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CIAO DATE: 3/99
If Regime Type Doesn’t Matter, Why Do States Act Like It Does? *
Department of Government and Foreign Affairs
University of Virginia
International Studies Association
40th Annual Convention
Washington, D.C.
February 16–20, 1999
Draft — Comments welcome.
Introduction
For several decades mainstream IR theory has been systemic, i.e., has abstracted from individual attributes of states and looked instead to the environment in which states act. Roughly speaking, that environment is said by neorealists to consist in the distribution of capabilities; for neoliberal institutionalists, in international regimes; and for constructivists, in norms. Systemic IR theory has definite virtues, as the achievements of these schools of thought attest. Yet, it raises a question that it is only able partly to answer, sc., what causes variation in state preferences? Systemic theory can only offer environmental changes such as in the balance of power, the existence and efficacy of international institutions, or alterations in system-wide norms.
Casual observation suggests that state preferences, “national interests,” are also altered when a state’s internal regime changes. The most dramatic cases include revolutions such as the French of 1789–93 and the Russian of 1917 (Walt 1996) and externally coerced regime changes such as those in West Germany and Japan following the Second World War (Smith 1994). Perhaps because this information is available to any observer, states, especially great powers, have commonly tried to alter other states’ internal regimes throughout the modern states system. They do so at least in part because they estimate that a regime change will make the target state’s policies friendlier toward themselves. Neither the practice of regime export nor its successes are anticipated by systemic IR theory.
Regime export, broadly defined, is pervasive in international relations. One state often pressures another state to make its internal institutions more like those of the great power. Mussolini did this with Hitler (Burgwyn 1996: 75–82); Deng’s China did this to Stalinist North Korea (source?). One state often supports a fifth column in another in hopes that the column will exert influence on and perhaps even replace the regime, thus making the target state’s policies friendlier. Both superpowers did this routinely during the Cold War; Iran does it in the middle east. Finally (and most easily observed), one state may use force to overthrow one regime and install another. It is this last, violent mode of regime export that concerns this paper. The motivating questions are: Why do states bother spending blood and treasure to replace other state’s domestic regimes? And why does the particular type of regime exported matter?
In this paper I make the following arguments. First, contrary to what systemic IR theory expects, regime export has been a common practice of states in several states systems, including ours since its emergence in early modern Europe. Second, a rationalistic domestic-political theory fares little better in explaining regime export. Such a theory generates two hypotheses that are falsified empirically. One is that regime-exporting states are indifferent as to the set of institutions they are exporting; I show a strong correlation in the 1790–1850 period between the regime of the exporter and the regime the exporter seeks in the target state. The other is that when regime export with a cost greater than zero occurs, it will be because the exporter and/or the target has withheld private information concerning its capabilities and/or resolve, thus preventing the full information needed to arrive efficiently at a mutually satisfactory conclusion. I show that in the case of French exportation of constitutional monarchy to Rome in 1849, Paris’s decision had nothing to do with informational problems, because Paris did not negotiate with Rome. Rather, Louis Napoleon, president of the French Republic, simply found the existence of either a Roman Republic or an absolute papal monarchy unacceptable.
Third, I argue that a domestic-political constructivist theory is best at explaining regime export. Such a theory takes identities into account, specifically identification among ideological confrères across state boundaries. Among the normative structures in which states move are, at least in many times and places, transnational ideological struggles or contests over the best way to organize domestic society. Such struggles constrain states to export particular regimes through some combination of three causal pathways.
In other words, states export regimes not primarily out of ideological zeal (although that may also be present), but to make themselves more secure against internal and external threats.Fourth, I argue that the transnational ideological struggles that structure state preferences and practices arise dialectically. When a new ideology emerges and captures the imaginations of enough actors, it generates a reaction to or negation of itself among those actors against which the new ideology defines itself. The reaction itself may generate a counter-reaction, and so on. The resulting struggle diffuses through processes exogenous to the theory (apart from the pathway of regime export itself). I show that in the 1790–1850 period, the ideological dialectic that arose in France between 1789 and 1793 metastasized across Europe and gripped the continent for more than half a century.
Finally, I argue that this theory can plausibly explain regime export during the Cold War and after. I conclude with a discussion of the theory’s implications for IR theory and practice.
Do It Matter Who Rules a State?
For reasons of parsimony, most IR scholars have for the last two decades formulated and accepted theories wholly unconcerned with the internal attributes of states. Kenneth Waltz’s persuasive powers convinced most IR theorists and empiricists—neorealist, neoliberal, and many constructivist—that regime type, culture, leadership, and all other domestic variables belong in a theory of foreign policy rather than of international politics. The problem with internal variables is alleged to be that they do not lend themselves to generalization and thus to a theory of international politics. Various “systemic” theorists certainly have strong disagreements with one another. Neorealists contend that the international system is constituted by the ordering principle of anarchy and the distribution of capabilities across sovereign units (Waltz 1979). Neoliberals add international regimes to the system, arguing that they can alleviate the collective actions problems that afflict states under anarchy (Keohane 1983). Systemic constructivists consider the international system to comprise norms of interaction and interest, norms which alter state identities (Wendt 1992, Finnemore 1998). All agree that although domestic variables may matter in some cases, they may profitably be left out of IR theory.
A remnant of scholars, however, includes domestic variables in their work. Liberals have a long tradition of doing so, and some go so far as to define liberalism as a theory that attributes causal power to domestic factors (Moravcsik 1997; Milner 1997). Many constructivists consider domestically generated norms and culture to have systematic effects (Katzenstein 1996). And even some realists, dubbed “neoclassical” for their evident affinity with Morgenthau, Carr, Aron, et al., include domestic differences among states in their theories. (Schweller 1998; Rose 1998). The argument is not that the international system is inconsequential, but rather that domestic factors have generalizable effects.
The Evidence
As usual, evidence that is consistent with one and only one side of this debate is hard to come by. One area in which systemic and domestic theories would make opposing predictions is over whether states are indifferent toward the identities of one another’s rulers. Systemic theory implies external indifference toward internal government. If the effects of rulers’ identities are indeterminate, then statesmen like scholars would be better off ignoring it and instead altering the incentives facing whatever regime is in power in a given state. Systemic rationalism would say that, because in an anarchical system commitments can never be wholly credible, any effort to alter another state’s government would be as likely as not to fail to move the target state’s behavior in the desired direction (cf. Fearon 1995). Unless they were costless, then, attempts to change a state’s government should be selected out by the international system, like any other wasteful behavior. Systemic constructivism would say that because international norms and interactions rather than internal institutions alter state practices, and states should be expected to concentrate their attention on changing the former (Wendt 1992).
A domestic theory, by contrast, can allow for predictable foreign policy effects of variation in the identity of the rulers. Among those types of state behavior that may be implicated include: degree of aggressiveness (as in theories of liberal or socialist pacifism); propensity toward international interdependence (as in liberal commercial theory); and affinities with like states (as in liberal or democratic peace theories). The general propositions at stake are:
If these propositions are true, then we would expect cases in which state A tries to alter the preferences of state B by altering the rulers of B.
Despite the axiomatic assumption in both IR theory and diplomatic practice that states are sovereign, i.e., have supreme authority over their territory and thus political autonomy, it is no secret that states have over the centuries commonly tried to replace one another’s rulers (Krasner 1995). In early modern Europe, the most common type of war was that over dynastic succession. As late as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which war was triggered over Spanish succession, the identity of one state’s monarch (or his or her house) was considered crucial to foreign states.
