This week we’re going to take a look at an aspect of contemporary international relations, rather than ancient ones. As has become somewhat customary, I am going to use the the week of July 4th to talk about the United States, or more correctly for this July 4th, the informal coalition (with formal components) of countries the United States inhabits and leads.
In some ways this is following up on a thread left hanging a couple of years ago when I commented briefly that I didn’t think the term ’empire’ effectively described the US position in the international order. And so this post will focus on what I do think is the US position in the international order, although the focus here is going to be somewhat less on the United States’ role within what I am going to call the ‘status quo coalition’ than it is on the coalition itself. Because the existence and breadth of this coalition is really unusual and thus remarkable; indeed it may be indicative of broader shifts in how interstate relationships work in an industrial/post-industrial world where institutions and cultural attitudes are beginning, slowly, to catch up to the new realities our technology has created.
Meanwhile, if you want to be part of the ACOUP Coalition, you can support this project on Patreon. We do, however, insist on a notional 2% of GDP support target that everyone ignores because, like NATO, there is no enforcement mechanism. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) and BlueSky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social), though I am most active on Twitter still (for now).
Balancing
But first, before we get into the coalition itself, I think it is a good idea to jump back to some of our international relations theory (particularly some neo-realism) to think about how countries ought, in theory to be behaving, based on how they have in the past normally behaved under conditions like those today. Mostly, of course, this is to point out that a rather chunky groups of countries are not behaving this way, which is the striking fact this essay is attempting to explain.
We’ve talked about the most common condition states find themselves in, interstate anarchy, before. In brief interstate anarchy is a condition in which there are many states operating in a state system which has few or no constraints on the use of violence. Because larger states can use the greater resources of their large size to impose their interests on smaller states, these conditions create a dog-eat-dog race in militarism where the only way for states to avoid becoming prey is to become the most effective predators. Such systems can be durable, if not stable, because everyone is doing this, creating a ‘Red Queen effect,’ where because all of the states are trying desperately to maximize security by maximizing military power, no one actually gets ahead.
But sometimes one or more powers do get ahead and begin to dominate the system. If it several larger powers doing this what we tend to see emerge are ‘balance of power’ systems. These too can be durable and even potentially stable (for a time), because of a key behavior that emerges among both the larger ‘Great Powers’ and smaller states: balancing. This behavior will be immediately familiar to players of strategy games, but we see it emerge in actual state systems too. The logic is fairly simple: weaker powers benefit from the relative independence that continued competition in the system gives them. Consequently, small powers want to avoid anyone ‘winning’ the game, since a singular winning power would be able to dominate and possibly absorb them.
The result of this behavior is the emergence of a ‘balance of power,’ facilitated by the fact that the powers in the system tend to align against whichever powers appear strongest, in order to check their advance. European politics from 1500 to 1945 followed this pattern, with shifting coalitions forming to contain any power or alliance that seemed on course to achieve a ‘breakout’ from the competitive system. Thus the anti-Habsburg coalitions of the 1500s and early 1600s, or the anti-France coalitions of the early 1700s, followed by balancing against Britain in the late 1700s and then balancing against France again in the aftermath of the French revolution, before the unification of Germany led to balancing against that power. The same behavior is visible in antiquity in both the Greek conflicts of 431-338 (balancing first against Athens, then Sparta, then Thebes and finally a failed effort to balance against Macedon) and the behavior of the Hellenistic successor states (and the Greek poleis) after Alexander’s death in 323 until Rome achieves breakout in the second century.
Balancing doesn’t always work of course: sometimes a large imperial power is able, by luck or superior resources, to achieve victory anyway, usually by winning a ‘war of containment’ – a war where a large balancing coalition attempts to cut a rising power back down to size. Rome successfully overcomes two (arguably three) of these on its way to achieving what we might term ‘hegemonic breakout.’ First in the Third Samnite War (298-290), the Romans faced down a grand coalition of Samnites, Etruscans and Gauls – essentially every non-Greek power not already part of Rome’s growing Italian empire.1 The Greek powers then try their luck inviting Pyrrhus in a similar balancing coalition, but also loses. The consequence of those wars was undisputed Roman hegemony in Italy: balancing had been tried and failed.
When balancing fails, the resulting system is hegemony. Once balancing fails, everyone’s interests suddenly recalculate in a diametrically opposed way. So long as balancing was possible, it was in most state’s interests to oppose the leading power in an effort to contain it; the moment balancing becomes impossible, it is suddenly in every state’s interest to support the leading power and align with it in the hopes of persisting as a client state and maintaining at least some degree of autonomy.
Of course the converse of this is that if the hegemon should stumble in some way, everyone’s interests all shift back to balance of power just as quickly. This is why some empires, especially very decentralized ones with lots of ‘vassal’ states, can decline for ages before failing very rapidly all at once. The collapse of the (Neo)Assyrian Empire in last three decades of the seventh century BC is a good example of this: one it becomes clear that central imperial power is weak, both subject peoples (Egypt, Babylon) and tributary neighbors (Medea, Persia) all turn on the former hegemon more or less all at once, leading to rapid disintegration.
These patterns of state behavior are quite well established and one could pile example after example of these general trends. They are, of course, not laws; states act in ways that deviate from their neo-realist ‘interests’ all the time. The people leading them make blunders, and miscalculations, stand on principle or make decisions for ideological reasons often enough. But in general when describing the pattern of decisions of a large number of states over a reasonably long period of time (say, three decades or so), the pattern holds pretty well.
Except right now.
The Failure of Balancing
Immediately after the end of the Cold War, we got the rough result we might expect: the rapid expansion of US influence as the United States – the sole remaining superpower after the collapse of the USSR – became a global hegemon and was thus in a position to rewrite the rules of international relations to suit itself. The End of History and all that. Many countries more consciously aligned with the United States and few more were made into high profile examples of what might happen to countries that failed to align with the new hegemon, being either ‘regime changed’ or isolated from the global economy. That part wasn’t the surprise.
What was surprising is that in the years that followed, a number of potential counter-weights to the United States did, in fact, emerge during what we may term the End of the End of History and yet balancing didn’t meaningfully reassert itself. One the one hand, two major revisionist powers emerged (Russia and China), with one of them clearly having the economic heft to potentially act as a peer-rival to the United States, to shield potential allies from the full brunt of American economic might and the nuclear umbrella to prohibit direct US military intervention in areas of high concern. Meanwhile a third possible power, the EU, emerged as ‘the dog that didn’t bark.’ A confederation of European states with enough economic power and population to immediately form a peer-competitor or at least containing coalition against US influence which simply opted not to.
Under the balancing model, we ought to expect a fairly wide range of countries to begin aligning with the potential competitors to the United States in order to limit American influence and constrain what the United States can do. A more multipolar world, they might well think, should offer great latitude for those countries to pursue their own interests.
Instead, global opinion looks like this:
That data, from a June, 2023 study of global perceptions of the United States is pretty remarkable. Of course polling this this varies by the political moment and the administration in power in the United States and so the figures might not have been quite so favorable to the United States back in, say, 2018. Indeed, they were less favorable, but still net favorable, back in 2018 during the Trump presidency (which, regardless of your politics in the USA, was as a matter of data, less well regarded abroad) and before the War in Ukraine. But as interesting as the fact that the United States is viewed favorably in these countries – which to be fair is not all countries, but is a solid cross-cut of countries that are now or are likely to become major global power centers (sans Russia and China, in which it is impossible to do such polling) – is the odd cross-implications of the results.
To oversimplify the results a touch, we might say that the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you. That is to say, respondents overwhelmingly thought the USA ‘interferes in the affairs of other countries’ and responses were profoundly ambivalent as to if the United States even tries to consider the interests of other countries, but despite that almost two-third of respondents concluded that the USA contributes to peace and stability and consequently had a positive view of it.
And that’s not just some polling data: globally we can see the failure of balancing. Despite the fact that the first real challenger to the US-led world order since 1989 has emerged in the form of the People’s Republic of China, the PRC has the same meager list of allies in 2023 that it had in 1953: North Korea. Russia likewise has a single European client state (Belarus); Russian friendship with Hungary has merely bought neutrality, not aid. The idea that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) would constitute some developing-world coalition hasn’t really materialized either. While the rest of the BRICS won’t, for economic reasons, join the anti-Russian sanction regime, they also aren’t sanction-busting to any significant degree; even China’s support for Russia has been remarkably tepid. These are precisely the countries that ought to be eager to balance against the United States in order to open space to push their own interests.
Meanwhile, the United States’ list of allies is preposterous. Of the top 10 countries by nominal GDP – a decent enough measure of potential military capabilities – one is the United States and six more2 are close allies of the United States. Of the next ten, five more3 are formal US treaty allies, one is pointedly neutral4 and three more5 have either extensive economic ties with the United States, significant military ties with the United States or both.
Meanwhile the list of formal treat allies of the United States is expanding with the addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO.6 Likewise the formal American infrastructure in the ‘Indo-Pacific’ seems to be deepening, rather than declining, with a range of countries expressing at least some interest in joining AUKUS or at least an AUKUS-like deal with the United States in the region. France – which was more than a little wounded by the AUKUS pact, which unilaterally canceled a deal they had with Australia with basically no notice – nevertheless remained in NATO and remains a major component of the NATO-led support of Ukraine. This was, I should note, no sure thing – France pulled out of NATO’s main command structure (while remaining in the alliance) and only rejoined in 2009. Again, in a period where we might expect balancing against the United States, France has pulled closer, not further away, from Uncle Sam.
At the same time, it is not the case that all countries or even most countries are aligning with the United States. One of the very striking indicators of this is the lack of appetite in much of the world for sanctions against Russia. Most countries are both unwilling to sanction Russia and unwilling to sanction-bust in favor of Russia. A huge portion of the world, including nearly all of the ‘Global South’ (a term I dislike, but it will do here) are functioning non-aligned. But that very non-alignment is useful for the United States: if there is a large pro-USA coalition, a large non-aligned non-coalition and then isolated revisionist powers, that is a system where the American geopolitical vision remains the predominant one.
And I don’t think the non-aligned states are sleepwalking here: I think they know this and in many cases broadly prefer this outcome. You can see that preference reflected in the views of countries like Indonesia, India, Kenya and Nigeria in the chart above. They won’t back the United States if that incurs meaningful costs – these are developing countries that cannot afford grandiosity, after all – but they also won’t oppose the United States without a pretty substantial incentive. China’s efforts to ‘buy allies’ through the Belt and Road Initiative appear to have spent a lot of money buying roughly zero allies, globally. A whole lot of these countries – as you can see in the Pew polling data of some of the largest above – seem pretty content to let ‘Uncle Sam and Pals’ run the show, while they focus on economic and political development at home.
