Peacemaking from Above, Peace from Below

Ending Conflict between Regional Rivals

Norrin M. Ripsman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781501704062
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Peacemaking from Above, Peace from Below, Norrin M. Ripsman explains how regional rivals make peace and how outside actors can encourage regional peacemaking. Through a qualitative empirical analysis of all the regional rivalries that terminated in peace treaties in the twentieth century—including detailed case studies of the Franco-German, Egyptian-Israeli, and Israeli-Jordanian peace settlements—Ripsman concludes that efforts to encourage peacemaking that focus on changing the attitudes of the rival societies or democratizing the rival polities to enable societal input into security policy are unlikely to achieve peace.Prior to a peace treaty, he finds, peacemaking is driven by states, often against intense societal opposition, for geostrategic reasons or to preserve domestic power. After a formal treaty has been concluded, the stability of peace depends on societal buy-in through mechanisms such as bilateral economic interdependence, democratization of former rivals, cooperative regional institutions, and transfers of population or territory. Society is largely irrelevant to the first stage but is critical to the second. He draws from this analysis a lesson for contemporary policy. Western governments and international organizations have invested heavily in efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian and Indo-Pakistani peace by promoting democratic values, economic exchanges, and cultural contacts between the opponents. Such attempts to foster peace are likely to waste resources until such time as formal peace treaties are concluded between longtime adversaries.

CHAPTER 1

Regional Stabilization in International Relations Theory

Regional conflicts are typically the most intractable of the enduring rivalries.1 Geographical proximity, which—barring the defeat of one of the parties—ensures that the rivals will continue to interact with each other and will likely be able to project power against each other’s core interests, heightens the intensity of the conflict. Consequently, while geographical distance makes recurring conflict between Great Britain and Argentina unlikely, making the Falklands War a unique event, the barriers to war between neighboring Israel and Syria or India and Pakistan are much lower. Furthermore, whereas great power rivalries often involve clashes over interests but not core territory, regional rivalries frequently feature competition over scarce territory that heightens the zero-sum nature of these conflicts. Thus, competition between Great Britain and Russia over colonial territories in the nineteenth century never reached the same degree of hostility as the conflict between France and Germany over the disputed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. Similarly, the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States never escalated to a hot war, not only because of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, but also because the superpowers were located a vast distance from each other and clashed only over territory, such as Cuba, Berlin, or Korea, that was not part of their core national land; in contrast, India and Pakistan waged multiple wars over Kashmir, whose disputed status conspires against efforts to resolve bilateral tensions.

Furthermore, regional rivalries often are exacerbated by incompatible ideological visions for the region or competing aspirations for regional hegemony. This is especially the case when at least one of the rivals is a revolutionary power.2 Under these circumstances, the consequences of defeat involve compromising deeply cherished ideological or religious values, which increases the stakes exponentially. In this manner, the Shiite revolution in Iran in 1979 intensified the rivalry between Iran and Iraq, as Ayatollah Khomeini’s ambition to export Shia Islam throughout the region constituted a mortal peril for the secular Sunni Ba’athist regime in Iraq, transforming the territorial conflict over access to the Persian Gulf into something much more intense.3 When the states are competing for regional hegemony, such as Brazil and Argentina throughout much of the twentieth century, that similarly increases the stakes of the rivalry.4

Because of the nationalist, ideological, and religious nature of many of these conflicts, regional rivalries frequently filter down to the societal level and are deeply personal with high levels of antagonism between the peoples.5 This problem intensifies as the rivalries persist, especially when they produce great death tolls on the respective populations. Thus, after three bloody wars in seventy-five years, the Franco-German rivalry grew so hostile that the majority of the French public in 1950 did not believe that France should have cordial diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany.6 In a similar vein, after decades of intractable Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East, more than two-thirds of the Palestinian public in November 2000 approved of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.7 Furthermore, because leaders need to enlist public sympathy in order to mobilize societal resources—including manpower, tax revenue, and industrial production—to prosecute wars and maintain a defense posture in peacetime sufficient to deter rival gains, they often stoke public hatred of the adversary.8

Given the bitterness of entrenched regional rivalries, conflict resolution is an enormously difficult undertaking. In this chapter, I will consider the approaches to regional conflict resolution suggested by the international relations literature, with a particular emphasis on the levels of analysis at which they operate—namely, whether they expect regional peacemaking to begin with changes in state behavior or with changes in societal attitudes.

