Cornell Studies in Security Affairs

Dale C. Copeland

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801467042
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

One of the most important questions of human existence is what drives nations to war—especially massive, system-threatening war. Much military history focuses on the who, when, and where of war. In this riveting book, Dale C. Copeland brings attention to bear on why governments make decisions that lead to, sustain, and intensify conflicts.Copeland presents detailed historical narratives of several twentieth-century cases, including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He highlights instigating factors that transcend individual personalities, styles of government, geography, and historical context to reveal remarkable consistency across several major wars usually considered dissimilar. The result is a series of challenges to established interpretive positions and provocative new readings of the causes of conflict.Classical realists and neorealists claim that dominant powers initiate war. Hegemonic stability realists believe that wars are most often started by rising states. Copeland offers an approach stronger in explanatory power and predictive capacity than these three brands of realism: he examines not only the power resources but the shifting power differentials of states. He specifies more precisely the conditions under which state decline leads to conflict, drawing empirical support from the critical cases of the twentieth century as well as major wars spanning from ancient Greece to the Napoleonic Wars.

[1]

Rethinking Realist Theories of Major War

The three most prominent realist explanations for major war among great powers, as I noted earlier, are classical realism, structural neorealism, and hegemonic stability theory.1 Classical realism argues that major war is likely when one state is preponderant and unlikely when great powers are relatively equal. A balance of power keeps the peace by convincing potential aggressors that war will have both high costs and a low probability of success. An imbalance provides the key condition for major war, since the superior state is more likely to expand in the belief that war can pay.2 As for this superior state’s motives, classical realists would agree with Hans Morgenthau that the preponderant state initiates war for unit-level reasons—for greed, glory, or what Morgenthau saw as its “lust for power” manifested in “nationalistic universalism.”3

Given the propensity of superior states to attack, classical realists argue that multipolarity should be relatively more stable than bipolarity. Since exact equality cannot always be ensured, alliance restructuring (external balancing) in multipolarity can create the requisite balance of power between blocs, even if individual states are unequal. As long as flexibility is maintained, such that great powers can easily shift alliance ties in response to a stronger power, preponderant states can be deterred from aggression. Conversely, bipolar systems are prone to be unstable since if any inequality between the two great powers opens up, no large alliance partners exist to forge an effective balance of power.4

Classical realism’s strength is its emphasis on power differentials, which provides a fine-grained sense of the relative weights that go onto the scales of the balance of power.5 It also highlights a flaw in theories that argue for the stability of bipolar systems: states in multipolarity have another mechanism—alliances—in addition to arms racing to help deter an aggressor when rough equality cannot be maintained. In bipolarity, great powers have no viable alliance option to fall back on when arms racing alone is not enough.

Classical realism confronts two main empirical problems, however. First, it cannot explain how multipolar systems with tight alliances against the potential hegemon, such as the one that existed before 1914, can still fall into major war. In such cases, the overall balance of power between the blocs fails to keep the peace.6 Second, in the key bipolar cases in history—Sparta-Athens, Carthage-Rome, and France-Hapsburgs—war ensued when the two great powers were essentially equal. Here, the balance of power between the individual great powers did not deter war. The theoretical problem behind these empirical anomalies lies with the largely static nature of classical realism. The theory derives predictions primarily from snapshots of the international systems. The result is the familiar picture of great powers as billiard balls of varying sizes.7 The importance of dynamic trends in the differentials of power is understated in such an analysis. Some classical realists such as Morgenthau recognize in passing that preventive wars—wars for fear of decline—are a significant problem in history. Yet the conditions under which preventive war motivations are invoked remain theoretically undeveloped.8

The second approach, neorealism, focuses on two enduring structural features of the international system, anarchy and polarity. Anarchy—the absence of a central authority to protect the great powers—produces the recurring pattern of conflict seen in international politics over the millennia.9 Across anarchic realms, neorealists assert that bipolar systems are less likely to experience major war than multipolar systems. Three main reasons are given: in bipolarity, great powers avoid being chain-ganged into major war by crises over small powers; they also stand firm, however, to prevent losses on the periphery, thus enhancing deterrence; and finally, the great powers are less inclined to neglect internal military spending that might allow a superior military power to arise.10

