Explaining War and Peace

Case Studies and Necessary Condition Counterfactuals

Jack Levy, Gary Goertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415422321
• eBook ISBN: 9781134101399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

This edited volume focuses on the use of 'necessary condition counterfactuals' in explaining two key events in twentieth century history, the origins of the First World War and the end of the Cold War.

Containing essays by leading figures in the field, this book analyzes the causal logics of necessary and sufficient conditions, demonstrates the variety of different ways in which necessary condition counterfactuals are used to explain the causes of individual events, and identifies errors commonly made in applying this form of causal logic to individual events. It includes discussions of causal chains, contingency, critical junctures, and 'powder keg' explanations, and the role of necessary conditions in each.

Explaining War and Peace will be of great interest to students of qualitative analysis, the First World War, the Cold War, international history and international relations theory in general.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Gary Goertz and Jack S. Levy

The nose of Cleopatra; if it had been shorter all the face of the earth would have changed.

Blaise Pascal

There are ever so many ways that a world might be; and one of these many ways is the way that this world is.

David Lewis

World War I and the end of the Cold War were two of the defining events of the 20th, with enormous implications for the subsequent evolution of politics, culture, and history in individual states and in the international system as a whole. Some scholars argue that had World War I not occurred the world might have been spared the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the rise of Hitler, the outbreak of World War II, and the Cold War. Others argue that if the Cold War had continued it is quite unlikely that we would have witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and democratization in Eastern Europe, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the wars in the Balkans, the 1990–1 Persian Gulf, and the 2003 war in Iraq.

These are strong claims, and many scholars dispute them, but each involves a specific kind of causal logic, what we call a “necessary condition counterfactual.”¹ The necessary condition counterfactual takes the deceptively simple form of “If X had not occurred or been present, then Y would not have occurred.”² It is a necessary condition because we can rephrase this as “X was a necessary condition for Y.” It is a counterfactual because it expresses a “possible world” where X and Y did not actually happen (Lewis 1973).³

Counterfactuals about World War I made it into the wider press when Niall Ferguson published a controversial book (1999c) about Britain’s role in the war. Boynton describes the argument in his New Yorker profile of Ferguson:

Rather than joining the Allied war effect, he said, Britain should have maintained its neutrality and allowed the Germans to win a limited Continental war against the French and the Russians. In that event, he postulated, Germany, whose war aims in 1914 were relatively modest, would have respected the territorial integrity of Belgium, France, and Holland and settled for a German-led European federation. Had Britain “stood aside” he continued, it is likely that the century would have been spared the Bolshevik Revolution, the Second World War, and perhaps even the Holocaust. (Boynton 1999:43)

As Paul Schroeder argues in his chapter, historians continually propose and use counterfactuals, if not always explicitly. Raymond Aron says the same thing: “Tout historien, pour expliquer ce qui a été, se demande ce qui aurait pu être [All historians in order to explain what actually happened ask themselves what might have happened]” (1986 [1938]: 202). They may not all take the form of a necessary condition counterfactual, but many do.

Scholars have applied necessary condition counterfactuals to the academic study of international politics as well as to historical events themselves. For example, Schweller and Wohlforth (2000) begin their essay on the end of the Cold War with a necessary condition counterfactual about the scholarship on the war:

The end of the Cold War was a watershed for international relations theory. Before 1989, realism “ruled the theoretical waves,” and scholars were preoccupied with a longstanding debate over the explanatory power of distribution of capabilities. The events of 1989–91 pushed this debate aside and accelerated the turn toward culture, sociological, and domestic approaches to the study of world politics. If the Cold War were still raging, it is unlikely that an intellectual sea change of this scope and magnitude would have occurred. (Schweller and Wohlforth 2000:60)

Our aim in this volume is to demonstrate the various ways in which necessary condition counterfactuals are used in the logic of causal explanation, and to do so by focusing on alternative explanations of the outbreak of World War I and the end of the Cold War, two of the critical events that frame the 20th century and that continue to be debated by historians and political scientists. We do not suggest that necessary condition counterfactuals are the only kind of causal explanation scholars use for individual events, just that they are very important ones. The reader will see in the next chapter and in each of the historical chapters the diverse ways in which scholars have invoked this kind of causal explanation in debates about World War I and the end of the Cold War. Necessary condition counterfactuals can be used to defend virtually any theoretical position, from the importance of individual variables to material structures or ideational factors.

With this volume we make an important contribution to the literature on the methodology of case studies. Counterfactual claims are a core, but underappreciated, part of the case study methodology and one that is rarely systematically discussed even in the expanding literature on qualitative methods in political science. An exception is Odell, who sees the close tie between case studies and counterfactuals:

A counterfactual argument is speculation, by definition. Nevertheless it is common, though often not explicit, throughout scholarship and political debate. When an author says “a hegemonic power structure in 1945 was necessary to reopen a liberal world economy,” the statement must mean that if the power structure had not been hegemonic in 1945 – a counterfactual – a liberal world economy would not have been reopened…. A single case study that presents counterfactual thought experiments explicitly and carefully is likely to convince more readers than assertion or private intuition would. (Odell 2001:164)

We have organized this volume for scholars and students alike. We include discussions of philosophical issues and more detailed examples of how political scientists and historians frequently make causal explanations. For example, we shall see how important it is to pay attention to the language of explanations, such as the use of terms such as window of opportunity, catalyst, powder keg, and the like. Each of these expressions and their variants suggest – implicitly or more directly – a necessary condition counterfactual. We shall see that causal explanations are just as often given via metaphor as in direct (and less colorful) language. By analyzing World War I and end of the Cold War counterfactuals we hope students learn to recognize these strategies and eventually use them in their own work.

