From Evans to Carney: Breathing Life Back into the Concept of the Middle Power

CSDS POLICY BRIEF • 10/2026

By Richard Higgott

22.4.2026

Key issues

• The classic Western model of middle powers as “good international citizens” was always overstated and is now outdated.
• Today’s middle powers are pragmatic, semi-autonomous and hedge between major powers on an issue-by-issue basis.
• A new but fragmented and more complex middle power role in international relations is emerging.

Introduction

Numerous leaders of non-great powers have recently espoused the virtues of the “middle power”, sometimes without the slightest conceptual understanding of what it means to be a middle power. This CSDS Policy Brief seeks to describe it and ask if the concept has any serious applied policy utility in the contemporary world order.

Let us start by acknowledging we have been here before. The concept of middle powers in world politics is not new. It was used in the 19^th century to describe those countries located between the then-great powers in Europe. At the end of the First World War, Jan Smuts, to no avail, proposed the concept to the League of Nations. The concept was resurrected in the 1940s and became a way to describe states during the Cold War.

The middle power idea flourished in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. Globalisation was in full swing. North-south antagonism was yet to be fully articulated. The Nordic states, Australia and Canada were the middle power poster children. They were white, western, wealthy, democratic, usually stable and invariably supportive of the United States’ (US) hegemonic project. The zeitgeist of this middle power moment was captured by then Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, who saw them as multilateralist, institutionally cooperative and “good international citizens”. The discourse was laced with ideas of “doing the right thing” and making the world a better place.

The modus operandi was to build issue-specific coalitions in support of collective action problem-solving in crucial international policy domains – especially peacekeeping, human security and trade facilitation – principally within the existing structures of the UN and Bretton Woods, but also the emerging regional architectures. The European Union (EU) and the emerging Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC) were favourites. Middle powers rejected zero-sum politics and favoured building “coalitions of the willing”. What Andrew Cooper called “niche diplomacy” became the name of the game.

While much of the literature on middle powers during the Cold War focused on defining them in positional terms – size, power, demography, location – Cooper, Higgott and Nossal developed a behavioural understanding that argued it was what states did and how they did it that made them middle powers. To be a middle power was to adopt a normative institutional, multilateral, consensual, positive-sum approach to international problem-solving on a specific policy issue. All very good. But we should remember that middle powers were never as internationalist, multilateralist or as good international citizens as this model suggested. It is not only middle powers that engage in “good international citizenship”. Compromise and positive-sum outcomes are sought by many states.

But that was then…

This initial understanding of middle powers effectively fell out of fashion at the turn of the century. The attacks of 9 September 2001 did much to remove the influence of the middle powers from the international policy agenda as the room for nuanced negotiation and compromise narrowed. The last decade has seen a change in the dominant narrative of the dynamics driving both the thinking and practice of world order. Put simply, we now talk predominantly about geopolitics and security, and only secondarily about economic globalisation and integration. Nationalism and virulent populist identity politics have resurfaced to displace a short-lived “globalist moment”.

This is not simply an academic debate. It casts massive policy shadows over the everyday practice of world politics as we move from that brief era of unipolar American hegemony into the immediate era. Here we must resist the popular clichés of contemporary order. We are not in a “Second Cold War” or a “new bipolarity”, or even a “multipolar world”. These characterisations are all used too loosely. Moreover, there is no managed transition from one formal order to another. We are in a turbulent interregnum of transformation – or Mark Carney’s “rupture” even – but with no promise of immediate resolution.

To be sure, there is a binary element to the “post-liberal” order, reflected most clearly in a contest between the US and China. But it is, at best, an ill-disciplined, bifurcated order with highly permeable boundaries. There is no tight ideological bipolar divide comparable to that of the Cold War. States no longer cleave automatically to one of the two great powers. Non-great powers – especially from the “global south” – are just as likely to hedge in their relationships between the US and China on an issue-by-issue basis as they are to bandwagon ideologically, with one or the other major.

This picture was emerging prior to the return of Donald Trump in 2025. But Trump brought an uncertainty and rapidity of change to world order greater than imagined by even the most pessimistic of his observers. Much “taken-for-granted” thinking about the norms, practices and institutions of world order has been shaken to its core. Trump and Xi Jinping (as revisionists), Vladimir Putin (as a spoiler) – and other strongman leaders – play old-fashioned transactional great power geopolitics as they try to consolidate their respective spheres of influence. The international system is now distinguished by fluidity and uncertainty, offering some increasing degree of autonomy to would-be middle powers than the tighter hierarchical bipolar and unipolar eras of the second half of the long 20^th century.

Is there really a (new) middle power moment?

