A presentation by Hugo Meijer (Sciences Po). This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium.
Throughout history, great powers have devised balancing strategies aimed at checking the ambitions of rival great powers. To do that, they have sought to enter and mobilize alliances and security partnerships with secondary states. Yet, the influence of secondary states on the balancing strategies of great powers remains largely under-estimated in the International Relations (IR) literature. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we posit that secondary state preferences play a key enabling or constraining role in shaping the balancing choices of great powers. We focus specifically on how the adoption of hedging strategies on the part of secondary states affects the balancing strategies of great powers. We argue that, in a context of heightened great power competition, when secondary states adopt a hedging strategy great powers are compelled to engage in what we call “covert balancing”. Covert balancing occurs when a great power conceals its security cooperation with a secondary state beneath a cover that is seemingly unrelated to the target of the balancing effort, providing plausible deniability to the hedging state whilst helping generate a latent capacity to balance. We probe our argument about the impact of secondary state hedging on great power balancing by examining U.S. balancing strategy against China in East Asia.
Dr. Hugo Meijer is CNRS Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Center for International Studies (CERI). He is also the Founding Director of the European Initiative on Security Studies (EISS), an interdisciplinary network of scholars from over eighty universities that share the goal of consolidating security studies in Europe. His research interests lie at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and security studies. He currently focuses on the reconfiguration of US hegemony in the face of a rising China and on its implications for American alliances in Europe and Asia. Previously, he was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI, Florence), Lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London and a Researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM, Paris). Dr Meijer was also a Senior Common Room Member at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University and a visiting scholar at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in International Relations from Sciences Po (cum laude), completed his M.A. in International Relations at Johns Hopkins University/School of Advanced International Studies (Washington DC/Bologna) and his B.A. in political economy at the LUISS (Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali) Guido Carli in Rome.
