Myths of Empire

Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)

Jack L. Snyder

• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468599
• Argomento: Politics & International Relations
• Categoria: National Security

Overextension is the common pitfall of empires. Why does it occur? What are the forces that cause the great powers of the industrial era to pursue aggressive foreign policies? Jack Snyder identifies recurrent myths of empire, describes the varieties of overextension to which they lead, and criticizes the traditional explanations offered by historians and political scientists.He tests three competing theories—realism, misperception, and domestic coalition politics—against five detailed case studies: early twentieth-century Germany, Japan in the interwar period, Great Britain in the Victorian era, the Soviet Union after World War II, and the United States during the Cold War. The resulting insights run counter to much that has been written about these apparently familiar instances of empire building.

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The Myth of Security through Expansion

Great powers in the industrial age have shown a striking proclivity for self-inflicted wounds. Highly advanced societies with a great deal to lose have sacrificed their blood and treasure, sometimes risking the survival of their states, as a consequence of their overly aggressive foreign policiés. Germany and Japan proved so self-destructive in the first half of this century that they ended up in receivership. Most other great powers, including the United States and the Soviet Union, have exhibited similar tendencies from time to time, but they were better able to learn from the adverse reactions their aggressive behavior provoked.1

In this book I try to explain why overexpansion has been so common among the great powers, and also why some states have been particularly inclined toward extreme overexpansion. I offer a two-step explanation, stressing the role of strategic concepts and their function as ideologies in domestic politics.

Counterproductive aggressive policies are caused most directly by the idea that the state’s security can be safeguarded only through expansion. This idea, the central myth of empire, was the major force propelling every case of overexpansion by the industrialized great powers. In the more egregious cases, the belief in security through expansion persisted tenaciously despite overwhelming evidence that aggressive policies were actually undermining the state’s security.

The myth of security through expansion originated in each case as a justification for the policies of domestic political coalitions formed among groups having parochial interests in imperial expansion, military preparations, or economic autarky. These groups, including economic sectors and state bureaucracies, logrolled their various imperialist or military interests, using arguments about security through expansion to justify their self-serving policies in terms of a broader public interest in national survival.

These opportunistic strategic justifications were propounded not only by the narrow interest groups themselves but also by the statesmen who tried to reconcile the groups’ competing programs within the ruling coalition. Often the proponents of these strategic rationalizations, as well as the wider population, came to believe them. The political and intellectual entrenchment of these myths hindered strategic learning and reinforced the impetus toward overexpansion. Even the pro-imperial elites became entrapped in this political and ideological dynamic, which in several cases hastened their departure from positions of power and privilege.

Understanding the myth of security through expansion and its origins is the first step toward solving the recurrent problem of self-defeating aggression among the great powers. This introductory chapter identifies the recurrent myths of empire, describes the varieties of overexpansion those myths have led to, and sets my arguments in the context of traditional explanations for overexpansion offered by historians and political scientists. The next chapter lays out competing theories of overexpansion in more detail. Subsequent chapters test those theories in the light of case studies of Germany, Japan, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States at the height of their expansionist impulses.

HYDRA-HEADED RATIONALES FOR EXPANSION

Statesmen and strategists have typically envisioned a world in which security is scarce and expansion is the best route to it. Like Catherine the Great, they have commonly contended that empires must either expand or die: “That which ceases to grow begins to rot.” They have often argued that costly wars must be fought in the hinterlands to prevent the empire from collapsing like a row of dominoes. Encircling alliances can best be broken up, they have claimed, by threats and preventive aggression rather than by appeasement. Reasoning this way, statesmen and strategists have recurrently created situations in which expansion and war have seemed unavoidable, even for states motivated primarily by the desire for security.2

In making these arguments, statesmen have exaggerated the benefits of expansion for both themselves and their opponents while underrating its costs. Likewise, they have exaggerated the probable success of offensive or expansionist strategies while underrating the prospects of defensive measures and retrenchment.3 Such views, though present to some degree in all the great powers, have been most extreme in Germany and Japan.

Underpinning the central idea that security requires expansion are a variety of more specific strategic conceptions that in varying mixtures have provided hydra-headed justifications for aggressive policies. These concepts can be grouped under three general premises: gains and losses are cumulative; the offense has the advantage; and offensive threats make others more cooperative. Together, these assumptions portray the international system as a place where the balance of power does not operate and where opponents are made more tractable by having their vital interests threatened.

