Fateful Transitions. Daniel M. Kliman
democracies reflects three interlocking factors—“Republican representation, an ideological commitment to fundamental human rights, and transnational interdependence”16—and that by treating each factor separately, Rosato fails to grasp the actual logic of the democratic peace.
Significant flaws have emerged in the analysis underlying Mansfield and Snyder’s qualification of democratic peace theory. John Oneal, Bruce Russett, and Michael Berbaum use their own statistical model to evaluate whether democratization increases the likelihood of conflict. Their findings contradict those of Mansfield and Snyder: “democratization reduces the risk of conflict and does so quickly.”17 Vipin Narang and Rebecca Nelson show that states with fragile institutions experiencing democratic transitions have almost never initiated war. They demonstrate that the relationship between incomplete democratization and military conflict in Mansfield and Snyder’s statistical model hinges entirely on a series of wars associated with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Narang and Nelson also challenge Mansfield and Snyder’s selection of case studies. Most feature countries with stable regimes or governments trending toward autocracy, not democratizing states with weak domestic institutions.18
This book intersects with the evolving democratic peace scholarship in several ways. It emphasizes the primacy of institutions over shared norms in promoting peace among democracies. The argument is that the byproducts of a state’s regime type frame outside perceptions of its rise. Decentralized authority and transparency work together to clarify intentions and create opportunities for the shaping of strategic behavior. Domestic institutions thus enable democracies to rise and reassure. The book’s focus on institutions rather than common values helps to move the democratic peace away from normative arguments grounded in Anglo-American political culture. Outside Great Britain and the United States, democratic leaders may not attribute ideological significance to the domestic arrangements of other nations. Yet the structural consequences of regime type should influence how democracies across different traditions and historical legacies relate to ascendant states.
The other contribution the book makes to the democratic peace is to extend the theory to an arena traditionally dominated by realism, an approach to international relations that downplays the impact of domestic political arrangements and prioritizes factors such as military capabilities and geography. These two factors, according to proponents of realism, should exert maximal influence over a state’s foreign policy during power transitions. Thus, the book affirms the democratic peace under conditions that should be least conducive to the theory.19
Power Transitions
Scholarship on power transitions has its origins in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the struggle between Sparta and an ascendant Athens. The starting premise of most work on power transitions is that the “relative strengths of the leading nations in world affairs never remain constant, principally because of the uneven rate of growth among different societies.”20 International relations theorist Robert Gilpin builds on this premise to conceive the arc of history as “successive rises of powerful states that have governed the system and have determined the patterns of international interactions and established the rules of the system.”21 In his account, war occurs when a declining but still dominant state confronts a rising power. Invariably, the rising power will seek to alter international rules, the global hierarchy of prestige, and the distribution of territory among states. The reason is that a disjuncture exists between the rising power’s newfound preeminence and an international system reflecting the preferences of the now declining state. This embattled nation will attempt to right the balance of power; failure to reverse the power transition results in war. If victorious, the newly dominant power, having displaced the leading state, will set about creating a new international system more favorable to its interests.22
Perhaps the most developed line of argument in the scholarship on power transitions is located in the work of A. F. K. Organski. In Organski’s view, differential rates of industrialization produce an international system where the distribution of benefits lags behind changes in the balance of power. The probability of war hinges on two variables: the magnitude of the gap between the dominant state and the rising power, and the rising power’s degree of satisfaction with the existing international order. When the dominant state retains an unbridgeable lead, the prospects for war are negligible. No matter how revisionist, a weak nation has little recourse but to accept the current international order. However, as the dominant state declines, the likelihood of war increases with the rising power’s level of dissatisfaction.23 No longer unassailable, the flagging leader begins to question its ability to defeat the rising power in future conflicts. On the flipside, the rising power becomes ever more confident that war with the dominant state will bring about an advantageous reordering of the international system.
Organksi and scholars building on his work remain divided over the sequencing of power transitions and war. Originally, Organksi argued that rising powers initiate war before overtaking the dominant state. But in a later book, Organski and Jacek Kugler contend that wars only occur after the power transition is complete.24 Kugler and Douglas Lemke assert that the probability of war peaks at the moment of parity between the declining and rising states, while Robert Powell finds that the likelihood of war rises throughout the course of power transitions.25
Disagreements over the timing of conflict point to several areas of weakness in the foundational scholarship on power transitions. The advent of nuclear weapons calls into question the merit of examining power transitions largely from the perspective of war. The costs of conflict become prohibitive when both the dominant state and the rising power possess nuclear weapons. A dissatisfied and powerful state may wish to overturn the existing international order, but in the nuclear age, radical redistribution of territory by force no longer presents a viable option.26 Another oversight in the early scholarship on power transitions is the disproportionate attention accorded to choices made by the rising state. Woosang Kim and James Morrow acknowledge this: “We do not ask the question of why dominant states do not crush nascent challengers far in advance of their rise to power. The literature, to our knowledge, has never addressed this question, so we do not.”27
Not all the early scholarship falls into one or both of these analytical traps. Stephen Rock examines how reconciliation occurs between major powers. Through several case studies, including the Anglo-American power transition, he finds that compatible geopolitical goals and a common culture and ideology promote reassurance.28 Yet his approach leaves unanswered how a state might gauge a rising power’s intentions. Randall Schweller focuses on why democracies experiencing relative decline refrain from preventive war. He suggests they will accommodate other democracies as they rise and form defensive alliances against ascendant autocracies. However, Schweller offers only a cursory explanation for these choices, observing that because of shared values and common external enemies, democracies inevitably regard relations with each other as positive sum.29 In a study on the origin of great power conflict, Dale Copeland asserts that dominant states perceiving a sharp decline in their relative standing may resort to preventive war if they confront a single rising power.30 The focus on the dominant state’s strategy is useful, but the nuclear age would appear to rule out preventive war as a tool for navigating power transitions.
In recent years, a new wave of scholarship has significantly enriched the power transitions literature. Schweller in the opening chapter of an edited volume on China’s ascendancy distills history and theory to describe potential responses to a new power’s rise. Although some of these strategies blur together in practice, the menu of policy options he articulates represents a major step forward.31 David Edelstein too focuses on how states navigate unfavorable power shifts. He asserts that a declining but still dominant state will pursue cooperation if the ambitions of a new power appear susceptible to external manipulation. In drawing attention to beliefs about a rising state’s intentions, Edelstein makes a significant contribution.32 Yet his perspective overlooks how such beliefs ultimately reflect a new power’s regime type. Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent examine a particular approach to relative decline: retrenchment. Surveying eighteen historical junctures, they find that a majority of great powers retract their strategic commitments when their position within the hierarchy of nations falls.33