Of ghosts and other spectres: the Cold War's ending and the question of the next ‘hegemonic’ conflict

Abstract

Our intent in this article is to try to determine if the manner of the Cold War's ending can suggest anything useful to those of us who ponder whether the twenty-first century will be able to break from the dismal cyclical pattern of all previous centuries, and become the first span of decades to exorcise the evil spirit of great power war. Our task is to employ cyclical constructs in such a manner as to cast doubt upon the ‘cyclical determinism’ of the power transition pessimists.

Notes

Michel Fortmann is Professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal. In 1996, he created the Research Group in International Security (REGIS), which is now the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS).

¹ A conflict that, for some, will be triggered by competition for scarce mineral resources. Inter alios, see Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Holt, 2002); Robert Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate (New York: Random House, 2012); Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Kent Calder, The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Dambisa Moyo, Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World (New York: Basic Books, 2012); and Stephen Burgess and Janet Beilstein, “This Means War? China's Scramble for Minerals and Resource Nationalism in Southern Africa”, Contemporary Security Policy 34 (April 2013): 120–43.

² Michel Fortmann, Les Cycles de Mars: Révolutions militaires et édification étatique de la Renaissance á nos jours (Paris: Economica, 2010).

³ Apropos the latter, Alexander Wendt has argued that the emergence of a “world state” effectively putting paid to the contemporary Westphalian system is foreordained, and largely because transformations in warfare have so elevated the costs of great powergreat power conflict as not only to render it an impossibility, but also to generate unstoppable momentum toward the erection of a global, Weberian, state possessed of a monopoly over the legitimate, and organised, use of violence; see Wendt, “Why a World State Is Inevitable”, European Journal of International Relations 9, 4 (2003): 491–542.

⁴ See, for this claim, John Childs, Warfare in the Seventeenth Century (London: Cassel, 2001).

⁵ Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States: A.D. 990-1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992).

⁶ Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: Free Press, 1994).

⁷ Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–83.

⁸ Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

⁹ Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge, 2002).

¹⁰ Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States.

¹¹ Porter, War and the Rise of the State, 298.

¹² As argued by Wendt, in n3, above.

¹³ An excellent source for the scholarly dispute over DPT is Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace: An International Security Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

¹⁴ Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93–130; and Kenneth N. Waltz, “Kant, Liberalism, and War”, American Political Science Review 56 (June 1962): 331–40.

¹⁵ On these entities see, Emanuel Adler and Michael N. Barnett, “Governing Anarchy: A Research Agenda for the Study of Security Communities”, Ethics & International Affairs 10 (1996): 63–98; and Karl Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).

¹⁶ This distinction is drawn most clearly in Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 41–43.

¹⁷ A. F. K. Organski, World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968; orig. pub. 1958), 364.

¹⁸ Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War”, World Politics 40 (October 1987): 82–107, quote at p. 85.

¹⁹ An indispensable source on the concept of collective security remains Inis L. Claude, Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 4^th ed. (New York: Random House, 1971).

²⁰ Sean Clark, “Deadly Decay: Great Power Decline and Cataclysmic War”, International Journal 65 (Spring 2010): 475–94.

²¹ Gilpin, War and Change, passim. Also see, for this logic, Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise”, International Security 17 (Spring 1993): 5–51.

²² Zakaria labels his own theory “state-centric realism”. See his From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

²³ Charles Doran, “War and Power Dynamics: Economic Underpinnings”, International Studies Quarterly 27 (Spring 1983): 419–41.

²⁴ The best-known proponent of this argument is Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

²⁵ Nathaniel Popper, “Economic Shifts in U.S. and China Batter Markets”, New York Times, 25 January 2014, A1, B7; Binyamin Appelbaum, “Fed Again Scales Back Purchases of Bonds”, ibid., 30 January 2014, B1, B6.

²⁶ For reasons we have never understood, European analysts frequently miscategorise economic prowess as falling outside the ambit of “hard power”, and this notwithstanding that none other than the guru of “soft power” himself, Joseph Nye, was explicit in writing that this latter, stemming from such power resources as “culture, ideology, and institutions,” stood in contrast with the “hard power usually associated with tangible resources like military and economic strength”. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 32.

²⁷ An argument advanced, inter alios, by John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

²⁸ William Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World”, International Security 24 (Summer 1999): 5–41, quote at p. 9.

²⁹ David Wilkinson, “Unipolarity Without Hegemony”, International Studies Review 1 (Summer 1999): 141–72, cite at p. 143.

³⁰ Daniel W. Drezner, “Military Primacy Doesn't Pay (Nearly As Much As You Think)”, International Security 38 (Summer 2013): 52–79.

³¹ Martha Finnemore, “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being a Unipole Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be”, World Politics 61 (January 2009): 58–85, quote at pp. 60–61.

³² Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895–1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968). For the varying ways in which this rapprochement has been interpreted, theoretically as well as historically, see Stephen R. Rock, Why Peace Breaks Out: Great Power Rapprochement in Historical Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Charles A. Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Kathleen Burk, Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning (New York: Grove Press, 2009); Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Harry Cranbrook Allen, The Anglo-American Relationship since 1783 (London: Black, 1959); Charles S. Campbell, Jr., From Revolution to Rapprochement: The United States and Great Britain, 1783–1900 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974); and Robert Balmain Mowat, The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and the United States (London: E. Arnold, 1925).

³³ Feng Yongping, “The Peaceful Transition of Power from the UK to the US”, Chinese Journal of International Politics 1 (2006): 83–108.

³⁴ An analogy that was most recently invoked by Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who told a high-level economic gathering at Davos that his country's current tense relationship with China looked like nothing so much as the relationship Britain had with Germany in 1914. Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Anxiety Rises Over Japan and China's Relations”, New York Times, 28 January 2014, B1, B8.

³⁵ Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).