What are superpowers and how have they changed over time?

Question 1

What is a superpower?

Answer 1

A superpower is a nation, or group of nations with a leading position in international politics.

Question 2

What percentage of financial transactions are in US dollars?

Answer 2

80 percent

Question 3

What percentage of foreign currency market transactions are in US dollars?

Answer 3

87 per cent

Question 4

What percentage of global military spending does the USA’s military spending account for?

Answer 4

37 per cent

Question 5

How many people living in the USA were born in a foreign country?

Answer 5

45 million people, four times that of the next-highest country

Question 6

How many universities out of the top 20 in the world are in the USA?

Answer 6

16

Question 7

What characteristics does a superpower have?

Answer 7

• Economic
• Political
• Military
• Cultural
• Demographic
• Access to resources

Question 8

How can a country gain or maintain power?

Answer 8

Through mechanisms that are broadly classified as ‘hard’ or ‘soft power’

Question 9

What was Antonio Gramsci (an Italian Marxist and geopolitical theorist) inspired by?

Answer 9

How Mussolini had maintained power in Italy in the 1930s

Question 10

What are the three main features of soft power?

Answer 10

• History
• Culture
• Diplomacy

Question 11

What does the historian Niall Ferguson argue that superpowers should do?

Answer 11

Stand astride the world like a ‘Colossus’, recognising that hard power, in the form of military force and economic change, is vital

Question 12

What are the two major aspects of hard power?

Answer 12

• Military power

- Economic power

Question 13

What have the consequences of hard power been for US and British operations in the Middle East?

Answer 13

Damaged reputations of both countries, and both have become increasingly reliant on soft power to maintain their influence

Question 14

What did the Romans and other ancient civilisations believe that their success depended on?

Answer 14

A strategic understanding of physical geography

Question 15

During the period of European empire-building, what was ‘completing the world’s blank maps’ an incentive for?

Answer 15

Exploration and sometimes conflict

Question 16

Why was the term ‘geopolitics’ avoided for many decades?

Answer 16

The association of geopolitics with physical geography (a form of environmental determinism) in Nazi Germany and the colonial powers meant that the term ‘geopolitics’ was avoided for many decades.

Question 17

Why was a policy of containment adopted by the USA after the Second World War?

Answer 17

To ensure that Russian ideology (communism) would not spread by force or influence countries recovering from the war

Question 18

What percentage of the world’s resources did the centre of the World Island, the Heartland, which Mackinder described as the Pivot area contain?

Answer 18

50%

Question 19

How powerful was the British Empire?

Answer 19

At its height, the British Empire extended over a quarter of the world’s land area and ruled a fifth of its population.

Question 20

What other countries did the British Empire grow to include?

Answer 20

New Zealand, Australia, India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as well as large expanses of west, east and southern Africa.

Question 21

What were the new technologies that were developed to help maintain the empire?

Answer 21

The steamship and telegraph

Question 22

What did the so-called ‘All Red Line’, an early precursor of the internet, consist of?

Answer 22

A network of underwater telegraph cables

Question 23

What were the consequences of Britain’s policy of ‘splendid isolation’ during the imperial era?

Answer 23

Although it had almost total global control, it played little part in European politics except for maintaining the balance of power and participating in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth century

Question 24

By 1914, what was happening to Britain’s Empire?

Answer 24

By 1914 Britain’s Empire was becoming overstretched and was facing competition from rapidly industrialising Germany. The idea of empire was now being questioned.

Question 25

What was the outcome of increasing agitation in Ireland for home rule since the close of the 19th century?

Answer 25

Guerrilla war against British rule and the eventual creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the separation of Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom

Question 26

What has discontent in India over the killing of hundreds of Punjabis at the Amritsar Massacre in 1919 led many in Britain to question?

Answer 26

The morality of colonialism