According to Thucydides, it was the rise of Athens and the fear it inspired in Sparta that caused the Peloponnesian War, a war that ended with the defeat (and fall) of mighty Athens. The History of the Peloponnesian War is many things, including the history of Athens’ fall. An analysis of more than a thousand novels purports to show that there are six types of plot patterns (BBC, May 25, 2018): (1) rags to riches (rise), (2) riches to rags (fall), (3) Icarus (rise-fall), (4) Oedipus (fall-rise-fall), (5) Cinderella (rise-fall-rise), (6) man-in-a-hole (fall-rise). Very similar plot patterns characterise most classic stories from ancient mythology to Shakespeare and Hollywood. Think Richard III.
Rise-and-fall tropes also feature prominently in historiography (White 2010). If historiography is to be believed, then virtually everything can rise and fall (or fall and rise), including empires, civilisations, states, peoples, economies, social classes, families, individuals and so on. Here is a completely arbitrary list of examples: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (James 1997), The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (Brendon 2010), The Decline and Fall the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Sked 2001), Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia (Clark 2006), not to mention Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Diamond 2004), The Great Divergence (Pomeranz 2000), (Historians Debate) The Rise of the West (Daly 2014), not to further mention such classics as Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934) and the work of GWF Hegel & Co. (Iggers 1984).
The rise-and-fall trope also informs public discourse and political debates. What may be termed thedecline-or-renewal debate can centre on different types of decline, including national, cultural, economic, demographic, moral etc. In the context of international relations, states – and especially powerful states – seem to agonise over the question of decline or renewal with greater regularity and greater intensity than less powerful states. Take the example of the United States. As the world’s most powerful country, the United States is naturally concerned about its relative position in the international system. Status anxiety is a rational response to the presence of rising powers and to the United States’ (actual or perceived) relative decline.
The debate between ‘declinists’ (pessimists) and ‘revivalists/ renewalists’ (optimists) goes way back in the case of the US (Dowd 2007). Shortly after the United States emerged victorious from WWII, Henry Luce declared the ‘American century’. The Korean War ended in stalemate and the Vietnam War for all practical purposes ended in defeat, while the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early seventies appeared at the time to spell the end of US economic supremacy. During the 1980s, the Reagan administration managed to instill new-found self-confidence ("Morning in America") and by the end of the decade it had emerged once again victorious from yet another great power conflict, the Cold War.
Academic work during the eighties sought to understand the causes behind the rise and fall great powers. It was also during the eighties when scholars sought to explore the consequences of hegemonic decline. Scholars and policymakers alike were concerned about the future of international economic cooperation in the absence of hegemonic leadership. This particular literature was more interested in the consequences of decline rather than its causes (Kindleberger 1981, Keohane 1984, Lake 1993). Work by others, a combination of international historians, international relations theorists and economists, sought to identify the factors that were responsible for the rise and fall of states (Gilpin 1981, Kennedy 1987, Arrighi 1994). More on this below.
After the end of the Cold War, ‘declinism’ went, not surprisingly, out of fashion and scholars instead explored the consequences of unipolarity for international politics and international relations theory (Krauthammer 1990, Kapstein & Mastanduno 1999, Ikenberry 2001). At times, the focus on unipolarity at times reflected a concern about too much rather than waning power. The revivalists also took it a step too far by declaring the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). This turned out to be premature, to say the least. This was also the time when foreign-policy practitioners coined terms like ‘indispensable power’ (Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), ‘hyperpower’ (French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine) and so on.
As soon as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to go badly and especially following the 2008 global financial crisis, the ‘declinists’ and pessimists came roaring back. The inexorable-seeming rise of China and a more assertive Russia yet again raised concerns about US decline. Here is another random selection of books and commentary from the past two decades. The End of the American Era (Kupchan 2002), Après l’empire (Todd 2003), The Post-American World (Zakaria 2008), The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in Cash-Strapped Era (Mandelbaum 2010) and Twilight of the American Century (Bacevich 2018). Other analysts put forward a somewhat less pessimistic view of America’s prospects, even while acknowledging that the structure and/ or the distribution of power in the international system was changing or had changed. They coined terms like age of non-polarity (Haass 2008) or the g-zero world (Gordon & Bremmer 2011) or, more neutrally, simply sought to assess the US position after the 2008 crisis (Kirshner 2014). The current pandemic and social, economic and political crisis in the US will exacerbate US concerns about its own decline.
