reading

I want you to read these reading and answer these questions for each reading

1. What’s the title of the reading and the name of the author?
2. What is / are the key arguments of the reading?
3. What theories and concepts are used in the reading? What are the examples?
4. What are the key strengths and weaknesses of the reading?
5. What do you particularly agree / disagree with and why? 

2 pages, first page 

1) P. Williams, ‘Security Studies: An Introduction’, in P. Williams, Security Studies: An Introduction, pp. 1-12. 2) Waever, Ole and Barry Buzan, ‘After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present and Future of Security Studies’, in Alan Collins, ed. Contemporary Security Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 417-435.

Second page 

1) William Wolforth, ‘Realism and Security Studies’, in Cavelty and Balzacq (eds), Routledge Handbook of Security Studies, 11-21. 

2) John Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the Future’, International Security 15: 1 (1990), 5-56.

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Course of Study:
(5PIRS007W) Global Security

Title:
Contemporary security studies (Chapter 28: After the return to theory: the
past, present and future of security studies)

Name of Author:
Waever, Ole and Buzan, Barry & Collins, Alan

Name of Publisher:
Oxford University Press

28
After the Return to Theory:

The Past, Present, and
Future of Security Studies
Ole Wrever and Barry Buzan

Chapter Contents
• I n tro d u c tio n 4 1 8

• T h e o rig in s a n d in stitu tio n a l s t r u c t u r e o f s e c u r ity s t u d ie s 4 1 9

• T h e G o l d e n A g e o f s e c u r ity s tu d ie s 421

• I n s titu tio n a liz a tio n a n d sta g n a tio n 4 2 3

• D isc ip lin ary q u e s tio n in g a n d th e o r e tic a l re la u n c h 4 2 6

• C o n c lu s io n : t h e p o w e r s o f t h e o r y a n d t h e c h a lle n g e s o f t h e f u t u r e 431

Reader’s Guide
T h is c h a p t e r p r e s e n t s an i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e p a s t a n d p r e s e n t o f s e c u r ity s tu d ie s w ith an e m p h a s is

o n t h e ch a n g in g p e r i o d s o f t h e o r y p r o d u c tio n a n d p ra c tic a l p r o b le m so lving. T h e field s t a r t e d o u t
a s a d is tin c t U S sp e c ia lty m u c h s h a p e d b y t h e n e w c o n d itio n s o f t h e 1 9 4 0 s s e t b y n u c le a r w e a p o n s

a n d a lo n g – te r m m o b iliz a tio n a g a in s t t h e S o v ie t U n io n , t w o f a c t o r s t h a t c r e a t e d a n e e d f o r a n e w

k in d o f civilian e x p e r t in d e f e n c e a n d s tr a te g y . F ro m an A m e r ic a n , th in k -ta n k b a s e d , in te rd is c ip lin a ry

field , s e c u rity s tu d ie s b e c a m e in s titu tio n a liz e d a s a p a r t o f o n e d isc ip lin e, I n te rn a tio n a l R e la tio n s (IR),

in c re a sin g ly in te r n a tio n a l a n d w ith t h e o r y a n c h o r e d in t h e u n iv e rs itie s . S in c e t h e 1 9 9 0 s, t h e field h a s

b e e n in a n e w p e r io d o f high t h e o r y p ro d u c tiv ity , b u t la rg e ly in t w o s e p a r a t e c l u s te r s w ith t h e U S A

a n d E u r o p e as c e n t r e s o f e a c h . T h is an aly sis is u s e d as a basis f o r raising s o m e c e n tr a l q u e s t io n s a n d

p r e d i c t i o n s a b o u t t h e f u t u r e o f t h e field .

Ole W aver and Barry Buzan

Introduction

T he fact that a book like the present one can be made,
indeed had to be made, to present an existing field to
people entering it testifies to major change in security
studies. H ad a similar book been produced in previous
decades, it w ould have looked very different. A 1950s
version would have been very short. In the 1960s, it
w ould have been structured with chapters on differ­
ent kinds o f policy questions—strategy, economy o f
defence, decision making—and in some o f these (not­
ably the chapter on strategy) there would have been
a lot o f theory (deterrence theory), but the theories
w ould n ot have com peted for dealing w ith the same
questions; a division o f labour would have kept them
in different chapters, The 1970s edition would prob­
ably have been thinner on theory and more com pre­
hensive in the them atic chapters—and it w ould have
com e w ith a com panion volum e (in German) de­
nouncing the whole field as part o f the repressive, mili­
tarized, Cold W ar system. The 1980s textbook would
have been a reader o f texts arguing for and against the
continued relevance o f the field, its possible widen­
ing o r even dissolution and m erger into wider fields

.

W ith developments in the 1990s, the field has come
to take a shape as reflected in the structure o f this vol­
ume: the wideners have succeeded enough for chap­
ters on different sectors o f security to be necessary,
and a num ber o f theories now com pete for tackling
the whole field o f security In the first decades o f the
twenty-first century, this reshaped discipline seems to
gain increased attention, generate more undergradu­
ate courses and n o t least m ore—often theoretically
inclined—PhD projects. This augm ented attraction is
supported b o th by the prom inence o f “security” in the
era o f the ‘global w ar on terror” and “climate security’,
and by the availability o f the family o f theories that
sprang up during the 1990s.

O ur focus in this chapter is on security theory, which
w e define as theory that aims at the understanding
a n d /o r m anagem ent o f security issues. Such theory
at different points in time resembles developments
w ithin general 1R theory, while at other points there is
less contact. For instance, some major developments
in IR theory, such as 1970s interdependence and re­
gim e theory, had minimal im pact on security studies
(at the time, at least), and some security theories were
(originally) specific to security studies, such as deter­
rence theory or the C openhagen School, not gen­
eral theories o f IR* O ther cases o f security theory are

simultaneously IR and security th eo ry such as con­
structivism , feminism, or dem ocratic peace. While
distinct from IR theory, security theory is also differ­
ent from security studies at large, because much work
in security studies does not deal explicitly w ith theory
Thus, security theory is a specific subset o f security
studies and one whose development has gone through
distinctive phases. (See Key Ideas 28. L)

One peculiarity o f this field is that it is divided more
strongly than comparable fields into subsets w ith­
out m utual recognition, often w ithout even mutual
awareness. Especially in European journals, confer­
ences, departments, and research centres, one finds
a lively discussion o f a num ber o f relatively recent
approaches: Critical Security Studies, feminism, the
Copenhagen School, the Paris School, and the merits
o f all these compared to “the traditional approach”. Go
to m ost departm ents in the USA or the leading jour­
nals, such as International Security and Security Studies,
and m ost scholars there w ould say who?’ and ‘what?*
about authors intensely discussed by a large n u m ­
ber o f scholars especially in Europe and parts o f the

KEY IDEAS 28J Terminology’ ’ ‘ ‘

The names ‘strategic studies ‘security sU;cte’ (of
“iniem atonal s<*cg* .1/ .if'r > i’» a

others û e or:
Afferent objects, it ts possible to g-ve cfeon defctbus.
IVpifVi/ ^ o n ty i^rtglr:td&X hr/:
sttidies the narrower suoset evented tcwrch m tor/ b* tes
(e £, Buzan I ?9 Belts I 9-??}. However; »n a h&ooca*
Overview fte th* prece^ a «..v>;kl be iracfci-M îc v * im

ro si cf te ̂military afr.̂ rs as tut* <-:>re o* the f”e’d
and crocs around this dr̂ wr* more or iess nam>wk From
the 1̂ 805 and owifds. thH tldd was In most contexts
refafc>J’ed as re o r«y *tud»e*. *jr-j only at lei
them cover the whefe area arid use mostly st^atef c ‘siudret in-
the: rm y penoo -ind secure >tuee$ in trie %ter, Today, ine –
r acne *-:trat*£c studies’ seerm to on tc^Jiise ;t

r^mut^nalizeci in outfits ike the Imemakonai tosn* ute
Strategic ofStrcie^k* S:u3$% 3*xl}’attnci of
W h m jrid Yjczt^i Sructi The demi ta/tir • the t^nr
‘strategic stuoe^ d-ini the Cold VVfcr m -jirf- .^ e mom
pervasive ir? the UK than jn vr& USA

‘

:

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‘

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,

After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies 419

developing world (Waever 2012a). In turn, the mostly
American m ain scene has had theoretical debates cen­
tred on offensive versus defensive realism, the relative
im portance o f ideational variables, and the role of
pow er and institutions in orders (and empires). These
debates did not structure the universe for m ost schol­
ars in the rest o f the world.

Therefore, w hen this concluding chapter attempts
an assessment o f where we are, where we came from,
and n ot least w here we might be going, it needs to fol­
low an asymmetrical structure, where the first part
treats the field as hom ogeneous—a kind o f unified
centre-periphery structure w ith the US definition of
security studies unrivalled—while the later part splits
into two parallel tracks. In the very last part of the
chapter this evolves further into a global constellation,
w here theory emerges from many parts o f the world,
n o t least beyond the West. The chapter is structured
chronologically. The first section looks at the origins
and institutional structure of security studies—w hat
and w here is it? The second covers the so-called
Golden Age, the formative period o f strategic studies
w hen m ost notably deterrence theory was developed
and game theory applied to it (and in tu rn given m uch
original impetus at the level of abstract theory), to as­
sist in the handling o f novel challenges from nuclear
weapons. The third section is about the immediate
post-Golden Age, when strategic studies was consoli­
dated as an integral part o f the security establishment,
and theory often lost out to ‘hectic empiricism’ (Buzan
1981, 2000), which m ight in tu rn have contributed to
the decline o f strategic studies as a field. A fourth sec­
tion deals w ith the soul-searching debates on w iden­
ing and (sub)disciplinary identity during the 1980s and
1990s, culminating in various theoretical innovations.
The final section looks from the current situation o f
theoretical wealth into a future where these theories
have begun to change their m utual relationships while
also developing new ways to be involved w ith the
m ain issues on the policy agenda.

T he first and second sections deal overwhelmingly
w ith the USA, because this is w here m odern strategic
studies em erged and found its characteristic shape.
W h en m odern-style strategic studies grew else­
where, even w here independent traditions existed,
this happened to such a large extent by attem pts to
copy or im p o rt the American experience, that the
formative period o f American strategic studies b e­
came the referent point for the field everywhere. A
systematic com parison o f American and

European

strategic studies is therefore presented towards the
end o f the second section (referring to th e status
in th e early 1970s), and only in the latest phases do
distinct trajectories becom e self-reliant enough that
a story o f two parallel tracks can explain th e pecu­
liarity o f debates unrecognizable to each other. The
World beyond the West is for similar reasons only
dealt w ith quite marginally, and mostly towards the
end o f this chapter.

The origins and institutional
structure of security studies

W ar and peace, threats and strategy, as well as dem o­
graphics and epidemics: issues like these have been
on the agenda o f thinkers and w riters for centuries.
However, anything resembling security studies as
we now know it did n o t becom e a distinct field o f
study until around the end o f the Second W orld War.
As always, when a field is established, it is easy to see
predecessors and preparatory w ork done in previous
phases, and thus security studies can be projected
back into the inter-w ar period w ith reference to w ork
done on the causes and prevention o f wars (Baldwin
1995).

The novelty in the 1940s, however, was the emer­
gence o f a distinct category o f w ork at the intersec­
tion o f military expertise and university-based social
science aimed at delivering policy-relevant knowledge
supported by a broad, interdisciplinary academic
knowledge base. In large part because o f the unprece­
dented implications o f nuclear weapons for w ar fight­
ing, b u t also because o f the broad-spectrum challenge
to the USA posed by the Soviet Union (ideological and
economic, as well as military) and the general prestige
gained during the Second World War by both natural
scientists (new weapons, code breaking) and social sci­
entists (for example, in advising on strategic bom bing
priorities), civilian experts w ould now also specialize
in military issues under the heading o f security. That
the leading strategic thinkers should be mainly civil­
ians was w hat distinguished post-1945 security studies
both from w hat had been done before, and from w hat
continued to be done outside the West.

This institutional innovation happened at the same
time as the concept o f security moved centre stage,
becoming the guiding idea over previously supreme
slogans such as defence and national interest (Yergin
1977; Waever 2012b).

420 Ole Waever and Barry Buzan

General enabling conditions in the USA were: opti­
mism about the usefulness o f science; the possibility
o f rational solutions to societal problems; novel secur­
ity issues that seemed n o t only urgent and prim ary
but very much so (nuclear weapons and the Soviet,
com m unist threat); generous funding for research;
and exponential expansion o f higher education.

T he m ain key to the emergence o f strategic stud­
ies around the time o f the end of the Second World
W ar and the beginning o f th e Cold War was the need
for civilian experts to balance the military leadership,
a need driven certainly by technological developments
(nuclear weapons and the rapid rise o f war avoidance
as the key strategic imperative), b u t also by broader
political considerations about the potentially problem ­
atic political implications o f long-term mobilization.

The military driver is straightforward: gradually it
becam e clear how radically nuclear weapons would
transform the security equations, and the kind o f
expertise needed differed from the classical military
one. At some risk o f oversimplification (actual plan­
ning was quite a bit more mixed), the problem was
that wars should no longer be fought b u t avoided,
and ways should be found so that the possibility/
impossibility o f w ar generated by nuclear deployments
could be manipulated for political gain. The centre of
gravity shifted from the tactical and operational level
to true long-term strategy (Brodie 1949), and from,
the deployment o f a given technology to the targeted
development o f fast-changing technologies for the fu­
ture. Although at first it seemed that even the games
o f deterrence could be seen as controlled by the bot­
to m line o f w hat would happen in an actual fight, it
gradually became necessary to treat nuclear strategy as
a partly independent universe to be analysed in its own.
right. This demanded a completely different form of
knowledge from the one delivered by military experts.
As succinctly p ut by Richard Betts (1997; 13); “Nuclear
w ar spurred theorizing because it was inherently m ore
theoretical than empirical: none had ever occurred/ Or,
in the words of Richard Smoke (1976:275), the first pre­
condition for the emergence o f security studies was a
“complexity dissectible by abstract analysis”,

W hile this is probably a relatively uneontroversial
interpretation o f the emergence o f security stud­
ies, it should also be noticed that the combination of
nuclear w eapons and the Cold W ar m eant a need to
coordinate m ore closely military and non-military
considerations. Already w artim e experiences had
shown, especially in. the USA, how challenging it was

to coordinate economic, political, and military plan­
ning (Etzold 1978: 1-2; Hogan 1998: 25). As it began
to be clear that the Cold W ar could becom e a drawn-
out, all-encompassing, and existential struggle, the
idea took hold that one needed a form o f integrated
understanding, where these different forms o f know­
ledge could become combined, and this was a major
part o f the reasoning behind the N ational Security Act
of 1947“ in addition to closer coordination o f the ser­
vices plus intelligence reform (Stuart 2008),

The specific challenge of th e USA, w ith its ”no-
standing-armies ‘* tradition having to organize for long­
term mobilization, shaped the em erging civil-military
interface in strategic studies. It was a deep-seated
argum ent within American political thought that a
perm anent military institution w ould be a threat to
dem ocracy because it could be misused by fa tyrant \
an anti-democratic executive (Publius 1787-8: Bailyn
1992; Deudney 1995), Also, it was only during the
Second World War that “the uniformed heads of the US
arm ed services assumed a pivotal and unprecedented
role in the formulation of the nation s foreign policies1
(Stoler 2000: m). Therefore, when the USA moved to­
wards institutionalizing an unprecedented level of
military mobilization, this could not be done purely in
term s of ‘war* o r ‘defence”. This is a central part o f the
explanation for the rise o f the term “security” to cover
the mobilization in. m ore inclusive and “civilian terms
(Waever 2008, 2012b). And it conditioned a particular
space for civilian expertise in a military-centred uni­
verse, The Cold War mobilization inevitably entailed a
tension between American liberalism and military pro­
fessionalism, and the field o f strategic studies emerged
as part o f the institutional responses to this tension
(Lasswell 1950; H untington 1957).

; * Se€̂ ‘*u ict say Dorn *fi the
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After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies

The Golden Age of security studies

The period o f the 1950s and 1960s is widely celebrated
as one w here the field was simultaneously productive,
influential, and relatively coherent. Although the field
contained a wide variety o f other kinds o f w ork (to
which we return shortly), the central and defining area
was gam e theory and nuclear strategy. We pay particu­
lar attention to this period for two reasons. First, it
was the formative period o f the new discipline, and
therefore developments in the so-called Golden Age
are n ot ju st episodes equal to m any others; they de­
fined how security studies was perceived: for good and
bad these developments were the quintessential w ork
o f security studies. Second, this m arked a (first) high
point o f theorization, and we w ant to point to the pat­
tern o f ebb and flow o f theory m aking w ithin security
studies.

The w ork on game theory and deterrence theory
was a rare instance o f an intellectual development
that scores high in term s o f theoretical creativity and
sophistication, and simultaneously policy relevance.
Very often this is seen as a trade-off—policy rele­
vance/utility versus theoretical abstraction /sophisti­
cation (cf. Hill 1994; Lepgold and Nincic 2001)—but
w hen nuclear weapons created a novel challenge o f
understanding a situation that was hypothetical and
speculative through-and-through and open to swift
and dramatic developments, a very sophisticated
theoretical boom gained centrality politically. At the
same time, this development became highly influen­
tial w ithin the academic world, because the nature
o f the object allowed for a high degree o f abstraction
and formalization that scored well on the criteria
o f the day for a new, m ore ‘scientific’ form o f Inter­
national Relations. Under a Cold War situation w ith
a boom ing US economy, a m ood o f technological
optimism and a willingness to support social science
as part o f the solution to social challenges (including
n o t only the Cold War struggle b ut social problems
o f all kinds), the reward was high for new approaches
that seemed to move IR in the direction o f the use of
scientific m ethods and tools, ranging from coding o f
events data allowing for computerized data process­
ing, through cybernetic models and experimental
psychology, to game theory. Deterrence theory be­
came a success story in this context for tw o reasons.
On the one hand, it produced a seemingly productive
(‘progressive’) research program m e where theoretical
w ork produced ever new and m ore complex problems

that could in tu rn be dealt w ith by new theoretical
moves. O n the other hand, all this seemed highly use­
ful because the theories actually produced their own
reality o f abstractions, the w orld o f ‘secure second-
strike capability’, ‘extended deterrence’, and ‘escala­
tion dom inance’.

This was reflected in the critique from peace re­
search and critical theory th a t the w hole ‘Golden
Age’ idea is a self-glorifying construction o f academ ­
ics whose real accom plishm ent was to make morally
co rru p t governm ent policies (MAD, Vietnam) look
respectable a n d /o r inevitable. Some critics said th at
this w hole literature produced validating smoke­
screens for w hat the politicians and the military
w anted to do anyway: build up a huge nuclear force
and prom ote m ilitary Keynesianism (Green 1966,
1968; Senghaas 1969). A lthough it is undoubtedly
true that these theories legitim ized deterrence and
nuclear weapons as such, it is n o t fair to conclude that
their ‘influence’ on policy was illusory. Theories of
deterrence shaped the whole way o f m aking sense o f
nuclear weapons, and thereby influenced th e shape,
if n o t necessarily the size o f investments. The relative
merits and roles o f bom bers, missiles, submarines,
the uses and non-uses o f tactical nuclear weapons,
and how to avoid vulnerability o f systems (the fa­
m ous basing study by W ohlstetter et al. in 1954)—for
all such policies, there was a clear link from theorists
to policy makers. But, in relation to targeting, there
was a m ajor slippage w here Strategic Air Com m and
largely continued w ith its ow n roughly ‘first-strike’-
oriented policy (Rosenberg 1983). If one counter-
factually im agined th a t the civilian experts had n o t
existed at all, it seems m uch m ore probable th at the
w hole nuclear build-up w ould have been shaped by
an old-fashioned m ilitary logic o f maximizing ‘fire
pow er’ w ithout m uch concern for overall stability
and the political possibilities for signalling and m an­
oeuvring. Nuclear quantity was probably a product
o f semi-independent dynamics having to do w ith the
military industrial complex and the overall politics o f
sizing the defence budget, b u t it should be beyond
doubt th at Golden Age theorizing produced a dif­
ferent mix o f nuclear weapons w ith different quali­
ties and locations, and a different role in policy, from
w hat w ould otherw ise have happened. For better or
worse, this story o f the Golden Age and deterrence
theory becam e the h e a rt o f th e discipline—its found­
ing m yth som ew hat similar to the way the first great
debate operates in IR theory.

W h at is .most unique about this particular episode
is, however, the degree to which policy-oriented w ork
m ade significant contributions to general theory. This
was n o t ju st application o f w ork done elsewhere to
policy questions o r transfer o f knowledge to the
political world, as we have come to expect o f th in k
tanks, N either was it, as w ith the m ost recent think
tanks* primarily about lobbying for specific policies,
although the w ork o f RAND clearly served the gen­
eral interests o f the air force and had built-in biases
towards a distrustful policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union
(Green 1968), This did not prevent lasting contribu­
tions to game theory. Even a m athem atician prefac­
ing the sixtieth anniversary edition o f von N eum ann
and M orgenstem s foundational Theory o f Games and
Economic Behavior (Kuhn 2004: x) posits that “many
observers agree” that RAND was one o f tw o centres
in which gam e theory flourished in the first post- war
decade (see also D im and and Dimand 1996: 142-3),
One need ju st m ention the 1950 invention at RAND
o f the prisoner s dilemma (Poundstone 1992:103) and
the late 1950s bargaining twist given to game theory
by Thom as ScheUing (1960b). It is quite easy to see
how these developments grew o ut o f specific chal­
lenges relating especially to the nuclear situation. Not­
iceably, these were also m ajor contributions to basic
science at the same time (Dodge 2006),

The second biggest example from the Golden Age
o f policy-relevant w ork that simultaneously consti­
tuted general theory was systems analysis, a m ethod
for solving problems o f force structure and resource
allocation th a t drew on economic theory as well as
operations research developed by natural scientists,
engineers, and economists during the Second World
W ar (Stem 1967; Smoke 1976: 290-3). Several pion­
eering RAND studies were im plem ented into policy,
notably the famous “air-bases” study by W ohlstetter
et a i (1954). Several o f the leading representatives
entered the Kennedy administration—McNamara’s
“whiz kids* (Brodie 1965; Kaplan 1983), From there,
this m ethod and related RAND techniques like the
* Plannmg~Programming-Budgetmg-SystemJ “spread
through m ost o f the federal government” (Smoke
1976: 292). It is generally underestimated today how
much, o f early strategic studies was n o t only inspired
by the discipline o f economics (Hitch 1960; Schell-
ing 1960a) b u t was actually about economics. A typi­
cal early course or 1960s-1970s textbook in strategic
studies had strategy and deterrence as the biggest
sub-field, but the second biggest w ould usually be ‘the

422 Ole Wasver and Barry Buzan

economics o f defence”—n o t so puzzling given the
size o f the American defence budget! (See Knorr and
Trager 1977 for a broader treatm ent o f “economic is­
sues and national security’.) The image nowadays is
often that Cold W ar strategic studies was obsessed
w ith military questions, and this is partly tru e —it was
mostly the economics o f defence planning—but strat­
egy was closely followed by economics as a key con­
cern. Most o f these textbooks had either no definition
o f security studies or ju st a vacuous or circular defin­
ition o f security (something like securing th e state or
essential values against threats; cf surveys in Buzan
1983; Buzan and H ansen 2009), W hat, de facto, .held
the field together was a focus on defence as a pecu­
liar effort by society and an attention to all the related
dimensions necessary for this; that is, selection, fund­
ing, m anagem ent, and politico-strategic utilisation
o f military force, and the support thereof by various
non-military instruments, Strikingly, clear definitions
o f this kind o f security studies were only articulated
m uch later, in the context o f the 198Cs-199Qs debate
on widening. That is, their appearance testified to the
opposite o f w hat they stated: that the field by then en­
capsulated a broader agenda w ithin which this narrow
definition was a possible bastion o f resistance (see Key
Q uote 28.1). D uring the Golden Age w here a defini­
tion like Wait s corresponded well to actual practice,
it had rarely if ever been spelled out—this was not
necessary, b u t implied- . ; ■

Many other things happened in strategic -studies
around this nexus, b ut the identity and nature;o f the
field were shaped by the Golden Age episode.-Beyond,
nuclear strategy, im portant areas w ithin strategic stud­
ies were systems analysis (planning, organization),
arm s control, alliance politics, counter-insurgency,
and organization o f governm ent institutions and deci­
sion making (Smoke 1976), In the late 1960s and early
1970s, were added area studies and internal develop­
ments (bureaucratic politics; decision making). Later
in the 1970s came perceptions, arms race theory,
proliferation o f nuclear weapons, proliferation o f ad­
vanced military technology, utility o f force, strategic
intelligence, conventional strategy, and self-reflections
o f the field (Bull 1968; Gray 1977; How ard 1979),

Many o f the new developments (notably percep­
tions and decision making) were reactions to the dif­
ficulties that the classical form o f security studies ran
into. The overly rational gam e theory became com­
plem ented by theories of Irrationality* like bureau-
eratic politics, and this, along w ith the V ietnam War,

After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies 423

became a turning point towards the next phase. The
USA entered the w ar w ith all the instrum ents o f stra­
tegic studies in high esteem. The Kennedy adminis­
tration and M cNamara’s time as Secretary o f Defense
m arked a high point in the belief in the social-scientific
vision o f security knowledge (Morgenthau 1962). But,
in the words o f Colin Gray (1982: 90), the strategists
knew ‘next to nothing’ about ‘peasant nationalism in
Southeast Asia or about the mechanics o f a counter­
revolutionary w ar’.

