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The Puzzle of Organizing Collective Action
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an attack across the 38th parallel. The aggression rattled the government of U.S. president Harry S. Truman. Mao Zedong’s communist forces had defeated the American-backed Kuomintang on the Chinese mainland only a few months earlier, in December 1949, and critics of the Truman administration had portrayed this “loss of China” as a colossal catastrophe. Weary of the claim of weakness, Truman’s advisers quickly formed a consensus: This time around, communist aggression had to be faced head on—the world would unite behind U.S. leadership. The U.S. government called the United Nations (UN) into action, and for the very first time since the creation of that global institution, UN member states were asked to mobilize military forces and uphold the principle of collective security. UN resolution 83 (1950) requested UN member states to “furnish … assistance to the Republic of Korea … to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.”1 Although many UN members voiced political support for the U.S. endeavor, their enthusiasm for sending troops to Korea was decidedly limited. U.S. goals in Korea were not theirs, and “feeding their people” had priority over “putting chains on Communists around the world.”2 Still, the U.S. government insisted that a multilateral coalition should be deployed. As U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson put it: “We are to do everything possible to encourage offers of actual military forces from other countries” to join the Korean War.3 Thus began the construction process of the Korean War coalition.
From 1950 to 1952, U.S. government officials worked tirelessly to recruit states to deploy to the Korean Peninsula. They cajoled, bargained, and intimidated. They used flattery, side payments, and coercive threats. In the end, they recruited over twenty states to join the Korean War. U.S. secretary of defense George Marshall presciently suggested in September 1950 that the process by which the Korean coalition was formed would set “a pattern for future collective military action.”4 He could hardly have been closer to the truth. Not only did U.S. techniques for the Korean War set a pattern for all future U.S.-led military coalitions, but other countries such as France, Great Britain, Australia, Russia, Nigeria, and even Saudi Arabia would adopt similar ways of persuading states to join military interventions. Moreover, the same patterns influenced coalitions constructed under the auspices of the UN, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), and most other international security organizations.
In this book, I use a social-institutional theory and evidence from over eighty multilateral military coalitions to explain these coalition-building practices. At the heart of the theory lies the belief that coalitions seldom emerge “naturally” due to common interests, norms, values, or alliance commitments. Rather, coalitions are purposefully constructed by individual states. The states that organize these efforts—pivotal states—instrumentalize preexisting institutional and social ties to bargain fellow states into a specific coalition. This process involves arguing, persuasion, and often also side payments. Bilateral and multilateral networks, which include civilian as well as military ties, constitute an invaluable resource in this process. These ties give pivotal states access to private information about the deployment preferences of potential participants. Moreover, they facilitate issue linkages and side payments and allow states to overcome problems of credible commitments. Finally, pivotal states can use common institutional contacts as cooperation brokers and can convert common institutional venues into fora for coalition negotiations.
The evidence presented in this book requires us to revisit the conventional wisdom about how collective action in the security sphere is achieved. It also generates new insights with respect to who is most likely to join a given multilateral intervention and what factors influence the strength and capacity of particular coalitions. Moreover, as the Trump administration promotes an “America First” policy and withdraws from international agreements and the U.K. negotiates Brexit, this book is an important reminder that international security cannot be delinked from more mundane forms of cooperation; multilateral military coalitions thrive or fail depending on the breadth and depth of existing social and diplomatic networks.
Why Does It Matter How Multilateral Coalitions Are Built?
The puzzle of collective mobilization lies at the root of all politics.5 Studying the construction of multilateral military coalitions trains this puzzle on the context of international security—the one area of international cooperation that has traditionally been perceived as the most difficult to sustain a cooperative equilibrium.6 How can states overcome problems of collective action in the face of human atrocities, terrorism, and the threat of weapons of mass destruction? What cooperative constellations are used to topple governments, deter aggressors, or build peace? What does international burden-sharing in this context look like between the rich and the poor or the big and the small? Who holds agency and what constitutes power in these processes that profoundly affect international security and stability? What is the role of international organizations and diplomacy? How do ideas, interests, cooption, and coercion interact? This book advances our understanding of all of these questions and adds new perspectives and insights on the central political phenomenon that is international cooperation.
Moreover, the specific techniques used to build multilateral military coalitions affect how wars are fought. On the battlefield, coalition operations are supposedly more successful than non-coalition endeavors.7 What explains this success? Multilateral coalitions enhance the perceived legitimacy of the operation and thus public support—domestically as well as internationally. They facilitate inter-agency bargaining and bargaining with third-party states over (for example) landing and basing rights. Multilateral coalitions can also have a deterrent effect on the target state and offer cover for compromises. That said, strategic or coercive coalition building can undermine war-fighting effectiveness; military forces that are not intrinsically motivated to join a given intervention have gained a reputation for a less reliable commitment. They also have a record of being discouraged by setbacks and casualties and of being less willing to follow through when a situation goes sour.8 Furthermore, the recruitment of forces for political motives can generate cumbersome command structures, introduce complex interoperability challenges, and affect coalition cohesion, agility, and discipline.9 Beyond the battlefield, such techniques can trigger social unrest, mutinies, and even coups d’état.10
Multilateral coalition building also affects the prospect for peace. Most peacekeeping deployments today are coalition endeavors, and research suggests that the stronger their participants, particularly in terms of personnel numbers and equipment, the more effective the missions are likely to be.11 In the same vein, coalition participants can influence peace negotiations, postwar stabilization, and state-building efforts. By participating in these practices, such states become local stakeholders: they contribute resources, ideas, and legitimacy. But can politically constructed peacekeeping cooperation really achieve successful and sustainable peace? Are coalition participants under these circumstances willing to give their all? Or do they restrict their involvement to whatever is needed to maintain their relationship with the pivotal state? Might they even be tempted to manipulate their engagement to extract further concessions from the pivotal state?
