Karen Rasler

War Making and State Making: Governmental Expenditures, Tax Revenues, and Global Wars

Addressing the disputed relationship between war and the expansion of governmental expenditures and revenues, Box-Tiao intervention models are applied to a number of British (1700-1980), United States (1792-1980), French (1815-1979), and Japanese (1878-1980) spending and taxation series. Distinguishing between global and interstate wars, the more intensive and extensive bouts of warfare (global wars) tend to bring about abrupt, permanent impacts in contrast to the temporary changes associated with most interstate wars. The observed displacements are reflected in both war-related and nonwar-related types of expenditure and are also observed before 1900. Although our findings are not universally applicable and are subject to various other qualifications, they may be interpreted, in general, as reinforcing the need for an appreciation of the persistent centrality of war, especially global war, in the discontinuous growth and expansion of the modern state.

Global Wars, Public Debts, and the Long Cycle

The explanation of the rise and fall of the world systems leading powers in terms of uneven economic development tends to overlook the role of the creation and management of public credit and national debts. Prior to 1815, the Netherlands and Great Britain owed a significant proportion of their respective victories over the larger and wealthier states of Spain and France to the development of competitive financial capabilities. Winning, however, leads to higher absolute debt burdens which, prior to 1945, encouraged postwar reductions in governmental expenditures. In this fashion, world leaders have contributed to the erosion of their preponderant capability positions before the emergence of international rivals. These ideas are elaborated within the context of George Modelskis long cycle of world leadership theory and through a brief review of war-related financial problems between 1500 and 1815 and the consequent development of national debts. The longitudinal analysis of British and American public debt data provides collaborating empirical support.

Defense Burdens, Capital Formation, and Economic Growth

One of the factors thought to explain the relative decline of system leaders is the high military overhead costs assumed by leaders. High defense burdens, however, may be achieved at the expense of investment, capital formation, and future economic growth. By evading the high defense burdens, rivals and competitors are able to improve their relative economic positions while the system leaders economic position is decaying. Focusing on Smiths (1977) earlier analysis of this phenomenon, we examine the empirical record for two system leaders (Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth century) and several other major powers. Longitudinal evidence for a defense burden-investment tradeoff is restricted to the cases of France (1872-1913) and the United States (1946-1978). These findings suggest that the tradeoff explanation may contribute to explaining some cases of leadership decline but that it will not necessarily fit all cases.

War, Accommodation, and Violence in the United States, 1890–1970

War, postwar demobilization, and economic depression are national crises that ultimately test the states capacity to respond simultaneously to internal and external challenges. This analysis probes the nexus between crises and domestic violence, investigating how this relationship is mediated by the influence of two variables: the severity of crisis and the presence or absence of government accommodation. Box-Tiao impact assessment models are used to estimate the separate and combined effects of American involvements in wars (the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars), their postwar periods, and the 1930s depression on economic, social, and political forms of American violence from 1890 to 1970. After establishing historical evidence for the role of national accommodation, I demonstrate that strong, positive associations between severe crises and domestic violence are to be found during the tenure of nonaccommodating administrations. Accommodating governments are associated with either negative or historically weak linkages between severe crises and domestic violence. Overall, the evidence underscores the benefit of using broad theoretical perspectives for understanding the linkages between international and domestic conflict.

Explaining Rivalry Escalation to War: Space, Position, and Contiguity in the Major Power Subsystem

Vasquezs (1996) rivalry escalation theory stressed territorial disputes as the principal focus for a two-path explanation of war. Neighbors fight over adjacent space and non-neighbors sometimes join ongoing wars between neighbors. But major powers are also much concerned with positional issues. Expanding the war motivation focus to encompass both spatial and positional issues facilitates the development of a new, more elaborate theory from which several new hypotheses can be derived, in addition to the older ones. Testing of the new theory can also proceed with rivalry data not based on dispute density measures, different types of contiguity can be assessed, and the presence of spatial-positional issues can be measured directly, as opposed to relying on a proximity proxy. The empirical outcome strongly supports the two-path, two-issue theory. In the major power subsystem, noncontiguous rivals outnumber contiguous rivals, dyadic wars are scarce, and war joining has been the norm. Spatial issues alone would have a hard time accounting for this pattern. Variable mixes of spatial and positional issues are able to account for it and a number of derived hypotheses reasonably well. This is not the last word on rivalry escalation to war but it appears to be an additional step in the right direction.