Balancing appears to have failed, without really even being tried. A handful of countries have tried to exploit what I think we can identify as balancing strategies. Israel retains studiously open channels with all of the major powers, while both Turkey and Indonesia have at least sounded out the idea of replacing US or NATO equipment in their militaries with Russian equipment. But where we might expect to see the emergence of a real anti-US-hegemony coalition, there is remarkably little appetite at present. Hungary is more pro-Russia than the rest of Europe, but not pro-Russia enough to send Russia tanks the way the rest of Europe sends Ukraine tanks. Viktor Orbán is, at most, only performatively pro-Russian, whereas the rest of NATO is actively pro-Ukraine in a way that bolsters American security policy. Instead, the ‘revisionist’ states, both large (Russia, China) and small (Iran, North Korea) largely stand both apart from each other and lack any kind of broader coalition that might reach other wealthy, industrialized countries with the will to actually make a challenge to the US-produced international system feasible.
For a revisionist power, this is a real challenge. Being isolated is no fun and successful efforts to overturn a leading power generally require either lots of alliances, diplomatically isolated the leading power, or both. So long as the United States sits ensconced in an alliance-system with dozens of the richest countries on Earth, the US-led international system is very difficult to revise. Just ask Russia how hard it is to move some borders in Europe.
And yet again, this is strange, because the countries arrayed, en masse around the United States ought to be some of the very countries – strong regional powers with big economies – that might benefit most from having the freedom to ‘revise’ the international order to suit themselves. And yet they don’t.
Why?
Ode to the Status Quo
I think the answer here is actually simple: the incentives for these countries have changed and now enough time has passed that they’ve realized it. The difference between Russia and France is, to be blunt, that the French know something the Russians haven’t learned yet (but are apparently in the process of learning right now). But let’s back up for a moment.
One of the very basic facts about IR theory is that, by necessity, it is developed using exemplars from the past. In particular, that means using mostly the pre-industrial or early-industrial past, if only because all examples we draw on must come before the present and we’ve only had lots of industrial societies interacting with each other for about a century and a half. We have centuries of balance-of-power politics in agrarian Europe, but far fewer years spent watching how post-industrial societies behave. And indeed, because social development is a process, we may not even yet be able to observe how mature post-industrial societies behave, because our institutions and mores may only slowly be developing into a stable shape. It took millennia from the development of farming to the emergence of the kind of large, extraction-based polities which became the standard large-scale organization of farmers. It is not at all clear that the societies we have now are stable, mature ‘post-industrial’ societies so much as some larval stage of transition to more stable forms.
But in any event, much of this theory was based on agrarian states or early industrial states. And one of the features of agrarian interstate relations was that returns to war outpaced returns to capital, which is a fancy way of saying you could get richer, faster by conquest than by development. Under those sorts of conditions, most powers were going to be, in some form, ‘revisionist’ powers because most powers would have something to gain by attacking a weaker neighbor and seizing their resources (mostly arable land and peasant farmers to be taxed). Indeed that basic interaction creates much of the ‘churn’ of interstate anarchy: everyone has an incentive to prey on their neighbors, creating the dog-eat-dog brutality of interstate interactions. The only countries without such an interest would be countries that were very small and weak, seeking to avoid being absorbed themselves.
But, as we’ve discussed, industrialization changes all of this: the net returns to war are decreased (because industrial war is so destructive and lethal) while the returns to capital investment get much higher due to rising productivity. In the pre-industrial past, fighting a war to get productive land was many times more effective than investing in irrigation and capital improvements to your own land, assuming you won the war. But in the industrial world, fighting a war to get a factory is many, many less times more effective than just building a new factory at home, especially since the war is very likely to destroy the factory in the first place. This was not always the case! The great wealth of many countries and indeed industrialization itself was built on resources acquired through imperial expansion; now the cost of that acquisition is higher than simply buying the stuff. War is no longer a means to profit, but an emergency response to avoid otherwise certain extreme losses.
So whereas in the old system, almost every power except potentially the hegemon, had something to potentially gain by upending the stability of the system, the economics of modern production means that quite a lot of countries will have absolutely nothing to gain from a war, even a successful one. Now that dispassionate calculation has arguably been true for more than a century; the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery, slaughter and destruction of a major power war. Subsequent conflicts have reinforced this lesson again and again, yet conflicts continue to occur. Azar Gat argues in part that this is because humans are both evolved in our biology (and thus patterns of thinking and emotion) as well as our social institutions, for warfare and aggression. We have to unlearn those instincts and redesign those institutions and this process is slow and uneven.
But we have started to learn and that has begun to influence state calculations. But note that those calculations are going to be fairly directly related to the level of economic development in a state: the more economic development, the more strongly the interest calculation tilts against war and towards stability.
At the same time, states aren’t unitary actors. Every state as conflict within it – conflicting visions of how the state ought to be run and so on. Those conflicts can of course become violent and boil over into broader conflicts which might end up involving even states who might not wish to be at war. Alternately, catastrophic state failure can produce refugee flows and other humanitarian disasters which can be destabilizing and trigger conflicts or convince states who do not want a war that nevertheless war is the ‘least bad option.’
That said, not all countries seem, in the post-WWII world (admittedly not the largest sample) to equally produce these sorts of externalities. In particular, rich democracies with robust protections for human rights and civil liberties tend not to. This isn’t to say such countries don’t have internal problems, but that these problems tend to be contained; they don’t generate refugee flows or cross-border insurgencies. Part of this is presumably that these tend to be strong states which can mostly maintain order in the borders and partly it is that the democratic nature of these states channels most internal divisions into peaceful democratic processes, while the protections for a range of human rights and civil liberties reduce the costs of ‘losing’ any particular round of democratic decision-making, incentivizing peaceful ‘repeat players’ in the game.
Please note how limited this argument is. It does not require that liberal democracies7 function perfectly, it does not require that they resolve all of their internal problems equitably or reach the right policy solutions or even that their internal political systems are entirely peaceful. It merely requires the greatest extremes of internal conflicts to be funneled into the political process. Given how rare it is for consolidated democracies to deconsolidate (to the point that arguing that it has never actually happened remains a live argument in political science; much depends on how one defines ‘consolidated’) it seems fairly clear that liberal democratic systems largely work in limiting violence in the political process and preventing it from either overturning the state or spilling over into neighboring states.
But all of that alters the incentives! For the inhabitants of those states, the status quo is actually really good. These are, after all, countries that are both rich and free, a distinction that we’re going to keep coming back to in this discussion. Such countries cannot get any richer through war, or any more free. Violent revisions to the status quo are thus only going to be bad for them.
Moreover they share all sorts of other interests because being rich and free creates a lot of ‘coincidences of interest.’ Rich countries generally prefer the free flow of goods, because their highly productive economies benefit from trade; they generally prefer the free flow of ideas because both their political and economic systems benefit. They tend to prefer stability in other regions, because they are prime targets for destabilizing refugee flows. Consequently, they tend to prefer the emergence of other rich and free countries, because those tend to be good trade partners who don’t generate massive refugee flows. That said, we don’t have a good grasp on how to create new rich and free countries and attempts to do so often fail.8
And the good news for these rich and free countries is that the current international system was largely the creation of one really big rich and free country (the United States) working together with a bunch of other rich and free countries, setting the rules the way rich and free countries like them. So the international system, embedded in organizations like the IMF, WTO, the World Bank and to a degree the United Nations, is institutionally structured to prefer the free movement of goods, ideas and capital and to discourage the revision of the status quo by force.
Rather than being simply an expression of American power (though they are that), those institutions are also an expression of the collective interests of this informal collection of rich and free countries, what we might call the status quo coalition.
The Status Quo Coalition
I think this idea of a status quo coalition which is both a key part of the structure of the United States’ geopolitical position but not exactly coextensive with it is important to understand. In the past I’ve struggled with how to describe the United States’ rather odd – and indeed, large to an unprecedented degree – global system of alliances and friendships. But I think the status quo coalition serves as the bedrock foundation on which that system is built. Not every United States partner or ally is a member of the status quo coalition, but I’d argue that nearly every rich and free country is a member and that nearly every member of the coalition is in turn, a US partner or ally. Indeed, the number of rich and free countries is small enough that we can simply list them, taking every country with a GDP per capita above $40,000 (PPP adjusted) and a Freedom House global freedom score above 70 (‘free’). I’ve also listed ‘memberships,’ mostly for the security arrangements these countries tend to have with each other; note that ‘BILAT’ indicates a bilateral security treaty with a member, usually (but not always) the USA; FVEY stands for ‘Five Eyes’ and AUKUS for, well, AUKUS.
| Country | GDP per capita ($PPP) | Freedom House Score | Memberships | Coalition Member? |
| Ireland | 145,196 | 97 | EU/Non-Aligned | Yes? |
| Luxembourg | 142,490 | 97 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Switzerland | 87,963 | 96 | Swiss Neutrality | No |
| Norway | 82,655 | 100 | NATO EEA | Yes |
| United States | 80,035 | 83 | NATO FVEY AUKUS | Team Captain |
| San Marino | 78,926 | 97 | BILAT (Italy) | Micro-Nation |
| Denmark | 73,386 | 97 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Taiwan | 73,344 | 94 | BILAT (USA) | Yes |
| Netherlands | 72,973 | 97 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Iceland | 69,779 | 94 | NATO EEA | Yes |
| Austria | 69,502 | 93 | EU | Official Neutrality (Yes?) |
| Andorra | 68,998 | 93 | BILAT (France, Spain) | Micro-Nation |
| Germany | 66,132 | 94 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Sweden | 65,842 | 100 | EU (NATO) | Yes |
| Belgium | 65,501 | 96 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Australia | 65,366 | 95 | FVEY AUKUS | Yes |
| Malta | 61,939 | 89 | EU | Yes |
| Finland | 60,897 | 100 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Guyana | 60,648 | 73 | Non-Aligned | No? |
| Canada | 60,177 | 98 | NATO FVEY | Yes |
| France | 58,828 | 89 | EU NATO | Oui |
| South Korea | 56,706 | 83 | BILAT (USA) | Yes |
| UK | 56,471 | 93 | NATO FVEY AUKUS | Yes |
| Israel | 54,997 | 77 | Complicated | Complicated |
| Cyprus | 54,997 | 92 | EU | Yes?/Non-Aligned |
| Italy | 54,216 | 90 | EU NATO | Yes |
| New Zealand | 54,046 | 99 | FVEY BILAT (USA, UK, AUS) | Yes |
| Slovenia | 52,641 | 95 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Japan | 51,809 | 96 | BILAT (USA) | Yes |
| Czechia | 50,961 | 92 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Spain | 49,448 | 90 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Lithuania | 49,266 | 89 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Estonia | 46,385 | 94 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Poland | 45,343 | 81 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Portugal | 44,707 | 96 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Bahamas | 43,913 | 91 | BILAT (USA, UK) | ? |
| Croatia | 42,531 | 84 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Romania | 41,634 | 83 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Slovakia | 41,515 | 90 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Latvia | 40,177 | 88 | EU NATO | Yes |
| Panama | 40,177 | 83 | No, but close USA ties | No? |
Naturally there are some quirks to a list like this. Some members – or arguably aspiring members – of the rich and free status quo coalition fall below my rather arbitrary GDP pet capita cutoff, Greece ($39,478/86GFS) and Bulgaria ($27,890/79GFS) most notably. Both countries are both NATO states and in the EU so they’re heavily involved in status quo coalition institutions, but theses are, in a sense free-but-not-rich countries, but they tend to move with rather than against the status quo coalition, so I think they mostly count as members.9 On the other hand are the rich-but-not-free countries, Hungary ($43,907/66GFS) and Turkey ($41,412/32GFS) which are also involved in status quo coalition institutions (both NATO, Hungary the EU) and it is of course immediately striking that these are the two obvious discontents with the Status Quo Coalition’s attitudes towards both the Russia-Ukraine and Syria crises. Not being free, it turns out, makes their fit with the coalition more awkward than it is for the countries that are free, but not yet rich. Yet both are, at least somewhat connected to the coalition despite that, often moving with it, complaints and all.