Neorealism’s strength is its isolation of the structural effects of anarchy and polarity. This leaves us with a profoundly tragic view of international relations: even when states only seek security, they may still fall into devastating wars that threaten their survival.11 In its Waltzian form, however, neorealism suffers from the same deficiency as classical realism: it is not dynamic enough. With polarity as the key structural variable, there is nothing to vary within either a bipolar or multipolar system to explain why any system should move from peace to war.12 As Waltz explains, “within a system, [systemic] theory explains recurrences and repetitions, not change.” If changes in state behavior “occur within a system that endures, their causes are found at the unit level.”13 This is an unnecessarily limiting view of the explanatory power of a systemic theory. As I explore below, changes and trends in the differentials of relative power between states—a systemic variable going beyond the mere number of great powers—can have marked effects on behavior without necessary consideration of unit-level changes.

Other neorealists have sought to go beyond Waltz by incorporating the classical realist point that power inequalities increase the likelihood of major0 war.14 Still others emphasize that states face a security dilemma, whereby the actions one state takes to enhance its security end up reducing the security of its adversaries. As a result, states sometimes have preventive incentives to eliminate a growing adversary before it becomes too strong.15 I build these additional elements into my synthetic argument. Since I examine the effects of power trends in bipolar versus multipolar systems, however, I reach conclusions different from those of neorealism on the conditions for war in the two system-types. Moreover, chapter 2 moves beyond existing structural arguments by fusing within a leader’s decision-making logic both the risks of decline and the risks of an inadvertent spiral to major war. Finally, by considering different forms of decline, including power oscillations and decline driven by inferiority in economic and potential power, I provide additional conditions constraining the rational response to decline.

The third realist perspective on major war is the security variant of hegemonic stability theory,16 represented most prominently by A. F. K. Organski and Robert Gilpin. Turning classical realism on its head, they argue that a hegemonic system with one powerful actor will be stable because of the hegemon’s self-interest in maintaining the political-military order. When a second-ranked state rises to near equality with this now former hegemon, however, this ascending state is inclined to initiate war to receive the status and rewards denied by the traditional system.17 Hence, contrary to the classical realist view that a balance of power keeps the peace, major war is the result of a growing equality of power between the two most powerful states in any system.

The strength of this approach lies in its dynamic nature. Hegemonic stability theory thus provides a more extended analysis of the impact of power changes on great power behavior than is offered in either classical realism or neorealism. Two main problems remain, however. First, hegemonic stability theory has no deductively consistent theory of war initiation. There is no logical reason why a state should attack while it is still rising, since by simply waiting, the state will be able to achieve its objectives more easily, and at less cost.18 This argument holds even if rising states have goals other than security, such as status and prestige, as hegemonic stability theorists assume they do. Waiting until the state has maximized its power ensures the maximum return on its war investment. After all, even more status and rewards are obtained by fighting when one stands the best chance of winning quickly and at low cost.19 Hegemonic stability theory thus cannot explain why German leaders in both World Wars did not initiate war until after they saw that Germany was declining. Moreover, it cannot account for the fact that in the seven other major wars prior to 1900, it was the declining great power that brought on the hostilities. A similar pattern is seen in each of the key crises of the early cold war: it was the state foreseeing decline that initiated the dangerous crisis period.

