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International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War, by Richard Ned Lebow and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors
5. Myths, Modernization, and the Post-Gorbachev World
Jack Snyder
The comparatively peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire is a virtually unprecedented event in the history of world politics. In the past, the demise of great empires has almost always been accompanied by major warfare. Either the declining power lashed out in an aggressive attempt to stem the tide, or rising powers used force to hasten the process and stake out their claims. Often the prospect even of less dramatic shifts in relative power has triggered preventive war between major powers. Decolonization has sometimes taken place without large-scale military conflict but never so close to the heart of an empire. 1 The peacefulness of the Soviet collapse was due primarily to the fact that the strongest powers in the international system at that time were, or aspired to be, liberal democracies. As long as this remains the case, intense conflict among the great powers will be much less common than it was in the past. 2 However, since the fate of liberal democracy in Russia, China, and other potential great powers is far from certain, this outcome must remain in doubt.
To understand the future directions of world politics, therefore, international relations theorists need to study why liberal democracies are now the prevailing form of the state in the developed world, why such states pursue more moderate foreign policies, what circumstances might lead to the emergence of illiberal great powers, and how such circumstances could be averted. The concluding sections of this essay will address some of the implications of this for scholarship on international politics. First, however, I will show how my previous theoretical formulations have attempted to explain the peaceful transformation of the Soviet empire.
The Gorbachev Revolution
In Myths of Empire I argue that a state's foreign policy is shaped by the myths it holds about how to achieve security. 3 The foreign policy concepts of the most aggressive states have as their centerpiece the idea that security can be enhanced by aggressive expansion. This general assumption is reflected, in turn, in more specific notions like the domino theory, the image of the opponent as a paper tiger, and the belief that states jump on the bandwagon of the strongest power. These strategic myths are ideologies put forward by interest groups, bureaucracies, politicians, or domestic political coalitions that receive some parochial benefit from a policy of expansion or from a climate of impending threat. The myths help sell parochial policies in terms of a collective interest in national security.
Whether or not such myths of empire emerge, and how quickly the state learns to correct erroneous ideas, depends on the state's domestic political structure. In well-institutionalized democratic political systems, the electoral power of the average voter and open public discourse on foreign policy have tended in the long run to thwart excessively costly expansionist ideas and policies. Thus Britain and the United States successfully retrenched from their flirtations with imperial overstretch. Drawing on Alexander Gerschenkron, I argue further that the British pattern of early industrialization, which featured the gradual and decentralized accumulation of capital in the textile sector, facilitated this outcome by creating a pattern of mobile, diversified elite interests amenable to political compromise and flexible adaptation. 4
In contrast, the pattern of capital accumulation in late industrializing states like Germany and Japan was associated with elite economic or bureaucratic cartels with relatively narrow, immobile interests. Under these conditions, politics typically took the form of logrolling among highly concentrated interest groups, some of which had parochial interests in imperial expansion. Since logrolling works by acceding to each groups' strongest parochial interest, and since the diffuse interests of average voters were insufficiently represented, imperial expansion resulted, even when its costs to the state as a whole exceeded its benefits. Strategic mythmaking ran rampant as interest groups and coalition leaders tried to justify the costly imperial policies to each other and to the broader society.
The Soviet Union was yet another type of state: a late, late industrializer. 5 In this pattern, the state developed a highly centralized set of political and economic institutions suited to the forced-draft mobilization of underutilized factors of production for the purpose of catching up militarily with more advanced powers. The tasks of what economists call extensive development led to the creation of a highly unitary political system, which hindered logrolling and mythmaking by independent interest groups. The unitary state itself mythologized foreign threats to justify political repression and economic mobilization, but the political autonomy of the state gave it more latitude to buffer actual foreign policy from threat-inflating rhetoric.
Once the revolution from above was over, however, the mobilizing institutions lived on as entrenched atavisms, bargaining with central state authorities, logrolling with each other, and using the mobilizing ideologies of the period of forced industrialization to promote their parochial interests. A number of these institutions--the combat party, the military, military-related heavy industry, and the secret police--had an interest in policies of foreign expansion or a climate of foreign threat, which were easily legitimated by the ideologies left over from the mobilization period. The resulting foreign policy was not so reckless as that of the late industrializers, however, since the comparatively stronger central state authorities in the late, late industrializer remained at least partly able to contain the logrolling and mythmaking activity when its costs mounted.