K E Y P O I N T S »

;

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Institutionalization and stagnation
The crisis for security studies—or w hat Baldwin (1995)
dubs the move into a phase o f ‘decline’—was, how ­
ever, n o t only about external challenges to an other­
wise perfect theoretical construction. The previous
period had already witnessed some ‘internal weaken­
ing’ o f the m ainstream strategy scholarship. Even in
the core area o f nuclear (and other forms o f military)
strategy, the highly theoretical and academic scholar­
ship o f the earlier period had succumbed to ‘hectic
empiricism’ (Buzan 2000). The task o f security schol­
arship was to keep up w ith fast-changing technologies
and the twists and turns o f political developments.
Increasing am ounts o f effort therefore w ent into ever­
m ore detailed w ork on technical specificities and nar­
row perfection o f isolated bits o f knowledge.

The corrupting influence o f policy was, however,
n o t the only explanation. During the 1970s and 1980s,
the very abstraction o f deterrence logic m ore o r less
broke down under the weight o f its own complexity
(ex p o st/e x ante, limited nuclear war, rationality de­
bates), causing an exhausted drift towards general or
existential deterrence (Morgan 1983; Freedman 1988).
The Golden Age lost its lustre also because the inter­
nal logic o f its key contribution atrophied.

A fu rth er complication o f the policy-academe in­
teraction has to do w ith an aspect that is very often

ignored in the debates these days, especially within
the m ore critical a n d /o r European forms o f security
studies: in the post-Golden Age period, the field was
m arked by a gradual IR-ification o f security studies.
It moved from interdisciplinarity into becom ing one
o f IR’s two pillars, paralleling International Political
Economy (IPE), N ot only did this m ean th at IR be­
came almost formalized as consisting o f these tw o
com ponents (in the USA symbolized by two lead jo u r­
nals, International Security and International Organiza­
tion); m ore im portantly in the present context—seen
from the angle o f security studies itself—it m eant that
IR became the main disciplinary context for security
studies theorizing, in striking contrast to the early
Golden Age situation. Previously, the leading scholars
cam e from a variety o f backgrounds—sociology,
mathematics, psychology, natural sciences, political
science, and quite a lot o f economists. Increasingly,
one discipline came to dominate: political science
(Waever 2010). In the retrospective construction o f
mainstream security thinking, (neo)realism and strat­
egic studies came to be seen as almost synonymous,
whereas, in actual history, they emerged as p art o f
separate communities, shaped by different dynamics
and only w ith limited personal overlaps (Hagemann
2011; Waiver 2015: 85).

Since the late 1960s, ‘strategic studies’ has becom e
the subject for specific courses as part o f general
IR /political science departm ents (Smoke 1976: 292;
Gray 1982: 86) and n o t least in specific, specialized
institutes, often w ith governm ent support, such
as SAIS at Johns Hopkins, the Saltzman Institute at
Columbia, and H arvard’s ‘John M. Olin Institute’. The
m ilitary academies and (especially in the USA) the
‘w ar schools’ o f each service becam e another arena
for systematic teaching o f courses in security studies.
Particularly in the USA, scholars—w ith military o r
civilian background—in these latter institutions have
been natural participants in the ‘international secur­
ity studies’ / ‘international security and arms control’
sections o f ISA (International Studies Association)
and APSA (American Political Science Association)
th at were set up in the 1980s. ‘Security theory’ almost
only develops w ithin the civilian, university-based
part—no longer in th e think tanks. It is im portant for
understanding the current situation regarding secur­
ity theory, th a t the field is now closely intertw ined
w ith the (sub)discipline o f IR in universities.

The potential problem for policy in this academi-
cized development has been compensated by a

424 Ole Waever and Barry Buzan

gradual modification o f the role o f think tanks in the
USA, In the early period, the leading think tanks—
notably the pioneering RAND C orporation—housed
(within their social science sections) heavy theory
w ork and large innovative projects. Today theory has
moved to the universities, and think tanks have com e
un d er strong competitive pressure for delivering fast,
usable policy guidance. Some think tanks have been
politicized and operate n ot only from a political per­
spective b ut as a key elem ent in political strategies for
conservatives or liberals; others are still loosely tied
to the services., b u t follow the policy agenda closely
(Rich 2004; Buzan and Hansen 2009), It has becom e
m uch rarer to find theory even explicitly discussed in
think tank work, b u t it is clearly drawn upon. The re­
sult is a chain construct, where academe, think tanks,
and policy m akers are distinct and each purifies its
role. Persons m ight travel betw een the categories—
move from think tank to university or to policy or
vice versa—but, as institutions, they are distinct, This
is, as we will re tu rn to in the next section, m uch less
clearly the case outside the USA (probably because
o f weaker competitive pressures on the intellectual
market).

Structural observation about the different kinds
of intellectual institutions in strategic studies is also
the ideal context for characterizing the difference b e­
tween the USA and W estern Europe during the early
decades, a comparison that should be introduced here
because the contrast will carry increasing weight as
our story unfolds. In Europe, even in the UK, think
tanks from the beginning mostly had the roles w ith
which they are associated today: to influence policy
in a specific direction, to mobilize the public behind
policy and at best to digest, popularize, and apply aca­
demic w ork done elsewhere into a m ore useful form at
for policy makers (Abelson 2002; Haas 2002; Parm ar
2004). In the area o f foreign and security affairs, m ost
policy-oriented w ork took place in ‘foreign-policy in­
stitutes’, which rarely engaged in m ore theoretical ef­
forts. One partial exception was in the early decades
of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
(IISS), in London, where the series o f Adelpki Papers
especially included serious research, often by scholars
from around the world who were resident at the Insti­
tute for a period. But generally during the Cold War
Europeans characteristically conducted their political,
argum ents over political and military strategy—often
against the USA—on the basis o f theories made in the
United States.

The m ost im portant non-American contributions
to strategic studies were probably Hedley Bulls (19 61)
foundational w ork on arms control and the continu­
ous interaction o f American social science scholarship
w ith a tradition o f British w ork steeped in classical
military strategy (Basil Liddell H art, Michael How­
ard, Lawrence Freedman, and P. M. S. Blackett). The
US-European contrast is clearly expressed in the way
France’s leading IR scholar, Raymond Aron, w rote re ­
peatedly about Clausewitz, and France’s m ain entries
in the history of post-war strategic thought are two
generals involved with the argum ent behind France’s
independent nuclear force, This is in contrast to the
centrality in the USA o f a kind o f strategy rooted in
m odern social science and relatively independent o f
classical military strategy, In hindsight, it can be seen
th at Pierre Hassner (1997), thro u g h o u t the Cold War
and after, produced a unique series o f analyses of the
political dimension o f security anchored in political
theory b u t this did n o t take off as a style or approach
establishing itself as a distinct presence in security
studies, and m ost o f his w ork during the Cold War
appeared in policy^oriented anthologies on current
challenges as ‘the French chapter’, rarely recognized
for the theory w ork it constituted (Gloannec and
Smolar 2003).

T he distinct phenom enon o f strategic- studies
emerged in Europe clearly as an im ported American
speciality, A m ost revealing testim ony to the asym m et­
rical relationship is the incredibly condescending tone
in W ohlstetter and W ohlstetter’s 1963 report on the
state o f strategic studies in Europe. They give marks
to the different national research comm unities (good
to Sweden, not so good England, hope for G erm any
and so on). Security studies was n o t born simultane­
ously in two places, and developments cannot be com ­
pared as independent phenom ena. It em erged in the
USA and was exported to Europe, Since European se­
curity studies mostly took shape in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, it becam e the post-Golden, institutional­
ized, theory-has-already-been-done kind o f w ork that
struggled to keep up w ith the newest technological
developments to assess optimal W estern military pol­
icy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

Strategic studies beyond the NATO area (Japan,
third world, Israel, and so on) has been almost, solely
o f the kind resembling political argum entation w ith
a bit o f factual, technical expertise—never “basic con­
ceptual analysis* (W ohlstetter and W ohlstetter 1966).
An interesting parallel to the US case was the Soviet

After the Return to Theory; The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies

one, w here think-tank-like ‘institutes’ gained a distinct
niche producing research w ith a different theoreti­
cal orientation than the (Marxist-Leninist) one in the
dom inant academic institutions. It is far beyond the
rem it o f this chapter to include a detailed and nuanced
coverage o f this development, but, in striking parallel
to the USA, real-world challenges form ed the basis for
innovative w ork in an institutional setting w ith a crea­
tive tension betw een tw o creative tensions: combining
a bond w ith a distance to high academe and a similar
duality in relation to policy itself. Comparable devel­
opm ents were n o t found to the same extent in Europe,

Nowhere beyond the USA did anything occur,
w ithin an independent field o f strategic studies, similar
to ‘RAND’s ability to produce systematic, long-range,
‘creative’ research rather than to engage in m ere short-
range tinkering w ith other peoples’ ideas’ (Green 1968:
304). If one chooses anachronistical^ to project the his­
tory o f security studies back into the inter-war period,
it can be noted that the think tanks o f the day (the first
such) produced policy-oriented w ork that simultane­
ously was theoretically innovative and entered the an­
nals o f IR-theory history. This happened in think tanks
such as the ‘Institute for Government Research’ (later
Brookings), Carnegie, the Council on Foreign Rela­
tions, and the Hoover Institution, plus Chatham House
in Britain. They contributed to the formulation o f plans
for the international order in the inter-war period, and
m uch o f the thinking recorded in IR theory’s history as
‘idealism’ was produced in connection to these.

Thus, the simultaneity o f policy and theory w ork
in universities and especially in separate institutions
characterized bo th the inter-war and the first post-war
periods in the USA, b ut this changed towards the end
o f the 1960s. ‘Having played a central role in the devel­
opm ent o f deterrence theory, economists were by [the
1970s] found hardly anywhere in the academic study o f
military affairs. RAND had also evolved into a bureau­
cratized contract research organization as m uch as a
think tank and was no longer the hothouse o f theoreti­
cal ferm ent it had been in the 1950s’ (Betts 1997:16).

A final elem ent to cover regarding this phase is the
parallel track constituted by peace research in relation
to security studies. These two tracks merge only dur­
ing the 1980s and 1990s, and, despite some overlaps
o f subject m atter (arms racing, arms control, war),
generally treated each other as political rivals divided
by the acceptability, or not, o f the whole structure o f
nuclear deterrence specifically, and the role o f w ar in
hum an relations generally (Buzan and Hansen 2009).

Sometimes peace research w ould be treated as left-
w ing’ security studies, and on o th er occasions as some­
thing (very much) other than security studies. Most
often, peace research repaid the latter favour by seeing
itself as certainly n ot ‘security studies’. Early peace re­
search ironically emerged in forms reminiscent o f stra­
tegic studies—as a scientific alternative to mainstream
IR. Much inter-war IR had been programmatically
constructed as aiming for the production o f peace, and
thus the history o f peace research can quite easily be
anchored in inter-war (and im m ediate post-war) clas­
sics such as Quincy W right’s A Study o f War (1942) and
Lewis Fry Richardson’s books, Generalized Foreign Poli­
tics (1939), Arms and Insecurity (1949), and Statistics o f
Deadly Quarrels (1960). After 1945, the UNESCO-spon­
sored attem pt to form a social-science-based study o f
w ar was dismissed by the em erging discipline o f Inter­
national Relations (Aron 1957; Waltz 1959), and con­
sequently peace research form ed w ith roots mostly in
the ‘softer o r m ore hum anistic social sciences such as
sociology and psychology, w ith pioneers like H erbert
Kelman andjo h an Galtung. An irony o f this is that the
same impulse towards ‘scientific’ approaches spurred
the development o f strategic studies mostly anchored
in game theory and thus economics. Some o f the
m ost ‘scientific’ work, such as quantitative events data
and psychological experiments m anaged to count as
both peace research, security studies, and IR (cf. the
Correlates o f War project and the Journal o f Conflict
Resolution). Especially in Europe, peace research w ent
through a radicalization in th e late 1960s and early
1970s, and so-called critical peace research w ith strong­
holds in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia,
came to see strategic studies as part o f the problem.

Especially in analyses like D ieter Senghaas’s cri­
tique o f deterrence theory (Senghaas 1969) an djohan
Galtung’s w ork on violence (Galtung 1969), mainstream
theories were understood as part of the balance o f ter­
ror, bipolar, Cold War system o f militarization, super­
power dominance, and exploitation o f the third world.
Critical peace research was usuaEy n ot seen as part o f
strategic studies or even security studies, either by the
mainstream or by the critics themselves. The critics did
n ot write in the nam e o f security, but m ore often in the
name of peace depicting ‘security’ as a destructive pur­
suit (Jahn et al. 1987; Waever 2008). Peace and security
were symbols of the opposing sides during the Cold War
(Buzan 1984; Waever 2008).

The period 1965-80 has been seen by m any obser­
vers as less successful, and by Baldwin (1995) it was even

426 Ole W aver and Barry Buzan

labelled ‘decline’. Already in the 1970s, however, some
new developments had begun that came into clearer
focus in the 1980s. Critics o f the traditional approach
had started to make the case for the inclusion o f se­
curity challenges in, for example, the economic and
environm ental sectors (Brandt et al. 1980; Palme et al.
1982; Buzan 1983; Ullmann 1983; Nye and Lynn-Jones
1988; Mathews 1989).

KE? POINTS

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Disciplinary questioning and
theoretical relaunch
There is no need here to rehash the familiar story of
the w id e/n arro w debate o f the 1970s and especially
1980s. The debate as such is covered well elsewhere—
w ithin and beyond (Buzan and Hansen 2009:156-225)
the present volume—-but for the present purpose o f
this chapter it is necessary to understand the way the
field developed theoretically in the 1980s and 1990s,
no t so m uch the debate as such, but the theoretical ap­
proaches that em erged ou t of this debate.

6 9
K.EK QU OT H 2H :■ N a r r o w j Jefinirion of
SeCorny jEvdir-i

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O f particular interest is the parallel tu rn to increas­
ingly abstract and ambitious theorizing o n both sides
o f the Atlantic—on separate tracks. The US m ain­
stream o f security studies focused on debates over
offensive and defensive realism, some discussion o f
constructivism, democratic peace, and a debate on
power versus institutions in e m p ire/o rd er building—
all shaped by a quest for empirically validated gener­
alizations about cause-effect relationships. A specific
form o f knowledge is hegemonic: cause-effect state­
m ents backed up either by statistical data or m ore
often by historical case studies (Walt 1999; Waever
2012a). In Europe, a debate em erged betw een a num ­
ber o f m ore o r less critical theories: Critical Security
Studies, feminism, Copenhagen School, Paris School,
and poststructuralism.

The different form o f knowledge in Europe re­
lates to a conflicting conception o f the relationship
to policy: less inclined to search for cause-effect
generalizations to assist policy makers in calculating
policy, m ore partaking in political reflections-—that is,
more the role o f public ‘intellectual’ than ‘expert’. It
is striking, however, that, parallel to both these th eo r­
etical clusters, lots o f specific ‘technical expertise*
developed on b o th sides, and they were often less dif­
ferent th an the theories: knowledge about AIDS as a
security problem , health security, or missile defence.
O n top o f this practical, empirical knowledge, tw o
different clusters o f theorization have developed. This
general split partly reflects a m ore problem-solving’
tradition in US social science versus a m ore critical
one in Europe, b u t recent developments are m ore ex­
trem e than the usual pattern, and security studies was
largely coherent across the Atlantic during the Cold
War, w ith the deep split developing only during the
1980s and especially after the end o f the Cold War (see
T hink Point 28.1).

While it would probably be w rong to explain this dif­
ference by policy needs (that is, an externalist sociology
o f science), the pattern is clearly reinforced by the pat­
tern o f w orld power at the beginning o f the twenty-first
century. In a world that m ight be described as consist­
ing of one superpower and four great powers (‘1 + 4 ’
according to Buzan and Waever 2003; Buzan 2004b) or
uni-multipolar (Huntington 1999) w ith the USA seeing
and handling it as unip o lar and the other great powers
acting according to multipolar logic, the different
angles o f watching the w orld point to different jornts of
knowledge (Waever 2012a, 2015): US decision makers
and academics see the USA as the actor that shapes

After the Return to Theory; The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies 427′

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the world and accordingly they need knowledge about
cause-effect relationships in order to understand how
to w ork the material they act upon (the world).

From a European perspective, in contrast, it is m ore
com m on to see the main voice o f security as an ex­
ternal factor to deal w ith (the USA) and therefore to
be in a tension-ridden relationship to security as such.
Calls for action in the nam e o f security can be seen as
p art o f US attem pts to organize the world—for exam­
ple under the slogan of a global w ar on terro r (Buzan
and W aver 2003:297,300,303,2009; Buzan 2006), and
therefore ‘E urope’ takes a position vis-a-vis security
where it is possible to problematize pronouncem ents
about w hat is a security issue (that is, de-securitize)
and insist on a wider concept o f security—for exam­
ple, an interpretation o f terro r and terro r fighting
th at emphasizes economic and political mechanisms.
Therefore, the whole question o f w hat should and
should not count as security issues and how to concep­
tualize security is m uch closer to the European policy
agenda than to the US one.

The difference also expresses a general meta-theoret­
ical divide—w ith the USA the more rationalist, Europe
the more reflectivist (Tickner and Wi-ever 2009)—but
this is far from the whole story. At least tw o other d e m ­
ents need to be taken into account (Wsever 2012a); one
is the different relationship to the concept o f security. In
Europe, the debate on this has stayed part o f the field. It
is seen as part o f the ongoing practice of being a security
analyst, to reflect on and problematize the concept—in
order to understand and unveil the actions by practition­
ers in the name o f security, but also as the politico-ethical
self-reflection o f a scholar who inevitably ‘does security’
w hen working in the name of security. In the USA, the
question o f the concept o f security is seen as at most
a necessary ‘define your terms’ operation in order to
delineate w hat is counted in and out. W hen done with,

one knows w hat is security o r not, and the concept is not
interesting in itself any more (Key Quote 28.1).

The other elem ent is the exact form o f knowledge
th at is valued. In contrast to the situation in general
IR, where the USA was dom inated especially in the
1990s by ra tio n a l choice and in later years by large-N
quantitative studies, the US security studies field is
absolutely not hard-core rational choice or num ber-
crunching. The leading security theory journals, In­
ternational Security and Security Studies, publish rather
little formalized rational choice, and even soft rational
choice th at draws on economic theory or organiza­
tional theory is far from valued in the way it is in
journals such as International Organization or Inter­
national Studies Quarterly (Wsever 1998, 2013; Brown
2000). T he typical article in International Security uses
historical case studies—maybe one in-depth histori­
cal case study—to examine a hypothesis fram ed as
a cause-effect relationship and very often tied into
general debates that are, on the one hand, o f sweep­
ing m agnitude, and, on the other hand, boiled down
to the m easurem ent o f one o r a few variables, such
as offensive versus defensive motivations (do states
maximize power or security?), the im portance o f
ideational variables, o r w hether international order
builds on pure pow er o r also on institutions and legit­
imacy. Although each of these debates could easily be
phrased as broad philosophical issues (as predecessors
o f each were in previous decades) o r as ethical dilem­
mas, the American security literature constructs these
questions as part o f a tight, causal machinery, where a
single, crucial question o f ho w the logic unfolds is to
be settled by empirical knowledge.

The m ost focused and sustained debate has prob­
ably been offensive versus defensive realism (plus neo­
classical realism), where a num ber o f m onographs
(some m ajor ones reviewed in Rose 1998) tried to use

428 Ole Waever and Barry Buzan

historical case studies to settle big, causal questions
(see also M earsheim er 2001), Similarly, the challenge
from constructivism, which in Europe turned into
m ajor self-reflective debates on the conditions and
responsibility o f scholarship, became in US security
studies m ostly a question o f testing the influence of
ideational variables in the big causal picture (Desch
1998; Tannenwald and W ohlforth 2005).

The top-level policy debate on American grand
strategy under presum ed unipolarity was academi­
cally addressed mainly in term s o f the proper expec­
tations regarding the balancing behaviour o f others
(Brooks and W ohlforth 2005), which again hinges
mostly on the general questions from the offensive-
defensive realism debate, and second on the pow er
o f institutions. The latter question generated a very
focused debate easily stylized (and taught) as Iken-
berry versus W ohlforth (Ikenberry 2002). Realism
traditionally took unipolarity to be impossible, and the
strictest o f neorealists—Waltz himself—actually p re­
dicted th at it would n o t last long. Those w ho w anted to
argue th at som e kind o f preponderance could endure
faced the challenge o f explaining its relative stability.
The major competing explanations emphasized, on the
one hand, the United States1 uniquely reassuringliberal
form o f hegem ony partly derived from attributes o f
the US state, partly built into US policy o f institution
building and self-binding, and, on the other hand,
the purely power-based stability o f a situation where
the USA is so superior that balancing becomes im ­
possible. (The debate is collected in Ikenberry 2002;
see also M earsheimer 2001; Buzan and Waever 2003;
Buzan 2004b; Brooks and W ohlforth 2005; Deudney
2006; Ikenberry et al. 2011.) The debate clearly had
im m ediate implications for optimizing American
grand strategy. But it was conducted less in term s o f
a future-oriented, purposive, and partly ethical debate
about w hat future to aim for, and almost solely as (if it
was) a theoretical-empirical debate over what theory
can explain the past record. During the presidency
o f Bill Clinton, the debate on democratic peace had
m uch the same status: the seemingly m ost relevant
knowledge for security studies to supply to policy
makers is whether there is or is no t a reliable causal
connection betw een democracy and peace (Lepgold
and Nincic 2001: ch. 5). After the collapse o f Bush Era
global can-do4sm, US scholarship has come to include
m ore w ork on terrorist movements and their internal
dynamics, as well as a predictable rehashing o f the de­
bate for and against US decline.