Contending Theoretical Approaches to Regional Stabilization

Are societies the engines of regional peacemaking, or are they obstacles to international reconciliation? On the one hand, we might expect peacemaking to require attitudinal change in the rival societies that overcomes entrenched mutual hatred and compels the belligerent states to resolve the bilateral conflict. If so, the way to foster peace would be to engage key societal elites, interest groups, and the public at large over time to generate internal pressure on the states to terminate the conflict. On the other hand, we might expect that societal hatred between enemy states might be so intense, especially if it has been nourished over generations, that it might stand in the way of peacemaking, as leaders who are willing to compromise with the adversary may be treated as traitors. Consequently, it might require forward-thinking state leaders to take the first steps toward peacemaking, perhaps outside the public purview, and bring society on board afterward. In that case, the path toward peace for belligerent states and interested third parties would lie in contacts between rival governments, bypassing societal actors. To foster peacemaking, therefore, the key would be to create incentives for the states to negotiate with each other in good faith even if domestic attitudes are recalcitrant.

Which of these two approaches is the more useful model of peacemaking between regional rivals? In other words, borrowing from I. William Zartman, does peacemaking require dialogue between hostile societies or negotiations between rival states?9 This section explores the theoretical underpinnings of these two distinct causal paths in international relations theory, which itself has confronted this levels-of-analysis problem—that is, whether foreign policy choices and international outcomes are the products of external pressures, domestic factors, or some combination of the two—for decades.10

bottom-up approaches

Bottom-up approaches to peacemaking seek to make the societies of the belligerent states the engines of conflict resolution, in the conviction that they can rein in their governments and restrain conflict if they are motivated to do so. To this end, they consist of strategies to create vested interests in the rival societies that favor compromise and conflict resolution, to foster societal norms that eschew conflict, to promote political institutions that facilitate societal control over government, and to resolve underlying societal conflicts by diffusing ethnonationalist grievances. In this regard, they are inspired by liberal theories of cooperation that emphasize interests and institutions and by constructivist theories that highlight the role of societal norms, among others. This section explores four theories that help inform this bottom-up societal approach to regional peacemaking: democratic peace theory, commercial liberalism, constructivist institutionalism, and Benjamin Miller’s state-to-nation balance theory.

Democratic Institutions and Norms. An implication of democratic peace theory is that changes to domestic political institutions may inspire regional cooperation. The theory posits that democratic states are unlikely to wage war against other democracies for both institutional and normative reasons.11 Democratic political institutions allow public scrutiny of and input into decisions of war and peace. Because the people, rather than their leaders, bear the costs of war—in terms of higher taxes to fund the war effort, service in the national military, and privations such as wartime rationing—they are unwilling to accept those costs lightly and, consequently, are reluctant to use force against other democracies, which they perceive both as more legitimate than nondemocracies and as less likely to use force against them. They will, consequently, discourage their governments from waging war against other democracies. Moreover, by requiring leaders to mobilize public and legislative support for war, these institutions slow down the resort to force and create time for the peaceful resolution of disputes. Whereas nondemocracies may abuse this inflexibility to achieve a military advantage through extra preparations or striking first, other democratic states are more likely to use this extra time to resolve the conflict without war.12

Democratic states also share political norms encouraging peaceful relations with each other. They are founded on the premise that individuals ought to be free to pursue their self-interests without undue coercion. They consequently reject coercion as a legitimate means of securing consent from other states that allow their people to manifest their will freely (i.e., other democracies). Furthermore, their shared liberal ideology leads democracies to view each other as compatible rather than as rivals. Thus, they consciously refrain from violent conflict with each other.13

