Destradi Sandra
Helmut Schmidt University / University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg and GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Germany.
Eur J Int Relat. 2017 Jun;23(2):315-340. doi: 10.1177/1354066116653665. Epub 2016 Jun 24.
Contemporary rising powers have often pursued a hesitant and ambiguous foreign-policy and have belied the expectations of potential followers and established powers who would want them to engage more actively in global and regional governance. The existing analytical toolbox of International Relations does not offer suitable concepts to make sense of the widespread phenomenon of states that pursue hesitant, inconsistent courses of action and do not bring to bear their power resources to coherently manage international crises that potentially affect them. A notion that is frequently employed to describe this peculiar type of foreign policy is that of 'reluctance', but this concept has not been systematically defined, discussed or theorized. This article aims to introduce the concept of reluctance into the field of International Relations. It develops a conceptualization of reluctance by identifying the concept's semantic field and discussing how reluctance relates to the similar but distinct notions of exceptionalism, isolationism, under-aggression and under-balancing (concept reconstruction); on that basis, the article outlines the constitutive dimensions of reluctance - hesitation and recalcitrance - and their operationalization (concept building). Several illustrative cases of (non-)reluctant rising powers are used to exemplify the concept structure and to show the analytical usefulness of the concept of reluctance, which refers to a distinct set of phenomena that are not addressed by other concepts in International Relations. An application of the concept allows us to identify policy shifts and differences across issue areas, as well as open up avenues for further research.
当代新兴大国往往奉行一种犹豫不决、模棱两可的外交政策，辜负了潜在追随者和既有大国的期望，这些大国原本希望它们能更积极地参与全球和地区治理。国际关系现有的分析工具箱中没有合适的概念来理解一种普遍现象，即一些国家采取犹豫不决、前后不一的行动方针，不运用其权力资源来连贯地应对可能影响自身的国际危机。一个经常被用来描述这种特殊外交政策类型的概念是“不情愿”，但这个概念尚未得到系统的定义、讨论或理论化。本文旨在将“不情愿”的概念引入国际关系领域。通过确定该概念的语义范围，并讨论“不情愿”如何与例外主义、孤立主义、低度进攻和低度制衡等相似但又不同的概念相关联（概念重构），来对“不情愿”进行概念化；在此基础上，本文概述了“不情愿”的构成维度——犹豫和固执——及其操作化（概念构建）。文中列举了几个（不）情愿的新兴大国案例，以例证概念结构，并展示“不情愿”概念的分析效用，该概念指的是国际关系中其他概念未涉及的一组独特现象。运用这一概念能让我们识别不同议题领域的政策转变和差异，并为进一步研究开辟道路。
