Starr: Coalitions and Future War

Harvey Starr, Coalitions and Future War: A Dyadic Study of Cooperationand Conflict (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1975). War is a driver and not only a driven variable. Countries that have been allies during war are more likely to be allies in the future. “This hypothesis propose that war coalition partners will comprise dyads that in future mutual war involvement are more likely to be allies and much less likely to be enemies. In testing this hypothesis we will also be testing the assumption that the war coalition experience is important and ‘unique’. If the war coalition experience, as will be tested below, does not produce future patterns of behavior different from other contemporary and comparable forms of experience then we should not be focusing on war coalitions but upon some other, broader, experience. The assumption, implicit so far, is that the war coalition, as a form of international cooperation, is in some way a unique experience. Thus, in testing the above hypotheses we are testing two things: that war coalitions produce a special type of international experience; and that this experience is unique by producing future patterns of war involvement which tend heavily towards continued allied behavior” (8-9). “Our working hypothesis may now be refined. We may propose that War Coalition Participant dyads will produce ‘t+k’ that are unique—that are statistically different from the patterns produced by Belligerent dyads and Non-Participant dyads. Moreover, War Coalition Participant dyads will be more likely to be come Allies at ‘t+k’, and less likely to become Enemies at ‘t+k’ than Belligerent dyads or Non-Participant dyads” (13). “The most compelling result we have produced so far—the strongest influence—is that of simply being a war coalition partner. That fact is related to an overwhelmingly non-belligerent set of future relationships with one’s war coalition partners. After that we find a variety of tendencies, albeit weak ones, which explain to some degree why 28.3% of the War Coalition Participant dyads that do become involved in future war become involved as Enemies (Or, why 13.5% of all War Coalition Participant dyads ‘go bad,’ and become Enemies in the future)” (50). This quote is from this publication: Skjelsbaek, K (1971): “Shared membership in interngovernmental organizations and dyadic war, 1865-1964” pp31-61 in E H Fedder [ed] The United Nations: Problems and Prospects. St Louis: Center for International Studies ‘The probability of a pair of nations becoming involved in war may be compared to the probability of persons getting lung cancer. In absolute terms both probabilities are very low. However, if a person smokes cigarettes, and a pair of nations substantially reduces its number of shared IGO memberships, the probabilities of getting lung cancer and fighting on opposite sides in a war, respectively, are relatively much higher than they would otherwise have been” (51). “Finally, the very striking difference in groups based on different Major Power-Minor Power composition was revealed. Simply, dyads composed of two major powers were more likely to become Enemies in the future. Of the total 624 War Coalition Participant dyads, 84 were composed of two major powers. Of these Major/Major dyads, a full 36% became Enemies at t+k…Above analyses clearly indicate that major/major dyads are more likely than other dyads to become Enemies. However, after this there is very little that can be said for major/major dyads. They differ from minor/minor dyads across almost every hypothesis, and do so by producing no relationships with most of the variables” (52). “If we look at three of the four best discriminatory variables—major power/minor, border, lastwar—we may be understandably pessimistic in observing that they offer a gloomy picture indeed. None of these variables are truly manipulable in the policy relevant sense that they can be altered easily by the conscious actions of officials. This argues for war as being a heavily ‘systemic’ phenomena, built into the status hierarchy of the international system via the major power/minor power dimension and relationships” (59).