Eventually, the institutions of the late, late industrializer became increasingly dysfunctional. Though well suited for the transitory tasks of extensive development, the command economy and hypercentralized polity were unable to provide the innovative climate and allocative mechanisms needed for the tasks of intensive development--that is, the more efficient use of already mobilized factors of production. The draining foreign and military policies demanded by atavistic interest groups exacerbated this problem.
At the same time, the partial successes of extensive development created a better-educated, urbanized, middle-class constituency for institutional change. The urban intelligentsia, in particular, was used as a spearhead by Gorbachev, a political entrepreneur who wanted to revitalize the state he commanded. 6 Domestically, the program of these reformers followed the approach to intensive development successfully adopted elsewhere: movement toward economic marketization and its necessary political concomitant, greater political pluralism. The domestic goals of the reformers required a new, more benign set of myths in foreign affairs--in particular, the belief that the advanced capitalist states were not threatening--so that military expenditures could be cut and avenues for foreign trade expanded.
This then is the main explanation for the puzzle posed at the out set: the new thinkers who controlled Soviet foreign policy in the Gorbachev period peacefully accepted the unraveling of their empire because (1) the stage of development of the domestic political economy functionally required a foreign strategy of peace and international economic integration, (2) the previous stage of the modernization process had created a significant political constituency for that policy, and (3) proponents of the policy succeeded in developing a plausible set of strategic ideas to justify the policy to themselves and to other participants in the Soviet political arena. Put more simply, the policy had a functional requirement, a political constituency, and a legitimating concept. All these elements were rooted in Russian economic backwardness, the pattern of political modernization that flowed from it, and the ubiquitous process of using foreign policy myths to forge a consensus favoring the prevailing pattern of domestic political rule.
Admittedly, this explanation leaves out some parts of the story, which a fuller exposition should address. For example, like any macrostructural theory, it is not very helpful in explaining details of timing. More importantly, my first formulation of the argument tended to treat the creation of an urban, educated middle class as a nearly sufficient precondition for liberal democracy. This overlooked the difficulty of creating effective democratic and market institutions from scratch, even with the benefit of those social preconditions.
A final element in the explanation hinges on the cooperative behavior of the advanced capitalist states, which happily matched the ideas being advanced by Soviet new thinkers. Though Soviet opponents of the new thinking called the retreat from empire a "new Munich," the West did nothing to lend credence to that argument. As the theory put forth in Myths of Empire would predict, liberal democracies, moderate in their expansionist impulse, would not without concrete provocation recklessly exploit the geopolitical collapse of a nuclear-armed great power, nor would they fall to fighting among themselves over the dubious spoils. If a militarized, logrolling late industrializer like pre-1914 Germany or pre-1945 Japan had been at the doorstep of Gorbachev's Russia, however, it might have behaved much differently, and Soviet new thinking might never have emerged.
Comparisons with Realism
In Myths of Empire I distinguish between two kinds of realism, the aggressive and the defensive variants. 7 Both accept that security is the strongest motivation of states in anarchy, but they have opposite views about how to achieve it. Aggressive realism holds that security-seeking states are often compelled to adopt strategies of expansion and offensive warmaking in order to survive in the harsh environment of international anarchy. In other words, aggressive realism contends that the myths of empire are often true. In contrast, defensive realism holds that aggression that threatens other great powers diminishes a state's security in a balance-of-power system. Clear-thinking states, such as the democratic early industrializers, tend to behave in accordance with the tenets of defensive realism. In this sense, my theory in Myths of Empire is fully compatible with what I see as the true form of realism.