Table I: Uses of Force for Dynastic/Succession Claims
Source: K. J. Holsti 1991
| Intervenor | Target | When? |
| Poland | Sweden | 1655–60 |
| Holland | Great Britain | 1665–67 |
| France | Spain | 1667–78 |
| France | HRE, GB, NL, E | 1689–97 |
| France | E, GB, NL, DK | 1702–13 |
| Spain | France | " |
| H.R.E. | France | " |
| Denmark | Holstein, Gottorp (Sw) | 1699–1700 |
| Saxony (P) | Sweden | 1700–06 |
| Poland | Saxony | " |
| Russia | Poland | 1733–35 |
| Poland | Russia | " |
| France | Austria | 1733–35 |
| Russia | Sweden | 1741–43 |
| Sweden | Russia | " |
| Russia | Poland | 1764 |
| Poland | Russia | " |
| Austria | Prussia, Bavaria | 1778–79 |
| Prussia, Bavaria | Austria | " |
| Prussia | Denmark | 1863–64 |
After the American and French revolutions made republicanism a live alternative and competitor to monarchy in major states, wars of dynastic succession faded and uses of force over the identity of a state’s regime became more common. Regime as here defined is the political institutions that ruled a state, as categorized by actors at the time. (I.e., we eschew the categories of today’s political scientists such as “democracy” or “anocracy,” since historical actors did not use such categories.) Table II shows how often since 1789 one or more states have used force to alter another state’s regime type.
[ Table II is currently unavailable. ]
Attempted regime export through covert means, as well as less physically coercive methods, have been frequent as well. Moreover, regime export was common in other international systems, including classical Greece and medieval Italy (Weart 1998). Once one takes into account that established religion was a political institution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the wars of religion that led to the establishment of the modern states’ system itself were obviously a time when the practice was frequent. The “Westphalian system,” an attempt to halt regime imposition so as to stabilize world politics, at best only partially succeeded. Beginning with Louis XIV’s attempts to re-Catholicize England by bribing Charles II and James II, states have tried to alter one another’s regimes up to the present day. Altogether, the evidence clearly supports the domestic theory: there are times when states care enough about one another’s internal attributes to spend blood and treasure to change them. Such is not to say that regime export is the only or even most common means of influence; bribery and coercion are doubtless much more typical due to their relatively low monetary and reputational costs.
Why Export Internal Regimes?
Here we compare rationalist and constructivist theories that would explain regime export. As explained below, the “constructivist” theory will not win the approval of all who call themselves contructivists, since it does not challenge most tenets of rationalism. 1 Constructivism as here used merely considers actors’ identities to be crucial to their preference formation, in particular the political groups to which they belong.
Rationalism
By rationalism I mean an approach that takes individual actors as the units of analysis, that assumes that those actors are goal-oriented and have transitive preferences, and that does not take actors’ identities into account. Rationalism assumes that actors’ perceptions of their interests and strategies by which they pursue them are not shaped by the groups to which they perceive themselves to belong. If A cooperates with B rather than C on some endeavor, it will not be due to a perception by A that A and B share a social identity that C does not share; i.e., it will not be because A and B see themselves “on the same side” and C on “the other side” of some divide. If A has such a perception but its interests would be better served by cooperating with C, A will do the latter and redefine itself as having a common identity with C rather than with B.
Purely rationalistic IR theories have typically been systemic, general assuming that international anarchy is so constraining that it overwhelms preferences generated within states and thus allows analysts to treat states as unitary actors. For neorealists, the imbalance of power in Europe forced the peace-loving Woodrow Wilson to take the United States into the First World War; for neoliberal institutionalists, the protectionist Beijing government must move toward WTO standards to continue developing its economy. Yet, in principle rationalism can be applied to a question such as regime export if the assumption that anarchy trumps all is relaxed. In that case, the effects of a given international structure (balance of power, hegemony, international regimes) will be indeterminate, yielding diverse foreign policies depending on conditions within the state. It would then follow that states must concern themselves with one another’s internal conditions.
State A will want conditions within state B to be such that B will implement policies conducive to A’s interests. The strategies A employs to that end will vary with costs and benefits, which in turn will be a function of inter alia the relative power between A and B. If A is rich and strong and B is poor and weak, A will have a number of ways to alter B’s internal conditions. One way would be to cultivate and subsidize opposition Y within B to B’s own regime B (we shall call B’s regime Bi and the opposition Bj). Support of Bj would give A leverage over Bi; in fact, Bi and Bj would bid for A’s patronage. Machiavelli reports that the Venetians nourished Guelf and Ghibelline factions in Italian cities for this reason. 2 But unless replacing Bi with Bj were costless, A and Bi should come to some mutually satisfactory agreement that would obviate the need for A to overthrow Bi. That is, regime export by A remains a puzzle in this case, analogous to the puzzle of war for neorealism (Fearon 1995): in principle, a mutually satisfactory outcome exists that could be reached without war, so rational states should reach that outcome through negotiations. With regime export, the analogous puzzle remains when state C, a rival to A who likewise wants to alter B’s policies in its direction, is added. State C would give Bi and Bj more leverage and thus possibly bid up the costs of patronage to A, but it would drive up those costs vis-à-vis Bj as well as Bi. State C’s presence might also drive up the costs of intervention in B by A.
Fearon offers three causal pathways 3 as possible solutions to the puzzle of war: one derives from the twin facts that actors have private information about their capabilities and resolve and that they have incentives to withhold that information so as to maximize their leverage; another, from the problem of commitment under the condition of anarchy; a third, from “issue indivisibility,” wherein no mutually satisfactory outcomes in principle. Only two of these three pathways potentially answer the puzzle of regime export. Ruled out is the commitment problem in an anarchical system, i.e., the difficulty of trust in the absence of reliable enforcement of agreements. We have already shown that regime export with costs above zero will only occur when anarchy is not as constraining as neorealism claims, i.e., does not determine state preferences. In such a situation, by definition trust is less problematic. Put another way, even were anarchy to render trust impossible, state A would have no more reason to trust Bi than Bj: the commitment problem remains regardless of the identity of the regime that rules B. Again, assuming that the costs of regime export are greater than zero, A should never replace Bi with Bj because of a commitment problem.
We are left then with Fearon’s other two pathways, bluffing and indivisible issues. The latter pathway, whose empirical validity Fearon himself doubts, obviously begs the question of why a mutually satisfactory outcome does not exist, i.e., of how interests are formed. It thus belongs in a constructivist explanation, as seen below.
The third pathway, bluffing, provides the basis for one of our rationalist hypotheses. In any negotiation, actors have incentive to dissemble so as to increase leverage over other parties. If it is the incongruity between the actors’ true and perceived capabilities and resolve that leads to regime export, then we should observe bargaining between A and Bi characterized by bluffing for various reasons. For example, to avoid appearing a bully to third parties, A might signal Bi that A does not demand as many policy changes as it really wants; this could lead Bi to fail to reduce its own range of acceptable outcomes enough to placate A. Or, Bi might exaggerate its ability to harm A’s interests in hopes of scaring A off, but that bluff might cause A to see Bi’s overthrow as more urgent and thus make it more likely.