The other odd exception are countries in the Americas not named The United States and Canada. Guyana, the Bahamas and Panama all seem like they are both rich enough and free enough to be in the coalition and yet aren’t part of the formal institutions of it. This, it seems to me, is pretty clearly a product of proximity to the United States, both in that these countries already effectively have US security guarantees via the Monroe Doctrine (and so don’t need to be in something like NATO; that the United States would end up intervening in a major war in the Americas is almost a forgone conclusion, treaty or no treaty) and at the same time have felt themselves on the business end of American foreign policy in the region, which has often been profoundly unpleasant. Consequently, their relations with the United States are a much larger focus and the proximity of the United States constrains their options. We should, quite frankly, strive to do better by our neighbors than we have.
Nevertheless, while the core of the coalition is the United States and its European partners, tied together by NATO, that is not the whole of the coalition and most rich and free countries are part of it, regardless of where in the world they happen to be, with countries outside the North Atlantic often instead tied to the United States or other members in other ways.
Now one may well argue the coalition is just a figment of my imagination, but I’d argue that the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine had demonstrated anything but. While many countries were willing to vote against Russia at the UN, the number of countries willing to sustain real economic costs by either supporting sanctions or sending meaningful aid to Ukraine was far more narrow and maps fairly well on the coalition as formulated above. The coalition action here is striking because none of the countries currently aiding Ukraine or sanctioning Russia had any sort of treaty obligation to do so. Instead, the coalition leapt to Ukraine’s aid with everything short of war (including free weapons, training, economic assistance and intelligence sharing) to defend the status quo, in which they are so invested. This is why, I’d argue, the response to the War in Ukraine and previously to cross-border conquests by ISIS was so much more intense than status quo coalition responses to other humanitarian crises, because it threatened a core component of the status quo, that territorial acquisition by conquest is not permitted in the international system.
What I want to stress here is an understanding of the coalition that it is not ‘countries in the thrall of the United States.’ Rather it is that this is a collection of countries which have developed, both economically and politically, in similar ways. Because of that similar development, they have come to have similar interests and values. And because they have already shaped the international system to favor those interests and values, they tend to act in concert in support of that international system, those interests and those values. I think this coalition, in some form, would continue to exist even without the United States and it would be a major force in international politics.
But of course the United States does exist, which brings us to…
The United States and the Status Quo Coalition
The United States’ position as ‘team captain’ of the status quo coalition is almost over-determined: it is the second largest bloc member by territory, has more than twice the population of any other member, the largest economy (six times larger than the next bloc member), one of the highest GDP-per-capitas, the most powerful military and is also ideologically one of the founders of the bloc, being both one of the origin points for modern liberal democracy and largely responsible for creating the bloc during the Cold War.
So while I think the coalition may well have emerged without the United States, it is no surprise that, the United States being a thing that exists, the coalition is often regarded (wrongly) by Americans and Russian propagandists alike as simply a tool of American Imperialism – a collection of smaller states huddled around Columbia‘s skirts. That reading is a mistake and it leads to misjudging how the coalition will act, because the coalition isn’t bound together by American power but by common interests and so behaves differently.
For the United States leading the coalition, the mistake is to assume that the members of the coalition are bound by American power (hard or soft), rather than by their own interests. That isn’t to say that US ‘soft power’ doesn’t matter. I think it matters quite a lot and is part of why the coincidence of values in the coalition is so strong. But when it comes to getting countries to act, interests are often much stronger. And the key interest at play here is a commitment to the status quo.
What that means is that United States leadership in the coalition (and consequently, US global leadership) is tied to the perception that the United States is, on net, a reliable guarantor of the status quo. What is going to shake the coalition is not outside pressure (which is, as we’ll see, a weak lever), but the United States as ‘team captain’ acting in ways that destabilize the status quo. This, I’d argue, is why the Iraq War seemed to shake the coalition so badly – it reflected an attempt to revise the status quo by expanding the coalition by force. It’s also why the Trump presidency’s promises of substantial revision to the United States’ place in the international system prompted concerns from the coalition as well.
But leading the coalition is good for the United States. For one, the vast network of interlinked institutions the coalition runs were built with US economic interests in mind and so tend to be favorable to them. Remember during the pandemic when all of the supply chains went haywire and prices rose dramatically? That’s what things would be like all the time in a less ‘globalized’ world – Americans would end up quite a bit poorer.10 This is a positive sum arrangement: the United States benefits a lot from the status quo it created, but other countries also benefit, which is what makes that status quo durable. But all of that free trade, free movement of ideas, free movement of capital and so on is facilitated by coalition institutions, like SWIFT, the IMF and so on.
Leading the coalition is also, frankly, good for American security interests. Alone, the United States is a power that a rising competitor (like the PRC) could imagine, if not defeating, at least excluding from substantial parts of the world. But ensconced in the coalition that becomes much harder, because challenging the United States risks trade agreements with France, or military action from Japan, or economic warfare from Australia, or diplomatic retaliation from Brussels. And remember for the United States, like every status quo country, our interest is not having a war in the first place. A system that thus raises the cost of challenging US leadership to the point that no country would attempt it is a system that makes a major war involving the USA directly a lot less likely, which is good, actually.
Not only does the coalition reinforce the American position by providing a ready suite of allies, it makes creating a revisionist coalition really hard because most of the best allies to have are already taken. Revisionist powers find themselves arriving at the pick-up basketball tournament to find that every player worth having is already only Team Status Quo, with only North Korea and Iran sitting on the bench waiting to get picked. And so long as the United States remains a reliable steward of the status quo, that is likely to remain the case, because the very things that make a country a good pick for your team – being a developed, highly productive country with strong institutions – make them more likely to instead join Team Status Quo.
For the voting public in the United States, all of this means it is necessary to come to understand that a lot of the good things we enjoy are as much a product of our reputation (again, see the polling above) as a reasonably reliable steward of the status quo as they are of US power directly. That in turn needs to influence political calculations about the costs and benefits of different courses of action: the cost for the United States of deciding to revise the status quo is potentially much higher than it seems, because it shakes the foundations of all of these mostly-invisible institutions that are in fact the root of a lot of the United States’ global power. Because the United States isn’t the king or general of the status quo coalition, it’s the ‘team captain.’ If it proves to be a bad team captain, the team may well choose a new captain, or disband altogether, with catastrophic implications for American interests.
From the outside, the mistake is to assume that applying a sufficient challenge to the United States and a sufficient degree of pressure will cause balancing to reassert itself and the coalition to fall apart. Both Russia and China have tried a strategy of trying to crowbar a wedge between the EU and the United States. I will not say such a thing is impossible, but it is pushing uphill: the community of interests is real and pushes back. Almost inevitably something, usually reminders of Russia and the PRC’s revanchist territorial claims, or some other international crisis, reminds everyone that they do, in fact, share interests and values. Instead of coming apart with pressure, the coalition solidifies with pressure because the pressure redirects everyone’s attention to those communal interests (rather than our petty squabbles, of which there are many). Since the community of interests is real, that pulls the bloc back together for collective action.
And that effect makes large-scale revisionist aims quite hard to achieve. To be clear, the most obvious sort of revisionist aims are shifts in territorial boundaries, but equally this goes for attempts to revise the structural of the global economy, for instance to de-dollarize it, or get many countries to move away from status quo coalition financial centers, or to get rid of the IMF and the World Bank, or substantially revise assumptions about freedom of navigation. For moves that require a critical mass of large economies in order to work, as with a decisive, global shift away from the dollar and euro, the problem is that there is a large bloc of big, rich countries that are largely uninterested in a revision to the economic status quo and who trade with everyone. You may want to be rid of the dollar and the euro, but it is going to be rather hard to convince the Germans.
That doesn’t make such revisions impossible, but it guarantees that accomplishing even minor revisionist aims is going to incur outsized costs. Of course the most striking example of this are the massive costs that Russia has incurred trying to shift its border to the west. But the PRC’s efforts to revise the status quo by shifting the governance of Hong Kong and pushing territorial claims in East Asia have also, slowly but surely, pushed the status quo coalition powers to begin pushing back and relations between the EU and the PRC seem to get frostier every month.
Moreover, the coalition doesn’t seem likely to go away. Once countries become rich and free, they tend to stay that way. Without a doubt there are politicians and parties in most status quo coalition countries that promise to pull their countries out of the coalition, usually on a nationalistic basis. In practice it seems to be hard (though surely not impossible) for such leaders to actually win elections and yet harder still once they’ve won elections to actually cleanly break with the fairly complex web of interlocking interests and institutions that tie them with the coalition. The experience of Hungary and Turkey’s ‘illiberal democracies’ provides something of a demonstration as neither country has yet managed to fully align away from the coalition.
That doesn’t mean I think countries will never leave, but it does mean that I think countries will tend to join the coalition at a faster clip than they leave. Global incomes, after all, are rising and seem set to keep rising. Remember: the interests that bind the coalition together are a product of economics as much as of politics. And unlike the zero-sum game of empire, where each empire has strong incentives not to let new powers join the ’empire club,’ economic development is positive sum. Rising incomes in the developing world are good news economically for the rich status quo powers as those developing economies ship out the raw materials rich economies require and buy the goods they make. Rising incomes in developing countries make them better trade partners as rising productivity means they both have more to export and more money to spend on imported goods. Moreover, as noted, high income, democratic countries tend to be stable and not create many problems (like refugee flows) which is also good news for the rich-and-free club.
Consequently, the status quo coalition wants to encourage other countries to be like it: rich and free. And quite a lot of countries are developing with that as a goal. So while I expect that here and there countries will, for internal political reasons, backslide out of the coalition, barring some major catastrophe it seems likely that the status quo coalition will grow, rather than shrink, over time. The big systemic risks here would seem, of course, to be nuclear war, another pandemic or climate change and it is no accident that the coalition countries tend to be quite worried about these. That said, it is worth remembering that even pessimistic climate change projections now expect that the impacts of climate change will cause global incomes to rise more slowly, not fall.11
As a result, I don’t think the coalition is likely to go away. As a historian, I’m always really reluctant in making Big Predictions and I think it is worth reiterating the caution that we do not know if this current arrangement is a mature or stable form of human organization in an industrial/post-industrial world. Most of the world isn’t really even fully industrialized yet and even the parts that are haven’t been long enough to make it clear that anything is settled in the long-term. And it’s not clear that, as global incomes rise, those rising countries will find the status quo as ameniable as the current crop of rich-and-free countries, especially since it sure seems like the ‘free’ part matters as much, if not more, than the ‘rich’ part.