Realist commentary on the Gorbachev revolution has been dominated by John Mearsheimer's analysis of the likely instability that will emerge from the increasingly multipolar international system. Mearsheimer, arguing from what he sees as realist assumptions, worries that "the international system creates powerful incentives for aggression," incentives that the great powers will find hard to ignore. 8 I generally agree with his argument that there are deductive reasons to expect multipolarity to be less stable than bipolarity, 9 but even in multipolarity states usually face strong incentives to avoid overly aggressive strategies. The reason that the pre-1945 period was more war-prone than the post-1945 era was that the late-industrializing German and Japanese polities provided fertile soil for imperial myths that left their elites and publics incapable of grasping the true nature of the balance-of-power system. The pre-1945 system often looked like a caricature of aggressive realism, but the engine driving this behavior was the irrational aggressiveness of myth-ridden states, not states' rational responses to the logic of anarchy. After 1945, these hyperaggressive states were turned into democracies, which pursued moderate foreign policies, and so the main source of disturbance to the international order was eliminated. The long peace occurred because no hyperaggressive great powers remained in the system.
Mearsheimer also argues that nuclear deterrence helps to explain the long post-1945 peace. Certainly, nuclear weapons strongly reinforced the previous incentives for states to be wary about embarking on aggression. But were those nuclear incentives so unambiguous that even a Nazi-type state, its perceptions clouded by the myths of empire, would have been deterred from launching a major war ? There is no clear test one way or the other of this proposition. But even relatively prudent Soviet and American military strategists minimized the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons and saw benefits in first-strike strategies. Soviet war planners thought they might be able to overrun a nuclear power with conventional forces. 10 General Curtis LeMay or Marshal Andrei Grechko, who reportedly advocated a preventive strike against Chinese nuclear forces, might have caused quite a stir in a Wilhelmine-type political system, nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
Nuclear deterrence does help to explain the peacefulness of the new thinking in Soviet foreign policy, but only in conjunction with Soviet assessments of the domestic politics of their potential nuclear adversaries. For example, in the earliest authoritative article in which new thinkers made a clear case for decisively downgrading the threat from the West, Vitaly Zhurkin and his coauthors began with the argument that aggression against a nuclear-armed power would be suicide. 11 But they knew that simply reciting the facts of nuclear deterrence would not win the argument for a reduced threat assessment and a more conciliatory foreign policy. Soviet conservatives had long argued that U.S. imperialists and militarists would behave recklessly despite nuclear risks. To rebut this view, Soviet new thinkers and their precursors argued with increasing effectiveness that American public opinion, which would have no stomach for a costly war, could use the democratic processes of an increasingly autonomous state to keep aggressive circles under control. 12 Moreover, Zhurkin and his colleagues argued that Gorbachev's peace offensive was helping to accomplish this result. They acknowledged that "bourgeois democracy" did not rule out assertive U.S. behavior in instances like Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, which involved little cost or risk for the average citizen. "Nonetheless," they insisted, "if one poses the question of large-scale aggression, a large war between two systems, whether local or global, bourgeois democracy serves as a definite barrier on the path toward the outbreak of such a war." 13 As evidence they cite the resistance of public opinion to the Vietnam War once casualties mounted.
In short, strategic factors like those considered by defensive realism may help to explain Soviet new thinking, but they should be viewed in conjunction with domestic variables. As Gorbachev recognized all along, a strategy of holding the empire by force, such as he temporarily adopted in the Baltics during the winter of 1990-91, would have ruined the political coalition behind the domestic reforms. Above all, Gorbachev's assurance that his retreats would not be exploited stemmed less from a nuclear ace in the hole than from the new thinkers' correct assessment of the relatively benign foreign policies of the democratic West. 14
Comparison with Liberal Theories
The argument in Myths of Empire has some similarities with several liberal theories that offer insights on the peaceful Soviet collapse, but some differences are also pertinent to broader questions of international relations.
One hotly debated issue is how and why democratic foreign policy differs from that of other states. The currently prevailing view argues that democracies are not in general more peaceful; they just refrain from fighting each other. Quantitative studies show, for example, that democracies fight as frequently as nondemocracies, and insofar as this can be determined reliably, democracies seem to be just as likely to start wars. But mature, stable democracies, by most reasonable definitions of this term, have never fought each other. Explanations for this finding generally fall into two camps: those stressing democratic institutional constraints on war-making state leaders, and those emphasizing the prevailing norm of peaceful settlement of disputes in and between democracies. Proponents of the normative argument often point out that institutional constraints do not seem to stop democracies from attacking nondemocracies. 15
My own view, based on the arguments in Myths of Empire, differs somewhat from the usual positions in the debate. I follow Michael Doyle in arguing that democracy has a moderating effect on a state's foreign policy because citizens who bear the costs of foreign adventures have power over policy. Doyle says that "the fundamental reason" why Kant thought democratic republics would have peaceful relations was, in Kant's words, that citizens "will have a great hesitation in . . . calling down on themselves all the miseries of war, such as doing the fighting themselves, supplying the costs of the war.'' 16 To make sense, normative explanations for the democratic peace must ultimately trace themselves back to this central insight, which is essentially an argument based on institutional constraint. Without this linchpin, there is no explanation of how the normative expectation of peaceful democratic behavior arises in the first place.
