How do actors struggle to modify and move up international hierarchies? Questions of status and social mobility have re-emerged as central foci in International Relations (IR) theory over the past few decades.Footnote 1 Scholars have devoted significant attention to understanding a wide range of strategies actors use to modify and move up international ladders of stratification.Footnote 2 Indeed, understanding the various techniques actors employ to enhance their position in international society has both crucial theoretical and policy implications. Only through understanding the logic of these strategies can we expect to develop adequate theories of recognition to accommodate actors’ ambitions.Footnote 3 This demands coming to grips with the various strategies actors deploy as they struggle over their stratified social position in world politics.
Against this backdrop, this paper develops a novel analytical approach to examine a particularly striking and previously undocumented strategy that actors employ to modify international hierarchies and improve their position in international society. I term this phenomenon the ‘middling of international hierarchies’. This phenomenon consists of actors attempting to produce, occupy, and claim the ‘middle’ position in ‘international pecking orders’.Footnote 4 As an analytical first cut, this article focuses on one specific, yet general, pathway through which actors engage in this activity. Specifically, the paper concentrates on the discursive invocation of ‘middle’ categories – categories that designate and specify a ‘middle’ position in a social hierarchy. Through this discursive invocation, actors seek to produce the very position they then seek to claim and occupy. This strategy frequently involves actors seeking to reform hierarchies characterised by categorical binary oppositions and make these hierarchies trichotomous, with the actor(s) claiming the ‘middle’ position in this trichotomous schema. The analytical approach I develop, therefore, examines attempts at the social construction and production of this ‘middle’ position in social hierarchies. Such an approach is agnostic about whether or not the ‘middle’ position actually exists. Likewise, given that these demarcation exercises are often deeply contradictory, we should not expect there to be a clear set of distinguishing features or a neat, coherent dividing line between the ‘middle’ and the ‘rest’. Rather, the middling of international hierarchies is itself a struggle to draw such a line.
This approach builds upon two strands of IR scholarship: first, recent work that conceptualises ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice, and second, research concerned with the social construction and production of international hierarchies.Footnote 5 Combining these areas of research, I recast the ‘middle power’ category as a case of a broader phenomenon that involves actors trying to construct and modify international hierarchies.Footnote 6 This paper gestures at other categories that actors have used to engage in the middling of international hierarchies. While I identify several of these categories, the paper explores the use of two specific categories to demonstrate the analytical utility of this approach. More precisely, I demonstrate how polities employed the categories of ‘Dominion’ in the early 20th century and ‘Central Europe’ in the late 20th century to engage in the middling of international hierarchies. These case studies do not just seek to demonstrate that there are other ‘middle’ categories that exist in world politic; rather, they are used to develop interpretive propositions about this phenomenon’s general workings. These cases are deliberately different, with this paper employing an ‘uncommon foundations strategy’Footnote 7 meant to increase our confidence in the transferability of the interpretive arguments I develop to shed light on other similar cases.Footnote 8 The two case studies are thus used illustratively and suggestively, with the conclusion gesturing at future potential cases to further refine some of the arguments presented herein.
The paper also makes contributions to each of the literatures it draws upon. First, I contribute to the burgeoning literature on how actors seek to alter and remake international hierarchies by identifying an analytically novel and general way that actors strive to shape international pecking orders. Specifically, I provide an account of middling that examines who engages in this activity, why they do so, how middling takes place, and the effects of this on existing patterns of stratification. Thus, the first contribution I make lies in identifying a general method that actors use in their struggles to alter international hierarchies, while also providing a set of preliminary theoretical interpretations of this phenomenon.
Second, I provide a means for the ‘middle power’ category to speak to broader debates in the discipline and IR theory more generally. I do so by subsuming this category into a more ambitious analytical framework and recasting it as a case of a broader phenomenon. Making this analytical move, however, involves sidestepping a core premise of much of this literature: that the ‘middle power’ category refers to a unique and distinguishable ‘population’ of actors.Footnote 9 By contrast, taking the middling of international hierarchies seriously reveals that this phenomenon takes many more forms than just the ‘middle power’ category. In other words, we can subsume the ‘middle power’ category into a broader analytical framework that allows us to generate insights that speak to other ‘middle’ categories in world politics. I do this by identifying other ‘middle’ categories that actors have used to engage in the middling of international hierarchies in addition to the ‘middle power’ category. This is also intended to pave the way for the ‘middle power’ category to make a long-overdue contribution to IR theory.Footnote 10 This approach aims to demonstrate the benefits of integrating this category into dialogue with broader theoretical themes within the discipline.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, the paper situates its arguments in literatures that have sought to understand how and why actors modify international hierarchies. The second section highlights recent arguments that cast the ‘middle power’ category as a ‘category of practice’. The purpose of this discussion is to subsume and extend these arguments beyond just the ‘middle powers’ category, embedding them in a more ambitious analytical approach concerned with the ‘middling of international hierarchies’. The third section develops the theoretical account of the middling of international hierarchies, considering what this phenomenon consists of, who engages in it, why, and how. The fourth section develops some of the interpretive arguments considered in the third section through two exploratory and illustrative case studies of the middling of international hierarchies. Finally, I conclude the paper by considering other categories through which actors have sought to mediate international hierarchies, in addition to discussing its broader implications for IR theory.
Moving up international hierarchies
The concept of ‘hierarchy’ has experienced a resurgence in IR scholarship over the past two decades.Footnote 11 There are now a range of frameworks and concepts scholars have deployed to theorise how actors shape and are shaped by international hierarchies. Some examples include path-breaking work on status,Footnote 12 stigma,Footnote 13 and social closure,Footnote 14 among others.Footnote 15 The focus of this paper, however, is the strategies actors use to modify these ‘pecking orders’ and improve one’s lot in international society.