Rationalist hypothesis #1: State A will replace Bi (B’s internal regime) because one or more actors denies the others information about its true capabilities and/or resolve.
Constructivism
What is meant by “constructivism” in the IR literature is much less clear than what is meant by “rationalism” (cf. Katzenstein et al. 1998; Kubalkova et al. 1998). Here I mean simply a positivistic approach to politics that takes actors’ identities into account, specifically their memberships in social groups. An actor’s preferences are shaped by its self-definition, which in turn is shaped by the various collectivities to which it belongs. An actor need not deliberately sacrifice its self-interest to support a given group (although altruism is not ruled out), but rather may under certain conditions identify its long-term self-interest with that of the group, as persons who volunteer for military service in wartime do. When making a decision it may consider its interests selfishly, but those interests will already have been shaped by group membership. Constructivism emphasizes the “sociological” side of politics, the extent to which actors are “produced” by socially held ideas. This constructivism does not contradict the rationalistic assumptions that actors maximize utility and have transitive preferences. It simply asserts that actors derive positive utility from furthering the interests of their groups.
Constructivism, like rationalism, may be either “third-image” or “second-image.” As mentioned above, systemic constructivism stresses the influences of international norms on the formation of state interests. There is no a priori reason, however, to assume that systemic norms are more important than domestic norms as shapers of state interests.
A second-image constructivism could expect regime export to happen not because of bluffing, but because of identities. Specifically, constructivism could focus on the regime that rules A (call it Ai) and would expect Ai to replace Bj if Ai and Bj belonged to different transnational groups. Transnational groups could conceivably be based on various common properties, including ethnicity, religion, or language. Here group identity will be ideological, where ideology refers to a vision for organizing the common life of a polity. A crucial property of an ideology is that it is a rejection of alternative ideologies. By definition, a society cannot be both monarchical and republican. Thus an ideological identity (i) is relational: it only emerges dialectically, in reaction to a (j). Should adherents of the ideology that (i)’s adherents call (j) come to feel threatened by (i), then (j)’s adherents will similarly define their ideology as a negation of (i). Further dialectical movements may take place; e.g., a third ideology (k) could emerge in reaction to both (i) and (j), thus changing the self-definitions of the latter two.
Transnational (or “trans-polity”) struggles have emerged in many times and places. Thucydides relates the trans-city contest in classical Greece between democracy and oligarchy; Athens frequently supported the demos in other cities in hopes that those cities would align with it, while Sparta cultivated the aristoi with the opposite goal in mind. In medieval Italy, Guelfs were pro-imperial and autocratic; Ghibellines were pro-papal and republican; cities ruled by one faction tended to align with one another (Weart 40). In early modern Europe, the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism and its causal role in the Wars of Religion are well known. The Peace of Augsburg that ended one set of those wars in 1555 was designed to eliminate the trans-polity religious struggles, and thus a cause of war, by sealing off each political unit’s notion of legitimacy. Although state sovereignty is a powerful norm in world politics, it should be abundantly clear by now that the pre-Augsburg tendency to export regimes has not disappeared (Krasner 1995).
The case from which this part of the theory derives is the French Revolution from 1789–93. The original revolutionaries in 1789 wanted to reduce the privileges of the nobles and clergy and move to a constitutional monarchy. Naturally, this movement of the commoners (mostly middle class at this point) generated a reaction among the most of the nobles. In 1792–93 the revolution became more radical as the First French Republic was declared, the king beheaded, and the Terror inaugurated under the influence of the Jacobins and Sansculottes. The appearance of this third, more radical ideology altered the original reactionaries to include monarchs and the original revolutionaries, the constitutional monarchists, became more consevative by comparison as seen in the Thermidors (Hobsbawm 1996: 53–76). Further ideological developments ensued, culminating in Bonapartism, but the dialectical movement should be clear from this case.
Ideological developments of this sort bring about regime export by means of three pathways. All three turn on the tendency for ideologies to diffuse across the boundaries of polities. The modes of diffusion are exogenous to the theory (apart from that of state power, i.e. regime export itself, which is what is to be explained). Doubtless congruent social conditions, the successes of the ideology in the originating country, and “fifth columns” play some role. In any case, when an ideology spreads its negations spread with it. In effect, ideological confrères form transnational groups, wherein adherents in one state see as their own the victories and defeats of their counterparts in other states. The existence of these transnational identities presents opportunities and constraints to regimes wishing to safeguard or extend their security and power. These opportunities and constraints operate along three causal pathways.
The first pathway derives from the internal threat posed to surrounding states by the new ideology (i). Suppose state A is ruled by a regime that now finds itself defined as (j) and thus opposed by newcomer (i), and that adherents of (i) are now appearing in A and threatening (j)’s hold on power. Regime Aj will have an incentive to prevent (i)’s taking or keeping power in state B. The incentive derives from the transnational quality of the ideologies. Success for (i) in B will give confidence and win converts to (i) in A, thus further endangering Aj. The regime may or may not be (j) but it surely will not be (i). Below we shall see this mechanism at work in a score of cases during the Concert of Europe period. When revolution would break out in an Italian or German state, a reactionary power, typically Austria, would dispatch a military force to overturn it and thereby quell the revolutionary elements at home. Such interventions were especially common during the continent-wide revolution of 1848–49.
The second pathway begins with states’ tendencies to expand and maintain spheres of influence. State B, now captured by new ideology (i), will have an incentive to alter its environment in its favor by helping adherents of (i) to gain power in A. Should A come to be ruled by (i), A would probably come to see its interests as more congruent with those of B because B is also ruled by (i). More precisely, Bi and Ai would perceive a common interest deriving from their being on the same side of an ideological struggle. (Again, the assumption is that the international system does not impose preferences on regimes.) We see this second pathway in the French Republic’s invasions of neighboring lands and installations of republican regimes there (Hobsbawm 1996: 81–82).
The third pathway consists of reactions to the first two. Since the exportation of a regime constitutes (or is meant to constitute) an expansion of the exporter’s sphere of influence, it can threaten other states. Thus when B exports (i) to A, C will worry about the increase in power that accrues to B from having A under its influence. State C will now have an incentive to overturn Ai and replace it with some regime type other than (i), that is, a regime lacking affinity with B. An example of this pathway comes during the Concert of Europe period, when as we see below Austria intervened in Italy in 1849 to overturn republican revolutions in some of the Papal States, thereby alarming France that Austrian influence was growing in an area vital to French interests. France saw the need to intervene in Rome so as to forestall an Austrian intervention there.
Thus the transnational groups upon which political identity are based in this theory are ideological, and such groups always exist in opposition to other groups. In overthrowing Bj, therefore, Ai would not be abnegating its interests but serving them, out of a belief that a victory for Bj is a victory for itself. Consistent with rationalism, either Ai or Bj might misrepresent its capabilities and/or resolve to the other. But Ai’s decision to oust Bj will not be due to a lack of information on either side. It will rather be produced by issue indivisibility (mentioned above), in which Ai simply cannot tolerate Bj’s existence. Because Ai and Bj belong to opposing transnational groups, Ai will not allow Bj to remain in power regardless of the concessions the latter makes. The problem between Ai and Bj, then, is not a function of international anarchy, else Ai would have the identical problem with any regime that ruled B. Rather, it is a problem of identification: Ai and Bj belong to opposing transnational groups.
