Great Powers and International Hierarchy

Daniel McCormack

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319939759
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319939766
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Hierarchical relationships—rules that structure both international and domestic politics—are pervasive. Yet we know little about how these relationships are constructed, maintained, and dismantled. This book fills this lacuna through a two-pronged research approach: first, it discusses how great power negotiations over international political settlements both respond to domestic politics within weak states and structure the specific forms that hierarchy takes. Second, it deduces three sets of hypotheses about hierarchy maintenance, construction, and collapse during the post-war era. By offering a coherent theoretical model of hierarchical politics within weaker states, the author is able to answer a number of important questions, including: Why does the United States often ally with autocratic states even though its most enduring relationships are with democracies? Why do autocratic hierarchical relationships require interstate coercion? Why do some hierarchies end violently and otherspeacefully? Why does hierarchical competition sometimes lead to interstate conflict and sometimes to civil conflict?

© The Author(s) 2019

Daniel McCormackGreat Powers and International Hierarchyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93976-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Daniel McCormack¹

(1)

Austin, TX, USA

Daniel McCormack

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

By 1953, a new equilibrium had begun to emerge on the European sub continent. The end of World War II had left Germany a defeated and burned-out shell, divided and occupied by the wartime Allies. The question of how to undo this division weighed heavily on Allied leadership. None could unilaterally withdraw their troops without ceding Europe’s industrial heartland to the other; neither could they coordinate on withdrawal and leave Germany to rearm again. While a few years earlier there had seemed to be some possibility of German reunification, the Soviets’ violent suppression of political protest in East Germany increasingly disabused Washington of the idea that reunification on Western terms would ever be attainable. In any case, the death of Joseph Stalin in March of that year had scuttled his plan for talks with the West and unsettled the remaining Soviet leadership, who were now focused on solidifying rule at home. Around the same time, French concerns about abandonment by the Americans were salved by a promise to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Western zone. This evolving partition helped, for a time, to ease U.S.-Soviet tensions. As Kissinger writes, by this point a summit was possible “not to settle the Cold War, but precisely because [it] would avoid all the fundamental issues.”¹ With international tensions over Germany temporarily quieted, the Western powers turned their gaze to Germany’s domestic politics.

Even with the Soviet threat sidelined, the subordination of WestGermany—or the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)—to the Western alliance was far from a given. The Americans viewed Kurt Schumacher, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), with great suspicion, believing the SPD to be a Soviet stalking horse that would pave the way for German consolidation under the aegis of Moscow. The former Secretary of State Dean Acheson had told Schumacher on the eve of the previous FRG election that “an attempt by the SPD to curry favor with the voters...by baiting the occupation would be given short shrift.”² The American ambassador to the FRG, James Conant, wrote to incoming U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that “the German reaction to the U.S. is at the present heavily conditioned by the forthcoming election...The [SPD] leaders cannot help regretting the obvious fact that the U.S. Government had taken actions which help [their opponent Konrad Adenauer’s] campaign.”³ What accounted for the United States’ deep involvement in West German domestic politics? Why did the U.S. feel the need to exert what amounted to an effective veto over German elections?

Neutering German military power had been the sine qua non for European peace since the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871. Many scholars have since looked to European integration after World War II as the ultimate solution to this recurrent geopolitical dilemma. In this telling, the answer to the problem of German militarization was a network of international institutions that bound Germany to the fate of its neighbors. By raising the cost of conflict through economic interdependence, Dulles wrote, Germany “could not make war again even if it wanted to.”⁴ But this begged a prior question: Would Germany want to fight again? West German participation in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and eventually the European Community was only the external manifestation of a deeper change. During the late 1940s and 1950s, the United States, along with its Western European allies, had forcibly reordered the boundaries of German domestic politics. The creation of the ECSC in 1951 was the linchpin of the Western allies’ plan to sideline Schumacher’s SPD in the upcoming elections. Konrad Adenaeur, of the Christian Democratic Union, embraced the French proposal of the ECSC as a way to “convince the population that Schumacher’s aims could be accomplished only through his [Adenauer’s] policies of cooperation with the Western powers,” rather than through Schumacher’s nationalist appeals.⁵ In the final ledger, the SPD would not form a government until the mid-1960s, after the political and territorial settlement structuring the Cold War had been hammered out and the Berlin Wall built. This emphasis on the domestic politics of Germany and the extent to which they were shaped by the Western alliance represent somewhat of a reversal of the narrative outlined above: Western institutions worked not by preventing a nationalist Germany from pursuing its interests; instead, they prevented nationalist interests from gaining political power in the first place. This specific historiographical debate surrounding early Cold War Germany is actually representative of a larger problem that troubles contemporary theories of international relations. The ability of international actors to reshape political interests within other states is not well understood by international relations scholars. This book offers an important corrective to this oversight.

