The second realm, “national performance,” seeks to capture the mechanisms that enable countries to convert the “building blocks” identified in the first realm, which represent latent power, into tangible forms of usable power. The objective of introducing this dimension of national power is to move beyond the traditional view of countries as “bordered power-containers”2 to something that models countries as active social structures consisting of state and societal actors and institutions, all of which exist in an environment populated by many similar such entities abroad. Introducing this dimension allows the framework to capture an element that most traditional measures of power do not accommodate: the relationship a state has with its own society and the consequences thereof for national power capability. In particular, this level of analysis allows the analyst to assess both the external pressures confronting a given country as well as its awareness of the new resources that must be produced if it is to develop the capability to dominate the cycles of innovation and then transform that dominance into effective hegemonic potential. Including variables like the infrastructural and ideational capacity of a country then enables the analyst to characterize the state’s capacity for: discerning the appropriate socio-technical production choices for augmenting its power given the current and prospective challenges imposed by both economic processes and international competition; developing the resources necessary to
dominate both the cycles of innovation and the processes of interna-tional politics; and, finally, transforming existing resources into effective capital instruments for securing favorable outcomes in both the productive and the coercive arenas internationally. At this level of “national performance,” the three variables to be examined are: (1) the external constraints emerging from the international system; (2) the infrastructural capacity of a given state; and (3) its ideational
resources.