The com m on denom inator tying together these
Euro-American differences is diverging understand­
ings o f the role o f security studies, their function vis-a-
vis policy. In the USA, this is m ost clearly understood
as theory uncovering causal laws about the workings
o f world politics, which enables policy makers to
make the right choices w hen facing situations where
these relationships are relevant. This in tu rn reflects
a situation o f an acting power, one th at has to decide
about how to shape world affairs, and it reflects a clear
division o f labour betw een politics, policy advice, and
academic research.

In circles m ore clearly anchored on the European
side, the trend was towards critical theories o f vari­
ous kinds th at reflected on the practices o f policy and
problem atized the nature o f security making. This
goes for Aberystwyth-style Critical Security Studies,
the Bourdieu-inspired w ork around Didier Bigo as
well as the Copenhagen School, feminists and radical
postm odernists such as Dillon, Constantinou, and D er
Derian. Here, the concept o f security has stayed p art
o f the ongoing debate, and the form o f knowledge dif­
fers from th e one in the American m ainstream , and is
closer to that o f a critical intellectual reflecting openly
about one’s own political responsibility—w ho argues
about one’s analytical and theoretical choices in term s
o f their political implications (Booth 1997, 2007; Wyn
Jones 1999; Bigo 1996, 2002a, 2002b; Huysm ans 2002,
2006; Buzan et al. 1998; Buzan and Hansen 2009).

A part o f this story is the role o f peace research
and its change during the 1980s. W ith the new peace
movement, peace research suddenly gained a new
practical relevance. W hat Hakan W iberg (1988) has
called ‘the peace research m ovem ent’ had to fulfil its
function as the natural intellectual adviser (more or
less asked for) to the peace m ovem ent (Jahn 1984).
This led in m uch o f N orth European peace research
to a new ‘realism3. Peace research became pro-security
and pro-Europe (where previously it had been anti­
security in the nam e o f peace and anti-Europe in the
nam e o f the third world). Even defence was reappro­
priated as alternative defence (non-offensive defence)
(Mailer 1991).

Security became, during this period, a m eeting
ground for strategic studies, which had until then op­
erated m ore w ith power as the guiding concept and
peace research having obviously peace as the key con­
cept. In the 1980s, security emerged as a m ore construc­
tive analytical concept (Buzan 1984; Jahn et al. 1987).
Power thinking is a national concern and sees anarchy

After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies 429

as inescapable and the end o f the story—peace is cos­
m opolitan and claims that anarchy has to go before
anything good can be achieved. In contrast, security is
a relational concept (that is, in-between national and
cosmopolitan), and sees anarchy as a spectrum, where
conditions can be improved in the direction o f a m ature
anarchy (Buzan 1984). In this sense, security became
the middle ground and increasingly explicit as the basis
for m uch IR w ork from the 1980s and onwards.

Peace research institutes, especially in the 1980s,
were often in a position somewhat parallel to that o f
think tanks during Golden Age strategic studies, The
link to policy was very different—n o t official advisers to
policy makers—bu t European security studies gained
political relevance (in a broader sense) because o f the
politicization o f security issues during the period de­
fined by the peace movement, Reagan, and Gorbachev.
The setting was—as in the 1950s—simultaneously inter­
disciplinary and connected to current developments
in theory in the different disciplines. Peace research in
contrast to university IR was under pressure to deal
w ith relevant issues, but there was no expectation o f
immediate delivery o f policy answers. At RAND in
the 1950s, the theorists were given extraordinary lee­
way to pursue highly abstract, idiosyncratic theoretical
tracks, which clearly could not be justified in term s of
a guaranteed pay-off vis-a-vis products to be delivered
to policy makers (Stem 1967). Precisely, therefore, pub­
lications often ended up being innovative solutions to
policy questions. Similarly peace research was interdis­
ciplinary, politically oriented, bu t with a distance both
to immediate policy responsibility and to the major
powers of the academic system. It is less clear w hether
there were policy effects, bu t our main point here is the
impact o f political involvement on theory. As rightly
noted by Betts (1997: 32) in relation to traditional stra­
tegic studies: ‘Ironically, in the past quarter century,
policy experience has enriched academic research
m ore than the reverse.’ The same might be said about
the 1980s and the birth o f critical, European theories.
A volatile political situation, a sense o f importance and
relevance, and engagement in heated poHtical debates
clearly contributed to the birth o f these theories, and,
in a few cases, theorists probably had some role as intel­
lectuals o f or for social movements such as the peace
movements and Pugwash as well as some, mostly op­
positional, political parties, but in general the effect o f
practice on theory was probably larger than vice versa.

Several observers (and observer participants) have
noted th at the debates am ong the new critical schools

o f security studies—to some extent seen as a ‘E uro­
pean’ development—have becom e surprisingly pro­
ductive and generated theory o f broader relevance
and inspiration to the field o f IR in general (Huysmans
1998b; Eriksson 1999; Williams 2003). Security stud­
ies in the USA largely works w ith theories th at are de­
veloped within IR and then tested and refined within
security studies on security cases—neorealism, soft
constructivism, and so on (Waever 2012a). T he m ost
m onum ental illustration o f this is the nature o f con­
structivism in American security studies. T he main
w ork here is the big Katzenstein volum e on The Cul­
ture o f National Security (Katzenstein 1996b). This was
mainly m anned by scholars w ho did no t have a long­
term involvement w ith security affairs. They were IR
scholars who had taken part in the theory wars on the
constructivist side, and it seem ed the right move at
the time to prove constructivism on the hom e ground
of materialist approaches: security. Quite visibly this
is a foray by general IR theorists into security stud­
ies for the sake o f m aking a point within IR theory
debates. The new ‘European’ schools, in contrast, did
no t develop deductively from the guiding symbolic
positions within the theory debates (and therefore
they are often hard to pin down—is the Copenhagen
School constructivist, neorealist, postm odernist, or all
o f these?); they emerged as p art o f the engagements
on a distinct security scene, and the theoretical inno­
vations have become part o f the theory landscape in
IR theory. For instance, one can find discussions o f
securitization theory in general IR journals (Williams
2003; Balzacq 2005; Vuori 2008) in ways that constitute
the main investigations o f the potential for IR o f draw­
ing on speeeh-act th e o ry in general. Similarly, debates
within the discipline (at least in Europe) o f the political
role o f researchers have been conducted w ith secur­
ity theory as the platform (Eriksson 1999; Huysmans
2002). The fate o f Frankfurt-style ‘Critical T heory’ in
IR has also been decisively influenced by security stud­
ies. The attem pts in the ‘fou rth debate’ in the 1980s
to launch Critical Theory w ere largely abortive, and
postm odern approaches came to structure the meta-
theoretical scene to a much larger extent. But gradu­
ally Critical Theory gained a position in the general IR
landscape mainly because o f the success o f Ken Booth
and others in showing its value within the area o f se­
curity (Wyn Jones 1999; Booth 2005b, 2007).

One might ask now whether these lively debates in
and among the new schools still qualify as ‘security stud­
ies’. Have they simply become IR and lost the in-between

430 Ole Waever and Barry Buzan

position, that defines security studies? W here the first-
generation representatives o f the different schools—
Booth, Bigo, Buzan, Waever—had developed their
arguments in engagements with policy questions and
in direct interaction with, policy makers and think tanks,
the next generation would be more clearly academicaEy
defined and develop these arguments in a more isolated
academic setting. However, the set-up continues to be
one where security theory is located between the IR
discipline as such and technical experts and practition­
ers, only w ith the arrows somewhat different from the
N orth American ones (see Figure 28.1),

The place of security experts here underlines the
point that m uch w ork in European and N orth Ameri­
can research institutes is quite similar; detailed techni­
cal w ork on AIDS as an epidemic; on the proliferation
o f missile technology; on the efficiency o f various
counterterrorist strategies. Most o f w hat goes on in for-
eign-policy institutes as well as the IIS5 in Europe and in
American think tanks is o f this nature, delivering on the
dem and o f politicians for factual knowledge here-and-
now on a question that came up yesterday and needs an
answer tom orrow (maybe with the main difference that
in the USA this is often structured m ore as a partisan ad­
vocacy for a specific policy, and in Europe as seemingly
neutral, technical background knowledge)* The point
here is that, as soon as this is reflected on in terms o f
theory—when an interaction emerges between, on the
one hand, technical experts in say European foreign-
policy institutes or Washington think tanks, and, on the
other, in university circles, for instance through PhD
students who do w ork that is simultaneously part o f
their university-based PhD and part o f the research in­
stitute—-the theoretical context differs. In the USA, this
will usually be the discussions reflected in International
Security, whereas in parts o f Europe, the young scholars
will relate to and draw inspiration from the new

theories that emerged in European research institutes
and now mainly thrive in European universities.

O n both sides, it is essential to the particular nature
of security theory that there is a distinct category of
“policy knowledge” that functions as expertise sup­
porting policy—-a form o f knowledge th at security
theory in the USA wants to assist, while security th e­
ory in Europe (to draw the contrast sharply) treats it
as a main empirical source for critical analysis, Critics
o f current policy in the USA will aim to obtain a pol­
icy change by presenting theoretical generalizations
based on empirical data that give scientific credentials
to a different policy as m ore likely to achieve the aims
aspired to. Critics working w ith the theories here asso*
d a te d w ith European security studies are m ore likely
to criticize politically and ethically the current policy
for its aims and effects and to expose the involved pol­
icy knowledge” as a p art o f policy-making, stru ctu r­
ally com plidt and produced from the policy m ak ers
perspective, rather than criticizing it for being scien­
tifically w rong and up for revision.

Beyond the West, security theory throughout the
1980s m eant the frames o f reference used in think tanks
dealing with military matters, most strongly articulated
in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Iran,
Turkey, India, and Pakistan (Ttekner and Waever 2009).
These frames were usually vague general coimnon-scnse
realism, or (especially in Latin America) if they were more
distinct theories then they were o f a more geopolitical
ilk, Increasingly, a new security studies has emerged in
m ost parts o f the world, most often affiliated with uni­
versities, and often engaging more with European than
American traditions, for example, South African scholars
have contributed im portant reflections on the concept
of emancipation in Critical Security Studies, n ot wres­
tled with offensive versus defensive realism (Tickner
and Blaney 2012). H um an Security resonated where

_—– — ,— .— ,— ——-.— ,— ,— _— ,— ,— —– — — «— _ _ _ _ _ _ — — .— ,— _ — _ — —— —– — — ,— „ — ^

Figure’ 28* 1 The position of security theory :n North America 8.,rope ’ ‘ .1

N o rth A m erican –

I E —— se cu rity th eo ry — — —► se cu rity ex p e rts p o litic a l p ra c tic e

European

IR — —► se c u rity th e o ry < -------- se c u rity ex p erts p o litical p ra c tic e

After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies

security and development were most closely linked (see
Chapter 10), while Africa was often presented as exhibit A
for the case against IR approaches being relevant at all to
real-world concerns. East Asian schools paid much atten­
tion to securitization theory as an element in an original
literature on ‘non-traditional security’, often anchored in
Singapore and Hong Kong (see Chapter 12 and Curley
and Siu-Lun 2008). Another project that also places it­
self between, and bridges, the dominant approaches in
the USA and Europe was an impressive edited volume
by Muthiah Alagappa (1998). Empirically, it is a compre­
hensive investigation o f Asian Security Practices’, and as
the subtitle ‘material and ideational influences’ indicates,
it follows a US ‘soft mainstream’ approach in including
constructivist elements as a causal question about idea­
tional factors. It is representative o f much w ork done by
scholars in, especially, South Korea, Singapore, and India.

The m ost thought-provoking developments in re­
lation to foreshadowing a future global landscape of
security theory are taking place in China. The m ost
determ ined project at producing a non-Western
theory, the Chinese School, aspires to build general
theory based on Chinese traditions, Chinese history
and political theory (Qin 2010; Yan 2010; Nielsen &
Kristensen 2013; Wang & Buzan 2014). However, this
has evolved during a period where the overriding sub­
stantial IR question for Chinese scholars to address has
been a policy question from the security field: Various
versions o f ‘peaceful rise’ thinking were m eant to
counter a US ‘China th reat’ story (Buzan 2010). Given
th a t the principal conceptions o f ‘theory’ in China
places it closer to practice than in the West, it is not
hard to see how each attem pt to construct a general
IR theory from China, at the same time offered an
explanation why and how China’s rise can be peace­
ful. However, it is a remarkable development that this
takes place n o t only or primarily through direct w rit­
ings on ‘peaceful rise’, b u t as part o f a broader, general
theory building effort. And as Chinese policy makers
and think tankers possibly shift towards a more

ambitious ‘China D ream ’, it will be interesting to see
w hether the m ore IR discipline centred construction
o f general theory continues w ith its ow n m om entum .

As the general global trend is towards a w ider distri­
bution o f power and a general strengthening o f South
and East, m ore security theory is likely to emerge in
new locales around th e world. As witnessed by the
account o f the USA and Europe, the link is far from
autom atic betw een power, policy, and theorizing,
b u t given the great variety o f academic, institutional
structures in different rising powers, and the different
attitudes towards th e im portance o f theory, it is likely
th at at least some will yield new security theory ap­
plicable beyond its parochial point o f origin. Emerg­
ing powers are likely to emerge in the field o f security
theory as well. The next era in security studies is likely
to become driven increasingly by interactions along
axes other than the previous transatlantic one.

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Conclusion: the powers of theory and the challenges of the future
Security studies in the second decade o f the twenty-first
century is in a strong position. It has been through a
prolonged period o f theoretical productivity. Strangely,
this has happened to roughly parallel degrees in Europe
and the USA, despite the very minimal connections be-
tw een these two sets o f theoretical developments; and
increasingly the general strengthening o f non-Western
theory delivers security theory as well. Now the field is

well equipped with a battery o f theories and since it is
imultaneously seen as generally im portant, it attracts
right students, and, increasingly, funding. W hat kind
o f development will this lead to?

s
b

Increasingly, the new ‘European’ security studies does
not remain structured by separate ‘schools’ (Waever
2012a). There is a tendency in the fast-growing and very
active trans-European community o f PhD students to

432 Ole Waever and Barry Buzan

move am ong and across these schools. Thereby they be­
come treated, more as theories, where one has to under­
stand their distinct character—they do not blend into
one synthesized European security theory—but they
can be drawn upon in individual projects as inspiration
and instruments. While it is still possible to find contribu­
tions (e.g. Booth 2005b) that try to cultivate a situation of
competition and theory construction through caricatur­
ing others, it is dearly more common among the emerg­
ing generation of scholars to see the combined field of
“New European Security Theories” (NEST) as a joint de­
bate where the different theories are developed and ap­
plied through their interaction (Biiger and Stritzel 2005;
Huysmans 2006), For instance, an expanding debate on
the relationship between risk and security .is largely con­
ducted in terms set by the theories o f the 1990s mixed
up w ith the main social theories of risk (Aradau and
van Munster 2007; Rasmussen 2010; Petersen .2012). Im­
portant recent work on ‘the politics o f possibility” and
“speculative security” (de Goede 2012; Amoore 2013) use
securitization theory’s focus on exceptional measures
as a foil to develop a more Paris-School-like argument
about the procedures that have evolved, where the mere
possibility o f something* the imagination o f scenarios,
become the centre of preparations irrespective o f classic­
al calculations o f risk. Analyses Eke these provide a new
generation of analytical models.

The future o f security theory in the USA should
be assessed in a different manner, because the the­
ories there are less security specific than the European
theories and m ore closely integrated into the main
constellation o f IR theories. The .future o f these secur­
ity theories is therefore inseparable from the general
prospects for IE theory. As often noticed (e.g. Gold-
m ann 1988), US theory debates within IR tend to be
about general theories—frameworks potentially ex­
plaining everything o r at least a m ajor part o f every
im portant question. The main theories in the security
field are expressed in such general term s that, if valid,
they w ould be overarching frameworks for our general
understanding o f international relations. Therefore,
their fate as security theories hinges on their ability to
prevail in the general debates in the discipline o f IR, and
these are at the m om ent quite inconclusive and some­
w hat unfocused (Waever 2013; Wight et a l 2013). The
only strong candidate for a kind o f hegemony is ra ­
tional choice as m eta-theory and this is exactly the the­
ory that is comparatively w eak within security studies
even in the USA. Therefore, it is unlikely that the intern­
al dynamics o f the theory debate will be decided by a
general prevalence o f one o f the current candidates.

More im portant for the future development of each
theory in both Europe and the USA is probably how
it handles some o f the current issues on the political
agenda. The two sets o f theories will be working on.
partly overlapping sets of questions, as indicated in
many chapters o f this book. Probably it will mostly be
the European theories that try to make sense o ut o f
environmental security, health security identity issues,
and gender, while the US theories will be m ost active
in areas such as proliferation o f weapons o f mass de­
struction and global military stability Both will work
on terror and anti-terror practices (with Europeans
comparatively more attentive to domestic practices,
the USA to international, operations). Also, both will
work on migration and the tension between security
and liberty including the logic o f exceptionalism. al­
though at least at present the theoretical side of this is
far m ore developed in the debate am ong the European
schools, while in the USA this is mostly policy work
disconnected .from the m ain theories b ut with some-
notable exceptions (like Andreas and Biersteker 2003),
Both will be working on. the role and nature o f technol­
ogy globalization, risk society and international eco­
nomic order. This quick picture shows that there will
actually be m any points o f contact between the cur­
rently disconnected fields o f theory A m ajor question
is, therefore: will they merge again-Htiot in agreement
but in debate? Will there be more exchange between
the different research environments? Some signs in this
direction can be found in the acceptance o f a some­
w hat widened security agenda in American textbooks,
while-—as always—all m ajor American theories are read
in Europe. The particularly heavy-handed usage o f se­
curity justifications under the administration of George
W. Bush (2001—8), spurred an increased interest among
American scholars in the European theories, not least
securitization theory As the polarization o f IR’s ‘4th de­
bate” (i^tionaUsm-versus-reflectivisin) wears off, there
are also signs of European critical scholars reintegrat­
ing arguments about pow er and polarity; maybe they
too were motivated by the Bush administration,

W hat will happen w hen the theories meet first trans-
Adantically and later globally on issues o f common
concern? Will they try to learn from, contrasting insights
from different kinds o f theories? The academic world is
usually quite slow, so if we lookat the cumulative effect of
15 years o f reaction to 9 /11 there were, on the one hand,
some overlapping concerns about the question of to what
extent the US-initiated w ar on terror could and would
become a globaly structuring political programme
(Buzan 2006; Ikenberry et a l 2011; de Goede 2012).

After the Return to Theory: The Past Present, and Future of Security Studies 433

On the other hand, the more general attem pt to de­
velop cumulative research agendas for a world where
the fight against terror topped the policy agenda hap­
pened very much on separate tracks. Here, it is strik­
ing that the European approaches have refined their
analysis o f Anti-Terror, that is sophisticated analyses o f
the emerging rationalities of Western societies in the
p o st-9 /11 period (Bigo 2002a, 2002b; de Goede 2012;
Petersen 2012; Amoore 2013), while the spearhead
o f mainstream security studies in the USA has been
an increased understanding of Terrorism, The leading
journal International Security compiled a collection o f
recent articles where the two focal points clearly are to
understand the inner dynamics o f terrorist groups and
the efficiency o f different strategies against them, n o t­
ably decapitation (Cronin et al, 2014). In term s o f m ore
short-term reactions to new surprising events, it was
thought-provoking to see how the quickest, strong, and
theory-driven intervention in the Ukraine crisis came
from neither novel US theorizing, nor critical Euro­
pean approaches, b u t John Mearsheimer (2014) writing
almost as a classical realist, exposing hubris and self­
righteousness in a Western policy unwilling to under­
stand the security needs o f another major power. The
almost total silence from critical theorists on an issue so
close to hom e for most European scholars points to a
worrying division o f labour that has emerged. The ‘new
security theories’ do ‘new security issues’, like environ­
m ent and disease, and they do the dark side o f dominant
policies; but (with notable exceptions: Peoples 2010;
Pouliot 2010), they do not engage with military security,
so “traditional security” is accepted by all parties to be
the domain o f ‘traditional theories*.

Fast-rising concerns over environm ental/clim ate
security could easily provide another big linking issue.
It seems less likely, however, that the rise o f China will
w ork in this way because the rise o f China threatens
US unipolar status, and is therefore becom ing a m ore
central concern of US security studies than its Euro­
pean counterpart. The broader coming to term s w ith
a post-W estern world is unlikely to become a fruitful
theoretical challenge, even in their separate universes.
Americans insist on repeating the debate on decline
(i.e. about themselves, n o t listening to new voices),
while European security studies is mostly about Eur­
ope. T hat challenge m ight have to wait for non*West­
ern scholars to lift it.

Beyond the West, theorizing is in m ost cases ru n ­
ning parallel to the main definition of policy issues.
Therefore, some o f it will remain local and be ignored
by scholars elsewhere. However, some im portant

m eeting points can be discerned. H um an security de­
bates in the West are likely to be increasingly impacted
by scholarship from especially Africa and the Middle
East, The Asian approach to non-traditional security
should find a voice within the European debates.
W ork on Islamic approaches to IR m ight become lis­
tened to in the West as policy becom es more and m ore
serious about n o t transform ing the region top-down
b u t acting strategically in relation to a region dom ­
inated by regional actors. Most im portantly however,
will be the question o f how debates within rising
powers about pow er transition are mediated with de­
bates from declining powers on the same issue.

W ith or w ithout such a meeting, this will be a time
w hen theory is central to security studies. W hat can
be envisaged here is not a “new great debate” between
coalitions o f security theories—rather a new encounter
between different debates in which the theories to some
extent represent a division o f labour brought to bear on
com m on problems. The grand theories of the 1990s as
well as the more recent innovations will have to prove
themselves in a dual challenge. The first question to each
is does it have the inner vitality to become a dynamic
research programme that continues to evolve? This de­
pends largely on the constellation o f key concepts—is
this at once tight enough to be operational and open
enough to generate puzzles and research problems?
So far the signs here are quite promising. The second
challenge is to be able to take up in interesting ways the
political challenges of the day In that regard, security
studies will continue to grapple with the problem noted
long ago by Waltz (1979: 112): ‘States, like people, are
insecure in proportion to the extent o f their freedom. If
freedom is wanted, insecurity must be accepted/

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♦

1. W h y w as it primarily in th e USA th a t strategic studies form ed as a separate field?

2. W h y did th e Vietnam W a r no t b eco m e th e g en erato r o f new waves o f theorization t o deliver on this new policy

challenge?

3. O n th e basis o f th e previous chapters in this b ook as well as this chapter, t o w hat e x te n t d o es ’security studies’
ap p ear t o b e on e integrated field, o r is it m ore appropriately seen as tw o o r m ore arenas sharing a nam e b u t ‘

separated by either geographical o r meta-theonetica! distance? .

4. W ould you explain th e increasing distance b etw een security theorizing In E urope and th e USA mainly by differences

in foreign policy, genera! philosophical orientations, institutional differences within th e academic world, o r o th e r

factors? .

5. W h y d o es constructivism lead t o such different kinds o f work in th e USA and Europe?

6. W h a t is difference b etw een th e form o f knowledge in US and European work?

7. W h a t institutional reform s regarding universities, think tanks, policy institutes, o r policy-making would be m ost

conducive to b e tte r security th e o r y and b e tte r security policy? . ■

8. W h a t are th e m ost im portant questions on th e policy agenda to g et a b e tte r understanding of, and why d o th e s e
n o t b eco m e th e m ost active areas o f research?