Arguably the most venerable concept for understanding how actors seek to modify international hierarchies to ensure higher standing for themselves is that of ‘status-seeking’.Footnote 16 Of particular relevance here is the status-seeking strategy of ‘social creativity’.Footnote 17 Social creativity involves either (a) re-evaluating the meaning of a characteristic considered negative or (b) finding other bases or criteria on which an actor’s identity outranks others.Footnote 18 Both these strands of social creativity involve actors seeking recognition from relevant others to move up the international hierarchy.
The analytical approach developed in this paper shares some commonalities with concepts like status-seeking and social creativity. But it also departs from them in two key ways. First, as the name suggests, status-seeking is frequently tied to the intrinsic motivation of status.Footnote 19 By contrast, the approach I develop is not. I do not seek to isolate status as a variable to determine its independent effects, as many studies attempt to.Footnote 20 In any empirical case of middling, status might be an important factor shaping an actor’s middling behaviour, but it need not be. In all likelihood, status is likely to be one among many different factors driving such action. Middling is analytically more flexible and open to different motives that animate actors’ behaviour than the concept of status-seeking is. Second, Larson and Shevchenko argue that ‘social creativity does not try to change the hierarchy of status in the international system but rather tries to achieve pre-eminence on a different ranking system’.Footnote 21 Middling, by contrast, as I discuss in the next section, does try to change international hierarchies by modifying the basic categories that are considered to structure stratification in the first place. Nevertheless, as a strategy, middling also has status quo-reinforcing properties and effects. In opposition to social creativity, middling is both status quo-modifying and status quo-reinforcing at the same time. Thus, the analytical approach developed in this paper builds upon but significantly departs from key contributions concerned with status-seeking and social creativity.
More broadly, the approach I build in this paper innovates upon work that has examined how actors have sought to modify, produce, and shape international hierarchies to improve their position in such pecking orders.Footnote 22 These include scholars who have examined the social closure strategies that actors have deployed to enter prestigious international groupings.Footnote 23 I am also indebted to practice-theoretic and critical scholarship that has examined how actors struggle to produce international hierarchies in and through practice broadly defined.Footnote 24
In what follows, I identify and develop an account of a striking and previously undocumented method that actors have employed in their attempts to alter international hierarchies and, in doing so, improve their position in international society. Before proceeding to this task, I provide a brief overview of the literature I draw upon to develop the main arguments of this paper.
‘Middle powers’ as a case of a broader phenomenon: From ‘middle powers’ to ‘middling’
This paper also builds upon and contributes to the literature on the ‘middle power’ category. Specifically, it draws upon recent contributions to this literature that have sought to overcome some of the major problems afflicting the broader ‘middle power’ research programme. The main pitfalls of the ‘middle powers’ literature are well known and do not require a full rehearsal here. Nevertheless, two common pitfalls stand out. First, scholars have never been able to come up with a defensible, analytically coherent understanding of what precisely marks this supposed population off from other actors. In other words, it is unclear what makes ‘middle powers’ a distinguishable set of actors. The second issue is what Barnett and Zarakol have called the ‘essentialism trap’.Footnote 25 Scholars assume that just because policymakers and scholars use this category, it must refer to something coherent and objective ‘out there’ in the world.Footnote 26
These issues are so severe that Robertson and Carr, leading scholars of the ‘middle power’ category, have recently declared the concept ‘dead’.Footnote 27 Many others have identified similar analytical problems with attempts to conceptualise who and what ‘middle powers’ really are. Scholars note that many of the so-called ‘middle powers’ are not distinctive in any way; there do not seem to be any distinguishing attributes that differentiate them from other types of states in the international system.Footnote 28 Some argue that while the concept might have been analytically useful in the 20th century, it is no longer analytically useful for today’s world. Due to these analytical difficulties Robertson and Carr suggest that:
Scholars (and officials) should no longer use the concept of ‘middle powers’. Just as we have moved on from terms such as ‘the orient’ or ‘Occident’, so too we argue we should no longer use the concept of middle powers. The middle power is dead, and the theory must be consigned to history.Footnote 29
These same scholars also argue that ‘the study of middle powers has often remained a self-referential field of study, concerned primarily with its internal conversations rather than a contributing element to the wider IR controversies’.Footnote 30
A sociological approach to the rhetoric of ‘middle class’ can overcome some of these issues by recasting ‘middle powers’ as a ‘category of practice’ that actors discursively deploy to shape international hierarchies.Footnote 31 Actors self-identifying as ‘middle powers’ are attempting to bring the category into existence in order to ensure they are not categorised as ‘small states’. Such an approach means we do not have to make assumptions about whether or not such a ‘population’ exists, or that this population has any essential, defining features.Footnote 32
Although this argument overcomes certain problems in this broader literature, it also reinforces a questionable assumption. Just as previous scholarship on ‘middle powers’ treats this concept as if there is something distinguishable and sui generis about such a category, this recent argument appears to implicitly assume that there is also something sui generis about ‘middle powers’ as a category of practice. By simply equating analogies about the ‘middle class’ with ‘middle powers’, such an argument does not seize upon, and in fact overlooks, the untapped potential for sociological literature on the rhetoric of the ‘middle class’ to extend to other categories in world politics. Crucially, however, historians and sociologists interested in the language and categories of practice that people use to shape stratification never saw their arguments confined to the language of ‘middle class’. Rather, many of their analyses are concerned with the broader discursive ploy of positioning oneself in the ‘middle’ of social hierarchies in general, with ‘middle class’ being one discursive instantiation of such a phenomenon. For example, Wahrman’s examination of the rhetoric about ‘middle class’ insists that ‘the emphasis here is on “middle” rather than on “class”’.Footnote 33 In other words, there is a clear possibility for such an argument to be extended beyond just the narrow confines of ‘middle powers’, and potentially to a much broader range of categories in international relations.
