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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
The reorientation of Soviet foreign policy under Mikhail Sergeievich Gorbachev and the East-West reconciliation it brought about constitute a formid0able challenge to international relations theory. Neither realists, liberals, institutionalists, nor peace researchers recognized beforehand the possibility of such momentous change, and they have all been struggling to find explanations consistent with their theories.
1
The ongoing transformation of the international system represents a double surprise for the profession. Most theorists and policy analysts assumed that bipolarity and its associated Soviet-American rivalry would endure for the foreseeable future. In the unlikely event of a system transformation, the catalyst for it would be superpower war. This was a fundamental tenet of realist theories of power transition. 2 Some peace researchers also predicted that relative shifts in power were likely to prompt more aggressive behavior on the part of the disadvantaged hegemon. 3 Everybody was surprised when the Soviet Union changed course, retreated from Eastern Europe, and allowed constituent republics to secede--and did all this peacefully.
Stability Versus Change
To improve our theories we need to know how and why they are inadequate. The how is not hard to establish. Political scientists and their theories failed not only to anticipate any of the dramatic events of the last several years but also to recognize the possibility that such changes could take place.
Radical shifts in policy and their consequences are almost always difficult to foresee. Diplomats and journalists--as well as political scientists--were taken by surprise by Stalin's purges and pact with Hitler and by President Anwar el-Sadat's peace overture to Israel, just as they were by the direction, scope, and pace of change in Gorbachev's Soviet Union.
To be fair, we must acknowledge that macrotheories of international relations do not aspire to make specific predictions. They attempt to predict broad trends, or responses to those trends, and rarely concern themselves with the timing of either. Most theories of international relations are also probabilistic; they do not require every case to conform to their expectations. Some approaches, like chaos theory and poststructuralism, challenge the notion of linear causality or the possibility of prediction. 4 However, the majority of international relations theorists--including those working within the traditions of realism, liberalism, and institutionalism--share the epistemological conviction that causal inferences of a conditional or probabilistic kind are possible. It is entirely legitimate to hold these scholars to their own standards and evaluate the validity of their theories on the basis of their probabilistic predictions.
Measured by its own standards, the profession's performance was embarrassing. 5 There was little or no debate about the underlying causes of systemic change, the possibility that the Cold War could be peacefully resolved, or the likely consequences of the Soviet Union's visible decline. None of the existing theories of international relations recognized the possibility that the kind of change that did occur could occur. Because of the failure to recognize this theoretical possibility, practitioners remained insensitive to the change after it was well under way. Few expected major change in Eastern Europe even after the Soviet Union's foreign policy had undergone radical changes and Gorbachev had repeatedly stressed his belief in the "absolute independence" of "all fraternal countries." 6
The why of our collective failure is also apparent. Intelligence analysts distinguish between simple and complex surprises. The former are idiosyncratic events that cannot be foreseen or whose prediction requires special information. The shooting down of a Korean airliner over the Soviet Union in September 1983 is a case in point. Western analysts had long been aware of the Soviet Union's sensitivity to unauthorized aerial incursions but could not have guessed that a Korean 747 would overfly the Kamchatka Peninsula or that Soviet air defense would mistake it for an American spy plane.
It is undeniable that scholars lacked precise data about the internal economic and political situation in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire. 7 But indications of Soviet economic decline were ample, and Sovietologists carried on a lively debate about the future of the post-Brezhnev Soviet Union. 8 The failure of Soviet specialists and international relations scholars was not empirical but conceptual. Because they did not consider the possibility of a peaceful but radical transformation of the Soviet political system and its foreign policy, they did not grasp the significance of the data at their disposal.
Complex failures refer to events that could have been predicted if analysts had interpreted properly the information at hand. Examples include the Soviet missile deployment in Cuba in 1962, the 1973 attack against Israel by Egypt and Syria, and the steep rise in oil prices imposed by opec following the 1973 Middle East war. In retrospect, analysts recognized that they had had the information necessary to predict these developments. They were the victims of faulty conceptions that led them to ignore relevant information or to interpret it incorrectly. 9
The failure to expect or seriously consider the possibility of far-reaching foreign policy change in the Soviet Union is a complex failure. International relations scholars were misled by widely shared and deeply ingrained conceptions about the behavior of great powers in general and the Soviet Union in particular. These conceptions determined the questions they thought important and researchable and directed scholarly attention toward the explanation of continuity and stability and away from the study of the prospect of change. Soviet and Eastern European specialists were similarly slow to grasp the revolutionary potential of Mikhail Gorbachev. They underestimated the possibility of significant political change in the Soviet Union and exaggerated the stability of Eastern Europe's communist regimes. Many scholars argued that the post-Brezhnev leadership would be unlikely to sponsor major political or economic reforms to address the Soviet Union's intensifying economic crisis. 10
For international relations scholars, the preeminent intellectual question in the security field was "the long peace" between the superpowers. In international political economy, it was the survival of the postwar international economic order despite the declining hegemony of the United States. Both questions assumed that the robustness of the political and economic status quo was an anomaly that required explanation. 11 Security specialists deemed it remarkable that the superpowers had avoided war, unlike rival hegemons of the past. They were just as surprised by the seeming durability of superpower spheres of influence. "The very fact," John Gaddis wrote, "that the interim arrangements of 1945 have remained largely intact for four decades would have astonished--and quite possi bly appalled--the statesmen who cobbled them together in the hectic months that followed the surrender of Germany and Japan." 12 Many political economists were equally surprised that neither Germany nor Japan had attempted to restructure international economic relations to suit their respective interests. 13
The prolonged survival of the postwar political and economic orders had important intellectual consequences. Because these arrangements had successfully weathered so many challenges, scholars greatly exaggerated their stability. Expectations about the continued survival of the economic and political orders may have reinforced one other. Concern about America's economic decline predated theoretical interest in the Soviet Union's decline. The fact that the postwar economic order established by the United States survived its decline as a hegemon encouraged the belief that the political-economic order erected by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe would survive the decline of its creator.
