Entangling’ and ‘Disentangling’ Alliances: Military Cooperation in the Age of Industrial Modernity

• In Event: Shadow of Violence

Abstract

It is common for researchers to invoke interdependence by way of explaining the emergence of institutions of arbitrary complexity and scope in terms of the national interests of self-regarding states. But what, exactly, are the causal mechanisms of interdependence? How can we measure it? How can we predict strategic choices from observed patterns of interdependence? Most crucially, what limits to incentive-compatible cooperation are internal to the logic of interdependence? Modern institutional theorists have provided plausible answers to these questions for issue-areas characterized by transactional interdependence. In the domain of violence interdependence, however, these questions have not yet received comparably thorough answers. Seminal works by leading scholars of world order, such as Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry, articulate a parametric conception of violence interdependence. Their contributions mark the beginning of a new and promising research agenda in political science, offering valuable heuristics establishing, at the minimum, the contingency and historicity of emergent forms of international order. But they do not offer a strategic model of violence interdependence suitable for granular analysis of historical changes in observed patterns of violence cooperation. In other words, they stand at the opening of a promising research agenda whose trajectory remains uncharted.

This paper takes one step forward along that trajectory. In the paper, I propose a strategic model of violence interdependence that explains variability in states’ preferences for rule-governed relations of violence. (By “rule-governed relations of violence”, I mean to encompass all instances of violence cooperation organized around mutually acknowledged rules, norms, and principles intended to limit the use of violence in positional disputes, potentially to the point of total prohibition, and empower actors to cooperatively enforce their common peace against renegades.) I argue that self-regarding states construct rule-governed relations of violence to regulate systemic risk induced by reliance on alliances for the improvement of their bargaining postures in positional disputes. Using the mathematical tools of network analysis and fitness analysis, and drawing on the familiar ATOP data and the COW National Capability and Militarized Disputes data, I am able to quantify the patterns of sensitivity and vulnerability to systemic risk induced by reliance on alliances through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I am further able to show that complementarities in the national vulnerabilities of prospective member-states to systemic risk account for the functional form and membership of emergent rule-governed relations of violence.

These results have substantial implications for critical issues in the theory of International Relations and practice of national security policymaking as well as subsidiary problems in historical sociology, political philosophy, and international ethics. Most valuably, they help to illuminate and explain the ways in which industrial modernity has fundamentally transformed optimal strategic uses of violence in positional disputes under anarchy. While systemic risk is, in all probability, a recurrent feature of interstate relations, it was only over the course of the past two centuries that it had begun prompting rival states, even the great powers, to cooperatively limit recourse to alliances and regulate the propagation of systemic risk through rule-governed relations of violence. As I explain in great detail, two factors necessitated that change: first, the international system repeatedly wavered about the criticality point of phase transition in its risk-connectedness through the nineteenth century – in effect, oscillating between states of near-universal risk-connectedness and merely local risk-connectedness – until, in the early years of the Cold War, it finally passed that point decisively, reaching, in the twenty-first century, universal risk-connectedness; and, second, the ability of the great powers to unilaterally bear the cost of systemic risk – at first, only of the European world-empires but, later, of the United States and Soviet Union, too – diminished substantially over the course of the twentieth century. This configuration of environmental pressures was without precedent in recorded history and, predictably, it prompted unprecedented accommodations in strategic uses of violence. Finally, the shortcomings and failures of some of the created rule-governed relations of violence can also be partially accounted for by variability in these environmental pressures.

In addition to these theoretical and policy contributions, the paper also makes an important methodological contribution by developing a broad suite of metrics which can be used in cognate research agendas for the study of the distribution and propagation of systemic risk in violence relations.

Author

• Anatoly Levshin, Princeton University