Recent work on ‘middle powers’ that builds upon studies of ‘middle class’ language therefore misses a trick by not extending this discussion to other middle categories in social hierarchies, treating ‘middle powers’ as a sui generis category of practice. However, as I demonstrate in subsequent sections of this paper, aspects of recent arguments about the ‘middle power’ category – as a stratificatory category of practice – extend much further than has been acknowledged. This also enables this category to engage with other categories, concepts, and debates in world politics. This requires adapting and extending some of these recent arguments beyond just the ‘discourse of powers’ and the ‘middle power’ category, a task I now turn to.
The middling of international hierarchies
I use the term ‘middling of international hierarchies’ to refer to actors’ attempts to produce, claim, and occupy the ‘middle position’ in a social hierarchy. Before I unpack this definition, let me briefly provide some examples – some of which I use as exploratory case studies later in the paper – to give a better sense of what I mean.
‘Middle powers’ is the most obvious example of this phenomenon, especially when we think about how the ‘middle power’ category has been used by actors in practice. As noted, one of the main ways actors have used this concept is to produce, claim, and occupy the ‘middle’ position in a social hierarchy, this social hierarchy being – historically – the ‘discourse of powers’.Footnote 34 States like Canada and Australia have sought to produce, claim, and occupy this ‘middle power’ position since the 1940s as a type of intervention into an international hierarchy divided between ‘great powers’ and ‘small states’.Footnote 35 The ‘middle power’ category has thus often been used to bestow the self-identifying ‘middle powers’ the position that they were attempting to produce.
The ‘middle power’ category is not the only example, and often, ‘middle’ positions or categories – that is, attempts at middling – operate in more subtle ways. The category of ‘Dominion’ could be interpreted similarly. The British Empire’s settler colonies introduced the term to refer to themselves officially and collectively in 1907 as a ‘middle’ position between the ‘mere colonies’ and the imperial metropole: Great Britain.Footnote 36 Another example I turn to later is the (re-)popularisation by some actors of the category of ‘Central Europe’ in the 1980s and 1990s as a hierarchical category in the ‘middle’ between a superior ‘Western’ and an inferior ‘Eastern’ Europe.Footnote 37 These examples are illustrative; many other ‘middle’ categories plausibly exist in world politics. I return to other potential cases of this phenomenon in the conclusion.
All of these can be considered ‘middle’ categories that actors have, at some points in history, used to produce, claim, and occupy a ‘middle’ position in a social hierarchy. This claim about the aforementioned categories is not that these categories exist purely to engage in what I am calling the middling of hierarchies. These categories have had many valences, meanings, and uses throughout their long histories. Rather, the claim here is that these categories, at certain times, have been used to engage in the activity I theorise in this paper.
Let us now turn to unpack the definition of middling more comprehensively. First, I assume that there is nothing natural or ‘given’ about these ‘middle’ categories or positions. Actors may often discursively refer to such categories as if they did ‘exist’, but we must not assume this is the case. These discursive struggles are themselves attempts to produce and bring these ‘middle’ positions into existence. Similarly, as stated earlier, one of the vexing issues for the ‘middle power’ literature has been precisely the assumption that there is something unique, distinguishable, and coherent about the ‘middle power’ ‘population’. I make no such assumptions. We are asking what these actors are doing with these categories. Following recent takes on the ‘middle power’ category, we can also bet that middling is itself a demarcation exercise in that it is concerned with actors attempting to produce differentiation between themselves and certain sets of ‘others’.Footnote 38 Given these demarcation exercises are often deeply contradictory, we should not expect there to be a clear set of distinguishing features or a neat dividing line between the ‘middle’ and the ‘rest’.Footnote 39 We will, however, encounter claims by those engaging in middling that try to justify such differentiation and demarcation. Instead of taking the existence of demarcation as a given, this approach seeks to understand the purpose of it, how actors engage in it, and with what potential effects.
Second and relatedly, the aforementioned definition clarifies that actors’ attempts at producing the ‘middle’ position of hierarchies are the analytic focus. This means adopting a relational approach to the categories that actors use to pursue these ends.Footnote 40 In the words of Charles Tilly, categories are ‘problem-solving social inventions’.Footnote 41 Through using these categories, actors are seeking to bring them into existence and reify them. However, this reification never succeeds once and for all. A relational approach does not see these categories as ever eternally reified but rather understands them as part of ongoing processes related to the construction of the social world.Footnote 42 Because the social world is never constructed or reified in certain ways once and for all, it is analytically defensible to study actors’ attempts instead of their success in reifying such categories.Footnote 43 This means I assume that actors engage in middling intentionally; actors do not do this by accident but do so actively and deliberately.
Third, I have defined middling in a way that means it is concerned with how an actor – or actors – struggles to produce a ‘middle’ position in a social hierarchy that they themselves then try to claim. I defend this particular way of defining middling by referring back to sociological and historical literatures mentioned above. Scholars like Wahrman and Cannadine note that the production of ‘middle’ positions has almost always come initially from those claiming to occupy this position in the first place.Footnote 44 Other actors – who are not trying to claim such a position for themselves – may support this endeavour and might even aid in the discursive production of such a category. However, these actors are not the focus of the phenomenon under consideration. Rather, the analytical focus is actors that try to produce this position – through the use of ‘middle’ categories – for themselves.
Fourth, a ‘middle’ position or category is, by definition, something that exists between other positions or categories. Take some dictionary definitions of the term ‘middle’ as examples: ‘equally distant from the extremes’ and ‘constituting a division intermediate between those prior and later or upper and lower’.Footnote 45 This has a family resemblance with a common idea that many social hierarchies take binary forms. Indeed, this is a fundamental insight that underpins much critical work on social hierarchies in world politics. Of course, not all hierarchies or acts of self/other identity formation necessarily rely on strict binaries as some major works have recognised.Footnote 46 However, middling tends to take place in cases where hierarchies do take these binary forms. Whether it be inside/outside,Footnote 47 civilised/uncivilised,Footnote 48 modern/traditional,Footnote 49 West/East,Footnote 50 core/periphery,Footnote 51 democratic/undemocratic,Footnote 52 liberal/illiberal,Footnote 53 among others, several hierarchies take these forms. In Derrida’s language, ‘an opposition of metaphysical concepts (speech/writing, presence/absence, etc.) is never the face-to-face of two terms, but a hierarchy and an order of subordination’.Footnote 54 As is the case with binary oppositions, the two categories have connotations of hierarchy ‘baked in’ to them, with the latter being deemed inferior to the former. Sometimes, actors or entities deemed to fall into the second half of these dichotomies can even internalise the normative principles that underpin these binary oppositions. As a result, they can be deeply sensitive to their internalised inferiority and abnormality, through stigmatisation processes, which can shape these entities’ behaviour in otherwise unexpected ways.Footnote 55 I return to this idea about internalisation later on when discussing who engages in middling and with what effects.