The Domino Theory: Cumulative Gains and Losses

The first category of myths of empire, cumulative gains, purports to explain why expansion will add to the state’s strength and, consequently, to its ability to defend itself.4 Conquest increases power, in this view, because it adds resources, both human and material, that can be used in further competition against other great powers. Vulnerable areas at the periphery are depicted as El Dorados, cheap to conquer yet harboring vast resources that must be acquired lest they fall into the hands of opponents. The lure of conquest is especially strong for states that are just short of self-sufficiency in the resources needed for war, since it can be argued that a grab for autarky can fundamentally improve their security. Imperial Japanese expansionists in particular stressed this rationale, though they found that with each outward push autarkic security was still out of reach.

Just as proponents of expansion have promised that cumulative gains will lead to imperial security, so too they have warned that losses in the empire’s periphery can easily bring a collapse of power at the imperial core, through any of several mechanisms: a cumulative erosion of economic and military resources; the increasing difficulty of imperial defense owing to the loss of strategic forward positions; or the progressive abandonment of the state by its allies, who might infer that it would not live up to its commitments.

Relatively satisfied powers like Britain and the United States have been especially prone to this domino theory. In a particularly inventive instance, accepted even by the skeptical and astute prime minister Lord Salisbury, Britain anticipated that a handful of French explorers might claim the outpost of Fashoda in the trackless hinterlands of the Upper Nile and somehow dam the river, destroying Egypt’s economy and provoking an anti-British revolt that would lead to the loss of the Suez Canal, thus cutting the royal navy off from India, which would lead in turn to an Indian mutiny and ultimately to the collapse of the entire British economy. Though none of the steps in this chain of reasoning stands up to scrutiny, it seemed plausible enough to both the French and the British to bring them to the brink of war in 1898.5

Offensive Advantage

A second category of imperial myths holds that the best defense is a good offense.6 This view asserts that cumulative gains in the imperial periphery can be reaped through aggressive action, whereas passivity will bring cumulative defeats. For example, the solution to security problems at the “turbulent frontier” of the empire is to conquer still more territory in order to punish or prevent harassment by contiguous barbarians.7 Likewise, it is held that the cheapest way to forestall cascading dominoes is to prevent the fall of the first one by a forward defense. Like the deployment of a few good Greeks in the pass at Thermopylae, active measures at the periphery allegedly allow a cheap defense of empire, whereas defending farther back, after the dominoes gather momentum, might be impossible at any price. Over the past two centuries, great powers have repeatedly fought costly, unsuccessful wars in Afghanistan, all justified by the alleged cost-effectiveness of forward defense of vulnerable imperial holdings.8

Likewise in direct military showdowns between great powers, attack is often held to be advantageous. States must always be prepared, in this view, for preventive aggression against competitors whose rising power might someday outstrip them. Moreover, the benefits of surprise and of forcing the opponent to fight at times and places of the attacker’s choosing create major first-strike advantages.

Paper Tigers and Bandwagons: Faith in Threats

A third contribution to the belief in security through expansion is the idea that threats make other states compliant. This belief leads to the paper tiger image of the adversary: the main opponent is seen as an implacable foe posing an immense security threat, yet at the same time as too weak, inert, or irresolute to combat aggressive countermeasures. Applied to allies and neutrals, this idea leads to “bandwagon” predictions. That is, third parties, instead of forming alliances to balance the power of the most threatening state, are expected to jump on the bandwagon and support its emerging hegemony.9 Threatening behavior is expected to attract allies and to intimidate opponents. In other words, the basic principles of the balance of power are held to operate in reverse.

Though moderate forms of such paper tiger and bandwagon beliefs have been common among most great power statesmen and strategists, they have been most extreme in Germany and Japan. Wilhelmine naval strategists argued, for example, that Britain would use its naval superiority to strangle Germany’s world trade, yet would not seriously contest a German attempt to close the gap.10 Likewise, the Germans saw the encircling Entente as unalterably bent on Germany’s destruction, yet so irresolute that a showdown would lead to the Entente’s humiliation and disintegration.11 The Japanese concocted similarly paradoxical views of their opponents. Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, a staff officer who played a key role both in instigating the occupation of Manchuria and in devising a strategy for an autarkic empire, decided in the early 1920s that all-out war between Japan and the United States was inevitable, given America’s inherently rapacious nature. At the same time, Ishiwara counted on the United States and Japan’s other foes to be so somnolent that they would allow Japan to conquer, piecemeal, the resource base that would let it successfully prosecute this war.12

Soviet theories of détente under Khrushchev and Brezhnev had a similar ring: the United States was so aggressive that it would accept détente only if handcuffed by a shift in the military and political “correlation of forces” in socialism’s favor; yet it was so passive that it would allow the handcuffs to be slipped on.13 The main difference is that the Soviets retreated when this image of the United States was disconfirmed, whereas the Germans and Japanese pushed ...