The evolution of superpower relations also encouraged this conclusion. Central Europe had been the most important arena of the Cold War; between 1947 and 1962, Moscow and Washington had approached the brink of war in a series of crises provoked by their efforts to extend, consolidate, or protect their respective spheres of influence. After the Berlin crisis of 1961, tensions eased, and an uneasy peace descended on the region. With the signing of the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords in August 1975, the Western powers formally acquiesced to the status quo. The United States and its principal European allies recognized the legitimacy of Eastern Europe's communist governments and the postwar boundaries imposed on them by the Soviet Union.
The unexpected stability of the postwar political and economic orders directed scholarly attention to the intriguing question of why they had endured. Attempts to explain this, and the controversy these explanations provoked, pushed the problem of change out of the pages of the principal journals and into the obscurity where it has lingered until quite recently. 14 No major theory of international relations made change its principal focus, and even theories that incorporated some concept of change made no attempt to specify the conditions under which it would occur. 15 In the absence of theoretical interest in change, there was no debate about how or why the postwar order might evolve or be transformed. Scholars became correspondingly insensitive to the prospect that this could occur.
In a deeper sense, our blindness may be attributable to the political assumptions that shaped our view of the world and directed our research agenda. For example, the absence of superpower war seemed so anomalous because of the widely shared belief that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and expansionist adversary. If Soviet leaders had not been regarded as gain seeking and risk prone but as loss avoiding and risk averse--and much evidence from the time of Khrushchev on recommends this interpretation--the superpowers' success in avoiding war would not have required an extraordinary explanation.
Cold War critics were equally myopic. Those who considered the nuclear arms race and its escalatory potential to be the major source of tension in East-West relations directed their scholarly attention to the domestic and international causes of the arms race and the ways it might be halted or stabilized through arms control and security regimes. Once again, few recognized or studied the possibility that the underlying conflict might undergo--or indeed, had already undergone--a profound transformation.
The same myopia affected the study of political economy. For years, the reigning orthodoxy, imported from classical economics, was that states were rational and gain seeking. If scholars had started from the premise that the world's capitalist establishment, like its political leaders, was above all else anxious to preserve order and predictability--especially when that order had been so spectacularly successful--they would not have viewed the survival of the postwar international economic framework as anomalous.
Theory is supposed to free scholars from their political, generational, and cultural biases. But social theory inevitably reflects these biases. It does a disservice when it confers an aura of scientific legitimacy on subjective political beliefs and assumptions.
Dependent Variables
The end of the East-West conflict, the breakup of the Soviet Union, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the possible reconciliation of Israel and the Palestinians have rekindled theoretical interest in change and its causes. The contributors to this book are divided in their judgment about the ability of existing theories to account for the end of the East-West conflict and the ensuing transformation of the international system. All the authors acknowledge causal links among changes in the international environment, developments within the Soviet Union, the shift in Soviet foreign policy, the end of the East-West conflict, and the transformation of the international system. Their attempts to explore the nature of these links provide the book with theoretical coherence.
All our essays are about change and its causes. However, there is no consensus among the authors (or in the discipline) about the nature of those changes, their timing, their causes or relative importance. For some scholars, the critical change is the end of bipolarity. For others, it is the end of the East-West conflict. The two events are related but distinct: the former refers to a shift in the distribution of power within the international system; the latter to a specific international conflict.
Bipolarity
The polarity of the international system is of particular interest to realist scholars who maintain that it determines the fundamental character of interstate relations. Most realists agree that bipolarity has come to an end, although they disagree about when and why it happened. Some, like John Mearsheimer, maintain that bipolarity ended with the Soviet Union's political and military retreat from Eastern Europe. 16 Other realists attribute the end of bipolarity to the breakup of the Soviet Union as a state. 17 Kenneth Waltz, who originally concurred with Mearsheimer, now argues that the international system remains bipolar. 18
These differences reflect realism's failure to develop an operational measure of polarity. Without such a measure, realists have no guidelines for distinguishing cause from effect. Some argue that the withdrawal from Eastern Europe or the collapse of the Soviet Union caused the end of bipolarity. Others insist that these developments were the result of the Soviet Union's decline and thus a consequence of the end of bipolarity. Both assertions are in any event problematic.