Rise-and-fall is an important concern for states – both ascending and descending. China is as preoccupied with it, practically and rhetorically, as the US. The trope as such is a figure of speech, not an explanatory account. At the purely descriptive level, the rise-and-decline pattern is fairly trivial. Most phenomena seem to have a beginning, middle and end and many things start out small/ weak, increase in size/ strength before weakening and/ or shrinking again. Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man tells this story very movingly in the case of human beings. Or, as an old piece of Wall Street wisdom has it, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop" (Arthur Stein). The trope is capable of describing the change most entities undergo over time – empires, civilisations to companies and even immaterial things like ideas and fashions. Only because phenomena resemble each other at the descriptive level does not mean that the patterns themselves constitute anything worth being called an explanation. The rise-and-fall trope refers to different conceptual schemes with varying empirical content.
First, and at its most simple, the rise-and-fall trope is a plot pattern and a literary device (White 2010). Given the ubiquity of the rise-and-fall and growth-and-decline processes, using such the trope in the context of a historical narrative may create the illusion of understanding. However, familiarity does not lend explanatory legitimacy to a trope. Psychologically, it may feel like an explanation, but epistemologically it isn’t. The trope helps organise and structure a plot.
Second, rise-and-fall is sometimes simply a fancier way of referring to the beginning, middle and end of a process. Many growth processes, whether social, biological or physical, exhibit common patterns of growth (Smil 2019). Think species, disease agents, companies, individuals, states, economies. For example, the lifespan of public companies listed on the US stock exchange is limited (10 years or so). Only a little more than 70 companies have stayed in the S&P 500 for more than 40 years (Deep et al. 2015). When companies become large, it seems, they tend to experience slower growth (unless they take advantage of their financial power to acquire smaller, more innovative and faster-growing companies). The vast majority of companies that are more than a century old employ less than 300 people. This suggests that size is not conducive to longevity. This also seems to apply to humans (Samaras & Elrick 2002). The analysis of company ‘mortality’ and its relationship with size potentially goes beyond description by implying possible causality. For the trope to be more than mere description, it needs to identify (potential) factors accounting the rise and fall.
Third, the trope can also be interpreted as a biological metaphor, analogy or model (Bailer-Jones 2009). For example, states and nations and peoples are sometimes referred to as organisms. Nationalist discourse sometimes invokes organic conceptions of nationhood (Volk, narod) as opposed to more civic conceptions (people, people). Nations are said to be young. They expand. They are aspirational. They want to gain status and respect. If they are particularly powerful and self-confident, they seek to replace the established powers. Such metaphors and analogies used to be very fashionable during the second half of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century. The point is that metaphors strive to be more than just a mere literary device. Whatever the merits of socio-biology (E.O. Wilson 1975), it proposes a model to account for human-social behaviour that is in principle falsifiable. The nationalist use of biological framework is more akin to a metaphor or analogy given its, arguably, vaguer implications and predictions.
Fourth, the rise-and-fall trope sometimes offers a covering law explanation (Hempel 1965). As such it is relatively uninteresting, unless it can be endowed with greater specificity. (“All empires disintegrate under circumstances x, y, z”.) After all, most/ all things rise and fall, grow and decline. A more interesting explanation would provide an account of the actual mechanism or the respective causal factors that enable the rise and/ or condition the fall. These mechanisms and factors are bound to vary depending on whether one analyses empires, ant colonies or the universe. But similar mechanisms can be assumed to be operative within a class of specified phenomena (e.g. empires). It is more explanatorily enlightening to determine why a specific empire collapsed or collapsed when it did or what might have helped avert its collapse and so on. A rise-and-decline trope that implicitly relies on a covering law approach to explanation is of limited interest unless it offers a fair amount of specificity.