By this reasoning, democracies should avoid not only wars with each other but also recklessly aggressive policies in general. But this does not mean that democracies are predicted to be generally peaceful. Why should the self-interested average voter veto cheap, lucra tive, successful, or unavoidable wars against authoritarian states whose policies threaten liberal aims ? A close look at the quantitative studies reveals that most of the democracies' many wars were either cheap conflicts against weak states, which imposed few costs on the average voter, or, in the two world wars, were necessary self-defense against the authoritarian aggressors. 17 Of course, the Soviet Union, during the loss of its empire, was less of a democracy than was Wilhelmine Germany, so democracy itself cannot explain Soviet moderation. Rather, what was important was the aspiration of Soviet new thinkers to join the peaceful Kantian league of liberal states and their expectation that the developed democracies would therefore act in security affairs as if the Soviet Union were a democracy. My theory of coalition ideology attempts to explain this, though Doyle's argument, which does more to develop the role of democratic norms, is perhaps better at explaining the overall dynamic of the Kantian league.
My argument also overlaps with Richard Rosecrance's contention that objective incentives in the contemporary international system are favoring more and more the adoption of trading-state strategies. 18 Soviet new thinkers were responding in part to this increasingly unavoidable insight. But such incentives have been present for almost all the great powers for over a hundred years. The problem is that the domestic coalitions in some great powers made them unwilling or unable to recognize these objective incentives.
Finally, there are the liberal theories that focus on the role of international institutions in fostering cooperation. 19 From this standpoint, the comparatively peaceful nature of the Soviet collapse might be explained as a consequence of international institutional structures assuring the Soviets that their concessions would not be exploited and that a strategy of international economic cooperation would be feasible. I myself wrote an article urging that international institutional arrangements in the security and economic spheres be used to create incentives for the emergence of liberal democratic coalitions in the successor states to the Soviet empire. 20 As a prescription, I think this was correct, but as an explanation of the peacefulness of the Soviet collapse, it is at best a third-order consideration. The role of international institutions and regimes in the recent transformations, whether in the area of arms control or that of economic assistance, has been quite small and lagged well behind the pace of political developments in the East. 21<
The theory put forward in Myths of Empire not only advances an interpretation of the peaceful Soviet collapse but also makes contingent predictions about the future. Like Doyle's theory, it predicts that international relations will become dramatically more peaceful among the great powers if all of them become stable democracies. This is because reckless strategic ideas will not be able to survive the process of democratic scrutiny. In addition, I predict not only that democracies will not fight each other but that they will pursue reasonably prudent, cost-conscious policies toward nondemocratic states as well. (This is one area where my predictions and Doyle's partially diverge.)
The theory in Myths of Empire indirectly addresses the likelihood that the great powers will all become stable democracies, but it does not make an unambiguous prediction about this. The modernization theory embedded in the Soviet case implies that democratization and marketization are functional necessities for the next stage of Russian socioeconomic development. It remains to be seen whether the political constituencies and institutions needed to bring this about can emerge under present conditions. It is possible, as my colleague Seweryn Bialer once argued, that the Bolshevik attempt to skip over developmental stages not only failed but actually undid some of the preconditions for a stable, liberal, democratic society. In particular, the market institutions destroyed by Stalin's revolution from above will have to be painfully recreated. Thus Russia might have to start over again on the developmental path as one of Gerschenkron's late industrializers, as one of Huntington's praetorian societies with booming participation and weak institutions, or as a Peronist-style state oscillating between military dictatorship and populist democracy. Pernicious foreign-policy mythmaking would be expected in such states. 22
Moreover, though mature democratic states are a moderating force in world politics, democratizing states, which combine booming mass political participation with unstable or incompletely democratic institutions, have often behaved very aggressively. Britain on the eve of the Crimean War, France under both Napoleons, Germany in the Wilhelmine and interwar periods, and Japan in the early 1930s were all great powers whose aggressive behavior in foreign affairs was exacerbated by poorly institutionalized mass political participation. 23 Today, the holding of mass elections has not made the Balkans or the Caucasus peaceful. Any predictions about the moderating effect of stable, well-institutionalized democracy on foreign policy must also take into account the contrary impact of the attempted transition to democracy.
