The Third Power

At a January Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) lecture , one Korean Studies scholar argued that in international relations there is a third power besides “soft” influence and “hard” military power. Professor David Kang argued that “…there’s a third type of power that in many ways we overlook but in many ways we all implicitly accept..which is what we might call social status.”

He said that “…social scientists have come up with three fundamental human motivations, right, and that’s wealth, power and status and as I said before, psychologists, sociologists, we all understand that social status is [an] extremely important motivator for human behavior.”

“In [international relations], we tend to ignore that a little bit,” Prof. Kang said.

“The first thing about status is that it has to be given by somebody else,” argued Kang, who teaches at the University of Southern California and directs the school’s Korean Studies Institute. “[Social status is] inherently social in a way that military or economic power is not,” he said.

“So anytime somebody’s talking about can China be a leader, how about American leadership, what about Japanese leadership, you are inherently talking about social status because if somebody has to give you the leadership label and be willing to follow and this is very different than coercion, right,” Professor Kang said at the event, which was co-sponsored by the Reserve Officers Association (ROA). “If I point a gun at your head, you’re not a [follower]—I’m not a leader, I’m coercing you.”

Commentator Kongdan Oh called Prof. Kang’s paper “very rich, very interesting” but with “some spots” that needed improvement. For example, she questioned what evidence there was that social scientists had agreed that “the three fundamental motivations of human behavior are wealth, power and status” since “the only person cited” in Kang’s paper was German scholar and sociologist Max Weber.

Baylor University professor Diana Kendall characterizes Weberian theory as influenced by Karl Marx and his theories on capital in her textbook, Sociology in Our Times (7th Ed). “Max Weber’s analysis of class builds upon earlier theories of capitalism (particularly those by Marx) and of money (particularly those by Georg Simmel…),” Kendall writes. “Weber agreed with Marx’s assertion that economic factors are important in understanding individual and group behavior,” she later adds.

“However, Weber emphasized that no single factor (such as economic divisions between capitalists and workers) was sufficient for defining the location of categories of people within the class structure.”

Some might also question the omission of “faith” as a motivating factor in human behavior. Georgetown Professor Thomas F. Farr, the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, has argued that religious motivations of state actors are often overlooked in U.S. foreign policy. “The transnational forces of globalization, of weapons of mass destruction, economic growth, HIV/AIDS—let alone Islamist terrorism—all have something to do, or an influence in some way by religious actors, religious ideas, and religious movements,” he told an Ethics and Public Policy Center audience in 2008.

Kongdan Oh, a research staff member for the Institute for Defense Analyses and senior nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, raised a series of questions about Kang’s thesis, including

• “If these [three listed concepts] are indeed basic motivations for human behavior are they also the motivations for state behavior?”
• “Isn’t it usually the case that a state or the people gives itself a higher ranking than everybody else gives that state? That is nationalism?”
• “Also, how is [a] state’s status measured?”
• and if so, “Is the measurement reliable or even stable?”

“I think the U.S. and western values remain the globally accepted values,” Prof. Kang concluded at the end of his presentation, arguing that “when you look at it from this perspective the question isn’t the balance of power…but from a status perspective the question would be is China going to actually going to be able to play or buy into the Western values and the western norms that are now global or are they gonna challenge them at some point, and I honestly have no answer.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.