Knorr: The War Potential of Nations

Knorr, Klaus Eugen. The War Potential of Nations. Greenwood Press Reprint, 1978.

 “This book is meant to contribute to a theory of war potential.  The term ‘war potential’ is used frequently in literature, press, lectures, and classroom discussion, yet its meaning is usually hazy and the literature to which the student might turn for consultation is inadequate” (vii).  The book is interested in economic, industrial, and morale components of war potential.

“Military means is one of the instruments through which nations attempt to settle international conflicts of interest.  Since the instrument is used to influence the behavior of other nations, military power is necessarily relative to that of other nations…Military power is subject to change for two reasons.  A nation’s power may rise or fall because there are changes in the power constituents of other nations or because there is a change in its own means of waging war” (19). 

“Short of battle, there is no precise test or measurement of mobilized military power” (28).

“In this sense, ‘war potential’ is simply a collective term for all the relevant elements of military strength other than the armed forces themselves” (40).

“For example, the following list of components have been drawn up by five different authors:”  (40):

This is Nicholas Spykman in America’s Strategy in World Politics: 

“(1) Size of territory; nature of frontiers; size of population; absence or presence of raw materials; economic and technological development; financial strength’ ethnic homogeneity’ effective social integration’ political stability’ and national spirit.” (40) 

This is Morgenthau in In Defense of the National Interest:

“(2) Geography; natural resources; industrial capacity; military preparedness; population; national character; national morale; quality of diplomacy.” (41) 

This is Gulick in Administrative Reflections from World War II:

“(3) Manpower; raw materials; capital investments; science, technology, and research; organizations and institutions (including government and economic and social institutions).” (41) 

This is Steinmetz:

“(4) Population (size and structure); size of territory; wealth; political institutions; leadership; national unity and cohesion; respect and friends abroad; moral qualities.” (41)

This is Fischer:

“ (5) Political factors:  geographical position; size of state and number and density of population; organizational skill and cultural level; kinds of frontiers and attitudes of neighboring countries.  Psychological factors:  economic flexibility and inventive skill; perseverance and adaptability of the population.  Economic factors:  fertility of soil and mineral wealth; industrial organization and stage of technology; development of commerce and transportation; and financial strength” (41).

This list is debilitating.  So the author makes three broad categories:  economic capacity, institutional acumen, and war motivation.

“If it is hard to measure and compare the ready striking power of nations, it is still harder to measure and compare their war potential and hence their total military power, of which potential is a major, and at most time the predominant, part…How can we measure administrative competence, motivation for war, and economic capacity?  How can the various components of these aggregates be measured?  Even if we could measure the three broad constituents of potential, how can we measure and compare the total war potential so long as our units of measurement are incommensurable?” (47).

Alcock and Newcombe:  The Perception of National Power

Alcock, Norman Z., and Alan G. Newcombe. “The Perception of National Power.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 14, no. 3 (September 1, 1970): 335–343.

"...if international relations is to become a science it will have to establish a definitive quantitative measure for its most basic variable--national power" (335).

"There may be differences between 'real' power and 'perceived' power.  Given some objective level of 'real' power, a nation may nevertheless be perceived as stronger, or weaker, y the people of another nation.  Yet both objective and subjective power must ber based on a number of measurable facts.  The purpose of this empirical study is to ascertain these measurable facts and thus help to establish a quantitative definition of national power.  In addition to its theoretical value, a quantitative measurement of power can have an immediate practical application for peace--that is, in devising formulas for weighted voting in the United Nations, which is now floundering on the 'one nation, one vote' principle" (335).  

They survey folks asking them to rank countries by "importance".  This is the dependent variable for their analysis.  

"We conclude, therefore, that perceived national power is some function of GNP or military expenditure (in purchasing-power-equivalent dollars) if none of the nations has been at war recently, but is a function of military expenditure alone if warring nations are included in the rating"  (342).

Two regressions that are salient:  Relative Power = -8.85 + 0.67 population + 0.47 GNP/cap

Relative power = 9.4 - 0.09 population + 0.93 GNP

Kugler and Arbetman:  Choosing Among Measures of Power

Kugler, Jacek, and Marina Arbetman. “Choosing Among Measures of Power:  A Review of the Empirical Record.” In Power in World Politics, edited by Richard J Stoll and Michael Don Ward. Boulder, Colo: L. Rienner Publishers, 1989.

