Introduction

Of all the misperceptions in international politics, perhaps the most grievous is embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, which declares that the organization "is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members." A laudatory notion, but one belied by hundreds of years of international politics and human nature itself. The fundamental ordering principle of international politics is hierarchy, not equality. And while guns and tanks are easy to count, far more can be explained by things that we cannot see, hear, or hold. It is ultimately on status, not bullets, that "the success or failure of all international policies" rests. But status is more even than the "everyday currency of international relations," because status is also the end goal for political leaders, many of whom are plainly obsessed with investing in, seizing, and defending it.

Smoking gun quotes and tales abound. In a 1952 cabinet memo that foreshadowed the war decades later, British officials argued that the Falklands must be retained, since "public admission of our inability to maintain these traditional possessions would cause a loss of prestige wholly out of proportion to the saving in money obtained." Friedrich von Holstein, a German diplomat during the 1911 Agadir Crisis, asserted that Germany must escalate the Moroccan crisis "not for material reasons alone, but even more for the sake of prestige." Later, on the eve of World War I, Russian leaders seemed wholly preoccupied with the threat to the regime's status if they should fail to meet the challenge issued by Germany. Russia refused to back down, despite the near certainty that its odds would be far better if it delayed the conflict for one or two years. Czar Nicholas explained this otherwise-puzzling decision to the Russian people by referring to the need to "protect the honor, dignity and safety of Russia and its position among the Great Powers." This is exactly what Germany wanted, since it had manipulated the situation precisely to play on the czar's concern for status: a 1913 memo from German prime minister Bethmann Hollweg stated that it would be "almost impossible for Russia, without an enormous loss of prestige ... to look on without acting during a military advance against Serbia by Austria-Hungary."

Not all tales of status in world politics involve war and peace; some cast world leaders in an almost-petty light. At his coronation in 1804, Napoléon arranged an informal meeting with the pope, who was in attendance. While both were competing for political and economic dominance over Europe, Napoléon got the upper hand by arranging his horse carriage in such a way that the pope was forced to dirty his shoes. At the Potsdam conference in 1945, the leaders of the three great powers of the day — Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — could not agree on the order they'd enter into the conference room. It was eventually decided that all three should enter simultaneously through separate doors. Vladimir Putin reportedly declined the invitation to a G8 summit at Camp David in 2012 so that he could avoid the humiliation of leaving when the leaders of other nations went to Chicago for a NATO summit to which he was not invited.

While it can be difficult to escape the image of world leaders stuck in a door frame, Three Stooges style, these anecdotes touch on concerns far more serious than they might first appear. Status is valuable, not least because it "confers tangible benefits in the form of decision-making autonomy and deference." Certainly, efforts to gain prestige may sometimes be both costly and risky, but "if they succeed, they can bring rewards all out of proportion to [those] costs by influencing the psychological environment and policies of other decision-makers." Even if status was useless as a currency (and it is not), it would still be sought after for the psychological benefits it confers on its holders. Thus, for leaders, a combination of intrinsic motivation — evolution has ensured that increased status makes us feel good — and instrumental benefits — higher status brings tangible benefits in security, wealth, and influence — makes status one of the most sought-after qualities in world politics.

So far, we are on uncontroversial, even staid ground; scholars from every corner of political science, along with their real-world counterparts in the White House (and Kremlin) agree on the critical importance of status. Yet the broad agreement that "status matters" has left us in a peculiar situation. While there is considerable agreement within the political science discipline and foreign policy community that status matters in world affairs, the depth of our understanding has lagged far behind our confidence. For all the bombastic declarations, there is too little in the way of focused research on how and when status matters. Qualitative work on this subject has been illuminating, but unable to establish patterns across time and space. Similarly, cross-national quantitative research on status and conflict has established an excellent foundation for future inquiries, but has yet to generate concrete, replicable findings on the subject.

Thus, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided by intuition, not evidence, and this has left us with a significant gap. There is still much we do not know about how status affects foreign policy behavior and international outcomes, and what we do "know" is often based on surprisingly little evidence. What we need — and what this book provides — is a systematic investigation into the ways that status concerns affect the behavior of states and leaders, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for military conflict.

This book begins that process by proposing a theory of status dissatisfaction designed to address the following questions. When does status matter: under what circumstances do concerns over relative status overshadow the myriad other concerns that decision makers face in complex international environments? How does status matter: what specific outcomes do status concerns trigger, and what strategies do states and leaders use to improve their rank? Finally, which types of status are most important? If status is standing in a hierarchy, then leaders may construct a virtually unlimited number of hierarchies based on different attributes (for example, wealth or power) and composed of different groups of competitors. Put more plainly, who forms the relevant comparison group for different types of states? This book addresses these questions while also shedding light on perennial dilemmas of foreign policy such as how status quo actors can accommodate dissatisfied powers (for example, modern-day China...