Of course, all categories – but especially binary categories – take the complexity of certain social relations and reduce them to precisely that: binary terms. Categories, like all social concepts, whether they be categories of practice or scholarly concepts, entail great simplifications. They bring some aspects of the social world to the foreground at the expense of others.Footnote 56 Binary categories are themselves often deeply stereotypical. As a result, these binary categories often fit extremely awkwardly and do not fully ‘capture’ certain actors, leading some actors to question them and their suitability. This is an important premise to establish for when I turn, in a moment, to who can and who does actually engage in the middling of hierarchies.
In summary, I have suggested that the middling of hierarchies is a phenomenon we can study in international relations. It involves actors seeking to produce, claim, and occupy a ‘middle’ position in social hierarchies. This approach does not assume the existence of such a position but rather examines how actors seek to produce and occupy such a position. I now turn to develop some arguments about how and why actors engage in this activity.
Why middle? Who engages in it? And how?
Why do actors engage in the middling of international hierarchies? I suggest that some interpretations developed by scholars studying the ‘middle power’ category, once adapted, have broader analytical validity in that they are plausibly applicable to other cases of the middling of international pecking orders. Specifically, I pay attention to two interrelated arguments developed by scholars that have more critically interrogated the ‘middle power’ concept. These arguments are that first, the ‘middle power’ category is a ‘category of practice’, and that second, this category is used by actors to ensure they are not lumped in with the lowest rung within the ‘grading of powers’. Both these arguments have a longer pedigree than recent analyses suggest.Footnote 57 For example, writing in the late 1990s, Stairs argued that the ‘middle power’ category was an attempt to reconfigure the ‘international class structure’ by these self-identifying ‘middle powers’. In his words, ‘For the great powers, there were two classes of states: (i) the great powers, and (ii) all the rest. For the middle powers, there were three classes of states: (i) the great powers; (ii) the middle powers; and (iii) all the rest.’Footnote 58
However, such an argument is not limited to the ‘middle power’ category or the ‘discourse of powers’. In brief, then, I extend and adapt this argument to other ‘middle’ positions in world politics. Specifically, I argue that actors engaging in middling do so to ensure they are not categorised in the bottom or lower half of a binary hierarchy.Footnote 59 These actors looking to break out of categorisation in the inferior part of a hierarchy therefore look to produce and bring into social existence the middle category as an ‘escape route’. If this ‘middle’ category exists, they have a plausible way out of their categorisation in the inferior part of a binary opposition.
There are crucial strategic considerations shaping this decision; actors are not seeking to shift from a ‘lower’ to a ‘middle’ position just for aesthetic or vanity reasons. Theoretically, a successful middler is likely to be able to secure certain tangible privileges, resources, or forms of social power that they may not be able to otherwise.Footnote 60 The examples I elaborate upon in the case study section illustrate this general point. In the early 20th century, the ‘Dominions’ sought greater autonomy over their affairs from the British metropole; in the late 20th century, ‘Central Europeans’ wanted to shore up their ‘European’ credentials and join European political and economic institutions; and the self-proclaimed ‘middle powers’ in the 1940s were pursuing a greater say in the constitution of the post-war international order.
This relates to who can and who does plausibly try to middle hierarchies. Of course, not all actors categorised in the bottom part of a binary opposition engage in middling. So, what type of actor sees middling as a plausible and viable strategy?
There are three relational features of actors that might pursue middling as a strategy. The first is actors that fit ‘awkwardly’ or significantly depart from the stereotype of the binary category they find themselves in. Given that middling is a discursive or rhetorical activity, actors engaging in this strategy need to be able to make some type of argument that they are, in fact, fundamentally different from the actors they are trying to disassociate from. For demarcation to be effective, there must be good reasons the middlers can draw on to make their case that they are indeed different. Likewise, actors that fit awkwardly or ‘on the edges’ of certain binary categories are also less likely to have internalised such categories: because they may blur the boundaries of such stereotypical categories, such actors are likely to both feel and suggest that the existing binary does not fully capture their situation.
Second, and related to questions of internalisation, actors that pursue middling have internalised aspects of the hierarchy that they are themselves seeking to middle in. Middling requires accepting important aspects of the binary in which these actors find themselves, including that the existing binaries are applicable to a huge swath of actors. In this sense, actors that pursue middling accept major aspects of the existing social hierarchy that they are attempting to middle. With that said, they will not have internalised two aspects of this hierarchy: the first is what we might call the distribution of position, meaning that they believe that the hierarchy should be trichotomous instead of merely binary; and second, they have not internalised their completely inferior position at the bottom of the hierarchy. Rather, these actors believe they are superior to those they are trying to escape.
Third, actors engaging in middling to drag themselves out of the lower category in a binary opposition might be able to claim they depart significantly from the inferior half of the binary. However, in all likelihood, such actors cannot realistically claim a position in the ‘top’ or superior part of the binary. As a result, their strategy to climb hierarchies is to go for the ‘middle’ position instead, although attaining such a position requires producing such a position in the first place.