Fifth, historians often provide intuitively plausible rise-and-fall accounts that are specific to a single, unique case. Such accounts are typically highly idiographic and rarely appeal to a broader theory or conceptual framework – or at least they do not do so explicitly. Covering law explanations are uninteresting because they are too general. Idiographic accounts are of limited interest because they are not general enough (from a social science point of view), rarely extending beyond a single, often unique case. Edward Gibbon, for example, ascribed the decline of Rome to the loss of civic virtue. This is plausible. Other historians have attributed Rome’s fall to macro factors (longue durée) such as climate change and infectious diseases (Harper 2019). This is also plausible. Who is on the money here? Impossible to say.
Conceptually and epistemically, the rise and fall trope comes in many different shapes and sizes. The trope can be descriptive, metaphorical, analogical, a model, be idiographic or nomothetic, literary or explanatory. As the Gibbon example shows, idiographic account whether they rely on micro- or macro-factors, while interesting, rarely satisify social scientist that seek a level of generality. Hence the preference for middle-range theories (Merton 1968). What do such middle-range theories have to say about the rise and fall of states in the international system? Here is a quick summary of some of the best-known rise and fall theories of the past forty years.
War and Change in World Politics (1981) by Robert Gilpin relies on economic reasoning to account for the rise and fall of great powers. The rise of states follows a U-shaped cost curve. Ascendancy is characterised by declining costs due to economies of scale. Expansion then continues until its marginal cost equals or exceeds its marginal benefit. Domestic factors also play a role. Following ascension, the economy is subject to diminishing returns, technology diffusion increases the costs of military commitments and, in an echo of Gibbon, the ‘corrupting influence of affluence’ leads to a divergence of public and private interests that makes the population unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to defend status quo against challengers. Meanwhile, the rising power benefits not only from the free provision of global public goods and technological diffusion, but also from lower costs. Gilpin provides a general, coherent theoretical account of why states rise and fall, including relevant mechanisms, that is potentially applicable all great powers.
The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982) by Mancur Olson adopts a cross-country perspective. It emphasizes the emergence of rent-seeking groups that impede efficiency- and welfare-maximising economic policies. This argument attributes the relative economic decline of countries to domestic politics, vested interests and their impact on the domestic economy. Olson provides a theoretical framework that offers a potential explanation not just of the decline and fall of a single country, but an explanation that is potentially relevant to many, if not all countries.
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (1987) by Paul Kennedy, also identifies the mismatch between economic resources and the military means required to maintain dominance as the major cause of the decline of great powers. Dominant powers, sooner or later, experience slowing productivity growth and are forced to increase military spending in order to defend its international position. This leads to lower investment, slower growth and higher taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities and weakening the state’s capacity to maintain its dominant position. The state is then confronted with ‘imperial overstretch’, that is, a situation where necessary military commitments exceed a state’s ability to meet them. (This concept is somewhat reminiscent of the Clausewitzian culmination point of the attack.) And hegemonic states generally find it difficult to implement successful retrenchment, in part because domestic institutions and interests prevent it from doing so (see Brawley 1999, MacDonalrd & Parent 2018). Either way, the hegemonic state is set to decline.
None of this is to suggest that the rise-and-fall accounts proposed by Olson, Gilpin and Kennedy are empirically valid. But from an epistemic point of view they are superior to rise-and-fall trope as analogy or metaphor, for it is more specific and suggests an underlying mechanism and/ or potential causes accounting for the rise and fall. It offers a nomothetic rather than an idiographic account. As suggested, the validity of idiographic accounts is more difficult to assess that that of nomothetic accounts. Nomotheticity allows not just for a more general explanation, it also allows for predictions. Last but not least, the middle-range rise-and-fall theories are connected to other theories and propositions (Waltz 1979, Sheehan 1996, Little 2007). This is a desirable feature of a theory.
All said and done: the rise-and-fall trope can be and can do, is and does, many things. It is ubiquitous in historiography and public discourse. Sometimes it merely describes, sometimes it seeks to explain, sometimes it is (or is used) as analogy, sometimes as a hypothesis that can in principle be falsified. Sometimes it features in middle-range theories and other times it simply serves as a literary device. When it comes to the rise-and-fall trope, clearing the conceptual underbrush is mandatory.