Norwegian Blues? Rethinking the Idea of Middle Powers in an Era of Fuzzy Bifurcation
Journal: Global Policy
Year: 2025

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 unde