"We show that, for major powers, a number of indicators used in international politics to index power are highly related.  Whether one chooses to use GNP, the COW Indexes, or adjust these for military expenditures is not critically relevant for the analysis of relations among major powers over time.  This choice affects cross-sectional analysis since rank varies at one point in time but even here the average disparity is on the order of 10%" (73-4).

Merritt and Zinnes:  Alternative Indexes of National Power

Merritt, Richard L, and Dina A Zinnes. “Alternative Indexes of National Power.” In Power in world politics, edited by Richard J Stoll and Michael Don Ward. Boulder, Colo.: L. Rienner Publishers, 1989.

"Our task is threefold   first, to summarize the more prominent indexes of power that researches have proposed, highlighting both similarities and differences; second, to compare the empirical consequences of these alternative approaches; and third, to explore the implications of these findings" (12).  They define power in line with what others have said, "...how probable it is that X can exert d amount of influence over Y with respect to issue g" (12).

Referring to single variable models of power:  "A high national income...can imply a country's long-term ability to influence others, but not if it means that the population is less willing and even less able than others to engage in activities such as wars that might jeopardize its high standard of living.  A healthy, skilled population may be a capability; an equally large but disease ridden and illiterate population can diminish the government's capacities.  General s never tire of telling us that even the best-equipped army is ineffective without good leadership and high morale.  Is energy used to drive television sets and compact-disk players equivalent to energy used for industrial production?  Without strong evidence that a single-variable indicator predicts..relevant outcomes,k it is difficult to answer the complaints of 'realists' who point to a more complex world than any single indicator suggests" (14).

They list various contributions to measurements of power:

Knorr:  very early, measured potential military power

Alcock and Newcombe:  interested in perceptions, used Russet 1968 (in Singer Quantitative International Politics).  Find three equations that can be used to assess relative power.  The two they like are:

Relative Power = -8.85 + 0.67 population + 0.47 GNP/cap
Relative power = 9.4 - 0.09 population + 0.93 GNP

Singer:  COW.

Demographics:  Total population and urban population
Industrial:  energy consumption and iron and steel production
Military:  total spending and size of military

Fucks:  non linear formulas that combine population, energy, and steel.  In German.  "Fucks predicts that growth in US power will taper off and reach 200 [base 100 US in 1960] by 2040.  Meanwhile, China's power will outstrip that of the United States in about 1975 and reach a score of approximately 3000 in the year 2040" (17).

Cline:  measures "capabilities" (population, territory, income, resource production, military capabilities) as well as "commitment" (national strategy, national will).

German:  non-linear, and influenced by possession of nuclear weapons.

Lemke:  Regions of War and Peace

Lemke, Douglas. Regions of war and peace. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

The book begins with an overview of power transition theory juxtaposed with balance of power theory.  "The critically important variables associated with war and peace within power transition theory are thus relative power relations and status quo evaluations" (25).

Lemke then applies the logic of power transition theory to regional levels.  He deploys a "multiple hierarchy model" which argues that a regional "status quo" and dominant power is common, and that global powers do not frequently interfere with these regional dynamics (Vietnam and Korea are exceptions).  "In spite of the fact that these authors variously use the terms lesser-, subordinate-, "inferiour"-, local-, or regional balances, they all seem to be suggesting the same thing; namely, the international balance or international system is a set of international systems arranged geographically, or in positions of relative inferiority/superiority, or both" (58).

He uses both COW CINC measures and GDP/GNP to measure relative power.  The threshold for parity is 70 percent of the power of the dominant.  He outlines regional groupings and and regional powers.  Does much more than I describe here.

Levy, Jack.  Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China.  

In:  Ross, Robert S, and Feng Zhu. China’s ascent: power, security, and the future of international politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.

"I argue that applications of power transition theory to the rise of China are compromised by the failure to recognize both the theoretical limitations of power transition theory and the contextual differences between a potential Sino-American transition and past power transitions.  I give particular attention to the theory's focus on a single international hierarchy and its lack of a conceptual apparatus to deal with global-regional interactions, which are important because China is more likely to pose a threat to US interests in East and Southeast Asia than to US global interests, at least for many decades" (11).

Reviews Organski's contribution to power transition theory.  "Organski and his colleagues measure productivity in terms of GDP/capita.  Their aggregate measure of power is the product of GDP and political capacity.  If a great power increases in strength to the point that it acquires at least 80 percent of the power of the dominant state, it is defined as a 'challenger' to the dominant state and to that state's ability to control the international system" (13).