Realists who contend that the retreat from Eastern Europe or the breakup of the Soviet Union brought about the end of bipolarity have difficulty explaining these triggering events. Realist theories assert that states need to maintain their power relative to other states. According to Kenneth Waltz, it is axiomatic that states "try to arrest or reverse their decline." 19 The Soviet Union's willingness to give up what had been regarded until then as a vital sphere of influence and allow constituent Soviet republics to secede appears to contradict realism's core assumption that leaders are highly motivated to preserve their states and their states' power.
Some realists have tried to finesse this problem by portraying both developments as unintended and unforeseen consequences of bad policy decisions by Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze. But if wiser policies could have preserved the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, the international system would by their definition still be bipolar. The argument of unintended consequences in effect divorces polarity from the international distribution of capabilities by which it is supposed to be determined. Moreover, the suggestion that Gorbachev's policies were ill-considered and counterproductive compels scholars to look outside realism--to ideas, domestic politics, or decision making--to explain Gorbachev's foreign policy and the resulting transformation of the international system it brought about.
Realists who maintain that the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were the result of the Soviet Union's decline avoid these conceptual problems. But they have no theoretical basis for making such a claim. Without operational definitions of polarity, there are no criteria for establishing the decline of bipolarity independent of its consequences.
The End of the Cold War
Realists and nonrealists alike are interested in why and how the East-West conflict was resolved. To answer this question, they need a more precise understanding of the nature of that conflict and the stages through which it passed. The dependent variable must be delineated before the search for independent variables can begin.
Most analyses of the end of the East-West conflict focus on the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev. This is understandable because his liberalization of the Soviet system, sponsorship of political change in Eastern Europe, and commitment to disarmament were the catalysts of accommodation. But as Kenneth Oye and Richard Herr-mann acknowledge in their essays here, major improvements took place in East-West relations long before Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
The Cold War is generally assumed to have begun in 1947 and to have had twin peaks of tension. The first peak, between 1948 and 1954, was characterized by acute confrontations in Central Europe, Korea, and the Taiwan Straits. The second peak, between 1958 and 1963, witnessed renewed confrontation in the Taiwan Straits and Central Europe and a war-threatening crisis in Cuba. In between, Stalin's successors made two unsuccessful attempts to reach an accommodation with the West. 20
By the late 1960s the Cold War had lost much of its intensity. American military involvement in Vietnam did not prevent the two superpowers, and the Soviet Union and Western Europeans, from exploring their common interest in war avoidance and trade. The resulting détente was short-lived, but the Cold War revival of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a pale imitation of its predecessor.Ostpolitik and the Helsinki Accords kept Central Europe free of confrontation, while strategic parity prevented another Cuba. In the Far East, American rapprochement with China reduced the threat of renewed confrontation in Korea or the Taiwan Straits. Cold War II was a search for strategic advantage and a limited competition for influence in the Third World.
By the time of Gorbachev, East-West relations were fundamentally stable. Twenty-three years had elapsed since the last war-threatening crisis. The superpowers took each other's commitment to avoid war for granted and had entered into a series of arms control and "rules of the road" agreements that regulated their strategic competition and interaction. These accords weathered the shocks of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Reagan's commitment to Star Wars. Gorbachev's initiatives were built on this preexisting foundation.
This cursory review of the Cold War suggests that Gorbachev's policies initiated the final phase of a reconciliation that had been proceeding fitfully since the death of Stalin. Gorbachev would never have contemplated--or have been allowed to carry out--his domestic reforms, asymmetrical arms control agreements, and liberation of Eastern Europe if he or the majority of the Central Committee had expected a hostile West to respond aggressively to a visibly weaker Soviet Union. The willingness of Gorbachev and his key associates to make unilateral concessions indicates that for them the Cold War had already receded into the past. They were doing away with its atavistic institutional remnants to facilitate cooperation with their former adversaries and the benefits this was expected to bring.
This understanding of the Cold War was not unique to Gorbachev and his advisers; it was shared by a sizable percentage of elite opinion in Western Europe and the United States. In their essays, Thomas Risse-Kappen and Janice Gross Stein argue that Soviet "new thinkers," and through them, Gorbachev, had largely assimilated an interpretation of the East-West conflict that had been developed by Western critics of the arms race. They do not deny that Gorbachev's accomplishments were real and significant: he set in motion the process that in five years led to the near-total and totally unanticipated reconciliation of the two blocs. But students of Gorbachev's foreign policy must acknowledge--as Janice Stein does in her essay--that his remarkable opening to the West was only possible because of all of the changes in East-West relations that had already taken place. Nikita Khrushchev, who was also committed to ameliorating East-West relations, could never have carried through the radical changes in Soviet foreign policy that characterized the Gorbachev era.
