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CIAO DATE: 12/01
Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer 2000)
This article builds on the work of Barry Posen, who analyzed how an intense security dilemma makes ethnic civil war more likely. While he focused on the military consequences of insecurity, this manuscript develops new explanatory hypotheses that have more of a political-diplomatic character. The new ideas are adapted from Stephen Van Evera's offense-defense theory, the analytical cousin of the security dilemma theory used here. When groups perceive an intense security dilemma, five additional war-causing phenomena are deduced: 1) Groups adopt fait accompli diplomatic tactics in their political relations; 2) 'Blameshifting' is more common, because an intense security dilemma leads to rapid interactions that obscure who caused violent clashes; 3) The parties negotiate less, reach fewer agreements, and honor fewer agreements that are reached; 4) They husband information that may suggest offensive capabilities and motives, including their grievances, demands, and political-military plans. 5) Alliances among ethnic groups in collapsing states tend to form more often, and they become tighter and unconditional. The evidence, drawn from the same two contrasting case studies that Posen examined, tentatively supports the plausibility of the first three hypotheses. For these hypotheses, policy-relevant predictions and prescriptions are forwarded. The evidence casts doubt on the first two-thirds of the hypothesis on secrecy, which leads to a revision of the theory. The cases shed no light on the plausibility of the final hypothesis. Since nearly all of the predictions inferred from the revised theory are supported, further study using more demanding research methods is warranted.
What explains the era of European peace and cooperation after 1815? This article examines a key case: Russia's moderate policy during the Greek revolution of 1821-29. Deriving predictions from three influential explanations of the post-Vienna peace, it tests them against fine-grained historical evidence. It finds that neither learning nor the Concert of Europe greatly restrained Russian officials after 1825. Nor does the balance of power, while important, adequately explain Petersburg's moderation. Russia's new restraint also reflected its rulers' contentment with the status quo. Realism explains Russian policy comparatively well, but only a realism that distinguishes between status quo and revisionist states. These findings bear out Henry Kissinger's thesis that the post-Vienna peace rested on both a balance of power and the great powers' contentment. They indicate the need for an international order that all great powers consider satisfactory, and that the West may be acting foolishly in running roughshod over Russia today.
Almost all treatments of democratic peace mistakenly approach democracy as a single undifferentiated category. The failure to break democracy down into different majoritarian and non-majoritatrian subtypes results in underspecified causal models, and an overstatment of the ambit of a variety of democratic-peace phenomena. This article describes several such democratic subtypes, which differ in the extent to which they constrain the executive, and in the degree to which foreign policymakers view war as a legitimate foreign-policy tool. The consequences of the incorporation of different democratic subtypes for variants of democratic-peace theory are illustrated with a review of recent studies, and an account of how the additional variation - the 'unpacked' concept of democracy - leads to qualifications in those studies' conclusions. The article continues with an empirical analysis, in which the impact of democratic subtypes on war and peace is illustrated by reviewing the decision-making process in two controversial cases involving democratic-nondemocratic dyads: the U.S. decision to declare war on Great Britain in 1812, and Finland's alliance with Nazi Germany and its decision to risk war with the Soviet Union in 1940. The essay concludes that both theorists and policymakers need to appreciate better different forms of democratic governance, and how they can influence decisions to use force.
Although much useful scholarly work has focused on why wars begin and end, we understand relatively little about actors' policy choices during ongoing wars. This article proposes an argument to explain such choices during limited wars, based on the concepts of political and policy risk. We examine when and why leaders alter either policy objectives or the means devoted to them during wartime, and evaluate the argument by examining four decision points in two ongoing conflicts. In contrast to much of the existing literature on war choices, we contend that one cannot understand policy choices during wars without taking into account leaders' domestic and international incentives, as well as the tradeoffs made between them. Theoretical work on actors' risk-taking preferences provides the underpinning for this argument, which applies the distinction between policy and political risks. We conclude that a risk-taking approach allows to specify the incentives toward various policy options better than much of the existing literature, resulting in a relatively accurate and powerful analysis of wartime choices about ends and means.
Modern realist international relations theory posits that Japan will assertively balance against China if it can, but bandwagon if its own balancing attempts fail. This article sees different possibilities, and describes why, based on both unit and system-level variables, Japan appears unlikely to be put in a position of making this choice. Because Japan is blessed by being in a defense-dominant situation vis-a-vis the Chinese, it can conceive of its security in absolute terms. Furthermore, it has been socialized on the dangers of assertive policies in the international system. Thus, Japan can be expected to pursue a policy of 'circumscribed balancing.' While this is good news for Sino-Japanese relations, it means that Japan will be less concerned about the fate of her peripheral neighbors. If the United States has interests in the region other than great-power stability, it has better defend them, because Japan will not.