9. D o th e cu rre n t policy challenges point t o a n eed for n ew interdisciplinary configurations? ;

10. Is a d o s e connection b etw een th e o ry and policy conducive o r disruptive for good theory?

11. If th e distribution o f po w er in th e global system becom es less unbalanced, and security th e o ry sta rts to em anate
from many quarters, will this result in a thoroughly fragm ented field, o r will it b eco m e m o re integrated as policy,
makers and scholars get a real n eed to understand pow erful o th e rs – for security reasons? .

FURTHER READING . ’

* B ro w n , Michael E, (ed.) (2000), Rational Choice and Security Studies: Stephen Wait and his Critics, Cambridge, HA; MIT
Press. Stephen Walt’s attack on rational choice approaches t o security is both interesting as an exploration o f t h e pros.: ■

and cons o f this approach, and as a clarification o f how security studies, international Security style, defines itself,
methodologically and meta-theoretically.

» Buzan, Barry (1983), People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, Brighton; •
W h e a tsh e a f (2nd edn subtitled An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post Cold War Fra), Boulder CO;
Lynne Rienner 2 0 0 1; re-issued with a new introduction as ECPR classic (2007). A defining w o rk fro m th e second

productive period, which bo th summarizes th e preceding reflections on th e co n cep t o f security and puts forw ard an

original synthesis th a t m ade on e o f th e first co h eren t cases fo r widening.

• Buzan, Barry and Hansen, Lens (2009), The Evolution o f International Security Studies, Cambridge: Cam bridge;
University Press. Surveys th e history of security studies, traditional as well as critical forms, and offers an explanation .’

in te rm s o f driving forces th a t shaped debates in 1SS. \

* B uzan, B a rry , Waever, O l e , and d e W ilde, jaap ( 1998), Security: A New Framework fir Analysis, Boulder; C O ; Lynne ■■
Rienner (Chinese translation 2004). T he main theoretical sta te m e n t from th e C openhagen School. W hile its world

analysis is m o re fully elaborated in a 2003 book, th e defining categories o f th e th e o r y are p u t forw ard here;

securitization and sectors.

• Gray Colin (1982), Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience, Lexington, KY: University Press o f f
Kentucky. A critical history o f early strategic studies, which com bines observations a b o u t institutions, politics, and
theory. . .

434 Ole W aver and Barry Buzan

After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies 435

• G uzzini, Stefano and Ju n g , Dietrich (eds) (2004), Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research,
London: Routledge, E x p lo re s th e ro le o f peace research (especially in N o rth e rn Europe) in furthering th e em ergence

o f th e new European security theories.

• Huysmans, je f (2006) The Politics of insecurity: Security, Migration and Assylum in the EU, London: Routledge. State-
o f-th e-art discussion— and partial synthesis— o f som e o f th e main th eo ries from Europe: C openhagen School, Paris

School, and post-structuralist political theory.

« tkenberry, G. John (ed.) (2002), America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power, Ithaca, NY: Cornell. Includes a
n um ber o f pow erful contributions th a t rep re sen t th e main American d eb ates over both offensive/defensive realism

and international o rd ers built on power/institutions.

» Jervis, R obert ( 1976), Perception and Misperception in International Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
O n e o f th e main books (to g eth er with Allison’s ( 19 7 1) Essence of Decision) t o op en up th e psychological and decision­
making approaches t o strategic thinking in opposition to rational acto r models,

• Krause , Keith and Williams , Michael C, (eds) ( ’997), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, Minneapolis:
University o f Minnesota Press. The defining w o rk from Critical Security Studies, which includes sufficient diversity t o

re p re se n t much o f th e n ew w ork in general, n o t only o n e narrowly defined school, and paradoxically th ereb y

p roduces th e ideal manifesto for CSS.

» Scheiling, Thomas C. (I960), The Strategy o f Conflict, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O n e o f th e m o st
original w orks fro m th e (first) Golden Age, produced a t RAND, eventually earning t h e au th o r a 2005 N obel Prize in

econom y (o r in security studies, if o n e reads closely th e justification from The Royal Swedish Academy o f Sciences),

Even fun to read.

• http://w w w .isn.ethz.ch International Relations and Security N etw ork. C e n te r fo r Security Studies, ETH, Zurich,

Switzerland. A good collection o f links t o both c u rre n t security Issues and cen tres o f research. From h e re o n e can

get to t h e institutes, journals, and organizations, o f which th e re are to o many to list individually here.

• h ttp ://w v w .m itp ressjo u m als.o rg /is international Security, th e leading m ainstream journal.

• http://w w w .tandf.co.uk/loum als/titles/096364l2.asp Security Studies, a n o th e r high-ranking journal mostly
publishing American m ainstream research, b u t o ften m o re op en to d e e p theoretical d e b a te than International
Security.

• http://ejt.sagepub.com European Journal of International Relations. Much o f th e d e b a te o v er th e new European
th eo ries has taken place in general IR journals such as EjlR, International Political Sociology, Review of International Studies,
and Millennium.

• http://sdi.sagepub.com Security Dialogue has recently developed into o n e o f th e leading places for discussion on
‘hum an security’, ‘risk/security’, ‘g ender and security’, and th e new European theories, while it is also relatively strong

on critical policy articles.

Visit th e O nline R esource C e n tre t h a t accom panies this b o o k fo r lots o f in terestin g additional m aterial:

w w w .oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/collins4e/

http://www.isn.ethz.ch

http://wvw.mitpressjoumals.org/is

http://www.tandf.co.uk/loumals/titles/096364l2.asp

http://ejt.sagepub.com

http://sdi.sagepub.com

www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/collins4e/

• Course of Study: (7PIRS027W) Theories of International Security

Title: Contemporary security studies (After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present and Future of Security Studies)
28 After the Return to Theory: The Past, Present, and Future of Security Studies Ole Waever and Barry Buzan
Chapter Contents
Reader’s Guide
Introduction
KEY IDEAS 28.1 Terminology
The origins and institutional structure of security studies
KEY POINTS
The Golden Age of security studies
KEY POINTS
Institutionalization and stagnation
KEY POINTS
Disciplinary questioning and theoretical relaunch
KEY QUOTE 28.1 Narrow definition of Security studies
THINK POINT 28.1 places, persons. and paradigms
KEY POINTS
Conclusion: the powers of theory and the challenges of the future
KEY POINTS
QUESTIONS
FURTHER READING
IMPORTANT WEBSITES

Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War

Author(s): John J. Mearsheimer

Source: International Security , Summer, 1990, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer, 1990), pp. 5-56

Published by: The MIT Press

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/2538981

Back to the Future John J. Mearsheimer
Instability in Europe
After the Cold War

The profound changes now underway in Europe have been widely viewed

as harbingers of a new age of peace. With the Cold War over, it is said, the

threat of war that has hung over Europe for more than four decades is lifting.

Swords can now be beaten into ploughshares; harmony can reign among the

states and peoples of Europe. Central Europe, which long groaned under

the massive forces of the two military blocs, can convert its military bases

into industrial parks, playgrounds, and condominiums. Scholars of security

affairs can stop their dreary quarrels over military doctrine and balance

assessments, and turn their attention to finding ways to prevent global

warming and preserve the ozone layer. European leaders can contemplate

how to spend peace dividends. So goes the common view.

This article assesses this optimistic view by exploring in detail the conse-

quences for Europe of an end to the Cold War. Specifically, I examine the

effects of a scenario under which the Cold War comes to a complete end.
The Soviet Union withdraws all of its forces from Eastern Europe, leaving

the states in that region fully independent. Voices are thereupon raised in

the United States, Britain, and Germany, arguing that American and British

military forces in Germany have lost their principal raison d’etre, and these

forces are withdrawn from the Continent. NATO and the Warsaw Pact then

dissolve; they may persist on paper, but each ceases to function as an alli-

ance.1 As a result, the bipolar structure that has characterized Europe since

This article emerged from a paper written for a February 1990 conference at Ditchley Park,
England, on the future of Europe, organized by James Callaghan, Gerald Ford, Valery Giscard
d’Estaing, and Helmut Schmidt. An abridged version of this article appears in the Atlantic,
August 1990. I am grateful to Robert Art, Stacy Bergstrom, Richard Betts, Anne-Marie Burley,
Dale Copeland, Michael Desch, Markus Fischer, Henk Goemans, Joseph Grieco, Ted Hopf,
Craig Koerner, Andrew Kydd, Alicia Levine, James Nolt, Roger Petersen, Barry Posen, Denny
Roy, Jack Snyder, Ashley Tellis, Marc Trachtenberg, Stephen Van Evera, Andrew Wallace, and
Stephen Walt for their most helpful comments.

John Mearsheimer is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Chicago.

1. There is considerable support within NATO’s higher circles, including the Bush administra-
tion, for maintaining NATO beyond the Cold War. NATO leaders have not clearly articulated
the concrete goals that NATO would serve in a post-Cold War Europe, but they appear to
conceive the future NATO as a means for ensuring German security, thereby removing possible
German motives for aggressive policies; and as a means to protect other NATO states against

International Security, Summer 1990 (Vol. 15, No. 1)
C 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

5

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International Security 15:1 | 6

the end of World War II is replaced by a multipolar structure. In essence,

the Cold War we have known for almost half a century is over, and the

postwar order in Europe is ended.2

How would such a fundamental change affect the prospects for peace in

Europe?3 Would it raise or lower the risk of war?

I argue that the prospects for major crises and war in Europe are likely to

increase markedly if the Cold War ends and this scenario unfolds. The next

decades in a Europe without the superpowers would probably not be as

violent as the first 45 years of this century, but would probably be substan-

tially more prone to violence than the

past 45 years.

This pessimistic conclusion rests on the argument that the distribution and

character of military power are the root causes of war and peace. Specifically,

the absence of war in Europe since 1945 has been a consequence of three

factors: the bipolar distribution of military power on the Continent; the rough

military equality between the two states comprising the two poles in Europe,

German aggression. However, the Germans, who now provide the largest portion of the Alli-
ance’s standing forces, are likely to resist such a role for NATO. A security structure of this sort
assumes that Germany cannot be trusted and that NATO must be maintained to keep it in line.
A united Germany is not likely to accept for very long a structure that rests on this premise.
Germans accepted NATO throughout the Cold War because it secured Germany against the
Soviet threat that developed in the wake of World War II. Without that specific threat, which
now appears to be diminishing rapidly, Germany is likely to reject the continued maintenance
of NATO as we know it.
2. I am not arguing that a complete end to the Cold War is inevitable; also quite likely is an
intermediate outcome, under which the status quo is substantially modified, but the main
outlines of the current order remain in place. Specifically, the Soviet Union may withdraw much
of its force from Eastern Europe, but leave significant forces behind. If so, NATO force levels
would probably shrink markedly, but NATO may continue to maintain significant forces in
Germany. Britain and the United States would withdraw some but not all of their troops from
the Continent. If this outcome develops, the basic bipolar military competition that has defined
the map of Europe throughout the Cold War will continue. I leave this scenario unexamined,
and instead explore what follows from a complete end to the Cold War in Europe because this
latter scenario is the less examined of the two, and because the consequences, and therefore
the desirability, of completely ending the Cold War would still remain an issue if the intermediate
outcome occurred.
3. The impact of such a change on human rights in Eastern Europe will not be considered
directly in this article. Eastern Europeans have suffered great hardship as a result of the Soviet
occupation. The Soviets have imposed oppressive political regimes on the region, denying
Eastern Europeans basic freedoms. Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe will probably change
that situation for the better, although the change is likely to be more of a mixed blessing than
most realize. First, it is not clear that communism will be promptly replaced in all Eastern
European countries with political systems that place a high premium on protecting minority
rights and civil liberties. Second, the longstanding blood feuds among the nationalities in Eastern
Europe are likely to re-emerge in a niultipolar Europe, regardless of the existing political order.
If wars break out in Eastern Europe, human rights are sure to suffer.

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Back to the Future | 7

the United States and the Soviet Union; and the fact that each superpower

was armed with a large nuclear arsenal.4 Domestic factors also affect the

likelihood of war, and have helped cause the postwar peace. Most impor-

tantly, hyper-nationalism helped cause the two world wars, and the decline

of nationalism in Europe since 1945 has contributed to the peacefulness of

the postwar world. However, factors of military power have been most

important in shaping past events, and will remain central in the future.

The departure of the superpowers from Central Europe would transform

Europe from a bipolar to a multipolar system.5 Germany, France, Britain,

and perhaps Italy would assume major power status; the Soviet Union would

decline from superpower status but would remain a major European power,

giving rise to a system of five major powers and a number of lesser powers.

The resulting system would suffer the problems common to multipolar sys-

tems, and would therefore be more prone to instability.6 Power inequities

could also appear; if so, stability would be undermined further.

The departure of the superpowers would also remove the large nuclear

arsenals they now maintain in Central Europe. This would remove the pac-

ifying effect that these weapons have had on European politics. Four prin-

cipal scenarios are possible. Under the first scenario, Europe would become

nuclear-free, thus eliminating a central pillar of order in the Cold War era.

Under the second scenario, the European states do not expand their arsenals

to compensate for the departure of the superpowers’ weapons. In a third

scenario, nuclear proliferation takes place, but is mismanaged; no steps are

4. It is commonplace to characterize the polarity-bipolar or multipolar-of the international
system at large, not a specific region. The focus in this article, however, is not on the global
distribution of power, but on the distribution of power in Europe. Polarity arguments can be
used to assess the prospects for stability in a particular region, provided the global and regional
balances are distinguished from one another and the analysis is focused on the structure of
power in the relevant region.
5. To qualify as a pole in a global or regional system, a state must have a reasonable prospect
of defending itself against the leading state in the system by its own efforts. The United States
and the Soviet Union have enjoyed clear military superiority over other European states, and
all non-European states, throughout the Cold War; hence they have formed the two poles of
both the global and European systems. What is happening to change this is that both the Soviet
Union and the United States are moving forces out of Central Europe, which makes it more
difficult for them to project power on the Continent and thus weakens their influence there;
and reducing the size of those forces, leaving them less military power to project. Because of
its proximity to Europe, the Soviet Union will remain a pole in the European system as long as
it retains substantial military forces op its own territory. The United States can remain a pole in
Europe only if it retains the capacity to project significant military power into Central

Europe.

6. Stability is simply defined as the absence of wars and major crises.

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International Security 15:1 | 8

taken to dampen the many dangers inherent in the proliferation process. All

three of these scenarios would raise serious risks of war.

In the fourth and least dangerous scenario, nuclear weapons proliferate in

Europe, but the process is well-managed by the current nuclear powers.

They take steps to deter preventive strikes on emerging nuclear powers, to

set boundaries on the proliferation process by extending security umbrellas

over the neighbors of emerging nuclear powers, to help emerging nuclear

powers build secure deterrent forces, and to discourage them from deploying

counterforce systems that threaten their neighbors’ deterrents. This outcome

probably provides the best hope for maintaining peace in Europe. However,

it would still be more dangerous than the world of 1945-90. Moreover, it is

not likely that proliferation would be well-managed.

Three counter-arguments might be advanced against this pessimistic set

of predictions of Europe’s future. The first argument holds that the peace

will be preserved by the effects of the liberal international economic order

that has evolved since World War II. The second rests on the observation

that liberal democracies very seldom fight wars against each other, and holds

that the past spread of democracy in Europe has bolstered peace, and that

the ongoing democratization of Eastern Europe makes war still less likely.

The third argument maintains that Europeans have learned from their disas-

trous experiences in this century that war, whether conventional or nuclear,

is so costly that it is no longer a sensible option for states.

But the theories behind these arguments are flawed, as I explain; hence

their prediction of peace in a multipolar Europe is flawed as well.
Three principal policy prescriptions follow from this analysis. First, the

United States should encourage a process of limited nuclear proliferation in

Europe. Specifically, Europe will be more stable if Germany acquires a secure

nuclear deterrent, but proliferation does not go beyond that point. Second,

the United States should not withdraw fully from Europe, even if the Soviet

Union pulls its forces out of Eastern Europe. Third, the United States should

take steps to forestall the re-emergence of hyper-nationalism in Europe.

METHODOLOGY: HOW SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT EUROPE S FUTURE?

Predictions on the future risk of war and prescriptions about how best to

maintain peace should rest on general theories about the causes of war and

peace. This point is true for both academics and policymakers. The latter are

seldom self-conscious in their uses of theory. Nevertheless, policymakers’

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Back to the Future I 9

views on the future of Europe are shaped by their implicit preference for one

theory of international relations over another. Our task, then, is to decide

which theories best explain the past, and will most directly apply to the

future; and then to employ these theories to explore the consequences of

probable scenarios.

Specifically, we should first survey the inventory of international relations

theories that bear on the problem. What theories best explain the period of

violence before the Cold War? What theories best explain the peace of the

past 45 years? Are there other theories that explain little about pre-Cold War

Europe, or Cold War Europe, but are well-suited for explaining what is likely

to occur in a Europe without a Soviet and American military presence?

Next, we should ask what these theories predict about the nature of

international politics in a post-Cold War multipolar Europe. Will the causes

of the postwar peace persist, will the causes of the two world wars return,

or will other causes arise?

We can then assess whether we should expect the next decades to be more

peaceful, or at least as peaceful, as the past 45 years, or whether the future

is more likely to resemble the first 45 years of the century. We can also ask

what policy prescriptions these theories suggest.

The study of international relations, like the other social sciences, does not

yet resemble the hard sciences. Our stock of theories is spotty and often

poorly tested. The conditions required for the operation of established the-

ories are often poorly understood. Moreover, political phenomena are highly

complex; hence precise political predictions are impossible without very pow-

erful theoretical tools, superior to those we now possess. As a result, all
political forecasting is bound to include some error. Those who venture to

predict, as I do here, should therefore proceed with humility, take care not

to claim unwarranted confidence, and admit that later hindsight will un-

doubtedly reveal surprises and mistakes.

Nevertheless, social science should offer predictions on the occurrence of

momentous and fluid events like those now unfolding in Europe. Predictions

can inform policy discourse. They help even those who disagree to frame

their ideas, by clarifying points of disagreement. Moreover, predictions of

events soon to unfold provide the best tests of social science theories, by
making clear what it was that given theories have predicted about those

events. In short, the world can be used as a laboratory to decide which

theories best explain international politics. In this article I employ the body

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International Security 15:1 | 10

of theories that I find most persuasive to peer into the future. Time will

reveal whether these theories in fact have much power to explain interna-

tional politics.

The next section offers an explanation for the peacefulness of the post-

World War II order. The section that follows argues that the end of the Cold

War is likely to lead to a less stable Europe. Next comes an examination of

the theories underlying claims that a multipolar Europe is likely to be as

peaceful, if not more peaceful, than Cold War Europe. The concluding section

suggests policy implications that follow from my analysis.

Explaining the “Long Peace”

The past 45 years represent the longest period of peace in European history.7

During these years Europe saw no major war, and only two minor conflicts

(the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary and the 1974 Greco-Turkish war in

Cyprus). Neither conflict threatened to widen to other countries. The early

years of the Cold War (1945-63) were marked by a handful of major crises,

although none brought Europe to the brink of war. Since 1963, however,

there have been no East-West crises in Europe. It has been difficult-if not

impossible-for the last two decades to find serious national security analysts

who have seen a real chance that the Soviet Union would attack Western

Europe.

The Cold War peace contrasts sharply with European politics during the

first 45 years of this century, which saw two world wars, a handful of minor

wars, and a number of crises that almost resulted in war. Some 50 million

Europeans were killed in the two world wars; in contrast, probably no more

than 15,000 died in the two post-1945 European conflicts.8 Cold War Europe

is far more peaceful than early twentieth-century Europe.

Both Europeans and Americans increasingly assume that peace and calm

are the natural order of things in Europe and that the first 45 years of this

century, not the most recent, were the aberration. This is understandable,

7. The term “long peace” was coined by John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace: Elements of
Stability in the Postwar International System,” International Security, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986),
pp. 99-142.

8. There were approximately 10,000 battle deaths in the Russo-Hungarian War of October-
November 1956, and some 1500-5000 battle deaths in the July-August 1974 war in Cyprus. See
Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1989 (Washington, D.C.: World Priori-
ties, 1989), p. 22; and Melvin Small a’nd J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil
Wars, 1816-1980 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1982), pp. 93-94.

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Back to the Future I 11

since Europe has been free of war for so long that an ever-growing proportion

of the Western public, born after World War II, has no direct experience with

great-power war. However, this optimistic view is incorrect.

The European state system has been plagued with war since its inception.

During much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries war was underway

somewhere on the European Continent.9 The nineteenth century held longer

periods of peace, but also several major wars and crises. The first half of that

century witnessed the protracted and bloody Napoleonic Wars; later came

the Crimean War, and the Italian and German wars of unification.10 The wars

of 1914-45 continued this long historical pattern. They represented a break

from the events of previous centuries only in the enormous increase in their

scale of destruction.

This era of warfare came to an abrupt end with the conclusion of World

War II. A wholly new and remarkably peaceful order then developed on the

Continent.

THE CAUSES OF THE LONG PEACE: MILITARY POWER AND STABILITY

What caused the era of violence before 1945? Why has the postwar era been

so much more peaceful? The wars before 1945 each had their particular and

unique causes, but the distribution of power in Europe-its multipolarity

and the imbalances of power that often occurred among the major states in

that multipolar system-was the crucial permissive condition that allowed

these particular causes to operate. The peacefulness of the postwar era arose

for three principal reasons: the bipolarity of the distribution of power on the

Continent, the rough equality in military power between those two polar

states, and the appearance of nuclear weapons, which vastly expanded the

violence of war, making deterrence far more robust.11

9. For inventories of past wars, see Jack S. Levy, War In the Modern Great Power System, 1495-
1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); and Small and Singer, Resort to Arms.
10. Europe saw no major war from 1815-1853 and from 1871-1914, two periods almost as long
as the 45 years of the Cold War. There is a crucial distinction, however, between the Cold War
and these earlier periods. Relations among the great powers deteriorated markedly in the closing
years of the two earlier periods, leading in each case to a major war. On the other hand, the
Cold War order has become increasingly stable with the passage of time and there is now no
serious threat of war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Europe would surely remain at
peace for the foreseeable future if the Cold War were to continue, a point that highlights the
exceptional stability of the present European order.
11. The relative importance of these’three factors cannot be stated precisely, but all three had
substantial importance.

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International Security 15:1 | 12

These factors are aspects of the European state system-of the character

of military power and its distribution among states-and not of the states

themselves. Thus the keys to war and peace lie more in the structure of the

international system than in the nature of the individual states. Domestic

factors-most notably hyper-nationalism-also helped cause the wars of the

pre-1945 era, and the domestic structures of post-1945 European states have

been more conducive to peace, but these domestic factors were less important

than the character and distribution of military power between states. More-

over, hyper-nationalism was caused in large part by security competition
among the European states, which compelled European elites to mobilize

publics to support national defense efforts; hence even this important do-

mestic factor was a more remote consequence of the international system.

Conflict is common among states because the international system creates

powerful incentives for aggression.12 The root cause of the problem is the

anarchic nature of the international system. In anarchy there is no higher

body or sovereign that protects states from one another. Hence each state

living under anarchy faces the ever-present possibility that another state will

use force to harm or conquer it. Offensive military action is always a threat
to all states in the system.

Anarchy has two principal consequences. First, there is little room for trust

among states because a state may be unable to recover if its trust is betrayed.

Second, each state must guarantee its own survival since no other actor will

provide its security. All other states are potential threats, and no international

institution is capable of enforcing order or punishing powerful aggressors.

States seek to survive under anarchy by maximizing their power relative

to other states, in order to maintain the means for self-defense. Relative

power, not absolute levels of power, matters most to states. Thus, states seek

opportunities to weaken potential adversaries and improve their relative

power position. They sometimes see aggression as the best way to accumu-

late more power at the expense of rivals.