Middling as a discursive activity
And how does middling take place? Middling is a linguistic activity, or what some often call ‘discursive’ and others call ‘rhetorical’.Footnote 61 It involves the discursive pronouncement of a ‘middle’ category in a bid to ‘sing it into existence’. Key to all discursive pronouncements and social action is legitimation, itself also a linguistic activity. When engaging in attempts to change social categories or meanings, actors need to couch such categories in ‘existing favourable terms’.Footnote 62 This means actors engaging in middling will draw upon existing categories, ideas, and discourses. Even those manipulating and innovating upon these discourses – like our actors pursuing middling – will have to couch their claims in existing favourable terms. It is for this reason that Quentin Skinner quips that even the most radical social actors must legitimate their actions this way. He states that ‘all revolutionaries are to this extent obliged backwards into battle’.Footnote 63 Actors must draw upon and invoke existing linguistic conventions even to make novel or innovative discursive moves.
Because the terms of binary hierarchies are often set by dominant actors,Footnote 64 those engaging in middling are likely to struggle produce the ‘middle’ position in language that appeals to the sensibilities of dominant actors. The principal ‘audience’ of middling – although certainly not the only audience – are those at the top of the hierarchy. After all, it is those at the top of international hierarchies that may have the ‘symbolic power’ to sanction statuses and positions.Footnote 65 Wahrman notes how actors’ struggles to produce the ‘middle’ position frequently draw upon criteria used by elite actors to justify their own superiority.Footnote 66 For example, those claiming to be part of the ‘middle class’ in early 19th-century European society would do so based on their supposedly higher levels of ‘civilisation’. These self-identifying middlers were using this criterion because this was one way that they believed they could distinguish themselves from the ‘working classes’ that they held in utter contempt. It was a criterion that was seen as ‘legible’ to elites, from whom the self-identifying ‘middle classes’ wanted recognition. Similarly, middlers are likely to also justify the existence of the ‘middle’ position in ways that speak to the interests of the powerful. For example, the self-styled ‘middle classes’ would often make an appeal to social stability, a value considered desirable for many elites. Of course, middling will often invite responses from those that the middlers are trying to differentiate themselves from. With this said, this paper intentionally brackets the issue of reception and recognition; this is merely a first cut of middling as a broader social phenomenon, and taking on this issue is too big for a short paper like this.Footnote 67
How does middling seek to change or reinforce hierarchies?
Middling seeks to modify some aspects of hierarchy, while reinforcing others. How can middling both alter and conserve hierarchies?
Middlers seek to alter hierarchies – and their constituent categories – in ways that make them more responsive to the preferences of the middlers. It allows them to claim a position that they would otherwise not be able to hold, and, in the process, would provide them with more social power than they would have otherwise. After all, those with higher standing are frequently considered to have more social power than those with lower standing.Footnote 68 Relatedly, middling also involves attempts to change and alter the structure of hierarchy. It seeks to take the binary categories that structure hierarchy and make that structure trichotomous or what Cannadine and Wahman call ‘triadic’ and ‘tripartite’, respectively.Footnote 69 The ‘tripartite social scheme’ is indeed intended to replace the ‘dual social scheme’, in Wahrman’s words.Footnote 70 In this sense, middling seeks to alter hierarchies.
At the same time, however, middling is also status quo-reinforcing. Middling reinforces the legitimacy of those criteria and principles because it draws upon the criteria that superior actors use to justify their dominance to make the case for a differentiated ‘middle’ position. On this basis, attempts at middling discursively support and legitimate the normative foundations of the hierarchy. In a similar vein, middling also reinforces the pre-existing superiority of the superior and the pre-existing inferiority of the inferior actors in a hierarchy. In principle, middling does not threaten the superiority of the top category, and it therefore stabilises fundamental aspects of stratification. The only part of the hierarchy that is really being contested is the existence of the ‘middle’ position and who occupies such a position; the rest of the hierarchy is being bolstered. It may be for this reason that elites in societies typically – although not always – condone middling: it reinforces their dominance and stabilises their superiority.Footnote 71
To this point, I have sought to provide a theoretical account of the phenomenon I have termed the ‘middling of international hierarchies’. It has built upon – while also extending and adapting – recent contributions to the ‘middle power’ category, seeking to show how some of these recent arguments can plausibly apply to other types of ‘middle’ categories in international social hierarchies. I situate the ‘middle power’ category as a case of this broader and more general phenomenon. In doing so, I have sought to create a bridge and a way for the ‘middle power’ category to speak to broader debates in IR theory, something of which critics have recently decried the category as being historically incapable of doing.Footnote 72 Recasting the ‘middle power’ category as a case of the middling of international hierarchies, however, means that much of the ‘middle powers’ literature must abandon one of its core premises: that there is something unique, sui generis, and exceptional about this category.
Case studies
To showcase the analytical value of the approach at the heart of the paper – the middling of international hierarchies – I now turn to illustrate some of the arguments I have developed in the previous section. I do so through two case studies. These cases are not meant to be decisive ‘tests’ of the arguments developed herein, but merely illustrations that seek to show the utility of the proposed analytics outlined above. Taking an explicitly interpretive approach,Footnote 73 the case studies that follow are initial forays into developing what Boswell et al. call ‘plausible conjectures’. Plausible conjectures are ‘are general statements that are plausible because they rest on good reasons, and the reasons are good because they are inferred from relevant information’.Footnote 74 By developing plausible conjectures about the middling of international hierarchies, this paper pushes research forward in three main ways. First, it illuminates a novel yet undocumented and general way that actors seek to mould international hierarchies in ways that are more congruent with their preferences. Second, it provides a basis for the ‘middle power’ category to dialogue with other categories in IR, thus (hopefully) paving the way for this category to make a greater contribution to IR theory and broader debates in the field. Third, I also seek to show how the concept of middling can show family resemblances between different categories that have not previously been considered similar or comparable.Footnote 75 I focus on two categories that I suggest some actors have used to engage in middling: ‘Dominions’ in the early 20th-century British imperial hierarchy; and ‘Central Europe’ in the late 20th-century European hierarchy.