The second limitation is that hegemonic stability theory’s core logic for major war is confined to the two most powerful states in any system—the leading state and the rising challenger. The theory thus minimizes the importance of third-, fourth-, and fifth-ranked great powers on the calculations of the other two.20 This might make some sense in a bipolar system, as I show, but it makes little sense for the multipolar cases of European history from 1556 on. Empirically, for example, the theory has a hard time explaining how one state in each of the two major wars of this century—Germany—was able to take on a coalition of second-, third-, and fourth-ranked great powers, fight a long war, and nearly emerge victoriously, if indeed Germany was only equal to the formerly dominant state in military power.21

Interestingly, the evidence provided by hegemonic stability theorists confirms that Germany was in fact preponderant when it took on the system. Organski and Jacek Kugler conclude that by 1913, “Germany [had] clearly surpassed the United Kingdom,” the formerly dominant state, while by 1939, Germany had a “significant advantage” over Britain.22 Kugler and William Domke, to explain how Germany could have come so close to winning both wars, show that Germany in 1914 and 1939–40 was significantly superior in actualized military power. In 1914, Germany was almost as powerful as Britain, Russia, and France combined. In 1939–40, Germany was almost twice as strong as France and Britain combined; in 1941–42, it matched the Soviet Union on the eastern front even as it continued to wage war in the west.23

To accommodate these facts, hegemonic stability theorists adjust the theory: they argue that although equality between individual great powers may not be associated with major war, relative equality between their alliance blocs is. Organski and Kugler conclude: “it is clear that [the World Wars] occur after the intersection when the two nations fight alone (which is contrary to what the power-transition model leads us to expect), but before the coalition of the challenger overtakes the coalition of the dominant country.”24 Woosang Kim, in an important statistical reworking of Organski’s argument, shows that major wars occur at points of essential equality only when power is adjusted to incorporate alliance partners.25 This reformulation still allows hegemonic stability theorists to challenge classical realism: as noted, classical realists cannot explain why in cases like World War I war occurred despite the relative equality between two tight alliances. Overall, however, the primary challenge of hegemonic stability theory has been dissipated. Classical realists and hegemonic stability theorists now essentially agree that in 1914 and 1939 one state—Germany—was significantly superior to any other individual state, even if Germany (along with minor partners) was opposed by a coalition of equal strength. Military historians, as I discuss in chapters 3 through 5, would agree.26

The agreement between classical realists and hegemonic stability realists on German military superiority in the twentieth century simplifies the task ahead. Yet we still lack a theory that can explain, without invoking ad hoc unit-level factors like “lusting for power” and “dissatisfaction with the status quo,” why preponderant states in multipolarity attack the system in the face of the staggering risks and costs. Moreover, how the pressures to initiate major war change between multipolar and bipolar systems is still underspecified. Providing a comprehensive systemic theory of major war, one that synthesizes the strengths of current realist approaches, is the objective of the rest of this chapter.

DYNAMIC DIFFERENTIALS THEORY

The core causal or independent variable of the argument is the dynamic differential: the simultaneous interaction of the differentials of relative military power between great powers and the expected trend of those differentials, distinguishing between the effects of power changes in bipolarity versus multipolarity.27 In addition, I break the notion of power into three types—military, economic, and potential—to show how decline in the latter two forms affects the behavior of states that may be superior in military power.

The theory makes three main assertions. First, in any system, assuming states are rational security-seeking actors which remain uncertain about others’ future intentions,28 it is the dominant but declining military great power that is most likely to begin a major war. Second, the constraints on the dominant state differ in bipolar versus multipolar systems. In multipolarity, major war is likely only if the declining state has a significant level of military superiority. In bipolarity, however, the declining state can attack even when only roughly equal, and sometimes even if it is second-ranked. Third, the probability of major war increases when decline is seen as both deep and inevitable. A consideration of overall economic power and potential power is thus necessary, since the levels and tren...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Rethinking Realist Theories of Major War
• 2. Foreign Policy Choices and the Probability of Major War
• 3. German Security and the Preparation for World War I
• 4. The July Crisis and the Outbreak of World War I
• 5. The Rise of Russia and the Outbreak of World War II
• 6. Bipolarity, Shifting Power, and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1950
• 7. The Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises
• 8. Major War from Pericles to Napoleon
• 9. The Implications of the Argument
• Appendix
• Notes