Two matryoshka dolls depicting Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin (AP Photo/Dmitry Serebryakov)
The way in which one state imposes its will on another has changed since the Cold War: because the world has changed, but also the criteria for interpreting it
When talking about international events, especially those involving larger countries, we often hear people talk about “spheres of influence”. This term has a long history and in recent years it has come back into fashion, especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and especially among those who adopt a vision of the world conditioned by geopolitics: for example, among the people closest to the Russian reasons for the war He frequently says that Russia invaded Ukraine to protect its “sphere of influence” over Eastern Europe.
“Sphere of influence”, or “zone of influence”, has a rather immediate and easily understandable meaning: it is the claim of a state to exercise exclusive power over another state or over an external territory deemed important for its own security or for their own economic interests. It is a term that is also used rather freely: one often hears it said, rightly or wrongly, that Western Europe is «in the sphere of influence of the United States», or that China is trying to insert part of Africa « within its sphere of influence.”
In reality, however, the term also has a strong political connotation, the meaning of which has changed over time and which depends greatly on who pronounces it. Some analysts – as well as many governments, including that of the United States and European institutions – believe that talking about “spheres of influence” is now obsolete. There are those who believe that the concept of spheres of influence is part of a partial worldview, which looks exclusively at competition between states and not at economic, political and social aspects. Conversely, others argue that spheres of influence are still one of the founding elements of international politics and that they are essential for understanding relations between states.
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The term sphere of influence began to be widely used in the nineteenth century, coinciding with the expansion of colonialism and imperialism in the United States and European countries. Some very famous examples are the “Monroe doctrine”, named after US president James Monroe who in 1823 proclaimed that only Americans (and therefore the United States) could intervene in the American continent, thus paving the way for a long season of US influence on Latin America.
Starting from the mid-nineteenth century, the large European countries divided their respective “spheres of influence” on the African continent (obviously without asking anything from the people who lived there), even going so far as to define a map in which France, the United Kingdom, Germany , Portugal and Italy each drew their own spheres of influence.
An 1897 colonial map showing the subdivisions of Africa between spheres of influence (Wikimedia)
«The concept of sphere of influence is halfway between that of direct control of one country over another, which eliminates the sovereignty of the country subjected to it, and the looser concept of sphere of interest, that is, the general interest of one country over another, but with a reduced degree of control”, says Francesco Strazzari, professor of International Relations at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore Sant’Anna. «The establishment of a sphere of influence preserves the sovereignty of the country subject to it, but binds two elements to the control of the great power: commercial interests and the conduct of foreign policy, therefore international alignment».
In practice, when a country establishes its sphere of influence over another (generally it is a large and rich country that does so towards a smaller country) it tends to control mainly two aspects: foreign policy, i.e. international alliances, and trade policy, i.e. large contracts, foreign investment, exports and so on. Furthermore, according to Strazzari, this control of a large country over a small country is exclusive: a country subjected to the sphere of influence of another cannot enter into political and commercial alliances contrary to the interest of the larger country.
Usually, when we talk about “establishing a sphere of influence” we are almost never talking about explicit impositions. Since the end of the colonial era, almost no large country has admitted to having established its own sphere of influence over others, and no small country has admitted to being under someone else’s sphere of influence. Also for this reason, it is quite complicated to understand to what degree a country is under the influence of another, because the exercise of this influence is based on commercial treaties, diplomatic and military alliances, relationships between leaders and so on.
Let’s try to give a practical example.
According to Strazzari, a hypothetical large and rich country that wanted to establish its sphere of influence over another should act first of all on military relations: sign mutual defense treaties, establish military bases and so on. Then it should take care of orienting the foreign trade of the subject country, with commercial treaties that establish clauses of mutual opening of trade but which at the same time maintain a privileged economic relationship, with tariffs and barriers towards the outside.