Because Gorbachev's policies represent the final stage of a long-term process of reconciliation, they must be situated in a historical perspective. To do this, we need appropriate conceptions of the East-West conflict. Analysts need to identify the key stages and turning points of the East-West conflict, the reasons for this evolution, and then go on to assess the relative importance of the final stage ushered in by Gorbachev's initiatives.
Our argument draws attention to the deeper structures of the East-West conflict. But it should not be read to suggest that those structures were in any way determining. We suggest that certain kinds of conciliatory initiatives require preconditions, but these initiatives will not occur just because the associated preconditions are present. In their essays, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein argue that someone other than Gorbachev could have come to power with very different conceptions of internal reform and foreign policy. Grigory Romanov or Yegor Ligachev, other contenders for power in 1985, would probably have pursued a kinder and gentler version of Brezhnevism, as had Konstantin Chernenko and Yuri Andropov. East-West relations might have improved, but the two blocs probably would have retained their essential character and antagonism. Analyses of the East-West conflict must recognize the importance of both structure and agents in explaining its resolution.
Analysis must also go beyond the study of Soviet foreign policy. Resolution of the Cold War required the active collaboration of the governments of Western Europe and the United States. Their policies reflected a fundamental reconceptualization of East-West relations. This had been under way for some time in Western Europe; it was accelerated, not initiated by Gorbachev.
President Ronald Reagan's positive response to Gorbachev's overtures was critical to East-West accommodation. And Reagan's about-face was hardly foreordained. In 1953, thetroika that followed Stalin--Malenkov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev--signaled its interest in winding down the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles recognized their objective but spurned most of their advances. Another American president might have responded differently to Gorbachev.
The evidence suggests that Eisenhower and Reagan acted differently because of their different assessments of long-term Soviet intentions. In the early 1950s, Eisenhower and Dulles regarded the Soviet interest in accommodation as sincere but tactical. They were convinced that Bulganin, Khrushchev, and Malenkov were just as hostile to the capitalist West as Stalin had been but sought to ease Cold War tensions to safeguard the Soviet position in a period of growing Western strength. Eisenhower and Dulles accordingly decided to step up the pressure on the Soviet Union in the hope of further weakening Moscow's grip on Eastern Europe. 21
Reagan and his secretary of state, George Schultz, were equally suspicious of Soviet intentions at first. Gorbachev's protestations of good will and his apparent interest in deep cuts in strategic forces flew in the face of their understanding of the Soviet Union and its goals. Even after Gorbachev's foreign and domestic policies had won widespread support and sympathy in the West, Reagan continued to adhere to his "evil empire" image of the Soviet Union and to express doubts about the Soviet leader's sincerity. After all, this was the same president who as late as 1980 had explained away the Sino-Soviet split as the result of "an argument over how best to destroy us." 22
Gorbachev's commitment to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan, his domestic reforms, and, above all, the personal impression he made on Reagan in their several meetings finally convinced the president of his sincerity. As a result of his "epiphany," Reagan was transformed from a doubting Thomas into the leading dove of his administration. 23
We can speculate that Reagan's about-face was facilitated by the nature of his image of the Soviet Union. Cognitive psychologists find that simple, undifferentiated images are more susceptible to change, while complex images with more components interconnected through elaborate causal reasoning are more resistant to change. 24 Reagan's image of the Soviet Union, while pronounced in its hostility, was relatively simple and undifferentiated. Once he came to regard Gorbachev as a friend and committed to peace, he may have changed his image of the Soviet Union to make it consistent with his image of Gorbachev. 25
The validity of any particular interpretation of the shift in Ronald Reagan's foreign policy is not the issue here. Rather, it is the existence of that shift, its importance for East-West accommodation, and the corresponding need somehow to account for it. To explain the Cold War and its ultimate demise, we need to develop conceptions of that conflict that identify critical structures, processes, and actors and their decisions. We need to ask the right questions before we can find the right answers.
The nine essays in this book attempt to explain the changes that occurred in Soviet foreign policy, East-West relations, and the international system from 1985 to 1992. Their authors acknowledge the problems these changes create for their preferred approaches or theories, and some of them attempt to specify further or reformulate their key propositions. It is our collective hope that constructive self-criticism will lead to better theory.
The first four essays assess the capability of structural explanations--realism, liberalism, and functionalism--to explain the end of the Cold War and the resulting transformation of the international system. Despite their differences in approach, all the authors identify Mikhail Gorbachev's dramatic reorientation of domestic and foreign policy as the critical factor in ending the Cold War and explain that reorientation as a response to the failures of the Soviet economic and political system. Their essays recognize the importance of a benign international environment in conditioning and encouraging Gorbachev's reformist and accommodative policies.