Constructivism would then expect the following hypotheses to be true, where Ai is the regime ruling A:
Constructivist hypothesis #1: Ai will replace Bj because Ai and Bj belong to opposing transnational groups and Ai thus considers Bj’s existence inimical to its (Ai’s) interests.
Test: Will A overthrow Bj because one or both parties has withheld private information from the other, or because Ai and Bj belong to different groups?
The actual grounds for any decision are always uncertain, but we can infer the reasons behind a decision by tracing out the events that led up to it. Here we take a closer look at Louis Napoleon’s decision to help restore the pope’s rule of the Rome in 1849. The case is of special interest because it is unique for the 1790–1850 period in that France exported a regime type not its own. It is thus a difficult test for constructivism, and moreover is similar to a number of Cold War cases in which the Americans and Soviets exported regimes other than their own.
We break the French decision into two parts: First, why intervene? Second, why restore the pope rather than support fellow republicans? Was Napoleon indifferent as to the type of regime in Rome?
Louis Napoleon was elected president by a wide margin in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848, which had overturned the July Monarchy (established in 1830) and set up the Second Republic. At first the new French regime was radical, and Louis Napoleon was elected by a coalition of conservatives and moderates. Judging from his writings prior to his accession, his primary goal was to restore France to pre-eminence in Europe without resorting to war. That is, he called for the end but not the means of his infamous uncle (Echard 1983: 5–7). The new president quickly sought a congress of the great powers to renegotiate the Vienna treaties of 1815, which had left France geopolitically weak. Among his goals for this congress, to be held in Brussels, was a reduction of Austrian influence over the Italian peninsula. To Louis Napoleon’s surprise, Great Britain refused his invitation of a joint proposal for the conference, fearing (probably correctly) that that congress would seek to overturn the recent revolutions that had sprung up all over the continent (Taylor 1970: 197–98) and thus violate the alleged British rule of noninterference in the internal affairs of sovereign states (Crawley 1965: 674–75). 4
The Brussels Conference never occurred. Instead, Louis Napoleon reluctantly joined a conference of Catholic powers called to address one particular outbreak of revolution, that in the Papal States. Pius IX, who had begun his papacy by enacting constitutional reforms in the parts of central Italy he ruled, found that his liberalism was insufficient for the radical elements in Rome and elsewhere. These elements demanded a lay government and removed the pope’s guard. Imprisoned in the Vatican, Pius fled Rome in November 1848 rather than accept democratic rule (Coppa 1979: 14–15, 90–91). When Giuseppe Mazzini and other revolutionary leaders declared a Roman Republic a few months later, Pius appealed to Spain, France, Austria, and Naples, all Catholic powers, to restore his temporal authority (ibid.: 92–93). It is clear from the negotiations at the conference that two outcomes were unacceptable to Louis Napoleon: a continuation of the Roman Republic, and a restoration of the pope by Austria. Louis Napoleon’s most preferred outcome was papal restoration by Italians alone, which would cost France nothing. When it became clear at the conference that Italians were not going do this without Austrian help, the French Assembly in Paris voted to fund a French expedition to restore the pope (Langer 1969: 441–42). Louis Napoleon quickly sent a force of 9,000. Garibaldi fought back fiercely, but when French reinforcements decided the contest easily.
The reason why both Louis Napoleon and mainstream French opinion found Austrian restoration of the pope unacceptable is not far to find: the French wanted to roll back Austria’s control of Italy. But why then should France restore the pope rather than provide diplomatic and material support to Mazzini, Garibaldi, and the other Italian republicans? The left wing in the French Assembly pushed for this policy and protested vehemently when France, itself a republic, betrayed a fledgling sister republic in favor of a symbol of the ancien regime, the temporal power of the pope (Langer 1969: 442). That Pius himself preferred to be reinstated by Austria, a conservative Catholic power, suggests that France would have had a more loyal client in the Roman republicans. (And in fact, upon his restoration Pius did lean toward Austria, which he correctly believed more strongly supported the status quo in Italy [Coppa 1979: 119–21].)
Constructivism provides and answer. France did not overthrow the Roman Republic because negotiations were hampered by the withholding of private information. Neither actor misrepresented its capabilities or preferences to the other. In fact, the two sides did not negotiate. The French emperor was simply determined to be rid of the Roman Republic from the outset. Evidently, no concessions by the revolutionaries would have satisfied him; the very existence of the regime was unacceptable to him. Although the republicans may have perceived a mutually satisfactory negotiated solution, Louis Napoleon did not.
The emperor was so opposed to the republicans because of conditions within France and throughout the continent of Europe. The new French president was facing a domestic and transnational threat from the revolutionary left. As his 1839 book Idées napoléoniennes showed, Louis Napoleon was like his uncle a man of the Enlightenment rather than of the reaction to it; and like his uncle believed that the a great man was required to instantiate Enlightenment principles of rationality and freedom (Echard 5). In 1848 as in 1793, however, the Enlightenment seemed to spin out of control in France, particularly when a worker’s rebellion in June raised the specter of communism. Louis Napoleon had been elected president of the young Second Republic because he seemd to promise stability and a transcending of the destructive factionalism that had plagued the nation since the 1790s. The factions included the legitimists, who sought a restoration of the Bourbons under the principle of divine right; the Orleanists, who had supported the now-overthrown constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe; the Bonapartists; the moderate republicans; and the radical republicans or “Mountain.” Louis Napoleon sat atop a coalition of legitimists, Bonapartists, and moderate republicans—factions that had in common one crucial property, enmity toward the radical left.
Louis Napoleon never considered supporting the republicans in Rome because they were part of this same transnational enemy. Although the president was himself a former revolutionary who would not have come to power in France without the radicalism of 1848, he obviously was now interested in preventing a relapse into revolution in France. As president his most dangerous foes were the Mountain whom he had replaced in power. Soon after his election he suppressed radical left by suspending constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, and the press. He approved of bills to restore Church control over education and to add a three-year residency requirement for voters, shrinking the rolls from 9.6 million to 6.8 million (Bierman 79–81). It was clear to all in 1848–49, as it has been ever since, that the radicalism still alive in France was linked to revolution everywhere. The revolution was truly a transnational movement, with what would come to be known a century later as “domino effects.” Thus a victory for the revolution in Rome meant a victory for revolution in France.
Second, the factions atop which he sat uneasily had affinity for the pope. The legitimist right, which can be identified with the mainstream of the Catholic Church, positively identified with Pius as the Vicar of Christ. They were horrified at the thought of his loss of temporal power. Furthermore, since the Church was itself a transnational institution, Pius’s misfortune was a real threat to the Church’s own power in France. Louis Napoleon needed the support of the Church, an institution that had little reason to trust him. As for the moderate republicans, their affinity for Pius was negative like that of Louis Napoleon himself: they shared a transnational enemy, sc., radicalism. Moderates were ambivalent about papal authority, but Louis Napoleon thought to satisfy them by blocking the Austrian intervention in Rome that would likely have meant a return to papal absolutism. French liberals reasoned that, should France rather than Austria restore the pope, Paris could constrain him to continue as the constitutional ruler he had become in previous years (Taylor 1970: 231–32).