Implications for International Relations Theory
If the argument of Myths of Empire is even roughly correct, the implication is that international relations theory ought to be integrated with comparative politics and an improved modernization theory. First, we need to know how different types of states behave in foreign affairs. Michael Doyle and other writers have provided a good head start on this question. Stephen Walt's work on revolutionary states will help to fill in the picture even further, while reminding us that a state's type and its international environment interact to produce an outcome. 24 Rather than scrapping international-level explanations for domestic-level ones, we should consider their interactions. This part of the task is almost at the stage of normal science.
But we also need to understand what causes the emergence of different types of states. Though this is a comparative politics topic par excellence, it is nonetheless essential for international relations scholars who hope to be at all relevant to the real questions of our day. American foreign policy debates over the past few years have hinged in large part on guesses about the likely direction of Soviet domestic reforms. Military budgets, treaties, and aid packages have been shaped by expectations about whether democrats or reactionaries could be expected to gain or retain power in Moscow. Moreover, insofar as the international setting is one of the factors that shapes domestic outcomes, we need a theory of the emergence of regime types in order to know how to exert whatever influence we may have in a responsible direction. Should one promote a liberal world order by spurring new democracies to accept economic shock therapy, or, as Karl Polanyi argued, are mass democracy and unregulated laissez-faire incompatible ? 25
Some off-the-shelf research on the impact of international forces on domestic structures will help answer these questions. Some of these works are realist, showing the effect of the security environment on the development of state institutions. Others do the same for the international economic environment. Still others explore tactical questions like the interaction of imf conditionality and domestic regime type. 26
Such theories will make a useful contribution. But the main tool for tracking, predicting, and influencing the emergence of regime types should be a good modernization theory, which should explain the connections among social ideologies, patterns of economic development, and the emergence of different types of polity. A generation ago, scholars like Barrington Moore and Alexander Gerschenkron were at work on theories of this type. 28 They had some good insights, but tytheir work was impressionistic. It remains unclear how to apply their theories to the present day. Now, when students of international politics really need such theories, modernization theory as a whole is derided because of the failings of a particular kind of modernization theory, which portrayed all societies as modernizing along the same path as the West European liberal democracies, especially England. But the most perceptive theorists of modernization and political development--such as Moore, Gerschenkron, and Samuel Huntington--were highly attuned to the possibility of multiple paths and culs-de-sac on the route to modernity. I made use of Gerschenkron in Myths of Empire, but a more fully articulated theory is needed to carry the burden of future work of this type.
In addition to a better theory of the evolution of domestic structures, Myths of Empire also suggests the need to study the role of social myths in foreign policy. In every case I examined, strategic myths arose from domestic politics but then took on a life of their own. Mythmakers became trapped in their own rhetoric, in the political arrangements their myths created, and in the internalization of myths by second-generation elites. To understand the outcomes, it was necessary to understand the process of mythmaking, not just the underlying structure of power and interests.
Today, the future of relations among the great powers hinges in large part on which set of social myths prevails: those of liberalism, aggressive nationalism, or some other ideological contender. Both liberalism and nationalism are on the intellectual offensive, competing to occupy the void left by the collapse of Soviet-style socialism. In June 1992 Czechs voted for a Europe-oriented neoclassical economist; Slovaks, reflecting a different economic base and an unfulfilled national identity, voted for a protectionist nationalist. In Russia, proponents of imf-backed shock therapy have vied for power against an emerging alliance of nationalists and industrial protectionists. 29
Which of these social programs, or what combinations of them, will prevail in which parts of the former Soviet empire ? What will be the consequences for international politics ? Once again, a modernization perspective is helpful.