Richard Ned Lebow begins with a critical examination of the explanations realists have offered for three of the most important international developments of the last half-century: the "long peace" between the superpowers, the Soviet Union's renunciation of its informal empire in Eastern Europe, and the post-Cold War transformation of the international system. Realist theories at the international level address the first and third of these developments, and realist theories at the unit level have made an ex post facto attempt to account for the second. Lebow maintains that all these explanations are unsatisfactory because of the conceptual failings of realist theories. He questions the overall utility of the realist paradigm.
Kenneth Oye acknowledges that realist theories are underspecified but believes that realism still offers the most compelling explanation for the changes in Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. Oye argues that the underlying cause of the end of the Cold War was economic decline, moderate in the United States and severe in the Soviet Union. The Soviet decline was attributable to the structure of the economy, disproportionate military spending, and costly foreign commitments. The Soviet response--glasnost, perestroika, and a conciliatory foreign policy--was conditioned by the specific character of the international environment. The stability that robust nuclear deterrence conferred to superpower relations allowed and encouraged policies that accepted short-term vulnerabilities in the expectation of strengthening the Soviet Union's economic and political situation in the longer term.
Michael Doyle examines the utility of three formulations of liberalism in accounting for the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He contends that "democratic liberalization," identified with people's aspirations for freedom from arbitrary authority, provides a good underlying explanation for opposition to communism but tells us nothing about the timing or outcome of rebellions against communist regimes. "Liberal modernization" theory, which emphasizes the superiority of democracy and market economies over authoritarianism and command economies, helps to explain the failure of Soviet-type systems but not the timing. For this, we need "liberal internationalism" with its identification of commerce as a potent international source of the change. It was the combination of pressures from below, coming from dissident groups in Eastern Europe, and decisions at the top, made by Andropov and Gorbachev under the strain of Cold War competition, that brought about the revolutions of 1989. The reformist choices of Soviet leaders were also encouraged by the prospect of joining in the benefits of the "democratic peace."
Jack Snyder applies historical modernization theory in the tradition of Alexander Gerschenkron and Barrington Moore to the Soviet Union. As a "late, late industrializer," the Soviet Union developed highly centralized political and economic institutions to mobilize the resources necessary to catch up militarily with more advanced powers. While well suited for the early stages of extensive development, these institutions became increasingly dysfunctional because they prevented the innovations required for more intensive development. Modernization created a better-educated, urbanized, and increasingly dissatisfied middle class. To win support and legitimize the policies that further economic development required, "new thinkers" appealed to this constituency with a set of ideas and strategic myths.
Snyder believes that his explanation is compatible with realism and liberalism. He distinguishes between what he terms aggressive and defensive realism. The latter takes account of the security dilemma and recognizes that aggressive foreign policies can be counterproductive because they are likely to provoke balancing behavior. Gorbachev's foreign policy revolution could be described as a shift from aggressive to defensive realism. Snyder's explanation is liberal in the sense that he, like Michael Doyle, emphasizes the importance of the benign international environment for Gorbachev's initiatives and attributes that environment to the preference of liberal democracies for cooperative foreign policies.
The Oye, Doyle, and Snyder essays emphasize how structures at the international or state levels influence foreign policy. None of the authors is a structural determinist. Each maintains that structure creates powerful constraints and opportunities but acknowledges that choices of leaders are also shaped by personality, ideas, coalitions, and broader domestic political considerations. These disparate substate-level influences can prompt decisions to try to adapt foreign policy to the constraints and opportunities created by structures, as seemingly happened in the case of Gorbachev. They can also impede foreign policy change, as Oye suggests happened in the case of Brezhnev.
Lebow presents an avowedly antistructural perspective. He contends that leaders and elites have subjective understandings of their international and domestic environments that are rooted in their conceptions of the world and their own societies and reflect their political needs and agendas. He explains the different responses of Brezhnev and Gorbachev to the Soviet Union's economic decline in terms of their different expectations about the feasibility and consequences of domestic reform.
The next four essays focus on nonstructural determinants of foreign policy, making the case that norms, ideas, domestic agendas, and personality were primarily responsible for Gorbachev's foreign policy and the transformation of the international system.
Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil argue that changes in beliefs and practices can bring about foreign policy and system change. They contend that the reinstitutionalization of civil society in Eastern Europe and its interaction with perestroika led to a redefinition of Soviet security interests that found expression in Gorbachev's repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. They draw on models of imperial decay to analyze Gorbachev's reforms as an unsuccessful counterreformation strategy to save the Soviet empire. Koslowski and Kratochwil argue that the transformation of the international system is a response to changes in norms and conventions, not to changes in relative power capabilities or other so-called structural attributes of the international system.
In his second contribution, Richard Ned Lebow offers a critical assessment of his earlier work in which he argued that leaders faced with mounting international and domestic pressures tend to pursue aggressive foreign policies. Gorbachev's accommodative foreign policy indicates an alternative response. To explain it, Lebow refor mulates his need-driven theory by specifying the conditions in which acute foreign and domestic threats prompt conciliatory responses. Leaders must be committed to domestic political and economic reforms whose success is seen to require accommodation abroad. They must recognize that the strategy of confrontation has failed in the past and is unlikely to work in the future. They must also entertain the expectation that conciliatory policies will be reciprocated. Lebow develops his argument by analyzing three historical cases of accommodation: France and Britain at the turn of the century, Egypt and Israel in the 1970s, and the recent Soviet-American experience. He finds striking similarities among the three cases, including evidence that the motivated biases that often blind leaders to the adverse consequences of confrontational policies can also lead them to minimize the risks associated with accommodation.