The methodological justification for studying these otherwise very different illustrative cases is that they allow me to pursue an ‘uncommon foundations strategy’.Footnote 76 This is the first study that I am aware of that even considers the categories of ‘Dominions’ and ‘Central Europe’ in the same breath. Indeed, on the face of it, these categories appear to have very little in common. These categories become popularised and emerge in vastly different contexts. Nevertheless, the uncommon foundations strategy posits that ‘if similar analytics … provide explanatory leverage despite these differences, then the uncommon characteristics of the case give us greater … confidence’ in those analytics’ transferability to other cases.Footnote 77
And, to reiterate a point made earlier, I am not claiming that the categories that I examine are always used by actors to middle international hierarchies. I am simply showing that these categories have, at certain times, been used by actors for this purpose. These categories – like many social categories – are incredibly elastic and can have a range of historical meanings and uses.
In the cases that follow, I illustrate a range of the arguments developed in previous sections. Nevertheless, I emphasise two main arguments that the case studies elucidate. First, I argue that actors engage in middling to avoid being categorised on the lowest rung of a hierarchy. The attempts at producing such a ‘middle’ position are themselves geared towards establishing the existence of such a position in the first place that the middlers can then claim to occupy. As elaborated previously, there are strategic reasons for doing this, albeit the precise reasons vary from case to case. Second, the actors that pursue this strategy often do so because they fit ‘awkwardly’ into existing categories within a binary, thus giving them the interpretive agency to make the case that they do not fit in either category and require a ‘middle’ category. They do this by invoking principles and criteria that appeal to the sensibility of their social superiors – those categorised in the ‘upper’ part of the hierarchy.
‘Dominions’ and the British imperial hierarchy
Australia and Canada are often treated as the quintessential ‘middle powers’.Footnote 78 And while historical accounts understand these states’ use of the term ‘middle powers’ as beginning in the 1940s,Footnote 79 these states have a longer history of engaging in the middling of international hierarchies. Indeed, this is one of the pay-offs of adopting the conceptual framework developed in this paper. We can develop an interesting theoretical interpretation by treating ‘middle powers’ as a more specific instantiation of the broader universe of cases of the middling of international hierarchies. For example, we can argue that the middling of international hierarchies is a historically important aspect of Australian and Canadian foreign policy even before ‘middle powers’ entered their lexicon in the 1940s.
The settler colonies of the British Empire first introduced the category of ‘Dominion’ in 1907 to refer to themselves collectively and institutionally.Footnote 80 Like the ‘middle powers’ category, we can plausibly treat the ‘Dominions’ category as a case of the middling of international hierarchies. As one scholar of international law has suggestively put it, ‘Dominion status was something between that of “Colony” and “State”’.Footnote 81 Another author has articulated that ‘Dominion status was a half-way house’ in the hierarchy between the ‘colonies’ and the independent imperial metropole.Footnote 82 Abbondanza has made the strongest gesture at the ‘Dominion’ category’s family resemblance to the ‘middle power’ category, lending further credence to ‘Dominion’ itself being a middling category. He has argued that:
The British Empire, therefore, displayed a broad tripartite power hierarchy, with the United Kingdom as the apical great power, the dominions as semi-autonomous middle powers, and the other colonies without such extensive forms of self-government as the minor powers within this power system.Footnote 83
Indeed, this category was a ‘middle’ position between the ‘colonies’ of the British Empire, and the independent, self-governing sovereign state that was at the imperial core (i.e. Britain). This approach brings to light the production of this ‘middle’ category and the trifurcation of the ‘power hierarchy’ that Abbondanza alludes to.
The ‘Dominion’ category was proposed by the settler colonies of the Empire and applied to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and eventually South Africa too.Footnote 84 Just as the ‘middle powers’ sought to make the official taxonomy of states change from a binary division between ‘great powers’ and ‘small states’, it appears that the term ‘Dominion’ itself was intended to function in a similar way. It sought to create a category between what Fieldhouse has called the ‘mere colonies’Footnote 85 of the British Empire and the self-governing sovereign state at the top of the hierarchy (i.e. Great Britain itself). In this sense, we can plausibly interpret the term ‘Dominion’ as a ‘middle’ category between these two positions in the British imperial hierarchy.
This ‘middle’ category of ‘Dominions’ was also used in ways that are consistent with the arguments developed above. In the words of Fieldhouse, the settler colonies wanted ‘to be recognized as being something more than mere colonies’.Footnote 86 A cursory glance at the Minutes from the 1907 Imperial Conference, which institutionalised the category ‘Dominions’, bears this out as well. New Zealand Prime Minister Joseph Ward would say that he wanted ‘to get out of the position of the self-governing countries of being regarded as on par with the Crown Colonies’.Footnote 87 Likewise, Canadian Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier expressed his desire for ‘some expression which would make a differentiation between the self-governing colonies and the other colonies’, going so far as to state that ‘so far as the colonies represented here are concerned, I wish we could drop the word “colonies”’.Footnote 88 Eventually, the settler colonies settled on the term ‘Dominions’ to serve precisely this purpose.
There were tangible strategic goals that these polities were pursuing while engaging in middling as well. The settler colonies sought greater autonomy within the British Empire.Footnote 89 By creating a classification that gave them a status as more than ‘mere colonies’, the settler colonies were attempting to secure greater rights than the ‘Crown Colonies’ who were subject to much stricter oversight by the metropole. For instance, in creating this new category, the settler colonies tried to wriggle their way out of dealing with the ‘Colonial Office’. Proponents of this category argued that if the settler colonies were ‘Dominions’ and not ‘colonies’, then they could and should not be subject to the oversight of the ‘Colonial Office’. Thus, by engaging in middling, the settler colonies were seeking more autonomy and self-rule, something these polities considered beneficial.Footnote 90 The ‘middle’ category of ‘Dominion’ was understood as a convenient way of pursuing these ends.