Most contemporary students of politicized ethnicity argue that nationalism, the demand of a self-defined people for its own state, is a symptom of modernity. 30 Beginning in the late eighteenth century, European peoples came to understand that creating a national state was a prerequisite for defending their economic and security interests in the face of the interlinked challenges of modern warfare, democratization, and industrialization. Modern warfare, argues Charles Tilly, forced states to bargain with their populations, giving them a stake in the state in exchange for taxation and conscription. 31 Increased political participation spurred nationalism, as upwardly mobile groups argued that "the people" should rule themselves and that the old elites were ineffective in advancing national interests. 32 Moreover, according to Ernest Gellner, industrialization and the expansion of market relations required a homogeneous culture, so ethnic groups were forced into a Darwinian competition to determine which would be the prevailing culture in the national market. 33 Finally, with the arrival of universal suffrage, the political backlash against unregulated markets swelled the ranks of nationalist parties, which offered a variety of projectionist, imperialist, and militarist programs that promised to subject market forces to political control.
These challenges of modernity promoted nationalism everywhere, but where ineffectual states failed to meet these challenges successfully, nationalism was especially intense. 34 States that lost wars, suffered severe economic depressions, or failed to develop legitimate democratic institutions were at high risk for what John Mearsheimer calls hypernationalism, an aggressive variant of nationalism based on fear and disdain for other peoples. Where states lacked the capacity to meet modernity's challenges, hypernationalist movements arose to demand the creation of a more effective state. As Gerschenkron argues, late developing states, fueled by nationalist ideology, often created authoritarian, hypertrophied states as a substitute for the more effective political and economic institutions that earlier-developing states developed more gradually. 35
Impotent post-Soviet states are now navigating all the challenges of modernity simultaneously: the creation of new military and state institutions in an anarchical environment, the expansion of democratic participation, and the marketization of the economy. The literature on nationalism and modernization suggests that this situation is pregnant with the potential for the emergence of aggressive nationalism, not only in Serbia and Karabakh but also in the more consequential case of Russia. A key question is whether strong international institutions--whether the imf or U.N. peacekeepers--can provide substitutes or supplements for underdeveloped state institutions that are struggling to meet these challenges. A better theory of modernization, nationalism, and the development of state institutions would be of great value not only in understanding but also in influencing these complex social processes.
Implications for Policy
Much depends on the outcome of the debate between realists and liberals and among the variants within each camp. Some realists, without even addressing the challenge that recent events pose to their theory, are offering policy prescriptions that could make their Hobbesian predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy. Samuel Huntington, for example, arguing that Japan now poses the greatest threat to U.S. national interests, proposes a mercantilist stance to guard America's relative power from that quarter. 36
Liberals likewise risk doing more harm than good with their theories. Some ideologues of neoclassical economics work from the unexamined assumption that peace-loving, democratic politics cannot survive in Russia without a root-and-branch market reform, notwithstanding the ambivalence of Russian citizens about its wrenching social consequences. In their fixation on the contradictions of socialism, these laissez-faire theorists forget that classical liberalism, too, had its internal contradictions. They overlook the many historical cases when the precipitous introduction of markets into nonmarket, multiethnic societies caused hypernationalism and fascism instead of liberal democracy. Uncontrolled markets were subject to periodic, catastrophic depressions, and under the gold standard even healthy but abrupt market adjustments wreaked havoc in labor markets that was intolerable in democratic conditions. Karl Polanyi's classic book The Great Transformation reminds us that the rise of mass political participation coincided with rising demands for protection from the vagaries of laissez-faire. 37 A great deal of the appeal of fascism and hypernationalism was precisely that they promised protection from socially corrosive world market forces--for example, by means of protectionism inside a militarily expanded territorial base.
Liberalism mitigated this internal contradiction between democracy and market economics, however, by expanding the sphere of political control over market forces. Domestically, government intervention on Keynesian principles evened out the business cycle, and corporatist compromises spread out the costs of adjustment to shifts in world markets. 38 Internationally, the old gold standard, which necessitated draconian domestic adjustments, was supplanted by the more forgiving Bretton Woods system, which created the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, and other instruments to maintain an open trading system while still buffering voters from its most disruptive consequences. In short, only the political control of domestic and international markets--what John Ruggie calls the "embedded liberal compromise''--solved the contradiction between democracy and market economics and thus made liberalism fully viable under conditions of a very advanced division of labor.