Thomas Risse-Kappen argues that neither the Gorbachev foreign policy revolution nor the Western responses to it can be adequately understood without taking into account the ideas that informed leadership decisions. He argues that many of the concepts associated with "new thinking" and "common security" were developed by American arms controllers and Western European peace researchers and left-of-center politicians and transmitted to Soviet leaders by analysts and scholars at Soviet institutes. "Common security" satisfied the Gorbachev coalition's need for consistent and coherent policy concepts and legitimized policies to which that coalition was attracted for other reasons. Ideas interacted with domestic structures and institutions and become politically relevant. Risse-Kappen contends that the benign Western response to the Gorbachev revolution was also shaped by the influence of these transnationally diffused ideas. The variation in domestic structures, especially between the United States and Germany, accounts for the differential impact of these ideas.
Janice Gross Stein also analyzes the reasons why Gorbachev and the key officials who helped to formulate or implement his foreign policy became proponents of "new thinking." She finds that propositions derived from cognitive psychology are less helpful than theories of political learning. Stein contends that Gorbachev came to power committed to domestic reforms but had few specific foreign policy beliefs. He was a prime candidate for learning and open to the ideas and policies promoted byinstitutchiks and Foreign Ministry officials, especially when they facilitated his domestic agenda. Gorbachev also learned by doing. He adjusted his policies in response to Western reactions to his initiatives. In contrast to ratio nal or interest-based explanations that assume deductive thinking, Stein argues that Gorbachev was an inductive learner.
Among the authors of these four chapters, Risse-Kappen is most sympathetic to the approaches of Oye, Doyle, and Snyder. He considers systemic and state structures very important but also recognizes the significance of ideas and the domestic political context in which they play out. He urges a more integrated approach to the study of foreign policy that attempts to bridge the gap between international and domestic policy.
The other authors--Koslowski and Kratochwil, Lebow, and Stein--are highly critical of the analytical utility of any conception of structure. Koslowski and Kratochwil argue for a "constructivist" approach that acknowledges the central role ideas play in shaping foreign policy. Lebow and Stein, and Richard Herrmann in his concluding essay, emphasize the role of agents over structures. Their starting point is the perspective of leaders and how their policies take shape in reference to their goals and subjective understandings of their domestic and international policy environments. For these authors, and also for Risse-Kappen, the interesting analytical question is how the conceptions of leaders develop and change. In common with Koslowski and Kratochwil, they see ideas as central to both processes.
The end of the Cold War and bipolarity have touched off a major debate about the shape of the post-Cold War world and its propensity for conflict. 26 Several of our contributors join this debate.
Richard Ned Lebow challenges the applicability of the realist concepts of anarchy and polarity to the post-Cold War world. He argues that the international system is still technically anarchical because there is no enforcement authority but that the concept of anarchy offers little help in explaining the character of present-day relations among the developed democracies. Lebow argues, as do Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kratochwil, that the allegedly in-escapable consequences of anarchy have been largely overcome by a complex web of multilateral institutions that govern interstate relations and provide mechanisms for resolving disputes. These institutions reflect and help sustain a consensus in favor of consultation and compromise that mute the consequences of power imbalances among states. To the extent that the principles that govern relations among the industrial democracies come to characterize relations between them and many of the countries of the former Eastern bloc, Lebow contends, this cooperative pattern of international relations will encompass most of the developed world. It will coexist with the more traditional, conflict-prone pattern that continues to characterize relations among other former communist states (e.g., Yugoslavia) and many lesser developed countries and between them and the developed world. 27
Michael Doyle and Jack Snyder share the liberal expectation that international relations will become more peaceful if democracy takes root in more states. For Doyle, optimism must be tempered by the realization that liberal states have frequently engaged in imprudent imperialism against authoritarian systems and that autarchy and nationalism remain powerful sources of conflict. He suggests that majority rule may be a necessary but not sufficient cause of international peace. Snyder points out the danger of an authoritarian backlash in the successor states of the Soviet Union. He warns that such a reversal could be the consequence of rapid economic liberalization that destabilizes efforts to build democracy.
In his concluding essay, Richard Herrmann addresses three themes that are common to many of the other contributions: the utility of neorealism, the nature and timing of the Cold War, and the sources and motives of Soviet foreign policy.