Thus what led Louis Napoleon to intervene in Rome was a desire to prevent the extension of Austria’s sphere of influence. What led him to restore the pope rather than to support the republicans was an affinity for the pope flowing from their mutual antipathy toward the transnational revolution. This affinity was shared by the legitimists, Bonapartists, and moderate republicans within France who supported his presidency. Louis Napoleon’s preferences were structured by the transnational ideological struggle that roiled the continent in 1848–49 and, as seen in a later section, had done so for sixty years.
Does Regime Type Generally Matter?
We see, then, that in one case at least the type of regime in a target state mattered to the exporting state. Is this true more generally? Because it ignores actors’ identities, rationalism expects a negative answer. For rationalism, A is indifferent toward any ideological differences between Bi and Bj. What A seeks from B is favorable policies; whether Bi or Bj implements those policies is immaterial. Similarly, Bi and Bj are indifferent toward A’s internal regime type; each will bargain with A (and A’s rival C, should there be one) based solely on expected material benefits. Thus, across cases of regime export, we should expect a random distribution of exported regimes. Various states A will not tend to export their own regime type or to overthrow an alternative regime type.
Rationalist hypothesis #2: The distribution of regime types in target states will be random.
Constructivism would expect by contrast a negative correlation between the regime type exported and the regime type most threatening to the exporter. Put another way, constructivism would expect states to tend not to export regime types that threaten them, as threats are explained above. If Ai is internally threatened by (j), then constructivism expects A to overthrow (j); if Ai has just overthrown Aj (i.e., [j] within A itself), it expects Ai to try to overthrow (j) in neighboring states; if Ai is threatened by the expanding influence of Bj being accomplished through B’s exporting of (j), then it likewise expects Ai to overthrow (j).
Because the constructivist theory offered here takes a regime type to be what actors say it is, however, the correlation will not emerge clearly without some hermeneutical investigation. It would be simple if actors across time and space, from Pericles to Metternich to today’s American political scientists, classified regimes in the same way. Unfortunately for our purposes, actors in the past and in other parts of the world would not recognize our coding rules for regimes. Two regimes in 1812 that have similar “democracy” scores on a dataset assembled in the 1990s may have had little affinity for each other and yet still have cared about regime type (Owen 1997: 88–90). Were we to ignore their perceptions and substitute our own, we would not only possibly miss a correlation, but would also be committing a functionalistic fallacy by attributing agency to an idea of regime type that has no “feedback mechanism” to actors themselves (Elster 1983: 20). By contrast, the theory presented here gives priority to the perceptions of the actors under study. We let them classify regimes for us.
The risk in using subjective categories is that actors may classify regimes post hoc in order to rationalize action taken for other reasons. An alleged example would be the U.S.-directed overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 (LaFeber 1984: 111–26). Some historians argue that Eisenhower ordered the CIA to oust Arbenz because the latter’s policies were costing the United Fruit Company millions of dollars; Eisenhower and Dulles portrayed Arbenz as a proto-communist to make his overthrow more palatable to U.S. and Western opinion. Without arguing this particular case, we note here that care must be taken in describing the criteria a given government used for classifying foreign regimes prior to any intervention. If Eisenhower and Dulles generally regarded as pro-communist governments that allowed communists onto their cabinets, as Arbenz did, then we would consider their classifications ex ante rather than ex post.
Constructivist hypothesis #2: States will export regimes least likely to belong to their enemy’s transnational ideological group.
The Test: Is the distribution of exported regimes random?
Table III is an amplification of the portion of Table II that covers the 1790–1849 period. The new table includes the subjectively defined regime types in each case. It demonstrates clearly that the distribution of regimes is nonrandom, that in fact across the centuries state A is much more likely to impose a regime belonging to its own group on B. During the period of the “Metternich System” (1815–49), for example, Austria, Prussia, and Russia only imposed their own system of so-called “absolute monarchy” or “legitimism” on other states. Great Britain helped impose constitutional monarchy, which was its regime type. As discussed below, France oscillated between these two regime types, and the regimes it imposed on foreign states oscillated in the same way. The distribution of regime types was not only not random, it was perfectly correlated with the regime type of the imposer.
Table III: Cases of Forcible Regime Export, 1790–1850
Some forcible attempts to change sovereign states’ internal regimes
| Target | Regime | Imposer |
Imposer’s regime |
Intended regime |
Date(s) |
| 1) Poland | Republic | Russia | AM | AM | 1792–93 |
| 2) France | Republic | Austria, Prussia |
AM | AM | 1792–97 |
| 3) Austria, Prussia | AM | France | Republic | Republic | 1792–97 |
| 4) Britain | CM | France | Republic | (contested) | 1793–97 |
| 5) Netherlands | CM | France | Republic | Republic | 1795 |
| 6) Italian regions | AM | France | Republic | Republic | 1797–98 |
| 7) France | Republic | GB, A, Pr, Turkey, Port, |
AM | AM | 1798–1802 |
| 8) Naples | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1821 |
| 9) Piedmont | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1821 |
| 10) Spain | CM | France | AM | AM | 1823 |
| 11) Portugal | (contested) | Great Britain | CM | CM | 1826–27 |
| 12) Modena | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1831 |
| 13) Parma | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1831 |
| 14) Papal States | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1831 |
| 15) Papal States | CM | Austria | AM | AM | 1832 |
| 16) Spain | (contested) | Great Britain France |
CM CM |
CM CM |
1836–38 “ |
| 17) Papal States | Republic | France Austria Two Sicilies Spain |
Republic AM AM AM |
CM AM AM AM |
1849 1849 1849 1849 |
| 18) Saxony | CM | Prussia | AM | AM | 1849 |
| 19) Tuscany | Republic | Austria | AM | AM | 1849 |
| 20) Bavaria | CM | Prussia | AM | AM | 1849 |
| 21) Baden | Republic | Prussia | AM | AM | 1849 |
| 22) Transylvania | (contested) | Russia | AM | AM | 1849 |
| CM = constitutional monarchy AM = “absolute” monarchy |
|||||
| Sources: René Albrecht-Carrié, A Diplomatic History of Europe since the Congress of Vienna, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage, 1996); K. J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); J. H. Leurdijk, Intervention in International Politics (Leeuwarden, Netherlands: Eisma B. V., 1986), 234–37. | |||||
Note that in the following explanations, I do not claim that a wish to export a regime was a sufficient cause of the military action. The states using force in these cases generally either wanted to safeguard their rule from internal threats (first causal pathway), to extend their spheres of influence (second pathway), or to contain or roll back rival states’ spheres (third pathway). Regime export was a means to end of power or security.
Pathway 1: Regime export for fear of internal threat
Cases 2 and 4 are examples of this mechanism at work. When France declared war on Austria and Prussia, the two monarchies declared as a war aim the overthrow of the French Republic. It is clear that the eastern monarchies feared Jacobin influences within their borders (Wangermann 1959: 73–74). The following year France declared war on Britain; the latter debated how threatening Jacobinism was within England (Cobban 1960: 273–98). Case 5 is a reprise of the same war, this time with Portugal and Turkey joining the other monarchies with the same war aim. (These cases also are examples of the second pathway below.)
In cases 8 and 9 Austria sent troops in 1821 to overturn the liberal insurrections in Piedmont and Naples that had established constitutional monarchies. These were classic instances of the use of regime export by Metternich to prevent transnational revolution from spreading to the Habsburg Empire. At the Troppau Conference of 1820, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia had declared its right to use arms if necessary to overturn revolutions “the results of which threaten other states” (Artz 1934: 149–52, 163–65). Case 8 saw France, newly under a legitimist regime, carry out a similar action in Spain in 1823. Ferdinand VII had been forced in 1820 to become a constitutional monarch; France restored Ferdinand’s absolute monarchy.