Ideas about self-governance were central to the settler colonies’ efforts to separate themselves from the ‘mere colonies’, or the ‘Crown Colonies’ as they were often referred to. The category ‘Dominion’ was often prefixed with the phrase ‘self-governing’. The settler colonies’ leaders argued that their polities were fundamentally ‘different in character’Footnote 91 to the ‘mere colonies’, and thus the ‘colony’ label should not apply to them. Instead, they required their own category that more adequately captured their situation and degree of self-government. The notion of self-government was tied up with civilisational and racial ideas as well. Indeed, Darwin notes that the ‘Dominions’ were often know ‘colloquially… [as] ‘the white dominions’.Footnote 92 In short, the settler colonies also drew upon pre-existing hierarchical ideas and principles to justify the need for a ‘middle’ category that differentiated them from the ‘mere colonies’.
As time went on, the meaning of the ‘middle’ category of ‘Dominions’ changed. This category was at the heart of debates within the British Empire about political authority. The contention in this section has been that, at least initially, the category ‘Dominions’ served to middle international hierarchies for its proponents.
The re-popularisation of ‘Central Europe’ in late 20th-century Europe
Political geographers and critical IR scholars have long argued that conceptions of geography can be deeply hierarchical.Footnote 93 Distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ or ‘North’ and ‘South’, for instance, are considered to denote stratified differences in modern international order.Footnote 94 Geographical categories are not neutral; they can often ‘reflect … social and political relations of power and knowledge’.Footnote 95
We can identify another instance of the middling of hierarchies – a case of middling geographic hierarchies specifically – in the European political hierarchy towards the back end of the 20th century. The category that certain actors used to engage in this was ‘Central Europe’. The ‘Central Europe’ category has a much longer history, being conceived in the early years of the 19th century as the German idea of Mitteleuropa.Footnote 96 This German term translates literally to ‘middle Europe’. The term was initially conceived as an imperial device that German-speaking peoples could use to claim certain territories. Indeed, scholars note that this term has historically had a number of valences and meanings.Footnote 97 In the late 20th century, however, notions of ‘Central Europe’ were revived and used by certain states and people to engage in what I have termed the middling of international hierarchies. Hagen has referred to this revival as ‘the rebirth or rediscovery of Central Europe’.Footnote 98 Schöplin and Wood have noted that the term was re-popularised in the 1980s by Polish, Czech, and Hungarian leaders and civil society actors claiming to be from this geographic category.
Europe had long been considered to have been dichotomously divided between ‘East’ and ‘West’ during the Cold War.Footnote 99 The end of the Cold War saw the victory of the ‘West’ over the ‘East’, with the teleology and triumphalism of the Cold War being read into these categories. Indeed, ‘Eastern Europe’ has long been defined as different from and inferior to ‘Western Europe’. The former has been represented as ‘backwards’ and ‘uncivilised’ in contrast to the ‘progressive’ and ‘civilised’ credentials the latter has been considered to have.Footnote 100 While this dichotomy was also a feature of the Cold War, aspects of it – and the stereotypes that underpinned it – hardened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The re-emergence and re-popularisation of the category ‘Central Europe’ was partly enabled by the reunification of Germany.Footnote 101 The division of Germany had made the fault lines between ‘East’ and ‘West’ relatively identifiable and stable; its sudden reunification allowed actors to further problematise and redraw Europe’s ‘imagined map’.Footnote 102 It is against this backdrop that ‘Central Europe’ was resuscitated and revived by certain states in the 1980s and 1990s.
Polish, Czech, and Hungarian leaders had to actually produce this long-dormant category, awakening it from its discursive slumber. ‘For three decades after 1945’, Garton Ash writes, ‘nobody spoke of Central Europe in the present tense’.Footnote 103 From the mid-1980s, scholars have documented the sudden surge in popularity of this category. In the words of Hagen, the category was being used to ‘redraw the map of Europe’ that had itself long been understood in binary terms, divided between a superior ‘West’ and an inferior ‘East’.Footnote 104
Hagen suggests that the revival of the idea of Europe having a ‘centre’ region – historically ‘Mitteleuropa’ or ‘Central Europe’ – has been a way for certain states to try and escape being classified as ‘Eastern European’.Footnote 105 Mälskoo develops a similar interpretation of the popularity of the ‘Central Europe’ category. For instance, she argues that ‘the idea of Central Europe was reanimated by some candidate countries in order to escape the straitjacket of “Eastern Europe” that was loaded with all sorts of negative connotations’.Footnote 106 Similarly, writing in 1989, Schöplin articulates that one of the main attractions of this category was that for certain states, it ‘offer[ed] a way out of Soviet-type homogenization’ that was associated with the term ‘Eastern Europe’.Footnote 107
This ‘middle’ category was also understood as serving more tangible ends for these self-identifying ‘Central European’ states. These states sought membership in the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), organisations associated with tangible material benefits. In the words of Frank Schimmelfennig, ‘when the Soviet Union released the Central European countries from its sphere of control and communist rule collapsed, the new governments … almost immediately announced their interest in joining the EC and the Council of Europe’.Footnote 108 The desire to join NATO came slightly later.Footnote 109 By recasting themselves as ‘Central European’, these states were struggling to ensure differentiated treatment than prototypical ‘Eastern European’ states would. The category of ‘Central Europe’ was meant to establish this differentiation.