War and the Economic Growth of Major Powers

As part of an ongoing analysis of the expansion of the international systems major powers, this study examines the net impact of warfare on the economic growth of five of the systems leading state actors since 1700. A review of earlier efforts suggests the technical utility of Box-Tiao intervention techniques. It is also important to distinguish between the historical impacts of global and interstate wars. As hypothesized, the impact of war on economic growth is primarily temporary. However, the effects of interstate wars are statisticaly insignificant while global wars tend to create significant impacts. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the lack of attention allocated to war consequences, the theoretical reluctance to differentiate between types of warfare, and the longer term relationships between economic and political effects of warfare.

The Democratic Peace and a Sequential, Reciprocal, Causal Arrow Hypothesis

One of the democratic peace puzzles is the question of whether and to what extent the democracy → peace relationship underestimates the possibility that peace precedes democracy: the reversed causal arrow hypothesis. From a war making–state making perspective, democratization needs to be viewed as a partial function of external threat and domestic power concentration. All three variables are found to be interrelated as predicted and related in turn to the external conflict behavior of major powers from 1816 to 1992. These monadic findings, however, do not appear to negate the dyadic relationship between democratization and selectively reduced conflict behavior. In sum, there is substantial support for the reversed causal arrow hypothesis, but it does not render the regime type → conflict behavior relationships spurious. Rather, it enriches the understanding of the context in which democratization has emerged to have some effect on international politics.

Rivalries and the Democratic Peace in the Major Power Subsystem

Strategic rivalry dyads facilitate conflict, while democratic dyads constrain conflict. Which effect is more powerful? Examining conflict (militarized disputes and war) in the major power subsystem (1816-1992), both types of relationships are statistically significant predictors of conflict, and both employed together are more powerful than either used separately. Of the two, rivalry information provides the more powerful predictor, but this explanatory advantage is eroding over time. Mixed dyads are also found to be more conflictual than either autocratic or democratic dyads. There are implications for monadic and systemic interpretations of the democratic peace that receive brief mention, but the main implication is that we need to be careful about not giving too much credit to regime type alone for bringing about more pacific interactions in dyadic relations. Domestic institutions operate within external environments that condition their effects on foreign policies. To best explain conflict, we need information on both domestic and external environments.

Predatory Initiators and Changing Landscapes for Warfare

The Gartner-Siverson war initiation models focus on selection bias and initiators selecting vulnerable targets is attractive, but it demands further specification. A predictive model of war initiations might not retain statistical significance after 1945. The authors examine 16 possibly related variables and develop a three-variable initiation model, adding information on target regime type and war duration to the original lone initiator-lone target variable for war initiations between 1816 and 1992. The instability of the initiation model before and after 1945 can be traced to changes in who initiates wars. The predatory initiator model does not predict minor power dyads very well, and these dyads have come to dominate the post-1945 war landscape. Several reasons for this phenomenon are suggested, including the argument that the context in which weaker states initiate wars renders opportunistic predators less likely and less successful.

Shocks, Expectancy Revision, and the De-escalation of Protracted Conflicts: The Israeli-Palestinian Case

This article introduces an evolutionary framework for the de-escalation of protracted conflicts. Key variables are political shocks, expectancy revision, policy entrepreneurship, third-party pressure, and reciprocity. The model is tested in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian case, 1979-98. A quantitative assessment is made with the use of Middle East KEDS data as well as a qualitative assessment of the intervening impact of shocks on the expectations and strategies of key decisionmakers. The results show that while shocks by themselves did not always change the expectations and strategies of the Palestinian and Israeli leaderships, their combined influence with entrepreneurship, third-party pressure, and reciprocity did indeed improve the frequency of Israeli and Palestinian agreements in the long term. In fact, the joint effect of shocks and entrepreneurship appears to play a crucial first step in the overall deescalation process. In addition, shocks had important intervening effects for both sides by reducing major institutional constraints that paved the way for an initial political settlement reached in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Finally, the results suggest that without political shocks, inertia overrides the inclination of decisionmakers to pursue new, risky policies that could undermine their political positions.