TRADITIONS OF EXPLANATION AND THE IDEA OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

THIS BOOK SEEKS to determine whether divergent uses of criteria have slowed movement toward consensus explanations in security studies. The central question of this study is whether to accept the hypothesis H1, that progress in security studies has been slowed because different scholars use of different notions of explanation or different criteria of explanatory superiority. The study also considers a directly related second hypothesis, H2, that if progress occurs, then contending explanatory schools use similar criteria.

In the course of finding answers, it will be necessary to see what exactly security studies authors are in fact trying to do when they offer explanations that are better than their rivals, and thus constitute "progress" over them. To succeed in these tasks, it is necessary to understand what international relations (IR) authors mean by the terms progress and explanation. This chapter offers a brief sketch of some of the important ideas about how progress is understood by some of the major philosophers of science in the past century, and explanation is the subject of the next chapter. This chapter begins the effort of answering the central question of why progress has been so slow by considering arguments for, and criticisms of, the effort to turn IR into a science. To understand the explanatory goals of these efforts, we must consider the overall goals and methods advocated by proponents and critics of the behavioral- quantitative approach to IR.

1. DEVELOPMENT OF IR THEORY AND APPROPRIATE METHODS

People in many cultures have been studying IR for centuries. Some claim to have discovered persistent patterns and even social science laws. Around 430 BCE Sun Tzu developed a set of principles based on observations of multiple cases, from which he derived regularities in the decisions of military leaders. He identified which politico-military methods were successful and which were not, and he then concluded which among them should be adopted. He confidently announced that whoever followed his strategic principles would be victorious, and whoever failed to heed them would be vanquished. Over the centuries, studies of IR have come to include many different topics and questions—examples include the relationship between trade and national wealth; the nature, effectiveness, and possibilities of international law; and the effects of different forms and structures of international institutions. But throughout the centuries, center stage has gone to concerns about the causes and consequences of war, and to identifying the factors that lead to victory once war has begun.

As the behavioral movement in the social sciences gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, IR scholars collaborated to construct what has become an enormous database, the well-known Correlates of War. As its name indicates, the project focuses on factors that theorists have associated, rightly or wrongly, with the onset of war. The core mission of the project has been to gain a greater understanding of war. While some expected that the quantitative study of IR would eventually dominate the entire field, many other approaches have persisted, including philosophical and legal studies. More recently, IR scholars have applied rational choice and game theory as they try to explain the actions of states.

No single method or methodology has come to dominate the field. Today there are frequent pleas for "methodological pluralism." Many who write on the subject of methods and make explicit recommendations are almost universally in favor of pluralism; they oppose the goal of finding the one ideal, all-purpose approach that alone has the potential to add to our knowledge and understanding of IR. The present study seeks to identify what sort of concept of explanation is used in security studies by examining the efforts to explain nuclear proliferation, alliance formation, and the relationship between democracy and peace.

2. THREE CENTRAL ISSUES IN SECURITY STUDIES

The study of IR has historically focused on questions of war, peace, and security. The contemporary field of security studies has a number of "most studied" issues, one of which is the presence of nuclear weapons. Two specific questions about nuclear arms have gained the most attention. The first concerns causes—why do states become nuclear weapons states?—and is primarily explanatory. The second concerns consequences—how will stability and warfare be affected if more states acquire nuclear weapons?—and is principally about predictions. The emphasis of this book on questions of explanation leads us to focus on the first. The earliest states to acquire nuclear weapons, the United States and Soviet Union in the 1940s, and the United Kingdom, France, and China in the 1950s and early 1960s, were largely seen as doing so for security reasons, which realist theories were able to explain. However, as more states pursued nuclear weapons and a new factor entered the calculations of states, namely the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a wider-ranging debate emerged on why various additional states would want to build nuclear weapons and why various others would resist. Even some of the reasons that the first five nuclear weapons states chose to "go nuclear" came to be reexamined. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical background of the contemporary debate and surveys the most influential works of the past several decades.

Another major issue that has been studied for centuries, and is still a major focus of debate, is how and why alliances form as they do. The most common explanations over the centuries have been tied to the realist concept of the balance of power. There are several versions of so-called balance-of-power theory. However, realist views have been challenged by liberals and constructivists, who deny that states, intentionally or unintentionally, seek power balances. In recent decades traditional balance-of-power explanations have also been challenged by arguments that states seek to balance in other ways that do not directly involve the balancing of power or capabilities. Chapter 4 examines the history of the debate and the current state of movement toward consensus on at least certain empirical claims.

A third important area that has risen in prominence in the past quarter century is sometimes called democratic peace (DP) studies. The key claim at issue here is that democracies are somehow different from other sorts of states, and they are most especially different in the way they deal with one another. Realists of course claim that power arrangements determine the stability or instability of international systems and that the...