In February 1831 Modena, Parma, and the Papal States (cases 12–14) in Italy all were shaken by revolutions that established constitutional governments. The following month Austrian troops marched into the states, easily defeated the armies of the new governments, and restored the monarchs. In Bologna, a city ostensibly ruled by the pope (case 15), violent resistance continued, and in January 1832 Austrian troops against intervened to restore papal authority (Leurdijk 239). As in the 1821 cases, Metternich was concerned to stamp out revolution in Austria’s sphere of influence.
Finally, the continent-wide revolutions of 1848 led to a number of reactionary interventions by Paris, Vienna, and Berlin the following year (cases 17–22). Above we saw how Louis Napoleon overturned the Roman Republic as a means to weaken radicalism within France. Austria, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, and Spain restored papal authority in the other Papal States. In Tuscany, a civil war between republicans and royalists brought an Austrian invasion to restore the rule of Archduke Leopold II in May 1849. Several German states also were undergoing republican revolts. In Saxony the king fled in May 1849, and a civil war between royalists and revolutionaries was decided in favor of the former by an invading Prussian force. In the Palatinate region of Bavaria, Prussia crushed a revolt that had set up a provisional government. In Baden, republicans forced the Grand Duke to flee and to request Prussian intervention. The invading Prussians faced heavy resistance, but ultimately prevailed in July (Leurdijk 1986: 240–42).
Pathway 2: Regime export to gain friendly neighbors
In case 1, Russia attacked the Polish Commonwealth the year after it ratified a reform constitution influenced by Jacobinism. Russia’s end was to restore its influence over its neighbor; its means was to overturn the liberal regime. The war ended in a partition of Poland (Hobsbawm 1996: 80; Holsti 1991: 86).
In the 1790s cases above (2, 4, and 5), this mechanisms also led to the war aims of the conservative monarchies against France. Under the influence of Burke and others, the monarchies were convinced that republicanism made France aggressive (cf. Pitt, in Cobban 1960: 453–56).
In several cases in the 1790s France used force to turn neighbors into friendly powers. In cases 3 and 4 France declared war on Austria and Prussia with the express aim of overturning their monarchies and helping their people establish republics. In cases 5 and 6 French armies conquered small neighboring states and set up republics there (the Netherlands became the Batavian Republic; Lombardy became the Cisalpine Republic; etc.). Hobsbawm writes about these latter cases: “... the military value of philo-Jacobinism [outside of France] was chiefly that of an auxiliary to French conquest, and a source of politically reliable administrators of conquered territories” (Hobsbawm 1996: 81–82). That is, the Jacobins in Paris placed their confrères in power in other states as a means to control the international environment.
Pathway 3: Regime export to roll back influence of rivals gained through their own regime export
Case 11 stands out as unusual, in that self-proclaimed non-interventionist Britain exported constitutional monarchy to Portugal. Like Spain, Portugal had declared a constitutional monarchy in 1820; France had not restored absolute rule, however. In 1826 John VI died and a legitimist pretender invaded from Spain. To forestall an extension of the influence of the legitimist powers to a country traditionally in Britain’s sphere of influence, London sent a small force to Lisbon that easily defeated the legitimists (Crawley 1965: 684).
In case 16 Great Britain again intervened on behalf of constitutional monarchy in 1836, this time in Spain and with the help of France, which was by now a constitutional monarchy (the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe). In 1833 Ferdinand VII died, and in the struggle for succession, which included the First Carlist War, Britain and France permitted Spanish liberals to recruit volunteers from among their citizens. In March 1836 the British Navy blockaded the northern ports of Spain. The outside help turned the tide in favor of the liberals, who triumphed in August 1838 (Leurdijk 1986: 238–40). These cases suggest that Britain’s objection was not to intervention per se (Holbraad 1971), but to interventions that threatened London’s sphere of influence.
Further underscoring the proposition that the specific type of regime exported was not arbitrary is the correlation between the regime type of France and the regime type Paris exported to Spain in cases 10 and 16. In 1823 France was ruled by a legitimist regime, and it intervened on behalf of legitimists and against constitutional monarchists in Spain. Thirteen years later France was ruled by a constitutional monarchy, and joined Britain in helping the corresponding faction win the civil war in Spain.
Table IV: French Regime Export, 1823 and 1836
| Year |
Party in power in France |
Target | Helped by France |
| 1823 | Legitimist | Spain | Legitimist |
| 1836 | Constitutional | Spain | Constitutional |
How Do Transnational Ideological Groups Form?
Both aggregate data on regime export and particular case studies from France, then, strongly suggest that, contra rationalism, identity matters. States export regimes in order to increase their influence in target states, and a reliable way to do that is to install a regime with which the exporting state shares a common ideological enemy. The question now arises: why do transnational enemies and friends exist to begin with? In other words, what is the origins of the transnational normative structure that constrains actors to intervene on behalf of Bi rather than Bj?
The French cases and other cases from Table IV between 1790 and 1849 offer an account of how actors come to identify across state boundaries. Actors belong to transnational ideological groups that form upon the emergence of a new notion of domestic political legitimacy. Between the French Revolution of 1789 and the European-wide revolutions of 1848–49, political conflict in Europe (and the Americas) was primarily over the proposition that government was responsible to the citizenry (defined narrowly by today’s standards). How an actor stood on that proposition determined the transnational group to which it belonged. We can divide these actors into three groups. Some were democratic and revolutionary, taking the proposition as far as they could imagine; others were reactionary, rejecting the proposition altogether; others still were moderate, desiring a combination of hierarchy and equality in society. Revolutionary democrats, reactionary legitimists, and moderate constitutional monarchists in one state saw a victory for their confrères in another state as a victory for themselves and hence for their own state.
Europe between 1789 and 1849 was an especially volatile place politically, but transnational ideological movements have existed in other times and places, including our own. They similarly shape actors’ identities and interests and thus the practice of regime export. In the final section we explore the degree to which transnational ideological struggles structured regime imposition during the Cold War and continue to do so today.
The Transnational Normative Structure: Revolution, Reaction, Moderation
Europe, 1789–1849
In the decades after the first French Revolution, actors moved in an environment formed by that revolution. Political struggles in the Iberian and Italian peninsulas and the German states were linked in the minds of everyone to the struggles within the great powers themselves that had been ignited in 1789 and became lethal in 1793. Remove the struggle over legitimacy and the foreign policies of the powers would have been very different. In this section we see that the French Revolution of 1789 altered ideological identities throughout Europe, and that those identities remained through the revolutions of 1848–49.
That the 1789–93 revolution radically altered the identities of political actors throughout Europe is clear from the shift in reactions from passivity to alarm that it generated among monarchs around the continent. Upon hearing of the Third Estate’s demands for equality in the Estates General in Paris, Joseph II of Austria blithely commented that Louis XVI was now having to reform his assembly as he, Joseph, had already done in Vienna. When the émigrés, the French aristocrats who had fled the revolution, began petitioning the European monarchs for intervention to overturn the revolution, Joseph expelled them from the Austrian Netherlands. Joseph’s successor Leopold remarked that Louis’s collapse in 1792 affirmed his own enlightened rule and constituted an “urgent warning to all sovereigns to treat their subjects with great consideration” (Ingrao 1994: 220–21). That an uprising of commoners in France did not alarm the Habsburg emperors suggests that their main adversaries for power in their own lands remained the nobles, as had been the case for centuries.
