralism in favour of bilateral arrangements to address tensions.

8. Interestingly, Leifer himself eventually did say that the workings of the ASEAN Regional Forum were ‘informed knowingly or not by neo-functionalist assumptions that an incremental linear process of dialogue can produce a qualitative improvement in political relationships’ (Leifer 1996a: 59).

9. The exchange began with Geoffrey Wiseman (1992). More recently, Wiseman (2002) has expanded on his original contribution.

10. See Alagappa (2003) for a critical discussion of the relationship between international order and international society as well as the balance of power as a pathway to order.

11. Leifer repeatedly used the term ‘security culture’ (Leifer 1996a: 9, 12, 19, 41), whereby he understood a ‘distinctive security culture of conflict avoidance and conflict management’. He did not embrace the concept of the ‘ASEAN way’, not even as shorthand for a wider set of practices and norms that would have included the principles that he seemed to endorse from the vantage point of someone committed to international society. On this point, see Acharya (2001) and Haacke (2003). Leifer's reluctance to use the term ‘ASEAN way’ was probably in part due to his unwillingness to take up official rhetoric that at times has also been used pejoratively as a synonym for the lowest common denominator.

12. The independence of states has at times been sacrificed on the altar of great power politics. See Bull (1977) on the relationship between the balance of power and other institutions in relation to order and sovereign independence.

13. For a fuller discussion of these two conceptions of the balance of power, see Little (1989). As Little (2000: 60) also put it, the balance of power metaphor has from its origins ‘been Janus-faced, looking in one direction at the competing interests between states and in the other at their common interests’.

14. Also see Emmers (2003) for a discussion of the balance of power factor within cooperative security regimes such as ASEAN and the ARF.

15. It is probably safe to assume that Leifer would be very critical of those scholars who refuse to engage in a relevant interpretive inquiry and only acknowledge the balance of power to be at work if behaviour taking the form of overt adversarial balancing is detected.

16. The discourse of kinship in Indonesia–Malaysia relations is examined in Liow (2003).

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Notes on contributors

Jürgen Haacke

Jürgen Haacke is a Lecturer in the Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science. His main research interests focus on the politics, security and international relations of Southeast Asia. He is the author of ASEAN's Diplomatic and Security Culture: Origins, Development and Prospects (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).