I had a discussion with someone who claimed the Vikings were a world power during the Viking Age. While I claimed they were not as a world power requires a global geopolitical level to act on and thus is only possible since the Age of Discovery. His definition was that of www.dictionary.com
"a nation, organization, or institution so powerful that it is capable of influencing or changing the course of world events."
While I defined a world power as " a political unit (as a nation or state) powerful enough to affect the entire world by its influence or actions"
We of course didn´t agree in the end. However the topic really interests me and I would like to ask: Are the Vikings considered a world power or a great power or something else in terms of "power" ranking? What is the "official" definition of a world power by historians?
Thanks for your time.
Viking is not a name of a culture or a kingdom/nation - it's a job, being a viking meant that you went about foreign countries and looted them. It's actually more accurate to use the word viking as a verb than as a name of a culture, because if I translated it to modern terms, you're asking if US Marines are a world power. Certainly not, though I'm sure they'd disagree if you said it to their faces :P
Nordic culture was not unified or centralized enough in the first place, and despite their successful raids couldn't really influence world events the way superpowers do. To make a parallel, various nomadic tribes in central Eurasia also aren't considered a superpower (until Genghis Khan united them, that is) despite their successful expeditions to raid eastern European and Asian kingdoms.
However, that's not the same as saying that they didn't have a major influence on Europe, it's just that that influence was an afterthought of their, on the grand scale disorganized, activities.