Norwegian Blues? Rethinking the Idea of Middle Powers in an Era of Fuzzy Bifurcation

ABSTRACT Unsuccessful efforts to update the middle power concept for the contemporary international system have prompted calls for the concept to be “historicized”—to be retired from common use and treated as a purely historical term. The problem with this proposal is that “middle power” has become increasingly popular in the 2020s in analysis, commentary, and state practice. The purpose of this article is to offer an alternative to historicization. While we acknowledge that the traditional understanding of middle power was deeply rooted in the twentieth century, and particularly in that era of American hegemony during the Cold War and post–Cold War eras, the continued use of the term suggests that we need to embrace the flexibility that has always been associated with the concept. This paper calls for a return to a variant of the nineteenth‐century idea that middle powers were located geographically “in the middle” between great powers. In the 2020s and 2030s, which we argue is marked by “fuzzy bifurcation,” we propose that middle powers are those located geostrategically “in the middle” between the two great powers of the contemporary international system, the United States and China.