This competitive world is peaceful when it is obvious that the costs and

risks of going to war are high, and the benefits of going to war are low. Two

aspects of military power are at the heart of this incentive structure: the

distribution of power between states, and the nature of the military power

12. The two classic works on this su1ject are Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The
Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973); and Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of
International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979).

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Back to the Future | 13

available to them. The distribution of power between states tells us how

well-positioned states are to commit aggression, and whether other states

are able to check their aggression. This distribution is a function of the

number of poles in the system, and their relative power. The nature of

military power directly affects the costs, risks, and benefits of going to war.

If the military weaponry available guarantees that warfare will be very de-

structive, states are more likely to be deterred by the cost of war. 13 If available

weaponry favors the defense over the offense, aggressors are more likely to

be deterred by the futility of aggression, and all states feel less need to

commit aggression, since they enjoy greater security to begin with, and

therefore feel less need to enhance their security by expansion.14 If available

weaponry tends to equalize the relative power of states, aggressors are

discouraged from going to war. If military weaponry makes it easier to

estimate the relative power of states, unwarranted optimism is discouraged

and wars of miscalculation are less likely.

One can establish that peace in Europe during the Cold War has resulted
from bipolarity, the approximate military balance between the superpowers,

and the presence of large numbers of nuclear weapons on both sides in three

ways: first, by showing that the general theories on which it rests are valid;

second, by demonstrating that these theories can explain the conflicts of the

pre-1945 era and the peace of the post-1945 era; and third, by showing that

competing theories cannot account for the postwar peace.

THE VIRTUES OF BIPOLARITY OVER MULTIPOLARITY. The two principal ar-

rangements of power possible among states are bipolarity and multipolarity.15

13. The prospects for deterrence can also be affected by crisis stability calculations. See John J.
Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe,” Inter-
national Security, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 1986), pp. 6-8.
14. See Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, Vol. 30, No.
2 (January 1978), pp. 167-214; and Stephen Van Evera, “Causes of War” (unpub. PhD disser-
tation, University of California at Berkeley, 1984), chap. 3. As noted below, I believe that the
distinction between offensive and defensive weapons and, more generally, the concept of an
offense-defense balance, is relevant at the nuclear level. However, I do not believe those ideas
are relevant at the conventional level. See John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 25-27.
15. Hegemony represents a third possible distribution. Under a hegemony there is only one
major power in the system. The rest are minor powers that cannot challenge the major power,
but must act in accordance with the dictates of the major power. Every state would like to gain
hegemony, because hegemony confers abundant security: no challenger poses a serious threat.
Hegemony is rarely achieved, however, because power tends to be somewhat evenly distributed
among states, because threatened states have strong incentives to join together to thwart an
aspiring hegemon, and because ‘the costs of expansion usually outrun the benefits before
domination is achieved, causing extension to become overextension. Hegemony has never

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International Security 15:1 | 14

A bipolar system is more peaceful for three main reasons. First, the number

of conflict dyads is fewer, leaving fewer possibilities for war. Second, deter-

rence is easier, because imbalances of power are fewer and more easily

averted. Third, the prospects for deterrence are greater because miscalcula-

tions of relative power and of opponents’ resolve are fewer and less likely.16

In a bipolar system two major powers dominate. The minor powers find

it difficult to remain unattached to one of the major powers, because the

major powers generally demand allegiance from lesser states. (This is espe-

cially true in core geographical areas, less so in peripheral areas.) Further-

more, lesser states have little opportunity to play the major powers off against

each other, because when great powers are fewer in number, the system is

more rigid. As a result, lesser states are hard-pressed to preserve their

autonomy.

In a multipolar system, by contrast, three or more major powers dominate.

Minor powers in such a system have considerable flexibility regarding alliance

partners and can opt to be free floaters. The exact form of a multipolar system

can vary markedly, depending on the number of major and minor powers

in the system, and their geographical arrangement.

A bipolar system has only one dyad across which war might break out:

only two major powers contend with one another, and the minor powers

are not likely to be in a position to attack each other. A multipolar system

has many potential conflict situations. Major power dyads are more numer-

ous, each posing the potential for conflict. Conflict could also erupt across

dyads involving major and minor powers. Dyads between minor powers

could also lead to war. Therefore, ceteris paribus, war is more likely in a

multipolar system than a bipolar one.

Wars in a multipolar world involving just minor powers or only one major

power are not likely to be as devastating as a conflict between two major

characterized the European state system at any point since it arose in the seventeenth century,
and there is no prospect for hegemony in the foreseeable future; hence hegemony is not relevant
to assessing the prospects for peace in Europe.
16. The key works on bipolarity and multipolarity include Thomas J. Christensen and Jack
Snyder, “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” Inter-
national Organization, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Spring 1990), pp. 137-168; Karl W. Deutsch and J. David
Singer, “Multipolar Power Systems and International Stability,” World Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3
(April 1964), pp. 390-406; Richard N. Rosecrance, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Future,”
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 10, No. 3 (September 1966), pp. 314-327; Kenneth N. Waltz,
“The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964), pp. 881-909; and
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, chap. 8. My conclusions about bipolarity are similar to
Waltz’s, although there are important differences in our explanations, as will be seen below.

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Back to the Future 1 15

powers. However, local wars tend to widen and escalate. Hence there is

always a chance that a small war will trigger a general conflict.

Deterrence is more difficult in a multipolar world because power imbal-

ances are commonplace, and when power is unbalanced, the strong become

hard to deter. 17 Power imbalances can lead to conflict in two ways. First, two

states can gang up to attack a third state. Second, a major power might

simply bully a weaker power in a one-on-one encounter, using its superior

strength to coerce or defeat the minor state.18

Balance of power dynamics can counter such power imbalances, but only

if they operate efficiently. 19 No state can dominate another, either by ganging

up or by bullying, if the others coalesce firmly against it, but problems of

geography or coordination often hinder the formation of such coalitions.204

These hindrances may disappear in wartime, but are prevalent in peacetime,

and can cause deterrence failure, even where an efficient coalition will even-

tually form to defeat the aggressor on the battlefield.

First, geography sometimes prevents balancing states from putting mean-

ingful pressure on a potential aggressor. For example, a major power may

not be able to put effective military pressure on a state threatening to cause

trouble, because buffer states lie in between.

In addition, balancing in a multipolar world must also surmount difficult

coordination problems. Four phenomena make coordination difficult. First,

alliances provide collective goods, hence allies face the formidable dilemmas

of collective action. Specifically, each state may try to shift alliance burdens

onto the shoulders of its putative allies. Such “buck-passing” is a common

feature of alliance politics.21 It is most common when the number of states

17. Although a balance of power is more likely to produce deterrence than an imbalance of
power, a balance of power between states does not guarantee that deterrence will obtain. States
sometimes find innovative military strategies that allow them to win on the battlefield, even
without marked advantage in the balance of raw military capabilities. Furthermore, the broader
political forces that move a state towards war sometimes force leaders to pursue very risky
military strategies, impelling states to challenge opponents of equal or even superior strength.
See Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, especially chap. 2.
18. This discussion of polarity assumes that the military strength of the major powers is roughly
equal. The consequences of power asymmetries among great powers is discussed below.
19. See Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and
Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 123-128.
20. One exception bears mention: ganging up is still possible under multipolarity in the restricted

case where there are only three powers in the system, and thus no allies available for the victim
state.
21. See Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” Review of
Economics and Statistics, Vol. 48, No. 3 (August 1966), pp. 266-279; and Barry R. Posen, The

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International Security 15:1 1 16

required to form an effective blocking coalition is large. Second, a state faced

with two potential adversaries might conclude that a protracted war between

those adversaries would weaken both, even if one side triumphed; hence it

may stay on the sidelines, hoping thereby to improve its power position

relative to each of the combatants. (This strategy can fail, however, if one of

the warring states quickly conquers the other and ends up more powerful,

not less powerful, than before the war.) Third, some states may opt out of

the balancing process because they believe that they will not be targeted by

the aggressor, failing to recognize that they face danger until after the ag-

gressor has won some initial victories. Fourth, diplomacy is an uncertain

process, and thus it can take time to build a defensive coalition. A potential

aggressor may conclude that it can succeed at aggression before the coalition

is completed, and further may be prompted to exploit the window of op-

portunity that this situation presents before it closes.22

If these problems of geography and coordination are severe, states can lose

faith in the balancing process. If so, they become more likely to bandwagon

with the aggressor, since solitary resistance is futile.23 Thus factors that

weaken the balancing process can generate snowball effects that weaken the

process still further.

The third major problem with multipolarity lies in its tendency to foster

miscalculation of the resolve of opposing individual states, and of the

strength of opposing

coalitions.

War is more likely when a state underestimates the willingness of an

opposing state to stand firm on issues of difference. It then may push the

other state too far, expecting the other to concede, when in fact the opponent

will choose to fight. Such miscalculation is more likely under multipolarity

because the shape of the international order tends to remain fluid, due to

the tendency of coalitions to shift. As a result, the international “rules of the

road”-norms of state behavior, and agreed divisions of territorial rights and

other privileges-tend to change constantly. No sooner are the rules of a
given adversarial relationship worked out, than that relationship may become

a friendship, a new adversarial relationship may emerge with a previous

Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984).
22. Domestic political considerations can also sometimes impede balancing behavior. For ex-
ample, Britain and France were reluctant to ally with the Soviet Union in the 1930s because of
their deep-seated antipathy to communism.
23. See Walt, Origins of Alliances, pp. 28-32, 173-178.

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Back to the Future | 17

friend or neutral, and new rules must be established. Under these circum-

stances, one state may unwittingly push another too far, because ambiguities

as to national rights and obligations leave a wider range of issues on which

a state may miscalculate another’s resolve. Norms of state behavior can come

to be broadly understood and accepted by all states, even in multipolarity,

just as basic norms of diplomatic conduct became generally accepted by the

European powers during the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, a well-de-

fined division of rights is generally more difficult when the number of states

is large, and relations among them are in flux, as is the case with multipo-

larity.

War is also more likely when states underestimate the relative power of

an opposing coalition, either because they underestimate the number of

states who will oppose them, or because they exaggerate the number of allies

who will fight on their own side.24 Such errors are more likely in a system

of many states, since states then must accurately predict the behavior of

many states, not just one, in order to calculate the balance of power between

coalitions.

A bipolar system is superior to a multipolar system on all of these dimen-

sions. Bullying and ganging up are unknown, since only two actors compete.

Hence the power asymmetries produced by bullying and ganging up are also

unknown. When balancing is required, it is achieved efficiently. States can

balance by either internal means-military buildup-or external means-

diplomacy and alliances. Under multipolarity states tend to balance by ex-

ternal means; under bipolarity they are compelled to use internal means.

Internal means are more fully under state control, hence are more efficient,

and are more certain to produce real balance.25 The problems that attend

efforts to balance by diplomatic methods-geographic complications and

coordination difficulties-are bypassed. Finally, miscalculation is less likely

than in a multipolar world. States are less likely to miscalculate others’

resolve, because the rules of the road with the main opponent become settled

over time, leading both parties to recognize the limits beyond which they

cannot push the other. States also cannot miscalculate the membership of

the opposing coalition, since each side faces only one main enemy. Simplicity

breeds certainty; certainty bolsters peace.

24. This point is the central theme of Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World.” Also see Geoffrey
Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973), chap. 3.
25. Noting the greater efficiency of internal over external balancing is Waltz, Theory of Interna-
tional Politics, pp. 163, 168.

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International Security 15:1 | 18

There are no empirical studies that provide conclusive evidence of the

effects of bipolarity and multipolarity on the likelihood of war. This undoubt-

edly reflects the difficulty of the task: from its beginning until 1945, the

European state system was multipolar, leaving this history barren of com-

parisons that would reveal the differing effects of multipolarity and bipolarity.

Earlier history does afford some apparent examples of bipolar systems, in-

cluding some that were warlike-Athens and Sparta, Rome and Carthage-

but this history is inconclusive, because it is sketchy and incomplete and

therefore does not offer enough detail to validate the comparisons. Lacking

a comprehensive survey of history, we cannot progress beyond offering

examples pro and con, without knowing which set of examples best repre-

sents the universe of cases. As a result the case made here stops short of

empirical demonstration, and rests chiefly on deduction. However, I believe

that this deductive case provides a sound basis for accepting the argument

that bipolarity is more peaceful than multipolarity; the deductive logic seems

compelling, and there is no obvious historical evidence that cuts against it.

I show below that the ideas developed here apply to events in twentieth

century Europe, both before and after 1945.

THE VIRTUES OF EQUALITY OF POWER OVER INEQUALITY. Power can be more

or less equally distributed among the major powers of both bipolar and

multipolar systems. Both systems are more peaceful when equality is greatest

among the poles. Power inequalities invite war by increasing the potential

for successful aggression; hence war is minimized when inequalities are

least.26

How should the degree of equality in the distribution of power in a system

be assessed? Under bipolarity, the overall equality of the system is simply a

function of the balance of power between the two poles-an equal balance

creates an equal system, a skewed balance produces an unequal system.

Under multipolarity the focus is on the power balance between the two

leading states in the system, but the power ratios across other potential

conflict dyads also matter. The net system equality is an aggregate of the

degree of equality among all of the poles. However, most general wars under

multipolarity have arisen from wars of hegemony that have pitted the leading

state-an aspiring hegemon-against the other major powers in the system.

Such wars are most probable when a leading state emerges, and can hope

26. This discussion does not encompass the situation where power asymmetries are so great
that one state emerges as a hegemon. See note 15.

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Back to the Future 19

to defeat each of the others if it can isolate them. This pattern characterized

the wars that grew from the attempts at hegemony by Charles V, Philip II,

Louis XIV, Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany, and

Nazi Germany.27 Hence the ratio between the leader and its nearest compet-

itor-in bipolarity or multipolarity-has more effect on the stability of the

system than do other ratios, and is therefore the key ratio that describes the

equality of the system. Close equality in this ratio lowers the

risk of war.

The polarity of an international system and the degree of power equality

of the system are related: bipolar systems tend more toward equality, be-

cause, as noted above, states are then compelled to balance by internal

methods, and internal balancing is more efficient than external balancing.

Specifically, the number-two state in a bipolar system can only hope to

balance against the leader by mobilizing its own resources to reduce the gap

between the two, since it has no potential major alliance partners. On the

other hand, the second-strongest state in a multipolar system can seek se-

curity through alliances with others, and may be tempted to pass the buck

to them, instead of building up its own strength. External balancing of this

sort is especially attractive because it is cheap and fast. However, such

behavior leaves intact the power gap between the two leading states, and

thus leaves in place the dangers that such a power gap creates. Hence another

source of stability under bipolarity lies in the greater tendency for its poles

to be equal.

THE VIRTUES OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE. Deterrence is most likely to hold

when the costs and risks of going to war are obviously great. The more

horrible the prospect of war, the less likely it is to occur. Deterrence is also

most robust when conquest is most difficult. Aggressors then are more likely

to be deterred by the futility of expansion, and all states feel less compelled

to expand to increase their security, making them easier to deter because

they are less compelled to commit aggression.

27. This point is the central theme of Ludwig Dehio, The Precarious Balance: Four Centuries of the
European Power Struggle, trans. Charles Fullman (New York: Knopf, 1962). Also see Randolph
M. Siverson and Michael R. Tennefoss, “Power, Alliance, and the Escalation of International
Conflict, 1815-1965,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (December 1984), pp. 1057-
1069. The two lengthy periods of peace in the nineteenth century (see note 10 above) were
mainly caused by the equal distribution of power among the major European states. Specifically,
there was no aspiring hegemon in Europe for most of these two periods. France, the most
powerful state in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, soon declined to a position
of rough equality with its chief competitors, while Germany only emerged as a potential
hegemon in the early twentieth century.

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International Security 15:1 | 20

Nuclear weapons favor peace on both counts. They are weapons of mass

destruction, and would produce horrendous devastation if used in any num-

bers. Moreover, if both sides’ nuclear arsenals are secure from attack, creating

a mutually assured retaliation capability (mutual assured destruction or

MAD), nuclear weapons make conquest more difficult; international conflicts

revert from tests of capability and will to purer tests of will, won by the side

willing to run greater risks and pay greater costs. This gives defenders the
advantage, because defenders usually value their freedom more than ag-
gressors value new conquests. Thus nuclear weapons are a superb deterrent:

they guarantee high costs, and are more useful for self-defense than for

aggression.28

In addition, nuclear weapons affect the degree of equality in the system.

Specifically, the situation created by MAD bolsters peace by moving power
relations among states toward equality. States that possess nuclear deterrents

can stand up to one another, even if their nuclear arsenals vary greatly in

size, as long as both sides’ nuclear arsenals are secure from attack. This

situation of closer equality has the stabilizing effects noted above.

Finally, MAD also bolsters peace by clarifying the relative power of states

and coalitions.29 States can still miscalculate each other’s will, but miscalcu-
lations of relative capability are less likely, since nuclear capabilities are not

elastic to the specific size and characteristics of forces; once an assured
destruction capability is achieved, further increments of nuclear power have

little strategic importance. Hence errors in assessing these specific character-

istics have little effect. Errors in predicting membership in war coalitions also

have less effect, since unforeseen additions or subtractions from such coal-

itions will not influence war outcomes unless they produce a huge change

in the nuclear balance enough to give one side meaningful nuclear superi-
ority.

THE DANGERS OF HYPER-NATIONALISM. Nationalism is best defined as a set

of political beliefs which holds that a nation-a body of individuals with
characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other individuals-

28. Works developing the argument that nuclear weapons are essentially defensive in nature
are Shai Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1982), pp. 45-49; Stephen Van Evera, ‘Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World
Doesn’t: American Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No.
2 (June 1990, forthcoming); and Vaq Evera, “Causes of War,” chap. 13.
29. See Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence, pp. 50-52; and Van Evera, “Causes of War,” pp. 697-
699.

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Back to the Future | 21

should have its own state.30 Although nationalists often believe that their

nation is unique or special, this conclusion does not necessarily mean that

they think they are superior to other peoples, merely that they take pride in

their own nation.

However, this benevolent nationalism frequently turns into ugly hyper-

nationalism-the belief that other nations or nation-states are both inferior

and threatening and must therefore be dealt with harshly. In the past, hyper-

nationalism among European states has arisen largely because most Euro-

pean states are nation-states-states comprised of one principal nation-and

these nation-states exist in an anarchic world, under constant threat from

other states. In such a situation people who love their own nation and state

can develop an attitude of contempt and loathing toward the nations who

inhabit opposing states. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that political

elites often feel compelled to portray adversary nations in the most negative

way so as to mobilize public support for national security policies.

Malevolent nationalism is most likely to develop under military systems

that require reliance on mass armies; the state may exploit nationalist appeals

to mobilize its citizenry for the sacrifices required to sustain large standing

armies. On the other hand, hyper-nationalism is least likely when states can

rely on small professional armies, or on complex high-technology military

organizations that do not require vast manpower. For this reason nuclear

weapons work to dampen nationalism, since they shift the basis of military

power away from pure reliance on mass armies, and toward greater reliance

on smaller high-technology organizations.

In sum, hyper-nationalism is the most important domestic cause of war,

although it is still a second-order force in world politics. Furthermore, its

causes lie largely in the international system.

THE CAUSES OF THE LONG PEACE: EVIDENCE

The historical record shows a perfect correlation between bipolarity, equality

of military power, and nuclear weapons, on the one hand, and the long

peace, on the other hand. When an equal bipolarity arose and nuclear weap-

ons appeared, peace broke out. This correlation suggests that the bipolarity

30. This definition is drawn from Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1983), which is an excellent study of the origins of nationalism. Nevertheless,
Gellner pays little attention to how nationalism turns into a malevolent force that contributes to
instability in the international system.

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International Security 15:1 | 22

theory, the equality theory, and the nuclear theory of the long peace are all

valid. However, correlation alone does not prove causation. Other factors

still may account for the long peace. One way to rule out this possibility is
to enumerate what the three theories predict about both the pre-war and

postwar eras, and then to ask if these predictions came true in detail during
those different periods.

BEFORE THE COLD WAR. The dangers of multipolarity are highlighted by

events before both world wars. The existence of many dyads of potential

conflict provided many possible ways to light the fuse to war in Europe.

Diplomacy before World War I involved intense interactions among five

major powers (Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany), and

two minor powers (Serbia, and Belgium). At least six significant adversarial

relationships emerged: Germany versus Britain, France, Russia, and Belgium;

and Austria-Hungary versus Serbia and Russia. Before World War II five

major powers (Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Italy) and

seven minor powers (Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary,

Romania, and Finland) interacted. These relations produced some thirteen

important conflicts: Germany versus Britain, France, the Soviet Union,

Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria; Italy versus Britain and France; the

Soviet Union versus Finland and Poland; Czechoslovakia versus Poland and

Hungary; and Romania versus Hungary. This multiplicity of conflicts made

the outbreak of war inherently more likely. Moreover, many of the state

interests at issue in each of these conflicts were interconnected, raising the

risk that any single conflict that turned violent would trigger a general war,

as happened in both 1914 and 1939.

Before World War II Germany was able to gang up with others against

some minor states, and to bully others into joining with it. In 1939 Germany

bolstered its power by ganging up with Poland and Hungary to partition

Czechoslovakia, and then ganged up with the Soviet Union against Poland.

In 1938 Germany bullied the Czechs into surrendering the Sudetenland, and

also bullied the Austrians into complete surrender.31 By these successes

Germany expanded its power, leaving it far stronger than its immediate

neighbors, and thereby making deterrence much harder.

German power could have been countered before both world wars had

the other European powers balanced efficiently against Germany. If so, Ger-

31. Austria is not a pure case of bullying; there was also considerable pro-German support in
Austria during the late 1930s.

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many might have been deterred, and war prevented on both occasions.

However, the other powers twice failed to do so. Before 1914 the scope of

this failure was less pronounced; France and Russia balanced forcefully

against Germany, while only Britain failed to commit firmly against Germany

before war began.32

Before 1939, failure to balance was far more widespread.33 The Soviet Union

failed to aid Czechoslovakia against Germany in 1938, partly for geographic

reasons: they shared no common border, leaving the Soviets with no direct

access to Czech territory. France failed to give effective aid to the Czechs and

Poles, partly because French military doctrine was defensively oriented, but

also because France had no direct access to Czech or Polish territory, and

therefore could not easily deploy forces to bolster Czech and Polish defenses.

Britain and France each passed the buck by transferring the cost of deter-

ring Germany onto the other, thereby weakening their combined effort. The

Soviet Union, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, sought to turn the German

armies westward, hoping that they would become bogged down in a war of

attrition similar to World War I on the Western Front. Some of the minor

European powers, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the

Scandinavian states, passed the buck to the major powers by standing on

the sidelines during the crises of 1938 and 1939.

Britain and the United States failed to recognize that they were threatened

by Germany until late in the game-1939 for Britain, 1940 for the United

States-and they therefore failed to take an early stand. When they finally

recognized the danger posed by Germany and resolved to respond, they

lacked appropriate military forces. Britain could not pose a significant military

threat to Germany until after it built up its own military forces and coordi-

nated its plans and doctrine with its French and Polish allies. In the meantime

32. Britain’s failure to commit itself explicitly to a Continental war before the July Crisis was
probably a mistake of great proportions. There is evidence that the German chancellor, Beth-
mann-Hollweg, tried to stop the slide towards war once it became apparent that Britain would
fight with France and Russia against Germany, turning a Continental war into a world war. See
Imanuel Geiss, ed., July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967),
chap. 7. Had the Germans clearly understood British intentions before the crisis, they might
have displayed much greater caution in the early stages of the crisis, when it was still possible
to avoid war.
33. See Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939: The Path to
Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine; and Arnold
Wolfers, Britain and France between Two WYars: Conflicting Strategies of Peace from Versailles to World
War II (New York: Norton, 1968); and Barry R. Posen, “Competing Images of the Soviet Union,”
World Politics, Vol. 39, No. 4 (July 1987), pp. 579-597.