Finally, it should put in place strong influences on the internal politics of the other country, and support parties and political leaders favorable to maintaining the alliance with the hegemon. In recent years, for example, this is what China has tried to do with Taiwan, supporting in every way the pro-Chinese Kuomintang party, which however lost the last elections in January. These political conditions must then materialize in foreign policy: “In international settings, a country in your sphere of influence must vote like you, it must be a second vote at your disposal.”
This is, more or less, the theory of spheres of influence. As we will see, however, its practical application – and also its theoretical legitimacy – has been severely questioned, especially in recent decades.
Hot and Cold War
The moment of maximum success and expansion of the logic of spheres of influence was at the end of the Second World War, when the victorious countries tried to divide influence on the European continent, and in some cases on the entire world, among themselves.
A well-known and decidedly explicit episode was the agreement made in October 1944 between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josip Stalin. The two, meeting in Moscow at the end of the Second World War, decided at a table how to divide Eastern Europe between the sphere of influence of the West and that of the Soviet Union. The agreement was completely informal and, as Churchill later wrote in his memoirs, it was written by Churchill himself on a slip of paper, on which it was read that, for example, in Greece the predominant power would be the West for the 90 percent, and the Soviet Union 10 percent. In Romania the Soviet Union would have had between 90 and 100 percent, and the West between 10 and zero percent. Yugoslavia would be divided half and half.
These percentages did not indicate direct control over the territory, but the level (actually difficult to measure) of influence and indirect control that each power would have over the various countries.
A copy of the agreement between Churchill and Stalin (Wikimedia)
This plan actually had only partial application, both because it lacked the approval of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and because its application in the field often proved unfeasible: for example, during the Cold War Yugoslavia remained independent from all spheres of influence, rather than being in the middle as Churchill and Stalin would have liked.
Spheres of influence today
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the concept of sphere of influence underwent major changes. In the West, the end of competition with the Soviet Union convinced many leaders that spheres of influence were now obsolete. In 2008, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state during George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–2009), said in reference to the imperialism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia that the idea of establishing a sphere of influence was “archaic.” John Kerry, who was Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, later said that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over.” The European Council also maintains that «the notion of “spheres of influence” has no place in the twenty-first century».
This does not mean that the United States and the European Union do not have international interests and are not determined to pursue them, even assertively (especially as regards the United States). The point is that, especially according to Western countries, the concept of sphere of influence no longer adapts to the world of recent decades, where globalization has made relations between countries more fluid and interdependent and is now almost impossible even for the powers larger states keep smaller states under their control.
In areas of the world that were once contested between the great powers, such as Latin America and Africa, today it happens quite frequently that Latin American and African states are exploring different forms of alignment, seeking varied economic and military alliances and refuse – or accept, depending on convenience – attempts at external interference.
Other countries, however, are still very tied to the old concepts. One of these is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which continues to consider the countries of the former Soviet Union – and more extensively those of the former Warsaw Pact – as part of its sphere of influence. Putin never explicitly talks about spheres of influence, but he has made it clear very clearly and in more than one document that he considers the former Soviet countries to be of exclusive concern to Russia.
Obsolete spheres
These different interpretations of spheres of influence are also discussed among experts. Although the theory of spheres of influence is still considered a useful reading tool (if only because there are still important world leaders, such as Vladimir Putin, who use it to guide their actions), there is a tendency to frame it as a part – and perhaps not even the main one – of a broader discussion.
«The spheres of influence narrative is just a narrative of the world, which understands international politics exclusively as a competition between states», says Strazzari. Also for this reason, on a theoretical level, especially the analysts and scholars closest to geopolitics talk about spheres of influence, that specific theory which interprets international politics as a competition between states based on mainly geographical variables: geopolitics sees the world as a large map in which states must expand at each other’s expense.
«The spheres of influence flatten the world into a dynamic of competition between nations, leaving out many important elements: equal alliances between countries, civil society, political orientations. They belong to a reductionist vision of the world”, says Strazzari.
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