"It is the combination of parity, overtaking, and dissatisfaction that leads to war, though power transition theorists have been inconsistent regarding the precise relationship among these key causal variables.  In the most recent statement of the theory, it appears that dissatisfaction and parity each approximate a necessary condition for war between the dominant state and the challenger" (14).

"Thus, population has a critical impact on power in the long term; economic growth has a large impact in the medium term; and political capacity has its greatest impact in the short term" (16).

"The question, according to power transition theory, is not whether China will eventually overtake the United States, since that is practically inevitable once China completes its modernization and moves up its growth trajectory, but rather when and with what consequences.  Power transition theorists equivocate in their discussion of the timing of the transition  but not about the conditions determining whether the transition will be peaceful or warlike" (16).

"Power transition theory posits that national power is a function of population, economic productivity, and the political capacity to extract resources from society and transform them into national power.  Thus in most applications of the theory national power = population * GDP/capita * political capacity.  One problem with the emphasis on population and GDP is that while GDP captures quantitative changes in the growth of the economy as a whole it does not fully capture qualitative changes int eh form of technological innovations that generate new leading economic sectors and trigger paradigmatic shifts in economic production" (18).

"To summarize, although power transition theory suggests that China's overtaking of the United States is both inevitable and imminent sometime within the next generation, a focus on the leading economic sectors and technological innovations that drive them suggests a more cautious attitude in predicting a Sino-American power transition" (20).

"To summarize, although power transition theory claims to provide a theory of great power war at the top of the international hierarchy, a look at its application to historical cases reveals that in important respects the theory mis-specifies the causal mechanisms leading to war" (30).

McNally: Sino-Capitalism

McNally, Christopher A. “Sino-Capitalism: China’s Reemergence and the International Political Economy.” World Politics 64, no. 4 (2012): 741–776.

Outlines the IR debate on the rise of China.  Then focuses on IPE interpretation of Sino-Capitalism in contrast to Anglo-Capitalism.  Sino-Capitalism:  "...relies on informal business networks rather than on legal codes and transparent rules.  It also assigns the Chinese state a leading role in fostering and guiding capitalist accumulation." (744)  "Central to Sino-capitalism's institutional structure is a unique duality that combines top-down state-led development with bottom-up entrepreneurial private capital accumulation" (744).

Piece goes on to place Sino-Capitalism within the varieties of capitalism literature.  It argues that the unique characteristics of this economic structure will be challenging to assimilate within the liberal economic order.  Author makes the interesting observation that China is entering the international system characterized by neoliberal globalization and other Asian countries that entered the system earlier did so  when it was more characterized by embedded liberalism.  

The article then goes on to document the moves that China is making to internationalize the yuan.  The further implications for the rise of China and US-China relations are ambiguous, but the author claims that the rise of Sino-Capitalism will continue to challenge the international financial order.

Ray and SInger: Measuring Concentration of Power

Ray, James Lee, J. David Singer. 1973. Measuring the concentration of power in the international system. Sociological Methods & Research. 1: 403.

"The purpose of this paper is to examine some earlier efforts to measure the inequality of distribution within several different substantive contexts, and to see how appropriate these different measures might be if they were applied to the distribution of 'power potential' in the international system or any of its subsystems" (405).

 "We should admit, and indeed will even emphasize, that the criteria for selection of an index will vary as research purposes change" (405).

Mearshimer: The Gathering Storm

Mearsheimer, John J. “The Gathering Storm: China’s Challenge to US Power in Asia.” The Chinese Journal of International Politics 3, no. 4 (December 21, 2010): 381–396.

 The argument here is that "China cannot rise peacefully" (382). This is because of power transition theory and standard Realist accounts of behavior in the international system. There are three arguments for why China will rise peacefully and Mearsheimer refutes each. 1. China will mitigate fears of it's revisionist nature by signaling to their neighbors that it will be peaceful. This isn't possible because states can have no truthful expectation about the behavior of other states. Cites Hobbes related work. Second, China could build defensive military capabilities in place of offensive. This isn't plausible because the line between defensive and offensive capabilities is blurry. 3. China's behavior to her neighbors has been peaceful lately. Problem with this thinking is that past behavior isn't predictive of future behavior.

 He also addresses the US role in the future and its desire to remain the global hegemon. This will further initiate conflict.

Then, after telling the reader that we can't understand the decisions of leaders in 2025 he goes on to tell us how we should expect countries to behave.

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).