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International Security 15:1 | 24

deterrence failed. The United States did not launch a significant military

buildup until after the war broke out.

Multipolarity also created conditions that permitted serious miscalculation

before both world wars, which encouraged German aggression on both

occasions. Before 1914, Germany was not certain of British opposition if it

reached for continental hegemony, and Germany completely failed to foresee

that the United States would eventually move to contain it. In 1939, Germany

hoped that France and Britain would stand aside as it conquered Poland,

and again failed to foresee eventual American entry into the war. As a result

Germany exaggerated its prospects for success. This undermined deterrence

by encouraging German adventurism.

In sum, the events leading up to the world wars amply illustrate the risks

that arise in a multipolar world. Deterrence was undermined in both cases

by phenomena that are more common under a multipolar rather than a

bipolar distribution of power.34

Deterrence was also difficult before both wars because power was distrib-

uted asymmetrically among the major European powers. Specifically, Ger-

many was markedly stronger than any of its immediate neighbors. In 1914

Germany clearly held military superiority over all of its European rivals; only

together were they able to defeat it, and then only with American help. 1939

is a more ambiguous case. The results of the war reveal that the Soviet Union

had the capacity to stand up to Germany, but this was not apparent at the

beginning of the war. Hitler was confident that Germany would defeat the

Soviet Union, and this confidence was key to his decision to attack in 1941.

Finally, the events leading up to both world wars also illustrate the risks

that arise in a world of pure conventional deterrence in which weapons of

mass destruction are absent. World War I broke out partly because all of the

important states believed that the costs of war would be small, and that

successful offense was feasible.35 Before World War II these beliefs were less

widespread, but had the same effect.36 The lesser powers thought war would

34. The problems associated with multipolarity were also common in Europe before 1900.
Consider, for example, that inefficient balancing resulted in the collapse of the first four coalitions
arrayed against Napoleonic France. See Steven T. Ross, European Diplomatic History, 1789-1815:
France Against Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969).
35. Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,”
International Security, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 58-107. Also see Jack Snyder, The Ideology
of the Offensive: Military Decision-Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984).
36. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, chaps. 3-4.

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Back to the Future | 25

be costly and conquest difficult, but the leaders of the strongest state-

Germany-saw the prospect of cheap victory, and this belief was enough to

destroy deterrence and produce war. Had nuclear weapons existed, these

beliefs would have been undercut, removing a key condition that permitted

both wars.

What was the role of internal German politics in causing the world wars?

So far I have focused on aspects of the international system surrounding

Germany. This focus reflects my view that systemic factors were more im-

portant. But German domestic political and social developments also played

a significant role, contributing to the aggressive character of German foreign

policy. Specifically, German society was infected with a virulent nationalism

between 1870 and 1945 that laid the basis for expansionist foreign policies.37

However, two points should be borne in mind. First, German hyper-

nationalism was in part fueled by Germany’s pronounced sense of insecurity,

which reflected Germany’s vulnerable location at the center of Europe, with

relatively open borders on both sides. These geographic facts made German

security problems especially acute; this situation gave German elites a

uniquely strong motive to mobilize their public for war, which they did

largely by fanning nationalism. Thus even German hyper-nationalism can be

ascribed in part to the nature of the pre-1945 international system.

Second, the horror of Germany’s murderous conduct during World War II

should be distinguished from the scope of the aggressiveness of German

foreign policy.38 Germany was indeed aggressive, but not unprecedentedly
so. Other states have aspired to hegemony in Europe, and sparked wars by

their efforts; Germany was merely the latest to attempt to convert dominant
into hegemonic power. What was unique about Germany’s conduct was its

policy of mass murder toward many of the peoples of Europe. The causes

of this murderous policy should not be conflated with the causes of the two

37. See Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century, trans. Dieter Pevsner
(New York: Norton, 1967); Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, trans.
Marian Jackson (New York: Norton, 1975); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German
Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), chap. 18; Hans Kohn, The Mind of
Germany: The Education of a Nation (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965), chaps. 7-12; and Louis
L. Snyder, German Nationalism: The Tragedy of a People (Harrisburg, Pa.: Telegraph Press, 1952).
38. There is a voluminous literature on the German killing machine in World War II. Among
the best overviews of the subject are Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives
of Interpretation, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 1989), chaps. 5, 8, 9; Henry L. Mason, “Imponderables
of the Holocaust,” World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (October 1981), pp. 90-113; and Mason, “Im-
plementing the Final Solution: The Ordinary Regulating of the Extraordinary,” World Politics,
Vol. 40, No. 4 (July 1988), pp. 542-569.

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International Security 15:1 | 26

world wars. The policy of murder arose chiefly from domestic sources; the

wars arose mainly from aspects of the distribution and character of power in
Europe.

THE COLD WAR RECORD. The European state system abruptly shifted from

multipolar to bipolar after 1945. Three factors were responsible: the near-

complete destruction of German power, the growth of Soviet power, and the

permanent American commitment to the European Continent. The weak-

ening of the German Reich was accomplished by allied occupation and dis-

memberment. Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia, and parts of West Prussia

and Brandenburg were given to other countries, the Sudetenland was re-

turned to Czechoslovakia, and Austria was restored to independence. The

rest of the German Reich was divided into two countries, East and West

Germany, which became enemies. This reduction of German power, coupled

with the physical presence of American and Soviet military might in the heart

of Europe, eliminated the threat of German aggression.39

Meanwhile the Soviet Union extended its power westward, becoming the

dominant power on the Continent and one of the two strongest powers in

the world. There is no reason to think that the Soviets would not have

reached for continental hegemony, as the Spanish, French, and Germans did

earlier, had they believed they could win a hegemonic war. But the Soviets,

unlike their predecessors, made no attempt to gain hegemony by force,
leaving Europe in peace.

Bipolarity supplies part of the reason. Bipolarity made Europe a simpler
place in which only one point of friction-the East-West conflict-had to be

managed to avoid war. The two blocs encompassed most of Europe, leaving

few unprotected weak states for the Soviets to conquer. As a result the Soviets

have had few targets to bully. They have also been unable to gang up on the

few states that are unprotected, because their West-bloc adversary has been
their only potential ganging-up partner.

Bipolarity also left less room for miscalculation of both resolve and capa-
bility. During the first fifteen years of the Cold War, the rules of the road for

the conflict were not yet established, giving rise to several serious crises.

However, over time each side gained a clear sense of how far it could push

the other, and what the other would not tolerate. A set of rules came to be

agreed upon: an understanding on the division of rights in Austria, Berlin,

39. See Anton W. DePorte, Europe betiveen the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance, 2nd ed. (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).

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Back to the Future | 27

and elsewhere in Europe; a proscription on secret unilateral re-deployment

of large nuclear forces to areas contiguous to the opponent; mutual toleration

of reconnaissance satellites; agreement on rules of peacetime engagement

between naval forces; and so forth. The absence of serious crises during

1963-90 was due in part to the growth of such agreements on the rights of

both sides, and the rules of conduct. These could develop in large part

because the system was bipolar in character. Bipolarity meant that the same

two states remained adversaries for a long period, giving them time to learn

how to manage their conflict without war. By contrast, a multipolar world

of shifting coalitions would repeatedly have forced adversaries to re-learn

how their opponents defined interests, reach new accords on the division of

rights, and establish new rules of competitive conduct.

Bipolarity also left less room to miscalculate the relative strength of the

opposing coalitions. The composition of possible war coalitions has been

clear because only two blocs have existed, each led by an overwhelmingly

dominant power that could discipline its members. Either side could have

miscalculated its relative military strength, but bipolarity removed ambiguity

about relative strength of adversarial coalitions arising from diplomatic un-

certainties.

The East-West military balance in Europe has been roughly equal through-

out the Cold War, which has further bolstered stability. This approximate

parity strengthened deterrence by ensuring that no state was tempted to use

force to exploit a power advantage. Parity resulted partly from bipolarity:

because the two blocs already encompassed all the states of Europe, both

sides have balanced mainly by internal rather than external means. These

more efficient means have produced a more nearly equal balance.

Nuclear weapons also played a key role in preventing war in post-World
War II Europe.

Western elites on both sides of the Atlantic quickly recognized that nuclear

weapons were vastly destructive and that their widespread use in Europe

would cause unprecedented devastation. The famous Carte Blanche exercises

conducted in Germany in 1955 made it manifestly clear that a nuclear war in

Europe would involve far greater costs than another World War II.40 Accord-

ingly, Western policymakers rarely suggested that nuclear war could be

“won,” and instead emphasized the horrors that would attend nuclear war.

40. See Hans Speier, German Rearmament and Atomic War: The Views of German Military and Political
Leaders (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1957), chap. 10.

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International Security 15:1 | 28

Moreover, they have understood that conventional war could well escalate

to the nuclear level, and have in fact based NATO strategy on that reality.

Soviet leaders also recognized the horrendous results that a nuclear war

would produce.41 Some Soviet military officers have asserted that victory is

possible in nuclear war, but even they have acknowledged that such a victory

would be Pyrrhic. Soviet civilians have generally argued that victory is im-

possible. Furthermore, the Soviets long maintained that it was not possible

to fight a purely conventional war in Europe, and that conventional victory

would only prompt the loser to engage in nuclear escalation.42 The Soviets

later granted more possibility that a conventional war might be controlled,

but still recognized that escalation is likely.43 Under Gorbachev, Soviet mili-

tary thinking has placed even greater emphasis on the need to avoid nuclear

war and devoted more attention to the dangers of inadvertent nuclear war.44

Official rhetoric aside, policymakers on both sides have also behaved very

cautiously in the presence of nuclear weapons. There is not a single case of

a leader brandishing nuclear weapons during a crisis, or behaving as if

nuclear war might be a viable option for solving important political problems.

On the contrary, policymakers have never gone beyond nuclear threats of a

very subtle sort, and have shown great caution when the possibility of

nuclear confrontation has emerged.45 This cautious conduct has lowered the

risk of war.

Nuclear weapons also imposed an equality and clarity on the power rela-
tions between the superpowers. This equality and clarity represented a

41. See Robert L. Arnett, “Soviet Attitudes Towards Nuclear War: Do They Really Think They
Can Win?” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (September 1979), pp. 172-191; and David
Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
42. Thus Nikita Khrushchev explained, “Now that the big countries have thermonuclear weap-
ons at their disposal, they are sure to resort to those weapons if they begin to lose a war fought
with conventional means. If it ever comes down to a question of whether or not to face defeat,
there is sure to be someone who will be in favor of pushing the button, and the missiles will
begin to fly.” Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. by
Strobe Talbott (New York: Bantam, 1976), pp. 603-604.
43. See James M. McConnell, “Shifts in Soviet Views on the Proper Focus of Military Devel-
opment,” World Politics, Vol. 37, No. 3 (April 1985), pp. 317-343.
44. See Stephen M. Meyer, “The Sources and Prospects of Gorbachev’s New Political Thinking
on Security,” International Security, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Fall 1988), pp. 134-138.
45. See Hannes Adomeit, Soviet Risk-taking and Crisis Behavior: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Brookings, 1987); and McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb
in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988). Also see Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Nuclear
Learning and U.S.-Soviet Security Reg’imes,” International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Summer
1987), pp. 371-402.

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Back to the Future | 29

marked change from the earlier non-nuclear world, in which sharp power
inequalities and miscalculations of relative power were common.46

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union have exhib-

ited markedly less hyper-nationalism than did the European powers before

1945. After World War II, nationalism declined sharply within Europe, partly

because the occupation forces took active steps to dampen it,47 and also

because the European states, no longer providing their own security, now

lacked the incentive to purvey hyper-nationalism in order to bolster public

support for national defense. More importantly, however, the locus of Eu-

ropean politics shifted to the United States and the Soviet Union-two states

that, each for its own reasons, had not exhibited nationalism of the virulent

type found earlier in Europe. Nor has nationalism become virulent in either

superpower during the Cold War. In part this reflects the greater stability of
the postwar order, arising from bipolarity, military equality, and nuclear

weapons; with less expectation of war, neither superpower has faced the

need to mobilize its population for war. It also reflects a second effect of

nuclear weapons: they have reduced the importance of mass armies for

preserving sovereignty, thus diminishing the importance of maintaining a

hyper-nationalized pool of manpower.

THE CAUSES OF THE LONG PEACE: COMPETING EXPLANATIONS

The claim that bipolarity, equality, and nuclear weapons have been largely

responsible for the stability of the past 45 years is further strengthened by

the absence of persuasive competing explanations. Two of the most popular

theories of peace-economic liberalism and peace-loving democracies-are not

relevaint to the issue at hand.
Economic liberalism, which posits that a liberal economic order bolsters

peace (discussed in more detail below), cannot explain the stability of postwar

Europe, because there has been little economic exchange between the Soviet

Union and the West over the past 45 years. Although economic flows be-

46. Some experts acknowledge that nuclear weapons had deterrent value in the early decades
of the Cold War, but maintain that they had lost their deterrent value by, the mid-1960s when
the Soviets finally acquired the capability to retaliate massively against the American homeland.
I reject this argument and have outlined my views in John J. Mearsheimer, “Nuclear Weapons
and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Winter 1984/85), pp. 19-46.
47. See Paul M. Kennedy, “The Decline of Nationalistic History in the West, 1900-1970,” Journal
of Contemporary History, Vol. 8, No. 1 (January 1973), pp. 77-100; and E.H. Dance, History the
Betrayer (London: Hutchinson, 1960).

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International Security 15:1 130

tween Eastern and Western Europe have been somewhat greater, in no sense

has all of Europe been encompassed by a liberal economic order.

The peace-loving democracies theory (also discussed below) holds that

democracies do not go to war against other democracies, but concedes that

democracies are not especially pacific when facing authoritarian states. This

theory cannot account for post-World War II stability because the Soviet

Union and its allies in Eastern Europe have not been democratic over the

past 45 years.

A third theory of peace, obsolescence of war, proposes that modern conven-

tional war had become so deadly by the twentieth century that it was no

longer possible to think of war as a sensible means to achieve national goals.48

It took the two world wars to drive this point home, but by 1945 it was clear

that large-scale conventional war had become irrational and morally unac-

ceptable, like institutions such as slavery and dueling. Thus, even without

nuclear weapons, statesmen in the Cold War would not seriously have

countenanced war, which had become an anachronism. This theory, it should

be emphasized, does not ascribe the absence of war to nuclear weapons, but

instead points to the horrors of modern conventional war.

This argument probably provides the most persuasive alternative expla-

nation for the stability of the Cold War, but it is not convincing on close

inspection. The fact that World War II occurred casts serious doubt on this

theory; if any war could have convinced Europeans to forswear conventional

war, it should have been World War I, with its vast casualties. There is no

doubt that conventional war among modern states could devastate the par-

ticipants. Nevertheless, this explanation misses one crucial difference be-

tween nuclear and conventional war, a difference that explains why war is

still a viable option for states. Proponents of this theory assume that all

conventional wars are protracted and bloody wars of attrition, like World

War I on the Western front. However, it is possible to score a quick and

decisive victory in a conventional war and avoid the devastation that usually

attends a protracted conventional war.49 Conventional war can be won; nu-

clear war cannot be, since neither side can escape devastation by the other,

regardless of the outcome on the battlefield. Thus, the incentives to avoid

48. This theory is most clearly articulated by John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obso-
lescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). See also Carl Kaysen, “Is War Obsolete? A
Review Essay,” International Security, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Spring 1990), pp. 42-64.
49. See Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, chaps. 1-2.

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Back to the Future | 31

war are far greater in a nuclear than a conventional world, making nuclear

deterrence much more robust than conventional deterrence.50

Predicting the Future: The Balkanization of Europe?

What new order will emerge in Europe if the Soviets and Americans with-

draw to their homelands and the Cold War order dissolves? What character-

istics will it have? How dangerous will it be?

It is certain that bipolarity will disappear, and multipolarity will emerge in

the new European order. The other two dimensions of the new order-the

distribution of power among the major states, and the distribution of nuclear

weapons among them-are not pre-determined, and several possible ar-

rangements could develop. The probable stability of these arrangements

would vary markedly. This section examines the scope of the dangers that

each arrangement would present, and the likelihood that each will emerge.

The distribution and deployment patterns of nuclear weapons in the new

Europe is the least certain, and probably the most important, element of the

new order. Accordingly, this section proceeds by exploring the character of

the four principal nuclear worlds that might develop: a denuclearized Europe,

continuation of the current patterns of nuclear ownership, and nuclear pro-

liferation either well- or ill-managed.

The best new order would incorporate the limited, managed proliferation

of nuclear weapons. This would be more dangerous than the current order,
but considerably safer than 1900-45. The worst order would be a non-nuclear

Europe in which power inequities emerge between the principal poles of

power. This order would be more dangerous than the current world, perhaps

almost as dangerous as the world before 1945. Continuation of the current

50. German decision-making in the early years of World War II underscores this point. See
Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence, chap. 4. The Germans were well aware from their expe-
rience in World War I that conventional war among major powers could have devastating
consequences. Nevertheless, they decided three times to launch major land offensives: Poland
(1939); France (1940); and the Soviet Union (1941). In each case, the Germans believed that they
could win a quick and decisive victory and avoid a costly protracted war like World War I. Their
calculations proved correct against Poland and France. They were wrong about the Soviets,
who thwarted their blitzkrieg and eventually played the central role in bringing down the Third
Reich. The Germans surely would have been deterred from attacking the Soviet Union if they
had foreseen the consequences. However, the key point is that they saw some possibility of
winning an easy and relatively cheap victory against the Red Army. That option is not available
in a nuclear war.

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International Security 15:1 132

pattern, or mismanaged proliferation, would be worse than the world of

today, but safer than the pre-1945 world.

EUROPE WITHOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Some Europeans and Americans seek to eliminate nuclear weapons from

Europe, and would replace the Cold War order with a wholly non-nuclear

order. Constructing this nuclear-free Europe would require Britain, France

and the Soviet Union to rid themselves of nuclear weapons. Proponents

believe that a Europe without nuclear weapons would be the most peaceful

possible arrangement; in fact, however, a nuclear-free Europe would be the

most dangerous among possible post-Cold War orders. The pacifying effects

of nuclear weapons-the security they provide, the caution they generate,

the rough equality they impose, and the clarity of relative power they create-

would be lost. Peace would then depend on the other dimensions of the

new order-the number of poles, and the distribution of power among them.

However, the new order will certainly be multipolar, and may be unequal;

hence the system may be very prone to violence. The structure of power in

Europe would look much like it did between the world wars, and it could

well produce similar results.

The two most powerful states in post-Cold War Europe would probably

be Germany and the Soviet Union. They would be physically separated by

a band of small, independent states in Eastern Europe. Not much would

change in Western Europe, although the states in that area would have to

be concerned about a possible German threat on their eastern flank.

The potential for conflict in this system would be considerable. There

would be many possible dyads across which war might break out. Power
imbalances would be commonplace as a result of the opportunities this

system would present for bullying and ganging up. There would be consid-

erable opportunity for miscalculation. The problem of containing German

power would emerge once again, but the configuration of power in Europe

would make it difficult to form an effective counterbalancing coalition, for

much the same reason that an effective counterbalancing coalition failed to

form in the 1930s. Eventually the problem of containing the Soviet Union

could also re-emerge. Finally, conflicts may erupt in Eastern Europe, provid-

ing the vortex that could pull others into a wider confrontation.

A reunified Germany would be surrounded by weaker states that would

find it difficult to balance against German aggression. Without forces sta-

tioned in states adjacent to Germany, neither the Soviets nor the Americans

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would be in a good position to help them contain German power. Further-

more, those small states lying between Germany and the Soviet Union might

fear the Soviets as much as the Germans, and hence may not be disposed to
cooperate with the Soviets to deter German aggression. This problem in fact

arose in the 1930s, and 45 years of Soviet occupation in the interim have

done nothing to ease East European fears of a Soviet military presence. Thus,

scenarios in which Germany uses military force against Poland, Czechoslo-

vakia, or even Austria become possible.

The Soviet Union also might eventually threaten the new status quo. Soviet

withdrawal from Eastern Europe does not mean that the Soviets will never

feel compelled to return to Eastern Europe. The historical record provides

abundant instances of Russian or Soviet involvement in Eastern Europe.

Indeed, the Russian presence in Eastern Europe has surged and ebbed re-

peatedly over the past few centuries.51 Thus, Soviet withdrawal now hardly
guarantees a permanent exit.

Conflict between Eastern European states is also likely to produce insta-
bility in a multipolar Europe. There has been no war among the states in

that region during the Cold War because the Soviets have tightly controlled

them. This point is illustrated by the serious tensions that now exist between

Hungary and Romania over Romanian treatment of the Hungarian minority

in Transylvania, a region that previously belonged to Hungary and still has

roughly 2 million Hungarians living within its borders. Were it not for the

Soviet presence in Eastern Europe, this conflict could have brought Romania

and Hungary to war by now, and it may bring them to war in the future.52

This will not be the only danger spot within Eastern Europe if the Soviet

empire crumbles.5

Warfare in Eastern Europe would cause great suffering to Eastern Euro-

peans. It also might widen to include the major powers, because they would

51. See, inter alia: Ivo J. Lederer, ed., Russian Foreign Policy: Essays in Historical Perspective (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, Russia and Europe, 1825-1878
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: George Wahr Publishing, 1954); and Marc Raeff, Imperial Russia, 1682-1825:
The Coming of Age of Modern Russia (New York: Knopf, 1971), chap. 2.
52. To get a sense of the antipathy between Hungary and Romania over this issue, see Witnesses
to Cultural Genocide: First-Hand Reports on Romania’s Minority Policies Today (New York: American
Transylvanian Federation and the Committee for Human Rights in Romania, 1979). The March
1990 clashes between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians in Tfrgu Mures (Romanian Transyl-
vania) indicate the potential for savage violence that is inherent in these ethnic conflicts.
53. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Post-Communist Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 5
(Winter -1989/1990), pp. 1-13; and Mark Kramer, “Beyond the Brezhnev Doctrine: A New Era in
Soviet-East European Relations?” International Security, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter 1989/90), pp. 51-
54.

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International Security 15:1 134

be drawn to compete for influence in that region, especially if disorder created

fluid politics that offered opportunities for wider influence, or threatened

defeat for friendly states. During the Cold War, both superpowers were

drawn into Third World conflicts across the globe, often in distant areas of

little strategic importance. Eastern Europe is directly adjacent to both the

Soviet Union and Germany, and has considerable economic and strategic

importance; thus trouble in Eastern Europe could offer even greater temp-

tations to these powers than past conflicts in the Third World offered the

superpowers. Furthermore, because the results of local conflicts will be

largely determined by the relative success of each party in finding external

allies, Eastern European states will have strong incentives to drag the major

powers into their local conflicts.54 Thus both push and pull considerations

would operate to enmesh outside powers in local Eastern European w%ars.

Miscalculation is also likely to be a problem in a multipolar Europe. For

example, the new order might well witness shifting patterns of conflict,

leaving insufficient time for adversaries to develop agreed divisions of rights

and agreed rules of interaction, or constantly forcing them to re-establish

new agreements and rules as old antagonisms fade and new ones arise. It is

not likely that circumstances would allow the development of a robust set of

agreements of the sort that have stabilized the Cold War since 1963. Instead,

Europe would resemble the pattern of the early Cold War, in which the

absence of rules led to repeated crises. In addition, the multipolar character

of the system is likely to give rise to miscalculation regarding the strength of

the opposing coalitions.

