The Price of Prestige

36 chapter two

for a good and enduring status symbol in international relations, starting

with a broader discussion in the fourth section and focusing more closely

on Goffman’s test of status mechanisms in the fifth.

The Functional Role of Status Symbols

The concept of power in international relations is elusive and highly com­

plex. Because power itself is unobservable, actors have to rely on numer­

ous indexes that are considered a proxy for an actor’s power (Jervis 1989 ,

18 ).^2 A country’s GDP, the life expectancy of its citizens, and the size of its

tank force are examples of such indicators. Yet international relations of­

fer countless possible indexes. While more tangible than “power,” these in­

dicators do not eliminate the complexity of power estimates. We still need

to be able to measure the relative weight and importance of each index and

find a way to aggregate all indexes into a workable power estimate. This

process is theoretically daunting — even more so when done collectively by

a group of actors.

In order to enable some level of multilateral cooperation and predict­

ability, actors need to reach some loose consensus on the relative ranking

of their peers (Goffman 1951 , 294 ). This type of mutual comparison is part

of almost any human interaction, and the resulting assessment of relative

rank affects deference, leadership, cooperation, and discord (Festinger

1954 ). Lake ( 2009 ) offers a detailed account of patterns of domination,

subordination, and authority that result from the recognition of hierar­

chical structures in international relations. Similarly, Morgenthau ([ 1947 ]

1960 , 80 – 81 ) observes that the “foreign policy of a nation is always the

result of an estimate of the power relations.... It is the primary func­

tion of the policy of prestige to influence these evaluations.” Thus, any

intersubjective conceptualization of hierarchical ranking has to rely on a

shared understanding of which indexes matter and how much. Hurd ( 2007 ,

54 ) argues that symbols should therefore be analyzed as collective goods:

they are shared assets that depend on the intersubjective beliefs of com­

munity members. Thus, a painted cloth becomes a flag only if we think that

a sufficient number of our peers are likely to view it as such. In this sense,

like prestige, symbols are a third­ order concept — they depend on what we

think other community members think about a specific object.

Over time, through repeated social interactions, actors learn to iden­

tify a core set of indexes that enables them to reach conclusions regard­