If Gareth Evans captured the zeitgeist of the late 20^th-century middle power moment, then Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, has set the tone for any 21^st-century revival. The hybridity of actors and strategy offers a greater latitude for middle power behaviour. Freed from a Cold War construct, non-great power states are now increasingly sceptical about the need to constrain their behaviour with a view to what the great powers think.

Traditional middle power diplomacy has also contracted as great powers’ views of them have changed. Great powers, especially the US, are largely intolerant of interfering normative “do-gooders”. They expect support from their traditional smaller northern allies, such as Canada, Australia and members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), rather than alternative policy solutions – as Trump’s would-be punitive responses to NATO’s refusal to get involved in his war on Iran attest. Middle powers – and non-great powers generally – are becoming more instrumentalist and pragmatic.

Moreover, middle powers are no longer just Western, white and privileged. Indeed, southern middle power actors are now as, if not more, important than northern ones. The emphasis is now on the “middle”, less so on “power”. That “middle” is the strategic crossroads where American and Chinese interests intersect. Not only liberal democracies but also quasi-authoritarian states, and what Cliff Kupchan has called “swing states”, – including, inter alia, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates – are learning what “middlepowerhood” involves. Kupchan, somewhat cavalierly, even claims that France and Germany are middle powers; in which case, arguably, Japan and South Korea could also be included. Unlike the earlier wealthy generation of “western” middle powers, the newer generation is less inclined to be respectful of, and deferential toward, the United States and the liberal institutional order it constructed. Certainly, we now hear much less about the normative assumptions and practices of “good international citizens” happy to operate within the institutional parameters defined by the US.

Has Carney triggered a new agenda?

How do we interpret middle powers in the wake of Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos? In contrast to the first wave of aligned middle powers, the putative newer middle powers listed above are less constrained when it comes to dealing with the United States. “Club” membership is expansive, ill-defined and stretches well beyond the traditional northern states. But perhaps the club should only include those who self-nominate. The new middle powers of the “global south” are also more instrumental and often lack the rhetorical moral norms of the traditional middle powers. But while the concept has become ubiquitous and overused, middle powers must be seen as a growing feature of the current system.

Notwithstanding pressures from the United States and China to fall in line, middle powers are active players in international relations, increasingly resisting traditional bandwagoning as their primary strategy. Much more frequently, they often adopt well-thought-out hedging strategies. While a single definitive understanding of what it means to be a middle power therefore continues to remain elusive, what is important is the perception of their presence as international actors and the self-perception of their capacity to influence international relations in an era of “structural ambiguity” if they have the expertise and conviction.

To identify this change is not to imply that the contemporary international system is necessarily a more benign place for middle powers. Indeed, it is arguably not. Canada, the states of Europe and numerous smaller states of the “global south” have all experienced the efforts of Trump to assert his right to punish antagonistic or oppositional stances towards US policy. But middle powers now mix the traditional strategies of bandwagoning and counterbalancing simultaneously with those of hedging and even the search for autonomy. Hedging simultaneously involves fluid, non-permanent and non-institutional coalition-building that is used as an insurance strategy. While there is a tradition of linking this strategy to middle powers in the management of great power rivalry, the looser contemporary era is proving more accommodating to middle power hedging than the more tightly disciplined bipolar rivalry of the Cold War period.

As a result, today Australia, Japan and South Korea nurture their economic ties to China while security bandwagoning with the United States; South Africa conducts military exercises with Russia and China, although it is the biggest African trading partner of the US; and Nigeria assertively rejects accepting deported US refugees while remaining a major US trading partner. These states, and many others, seek to manage their interests by arbitrating between the two great powers. While the great powers might not like it, they do acknowledge it as a de facto practice. Yet, beyond the short-term interests and defensive postures associated with hedging, middle powers in a mixed-motive game can also increasingly use tactical hedging as an act of principle – to enhance their strategic autonomy.

As a further result, their behaviour is increasingly flexible: both within and across policy domains. India can thus bandwagon with the US on security in the Indian Ocean against a growing Chinese presence while combating American tariffs, buying Russian oil and negotiating with China on a border agreement. Canada is willing to rebuff Trump at great economic cost as a symbol of its insistence on autonomy, but retain strong security ties as a member of NATO. And Australia is unwilling to de-couple its economy from that of China’s, despite US pressure and Canberra’s desire to advance the 2021 AUKUS agreement. More broadly, Indo-Pacific middle powers have learned how to skirt great power control, as regional economic cooperation takes place without US participation – as in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) or the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) –demonstrates.

The middle power states of the “global south” behave observably differently than the traditional northern middle powers during the 20^th century. These states, especially Kupchan’s swing states, operate on a variety of assumptions and practices that aspire to give them greater autonomy in a disorderly world in a way that the Cold War bipolar era did not permit. They emphasise their independence and a commitment to peaceful conflict resolution. India, for example, explicitly chose not to define the war against Ukraine as a case of democracy versus autocracy. It refused to join the Western sanctions regime against Russia, a choice also made by every other southern middle power. India instrumentally increased its import and onward export of Russian oil. Other southern democracies, notably Indonesia, mirrored this approach, deepening both security ties with the United States and economic ties with China.