Wright: A Study of War

Quincy Wright, A Study of War, Abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

Quincy Wright’s quantitative and philosophical treatise on various aspects of international conflict is rightfully decisive in the field. It represents a very early attempt (before data was even readily available) to take a macro-level account of the causes of different kinds of international conflict. However, to my chagrin, I boarded the plane with the abridged version of the book, which leaves out some of the most critical quantitative results which are said to be located in the appendix.

The famous Deutsch quote from the foreword: “War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied” (xii).

“In the broadest sense war is a violent contact of distinct but similar entities. In this sense a collision of stars, a fight between a lion and a tiger, a battle between two primitive tribes, and hostilities between two modern nations would all be war” (5).

Wright tends to analyze things in fours, typically with an analysis that takes a social, psychological, technical and legal frameworks. In terms of definitions, he substitutes philosophical for technological. The definitions of war from different frameworks are the following:

Sociological: “…socially recognized form of intergroup conflict involving violence”

Legal: “……usually followed Grotius’ conception of war as ‘the condition of those contending by force as such’” (5).

Philosophy: have focused on the “…degree in which military methods are employed” (6). Here he quotes Clausewitz.

Psychological: “…ignoring form, have found the substance of war in the degree of hostile attitude in the relation of states” (6).

“Whatever point of view is selected, war appears to be a species of wider genus” (7).

“Combining the four points of view, war is seen to be a state of law and a form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality, of hostility, and of violence in the relations of organized human groups, or, more simply, the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force” (7).

“It is to be observed that this definition implies sufficient social solidarity throughout the community of nations of which both belligerents and neutrals are members to permit general recognition of the behaviors and standards appropriate to the situation of war. Although war manifests the weakness of the community of nations, it also manifests the existence of that community” (7).

There is a general and persistent attempt to trace out a conceptual framework—across time—that can help to identify and map out different components of armed international conflict. Much of this is of no interest to me.

The causes of war, by social system:

Technological: “…war is a violent encounter of powers, each of which is conceived as a physical system with expansive tendencies…War occurs whenever the tension, arising from pressures and resistances on a given frontier, passes beyond the tolerance point and invasion occurs” (108).

Legal: “War may…be conceived as the consequence of the diversity of legal systems. Each state, because it claims legal sovereignty, assumes that its law must prevail whenever it extends, even on the high seas, over foreign territory, or over aliens” (110).

Sociological: “Wars may…be considered consequences of the contacts of diverse cultures” (111).

Psychological: “The tendency for individuals to concentrate their loyalties upon a concrete group and to concentrate their aggressive dispositions upon an external group makes it possible that an incident in the relations of the two groups will acquire a symbolic significance and stimulate mass reactions which may produce war” (113).

“With much oversimplification and with decreasing accuracy as civilization develops, it may be said that wars usually result (1) technologically, because of the need of political power confronted by rivals continually to increase itself in order to survive, (2) legally, because of the tendency fo a system of law to assume that the state is completely sovereign, (3) sociologically, because of the utility of external war as a means of integrating societies in time of emergency, and (4) psychologically, because persons cannot satisfy the human disposition to dominate except through identification with a sovereign group” (114).

“Explanations of war from the deterministic and voluntaristic points of view differ in degree rather than in kind, and they tend to approach each other as the knowledge and intelligence of the entity which initiates war approach zero or infinity. Determinism is a function either of matter or of God. Man, being superior to unconscious matter and lower than the angels, can exercise uncertain choices. If a government had no knowledge at all of the external word, its reactions would be entirely determined by the natural law defining the behavior of entities of its type in contact with an environment of the type within which it exists. It would have no more freedom than would a particle of matter obeying the laws of gravitation and inertia. On the other hand, if a government had perfect knowledge of the universe in which it exists, it would be able to frame policies and adopt methods which were certain to succeed without disabling costs. Proposals which did not conform to these conditions would not be accepted. Wars arise unpredictably because governments know something but not everything. Their image of other governments, of the world situation, and even of themselves, upon which their policies, decision, and actions are based, is always in some measure distorted” (115).

“Wars arise because of the changing relations of numerous variables—technological, psychic, social and intellectual. There is no single cause of war. Peace is an equilibrium among many forces. Change in any particular force, trend, movement or policy may at one time make for war, but under other conditions a similar change may make for peace. A state may at one time promote peace by armament, at another time by disarmament; at one time by insistence on its rights, at another time by a spirit of conciliation. To estimate the probability of war at any time involves, therefore, an appraisal of the effect of current changes upon the complex of intergroup relationships throughout the world” (351).