Like Snyder, Herrmann criticizes realism for its monocausal focus on power. He acknowledges that multicausation introduces unit-level variations that neorealism was designed to avoid but contends that it is necessary to explain the evolution of Soviet foreign policy. That evolution and its Western counterpart, as Herrmann agrees with Koslowski and Kratochwil, were the result of mutual redefinitions of threats and interests. These redefinitions were independent of any shift in relative capabilities and contrary to realism's expectation that the condition of anarchy would make cooperation extraordinarily difficult to achieve and maintain. Herrmann also challenges realism's characterization of the state. He suggests that states are artificial constructs based on varying conceptions of legitimacy and that the end of the Cold War has unleashed a new era in which the principle of national identity may compete more successfully with territoriality as a basis for statehood.
Realists have depicted the Cold War as a bipolar security dilemma. However, Hans Morgenthau, the preeminent classical realist, viewed the Cold War as primarily an ideological struggle. He argued that the rise of mass politics and democracy had swept away the transnational aristocracy that had provided the common norms necessary for a balance-of-power system to work. Without these constraints, postwar international politics had become a Manichaean struggle between contending forms of nationalistic universalism. Herrmann adduces evidence in support of Morgenthau--most notably the consistent willingness of the superpowers to invest heavily in geostrategically insignificant areas in the name of their respective crusades--but concedes that the ideological component of superpower relations declined sharply over time. Nevertheless, he contends, Morgenthau's characterization of the Cold War, offers important insights into the conflict, and it is imperative for students of the Cold War to come to an understanding of what that conflict was about before they attempt to explain its resolution.
To understand the nature of the Cold War, we must know something about the motives of its protagonists. Traditional realists sidestepped or denied this issue by assuming a common motivation for all states. Several of the contributors to this book argue that, since the motives of leaders of the same country can vary enormously, understanding the motives of different Soviet leaders is critical to understanding their respective foreign policies. Herrmann reviews some of the different explanations advanced to explain Soviet foreign policy, all of which he contends are nonfalsifiable as presently constructed. They can account for the end of the Cold War but could never have predicted its timing. Herrmann is cautiously optimistic that new information about the deliberations of Soviet leaders might permit us to discriminate more authoritatively among these competing explanations.
Herrmann insists that the importance of motivation makes it imperative to base inferences about a country's foreign policy on its elite's perceptions of its goals, the nature of the environment in which it operates, and the foreign and domestic constraints it faces. From such a perspective, the most critical feature of the international system is the distribution not of capabilities but of interests and aims. Such an orientation would compel theorists to engage in the interpretative debates that were at the heart of the Cold War.
Note 1: Some of the more interesting postdictive efforts include Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change,"International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 74-118; Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "Soviet Reform and the End of the Cold War: Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change,"Review of International Studies 17 (summer 1991): 225-50; George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock, eds.,Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy ( Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991); and James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, "A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era,"International Organization 46 (spring 1992): 467-91. Back.
Note 2: See A. F. K. Organski,World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), 202-3; A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler,The War Ledger ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); George Modelski, "The Long Cycle of Global Politics and the Nation-State,"Comparative Studies of Society and History 20 (April 1978): 214-35; William R. Thompson, ed.,Contending Approaches to World System Analysis ( Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983); Raimo VŠyrynen, "Economic Cycles, Power Transitions, Political Management, and Wars Between Major Powers,"International Studies Quarterly 27 (December 1983): 389-418; Robert Gilpin,War and Change in World Politics ( New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Charles F. Doran and Wes Parsons, "War and the Cycle of Relative Power,"American Political Science Review 54 (December 1960): 947-65; and Paul Kennedy,The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). This literature is reviewed by Jack S. Levy, "Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,"World Politics 40 (October 1987): 82-107; and by Richard Ned Lebow, "Thucydides, Power Transition Theory, and the Causes of War," inHegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age, ed. Richard Ned Lebow and Barry S. Strauss (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), 125-68. Back.
Note 3: One of us made this point at the beginning of the 1980s. See Richard Ned Lebow, "Clear and Future Danger: Managing Relations with the Soviet Union in the 1980s," inNew Directions in Strategic Thinking, ed. Robert O'Neill and D. M. Horner (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), 221-45; and a subsequent revision, "The Deterrence Deadlock: Is There a Way Out ?" inPsychology and Deterrence, Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 180-202. Back.
Note 4: See, for example, Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,"International Security 17 (winter 1992 / 93): 59-90; James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds.,International-Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics ( Lexington, Mass.: Lexington, 1989); and Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, eds., "Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies,"International Studies Quarterly ( special issue) 34 (September 1990): 259-68. Back.
Note 5: For an excellent overview, see Philip Everts, "The Events in Eastern Europe and the Crisis in the Discipline of International Relations," inThe End of the Cold War: Evaluating Theories of International Relations, Pierre Allan and Kjell Goldmann (Dordrecht, Holland: Martinus Nijhoff, 1992), 55-81. ; Back.
Note 6: Mikhail S. Gorbachev,Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World ( New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 165. Back.
Note 7: On the methodological problems of studying the former Soviet Union, see Jack Snyder, "Richness, Rigor, and Relevance in the Study of Soviet Foreign Policy,"International Security 9 (winter 1984 / 85): 89-103; and Jack Snyder, "Science and Sovietology: Bridging the Methods Gap in Soviet Foreign Policy Studies,"World Politics 40 (January 1988): 93. Back.
