Verwandte Artikel zu How Rivalries End

9780812244984: How Rivalries End
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812244982 ISBN 13: 9780812244984
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Rivalry between nations has a long and sometimes bloody history. Not all political opposition culminates in war—the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union is one example—but in most cases competition between nations and peoples for resources and strategic advantage does lead to violence: nearly 80 percent of the wars fought since 1816 were sparked by contention between rival nations. Long-term discord is a global concern, since competing states may drag allies into their conflict or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. How Rivalries End is a study of how such rivalries take root and flourish and particularly how some dissipate over time without recourse to war.

Political scientists Karen Rasler, William R. Thompson, and Sumit Ganguly examine ten political hot spots, stretching from Egypt and Israel to the two Koreas, where crises and military confrontations have occurred over the last seven decades. Through exacting analysis of thirty-two attempts to deescalate strategic rivalries, they reveal a pattern in successful conflict resolutions: shocks that overcome foreign policy inertia; changes in perceptions of the adversary's competitiveness or threat; positive responses to conciliatory signals; and continuing effort to avoid conflict after hostilities cease. How Rivalries End significantly contributes to our understanding why protracted conflicts sometimes deescalate and even terminate without resort to war.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen Rasler and William R. Thompson, Professors of Political Science at Indiana University, have cowritten many books, including Strategic Rivalry: Space, Position, and Conflict Resolution in World Politics. Sumit Ganguly is Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations, and Director of the Center on American and Global Security, at Indiana University. He is the author, most recently, of Conflict Unending: Indo-Pakistani Tensions Since 1947.

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Chapter 1
The Problem of Rivalry Deescalation and Termination

The demise of the Cold War caught many, if not all, observers and participants alike by surprise. For much of the time between the end of World War II and the late 1980s/early 1990s, analysts and policymakers alike assumed that the East-West structural cleavage in world politics would remain unvarying. This cleavage was so paramount that it permeated and influenced world politics at all levels. In fact, for many observers every competition appeared, rightly or wrongly, as if it were a proxy struggle for the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Then, abruptly, the central cleavage no longer existed. As a consequence, analysts and decision makers alike lost their conceptual anchor for deciphering how the world worked. The "world still worked," but a basic key to unlocking the secrets of how it worked had disappeared for good.

In such periods of fundamental structural transformation, the usual response is to search for new ways to explain events and processes. Although the idea is hardly new, rivalry offers such an avenue. The history of international relations is replete with many examples of states engaged in long and intensive feuds. The Athenians and Spartans would have appreciated the idea of rivalry in the fifth century BCE. So would have the Romans and Carthaginians a few centuries later. The problem—perhaps because the phenomenon has been ubiquitous for so long—is that we have taken rivalries for granted. Therefore, the explicit study of rivalries as generic processes of conflict and cooperation is a relatively recent development. While there has been some effort at looking at nation-state dyads that have fought repeatedly prior to the end of the Cold War, there are still few clues as to why rivalries come and go. The unanticipated and abrupt end of the late twentieth century's "mother" of all rivalries—the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union—highlights this lacuna.

In this study, an expectancy theory pertaining to rivalry deescalation and termination is advanced and tested. The theory contends that rivalries end when four factors come together: shocks, expectational revision, reciprocity, and reinforcement. The examination of a single rivalry can help probe the utility of such a theory, but it can only be a starting point. More cases and more variation in outcomes are essential to testing the argument more comprehensively. Therefore, we examine ten rivalries: Egypt-Israel, Israel-Syria, Palestine-Israel, India-Pakistan, China-United States, China-Soviet Union, China-Taiwan, China-Vietnam, Thailand-Vietnam, and North Korea-South Korea.

This collection provides ample variance in rivalry behavior with four terminations, three significant deescalations, albeit not permanently, and three continuing cases. Within these ten cases, there are also thirty-three episodes of attempted deescalation with successful or failed outcomes in rivalry deescalation/termination. For instance, the Egypt-Israel rivalry generates ten subcases of attempts at rivalry deescalation; the Israel-Syria rivalry yields six; the India-Pakistan rivalry eight; and the North-South Korea rivalry three.

Moreover, some of these rivalries overlap partly as a consequence of their location in similar geopolitical neighborhoods. Hence, the interdependencies among these rivalries make it challenging to analyze them individually or as a combination or sets of cases. The concern is that a case-by-case analysis of these rivalries could overlook some theoretical breakthroughs that could be better observed when the interdependencies of these cases are taken into account via a more macro-investigation. Therefore, we propose to do both types of examination. In Chapters 3-7, we examine rivalries on a case-by-case basis. In Chapter 7, we investigate six rivalries as an ensemble within the Asian subsystem.

The Problem

Maoz and Mor (2002: 3) capture the heart of much of the motivation for rivalry analysis: "The belief in the pervasiveness of international conflict contrasts with the empirical record. A systematic survey of the last two centuries yields two seemingly striking facts. First, most states were relatively peaceful; only a small group of states was responsible for most interstate disputes and wars during this period. Second, these conflict prone states did not fight randomly—they tended to fight each other. Consequently, a small group of dyads is responsible for a disproportionately large number of conflicts and wars."

More precisely, less than 1 percent of all the dyads in the past two centuries have been responsible for nearly 80 percent of the interstate warfare (Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson 2007). While there is disagreement about how best to conceptualize these conflict prone states, scholars have begun drawing attention to the distinctive nature of rivalries and rivals—the dyads and states that tend to be most likely to become involved in international conflict.

What constitutes a strategic rivalry? Two important criteria are that states regard each other as competitive and as threatening enemies. States view other states as competitive when they are roughly in the same capability league. For instance, few scholars would argue that the United States and Mexico are able to mobilize capabilities at the same level. This disparity is due partly to the U.S. lead in resource endowment and partly to the seizure by the United States of a large proportion of Mexico's territory—which also ensured and enhanced the future lead of the United States over Mexico. Nevertheless, the United States and Mexico were once competitors of sorts, but they were not after 1848.

However, the stipulation that rivalry is restricted solely to those states that have symmetrical capabilities does not always hold. For example, the United States and Cuba have never been equal in strength, but, for a while, U.S. decision makers perceived Cuban foreign policy as highly threatening and Cuba as an enemy. Cuba reciprocated the favor. In recent years, the rivalry has atrophied, but neither side is willing to admit it.

States are viewed as enemies by the decision makers of a country if they have done physical harm in the past, or project some probability of doing such harm in the present or future. If they have already attacked or done damage to a state's interests, then the probability of inflicting more damage in the future is likely to be all the greater. If this perception is combined with competitive status, then there are four possibilities as delineated in Table 1.1. The most common situation is found in the lower right-hand cell: states that are neither especially competitive with one another nor explicitly threatening to each other. In the upper right-hand cell are states that are competitive but nonthreatening. Normally, this category would encompass states that might become political-military rivals sometime in the future or may have been rivals in the past but no longer perceive mutual threats emanating from each other. Examples of the former type are commercial rivals like Japan and the United States in the early 1990s. The latter type is exemplified by Britain and the United States or Britain and France after 1904, or France and Germany today.

Asymmetrical relationships, the lower left-hand cell, have already been discussed in the context of states that were not in the same league as their rivals but that acted temporarily as if they were. The more common situation is the genuine asymmetrical relationship in which a large and powerful state threatens a weaker neighbor and there is not a great deal that the weaker neighbor can do about it. Most recently, the Russian-Georgian relationship provides a good example. The point is that this type of structured dyad does not usually lead to a rivalry between the two...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812244982
ISBN 13 
9780812244984
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
280
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Verantwortliche Person
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