Finally, coalitions unleash important socialization dynamics among participating states. They create common battle experiences and shape threat perceptions, military doctrine, and strategy for years to come. Sometimes, participation in a coalition can radically change a country’s political trajectory. Turkey’s participation in the Korean War, for instance, led to its membership in NATO, and Thailand’s participation in the same war led to its alignment with the United States during the Cold War. More recently, Pakistan’s deployment to Somalia arguably influenced the U.S. decision to remove economic sanctions imposed on Pakistan as a result of the country’s nuclear program. Poland, in turn, influenced the EU Lisbon Treaty negotiations by deploying forces to Chad in 2008. These examples indicate that countries can convert their coalition deployments into a fungible, tradable power asset. Multilateral coalition building allows these states to reap political and economic benefits that other areas of international cooperation do not offer. Indeed, a large number of states no longer calibrate their military involvements to their security interests. Instead, they are willing to trade their coalition contribution for cash or a concession on another international issue.
The Limits of Existing Explanations
Most research on multilateral interventions takes coalition building as a given. Research that offers explanations of how this process unfolds takes three broad approaches; they focus on alliance ties; hegemonic order and related economic and political coercion; or interest convergence among coalition participants. This body of literature is rich, but it suffers from several important limitations.
Alliance theory proposes that alliance partners share threat perceptions, norms, and values and therefore are likely to join the same military coalitions. Moreover, the “Alliance Security Dilemma” holds that alliance partners support each other even if their interests and values do not converge.12 Rather, by joining forces, alliance partners intend to signal the credibility of their mutual commitment. Cox and O’Connor argue, for example, that such a motive explains Australia’s participation in the Iraq War coalition in 2003; Davidson makes the same argument for the involvement of Italy and the U.K. in the same conflict.13 Weitsman, in turn, suggests that “institutions of interstate violence serve as ready mechanisms for employing force” in multilateral coalitions.14 But while alliances are undoubtedly important, they do not generate coalition contributions automatically: roughly three quarters of coalitions that intervened in crises during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries involved no allied states, and of those coalitions that did involve allies, most also included non-allied partners (e.g., the Gulf War, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Libya). Theories of alliances and alignment thus cannot predict who participates in multilateral military coalitions.15
A more recent wave of research argues that hegemonic orders and related economic or political dependencies better explain coalition contributions. Powerful states coerce other countries into cooperation. Two types of coercive mechanisms are at play. In the first one, a pivotal state uses or threatens to use its superior power capabilities to get a third party to join a coalition.16 Newnham, for instance, writes that the United States “found it especially easy to influence countries” to contribute troops to the Iraq invasion that “were already dependent on U.S. aid.”17 In the second one, a pivotal state commands a third party to join an operation, and the latter chooses to comply out of “subordination” to the superior power capabilities of the pivotal state.18 The subordinate state finds the coalition demand legitimate given the existing power hierarchy. Lake indeed suggests that the latter logic was prevalent during the Iraq War. He writes: “It appears that states participated in the war as a costly signal of support for the United States and an acknowledgment of its authority.”19 There are certainly cases that support this argument, but many instances contradict the logic. Instead of obliging to coercive threats or demonstrating submissiveness, countries receive generous compensation for joining a coalition. Examples include Thailand, South Africa, and Ethiopia in the Korean War; Poland and Bulgaria in the Iraq War; and Turkey and Syria in the Gulf War—to name just a few.
The third explanation focuses on preference convergence among coalition partners irrespective of alliance concerns. States join coalitions for a range of idiosyncratic reasons. Countries may be driven by normative rationales or identity motivations, by civil-military relations, or by other types of political and economic motives such as prestige or financial reimbursements. Such motivations push coalition partners to coalesce or, as Ward and Dorussen put it, most such deployments constitute “a collective response of a coalition of countries that perceive a common interest to intervene in a particular situation.”20 Many of these accounts do acknowledge the existence of a diplomatic process of some sort coordinating coalition participation. Nevertheless, this process remains largely undertheorized. This constitutes a glaring oversight. Any type of cooperation requires organization. It entails an adjustment of policies, which does not just happen automatically. On top of this, collective action problems need to be overcome. Furthermore, the convergence of intrinsic preferences in many coalitions is doubtful. What seems more likely is that a spectrum of preference intensities exists with regard to the launch of a particular intervention. Some states feel very strongly about a situation, whereas others care less.
There are two more general problems with existing research. First, the literature on coalition building has focused almost exclusively on categorical causes (e.g., alliance concerns, normative motivations, threat perceptions, economic interests) to explain decisions to join an operation. It pays little to no attention to how multilateral military coalitions are actually built. But political processes matter: they can determine election outcomes, peace negotiations, and incarceration rates. They affect the selection of job candidates, mortgage fees, and construction permits. They can affect a particular outcome at least as much as individual preferences and actions.21 Second, the literature provides little understanding of the bargaining nature of coalition building.22 Who holds agency in coalition negotiations, and how does agency affect the outcomes? Who holds po...