At the same time, as a student of the history of war, the emergence of a durable coalition in international affairs with an interest in limiting at least some kinds of wars (because let us not pretend all of the status quo powers are pacifists) is an exciting development in the growing ‘Long Peace‘ that we may hope begins to indicate that humanity might at long last be outgrowing war.
So the status quo coalition isn’t necessarily the beginning of the End of History (Volume II: We Mean It This Time). But it is, I suspect, likely to be a durable component of the international system and, for as long as the United States remains a reliable steward of it, the foundation of American global leadership.
- It is striking but oh-so-typical of failed containment that one group holds aloof for what seem like cultural reasons. Rome only just wins the Third Samnite War – had the Italian Greeks joined in, the Romans probably would have lost. Instead, the Greeks of S. Italy opt to wage their own war (the Pyrrhic one), lose that one too and thus their independence. The refusal of key Greek states to join the balancing coalition against Philip II of Macedon is a similar sort of lesson: sitting out the Big Containment War can have catastrophic consequences for the folks sitting it out on the benches.
- 3. Japan, 4. Germany, 6. UK, 7. France, 8. Italy and 9. Canada
- South Korea, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, and Turkey
- Switzerland
- Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia
- Tervetuloa and hopefully soon Välkommen! Assuming Google Translate has not let me down!
- American readers! ‘Liberal’ here means ‘with liberty’ not ‘of the political left.’ So a democracy with protections for core liberties and human rights is a liberal democracy.
- Most notably recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, but compare the successful creation of rich and free regimes – albeit it took some time – in East Asia (Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan) and Eastern Europe. It doesn’t always fail.
- Note for instance both are active supporters of Ukraine against Russia.
- Which is why even when then-president Trump revised NAFTA, he came up with a replacement that…was mostly just NAFTA (the USMCA). The deal was already very good for the United States, because we wrote it.
- ‘Rise more slowly,’ to be clear, is bad. It means more people in poverty longer than they needed to be. That’s bad. But it is a different kind of bad than global incomes falling (more people in poverty than yesterday), with different implications.
I’m unsure if it *really is* true that every country benefits from, well, not conquering territory. Particularly given that, as you mentioned, we don’t really know how to reliably make a country rich.
If Russia’s GDP per capita caps at $12k, and it reaches $12k, the only way for it to increase its GDP is either to make more people, which we also have no idea how to do (basically every country is trying to recover its TFR and has been marginally successful at best), or to steal them from somewhere else (e.g. Ukraine). If Russia’s GDP contracts by 5% due to the invasion, but then recovers after a long-fought victory, it might well be in a better position in 2030 than it would have been otherwise. The same is true of every country that’s not already rich.
It’s clear the enormous power differential that enabled the European powers to stomp all over every other continent is gone, but it doesn’t require such a differential if you’re only aiming for marginal territory (e.g. Crimea, Donbass, Taiwan, Golan Heights, etc). If the targeted region is sufficiently small compared to the conqueror, then it’s entirely possible to successfully annex and integrate it to one’s personal benefit.
“If Russia’s GDP per capita caps at $12k, and it reaches $12k”
But it hasn’t and we’ve no reason to suppose that it will. I doubt that there are any countries in the world where you can point to a per capita GDP that has probably capped out.
Russia’s per capita GDP is roughly the same today, adjusting for inflation ($26k more or less) as ten years ago, but that’s largely a demographic issue – ageing population. Per worker, Russian GDP is climbing steadily.
When we say “we don’t know how to make a country rich” we do not mean “economic growth per capita is impossible”. We mean “we don’t know how to move a country relative to other countries – how to make Thailand equal with Germany”. Making a country richer than it is now is just about waiting. Thailand in 2050 will be richer than Thailand is now. Thailand in 2050 will potentially be richer than Germany is now. But Thailand in 2050 probably won’t be as rich as Germany in 2050, and we don’t know how to make that happen.
An ex third world country GNP per capita can certainly pass Germany. See
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/ADVEC/WEOWORLD/TWN/CHN
Germany 51.38 thousand
Israel 55.54 thousand
Singapore 91.1 thousand
Absolutely. It isn’t impossible – it definitely does happen – but we don’t know how to make it happen reliably.
‘When we say “we don’t know how to make a country rich” we do not mean “economic growth per capita is impossible”. We mean “we don’t know how to move a country relative to other countries – how to make Thailand equal with Germany”. Making a country richer than it is now is just about waiting. Thailand in 2050 will be richer than Thailand is now. Thailand in 2050 will potentially be richer than Germany is now. But Thailand in 2050 probably won’t be as rich as Germany in 2050, and we don’t know how to make that happen.’
I’d dispute this, actually. The answer is heavy state subsidy into leading-edge industrial development. It worked for postwar Japan, it worked for Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s, it is working now in China. It’s not always easy to pull off politically – since it is essentially wealth redistribution from the rest of society to the rich in exchange for long-term growth prospects, it’s a tough row to hoe with voters – but it works. Since technological growth outpaces amortization of industrial assets, a sector you built overnight will do better than one that’s been built up piecemeal over the last few decades.
Evan – that’s certainly how a lot of countries did it but it isn’t a reliable technique – there are many examples of countries which tried and failed.
And in Brazil’s case, such failure came in the form of the Status Quo Coalition knocking at the door to replace such intercentionist government with one that would let them keep sacking the country.
I would agree with you in general but I’m not sure that this applies to Russia as currently constituted. In her book *China’s Gilded Age* Yuen Yuen Ang tries to look at various sorts of political corruption and sort them into categories. The type of graft most typical of the Gilded Age US or of modern China is perfectly compatible with development, though at a cost to citizen welfare. But Russia’s current situation where gangster officials expropriate the most profitable companies from their founders on flimsy pretexts is terrible for any high value chain development. In a world where the Russia’s huge oil and gas resources are becoming less valuable it wouldn’t be surprising if Russia’s absolute wealth per capita were to shrink going forward.
Greetings from a fellow high-income democracy (in this case, Korea)!
One wonders why being free seems to matter for membership in this Status Quo Coalition. The crux of the argument seems to be that industrialised states that do not derive their wealth from conquerable territorial resources (like, say, farmland and peasants) have strong rational incentives not to go to war. But this incentive holds for democratic and authoritarian states alike. China, for example, has done extremely well for themselves under the WTO regime and has almost as much to lose from a break-up of the international order as the United States does. The article does gesture in the direction of ‘being rich and free is good, and people who have it good don’t want to upset the status quo’. But if you’re a rich elite in the Kremlin or the Politburo – the kind of person who can meaningfully influence foreign policy in an authoritarian state – how much does being free matter to you? After all, you very possibly owe your status as an elite to that very lack of political freedoms.
Yet we very much do see that autocracies are more likely to pursue revanchist claims, against what very much seems to be their own national interests. The Status Quo Coalition, in the framework presented by this article, doesn’t love the United States in particular, it loves the peaceful and prosperous international order of which American power happens to be the guarantor. If it is global pre-eminence that China desires, how hard would it have been for China to step inside, play the game in strict adherence to the rules, and take over this role in a few decades by dint of its vast size? Difficult, yes, but surely much less so than the strategy that it is currently pursuing, which is trying to somehow gain global pre-eminence by… alienating the entire Status Quo Coalition and a bunch of non-aligned power to boot with Hong Kong crackdowns, aggressive noises at Taiwan, and weird maritime claims against everyone else along the Asia-Pacific coast.
Plus, as the article points out, even within the Coalition – within Nato – the two members most sceptical of collective pro-Ukraine action happen to be its two least democratic.
I don’t believe that democratic regimes are any more rational than autocratic regimes. China wouldn’t have managed that amazing economic growth unless their government was at least basically competent at managing their country. Surely the Politburo understands that alienating the rest of the world is not how you go about building a hegemony. So… why?
One argument (that of the Dictator’s Handbook) would be that in less free states decisions are made on behalf of fewer people, for whom it is at least theoretically easier to avoid the costs and gain the benefits of the war, and for whom the wealth of the state not being based on conquerable resources is less of an unalloyed good, as it makes it harder to squelch discontent if it arises (though the wealth itself can be useful to keep that from happening in the first place, of course).
The issue, I think, is how internal conflict is handled. All states (for that matter, all groups) have internal conflict. Free states tend to handle internal conflict via election cycles or self-imposed segregation. In the first case, if you know there’s going to be an election next year (or four years from now, or whatever) it’s more cost-effective for you to focus on winning the next election than to behave violently. In the second, think of things like Communist communes: a free state by definition values individual rights, so the machinery of the state protects your right to live under Communist principles on your property, within certain limits (you’ve still gotta pay taxes, for example).
Dictatorships and non-free states tend to be antithetical to both principles. There’s no way to enact political change except through violence, either actual violence or acts perceived by those in power as violence. This can easily spill over boarders, as each side seeks to gain allies (this is a common way democracies fail as well). Likewise, there’s no real way to live a lifestyle that’s dramatically different from what those in power want you to have in a dictatorship. Alternative lifestyles create political factions, after all, and thus rivals for power. This is important because it will necessitate a restriction on the exchange of goods, people, and ideas–dictators don’t want their populations exposed to competing lifestyles, after all.
Further, a major aspect of modern industrial economies is innovation. Innovation is easier in free countries, because each of us chooses (within broad categories) how we want to live. This means that a problem is likely to be attacked 16 different ways at the same time. In contrast, a dictatorship would attempt to attack a problem in a more limited manner, since the success of an individual could potentially create a rival for power. You’d have one, maybe two groups working on the solution, rather than a bunch of people trying different things.
Since free countries deal with conflict in largely the same ways, it’s easier to cooperate. Cultural differences are the norm internally, so aren’t as stressful externally. If we don’t like who’s in power, we’ll try to swing elections (via advertisements and news media and the like) to put someone we do like in power. Dictatorships play by different rules, and react in unexpected ways. It’s not impossible–the USA works with countries we’d classify as dictatorships routinely–just trickier.
(I hope it’s clear that I’m holding “dictatorship” as a value-neutral term. King Arthur would be considered a dictator today, despite being a paragon of nobility by Western European standards. So it’s not, despite the propaganda to the contrary, an issue of “Free good, dictatorships evil”, but rather how to cooperate with one another.)
In the first case, if you know there’s going to be an election next year (or four years from now, or whatever) it’s more cost-effective for you to focus on winning the next election than to behave violently.
I feel like I have to respond to this, like I have to respond to Bret’s similar comment here:
Part of this is….. that the democratic nature of these states channels most internal divisions into peaceful democratic processes,
I think these are both *wildly* idealistic statements about the nature of liberal-democratic societies.