A strictly rational-choice reconstruction of the embedded liberal compromise might construe it as a calculated bargain mediated by democratic politicians between owners of mobile capital, who would normally favor laissez-faire, and workers and owners of fixed capital, who would normally prefer some buffers against the unrestrained workings of the market. Ruggie, however, puts it in a cognitive and normative light. The founders of the Bretton Woods order hit upon this system because they had already internalized the concepts and norms of embedded liberalism from their domestic social orders. 39
This has important implications for the present management of the problems of order in the former Soviet empire and of the new world order in general. Despite the practice of the embedded liberal compromise, a good deal of the ideology of contemporary American liberalism is left over from nineteenth-century laissez-faire. As a result, there remains the myth that draconian laissez-faire and strict conditionality constitute the best, indeed the only, economic basis on which democracy can survive. In this view, only if subsidies, protectionism, and other forms of political intervention in markets are swept away will a liberal political order emerge.
Naturally, no one will argue that a Peronist-style economy with heavy protectionism and grossly inefficient state-industrial subsidies provides a firm foundation for political democracy. On the other hand, all modern democratic politicians win votes and maintain social peace by buffering constituencies from the worst pain of market adjustment. In Boris Yeltsin's successful run for the Russian presidency, he promised a 50 percent increase in Russians' old-age pensions. 40 Such expedients would be severely limited under the terms of any agreement that the imf would oversee. But if it takes populist promises and payoffs to forge a social consensus for market reform, then imposing harsh restrictions on political coalition making will only serve to undercut fragile democracies. It is therefore important to remember that even in the West it was the introduction of politically controlled markets, governed by the norms of embedded liberalism, that made democracy and economic liberalism compatible.
The peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire was the bellwether that should have alerted us to the fundamental changes in international politics that are now possible. But those changes could still be derailed if we fail to acknowledge them or if we misread the forces driving them. International relations theorists can do their part by revising the partial truths of realism and laissez-faire liberalism and exploring the connections among modernization, social myths, and international conflict.
Note 1: Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jack Levy, "Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War," World Politics 40 (October 1987): 82-107; and Miles Kahler, Decolonization in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Back.
Note 2: However, Robert Jervis, "The Future of World Politics: Will It Resemble the Past ?" International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 39-73, correctly argues that in the Third World "there is no reason to think that the basic contours of international politics will be unfamiliar" (61). Back.
Note 3: Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Back.
Note 4: On the political consequences of the timing of industrialization, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Back.
Note 5: In addition to Snyder, Myths of Empire, ch. 6, see also Jack Snyder, "The Gorbachev Revolution: A Waning of Soviet Expansionism ?" International Security 12 (winter 1987 / 88): 93-131. Back.
Note 6: On the intelligentsia's political role, see Sarah Mendelson, "Internal Battles and External Wars: Politics, Learning, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan," World Politics 45 (April 1993): 327-60; and Mary McAuley, "Politics, Economics, and Elite Realignment in Russia: A Regional Perspective," Soviet Economy 8 (January-March 1992): 46-88, esp. 62. Back.
Note 7: Snyder, Myths of Empire, 11-12. On defensive realism, see also Fareed Zakaria, "Realism and Domestic Politics," International Security 17 (summer 1992): 177-98, esp. 190-96. Though Zakaria is critical of the notion of defensive realism, he captures the essence of the concept very astutely. Back.
Note 8: John J. Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security 15 (summer 1990): 5-56, at p. 12. Mearsheimer is, of course, not prescribing the adoption of aggressive strategies. He simply fears that insecure states in multipolarity will be irresistibly drawn toward bellicose policies. His policy recommendations focus on realist measures, like nuclear deterrence, that might allow the great powers to maintain their security without resorting to aggressive means. I thank Thomas Risse-Kappen for insightful comments on this point. Back.
Note 9: Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder, "Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity," International Organization 44 (spring 1990): 137-68. Back.
Note 10: Richard Ned Lebow, "The Soviet Offensive in Europe: The Schlieffen Plan Revisited ?" International Security 9 (spring 1985), reprinted in Soviet Military Policy, ed. Sean Lynn-Jones (Cambridge: mit Press, 1989), pp. 312-46. Back.
