Inadvertent Expansion in World Politics

• In Event: New Research on Territorial Conquest, Expansion, and Empire

Abstract

Why do great powers adopt expansionist foreign policies? Despite its great variety, much of the existing literature shares a common characteristic: that of seeing expansion as the centrally-driven and strategic extension of the state’s territorial domain. However, a number of important historical instances of great power expansion do not comport with these expectations, showing expansion to be far more peripherally-driven and far less strategic than they would expect. In this paper, I argue that there is an important distinction to be made between forms of expansion whose process is more centralized and strategic, and those that are more peripheral and inadvertent, and I lay out a theory to explain when we should expect one form over the other. I argue that it is the amount of security afforded by the state’s frontiers that explains this divergence. States facing frontiers where security is scarce delegate less authority to peripheral actors, reducing the risk of principal-agent problems, and therefore when they expand, they tend to do so in a more centralized, strategic way. States facing frontiers where security is abundant delegate more authority to peripheral actors, increasing the risk of principal-agent problems, and thus often expand in a peripherally-driven, inadvertent manner--opportunistically, even reluctantly, stepping through “windows of opportunity” opened up by these peripheral agents. These arguments will be illustrated with a pair of comparative-historical case studies of great power expansion.

Author

• Nicholas Anderson, Yale University