Yet, some began to see that a new domestic struggle was forming in France that could well spread throughout the continent. The confinement of Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, in Paris drew the attention of the monarchs and their supporters. In England Edmund Burke began writing that the “European commonwealth” itself, and therefore the peace of the Continent, was at stake (Welsh 1995). 5 And in Coblentz in 1790, a young Austrian noble named Metternich wrote his foreign minister that French revolutionaries were fomenting democratic rebellion in German lands. Such reports, coupled with pleas from Leopold’s sister Marie Antoinette did begin to change the Austrian emperor’s thinking. The King of Sweden organized an escape for his counterpart in France; when this flight to Varennes failed and king and queen were forced return to captivity in Paris, Leopold saw that monarchs now had a new enemy. The infamous Pillnitz Declaration, issued in July 1791 jointly by Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia, called for a concerted intervention by the powers against the French Revolution. Contemporary documents indicate that the Austrians did not want to intervene directly (and that Prussia wanted territory at least as much as counter-revolution), but they also show that the absolute monarchs of the east were beginning to react to the new ideological configuration in France (Wangermann 1959: 62–67; Walt 1996: 64–65). A spiral of hostility and paranoia between the French revolutionaries, especially the Gironde faction, and the eastern monarchies, ended in the War of the First Coalition in April 1792.
The French Revolution altered political identities by supplanting the old struggle between monarch and nobles with one between those seeking to weaken or eliminate societal hierarchy and those determined to maintain it. Upon the death of Leopold in 1792, his successor Francis II ended enlightened absolutism and restored noble and clergy privileges (Wangermann 1959: 106). The monarchs and nobles had a new common enemy. That enemy identified its interests as diametrically opposed to those of the monarchs, Church, and nobles, whom it lumped together into the ancien régime. In response the monarchs, Church, and nobility, parties that had so often fought one another for supremacy, now identified their interests as congruent. To use somewhat oversimplified dialectical language, the ancien régime was the revolution’s antithesis; when the revolution descended into the radical destructiveness of the Jacobins and Sansculottes in 1793, a moderate synthesis appeared that favored reform over continued revolution (cf. Hobsbawm1996: 70–76).
Thesis, anthithesis, and synthesis all survived and pervaded Europe for the next six decades. As Hobsbawm writes, the events of 1789–93 served as model and inspiration for European revolutionaries at least until the revolutions of 1848. The post-Napoleonic revolutions happened because the monarchies were inadequate to handle local political conditions. “But the political models created by the Revolution of 1789 served to give discontent a specific object, to turn unrest into revolution, and above all to link all Europe into a single movement—or perhaps it would be better to say current—of subversion” (Hobsbawm 1996: 112). The principles of revolution, reaction, and moderation spread, e.g., from France to Spain in the 1790s, such that by 1812 the liberal Cortes (national legislature) had enacted the Constitution that was to inspire the Iberian and Italian revolutions of the 1820s (Carr 1965: 439–48). All over the continent, monarchies that in the eighteenth century had been committed to the Enlightenment, such as the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns, in the nineteenth century disowned it in favor of the doctrine of divine right. And co-existing with both revolution and reaction was the third way, epitomized by Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Louis Napoleon, who not coincidentally strove throughout his rule for good relations with London, was captive in 1849 to the normative structure generated in France sixty years earlier.
Recent Cases: The Cold War and After
The theory presented here provides a plausible explanation for regime export in more recent cases, including those of the Cold War and after. The Cold War was a typical great power struggle in the sense that it was largely a struggle over influence in the “second” and “third” worlds. Usually regime export was too costly a mode of influence, and the superpowers resorted to methods anticipated by rationalism such as side payments and military pressure (David 1991: 22–23) including with each other (Gaddis 1983: 71–83). But regime export was a common means of securing influence when costs were low and/or stakes were high (see Table II). The clearest cases were in Europe between 1945 and 1948. Both Washington and Moscow saw to it that states their militaries liberated were ruled by friendly regimes, meaning liberal-democratic for Washington and communist for Moscow. That these two regime types that had a history of mutual negation began creeping toward one another was one cause of the Cold War itself. For the West, the fall of Eastern Europe to communism and the fear that Western European states were vulnerable to communist subversion made the former Soviet ally into an enemy (cf. Leffler 1984). It also made communism and liberal democracy, recently both threatened by Nazism, one another’s most threatening enemies.
As the case of Louis Napoleon and Pius IX implies, that the United States and the Soviet Union did not always export their own regime types does not mean they were indifferent toward regime type. Washington wanted to minimize the probability that a given state it wanted to influence, be it Italy or El Salvador, would defect to the Soviet sphere of influence. A reliable strategy was to install and support regimes that kept communists out of government. Arbenz in Guatemala made common cause with his country’s communists; Allende in Chile in the early 1970s included communists in his cabinet. Moscow made the same types of decisions in trying to minimize the probability that states in its sphere would defect to the American sphere. Hungarians in 1956 and Czechoslovaks in 1968 learned how seriously Moscow took their regime types. In the Hungarian case, the Soviets decided to invade before Budapest announced its withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact (Nelson 1998). Moscow correctly recognized that liberalization in Hungary would lead ineluctably to a Hungarian defection from the Soviet bloc. The superpowers’ preferences concerning the regime types of other states were structured by the transnational struggle among the ideologies of communism, liberal democracy, and authoritarianism.
To reiterate, the theory propounded in this paper does not imply that the Americans and Soviets were motivated by a simple desire to replicate their systems the world over (although it does not exclude that motivation). Relatedly, it does not propose a simplistic ideological theory that attributes wars to some impulse to proselytize. 6 Rather, it implies that each superpower perceived that its influence in a given state increased with the enmity the regime ruling that state had for the opposing superpower. Neorealism correctly asserts that Washington wanted to keep South Korea outside the Soviet sphere of influence. What neorealism, and any rationalist theory, cannot explain is why a necessary means to that end was a non-communist regime in Seoul. Despite the pleas of the Left in the West, Washington found that it could not work with Mao in 1949 or Ho in 1954 or Castro in 1959 or Ortega in 1979.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has cared much less about containing communism. As former U.S. friends such as Jean-Claude Duvalier in Haïti and Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaïre learned, Washington now seeks to spread and consolidate liberal democracy rather than anti-communism. Communism is no longer dangerous to U.S. interests. It barely exists at all except in Pyongyang, Havana, and the Andes, in th e ruling party in China (mainly as sham), and among sentimentalists in Russia and certain university towns in the West. Even if communism were still attracting adherents, there is no more Soviet Union to contain. Doubtless the very demise of the Soviet Union is one cause of the shriveling of world communism, in that the regime exporter no longer exists. As discussed above, state power is one pathway by which transnational ideological struggles are reproduced. Washington, however, stopped supporting anticommunist authoritarians well before the Soviet Union collapsed, beginning at least as early as its dropping of Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. Communism itself lost its luster in the Third World well before the Soviet collapse.