It is difficult to predict the precise balance of conventional military power

that would emerge between the two largest powers in post-Cold War Europe,

especially since the future of Soviet power is now hard to forecast. The Soviet

Union might recover its strength soon after withdrawing from Central Eu-

rope; if so, Soviet power would overmatch German power. Or centrifugal

national forces may pull the Soviet Union apart, leaving no remnant state

that is the equal of a united Germany.55 What seems most likely is that

54. The new prime minister of Hungary, Jozsef Antall, has already spoken of the need for a
“European solution” to the problem of Romania’s treatment of Hungarians in Transylvania.
Celestine Bohlen, “Victor in Hungary Sees ’45 as the Best of Times,” New York Times, April 10,
1990, p. A8.
55. This article focuses on how changes in the strength of Soviet power and retraction of the
Soviet empire would affect the prospects for stability in Europe. However, the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, a scenario not explored here in any detail, would raise dangers that would
be different from and in addition to those discussed here.

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Germany and the Soviet Union might emerge as powers of roughly equal

strength. The first two scenarios, with their marked inequality between the

two leading powers, would be especially worrisome, although there is cause

for concern even if Soviet and German power are balanced.

Resurgent hyper-nationalism will probably pose less danger than the prob-

lems described above, but some nationalism is likely to resurface in the

absence of the Cold War and may provide additional incentives for war. A

non-nuclear Europe is likely to be especially troubled by nationalism, since

security in such an order will largely be provided by mass armies, which

often cannot be maintained without infusing societies with hyper-national-

ism. The problem is likely to be most acute in Eastern Europe, but there is

also potential for trouble in Germany. The Germans have generally done an

admirable job combatting nationalism over the past 45 years, and in remem-

bering the dark side of their past. Nevertheless, worrisome portents are now

visible; of greatest concern, some prominent Germans have lately advised a

return to greater nationalism in historical education.56 Moreover, nationalism

will be exacerbated by the unresolved border disputes that will be uncovered

by the retreat of American and Soviet power. Especially prominent is that of

the border between Germany and Poland, which some Germans would

change in Germany’s favor.

However, it seems very unlikely that Europe will actually be denuclearized,

despite the present strength of anti-nuclear feeling in Europe. For example,

it is unlikely that the French, in the absence of America’s protective cover

and faced with a newly unified Germany, would get rid of their nuclear

weapons. Also, the Soviets surely would remain concerned about balancing

the American nuclear deterrent, and will therefore retain a deterrent of their
own.

THE CURRENT OWNERSHIP PATTERN CONTINUES

A more plausible order for post-Cold War Europe is one in which Britain,

France and the Soviet Union keep their nuclear weapons, but no new nuclear

powers emerge in Europe. This scenario sees a nuclear-free zone in Central

Europe, but leaves nuclear weapons on the European flanks.

56. Aspects of this story are recounted in Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German
Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon, 1989). A study of
past German efforts to mischaracterize history is Holger H. Herwig, “Clio Deceived: Patriotic
Self-Censorship in Germany After the Great War,” International Security, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall
1987), pp. 5-44.

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International Security 15:1 | 36

This scenario, too, also seems unlikely, since the non-nuclear states will

have substantial incentives to acquire their own nuclear weapons. Germany

would probably not need nuclear weapons to deter a conventional attack by

its neighbors, since neither the French nor any of the Eastern European states

would be capable of defeating a reunified Germany in a conventional war.

The Soviet Union would be Germany’s only legitimate conventional threat,

but as long as the states of Eastern Europe remained independent, Soviet

ground forces would be blocked from a direct attack. The Germans, however,

might not be willing to rely on the Poles or the Czechs to provide a barrier

and might instead see nuclear weapons as the best way to deter a Soviet

conventional attack into Central Europe. The Germans might choose to go

nuclear to protect themselves from blackmail by other nuclear powers. Fi-

nally, given that Germany would have greater economic strength than Britain

or France, it might therefore seek nuclear weapons to raise its military status

to a level commensurate with its economic status.

The minor powers of Eastern Europe would have strong incentives to

acquire nuclear weapons. Without nuclear weapons, these Eastern European

states would be open to nuclear blackmail from the Soviet Union and, if it

acquired nuclear weapons, from Germany. No Eastern European state could

match the conventional strength of Germany or the Soviet Union, which

gives these minor powers a powerful incentive to acquire a nuclear deterrent,

even if the major powers had none. In short, a continuation of the current

pattern of ownership without proliferation seems unlikely.

How stable would this order be? The continued presence of nuclear weap-

ons in Europe would have some pacifying effects. Nuclear weapons would
induce greater caution in their owners, give the nuclear powers greater

security, tend to equalize the relative power of states that possess them, and

reduce the risk of miscalculation. However, these benefits would be limited

if nuclear weapons did not proliferate beyond their current owners, for four

main reasons.

First, the caution and the security that nuclear weapons impose would be

missing from the vast center of Europe. The entire region between France

and the Soviet Union, extending from the Arctic in the north to the Medi-

terranean in the south, and comprising some eighteen significant states,

would become a large zone thereby made “safe” for conventional war. Sec-

ond, asymmetrical power relations would be bound to develop, between

nuclear and non-nuclear states and among non-nuclear states, raising the

dangers that attend such asymmetries. Third, the risk of miscalculation

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would rise, reflecting the multipolar character of this system and the absence

of nuclear weapons from a large portion of it. A durable agreed political

order would be hard to build because political coalitions would tend to shift

over time, causing miscalculations of resolve between adversaries. The rela-

tive strength of potential war coalitions would be hard to calculate because

coalition strength would depend heavily on the vagaries of diplomacy. Such

uncertainties about relative capabilities would be mitigated in conflicts that

arose among nuclear powers: nuclear weapons tend to equalize power even

among states or coalitions of widely disparate resources, and thus to diminish

the importance of additions or defections from each coalition. However,

uncertainty would still be acute among the many states that would remain

non-nuclear. Fourth, the conventionally-armed states of Central Europe

would depend for their security on mass armies, giving them an incentive

to infuse their societies with dangerous nationalism in order to maintain

public support for national defense efforts.

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION, WELL-MANAGED OR OTHERWISE

The most likely scenario in the wake of the Cold War is further nuclear

proliferation in Europe. This outcome is laden with dangers, but also might

provide the best hope for maintaining stability on the Continent. Its effects

depend greatly on how it is managed. Mismanaged proliferation could pro-

duce disaster, while well-managed proliferation could produce an order

nearly as stable as the current order. Unfortunately, however, any prolifer-

ation is likely to be mismanaged.

Four principal dangers could arise if proliferation is not properly managed.

First, the proliferation process itself could give the existing nuclear powers

strong incentives to use force to prevent their non-nuclear neighbors from

gaining nuclear weapons, much as Israel used force to preempt Iraq from

acquiring a nuclear capability.

Second, even after proliferation was completed, a stable nuclear competi-
tion might not emerge between the new nuclear states. The lesser European

powers might lack the resources needed to make their nuclear forces surviv-

able; if the emerging nuclear forces were vulnerable, this could create first-

strike incentives and attendant crisis instability. Because their economies are

far smaller, they would not be able to develop arsenals as large as those of

the major powers; arsenals of small absolute size might thus be vulnerable.

Furthermore, their lack of territorial expanse deprives them of possible basing

modes, such as mobile missile basing, that would secure their deterrents.

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International Security 15:1 | 38

Several are landlocked, so they could not base nuclear weapons at sea, the

most secure basing mode used by the superpowers. Moreover, their close

proximity to one another deprives them of warning time, and thus of basing

schemes that exploit warning to achieve invulnerability, such as by the quick

launch of alert bombers. Finally, the emerging nuclear powers might also

lack the resources required to develop secure command and control and

adequate safety procedures for weapons management, thus raising the risk

of accidental launch, or of terrorist seizure and use of nuclear weapons.

Third, the elites and publics of the emerging nuclear European states might

not quickly develop doctrines and attitudes that reflect a grasp of the dev-

astating consequences and basic unwinnability of nuclear war. There will

probably be voices in post-Cold War Europe arguing that limited nuclear

war is feasible, and that nuclear wars can be fought and won. These claims

might be taken seriously in states that have not had much direct experience

with the nuclear revolution.

Fourth, widespread proliferation would increase the number of fingers on

the nuclear trigger, which in turn would increase the likelihood that nuclear

weapons could be fired due to accident, unauthorized use, terrorist seizure,

or irrational decision-making.

If these problems are not resolved, proliferation would present grave dan-

gers. However, the existing nuclear powers can take steps to reduce these

dangers. They can help deter preventive attack on emerging nuclear states

by extending security guarantees. They can provide technical assistance to

help newly nuclear-armed powers to secure their deterrents. And they can

help socialize emerging nuclear societies to understand the nature of the

forces they are acquiring. Proliferation managed in this manner can help
bolster peace.

How broadly should nuclear weapons be permitted to spread? It would

be best if proliferation were extended to Germany but not beyond.57 Germany

has a large economic base, and can therefore sustain a secure nuclear force.

Moreover, Germany will feel insecure without nuclear weapons; and Ger-

many’s great conventional strength gives it significant capacity to disturb

Europe if it feels insecure. Other states-especially in Eastern Europe-may

also want nuclear weapons, but it would be best to prevent further prolif-

eration. The reasons are, as noted above, that these states may be unable to

57. See David Garnham, “Extending Deterrence with German Nuclear Weapons,” International
Security, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Summer 1985), pp. 96-110.

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secure their nuclear deterrents, and the unlimited spread of nuclear weapons

raises the risk of terrorist seizure or possession by states led by irrational

elites. However, if the broader spread of nuclear weapons proves impossible

to prevent without taking extreme steps, the existing nuclear powers should

let the process happen, while doing their best to channel it in safe directions.

However, even if proliferation were well-managed, significant dangers

would remain. If all the major powers in Europe possessed nuclear weapons,

history suggests that they would still compete for influence among the lesser

powers and be drawn into lesser-power conflicts. The superpowers, despite

the security that their huge nuclear arsenals provide, have competed in-

tensely for influence in remote, strategically unimportant areas such as South

Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central America. The European powers are likely

to exhibit the same competitive conduct, especially in Eastern Europe, even

if they possess secure nuclear deterrents.

The possibility of ganging up would remain: several nuclear states could

join against a solitary nuclear state, perhaps aggregating enough strength to

overwhelm its deterrent. Nuclear states also might bully their non-nuclear

neighbors. This problem is mitigated if unbounded proliferation takes place,

leaving few non-nuclear states subject to bullying by the nuclear states, but

such widespread proliferation raises risks of its own, as noted above.

Well-managed proliferation would reduce the danger that states might

miscalculate the relative strength of coalitions, since nuclear weapons clarify

the relative power of all states, and diminish the importance of unforeseen

additions and defections from alliances. However, the risk remains that

resolve will be miscalculated, because patterns of conflict are likely to be

somewhat fluid in a multipolar Europe, thus precluding the establishment

of well-defined spheres of rights and rules of conduct.

Unbounded proliferation, even if it is well-managed, will raise the risks

that appear when there are many fingers on the nuclear trigger-accident,

unauthorized or irrational use, or terrorist seizure.

In any case, it is not likely that proliferation will be well-managed. The

nuclear powers cannot easily work to manage proliferation while at the same

time resisting it; there is a natural tension between the two goals. But they

have several motives to resist. The established nuclear powers will be reluc-

tant to give the new nuclear powers technical help in building secure deter-

rents, because it runs against the grain of state behavior to transfer military

power to others, and because of the fear that sensitive military technology

could be turned against the donor state if that technology were further

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International Security 15:1 | 40

transferred to its adversaries. The nuclear powers will also be reluctant to

undermine the legitimacy of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by

allowing any signatories to acquire nuclear weapons, since this could open

the floodgates to the wider proliferation that they seek to avoid, even if they

would otherwise favor very limited proliferation. For these reasons the nu-

clear powers are more likely to spend their energy trying to thwart the

process of proliferation, rather than managing it.

Proliferation can be more easily managed if it occurs during a period of

relative international calm. Proliferation that occurred during a time of crisis

would be especially dangerous, since states in conflict with the emerging

nuclear powers would then have a strong incentive to interrupt the process

by force. However, proliferation is likely not to begin until the outbreak of

crisis, because there will be significant domestic opposition to proliferation

within the potential nuclear powers, as well as significant external resistance

from the established nuclear powers. Hence it may require a crisis to motivate

the potential nuclear powers to pay the domestic and international costs of

moving to build a nuclear force. Thus, proliferation is more likely to happen

under disadvantageous international conditions than in a period of calm.

Finally, there are limits to the ability of the established nuclear powers to

assist small emerging nuclear powers to build secure deterrents. For example,

small landlocked powers cannot be given access to sea-based deterrents or

land-mobile missile systems requiring vast expanses of land; these are geo-

graphic problems that technology cannot erase. Therefore even if the existing

nuclear powers move to manage the proliferation process early and wisely,

that process still may raise dangers that they cannot control.

Alternative Theories that Predict Peace

Many students of European politics will reject my pessimistic analysis of

post-Cold War Europe and instead argue that a multipolar Europe is likely

to be at least as peaceful as the present order. Three specific scenarios for a

peaceful future have been advanced. Each rests on a well-known theory of
international relations. However, each of these theories is flawed and thus

cannot serve as the basis for reliable predictions of a peaceful order in a

multipolar Europe; hence the hopeful scenarios they support lack plausibility.

Under the first optimistic scenario, even a non-nuclear Europe would

remain peaceful because Europeans recognize that even a conventional war

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would be horrific. Sobered by history, national leaders will take great care to

avoid war. This scenario rests on the “obsolescence of war” theory.

Although modern conventional war can certainly be very costly, there are

several flaws in this argument. There is no systematic evidence demonstrat-

ing that Europeans believe war is obsolete. However, even if it were widely

believed in Europe that war is no longer thinkable, attitudes could change.

Public opinion on national security issues is notoriously fickle and responsive

to elite manipulation and world events. Moreover, only one country need

decide war is thinkable to make war possible again. Finally, it is possible that

a conventional war could be fought and won without suffering grave losses,

and elites who saw this possibility could believe war is a viable option.

Under the second optimistic scenario, the existing European Community

(EC) grows stronger with time, a development heralded by the Single Eu-

ropean Act, designed to create a unified Western European market by 1992.

A strong EC then ensures that this economic order remains open and pros-

perous, and the open and prosperous character of the European economy

keeps the states of Western Europe cooperating with each other. In this view,

the present EC structure grows stronger, but not larger. Therefore, while

conflict might emerge in Eastern Europe, the threat of an aggressive Germany

would be removed by enmeshing the newly unified German state deeply in

the EC. The theory underpinning this scenario is “economic liberalism.”

A variant of this second scenario posits that the EC will spread to include

Eastern Europe and possibly the Soviet Union, bringing prosperity and peace

to these regions as well.58 Some also maintain that the EC is likely to be so

successful in the decade ahead that it will develop into a state apparatus: a

unified Western European super-state would emerge and Germany would

be subsumed in it. At some future point, the remainder of Europe would be

incorporated into that super-state. Either way, suggest the proponents of

this second scenario and its variants, peace will be bolstered.

Under the third scenario, war is avoided because many European states

have become democratic since the early twentieth century, and liberal de-

mocracies simply do not fight against each other. At a minimum, the presence

of liberal democracies in Western Europe renders that half of Europe free

from armed conflict. At a maximum, as democracy spreads to Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union, it bolsters peace among these states, and between

58. Jack Snyder, “Averting Anarchy in the New Europe,” International Security, Vol. 14, No. 4
(Spring 1990), pp. 5-41.

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International Security 15:1 | 42

these states and Western Europe. This scenario is based on the theory that

can be called “peace-loving democracies.”

ECONOMIC LIBERALISM

THE LOGIC OF THE THEORY. Economic liberalism rejects the notion that the

prospects for peace are tightly linked to calculations about military power,

and posits instead that stability is mainly a function of international economic

considerations. It assumes that modern states are primarily motivated by the

desire to achieve prosperity, and that national leaders place the material

welfare of their publics above all other considerations, including security.

This is especially true of liberal democracies, where policymakers are under

special pressure to ensure the economic well-being of their populations.59

Thus, the key to achieving peace is establishment of an international eco-

nomic system that fosters prosperity for all states.

The taproot of stability, according to this theory, is the creation and main-

tenance of a liberal economic order that allows free economic exchange

between states. Such an order works to dampen conflict and enhance political

cooperation in three ways.60

First, it makes states more prosperous; this bolsters peace because pros-

perous states are more economically satisfied, and satisfied states are more

59. This point about liberal democracies highlights the fact that economic liberalism and the
theory of peace-loving democracies are often linked in the writings of international relations
scholars. The basis of the linkage is what each theory has to say about peoples’ motives. The
claim that individuals mainly desire material prosperity, central to economic liberalism, meshes
nicely with the belief that the citizenry are a powerful force against war, which, as discussed
below, is central to the theory of peace-loving democracies.
60. The three explanations discussed here rest on three of the most prominent theories advanced
in the international political economy (IPE) literature. These three are usually treated as distinct
theories and are given various labels. However, they share important common elements. Hence,
for purposes of parsimony, I treat them as three strands of one general theory: economic
liberalism. A caveat is in order. The IPE literature often fails to state its theories in a clear
fashion, making them difficult to evaluate. Thus, I have construed these theories from sometimes
opaque writings that might be open to contrary interpretations. My description of economic
liberalism is drawn from the following works, which are among the best of the IPE genre:
Richard N. Cooper, “Economic Interdependence and Foreign Policies in the Seventies,” World
Politics, Vol. 24, No. 2 (January 1972), pp. 158-181; Ernst B. Haas, “Technology, Pluralism, and
the New Europe,” in Joseph S. Nye, Jr., ed., International Regionalism (Boston: Little, Brown,
1968), pp. 149-176; Robert 0. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Power and Interdependence: World
Politics in Transition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977); Robert 0. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation
and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); David
Mitrany, A Working Peace System (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1966); Edward L. Morse, “The
Transformation of Foreign Policies: Modernization, Interdependence, and Externalization,”
World Politics, Vol. 22, No. 3 (April 1970), pp. 371-392; and Richard N. Rosecrance, The Rise of
the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

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Back to the Future | 43

peaceful. Many wars are waged to gain or preserve wealth, but states have

less motive for such wars if they are already wealthy. Wealthy societies also

stand to lose more if their societies are laid waste by war. For both reasons
they avoid war.

Moreover, the prosperity spawned by economic liberalism feeds itself, by

promoting international institutions that foster greater liberalism, which in

turn promotes still greater prosperity. To function smoothly, a liberal eco-

nomic order requires international regimes or institutions, such as the EC,

the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and the International

Monetary Fund (IMF). These institutions perform two limited but important

functions. First, they help states to verify that partners keep their cooperative

commitments. Second, they provide resources to governments experiencing

short-term problems arising from their exposure to international markets,

and by doing so they allow states to eschew beggar-thy-neighbor policies

that might otherwise undermine the existing economic order. Once in place,

these institutions and regimes bolster economic cooperation, hence bolster

prosperity. They also bolster themselves: once in existence they cause the

expansion of their own size and influence, by proving their worth and selling

themselves to states and publics. And as their power grows they become

better able to promote cooperation, which promotes greater prosperity, which

further bolsters their prestige and influence. In essence, a benevolent spiral-

like relationship sets in between cooperation-promoting regimes and pros-

perity, in which each feeds the other.

Second, a liberal economic order fosters economic interdependence among
states. Interdependence is defined as a situation in which two states are

mutually vulnerable; each is a hostage of the other in the economic realm.61

When interdependence is high, this theory holds, there is less temptation to

cheat or behave aggressively towards other states because all states could

retaliate. Interdependence allows states to compel each other to cooperate

on economic matters, much as mutual assured destruction allows nuclear

powers to compel each other to respect their security. All states are forced

by the others to act as partners in the provision of material comfort for their

home publics.

Third, some theorists argue that with ever-increasing political cooperation,

international regimes will become so powerful that they will assume an

61. See Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Myth of National Interdependence,” in Charles P. Kindelberger,
ed., The International Corporation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 205-223.

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International Security 15:1 | 44

independent life of their own, eventually growing into a super-state. This is

a minority view; most economic liberals do not argue that regimes can become

so powerful that they can coerce states to act against their own narrow

interests. Instead most maintain that regimes essentially reflect the interests

of the states that created and maintain them, and remain subordinate to

other interests of these states. However, the “growth to super-statehood”

view does represent an important strand of thought among economic liberals.

The main flaw in this theory is that the principal assumption underpinning

it-that states are primarily motivated by the desire to achieve prosperity-

is wrong. States are surely concerned about prosperity, and thus economic

calculations are hardly trivial for them. However, states operate in both an
international political environment and an international economic environ-

ment, and the former dominates the latter in cases where the two systems

come into conflict. The reason is straightforward: the international political

system is anarchic, which means that each state must always be concerned

to ensure its own survival. Since a state can have no higher goal than survival,

when push comes to shove, international political considerations will be

paramount in the minds of decision-makers.

Proponents of economic liberalism largely ignore the effects of anarchy on

state behavior and concentrate instead on economic considerations. When

this omission is corrected, however, their arguments collapse, for two rea-

sons.

First, competition for security makes it very difficult for states to cooperate.

When security is scarce, states become more concerned about relative gains
than absolute gains.62 They ask of an exchange not, “will both of us gain?”
but instead, “who will gain more?”63 When security is scarce, they reject
even cooperation that would yield an absolute economic gain, if the other

state would gain more of the yield, from fear that the other might convert

its gain to military strength, and then use this strength to win by coercion

in later rounds.M4 Cooperation is much easier to achieve if states worry only
about absolute gains, as they are more likely to do when security is not so

62. See Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the
Newest Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Summer 1988),
pp. 485-507; and Grieco, Cooperation among Nations: Europe, America and Non-Tariff Barriers to
Trade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
63. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 105.
64. It is important to emphasize that because military power is in good part a function of
economic might, the consequences of economic dealings among states sometimes have important
security implications.

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Back to the Future | 45

scarce. The goal then is simply to insure that the overall economic pie is

expanding and each state is getting at least some part of the resulting benefits.

However, anarchy guarantees that security will often be scarce; this heightens

states’ concerns about relative gains, which makes cooperation difficult un-

less gains can be finely sliced to reflect, and thus not disturb, the current

balance of power.

In contrast to this view, economic liberals generally assume that states

worry little about relative gains when designing cooperative agreements, but

instead are concerned mainly about absolute gains. This assumption under-

lies their optimism over the prospects for international cooperation. How-

ever, it is not well-based: anarchy forces states to reject agreements that

result in asymmetrical payoffs that shift the balance of power against them.

Second, interdependence is as likely to lead to conflict as cooperation,

because states will struggle to escape the vulnerability that interdependence

creates, in order to bolster their national security. States that depend on

others for critical economic supplies will fear cutoff or blackmail in time of

crisis or war; they may try to extend political control to the source of supply,

giving rise to conflict with the source or with its other customers. Interde-

pendence, in other words, might very well lead to greater competition, not

to cooperation.65

Several other considerations, independent of the consequences of anarchy,

also raise doubts about the claims of economic liberals.

First, economic interactions between states often cause serious frictions,

even if the overall consequences are positive. There will invariably be winners

and losers within each state, and losers rarely accept defeat gracefully. In

modern states, where leaders have to pay careful attention to their constit-

65. There are numerous examples in the historical record of vulnerable states pursuing aggres-
sive military policies for the purpose of achieving autarky. For example, this pattern of behavior
was reflected in both Japan’s and Germany’s actions during the interwar period. On Japan, see
Michael A. Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security, 1919-1941
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and James B. Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). On Germany, see William Carr, Arms, Autarky and
Aggression: A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933-39 (New York: Norton, 1973). It is also worth
noting that during the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, when it became apparent that the
United States was vulnerable to OPEC pressure, there was much talk in America about using
military force to seize Arab oil fields. See, for example, Robert W. Tucker, “Oil: The Issue of
American Intervention,” Commentary, January 1975, pp. 21-31; Miles Ignotus [said to be a
pseudonym for Edward Luttwak], “Seizing Arab Oil,” Harpers, March 1975, pp. 45-62; and U.S.