“War tends to increase both in frequency and in severity in times of rapid technological and cultural change because adjustment, which always involves habituation, is a function of time” (352).

Lee Ray: The Measurement of System Structure

“The Measurement of System Structure,” in Measuring the Correlates of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

“We can think of few words that are so causally and imprecisely used as system and structure; this semantic permissiveness has even gone so far as to see them used interchangeably. Thus any pattern, order, or regularity—real or imagined—in the referent world may well be graced with the label ‘system’ or ‘structure.’ We mean, of course, to sue them rather more carefully here. By system, we mean an aggregation of social entities that share a common fate (Campbell 1958), or are sufficiently interdependent to have the actions of some consistently affect the behavior and fate of the rest. In addition, our definition of system is clearly distinct from those that focus on ‘systems of action’ and thus fail to specify which social entities constitute the system (Singer 1971). By the structure of the system we mean the way in which relationships are arranged, but this definition leaves unclear the distinction between two kinds of relationships, that is, those based on comparisons between and among states or other entities and those based on links or bonds between them. For example, if we refer to the concentration of military industrial capability in the international system, we are focusing on a structural attribute based on comparisons of the attributes of states. However, if we focus on the bipolarity of the system, we are then discussing a structural attribute that arises out of the links and bonds among states. It should also be pointed out that these two kinds of structural attributed are related in the sense that variation in one may produce variation in the other. For example, a concentration of military-industrial capability in the hands of two dominant states in the system may well lead to its bipolarization” (99-100).

“We have already mentioned one distinction that we find useful, that is, the distinction between structural attributes based on comparisons among states and those based on linkages and bonds. Both kinds of structural variables order states…either vertically or horizontally” (101).

This chapter is very interesting for my work and it contains a slew of relevant citations that need to be checked and reviewed.

Howard: The Causes of Wars

Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984).

"Whatever may be the underlying causes of international conflict, even if we accept the role of atavistic militarism or of military-industrial complexes or of socio-biological drives or of domestic tensions in fuelling it, wars begin with conscious and reasoned decisions based on the calculation, made by both parties, that they can achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace" (22).

Wide ranging and often rambling.

Suganami: On the Causes of War

Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996).

The author breaks down approaches to analyzing the causes of war into those that address three distinct questions. The kind of question that the theorists are attempting to address directly drives the approach taken, and the conclusions gleaned.

The three questions are:

“What are the conditions that must be present for wars to occur?”

“Under what types of circumstances have wars occurred more frequently?”

“How did this particular war come about?”

The first question addresses the necessary conditions for war to occur. A necessary condition, like oxygen for fire, can hardly be found to exist for the causes of international war. The second question—regarding the correlates of war—has a much richer set of studies to draw from. The final question deals most explicitly with understanding notions of causality. This is where Suganami fleshes out his own understanding of the causes of international crises.

The other two questions are relatively more straight forward.

“Nearly everyone knows that correlation is not causation” (Haas 1974, 59) (80).

Dickinson: Causes of International War

G. Lowes Dickinson, Causes of International War (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1984).

“In discussing war it is important to distinguish clearly what we mean by it…We mean the deliberate use of organized physical force by groups of men against other groups” (7).

“It is necessary…to distinguish international war from civil. In some periods of h8istory, the distinction is not easy to draw in practice. But it becomes clear as soon as sovereign states have appeared. International war is, then, war between such states; while civil war is war between groups included in one of them” (8).

The book begins by positioning international war as a strange thing. Yes, people will fight, but that is because they are mad at each other. War, on the other hand, does not require that any of the participants actually dislike one another.

One necessary condition for the occurrence of international conflict is that humans tend to be “social animals”, and that without this sense of community, the drive for war would be less likely.

“We have seen that the community-sense is a condition of the possibility of war. But it is not enough to account for war” (15).

“There is no evidence for the statement, sometimes hastily made, that whenever and wherever there have been men there has been war” (16).

Cashman: What Causes War?

Cashman, Greg. 1993. What Causes War?: An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict. New York: Lexington Books.

This book is a wide ranging overview of the different causes of war organized by levels of analysis.”Clues to the cause of war may be found in a variety of different locations. The causes of war may be said to exist at several levels of analysis. While there are different views of the number and identity of levels of analysis, we will examine theories of war at five levels: the individual, the small group, the state, the interaction between two states, and the international system” (13).