To take just one example (that’s familiar to me), I think it was totally rational for Tamils in Sri Lanka to take up arms against the government in the 1970s and 1980s. In a society where your ethnic group is outnumbered 3 to 1 (today it’s more like 5 to 1, but that’s after extensive re-migration / population transfers), and where politics is largely ethnically based, it’s unlikely that you are ever going to get your way through democratic elections at a national level. In such a context, all an election really amounts to is the equivalent of a census. And under such contexts, it makes total sense to bet that you might as well resort to armed struggle- you are probably *not*, in any foreseeable future, going to achieve your agenda (in this case, a separate nation-state) through elections, after all.
There are other situations where it might make sense to resort to armed struggle rather than elections- for reasons of ideology, class, economics, etc.- but I just bring up ethnicity in this context since it’s one of the easiest to understand.
Indeed; multi-ethnic states tend not to do very well as democracies. The main exception I can think of is Switzerland, which gets around the problem by having most of the day-to-day decision making carried out at a very local level, the cantons generally being much more homogenous than Switzerland as a whole.
“multi-ethnic states tend not to do very well as democracies”.
This simply is not the case. Virtually every country ranked as “Full Democracy” in the Economist index is at least as multi-ethnic as Switzerland, if not more so. Down at the bottom of the scale, many of the “Authoritarian” states are virtually completely monoethnic.
I suspect this leans heavily on your definition of “not doing well”.
This simply is not the case. Virtually every country ranked as “Full Democracy” in the Economist index is at least as multi-ethnic as Switzerland, if not more so. Down at the bottom of the scale, many of the “Authoritarian” states are virtually completely monoethnic.
This is untrue. Virtually every country ranked as a “Full Democracy” was very ethnically homogenous until the last few decades. And Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, where most of the “Authoritarian” states are found, have significant and long-standing minority populations.
Virtually every country ranked as “Full Democracy” in the Economist index is at least as multi-ethnic as Switzerland, if not more so.
Some of that probably depends on what aspects of ethnicity you’re looking at. Switzerland is less racially diverse than America, obviously, but also more linguistically heterogeneous.
I don’t think multiethnic democracies are necessarily doomed to fail- America has done fine thus far in terms of maintaining its political order, as has India among poorer countries, although in both cases that’s starting to change- but I think it’s definitely one likely and plausible failure mode.
Someone mentioned Israel up the thread, and Israeli liberal-democracy is starting to break down largely over the “national question”, which is the same rock that has broken lots of other political orders (communist, Christian, Islamic, monarchical) in the past.
I don’t think multiethnic democracies are necessarily doomed to fail- America has done fine thus far in terms of maintaining its political order, as has India among poorer countries, although in both cases that’s starting to change- but I think it’s definitely one likely and plausible failure mode.
I don’t know enough about India to comment, but reading histories of the US, I always got the impression that the government there was pretty corrupt and inefficient by European standards, but that this was papered over for a long time by the fact that the country basically had an entire continent’s worth of resources to itself and so everybody could enjoy a high standard of living anyway. Now that that’s not so much the case, it seems that increasingly large cracks are appearing in the socio-political fabric, including along ethnic lines (cf. the George Floyd riots a couple of years ago).
It’s also worth pointing out that, despite its professed ideology, America has always resorted to decidedly illiberal measures to deal with its most visible ethnic minority (blacks) — slavery and legally-enforced segregation until the 1960s, and attempts at state-mandated integration afterwards.
I don’t think multi-ethnic democracies are 100% doomed, but they’re definitely playing on hard mode compared to more homogenous places.
Switzerland is ethnically diverse in the same way its neighbors are (i.e. with minority ethnicities mainly from 20th century immigration), and while the problems arising from that aren’t as intense as they are in France right now, a lot of that can be explained simply by being wealthier and thus not having the same number of economically disadvantaged minority youth. But that’s probably not what you meant.
The thing you’re probably talking about, the linguistic diversity, is simply not seen as constituting an “ethnic” difference. Switzerland is not a model of how to run a multi-ethnic democracy because in their own view, the Swiss aren’t that; they are (with the possible exception of some immigrants) an ethnically homogeneous nation whose members happen to speak a variety of different dialects and languages depending on what part of the country they grew up in.
The thing you’re probably talking about, the linguistic diversity, is simply not seen as constituting an “ethnic” difference. Switzerland is not a model of how to run a multi-ethnic democracy because in their own view, the Swiss aren’t that; they are (with the possible exception of some immigrants) an ethnically homogeneous nation whose members happen to speak a variety of different dialects and languages depending on what part of the country they grew up in.
The Swiss speak at least four different language and follow at least two different religions, and language and religion are both major determinants of ethnicity.
We tend to gloss over that multi-ethnic states were the norm until recently, that homogeneity in terms of language and often religion was fairly forcibly imposed (in Britain’s case in the 18th century, in France in the 19th, in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th). Even Switzerland had a couple of small civil wars in the 19th century.
At the time of the French Revolution, most of the French did not speak French but a patois.
Which may help explain the Vendee.
“The thing you’re probably talking about, the linguistic diversity, is simply not seen as constituting an “ethnic” difference. Switzerland is not a model of how to run a multi-ethnic democracy because in their own view, the Swiss aren’t that; they are (with the possible exception of some immigrants) an ethnically homogeneous nation whose members happen to speak a variety of different dialects and languages depending on what part of the country they grew up in.”
Thank you, that was really informative. And strengthens my previous impression that the “heterogeneity” in Switzerland is sometimes overstated.
Language is an important component of ethnicity but of course it isn’t the only one- religion, genetic ancestry, and other things matter too. I’m having this conversation in English, after all, but I’m not a member of any natively Anglophone ethnic group.
“I don’t think multi-ethnic democracies are 100% doomed, but they’re definitely playing on hard mode compared to more homogenous places.”
Oh, I totally agree. And I’m certainly not saying that either America or India is a well functioning society in general, or that their diversity actually *helps* them. I’m just saying they have both been able, at a minimum, to keep a liberal democratic system chugging along for a considerable amount of time. Both are getting less liberal and democratic, of course, so we’ll see how long that lasts. (For quite different reasons, of course: I wouldn’t say that India is becoming *more* diverse, in fact probably quite the opposite).
I’ve read a lot of your assertions down thread and I find them highly problematic. This idea that America was more corrupt for most of its history than Europe? I suppose if you cherry pick the time, the country and specifically rig the terms corrupt to suit your terms. Even countries in which bribes might be considered low was that way because inherited elites were put there for the benefit of inherited elites.
And the idea of Switzerland, of 8 million people, one race and only three languages being compared to the US (or India) at all is just silly. New York city alone has the same population. And far more languages & ethnicities. The New York metro area has the most ethnic and linguistic diversity in the world. And it is frankly, contrary to your assertion doing just fine.
When one compares it to authoritarian regimes and multi-ethnic societies, well precisely what do you mean by handle it well?
And the illiberal treatment of Blacks you point out only argues for democracy since the pre-civil rights South was essentially an authoritarian regime. Most residents were also very poor, even white ones.
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Two major examples right at the top of the ‘rich and free’ list, not including the USA are the UK and Spain.
The UK has been comprised of at least 4 different nationalities since 1801. The English, the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish (variously all of them and latter the Northern Irish). Depending on who you speak to you could reasonably include the Cornish as well. I wouldn’t say it’s been the smoothest ride, but broadly it has held and on the whole we’ve been stronger for it. The UK’s population is 18.77% British, 59.2% English, 7.6% Scottish, 3.7% Welsh, 2.3% Irish.
I know less about Spain, but it has a 16% Catalan population that would likely be very irritated if you lumped them in as ‘just Spanish’. Again, it hasn’t been the easiest, but Spain is hardly on the brink of collapse.
I may have got the Spanish situation wrong (I did say I knew less about Spain!). 4.6% Basque population would probably be a better example.
In addition to what I said in my previous comment — given that multi-ethnic states tend to have difficulties as democracies, and given that most members of the status quo coalition are becoming increasingly multi-ethnic at a historically unusual rate, I think that the coalition, or at least its individual members, has a rocky few decades facing it, and bland “end of history” style predictions are likely to be far from the mark.
“Virtually every country ranked as a “Full Democracy” was very ethnically homogenous until the last few decades.”
Well, now you’re shifting the goalposts and you still aren’t right. No, there are several countries in the “Full Democracy ” list that have been multi ethnic for many decades if not centuries.
Well, now you’re shifting the goalposts
Social and political norms take some time to shift in response to new circumstances. I thought the point was too obvious to need repeating, particularly in a comments section where people have been talking about how, e.g., WW1 was a mistake caused by outdated views of how nations become stronger, but apparently not.
and you still aren’t right. No, there are several countries in the “Full Democracy ” list that have been multi ethnic for many decades if not centuries.
Which ones, what proportion of the “Full Democracy” countries are they, and how big are their ethnic minority populations?
“Which ones, what proportion of the “Full Democracy” countries are they, and how big are their ethnic minority populations?”
24 countries were listed as “Full Democracy” by the EIU in 2022.
Of those, 18 have a minority population greater than 10% – I have decided that this is a good definition of “not very ethnically homogenous” – and this has been true for more than 20 years:
Norway
New Zealand
Sweden
Switzerland
Ireland
Netherlands
Uruguay
Canada
Luxembourg
Germany
Australia
Costa Rica
UK
Chile
Austria
France
Spain
Mauritius
6 haven’t:
Iceland
Finland
Sweden
Denmark
Taiwan
Japan
South Korea
From this, I conclude that you are wrong to state that “Virtually every country ranked as a “Full Democracy” was very ethnically homogenous until the last few decades”.
In fact, it would be truer to say “Most countries ranked as a “Full Democracy” have been ethnically heterogenous for decades”.
I am sure that, in your continuing efforts to fight against the evils of immigration and race mixing, you will now proceed to change your definitions yet again in order to keep arguing that only pure monoracial states can be truly democratic.
You will continue on this intellectual journey alone.
“and given that most members of the status quo coalition are becoming increasingly multi-ethnic at a historically unusual rate, I think that the coalition, or at least its individual members, has a rocky few decades facing it, and bland “end of history” style predictions are likely to be far from the mark”
I think Eastern/Central Europe and countries like Japan and South Korea look like they’re going to remain quite ethnically homogeneous for the foreseeable future. But, as far as western countries go, I think you’re exactly right. Being an ethnically heterogeneous state is definitely going to make maintaining a stable democracy in the future more difficult, and the western powers (at least, the ones which have chosen to embrace large-scale migration) are going to have a rocky century ahead of them.
Maybe as a result of that, you’ve already started seeing some “western” countries substantially toughen up their migration laws and lose their appetite for increasing diversity- Denmark comes to mind here.
Of those, 18 have a minority population greater than 10% – I have decided that this is a good definition of “not very ethnically homogenous” – and this has been true for more than 20 years:
Twenty years ago is still well within “the last few decades”.
your continuing efforts to fight against the evils of… race mixing,
Who ever said anything about race mixing being evil? My fiancee is Hong Kong Chinese.
