| Summary/Abstract |
Chinese and Russian foreign policy, in part, reflects both countries’ ambitions for higher status in the international system. This implies a critical question: can accommodating these ambitions prevent, or even reverse, the turn toward geopolitically competitive grand strategies by Moscow and Beijing? In other words, might accommodation lead them to channel their efforts in more benign directions? The dominant framework for analyzing the ways in which states seek status—a framework rooted in the insights of Social Identity Theory (SIT)—suggests that the answer is yes: status-seekers will most likely turn toward geopolitically competitive strategies when they face apparently “impermeable” obstacles to their ambitions. I argue that this framework depends on a “mistranslation” of SIT. Properly translated, the theory tells us little about the consequences of persistent status denial for international politics. Instead, it implies that status-seeking will resolve into geopolitical competition when, first, participants view geopolitically significant resources as markers of status and, second, when leaders believe that they can successfully change the distribution of status. I use analyses of two prominent cases that should prove friendly ground for the conventional translation of SIT—Germany before World War I and Imperial Japan—to demonstrate the serious problems that plague the framework favored by international relations scholars, especially with respect to its central claim about the link between persistent status denial and geopolitical competition.
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