At the level of states—where internal conflict can foment external conflict—Blainey argued that about 50% of wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries were “immediately preceded by civil conflict in one of the belligerent nations” (147). This is referred to as the “kick them while they’re down” theory of war. The “scapegoat” theory of war, or the diversionary conflict theory, has been supported by Rosencrance. Lebow also supports this argument by presenting the case for “brinksmanship crises”. Maoz argues that revolutionary transformations create a context where states are likely to either be the perpetrator of international violence or the recipient. Rummel explored this empirically and found that internal and external conflict are not related. Wilkenfeld argued that this lack of a finding was the result of Rummel grouping all regime types into the same analysis and not breaking them out at all.

There is obviously much more than this brief abstract, though this piece was the one that I was most interested in at the moment.

UPDATE:

ToC:


The individual Level of Analysis: Human Aggression
The Individual Level of Analysis: Psychological Explanations for War
Governmental Decision Making
The State and International Conflict
International interaction: Stimulus-Response Theory and Arms Races
International Interaction: Game Theory and Deterrence
The International System: Anarchy and Power
The International System: Cyclical Theories and Historical Structural Theories of War

UPDATE II:


The book begins by claiming that there is both good news and bad news about "war". First, big wars are less frequent than they used to be. Second, they are more deadly. Third, intra-state wars are more prevalent. Fourth, inter-state wars are incredibly rare, especially when all possible dyads are taken into consideration.

The introduction then goes on to explore different explanations for the causes of war from the perspective of different levels of analysis. These levels are the following: the individual level, the substate level, the nation-state level, the dyadic level, the international system level and then analyses that take place across levels, or multilevel analysis.

The book then thoroughly explores major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries from the perspectives of these levels of analysis.

Miller: States, Nations and the Great Powers

Miller, Benjamin. 2007. States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace. Cambridge studies in international relations 104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

“”I argue that if we approach the question of war and peace from the regional perspective, we may gain new insights which are otherwise obscured. The new theory developed here thus offers an explanation of the variations between war and peace within and among regions. It explains why some regions are particularly war-prone , while others are so peaceful that war among the regional states has become practically unthinkable” (1).

“What I call the ‘state-to-nation-balance’ is the key underlying cause that affects the disposition of a region toward war…The state-to-nation balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region’s peoples. This balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. There is a nation-to-state imbalance when there is a lack of congruence between states and national identifications and at least some of the regional states are weak states” (2).

“…I argue that the old and apparently irreconcilable divide between systemic and regional/domestic explanations of state behavior may be bridged, and this books offers a theoretical synthesis that shows how a fruitful and compelling theoretical coexistence may be created within different schools of IR scholarship, and between IR scholarship and comparative politics” (3).

Both regional and global drivers explain the occurrence of international conflict. “Regional/domestic factors are responsible for hot outcomes; global factors are responsible for cold outcomes” (13).

Argues that there are “outside-in” and “inside-out” explanations for the cause of international conflict. The main drawback of these accounts is that they don’t take each other into consideration.

The author argues that most previous theory has treated the causes of war and peace as being separate. Instead, we should be looking at why certain regions are more or less war-prone than others, which takes into consideration both drivers of peace and war.

Axelrod: The Complexity of Cooperation

Robert M Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton studies in complexity (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1997).

This book builds upon Axelrod's earlier work on cooperation--specifically using the Prisoner's Dilemma--by adding complexity to the mix. "Adding complexity to that framework allows the exploration of many interesting and important features of competition and collaboration that are beyond the reach of the Prisoner's Dilemma paradigm" (3).

"Complexity theory involves the study of many actors and their interactions. The actors may be atoms, fish, people, organizations or nations...a primary tool of complexity theory is computer simulation" (3).

"Agent-based modeling is a third way of doing science. Like deduction, it starts with a set of explicitly assumptions. But unlike deduction, it does not prove theorems. Instead, an agent-based model generates simulated data that can be analyzed inductively. Unlike typical induction, however, the simulated data come from a rigorously specified set of rules rather than direct measurement of the real world. Whereas the purpose of induction is to find patterns in data and that of deduction to find consequences of assumptions, the purpose of agent-based modeling is to aid intuition" (3-4).

Weltman: Systems Theory in International Relations

Weltman, John J. 1973. Systems Theory in International Relations: A Study in Metaphoric Hypertrophy. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books.