The United States, then, continues to try to export regimes, and more than ever the regimes it exports are liberal-democratic. It usually promotes democracy by subsidies of various sorts. But in Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 1994 the U.S. military was the mode of export.
Liberal democracy is not the only ideology left standing, however. If a political ideology necessarily generates negations of itself, is in fact partly constituted by such negations, then liberal democracy is likewise struggling with transnational opponents (Huntington 1996)—and not only struggling with but producing and reproducing them. The most obvious anti-liberal ideology in the world today is “Islamism,” a body of belief blending orthodox Islam with political power to defend or revive traditional Muslim ways of life against the secularity emanating from the West (Juergensmeyer 1993). Islamism, that is, arose as an anti-Western, anti-American ideology. Iran in particular tries to export Islamism just as America exports liberal democracy. That Islamism is so powerful in the middle east explains why that region is virtually the only one where Washington continues to support repressive monarchical and authoritarian regimes. Liberal democracy does not seem an option in most of these countries, and so the United States cultivates whoever is most likely to preserve states from Islamism.
Other anti-liberal ideologies include the alleged East Asian or Confucian “soft authoritarianism” propagated especially by Singapore and Malaysia, which generally is more communitarian and less attached to individual rights and the rule of law than is liberal democracy; the resistance to the global economy or “neoliberalism” found especially in regions of Latin America that have suffered economic losses from liberalism; and ethno-nationalism in the former communist regions of Europe and western Asia. Finally, as always anti-liberal reactions exist within the West itself, parallel to some of these non-Western ideologies.
Washington is doubtless exporting liberal democracy in part because domestic actors believe (correctly) that it is right to do so, at least if the methods are morally acceptable, and these actors pressure the government to do it. Yet, for the same reasons as always, America’s interests are also enhanced by having a more liberal democracies in the world (Layne and Lynn-Jones 1999). It is not simply that liberal democracies tend to trade with and invest in each other more due to their inherent openness to external goods and capital. It is also that liberal regimes tend to see themselves as part of the same transnational group, on the same side of the struggle, as the U.S. regime. Liberal actors in states such as Russia and China tend to favor good relations with the United States, and thus U.S. influence in such states tends to increase with the amount of power held by liberal reformers (cf. Owen 1997: 37–41). Policy makers know that the more liberal and democratic are Russia and China, the more their foreign policies will be friendly to American interests.
Conclusion
Judging from the common practice of regime export, the leaders of great powers typically believe that state sovereignty is a norm often honored more in the breach than in the observance. In various times and places, including the 1790–1850 period, the Cold War, and the 1990s, states have used force to alter the internal regimes of other states. In doing so these regime exporters have sought to shift the interests of the target states in a friendly direction.
In the interests of parsimony, systemic IR theory has rendered itself unable to account for regime export. Instead, systemic theory has emphasized methods of incentive manipulation such as side payments and military coercion. These methods are obviously extremely common. But when they judge it to be worth the probable costs, states also opt to alter other states’ identities by replacing their internal regimes. Regimes may be exported to target states through a variety of means, including subsidizing and even arming opposition factions. The means upon which we have focused is military force.
Not only do states export regimes, they export particular regimes. Following the realist aphorism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” states export regimes opposed to the regime that most threatens their own regime. In 1849 Louis Napoleon, president of the French republic, intervened in Rome to contain Austrian influence in Italy; his intervention overturned republicanism in Rome because radicalism was the greatest threat to his own rule in France. Throughout the Cold War the United States never exported a communist regime anywhere, nor did the Soviet Union ever export liberal democracy. That the identity of regimes matters suggests that rationalism alone cannot explain regime export. If it could, then we should observe two phenonema. First, the distribution of exported regimes would not correlate with the regimes of the exporters or their enemies. Second, regime export would not happen (assuming its costs are greater than zero) except when either exporter or target withheld private information concerning capabilities and/or resolve. Above we saw that the first rationalist hypothesis is clearly contradicted in the 1790–1850 period, as absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies invariably exported their own regime types. We also saw that the second rationalist hypothesis was contradicted by the case of French restoration of papal temporal authority in Rome in 1849.
The 1790–1850 period is better explained by a constructivist theory that takes actors’ identities into account, specifically the transnational ideological groups to which they belong. Such groups emerge in particular times and places when an ideology appears that spreads across state boundaries. Actors in various states adhering to the same side of an ideological struggle identify with one another and one another’s victories and defeats. These affinities present constraints and opportunities to states. They give states incentives to overturn regimes whose existence threatens, by means of fifth columns, their own hold on power. It tempts them to export their own regime so as to gain influence in target states. And it gives them reasons to oust regimes that other states have exported so as to regain influence in those same target states.
Regime export has several implications for IR theory. First, it underscores that state sovereignty, a building block of most theory, is frequently violated, even by force. The almost-normal quality of its violations renders problematic the dominant anarchical model of IR in favor of a hierarchical model. Second, and relatedly, it illuminates an area in which domestic politics has a systematic, generalizable effect on IR, thus belying the orthodox claim that only systemic theory is true IR theory. If a state’s internal regime matters this much, then international anarchy and the balance of power are not as determinate as neorealists claim. Third, it supports the proposition favored by constructivists that identity matters, in even a rationalism that takes domestic politics into account but ignores identity cannot explain the practice. Fourth, it shows that an important source of identity is ideology, specifically competing notions of domestic political legitimacy. Sixth, it demonstrates that transnational normative structures matter, just as systemic ones do. Seventh, it illustrates the “agent-structure” problem that has been of late interest (Wendt 1987; Dessler 1989): the actions of states (agents) are structured by norms and yet reproduce those same norms. Metternich sustained counter-revolution in the German and Italian states; he thereby also kept the revolution alive; and he thereby reproduced the transnational normative structure that led him to intervene in those states to begin with.
The policy implications of regime export are less clear, because of the moral issues at stake. Insofar as one considers state sovereignty a moral good, one will be disinclined to export regimes by any means, particularly force. Insofar as one considers the security of one’s own state a moral good, however, one will be inclined to support regime export. In practice, states tend to value their own security over general rules such a sovereignty, and that is why they export regimes. Academic theorists of international relations may tell U.S. policy makers that promoting liberal democracy is a waste of time and even dangerous. The policy makers know better.
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Endnotes
*: Prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, D.C., February 16–20, 1999. Back.
Note 1: Insofar as rationalism can accommodate identity, the “constructivist” theory offered here is rationalist. Back.
Note 2: Machiavelli advises against this strategy, however, saying that in the event of war with a third state one faction will join that state in fighting you. See The Prince, ch. 20 Back.
Note 3: Fearon uses the term “mechanisms,” but due to the mechanistic implications of that terms I prefer “causal pathways.” Back.
Note 4: As seen in Tables II and IV, Britain in fact did intervene in Portugal in 1826–27 and in Spain in 1836–38 on behalf of constitutional monarchy. It is thus more likely that London’s fear was of an expansion of Austrian, Russian, and Prussian influence in liberalizing areas rather than the violation of Castlereagh’s normative doctrine of non-interference. Back.
Note 5: Burke wrote his Reflections in 1790, well before the revolution became violent; he continued to attack the revolution in print until his death in 1797. For a consideration of Burke’s influence on international relations, see Welsh. Back.
Note 6: This type of ideological theory is effectively attacked by Blanning (1986) and David (1991). Back.
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