Note 8: See, for example, George Breslauer,Five Images of the Soviet Future: A Critical Review and Synthesis ( Berkeley: University of California, Institute of International Studies, 1978); Robert Byrnes, ed.,After Brezhnev: The Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Robert Wesson, ed.,The Soviet Union: Looking to the 1980s (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1980). Back.
Note 9: For a good general treatment of this problem, see Richard K. Betts,Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning ( Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1982). On 1973, see Janice Gross Stein, "Calculation, Miscalculation, and Deterrence II: The View from Jerusalem," inPsychology and Deterrence, ed. Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 60-88. On American intelligence and the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein,We All Lost the Cold War ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chap. 14. Back.
Note 10: For a critical evaluation of the performance of Soviet studies with regard to the Gorbachev revolution, see the debate between Jerry Hough and George Breslauer inMilestones in Glasnost and Perestroika, ed. Ed Hewett and Victor H. Winston (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1991), pp. 465-95. Back.
Note 11: The focus of realism is great-power relations. In describing the postwar political order as stable, realists are referring to the stability of Europe and the de facto, and later de jure, acceptance of its division by East and West. The postwar political order in other regions of the world could hardly be called stable. Back.
Note 12: John Lewis Gaddis,The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War Era ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 218. Back.
Note 13: See Charles Kindleberger,The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); and Gilpin,War and Change in World Politics. For critical discussions and alternate explanations, see Robert O. Keohane,After Hegemony ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert O. Keohane,International Institutions and State Power ( Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989); Duncan Snidal, "The Limits of Hegemonic Stability Theory,"International Organization 39 (autumn 1985): 579-614; and Volker Rittberger, ed.,The Study of Regimes in International Relations ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 14: A literature search reveals that between 1970 and 1990International Organization, World Politics, andInternational Studies Quarterly published no more than a half-dozen articles whose primary focus was major foreign policy or systemic change. Back.
Note 15: An exception is Gilpin,War and Change in World Politics. This point is also made by three articles in Robert O. Keohane, ed.,Neorealism and Its Critics ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1986): John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," pp. 131-57; Robert O. Keohane, "Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond," pp. 158-203; and Robert W. Cox, "Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory," pp. 204-55. For a critique of cognitive psychology's failure to deal adequately with change, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, "Afghanistan, Carter and Foreign Policy Change: The Limits of Cognitive Models," inDiplomacy, Force, and Leadership: Essays in Honor of Alexander L. George, ed. Dan Caldwell and Timothy J. McKeown (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993), pp. 95-128. Back.
Note 16: See John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War,"International Security 15 (summer 1990): 5-56. Mearsheimer appears to be making the same argument as Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Emerging Structure of International Politics," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30-September 2, 1990. Back.
Note 17: Stephen Walt to the author, October 20, 1993. Back.
Note 18: Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Emerging Structure of International Politics,"International Security 18 (fall 1993): 44-79. Back.
Note 19: Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Emerging Structure of International Politics," third draft of a paper prepared for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Society, San Francisco, August 1990, pp. 7-8. Back.
Note 20: For the Soviet perspective on these early efforts at détente, see James G. Richter, "Perpetuating the Cold War,"Political Science Quarterly 107 (summer 1992): 271-301; and Lebow and Stein,We All Lost the Cold War, chap. 3. Back.
Note 21: The best source on this is Matthew A. Evangelista, "Cooperation Theory and Disarmament Negotiations in the 1950s,"World Politics 41 (July 1990): 502-28. Back.
Note 22: See Don Oberdorfer, The Turn from the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983-1990 (New York: Poseidon, 1991), esp. chs. 1-4; and Robert Scheer's interview with Ronald Reagan during the 1980 primary campaigns in Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 242. Back.
Note 23: See Oberdorfer,The Turn, chs. 4-7, on the Reagan-Gorbachev summit encounters. Back.
Note 24: Philip E. Tetlock, "Monitoring the Integrative Complexity of American and Soviet Policy Rhetoric: What Can Be Learned ?"Journal of Social Issues 44 (summer 1988): 819-27; and Philip E. Tetlock, "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy: In Search of an Elusive Concept," inLearning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 20-61. Back.
Note 25: For an alternate point of view, see Keith L. Shimko, "Reagan on the Soviet Union and the Nature of International Conflict,"Political Psychology 13 (September 1992): 353-78. Back.
Note 26: See, for example, Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future"; Steven Van Evera, "Primed for Peace: Europe After the Cold War,"International Security 15 (winter 1990 / 91): 7-57; Goldgeier and McFaul, "A Tale of Two Worlds"; Robert Jervis, "The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past,"International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 39-73; and Charles Kupchan and Clifford Kupchan, "Concerts, Collective Security, and the Future of Europe,"International Security 16 (summer 1991): 114-61. Back.
Note 27: A similar argument has been made by Goldgeier and McFaul, "A Tale of Two Worlds." Back.
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