“The best-known application of this approach to international relations is embodies in Morton A. Kaplan’s System and Process in International Politics. Building on Kaplan’s framework and modifying it to suit their own purposes, other authors have employed systems theory in many studies. …We propose to analyze in this work the utility of this body of thought as a vehicle by which knowledge relating to the field of international relations may be advanced” (1). Utility will be defined as the explanatory power of the theory.

Kaplan’s definition of systems approach to IR: “A system of action is a set of variables so related, in contradistinction to its environment, that describable behavioral regularities characterize the internal relationships of the variables to each other and the external relationships of the set of individual variables to combinations of external variables” (3).

“Through the use of this concept it is possible to describe the state of the system, and to delineate the requirements for its continue dexistance. Processes contributing to these requirements are functional. The system is by definition in equilibrium. The regularities observable in its operation provide the limits of the equilibrium. A disequilibrium indicates the dissolution of the system; with the ordered pattern of interaction previously defining it no longer operative, the system can no longer be distinguished from its environment” (3).

Discussion of feedback, a term drawn from cybernetics (4).

“Marion J. Levy’s definition of Structure, as cited in Weltman: “The term structure as used here means a pattern, i.e., an observable uniformity ,of action or operation” (4) The definition of function: “The term function…is defined here as a condition, or state of affairs, resultant from the operation…of a structure through time” (4).

Martindale quote on holism and elementarism in Weltman: “Holism is the view tha the basic social reality consists of interrelated wholes which are superior to the individual and his acts…One cannot of course have a whole without parts, but the whole is prior to the parts in the sense that its operations are irreducible to these parts and their properties. Elementarism is the view that the basic social reality is constituted by individuals and their acts. Social events consist solely in their interaction. Any notion that interaction possesses new or emergent properties such that some sort of whole with irreducible properties of its own arises is a pure product of reification” (5).

There is a discussion of “sociological functionalism” with many references to “self sufficiency” “system maintaining” “system determined” (6-7).

In summarizing Merton: “Function is defined as an equilibrium-conducing operation” (7).

“But precisely what is the nature of this system called political? Easton answers this question by referring to what can only be called the function of the political within the larger context of the social system or society. The political system stems from and fulfills a need of the social system. Without fulfillment of this function of ‘authoritative allocation of values,’ a society cannot exist” (9).

The discussion moves from sociological functional theories to general systems theory, its structure, and ability to produce hypotheses of use. General Systems Theory is an attempt to create the language of a methodological approach that can be used across scientific fields.

“The view of reality lying behind the more ambitious formulations of the utility of general systems theory can be neither proved nor disproved; it can only be stated. It is basically a metaphysical scheme which seeks to find in reality an ultimate orderliness above and beyond the ken of normal scientific methods of verification. Systems theory in the study of international relations is a mode of analysis growing out of, and conditioned by, two pervasive currents of thought—functional sociology and general systems theory. These modes of thought do exhibit certain points of common concern. They are both essentially holistic; each would find more in the whole than the sum of its parts. They approach this point of common concern, whoever, by different, and one might say complementary, routes. The functional sociologists are more concerned with activity than with the entity within which this activity occurs, to which it is related, and in terms of which it is assessed. The whole often appears as a residual, whose definition is important less for operational utility than for logical completeness. What is secondary for functional sociology is primary in general systems theory. The nature of the entity within which activity occurs is paramount, often to the exclusion of direct concern with the concrete activity itself” (14).

“Given the non-operational or tautological nature of the bulk of the ‘essential rules’ of his systems, it follows that Kaplan’s conclusions concerning systemic stability and transformation are not compelling. Too often these statements refer merely to end results of processes…We are left with little to enable us to predict in concrete circumstances which one among several possible transformations will occur…Conclusions as to stability or transformation—if they are not make indeterminate as above—turn on hypotheses as to international relations which are not made an explicit part of the systems analysis. It is possible to trace through Kaplan’s work a series of assumptions of this sort, which, rather than systemic analysis, provide the basis from which his conclusions follow. Thus Kaplan assumes rather than demonstrates a tendency toward instability as the state structure approaches bipolarity” (34).

The next book explored is Haas and Beyond the Nation-State. The same criterion are used to judge the use of the theory.