Maybe as a result of that, you’ve already started seeing some “western” countries substantially toughen up their migration laws and lose their appetite for increasing diversity- Denmark comes to mind here.
Many of them have also adopted rather illiberal hate speech policies to try and keep a lid on ethnic tensions. A recent example: https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/police-hate-incident-autistic-boy-quran-school/
“Of those, 18 have a minority population greater than 10% – I have decided that this is a good definition of “not very ethnically homogenous” – and this has been true for more than 20 years:”
10% might be an excessively stringent threshold here, elsewhere I’ve seen people use thresholds closer to 20%.
But a system in which elections are structured around immutable or largely immutable characteristics such as ethnicity and religion, with substantial disadvantages to the losing group, isn’t a liberal democracy. What defines liberal democracy is not only competitive elections but the fact that the basic rights of losing groups remain respected. (Also, the Tamil strategy wasn’t that rational anyway, since being at such a numerical disadvantage, they were likely to lose an armed conflict, which they did)
I think they were betting that they could win with enough foreign support- they expected to get either Indian support (for reasons of Indian domestic politics), support from rich foreign donors (there were and are a lot of fairly successful Tamils in the United States, Canada, Australia etc.) or Soviet / Eastern Bloc support (for reasons of ideology, they were at least nominally communist). They did get Indian support for a while, but then that ended as the political winds changed, and by the mid 1980s the Soviets were in enough turmoil anyway that they couldn’t be counted on.
You can also win an armed struggle if you have enough motivation to win that you can convince the other side to fold before you do: I think that was another part of their hopes. It was a rational choice, just not successful in the end.
With the caveat that you have to be alive to have motivation, since being dead is one version of folding. In the American Civil War the motivation to win on the Southern side was apparently limitless, while at times it was distinctly shaky in the North. But the North won by, to a first approximation, killing almost every southern white male willing and able to bear arms in the cause of secession.
” Can you identify the specific preconditions that would make it rational for the Irish to rebel, but irrational for the Tamils to do so?”
After WW1, in Orwell words, “I did not even know that the British Empire is dying”.
A rebellion against a dying Empire has a good chance to succeed – just see all the rebellions against the dying Soviet Empire. Sri Lanka is not an Empire and it still has a lot of will to live.
The Tamil example seems to overlook the fact that, after several decades of hardship and slaughter, the Tamils’ supposedly rational strategy failed. There is no separate nation-state of Tamil Eelam now, and there won’t be for the foreseeable future. In other words, taking up arms achieved exactly the same as participating in electoral politics would have done, with the added effect of creating tens of thousands of dead Tamils.
I wouldn’t say that looks very rational.
Unsuccessful =/= irrational. For that matter, unlikely to succeed =/= irrational either, or at least not necessarily. If you really want an independent Tamil state, taking the small chance of getting it through armed conflict vs. zero chance of getting it through democratic means can be a rational decision.
I don’t think you can judge the rationality of the position based on the hindsight of the result.
In 1920 there were about 44 million British citizens, and about 4 million Irish citizens. What if, straight after WW1, the Brits would still be jingoistic and bloodthirsty enough that, instead of some 20,000 British soldiers would be sent to support the 18,100 British police, it would be about 200,000 instead, cutting a genocidal swath across Ireland to cower the local population into compliance by force? Would you say that the Irish War of Independence was irrational as well? At first glance, the position of the Irish seems eerily similar to the position of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. And yet, in hindsight, the Irish won. Can you identify the specific preconditions that would make it rational for the Irish to rebel, but irrational for the Tamils to do so?
Well first, it helps to be seeking independence from a government that is liberal enough that it doesn’t consider near-genocide an option. Second, engage not in actual rebellion but what might be termed “armed civil disobedience”: that is, make it clear that “The Troubles” are neither going to rise to the level where crushing them by military force isn’t counter-productive, nor are they going to go away. Third, be willing to accept any real concessions if that will largely fulfill ones’ goals rather than stubbornly insisting on independence or defeat.
In 1920 there were about 44 million British citizens, and about 4 million Irish citizens. What if, straight after WW1, the Brits would still be jingoistic and bloodthirsty enough that, instead of some 20,000 British soldiers would be sent to support the 18,100 British police, it would be about 200,000 instead, cutting a genocidal swath across Ireland to cower the local population into compliance by force? Would you say that the Irish War of Independence was irrational as well? At first glance, the position of the Irish seems eerily similar to the position of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. And yet, in hindsight, the Irish won. Can you identify the specific preconditions that would make it rational for the Irish to rebel, but irrational for the Tamils to do so?
Given British politics and culture in 1920, “cutting a genocidal swath across Ireland” would be very unlikely, so it was rational for the Irish rebels to act on the assumption (correct, as it turned out) that the actual response would be rather less drastic. I don’t know enough about the Sri Lankan situation to say how reasonable the Tamils’ assessment of the government’s likely response was.
“Well first, it helps to be seeking independence from a government that is liberal enough that it doesn’t consider near-genocide an option”
I think it has less to do with the British being liberal, and more to do with the fact that Ireland wasn’t England, and the British (not so much the Irish Protestants) could easily go home if things got too tough. In Sri Lanka (like in Israel/Palestine), both sides legitimately felt that they were fighting for their homeland. Both sides, or at least their left-wing nationalist elements, also felt that they were fighting against socio-economic oppression (for historical reasons, Tamils were overrepresented both among educated professionals and among the really impoverished marginalized tea-plantation laborers, and so both sides could argue with some justification that the other side was the economic oppressor).
They may be idealistic, but I don’t think that invalidates them. The idea isn’t “These things are good, and thus true, and anyone who doesn’t abide by them is a big fat poo-poo-head that we don’t want in our clubhouse anyway”. Rather, the idea is that these are shared values that facilitate international relations. We can assume that Britain isn’t going to have a bloody revolution and install a totally new regime in the next five years; we cannot make such an assumption about Russia, or about many smaller states. Plus, free press means that we can influence their politics in ways that are in line with each other’s values–if, say, the USA realizes that Brexit is a bad thing for us, we can write articles and hold conferences about how bad it is, and since we both value (more or less) freedom of expression even Brexit supporters are going to have to put up with it, even if it means they lose the next election cycle. It’s all part of an ongoing conversation which Britain (and, essentially, the entire Status Quo Coalition) is already a participant in. In contrast, trying to influence Iran’s politics, or that of a military government in South America or Africa, is going to take more extreme measures. They are NOT part of the conversation, nor do they want to be part of it.
Further, assumptions about what Britain (or France, or Germany, or Japan) want are going to be more intuitive to the USA, because they share many of the same values. We all generally accept, for example, that free trade is good, so opening more trade (lessening import/export taxes, issuing more visas, that sort of thing) is a carrot we can add to treaties. Other nations, which value internal security and distrust outside forces, may not consider loosening trade restrictions to be a benefit.
Please note that that these are examples illustrating my argument, not the sum total of my argument. The point is, shared values means that we can work together easier. Differing values means that it’s harder to work together–not impossible, but harder. So it makes sense that nations that share similar values (and remember, political structures are expressions of shared values in a culture) join together.
This is well stated, but I still fundamentally disagree with it. For several reasons,
1) Two societies being “free” (i.e. liberal democratic) in the political sense means that they share a few particular core values about political systems, but they might differ *wildly* on other issues. I’m not sure that “rich” even has much valence in terms of sharing a value system.
2) In point of fact, the “status quo coalition” (at least if you extend it outside the west to include Eastern-Central Europe and East Asia) does include countries that differ *wildly* on core values about what makes a good society. These include issues as critical, and visceral, as openness to difference, tolerance of ethnic diversity, etc.. These are not issues that impact being rich, or free, per se, but they’re really important issues nonetheless. As noted above, ethnic differences and society’s toleration of them (or not) have been the cause of a lot of political division and conflict in the past. If you don’t believe me, look at any public opinion poll that touches on these topics (Pew surveys are my go-to, in general).
3) Whether a society is “rich and free” (which in this context really means “formally liberal democratic and capitalist” depends more on the preferences and choices of its political elites than on mass public opinion. I think a lot of people might be surprised how *shallow* support for capitalism and/or liberal democracy is, in plenty of societies that are capitalist and liberal democratic.
4) Finally, you’re making the assumption that countries are choosing their alliances and their political and economic systems based on values, rather than political expediency. I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case. I think very often people, and societies, choose their allegiances based on power politics rather than sincere convictions. People want to be allied with powerful individuals and societies, and to share their value complexes, in the hope that that will help them achieve some of their prosperity and power. In the past, lots of people converted to Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, because they saw these religions as associated with an advanced civilization whose technological and social advancements they wanted to share in. I think something similar is going on with admiration of the American political and economic model today. When China becomes the most powerful country in the world (especially if they learn to use their power wisely and to invest in soft rather than hard power), I suspect you’re going to see things change.
They tend to be much more different in what difference they accept rather than in “open to differences.”
The obvious, though difficult and scary, non-violent democratic solution to minority governance within a larger state is devolved parliaments like the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish parliaments in the UK. It’s not easy, carries risks, and is a compromise between prosperity and self-autonomy, but it’s a lot more preferable to having everyone blowing each other up (which, being British myself and living through the tail end of the Troubles, I know is a very real alternative).
One wonders why being free seems to matter for membership in this Status Quo Coalition.
Countries are more likely to get along when they share a similar ideology. It’s like how Hitler and Mussolini were allies in WW2 — I’m not sure Germany and Italy really had many common interests, but they were Europe’s two main fascist dictatorships.
Yet we very much do see that autocracies are more likely to pursue revanchist claims, against what very much seems to be their own national interests.
European democracies saw plenty of revanchism during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After WW2, the victorious Allies engaged in what are politely called “population transfers” to make sure the continent’s ethnic borders matched its new political ones, which seems to have solved the problem there. And members of the status quoalition in the rest of the world haven’t generally suffered significant territorial losses, so they have no territory to get revanchist about.
If it is global pre-eminence that China desires, how hard would it have been for China to step inside, play the game in strict adherence to the rules, and take over this role in a few decades by dint of its vast size? Difficult, yes, but surely much less so than the strategy that it is currently pursuing, which is trying to somehow gain global pre-eminence by… alienating the entire Status Quo Coalition and a bunch of non-aligned power to boot with Hong Kong crackdowns, aggressive noises at Taiwan, and weird maritime claims against everyone else along the Asia-Pacific coast.
As mentioned above, countries tend to band with those that share their ideology. So to take over the status quoalition from the inside, China (or Russia, or whoever) would probably have to adopt liberal democratic ideology wholesale, which isn’t something they want to do.
In fact, I think China’s rulers are concerned that enthusiastic membership in the “status quo coalition” (as we shall call it) would mean that the ideals of the coalition would infiltrate Chinese discourse and thought, which might be good for China, but would be very bad for the current ruling elite, whose legitimacy derives from a wholly different ideology.