Congress, House Committee on International Relations, Report on Oil Fields as Military Objectives:
A Feasibility Study, prepared by John M. Collins and Clyde R. Mark, 94th Cong., 1st sess.
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [U.S. GPO], August 21, 1975).

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International Security 15:1 | 46

uents, losers can cause considerable trouble. Even in cases where only win-

ners are involved, there are sometimes squabbles over how the spoils are

divided. In a sense, then, expanding the network of contacts among states

increases the scope for international disagreements among them. They now

have more to squabble about.

Second, there will be opportunities for blackmail and for brinkmanship in

a highly dynamic economic system where states are dependent on each other.

For example, although mutual vulnerabilities may arise among states, it is

likely that the actual levels of dependence will not be equal. The less vul-

nerable states would probably have greater bargaining power over the more

dependent states and might attempt to coerce them into making extravagant

concessions. Furthermore, different political systems, not to mention indi-

vidual leaders, have different capacities for engaging in tough bargaining

situations.

THE HISTORICAL RECORD. During two periods in the twentieth century,

Europe witnessed a liberal economic order with high levels of interdepend-

ence. Stability should have obtained during those periods, according to eco-

nomic liberalism.

The first case clearly contradicts the theory. The years between 1890 and

1914 were probably the time of greatest economic interdependence in Eu-

rope’s history. Yet World War I broke out following this period.66

The second case covers the Cold War years. During this period there has

been much interdependence among the EC states, while relations among

these states have been very peaceful. This case, not surprisingly, is the

centerpiece of the economic liberals’ argument.

The correlation in this second case does not mean, however, that inter-

dependence has caused cooperation among the Western democracies. It is

more likely that the prime cause was the Cold War, and that this was the

main reason that intra-EC relations have flourished.67 The Cold War caused

these results in two different but mutually reinforcing ways.

First, old-fashioned balance of power logic mandated cooperation among

the Western democracies. A powerful and potentially dangerous Soviet

66. See Richard N. Rosecrance, et al., “Whither Interdependence?” International Organization,
Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer 1977), pp. 432-434.
67. This theme is reflected in Barry Buzan, “Economic Structure and International Security: The
Limits of the Liberal Case,” International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Autumn 1984), pp. 597-
624; Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign
Direct Investment (New York: Basic Books, 1975); and Robert A. Pollard, Economic Security and the
Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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Back to the Future | 47

Union forced the Western democracies to band together to meet the common

threat. Britain, Germany, and France no longer worried about each other,

because all faced a greater menace from the Soviets. This Soviet threat muted

concerns about relative gains arising from economic cooperation among the

EC states by giving each Western democracy a vested interest in seeing its

alliance partners grow powerful, since each additional increment of power

helped deter the Soviets. The Soviet threat also muted relative-gains fears

among Western European states by giving them all a powerful incentive to

avoid conflict with each other while the Soviet Union loomed to the east,

ready to harvest the gains of Western quarrels. This gave each Western state

greater confidence that its Western partners would not turn their gains

against it, as long as these partners behaved rationally.

Second, America’s hegemonic position in NATO, the military counterpart

to the EC, mitigated the effects of anarchy on the Western democracies and

facilitated cooperation among them.68 As emphasized, states do not trust

each other in anarchy and they have incentives to commit aggression against

each other. America, however, not only provided protection against the

Soviet threat, but also guaranteed that no EC state would aggress against

another. For example, France did not have to fear Germany as it rearmed,

because the American presence in Germany meant that the Germans were

not free to attack anyone. With the United States serving as night watchman,

relative-gains concerns among the Western European states were mitigated

and, moreover, those states were willing to allow their economies to become

tightly interdependent.

In effect, relations among EC states were spared the effects of anarchy-

fears about relative gains and an obsession with autonomy-because the

United States served as the ultimate arbiter within the Alliance.

If the present Soviet threat to Western Europe is removed, and American

forces depart for home, relations among the EC states will be fundamentally
altered. Without a common Soviet threat and without the American night

watchman, Western European states will begin viewing each other with

greater fear and suspicion, as they did for centuries before the onset of the

Cold War. Consequently, they will worry about the imbalances in gains as

well as the loss of autonomy that results from cooperation.69 Cooperation in

68. See Josef Joffe, “Europe’s American Pacifier,” Foreign Policy, No. 54 (Spring 1984), pp. 64-
82.
69. Consider, for example, a situation where the European Community is successfully extended

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International Security 15:1 | 48

this new order will be more difficult than it has been in the Cold War. Conflict

will be more likely.

In sum, there are good reasons for looking with skepticism upon the claim

that peace can be maintained in a multipolar Europe on the basis of a more

powerful EC.

PEACE-LOVING DEMOCRACIES

The peace-loving democracies theory holds that domestic political factors,

not calculations about military power or the international economic system,

are the principal determinant of peace. Specifically, the argument is that the

presence of liberal democracies in the international system will help to pro-

duce a stable order.70 The claim is not that democracies go to war less often

than authoritarian states. In fact, the historical record shows clearly that such

is not the case.71 Instead, the argument is that democracies do not go to war

against other democracies. Thus, democracy must spread to Eastern Europe

and the Soviet Union to insure peace in post-Cold War Europe.

It is not certain that democracy will take root among the states of Eastern

Europe or in the Soviet Union. They lack a strong tradition of democracy;

institutions that can accommodate the growth of democracy will have to be

built from scratch. That task will probably prove to be difficult, especially in

an unstable Europe. But whether democracy takes root in the East matters

to include Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and that over time all states achieve greater
prosperity. The Germans, however, do significantly better than all other states. Hence their
relative power position, which is already quite strong, begins to improve markedly. It is likely
that the French and the Soviets, just to name two states, would be deeply concerned by this
situation.

70. This theory has been recently articulated by Michael Doyle in three articles: “Liberalism and
World Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1169;
“Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 3
(Summer 1983), pp. 205-235; and “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Part 2,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Fall 1983), pp. 323-353. Doyle draws heavily on Immanuel
Kant’s classic writings on the subject. This theory also provides the central argument in Francis
Fukuyama’s widely publicized essay on “The End of History?” in The National Interest, No. 16
(Summer 1989), pp. 3-18. For an excellent critique of the theory, see Samuel P. Huntington,
“No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” The National Interest, No. 17 (Fall 1989), pp. 3-11.
71. There is a good empirical literature on the relationship between democracy and war. See,
for example, Steve Chan, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall . .. Are the Freer Countries More Pacific?”
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 28, No. 4 (December 1984), pp. 617-648; Erich Weede, “De-
mocracy and War Involvement,” in ibid., pp. 649-664; Bruce M. Russett and R. Joseph Monsen,
“Bureaucracy and Polyarchy As Predictors of Performance,” Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 8,
No. 1 (April 1975), pp. 5-31; and Melvin Small and J. David Singer, “The War-Proneness of
Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965,” The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, Vol. 1, No. 4
(Summer 1976), pp. 50-69.

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little for stability in Europe, since the theory of peace-loving democracies is

unsound.

THE LOGIC OF THE THEORY. Two explanations are offered in support of the

claim that democracies do not go to war against one another.

First, some claim that authoritarian leaders are more prone to go to war

than leaders of democracies, because authoritarian leaders are not account-

able to their publics, which carry the main burdens of war. In a democracy,

by contrast, the citizenry that pays the price of war has greater say in the

decision-making process. The people, so the argument goes, are more hesi-

tant to start trouble because it is they who pay the blood price; hence the

greater their power, the fewer wars.

The second argument rests on the claim that the citizens of liberal demo-

cracies respect popular democratic rights-those of their fellow countrymen,

and those of individuals in other states. As a result they are reluctant to

wage war against other democracies, because they view democratic govern-

ments as more legitimate than others, and are loath to impose a foreign

regime on a democratic state by force. This would violate their own demo-

cratic principles and values. Thus an inhibition on war is introduced when

two democracies face each other that is missing in other international rela-

tionships.

The first of these arguments is flawed because it is not possible to sustain

the claim that the people in a democracy are especially sensitive to the costs

of war and therefore less willing than authoritarian leaders to fight wars. In
fact, the historical record shows that democracies are every bit as likely to

fight wars as are authoritarian states.

Furthermore, mass publics, whether democratic or not, can become deeply

imbued with nationalistic or religious fervor, making them prone to support

aggression, regardless of costs. The widespread public support in post-rev-

olutionary France for Napoleon’s wars of aggression is just one example of

this phenomenon. On the other hand, authoritarian leaders are just as likely
as democratic publics to fear going to war, because war tends to unleash

democratic forces that can undermine the regime.72 War can impose high
costs on authoritarian leaders as well as on their citizenries.

The second argument, which emphasizes the transnational respect for

democratic rights among democracies, rests on a weaker factor that is usually

72. See, for example, Stanislav Andreski, “On the Peaceful Disposition of Military Dictator-
ships,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (December 1980), pp. 3-10.

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International Security 15:1 | 50

overridden by other factors such as nationalism and religious fundamental-

ism. There is also another problem with the argument. The possibility always

exists that a democracy will revert to an authoritarian state. This threat of

backsliding means that one democratic state can never be sure that another

democratic state will not change its stripes and turn on it sometime in the

future. Liberal democracies must therefore worry about relative power among

themselves, which is tantamount to saying that each has an incentive to

consider aggression against the other to forestall future trouble. Lamentably,

it is not possible for even liberal democracies to transcend anarchy.

THE HISTORICAL RECORD. Problems with the deductive logic aside, the his-

torical record seems to offer strong support for the theory of peace-loving

democracies. There appears to have been no case where liberal democracies

fought against each other. Although this evidence looks impressive at first

glance, closer examination shows it to be indecisive. In fact, history provides

no clear test of the theory. Four evidentiary problems leave the issue in
doubt.

First, democracies have been few in number over the past two centuries,

and thus there have not been many cases where two democracies were in a

position to fight with each other. Only three prominent cases are usually

cited: Britain and the United States (1832-present); Britain and France (1832-

49, 1871-1940); and the Western democracies since 1945.

Second, there are other persuasive explanations for why war did not occur
in those three cases, and these competing explanations must be ruled out

before the peace-loving democracies theory can be accepted. While relations

between the British and the Americans during the nineteenth century were

hardly free of conflict,73 their relations in the twentieth century were quite
harmonious, and thus fit closely with how the theory would expect two

democracies to behave towards each other. That harmony, however, can

easily be explained by the presence of a common threat that forced Britain

and the United States to work closely together. 74 Both faced a serious German

threat in the first part of the century, and a Soviet threat later. The same

basic argument applies to France and Britain. While Franco-British relations

73. For a discussion of the hostile relations that existed between the United States and Britain
during the nineteenth century, see H.C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of
Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1952 (London: Odhams, 1954).
74. For a discussion of this rapprochement, see Stephen R. Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out: Great
Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1989), chap. 2.

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were not the best throughout most of the nineteenth century,75 they im-

proved significantly around the turn of the century with the rise of a common

threat: Germany.76 Finally, as noted above, the Soviet threat can explain the

absence of war among the Western democracies since 1945.

Third, it bears mention that several democracies have come close to fighting

one another, which suggests that the absence of war may be due simply to

chance. France and Britain approached war during the Fashoda crisis of 1898.

France and Weimar Germany might have come to blows over the Rhineland

during the 1920s, had Germany possessed the military strength to challenge

France. The United States has clashed with a number of elected governments

in the Third World during the Cold War, including the Allende regime in

Chile and the Arbenz regime in Guatemala.

Lastly, some would classify Wilhelmine Germany as a democracy, or at

least a quasi-democracy; if so, World War I becomes a war among democra-

cies.77

Conclusion

This article argues that bipolarity, an equal military balance, and nuclear

weapons have fostered peace in Europe over the past 45 years. The Cold

War confrontation produced these phenomena; thus the Cold War was prin-

cipally responsible for transforming a historically violent region into a very

peaceful place.

There is no doubt that the costs of the Cold War have been substantial. It

inflicted oppressive political regimes on the peoples of Eastern Europe, who

were denied basic human rights by their forced membership in the Soviet

75. For a good discussion of Franco-British relations during the nineteenth century, see P.J.V.
Rolo, Entente Cordiale: The Origins and Negotiation of the Anglo-French Agreements of 8 April 1904
(New York: St. Martins, 1969), pp. 16-109.
76. Stephen Rock, who has examined the rapprochement between Britain and France, argues
that the principal motivating force behind their improved relations derived from geopolitical
considerations, not shared political beliefs. See Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out, chap. 4.
77. Doyle recognizes this problem and thus has a lengthy footnote that attempts to deal with
it. See “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs [Part One],” pp. 216-217, n. 8. He argues
that “Germany was a liberal state under republican law for domestic issues,” but that the
“emperor’s active role in foreign affairs . .. made imperial Germany a state divorced from the
control of its citizenry in foreign affairs.” However, an examination of the decision-making
process leading to World War I reveals that the emperor (Wilhelm II) was not a prime mover in
foreign affairs and that he was no more bellicose than other members of the German elite,
including the leading civilian official, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.

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International Security 15:1 | 52

empire. It consumed national wealth, by giving rise to large and costly

defense establishments in both East and West. It spawned bloody conflicts

in the Third World; these produced modest casualties for the superpowers,

but large casualties for the Third World nations. Nevertheless, the net human
and economic cost of the Cold War order has been far less than the cost of

the European order of 1900-45, with its vast violence and suffering.

A Cold War order without confrontation would have been preferable to

the order that actually developed; then the peace that the Cold War order

produced could have been enjoyed without its attendant costs. However, it

was East-West enmity that gave rise to the Cold War order; there would have

been no bipolarity, no equality, and no large Soviet and American nuclear

forces in Europe without it. The costs of the Cold War arose from the same

cause-East-West confrontation-as did its benefits. The good could not be

had without the bad.

This article further argues that the demise of the Cold War order is likely

to increase the chances that war and major crises will occur in Europe. Many

observers now suggest that a new age of peace is dawning; in fact the

opposite is true.

The implications of my analysis are straightforward, if paradoxical. The

West has an interest in maintaining peace in Europe. It therefore has an

interest in maintaining the Cold War order, and hence has an interest in the

continuation of the Cold War confrontation; developments that threaten to

end it are dangerous. The Cold War antagonism could be continued at lower

levels of East-West tension than have prevailed in the past; hence the West

is not injured by relaxing East-West tension, but a complete end to the Cold

War would create more problems than it would solve.

The fate of the Cold War, however, is mainly in the hands of the Soviet

Union. The Soviet Union is the only superpower that can seriously threaten

to overrun Europe; it is the Soviet threat that provides the glue that holds

NATO together. Take away that offensive threat and the United States is

likely to abandon the Continent, whereupon the defensive alliance it has

headed for forty years may disintegrate. This would bring to an end the

bipolar order that has characterized Europe for the past 45 years.

The foregoing analysis suggests that the West paradoxically has an interest

in the continued existence -of a powerful Soviet Union with substantial mili-

tary forces in Eastern Europe. Western interests are wholly reversed from

those that Western leaders saw in the late 1940s: instead of seeking the

retraction of Soviet power, as the West did then, the West now should hope

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that the Soviet Union retains at least some military forces in the Eastern

European region.

There is little the Americans or the Western Europeans can or are likely to

do to perpetuate the Cold War, for three reasons.

First, domestic political considerations preclude such an approach. Western

leaders obviously cannot base national security policy on the need to maintain

forces in Central Europe for the purpose simply of keeping the Soviets there.
The idea of deploying large forces in order to bait the Soviets into an order-

keeping competition would be dismissed as bizarre, and contrary to the

general belief that ending the Cold War and removing the Soviet yoke from
Eastern Europe would make the world safer and better.78

Second, the idea of propping up a declining rival runs counter to the basic

behavior of states. States are principally concerned about their relative power

position in the system; hence, they look for opportunities to take advantage

of each other. If anything, they prefer to see adversaries decline, and thus

will do whatever they can to speed up the process and maximize the distance

of the fall. In other words, states do not ask which distribution of power
best facilitates stability and then do everything possible to build or maintain

such an order. Instead, they each tend to pursue the more narrow aim of

maximizing their power advantage over potential adversaries. The particular

international order that results is simply a byproduct of that competition, as

illustrated by the origins of the Cold War order in Europe. No state intended

to create it. In fact, both the United States and the Soviet Union worked hard

in the early years of the Cold War to undermine each other’s position in

Europe, which would have ended the bipolar order on the Continent. The

remarkably stable system that emerged in Europe in the late 1940s was the

unintended consequence of an intense competition between the superpow-

ers.

Third, even if the Americans and the Western Europeans wanted to help

the Soviets maintain their status as a superpower, it is not apparent that they

could do so. The Soviet Union is leaving Eastern Europe and cutting its

78. This point is illustrated by the 1976 controversy over the so-called “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine.”
Helmut Sonnenfeldt, an adviser to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was reported to have
said in late 1975 that the United States should support Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. It
was clear from the ensuing debate that whether or not Sonnenfeldt in fact made such a claim,
no administration could publicly adopt that position. See U.S. Congress, House Committee on
International Relations, Hearings on United States National Security Policy Vis-a-Vis Eastern Europe
(The “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine”), 94th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, April 12, 1976).

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International Security 15:1 | 54

military forces largely because its economy is foundering. It is not clear that

the Soviets themselves know how to fix their economy, and there is little

that Western governments can do to help them solve their economic prob-

lems. The West can and should avoid doing malicious mischief to the Soviet

economy, but at this juncture it is difficult to see how the West can have

significant positive influence.79

The fact that the West cannot sustain the Cold War does not mean that

the United States should abandon all attempts to preserve the current order.

The United States should do what it can to direct events toward averting a

complete mutual superpower withdrawal from Europe. For instance, the

American negotiating position at the conventional arms control talks should

aim toward large mutual force reductions, but should not contemplate com-

plete mutual withdrawal. The Soviets may opt to withdraw all their forces

unilaterally anyway; there is little the United States could do to prevent this.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

If complete Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe proves unavoidable, the

West faces the question of how to maintain peace in a multipolar Europe.

Three policy prescriptions are in order.

First, the United States should encourage the limited and carefully man-

aged proliferation of nuclear weapons in Europe. The best hope for avoiding

war in post-Cold War Europe is nuclear deterrence; hence some nuclear

proliferation is necessary to compensate for the withdrawal of the Soviet and

American nuclear arsenals from Central Europe. Ideally, as I have argued,

nuclear weapons would spread to Germany, but to no other state.

Second, Britain and the United States, as well as the Continental states,

will have to balance actively and efficiently against any emerging aggressor

to offset the ganging up and bullying problems that are sure to arise in post-

Cold War Europe. Balancing in a multipolar system, however, is usually a
problem-ridden enterprise, either because of geography or because of signif-

icant coordination problems. Nevertheless, two steps can be taken to maxi-

mize the prospects of efficient balancing.

The initial measure concerns Britain and the United States, the two pro-

spective balancing states that, physically separated from the Continent, may

79. For an optimistic assessment of h,ow the West can enhance Gorbachev’s prospects of suc-
ceeding, see Jack Snyder, “International Leverage on Soviet Domestic Change,” World Politics,
Vol. 42, No. 1 (October 1989), pp. 1-30.

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thus conclude that they have little interest in what happens there. They

would then be abandoning their responsibilities and, more importantly, their

interests as off-shore balancers. Both states’ failure to balance against Ger-

many before the two world wars made war more likely in each case. It is

essential for peace in Europe that they not repeat their past mistakes, but

instead remain actively involved in maintaining the balance of power in

Europe.

Specifically, both states must maintain military forces that can be deployed

to the Continent to balance against states that threaten to start a war. To do

this they must also socialize their publics to support a policy of continued

Continental commitment. Support for such a commitment will be more dif-

ficult to mobilize than in the past, because its principal purpose would be to

preserve peace, rather than to prevent an imminent hegemony, and the latter

is a simpler goal to explain publicly. Moreover, it is the basic nature of states

to focus on maximizing relative power, not on bolstering stability, so this

prescription asks them to take on an unaccustomed task. Nevertheless, the

British and American stake in peace is real, especially since there is a sure

risk that a European war might involve large-scale use of nuclear weapons.

It should therefore be possible for both countries to lead their publics to

recognize this interest and support policies that protect it.80

The other measure concerns American attitudes and actions toward the

Soviet Union. The Soviets may eventually return to their past expansionism

and threaten to upset the status quo. If so, we are back to the Cold War; the

West should respond as quickly and efficiently as it did the first time. How-

ever, if the Soviets adhere to status quo policies, Soviet power could play a
key role in balancing against Germany and in maintaining order in Eastern

Europe. It is important that, in those cases where the Soviets are acting in a

balancing capacity, the United States recognize this, cooperate with its former

adversary, and not let residual distrust from the Cold War interfere with the

balancing process.

Third, a concerted effort should be made to keep hyper-nationalism at bay,

especially in Eastern Europe. This powerful force has deep roots in Europe

and has contributed to the outbreak of past European conflicts. Nationalism

has been contained during the Cold War, but it is likely to reemerge once

80. Advancing this argument is Van Evera, “Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World
Doesn’t.”

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International Security 15:1 | 56

Soviet and American forces leave the heart of Europe.81 It will be a force for
trouble unless it is curbed. The teaching of honest national history is espe-

cially important, since the teaching of false chauvinist history is the main

vehicle for spreading virulent nationalism. States that teach a dishonestly

self-exculpating or self-glorifying history should be publicly criticized and
sanctioned.82

On this count it is especially important that relations between Germany

and its neighbors be handled carefully. Many Germans rightly feel that

Germany has behaved very responsibly for 45 years, and has made an honest

effort to remember and make amends for an ugly period of its past. Therefore,

Germans quickly tire of lectures from foreigners demanding that they apol-

ogize once again for crimes committed before most of the current German

population was born. On the other hand, peoples who have suffered at the

hands of the Germans cannot forget their enormous suffering, and inevitably

ask for repeated assurance that the past will not be repeated. This dialogue
has the potential to spiral into mutual recriminations that could spark a

renewed sense of persecution among Germans, and with it, a rebirth of

German-nationalism. It is therefore incumbent on all parties in this discourse

to proceed with understanding and respect for one another’s feelings and

experience. Specifically, others should not ask today’s Germans to apologize

for crimes they did not commit, but Germans must understand that others’

ceaseless demands for reassurance have a legitimate basis in history, and

should view these demands with patience and understanding.

None of these tasks will be easy to accomplish. In fact, I expect that the

bulk of my prescriptions will not be followed; most run contrary to powerful

strains of domestic American and European opinion, and to the basic nature

of state behavior. Moreover, even if they are followed, this will not guarantee

the peace in Europe. If the Cold War is truly behind us, the stability of the

past 45 years is not likely to be seen again in the coming decades.

81. On the evolution of nationalistic history-teaching in Europe see Kennedy, “The Decline of
Nationalistic History,” and Dance, History the Betrayer.
82. My thinking on this matter has been influenced by conversations with Stephen Van Evera.

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Summer, 1990) pp. 1-218
Front Matter [pp. ]
Editors’ Note [pp. 3-4]
Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War [pp. 5-56]
The Globalization of America’s Defense Industries: Managing the Threat of Foreign Dependence [pp. 57-99]
The B-2 Debate
The Manned Bomber and Strategic Deterrence: The U.S. Air Force Perspective [pp. 100-128]
The Case against the B-2 [pp. 129-153]
Beyond START: How to Make Much Deeper Cuts [pp. 154-180]
Air Defense of the United States: Strategic Missions and Modern Technology [pp. 181-211]
Correspondence
Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: Should We Swallow Oral History? [pp. 212-218]
Back Matter [pp. ]