Great Power Politics Among Asante and its Neighbours in the 18th and 19th Centuries: An Offensive Realist Explanation
Abstract
Pre-colonial African history has been excluded from realists’ analysis of great power politics because they consider Africa to have had no significant history of influence before the World Wars. This thesis seeks to determine whether a pre-colonial African states system was equivalent to the European model, and whether the same factors influenced security competition and the motivation to maximize military power. The thesis answers the above assertion by testing Mearsheimer’s offensive realism’s central proposition—‘maximizing military power with the ultimate aim of becoming a hegemon is the logical solution in an anarchic environment’—against the international relations of Asante and its neighbors in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Although both Africanists and realists may reject the application of offensive realism to pre-colonial African history, there is evidence to suggest that this maybe a viable argument. The Asante case, just like Mearsheimer’s great power politics of Europe, was characterized by the lack of higher authority, which generated a climate of uncertainty that manifested itself through maximization of military power, formation of alliances and wars. The African polities’ drive to maximize their military power arguably made the concept of ‘balance of power’ unworkable, in the sense that almost all the polities in the system were prepared to use military power to achieve their objectives, and this made wars more frequent. In this case, whereas Asante used military aggression to aspire for hegemony, its neighbors rather used military aggression to defend their status quo, that is, their control of the trade routes.
Mearsheimer’s theory was useful in explaining how structural factors such as anarchy and the distribution of military power strongly shaped the behavior of the polities of the Asante case, but it has little to say about why Asante, a revisionist state was revisionist. Furthermore, although Mearsheimer introduces the argument that nationalism, a sub-unit factor can directly influence structural factors, it may benefit realism to build on Mearsheimer’s theory by looking into non-Western ways of thinking, which incorporates non-structural factors like collective identity (glorification of the nation) and regime (personal) power into their understanding of great power politics and revisionism.
Description
Keywords
History--African, Political Science, Political Science--International Law and Relations
Citation
Yankey-Wayne, V. A. (2017). Great Power Politics Among Asante and its Neighbours in the 18th and 19th Centuries: An Offensive Realist Explanation (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26320