“It should of course be obvious that this analysis too could easily be formulated without the intrusion of the concepts of systems theory…That third parties find their positions enhanced by the occurrence of conflict between others is a commonplace of the folk wisdom of political thought…Haas has attempted to rework the systems approach so as to eliminate the occurrence of causal statements purporting to explain phenomena by reference to an attribute of the system. This he has attempted to do by introducing his ‘concrete, actor-oriented’ system. Unfortunately, by doing away with the type of explanation mentioned, he has left us with little but an undifferentiated mass of data. It is only by introducing criteria of importance and behavioral assumptions which are systemic and autonomous that this data can be made to yield explanations and interpretations. At best the conceptualizations of systems theory become simply redundant in this process. At worst the approach can serve to absolutize arbitrary interpretations by concealing their origins, and to lend seeming objectivity to mere value preferences. Furthermore, Haas is unable to demonstrate the necessity of the systems approach in arriving at his substantive conclusions or in making predictions” (47-8).

Next is Rosecrance and his Action and Reaction in World Politics. “Rosecrance’s analysis falls into three parts. First there is a series of historical essays describing nine periods of international politics…Next, these nine periods are translated into nine international systems. On the basis of this systemic analysis Rosecrance then explains the mutations of international politics in terms of the interactions of four factors whose influence in the present day he assesses” (49).

“The conclusions Rosecrance derives, supposedly through the vehicle of systemic analysis, are simply the themes of his historical analysis in slightly different form…Thus, the distinction between stable and unstable historical periods is correlated in most instances simply with the presence or absence of international war; and historical analyses in terms of a regulative mechanism often strike the reader as serving no useful purpose furthering explanation of the materials at hand” (60).

Chapter 6 is highly germane for my work. It is on balance of power in the international system and the stability.

“It may be that systems theory should not be regarded as an explanatory scheme, but only as a suggestive device. It does not serve to verify hypotheses, but merely to provide them. It should be understood, then, primarily as a sort of bank of ideas and novel interpretations” (79). However, we have plenty of hypotheses, and what we need is a way to solve them. “The systems approach, then, seems to ahev little utility either as an explanatory scheme or a suggestive device” (79).

Blainey: The Causes of War

Blainey, Geoffrey. 1973. The Causes of War. New York: Free Press.

This book is a wide ranging exploration of the causes of war and peace. The author refers to its structure as an "intellectual detective story" (vii), and proceeds to explore and adjudicate a large chunk of extant literature, keeping some insights, and tossing others away.

The book begins with a claim that, "for every thousand pages published on the causes of wars there is less than one page directly on the causes of peace" (3). Many of the theories explored in the first two chapters are arcane, and are not explorations of the causal dynamics of international conflict, but rather the identification of a certain possibly correlated variable (ie., there is a certain amount of energy that a society has, and it can be for international conflict or domestic, or that this energy can be used in building the economy, or that there is a process of jingoism, war and then weariness, which eventually leads to more war (87), etc).


Theories of war explore, in part, perceptions about the likelihood of victory, finding that many who perceive wars to be winnable and short are likely to engage. Though, when this happens from two sides, it becomes problematic, as both sides cannot win.

"A prediction of a war about to be fought is thus a crystallization of many moods and arguments, each of which has some influence on the decision to make war" (54).

Potential alliances also inform the decision to go to war.

There was previously a relationship between wars and the deaths/succession of monarchs.

Few wars are started in December and January.

The discussion of balance of power is interesting. Is it the balancing of power that makes for more peace, or is it the hegemon that makes for a peaceful environment? This is a crucial question in the study of international conflict. "The idea that an even distribution of power promotes peace has gained strength partly because it has never been accompanied by tangible evidence. Like a ghost it has not been captured and examined for pallor and pulsebeat" (112).

On the interaction of diplomats: "In peace time the relations between two diplomats are like relations between two merchants. While the merchants trade in copper or transistors, the diplomats' transactions involve a variety of other issues which they have in common. A foreign minister or diplomat is a merchant who bargains on behalf of his country. He is both buyer and seller, though he buys and sells privileges and obligations rather than commodities. The treaties he signs are simply more courteous versions of commercial contracts"
(115).

"Wars usually end when the fighting nations agree on their relative strength, and wars usually begin when fighting nations disagree on their relative strength" (122).

“One may suggest that nations, in assessing their relative strength, were influenced by seven main factors: military strength and the ability to apply that strength efficiently in the chosen zone of war; predictions of how outside nations would behave in the event of war; perceptions of internal unity and of the unity or discord of the enemy; memory or forgetfulness of the realities and sufferings of war; perceptions of prosperity and of ability to sustain, economically, the kind of war envisaged; national and ideology; and the personality and mental qualities of the leaders who weigh the evidence and decide for peace or war” (123).

Skipped book 3.