Note 11: Vitaly Zhurkin, Sergei Karaganov, and Andrei Kortunov, "Vyzovy bezopasnosti--Starye i novye," Kommunist, no. 1 (January 1988): 42-50. These three were prominent analysts at the USA and Canada Institute writing in what was then still the Communist Party's most authoritative journal. Back.
Note 12: For background, see Franklin Griffiths, "The Sources of American Conduct: Soviet Perspectives and Their Policy Implications," International Security 9 (fall 1984): 3-50. See also Ted Hopf, "Peripheral Visions: Brezhnev and Gorbachev Meet the 'Reagan Doctrine,' " in Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy, ed. George W. Breslauer and Philip E. Tetlock (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1991), pp. 609-19. Back.
Note 13: Zhurkin, Karaganov, and Kortunov, "Vyzovy bezopasnosti," p. 45. Back.
Note 14: See Randall L. Schweller, "Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific ?" World Politics 44 (January 1992): 235-69, for the argument that democracies virtually never fight preventive wars. More generally, see Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry, "The International Sources of Soviet Change," International Security 16 (winter 1991 / 92): 74-118. Back.
Note 15: See, e.g., Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 16: Michael Doyle, "Liberalism in World Politics," American Political Science Review 80 (December 1986): 1160. Back.
Note 17: For an assessments of this evidence, see Steve Chan, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . . . : Are the Freer Countries More Pacific ?" Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (December 1984): 617-48. In general, quantitative studies must be read with a sharp eye. For example, what are we to make of the so-called fact (reported in Chan, 627) that Australia has been more war-prone than Prussia / Germany? Back.
Note 18: Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic, 1986). Back.
Note 19: See, e.g., Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Stephen Krasner, International Regimes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); and, in the Gorbachev context, John Ruggie, "Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution," International Organization 46 (summer 1992): 561-98. Back.
Note 20: Jack Snyder, "Averting Anarchy in the New Europe," International Security 14 (spring 1990): 5-41, revised and reprinted in The Cold War and After, ed. Sean Lynn-Jones (Cambridge: mit Press, 1991). Back.
Note 21: For a more positive assessment, see Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffmann, and Robert O. Keohane, eds., After the Cold War: State Strategies and International Institutions in Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 22: Snyder, "Averting Anarchy." Back.
Note 23: I discuss these cases, except France, in Myths of Empire. Back.
Note 24: Stephen Walt, "Revolutionary States and War," World Politics 44 (April 1992): 321-68. Back.
Note 25: Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944; reprint, New York: Octagon, 1975). Back.
Note 26: For realist views, see, e.g., Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ad 990-1990 (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). For works on the international economic environment, see, e.g., Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Ronald Rogowski, Commerce and Coalitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Jeffry Frieden, Debt, Development, and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). For studies of the interaction of imf conditionality and domestic regime type, see, e.g., Stephan Haggard, "The Politics of Adjustment: Lessons from the imf's Extended Fund Facility," International Organization 39 (summer 1985): 505-34. Back.
Note 28: Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 1966); Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Back.
Note 29: See Philip Hanson and Elizabeth Teague, "The Industrialists and Russian Economic Reform," Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty Research Report 1 (May 18, 1992): 1-7. Back.
Note 30: Good surveys include Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 31: Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, ch. 4. Back.
Note 32: Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York: St. Martin's, 1987); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Back.
Note 33: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). Back.
Note 34: I develop these and the following arguments in Jack Snyder, "Nationalism and the Crisis of the Post-Soviet State," Survival 35 (spring 1993): 5-26. Back.
Note 35: Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, p. 25 and passim. Back.
Note 36: Samuel Huntington, "America's Changing Strategic Interests," Survival 23 (January-February 1991): 3-17. Back.
Note 37: Polanyi, The Great Transformation, chap. 19. Back.
Note 38: Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times, chap. 4; and Peter Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), chap. 4. Back.
Note 39: John Ruggie, "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order," International Organization 36 (spring 1982): 379-416, esp. 393. Back.
Note 40: Transcript of June 6, 1991, Soviet television interview, reprinted in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Soviet Union, June 7, 1991, pp. 65-66. Back.
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