Joseph M. Parent

Graceful Decline?: The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment

There is broad scholarly consensus that the relative power of the United States is declining and that this decline will have negative consequences for international politics. This pessimism is justified by the belief that great powers have few options to deal with acute relative decline. Retrenchment is seen as a hazardous policy that demoralizes allies and encourages external predation. Faced with shrinking means, great powers are thought to have few options to stave off decline short of preventive war. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, retrenchment is not a relatively rare and ineffective policy instrument. A comparison of eighteen cases of acute relative decline since 1870 demonstrates that great powers frequently engage in retrenchment and that retrenchment is often effective. In addition, we find that prevailing explanations overstate the importance of democracies, bureaucracies, and interest groups in inhibiting retrenchment. In fact, the rate of decline can account for both the extent and form of retrenchment, even over short periods. These arguments have important implications for power transition theories and the rise of China.

Central Authority and Order

Strong central authorities are able to effectively manage costly defection, but are unable to adequately address lesser conflicts because of limits to their ability to monitor and enforce. We argue, counterintuitively, that these limitations build cooperation and trust among subordinates: the limitations contribute to the production of order. First, limits to authority leave space for locally informed decentralized enforcement. Second, central authorities act as powerful but incompetent third parties whose threatened interventions increase incentives to cooperate and, therefore, to trust. We outline the mechanisms by which a strong central authority enforces order and test their utility by considering the secondary literature on rates of conflict in strong, weak, and capricious states. We supplement this evidence, based on association, with a close examination of diverse case studies: baseball umpires, commercial contracts, and domestic disputes. By analyzing these case studies, we isolate and describe the mechanisms by which central authorities produce order in varied settings. We find that central authority may be effective, but the majority of this effectiveness derives from an indirect influence on dyadic relations rather than direct intervention. The state interacts with local communities, but each operates according to distinct logics. The particular character of their interaction produces four mechanisms useful in the production of order. We briefly explore implications for the operation of law as well as the production of generalized trust.

Uniting States: Voluntary Union in World Politics

1. Introduction 2. Explaining Political Union 3. Force, Fraud, and the Founding of the American Constitution 4. Americas necessity 5. Switzerland, Staatenbund to Bundesstaat 6. The Liminal Union of Sweden and Norway 7. Bolivars Dreams of Gran Colombia 8. Europes American Idol 9. Conclusion Appendix: Machiavelli and the Missing Romulus

Correspondence: Decline and Retrenchment—Peril or Promise?

Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent’s article “Graceful Decline?” offers a clear, parsimonious theory of great power retrenchment that helps all a massive gap in international relations scholarship.1 Through comparative case studies and “coarse grained” statistical analysis, MacDonald and Parent argue that the degree of a state’s decline often explains the form and extent of its retrenchment. They then show that retrenchment is a surprisingly common and effective response to relative decline. MacDonald and Parent correctly point out the myopia of the “pessimistic” structuralist dogma that simply dismisses retrenchment as an impractical and dangerous strategy that only accelerates decline by signaling weakness and creating additional vulnerability (pp. 13–18).2 Their spare neorealist model goes a long way toward repairing this deaciency. As a arst cut, it improves on the existing literature while facilitating progressive future research on the topic. Still, a number of theoretical and conceptual problems undermine their argument and compromise their results. Below I discuss three issues with MacDonald and Parent’s theory of retrenchment.

Of polarity and polarization

Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz argue that bipartisan support for liberal internationalism in U.S. foreign policy is gone for the foreseeable future, and that the United States should trim its grand strategic ambitions accordingly.1 Their article is timely and insightful, but has three major oaws: (1) claims that are unsupported by the evidence, (2) endogeneity issues that obscure causal relationships, and (3) pessimistic conclusions that do not follow from the analysis. First, Kupchan and Trubowitz’s claims exceed the evidence with respect to economic forces and gerrymandering. They contend that the rise of foreign policy moderates was caused by economic growth, which acted as a balm to ease tensions, and the economic downturn of the 1970s dealt a heavy blow to moderates (pp. 19, 23).2 Contrary to their logic, however, the remarkable economic rallies in the 1980s and 1990s correlate with serious weakening of moderates. So, too, blaming partisan polarization on gerrymandering lacks support. Unaided by redistricting, the Senate has polarized just as the House of Representatives has. Although the number of competitive congressional districts declined in the mid-1960s and generally stayed low in the 1970s and 1980s, this number actually increased in the 1990s, an era of pronounced partisanship.3 Second, the independent variables in the article may be less independent than they Correspondence: Of Polarity and Polarization

Anarchy, hierarchy and order

How does order emerge from anarchy? While scholars generally agree that international politics is anarchic, there is much dispute about how anarchy orders relationships. This paper challenges prevailing views by attacking the problem of anarchy from behind. We examine how hierarchy creates order and argue that two mechanisms are responsible. The first is the direct actions of a leviathan; the second is an indirect effect, which counterintuitively results from insurmountable handicaps to central authority, that we call the threat of incompetent intervention. We then examine how these two mechanisms affect order as power decentralizes and highlight how bottom–up and top–down processes intersect. Our arguments are tested in difficult cases: highly developed states, where central authority is strongest, and international politics, where central authority is weakest. The arguments have broad implications for all the paradigms, trust in world politics and organizational change.

Duelling and the abolition of war

Political scientists have long compared war to duelling in the hope that war could be abolished like duelling, that is, at the hands of a normative campaign. However, there has been limited investigation of duellings past. What can the history of duelling teach us about the future of war? This paper advances two arguments. First, by refining the conventional wisdom, it argues that duellings demise was caused less by normative campaigning than by the timing of industrialization. Second, it argues that although duelling is not an analogous institution to modern war, its ancestor, feuding, is. Writings on feuds contribute a complementary literature to the limited data on war, which is helpful for thought experiments and hypothesis testing. Further, feudings fall was caused more by the growth of state capacity than by normative campaigning. In sum, neither the history of duelling nor that of feuding confirms the view that ideational factors played the principal role in suppressing these practices; therefore, we should reconsider how the abolition of war might occur.

La Grande Guerre, en théories

La Premiere Guerre mondiale a permis l’emergence de la discipline des relations internationales, mais ce sont la Seconde Guerre mondiale puis la guerre froide qui en ont favorise le developpement. Le premier conflit mondial demeure une reserve fertile d’exemples et d’arguments sur les causes et le deroulement de la guerre et de la paix. Mais sa place centrale dans cette discipline est contestee par la revolution nucleaire, la force des nationalismes ou le role nouveau du terrorisme.

Publius's Guile and the Paranoid Style

When foreign dangers become domestic threats, how should governments respond? This article turns to the past to better understand the present. Three rebellions in early American history—Shayss Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and Friess Rebellion—illustrate how similar domestic events elicited different governmental responses, depending on changes in the international environment. The ethical implications are mixed, but the policy recommendations suggest that quick executive action and slow judicial action are appropriate responses. A necessary cause of these events, both in government officials and those opposing them, is traced back to imbalances of power. The argument builds on Richard Hofstadters Paranoid Style in American Politics, and elaborates the strategic logic of political paranoia.