German politics during the Cold War were characterized by international hierarchy. By this, I simply mean that political behavior within West and East Germany depended heavily on U.S. and Soviet preferences. On its own, this statement is probably uncontroversial. Lake argues that states throughout Western Europe, in their monetary arrangements and hosting of U.S. military bases, were highly “subordinate” to the United States throughout the Cold War and indeed remained so through the end of the century.⁶ What has remained relatively unappreciated, however, is the effect that these hierarchical relationships have on domestic politics within these subordinate states. As illustrated above, the reshaping of domestic politics in the FRG was a prerequisite for the successful execution of the United States’ goals in Europe during the Cold War. An analysis of hierarchy that does not pay attention to domestic politics within subordinate states is missing much of the story.

Hierarchy, this book argues, is one of the fundamental organizing principles of politics. Just as West German nationalist fervor during the Cold War was cooled in the shadow of the United States, many domestic political arrangements throughout the globe are determined by great power influence. Inattention to this fact has left political scientists unable to accurately explain behavioral patterns of politics in two ways. First, international relations theorists have been unable to reconcile systemic theoretical models that give pride of place to great powers with mid-level theorizing that treats states as like units differentiated only by their observable capabilities. Recently, theoretical models of politics have begun to provide a way to think about interstate relations outside of the realm of great power politics. According to the logic forwarded in these and many other works, the differences between “great powers” and smaller, weaker states can be fully attributed to their differing scores on key parameters of interest, for example, military power,⁷ democracy,⁸ leader security,⁹ or crisis resolve.¹⁰ But in fact great powers engage in qualitatively different types of behavior than weaker states. Great powers are the states that, in the aftermath of interstate conflict, write the terms of peace settlements that structure political behavior in the postwar years.¹¹ Most importantly, as Braumoeller wites, “the structure of the system is overwhelmingly influenced by the actions of a small number of states that conventially go by the title of either Great Powers, or, during the Cold War, superpowers.”¹² By specifying the different roles that states play in international politics, a hierarchical approach to international politics provides an intuitive way to reconcile obvious differences in state capabilities and behavior. Second, comparative politics scholars for the most part ignore the influence of great powers in shaping political outcomes within smaller states. Even those who do take these asymmetric relationships into account do not generally specify the conditions under which great power influence is decisive. By contrast, the theory presented in this book provides clear expectations over the conditions under which hierarchy is most likely to provide explanatory leverage. There is, then, a real and persistent crevasse in political knowledge created by the intellectual division between international and comparative politics scholars that a hierarchical theory of politics can bridge.

An account of hierarchy and its effect on domestic politics allows for a reformulation of some of the core tenets of received international relations theory. Scholars have for many years assumed that states are the primary actors in international politics, and that all states are fundamentally alike. In one of the most famous assertions of this claim, Waltz wrote that “[t]o call states ‘like units’ is to say...that states are sovereign....To say that a state is sovereign means that it decides for itself how it will cope with its internal and external problems.”¹³ But it is manifestly not true that all states are alike in their ability to decide for themselves. Krasner argues that the principles leading to a state’s recognition as such are not logically tied to its ability to operate free from “external authority or control.”¹⁴ Because domestic political arrangements are often subject to high levels of external influence or even veto power, as in the German example above, they cannot be studied independent of great power politics. To the extent that states displayed differences, Waltz argued, “the differences are of capability, not of function. States perform or try to perform tasks, most of which are common to all of them...Each state has its agencies for making, executing, and interpreting laws and regulations, for raising revenues, and for defending itself.”¹⁵ But for a great many states, these agencies are explicit functions of other states’ behavior. The defense of Japan, for instance, has rested on its defense treaty with the United States throughout the post-World War II period—so much so, in fact, that it for many years altogether abandoned the “common task” of defending itself. As for raising revenues, many small states throughout the Cold War depended heavily on foreign aid transfers from either the United States or the Soviet Union. The function of these defense or revenue institutions is simply different in great powers than it is in small states—the former states provide defense and revenues, and the latter receive them. An account of international hierarchy therefore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Structural Analogies in International Relations
• 3. Hierarchy Throughout History
• 4. The Shifting Territorial Logic of Hierarchy
• 5. Maintaining Hierarchy
• 6. Extending Hierarchy
• 7. Eclipsing Hierarchy
• 8. Conclusion: Hierarchy and Political Violence in the International System
• Back Matter