We have chosen World War I and the end of the Cold War, not only because of their substantive importance in world history, but also because scholars writing on each subject frequently use necessary condition counterfactuals, and hence a common logical structure, in their historical explanations.⁴ For example, in both cases the “window of opportunity” idea plays a central role. In both cases, we see strong arguments that individual persons (e.g., Gorbachev) or events (the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) played a necessary role.

If one looks at the debate regarding the other most important events of the 20th century, such as the Russian and Chinese Revolutions and World War II, one can find scholars using the same sort of explanatory strategies. For example, in her classic States and social revolutions (1979) Theda Skocpol proposes that a state crisis was necessary for the occurrence of social revolution in China and Russia. In response to the common belief that after World War I and the unsatisfactory Versailles treaty another major war was inevitable, some make the necessary condition counterfactual argument that without Hitler World War II would not have occurred. Mueller (1991:21; see also Mueller 1989:64–8), for example, argues that:

[H]istorical conditions in no important way required that contest, and that the major nations of Europe were not on a collision course that was likely to lead to war. That is, had Adolf Hitler gone into art rather than into politics; had he been gassed a bit more thoroughly by the British in the trenches in 1918; had he succumbed to the deadly influenza of 1919; had he, rather than the man marching next to him, been gunned down in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; had he been denied the leadership position in Germany; or had he been removed from office at almost any time before September 1939 (and possibly even before May 1940), history’s greatest war would most probably never have taken place.

We suggest that the causal explanation of major events often use the necessary condition counterfactual strategies that are described in this volume.

We have designed the volume so that the chapters provide the basic background historical information about our two events. Hence the volume can be used in a classroom setting without additional readings. Levy gives a clear and detailed analysis of the basic positions of the key players in the period just preceding World War I along with the key events and decisions that led to the war. Schroeder provides the larger historical setting within which World War I occurred and describes the mentalities and general approaches to foreign policy of the major powers of the time. Brooks and Wohlforth give a good survey of the problems facing the USSR in the 1980s and 1990s, emphasizing the serious economic, military, technological problems confronting the Soviet Union. English in his chapter focuses more on the players, e.g., Gorbachev, the ideas and the policy options that key decision-makers used.

To make this volume more useful in a teaching setting we have constructed a webasite. This site provides a series of exercises using World War I and the end of the Cold War along with other important international events to help hone one’s skills in seeing how other scholars have used the causal explanations that we cover here.⁵ In almost all cases we give references to published works that are available electronically via library subscription (e.g., JSTOR). We will continue to add new exercises to our site as we find them: we also encourage readers to submit examples to us for incorporation.

Our focus in this anthology is on how scholars often use a certain family of causal explanations in their analyses of historical events, such as World War I and the end of the Cold War. The next chapter by Goertz and Levy serves as a survey of the various ways necessary condition counterfactuals appear in the literature on the causes of World War I and the end of the Cold War. We do not pretend to cover exhaustively these massive debates, but we have chosen prominent scholars whose work illustrates the various aspects of our central theme. While the idea of a necessary condition is simple, they show that there are extensive ramifications for research design, theory, and causal explanations.

Although necessary condition counterfactuals are the central focus of this volume, not all of the contributors agree that the concept is a useful one. In particular, Brooks and Wohlforth (this volume, chapter 9) argue that probabilistic approaches to explanation and causation are more useful. Thompson worries that an emphasis on necessary and sufficient condition causation will detract from the goal of evaluating the relative causal weights of different factors (see Goertz and Starr 2003 for a discussion of these two issues). So while Goertz and Levy show that the necessary condition explanatory strategy is widespread, this does not necessarily mean that it is without problems or that other alternative strategies do not exist.

Lebow in his provocative chapter illustrates most of the themes discussed by Goertz and Levy in their overview chapter. In particular, his claim about the central importance of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in the causes of World War I illustrates a very important issue in the analysis of events: what is the role of idiosyncratic events or individual people in causal explanations? The same issue arises in the debate about the end of the Cold War: how much importance should one attribute to Gorbachev and his ideas? English in his chapter makes a strong case for the importance of ideas and individuals in the end of the Cold War.

Not surprisingly, proponents of structural arguments dispute the significance of individuals. As Brooks and Wohlforth stress (this volume, chapter 9), one can downplay the importance of individuals by arguing that ideas, people, and particular events are endogenously produced by larger structural factors. They argue that the severity of material constraints almost inevitably push...

Table of contents

• Contemporary Security Studies
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Causal explanation, necessary conditions, and case studies
• Chapter 3 The role of necessary conditions in the outbreak of World War I
• Chapter 4 Contingency, catalysts and nonlinear change: the origins of World War I
• Chapter 5 Powderkegs, sparks and World War I
• Chapter 6 Necessary conditions and World War I as an unavoidable war
• Chapter 7 Power, globalization, and the end of the Cold War: reevaluating a landmark case for ideas
• Chapter 8 Perestroika without politics: how realism misunderstands the Cold War’s end
• Chapter 9 New versus old thinking in qualitative research
• Chapter 10 The elaboration model and necessary causes
• Appendix: Classroom exercises and website
• References
• Index