States that were attempting to ‘redraw the map of Europe’ to produce, claim, and occupy the ‘middle’ category of ‘Central Europe’ did so by appealing to European notions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’.Footnote 110 Some authors have studied the changing definitions of self/other involved in self-identifying ‘Central European’ states through this process. For example, both Kalmar and Neumann have documented how proponents of this category in the 1980s and 1990s argued that states like Poland and Czechia (and its predecessor, Bohemia) had previously been part of the ‘West’ but had simply been ‘kidnapped’ by the Soviet Union.Footnote 111 Culturally and civilisationally, however, these states had their roots in the ‘West’, according to those concerned with shoring up their ‘Central European’ credentials. These states also weaponised geography and the fact that they are indeed geographically closer to ‘Western’ European states like Germany than ‘Eastern European’ states like Ukraine and Estonia.Footnote 112
Conclusions
This paper has developed an analytical account of a phenomenon I have termed the ‘middling of international hierarchies’. This account has analytical pay-offs as well, and I have gestured at two of these. In the first instance, we can put the ‘middle power’ category in discussions with other categories that actors have used to engage in the middling of international pecking orders. This can allow us to identify and theorise family resemblances and patterns in how and why actors seek to reconfigure social hierarchies in this way. Second, and relatedly, I illustrated how some conclusions made by scholars of the ‘middle power’ category can be extended to other cases. I elucidated this through short case studies of two other categories that I suggested can be thought of as other instances of the middling of international pecking orders: the category of ‘Dominion’ in the British Imperial hierarchy and the category of ‘Central Europe’.
This paper’s core arguments also make a major contribution to debates about the ‘middle power’ category in IR. It provides another way out of the endless and unproductive debates about what ‘middle powers’ are. In a recent paper, Robertson and Carr identify a number of weaknesses and major issues that plague the concept of ‘middle powers’ today, arguing that we ought to historicise this concept, which is no longer analytically fit for purpose.Footnote 113 In this paper, I have suggested a different path that is itself not mutually exclusive with, antagonistic to, or incompatible with Robertson and Carr’s suggestion. I have proposed a different route to reinvigorate the ‘middle power’ concept, proposing that we think of the ‘middle power’ category as a case of what I have labelled the middling of international hierarchies. I have also made an explicit contribution to literature on hierarchy by identifying a novel method actors use to shape and move up international hierarchies that is distinct from that identified by existing approaches.
These arguments also speak to other debates, like those in the literature on status. First, it contests the idea that weaker actors are prone to moral status-seeking and do-gooding.Footnote 114 This paper suggests that weaker actors engaging in middling are often far more sinister than such a view contends. In this sense, it dovetails with Naylor’s arguments about how weaker actors’ attempts to improve their position can end up reinforcing both the superiority of superior actors and the inferiority of inferior actors.Footnote 115 Second, it contributes to debates about the conditions under which one’s status aspirations are likely to be recognised.Footnote 116 Mercer outlines how there are strong incentives for actors to withhold the status recognition of others, thus potentially making most status-seeking irrational. However, because higher-ranking actors prima facie benefit from middling, this paper has shown how middling can plausibly be considered a rational form of status-seeking. This type of engagement with the status literature also provides a potential for dialogue between the interpretive approach developed in this paper and those of a more positivist disposition.
The approach I have developed has enormous potential to be explored, refined, and developed in a number of other ways as well. There are three main pathways that might be particularly fruitful. First, scholars might explore other ‘middle’ categories. I have offered only a few examples of attempts at the middling of international hierarchies as a first analytical cut of this phenomenon. However, there are a number of other ‘middle’ categories that future research could explore to develop, refine, and/or reject some of the interpretations offered as part of this first cut. ‘Middle income’ countries and ‘emerging economies’ are other potential cases, as is the idea of states in the contemporary world that seek to act as ‘bridges’ between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, or the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’. In the words of Zarakol, ‘present-day Turkey and Japan … often claim to be a “bridge” between the East and the West’.Footnote 117 Meanwhile, Sean Burges has spoken about Brazil as a bridge between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’.Footnote 118 Ideas about Non-Alignment may also have some middling qualities, given the actors within this movement itself had such heterogeneous goals. While some Non-Aligned or ‘Third World’ states may have used their credentials to engage in middling, others may not have. Whether or not this actually was the case is ultimately an empirical question that requires detailed historical work. I hope the analytical innovations in this paper can assist scholars in beginning such an inquiry.
Second, future work could seek to develop other general theoretical interpretations of the middling of hierarchies. I have offered a handful of arguments about this phenomenon, especially in relation to how and why actors engage in it. Future research can develop more of these propositions, perhaps by examining some of the cases mentioned in the previous paragraph. Abbondanza’s attempts to identify cases of trichotomised hierarchies with polities categorised in the ‘middle’ provide other potential cases of the middling of international hierarchies.Footnote 119 Abbondanza’s work may even give us leverage to consider how this phenomenon works across historical international systems. Likewise, we might even distinguish between ‘middle’ categories that have a transitional or transitory quality to them and ‘middle’ categories that do not. For example, categories like ‘Dominion’ appear to have some type of impermanence baked into them; occupants and claimants of such a status may be using it temporarily as they transition from, say, colony to independent state.
Third, this paper has largely bracketed the question of (mis)recognition. The cases I have studied could be construed as successful instances of middling, allowing me to put the question of recognition to one side. I already stated in this conclusion that stronger actors have theoretical incentives to recognise instances of middling in general, given that such action reinforces the dominance of the already dominant. Future research could examine how a refusal to recognise middling subsequently shapes the foreign policy of aspirant middlers: do they change course or double down on their efforts? Might such a scenario turn otherwise status quo-oriented middlers into proponents of ‘subversive revisionism’?Footnote 120 Indeed, this question only underscores the importance of further understanding of key aspects of the middling of international hierarchies, especially as they relate to questions of (mis)recognition.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the RIS editors and anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally thoughtful comments and feedback on this paper. I would also like to thank Jan Eijking, Todd Hall, Alexander Hynd, George Lawson, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, and Carl Strikwerda for their comments on earlier iterations of this piece, as well as participants on panels at ISA Northeast 2024 (especially Sammy Barkin and Vincent Pouliot) and ISA Chicago 2025 (especially Dan Green). I am indebted to Alan van Beek, whose feedback reinvigorated this piece; to Alexandra Stafford, as always; Eddie Keene, for his excellent supervision and mentorship; and finally, to Kye Allen, Caiban Butcher, Jan Eijking, Sam Holcroft, and Alexandra Stafford for a seminar discussion on a dark and dreary day way back in 2021 that ultimately inspired this piece.
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