I doubt it would be good for China either, but I generally agree with the rest of your point.
American political leaders were pretty explicit that one of the end goals of inviting China into the economic system created by the Status Quo Coalition, is that China would eventually end up politically similar to the other pillars of the Satus Quo Coalition.
https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/china-and-fairy-tale-change-through-trade
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/contentious-us-china-trade-relationship
In the 1990s the belief in Trade > Democracy as natural process was robust and largely unquestioned. It also formed the foundation of US relations with China and German relations with Russia.
Many of the authoritarian states inside the Status Quo Coalition, and that want inside the Statuts Quo Coalition, show hesitation on the simple and accurate belief that countries in the Status Quo Coalition are either actively or passively hostile to their political systems.
Yes, this was openly the idea with regards to engagement with China: that trade and rising wealth would result in a slow, potentially non-violent liberalization of the political system over time. Folks were envisaging a situation where, after some time the CCP allows other real parties in elections, and so on. They also imagined that being integrated into the international system would make China less revisionist, more willing to compromise on territorial claims and work together towards common goals.
None of that happened, thus the pivot away from engagement towards competition.
After WW2, the victorious Allies engaged in what are politely called “population transfers” to make sure the continent’s ethnic borders matched its new political ones
I entirely agree with you here, but it seems to me .
If the stability and peace of Europe today depends on actions taken in the fairly recent past that were *totally contrary to liberal democratic principles* (and I entirely agree that it is, incidentally), then isn’t it silly to think that liberal democracy is going to be a guarantor of peace in the future?
Maybe we are going to see more population transfers and consequent refugee flows in Europe’s future, I certainly wouldn’t rule that out. Population transfers are pretty common throughout human history, after all.
I’m not sure the peace of Europe today does depend specifically on forced migrations and “population transfers” taken after World War Two.
I think it depends much more on the fact that across most of Europe, people no longer conceptualize their nationality as a distinct ‘race’ that is competing against other distinct ‘races’ in some kind of zero-sum battle for dominance.
A lot of people in 1900 seem to have thought of European political affairs the way a modern 4X game works, where only one country or alliance can really ‘win’ and it wins by locking out and beating everyone else, usually through violence. This made people a lot more enthusiastic about fighting wars, even very deadly wars, that their nation and ‘race’ could win.
A 1910-era Frenchman was much more likely to believe that the well-being of future generations of Frenchmen depended on France being powerful and feared and kicking the Germans a lot. The 1910-era German was more likely to believe the same about the French.
The reason they stopped believing this wasn’t because all the German-speakers were driven out of Alsace-Lorraine, as they weren’t all. It was because Germany and France collectively stopped believing that the long-term interests of their people were best served by constantly preparing to fight one another, or that upholding the interests of a German minority within a French province was necessarily prejudicial to France, or vice versa. Or that France’s loss was consistently Germany’s gain, or vice versa.
So I don’t think the argument “if Europe’s current peace depends on WWII-era population transfers, then liberal democracy is being guaranteed by illiberal actions and therefore is not a guarantor of peace” necessarily works. I don’t see much evidence that the illiberal actions ARE the guarantors of peace here. There are entirely unrelated reasons why nobody in modern Germany is being revanchist over Alsace-Lorraine and threatening to start a fourth major war with their neighbors over it.
Peace in Europe today is the result of forced migration. The Sudetenland Germans lost a lot after WW2. It shows the risks of being a bully who ignites wars.
Germany will start WW3 after:
1. The US and Russia will not have much power in Europe.
2. The collective memory of how WW2 started will fade away.
But that will take a couple of generations. Nothing to worry about right now.
Germany will start WW3 after:
1. The US and Russia will not have much power in Europe.
2. The collective memory of how WW2 started will fade away.
But that will take a couple of generations. Nothing to worry about right now.
So, Germany will suddenly become militaristic and expansionist after generations of pacifism and not meeting their NATO defence spending targets*? And they do this against neighbouring countries with which they are so economically integrated that they even share the same currency? And knowing that everybody in Europe will gang up on them because they do not want war to be normalized again in Europe?
Is this some kind of joke? I can see Germany becoming like Japan in a few generations, a nationalistic nation which has problems with war crime denialists and quarrels with neighbouring countries; but that falls quite short of expansionist militarism.
*At the moment it are not yet ‘generations of pacifism and not meeting their NATO defence spending targets’; however, it looks like current trends will continue for quite a while.
“European democracies saw plenty of revanchism during the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Did they? The original revanchistes were French nationalists who wanted Alsace-Lorraine back – so that’s one example. Who else?
Hitler and Mussolini both rose to power in part by appealing to revanchist sentiment. Granted their countries were no longer democracies by the time they started fighting, but there was clearly a politically significant level of revanchism during their democratic periods.
My mistake – I read “19th and early 20th” as meaning “before WW1”.
But which lost territories was Mussolini trying to regain?
But which lost territories was Mussolini trying to regain?
Dalmatia, mostly.
Though, since you mention WW1, it’s worth mentioning that a major reason for Italy’s involvement was the desire to annexe Italian-speaking territories under Austro-Hungarian control. Some of these territories (e.g., South Tyrolia) were actually annexed after the war; others (such as the aforementioned Dalmatia) weren’t, leading to a sense of resentment which enabled Mussolini to take power.
Greece alone was involved in 7 wars between 1853 and 1922.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1897)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_Intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922)
You can count the internvention in the russian civil war and the second greco-turkish war as part of WWI and it’s still 5 major (for Greece) wars in 70 years.
Italy – Istria and South Tyrol. Germany – Sudetenland and Danzig and parts of Poland. Hungary – parts of Romania and Poland. Serbia – Bosnia. Croatia – Bosnia. Bulgaria and Serbia and Greece – Macedonia. Greece – Smyrna. Germany – parts of Denmark. Poland – parts of Ukraine.
I would think that for Poland, the answer for most of the 19th century would be “any territory at all.” Although maybe that is called “nationalism” not “revanchism”: not sure where one ends and the other begins.
Also, once Bismarck took Schleswig and Holstein, it was Denmark that was revanchist.
There is a cultural factor here too. The broad Chinese population sees it as a given that ‘China’ is one – so Hong Kong and Taiwan are limbs ripped from the motherland by brute imperial force. That many HK-ers and probably most Taiwanese don’t see this is a result of tragic indoctrination by those same evil imperialists.
The circle of decision making. It’s a similar idea of how economic markets work, and the effecient market hypothesis. The more people making decisions, the more accurately all people are going to be in achieving their desires.
In an autocratic system the decision making power narrows, potentially down to a single individual. The smaller the group of individuals making decisions the more unpredictable factors like (1) intelligence; (2) emotional and mental stability; (3) in group & out group dynamics, and (4) basic competence matter.
Democratic leaders aren’t by their nature more competent, but they are by their nature more replaceable. Few innovations are as powerful as simply learning the lesson, “it’s easier to replace the coach than the team.”
I believe that China and Russia haven’t joined the Status Quo Coalition because they cannot see it. They believe that America rules an empire, and they cannot be secure in their independence while the American empire is stronger than they are. In this view “joining the status quo coalition” looks like “submitting to American rule”. They expect that if they become American subjects they’ll be compelled to adopt American social and political norms. One can see this theory in Putin’s public speeches, and while it’s tempting to think that he’s lying to manufacture consent I believe his actions amount to putting his money where his mouth is.
As for why they’ve failed to see the Status Quo Coalition, I think that’s because authoritarian regimes cannot allow themselves to think freely: the kind of double-think posited by Orwell has proven impossible in reality, so when a government chooses to forbid a line of thought to its citizens, it also forbids that line of thought to itself. In fact the restrictions are more tightly binding on the ruling elite, whose loyalty is more crucial to regime maintenance. Therefore, the doctrine that America is a fading imperial power is required for membership in the ruling elite and foreign policy cannot be conducted except according to that doctrine. No matter how many adverse surprises they suffer when the status quo coalition fails to act like a decaying empire, they are required by their internal rules to stick to the doctrine.
Orwellian doublethink is perfectly possible, I’ve seen it.
Nevertheless, avoiding the thought of the coalition has to be more pleasant than trying to doublethink it.
I believe that China and Russia haven’t joined the Status Quo Coalition because they cannot see it. They believe that America rules an empire, and they cannot be secure in their independence while the American empire is stronger than they are.
Given America’s history of interfering in the domestic politics of foreign states, I don’t think this belief is quite as ridiculous as you suggest.
+1000.
I did not state, nor do I believe, that the empire theory of America is ridiculous. At the outset of this essay Dr. Devereaux describes the expected pattern of hegemony and that current deviation from that pattern is surprising, and I don’t disagree. But Russ Kaunelainen and I are both persuaded by this article that it’s an error, and Russ reasonably asks why China and Russia have made and persisted in this error despite their material interest in getting the question right. (If you are not persuaded, China and Russia likewise being unpersuaded is not mysterious.)
I don’t think America is an empire either (and I think the world really is in a better place today, in this narrow sense at least, than in the bad old days of pre-1945 real empires, so we should not elide that distinction), but I don’t think it’s the kind of benevolent force in the world that (small-L) liberal propagandists tend to believe it is, either.
I would caution in treating Russian and Chinese motivations as the same. They have different cultural understanding of power. Very different histories, etc.
But if one must treat as the same, consider similarities. Both had a large aristocracy-peasant divide. Both were behind the world industrialization wise and used communism to dismantle feudalism and leapfrog them into the industrial future. Just as they caught up, a new standard (technological) was demanded. China embraced this and excelled in the new world to a point. Russia not so much. But both also got cold feet about technology because they discovered it could undermine their authority.
So if they are not embracing status quo’isms I think it is more because then they can’t isolate themselves from technology and will lose control of the population–which quite clearly is not in the interest of the powers that be.
> I don’t believe that democratic regimes are any more rational than autocratic regimes.
Me neither. But what democracy does usually provide is an easier-to-achieve and generally more timely auto-correction with lower costs when things go in bad direction. You generally don’t need to start revolution in order to change policy most people in the country perceive as a vital one for their well-being.
> The crux of the argument seems to be that industrialised states that do not derive their wealth from conquerable territorial resources (like, say, farmland and peasants) have strong rational incentives not to go to war. But this incentive holds for democratic and authoritarian states alike.
I think your argument is based on an implicit (and invalid) assumption that in authoritarian society the measure of success is generally the same as in democratic society.
In authoritative societies, or even more so totalitarian ones, success is mainly measured by those in power and the main point of that measure is, unsurprisingly, to stay in power. True, they still need to deliver to general population — but only to an extent their economic situation doesn’t make them to rebel openly. They need to redistribute more (repressive apparatus is expensive, as is buying loyalty of state apparatus, not speaking about their own palaces) and also too much economic power outside the control of the ruling class may become a threat to them.
Although I’ve had similar thoughts, I’m a little reluctant to embrace the conclusion, partially because it reminds me of the End of History nonsense from the 90s (and some pre-WWI talk about how e.g., Germany and Britain would lose far too much from going to war) and especially because of Climate Change and political and economic problems inherent in an unsustainable model of unending economic growth.
