Abstract

Most theorists on International Relations agree on recognizing natural resources, economic strength, technologica! development, political stability and military strength as the five bases of a state's power.This unanimity is in sharp contrast with the divergence in the operationalizations of the power of states. Most operationalizations use only one or two bases of a state's power and thus are very limited in scope.Therefore, the demand for an operationalization sticking as closely as possible to the unanimity among theorists, farces itself on the researcher. The present study is an attempt to transform the theoretical unanimity into an operational measuring.Such an operationalization was obtained by granting all five power bases an equal share in the index, and by giving an equal weight to the sums of the arithmetical values for fifteen subindicators and thus for the five indicators. The nations'power index thus obtained was applied for 110 nation states as they existed in the beginning of the '70s. On this power scale, ratings diHer from 29,046 IWM for the USA to 276 IWM for Gambia, and even less for a number of the smaller states that could not be investigated.