Lest there be any doubt, the middle powers of the “global south” are interested in rules; just not those they see imposed solely for the benefit of the United States and the West. Rules-based, multilateral cooperation remains necessary in any post-liberal international order, even if, or especially because, they are now rejected by the United States. The BRICS are reflective of this emergent multilateralism, given greater credence by the fact that their membership consists primarily of southern middle powers.

Despite Trump’s overt hostility and threats towards its members, the BRICS is not simply an anti-Western bloc. Indeed, the BRICS middle powers support the reform, not the dismantling, of the Bretton Woods institutions. They are reflective of the emergence of a new bottom-up, decentralised, messy, southern-in-origin attempt to foster the reform of the strained structures of global governance. This could make it an increasingly middle-power-driven force in international politics, especially if it can develop some more widely accepted norms of cooperation.

None of this is to suggest that the continued development of the BRICS is inevitable. The group lacks normative-cum-ideological coherence. It is a fragile non-institutionalised coalition of both authoritarian China and Russia, but importantly, the world’s four largest democracies. Its membership reflects divergent interests that lack formalised strategic goals other than the implicit desire of all non-great power members to limit the influence of the gravitational pull of the G-7. But they nonetheless cohere around a series of shared issues, centrally poverty and climate change, and these shared concerns allow their flexibility to be an asset in pushing policies in the same direction. The principal goal of such actors is not to have to choose sides but also to broaden negotiating and policy options that strengthen their perceived notions of sovereignty. This is quintessential middle power behaviour.

Critics of the BRICS miss a further key point. The BRICS is a tangible reflection of the desire of all members to change the balance of the global order. Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa, all democracies, play important bridging roles to the wider “global south’s” desire to chip away at the Western order. New bottom-up forms of multilateralism are a challenge to both the United States and the institutions that it once fostered. This is an international environment increasingly providing potential strategic avenues for both northern and southern middle power actor.

Conclusion: a second middle power moment?

“If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”

(Carney, Davos, January 2026)

Traditional northern middle powers, and the greater cooperation with like-minded states advanced by Carney, must be understood as a product of strategic self-preservation in the face of “America First” – disorder-generating – unilateralism. Carney is not proposing an anti-American bloc; rather, the need for de-Americanisation. In so doing, he is adopting a long-standing policy position to be found among most southern middle powers with their bottom-up approach to multilateralism. While the trend is clear, we cannot know when, how, or if this new bottom-up multilateralism will usurp the hitherto dominant bipolar and unipolar moments of the long 20^th century. The significance of US foreign policy interests can be expected to endure, but characteristics of fluidity, hybridity, change and contingency will also grow. In that context, middle power states have a role to play in defining new rules, new processes and a more collaborative relationship for addressing the dominant collective action problems of our times. International standing, and especially the diplomatic capability of the state, rather than size, is the key here. It is for that reason that Carney and Canada are crucial actors over the remaining period of the Trump administration.

In the middle power world, Canada, if it chooses to offer this leadership, can be primus inter pares among middle powers. Canada has measures of credibility and respect (not to mention size) in abundance that have been enhanced by, and in turn enhance, Carney’s Davos and post-Davos speeches that sought to reach out to the other key middle powers. It also espouses many of the key values needed to address contemporary existential socio-political and economic issues: values of multiculturalism, openness including a plurilateral approach towards trade, respect for human rights, environmentalism and sustainable development, multilateral institutionalism and, yes, even a commitment to liberal globalisation.

Appendix: some further questions for middle power consideration

1. What are the domestic and international conditions under which the discourse of the middle power becomes persuasive?
2. Can middle powers, and if so, how, help shape the structure of a new order?
3. Can the 20^th-century assumptions of “good international citizenship” – practising internationalist multilateralism – be saved, or at least refreshed, repurposed and operationalised for the 21^st century? Or is it simply a liberal conceit: a naïve and redundant conceptualisation in our times?
4. What symbols, norms, narratives, visions and aspirations can policymakers and politicians use in the second quarter of the 21^st century to shape their countries’ middle power diplomacy?
5. Does agency, exercised by the swing states of the “Global South”, give the middle power concept new impetus?
6. Is it possible that Carney’s “greater development of middle power strategic autonomy” might, in fact, fragment rather than unite the global order by further weakening global liberal norms?

Note: for more thoughts and reflections on middle powers, read the new special issue with the Global Policy journal entitled “Re-Imagining Middle Powers in an Age of Global Transformation”, edited by Soon-ok Shin, Chris Alden and Richard A. Higgott.

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