Democratic peace theory suggests, then, that former rivals should be able to achieve stability and cooperation if they both democratize.14 Outside actors, such as great powers and international institutions, could best promote regional peacemaking by helping to spread democracy throughout the region, making war less likely between regional participants. Using this logic, President Bill Clinton pursued a national security strategy of enlargement after the Cold War to expand the global zone of peace by spreading democracy to states beyond the democracy-rich regions of North America, Western Europe, and Oceania.15

To test whether the logic of public pressure within democracies motivated peacemaking, I address the following sequence of questions in my detailed case studies. First, were both rivals democracies, or did they at least allow significant public input into the policy process at the time of the treaty? To investigate this, I begin by consulting the Polity IV database 0–10 “democracy” score, treating any state with values of 8 or higher as democratic.16 For states with lower scores, I investigate the nature of the regime and the conduct of foreign policy making within it to make a qualitative judgment about the degree to which the public was consulted on matters of war and peace. Second, I examine whether public opinion in both states favored making peace and expressed willingness to make concessions to reach an agreement. Because public opinion polls are not available for all the states I examine in this book, nor for all time periods, and because the questions asked where they are available are not consistent either within or across cases, I do not evaluate public attitudes with a clear-cut quantitative threshold. Instead, I use whatever public opinion polls exist and are available, together with other indicators of public attitudes—such as protests against the treaty and secondary accounts of public attitudes—to reach a qualitative judgment of the public mood. Third, I explore whether the publics of both states actually compelled their governments to negotiate peace. This I determine with causal analyses of the states’ decisions to make peace. To test whether democratic institutions were used to stabilize the treaty after it was signed, I use the Polity IV democracy scale to determine whether either of the parties democratized in the postsettlement era, as well as indicators of public attitudes toward the former enemy similar to those described above.

Economic Incentives. Commercial liberals suggest an economic path to stabilizing regional conflicts. They argue that high levels of trade and investment between states engender economic interdependence between them. Heavily interdependent states are less likely to resort to force to resolve disputes for two reasons.17 First, when interdependence is high, states face considerable opportunity costs associated with the use force in terms of trade and investment forgone. After all, they can expect economic relations between belligerents to be drastically curtailed, while other interested states and international investors may reduce their economic exposure to the conflict zone.18 Second, when trade and investment flow freely across national borders, trade becomes a more efficient means of securing resources from a territory than conquest, which involves the costs of mobilization, war itself, and occupation afterward. Under these circumstances, states will have fewer reasons to use force. The losses associated with war would accrue to business interests in interdependent countries that are most vulnerable to the economic costs of war, which, in turn, makes them pressure their governments for restraint. Therefore, it stands to reason that extending economic relations between military rivals can create a vested transnational interest group that will pressure both sides to resolve their conflicts peacefully.19 In this regard, a significant component of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Mercado Commun del Cono del Sur (Mercosur) regional trade agreements was the expectation that the economic ties they would engender would help keep the peace among regional members.20

Moreover, even the prospects of gains should generate pressures for settlement. After all, if business elites in belligerent countries were to expect significant economic gains as a result of expanded trade and investment opportunities following a peace treaty, they would be motivated to lobby their governments to make peace.21 It follows, therefore, that third parties could promote regional peacemaking by fostering economic ties between regional rivals, as well as by promising considerable investment in the region as a reward for the signature of a peace treaty.22

It is important to note, though, that for economic considerations to be considered “bottom-up” mechanisms, they must filter through the business sector of society. Therefore, not all economic considerations are societal. As we shall see, if the prospect of economic payoffs...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Top-Down Peacemaking, Bottom-Up Peace
• 1. Regional Stabilization in International Relations Theory
• 2. Franco-German Peacemaking after World War II
• 3. The Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty
• 4. The Israeli-Jordanian Treaty
• 5. Other Twentieth-Century Cases
• Peacemaking between Regional Rivals: Theoretical and Policy Implications
• Notes
• Index