My biggest concern is that the plausible future material conditions of this century do not strike me as being overly conducive to stability. The calculus, right now, favors the status quo for most big nations, but that calculus may well change; food and water crises, inequality, and what not, all can rock the boat, and the boat may or may not capsize.
The difference between this and the pre-WWI talk is that it was readily apparent to observers in 1910-era Europe that much of Europe was forming into a pair of mutually hostile alliance structures- classic balancing behavior was in play. You could accurately point out that it would be against these countries’ interests to fight each other, but the equally accurate response would be “nevertheless, they appear to be preparing to do so, so we cannot dismiss the risk that they will do so.” Today, there is no such balancing behavior directed against the “coalition” of shared interests. Nearly everyone seems to have internalized that playing by the shared ruleset is a better idea than going to war, and is preparing accordingly.
But it’s entirely true that if the underlying assumptions Dr. Devereaux is making based on recent historical trends break down (as you describe) then so too may the alliance structure those trends created break down (as you described).
There are differences, certainly. The biggest is that Great Britain wasn’t as totally dominant as the US is now, which IMO was at least as significant as the rise of Germany and Russia for the dynamics leading to war- the US and IIRC Germany had already surpassed them economically, the British army wasn’t as dominant as the US army, and the British fleet, while strong enough to take on multiple European powers, wasn’t necessarily capable of taking on the entire continent. The US has more carriers than the rest of NATO combined; the Triple-Alliance (or Franco-German, or German-US) alliance circa 1914 would have been potentially strong enough to seriously menace the British Navy at least on paper, which was a big part of why the Entente Cordiale happened- the Admiralty found it quite convenient to let the French handle the heavy lifting in the Med so they could focus on the Channel, and vice versa for the French re- Germany and Italy+Austria.
The big elephant in the room here (or one of them) is the question of whether the Ukraine War truly results in a lasting reinforcement of NATO. Prior to Mr Putin’s Bizarre Adventure, the international tendency seemed to be the opposite- a divergence of European and American interests, of which Trump was merely accelerant on the bonfire.
And this comes to a broader consideration, namely: how much of this coalition reflects something greater than the sum of its parts, and how much of this is a permanent rather than a temporary thing. One could just as easily argue that the hegemonic system is indeed still mapping quite well to the broader dynamic- that the alignment of various powers broadly reflects the continued dominance of the US. I’m not entirely convinced that the US-led coalition is entirely outside the framework of hegemony, with all that this implies. The Ukraine War demonstrated this quite well- many in Europe were arguably less than inclined to step up and oppose Russia initially, until the US turned on the fire hose and the Ukrainians crumpled Russia’s rusty spearhead. If Russia had succeeded in their initial drive to Kyiv, or the US been less involved, then this conflict quite plausibly could have shattered the EU-US accord. My conclusion is that the US has- for the immediate future- forestalled a 1914-style conflagration by flexing its muscles and reasserting its status as top dog, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the end of realpolitik- quite the contrary!
the US and IIRC Germany had already surpassed them economically, the British army wasn’t as dominant as the US army, and the British fleet, while strong enough to take on multiple European powers, wasn’t necessarily capable of taking on the entire continent.
That’s correct apart from the bit about the armies — the US army was still small, and this didn’t permanently change until WW2.
> Nearly everyone seems to have internalized that playing by the shared ruleset is a better idea than going to war, and is preparing accordingly.
However, there is actually a war going on now in Europe. It is quite possible that we’re in a potentially horrible 1930s situation now, rather than a more benign one (though also worth noting that there were wars in Europe in the 1990 too).
The difficulty with crossing the military threshold (‘going to war’) is that it’s monumentally difficult to predict outcomes. The revisionist powers in the 1930s faced what looked like intractable situations prior to WW2, but they still ended up trying it. Looking back on that, the primary difference in the equation seems to be that the US is engaged now, rather than not, and all countries are much richer, the Status Quo Coalition more so than the current potential revisionist powers. Hopefully, that will be more of a brake on them.
I am optimistic mainly because of the slowing population growth from urbanization, modern gender roles, and whatever other factors going into it. The crazy growth rate from 1800 to now is long over in developed countries and is trending that way in even poor countries, great news not only for the environment but for living standards themselves. IMO the positive effects on western living standards from the savings on childcare are more than a little underrated. That aside the main question becomes if efficiency gains, recycling, climate change or its avoidance, and other such factors can outrace the demand of the population in developing nations for better living standards…
The crazy growth rate from 1800 to now is long over in developed countries and is trending that way in even poor countries, great news not only for the environment but for living standards themselves.
That “crazy growth rate” coincided with the biggest sustained rise in living standards in human history. Maybe this rise happened in spite of the growth in population, but it would be rather bold (in the Sir Humphrey sense) to assume such a thing without very good evidence.
The slowing in population growth (which is shortly going to go negative) is definitely one of the few reasons to be optimistic about the future, and I think it’s one of the greatest achievements of the last half century.
I am not convinced that the slowing population growth rate is a net good thing, let alone “one of the few reasons to be optimistic”.
Firstly, there is lots of other reasons to be optimistic, increasing life expectancy and wealth and technology.
These increases strongly correlate with a period of rapid population growth.
There are two effects of population growth. First is that more people use up more resources. Second is that more people make more innovations and infrastructure, and get better economies of scale.
Prior to the industrial revolution, the first effect was dominant, at least on short timescales. (With the population slowly accumulating more inventions that lead to a slow population increase in the long run). Over time the second effect has become more pronounced.
The first cave man in the world had all the uranium in existance. But had no way to dig it up from deep underground, and no way to extract it and use it.
Really using “all available resources” looks like taking apart every star in the reachable universe. (Once we have disassembled the sun, light speed limits start to restrict the rate of economic growth)
Technological history is a long story of innovations that let us replace a less plentiful resource, like ivory, with one we can produce in greater quantities, like plastic.
A larger population means more people to produce solar pannels and to research fusion. It means more people working on a cure for cancer. More people genetically engineering new crops. In general a larger, richer and higher tech world. I see a lot of really cool, useful and powerful things we could do with a bit more technology. The current returns on marginal R&D are high.
Re balance of power. I think this type of theoretical analysis can be (and often is) taken too far. For example, a closer analysis of “the anti-Habsburg coalitions of the 1500s and early 1600s” shows much more complex relationships between polities, individuals, and social, cultural, and religious groups; not to mention the judicial frameworks and customs surrounding the Holy Roman Empire and kingdoms around it. The Habsburgs themselves were aware of both their own collective power, and the difficulty of wielding it; hence the split between the Spanish and loosely Austrian parts, which demonstrably and visibly did not co-operate effectively, because of their different interests. It can, and has, been argued convincingly that local, regional, and individual interests were much more important than any ‘balance of power’ thinking (see Peter Wilson’s The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy for an example, especially up to the start of the war in 1618; for example, the intervention of Denmark in 1625 was very much to do directly with Christian IV’s interests in Germany, and by no means to do with the balance of power, because by then the Habsburg’s enemies had already been defeated).
I suspect the stress on balance of power as a key mover is partly to do with a British / Anglo-Saxon approach to foreign policy issues. Britain’s key foreign policy issue was to prevent the emergence of a hegemon, except of course for itself.
I feel like this leans a bit toward Fukuyama-ist “end of history” thinking, but overall the emphasis on “this is a voluntary coalition based on shared economic interests and thinking of it as otherwise is a mistake” works out.
The thing that does stand against the “rising tide can lift all boats” aspect, as far as I understand contemporary politics and economics is the “middle income trap.”
Someday, I would really like to see Dr. Deveraux review CGP Grey’s “Rules for Rulers.”
The idea that we now inhabit a self-reinforcing Coalition of the Stabile is attractive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. According to Deveraux the US is the chief overall beneficiary of a stable system: why then does it sometimes destabilise foreign countries and their alliances? I suggest that it’s because we still inhabit a hegemonic system, and hegemonic powers find that maintaining some degree of instability can be valuable.
Take AUKUS, for example. Its members have good reasons to desire strong relationships between each other, but they already had an extremely high level of military and security cooperation. The significant feature of AUKUS is that by agreeing to supply Australia with nuclear submarines it blocked an earlier deal under which France would have been the supplier. This was probably a good deal for Australia but it’s not as if the US has offered these submarines to other allies: why did it intervene at this time, sparking a diplomatic crisis? The ancillary benefits of, e.g., acquiring better submarine repair facilities in Australia could have been achieved otherwise, or by offering the deal earlier. I think the real reason the US seized upon it because it wanted to discourage an independent alliance between two otherwise disparate allies. A French/Australian deal would have been outside NATO and ANZUS, and it would potentially have given France (and perhaps, one day, France’s neighbours) a greater ability to act independently in the Pacific.
This interference makes perfect sense from a hegemonic perspective: the US’s ability to be the Great and Powerful Friend of its allies diminishes to the extent they form their own alliances. But the logic of stability would say otherwise: it would suggest that the US should have been more ready to sell submarines to its allies and it would certainly not argue that it should interfere with deals between them. Nonetheless, this is what it did. I could cite other instances of destabilisation by lesser powers (including my own: Australia is a regional power) but my point is that history has not ended: to believe otherwise is to throw out a lot of evidence and to assume that the present situation is natural, and not somewhat artificial.
>According to Deveraux the US is the chief overall
>beneficiary of a stable system: why then does it
>sometimes destabilise foreign countries and their
>alliances? I suggest that it’s because we still inhabit
>a hegemonic system, and hegemonic powers find
>that maintaining some degree of instability can be
>valuable.
US foreign policy is driven by a mix of different factions and pressures. Some of these factions do not seem to believe that the US is a “team captain,” but rather a hegemon that should act like one, attempting to bully foreign countries into offering ‘better deals.’ Some factions simply do not worry much about abstract concerns like destabilizing an alliance structure and just want to secure profitable defense contracts for US corporations that export weapons.
So the US sometimes acting ham-handedly or destabilizing a previously stable political status quo is not unexpected, especially at times when one of these factions is in the ascendancy. For instance, we can look at the nuclear treaty the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, which the Trump administration in turn rejected in favor of a more belligerent stance and the assassination of an Iranian general.
Trump personally, and many of his supporters, seemed to view the nuclear treaty as unacceptable because it gave the Iranians “too much,” and wanted to exert greater punishing force or greater demands on the Iranians. Thus, they acted to change things, and if this undermined stability or the US’s credibility in future negotiations, well then, that’s the cost of making sure you get a ‘good deal’ by being a ‘tough guy’ in negotiations, right?
(I’m trying to be charitable here, given that I personally disagree with the decision to repudiate the treaty)
The point here being that Trump repudiating that treaty could reasonably be seen as an example of “the US destabilizing an otherwise stable system it benefited from.” Someone could say that this is what happened there; I know I would. But it doesn’t take much insight to understand why this happened. It’s because regardless of whether the US is the leader of a consensual team or a hegemony, some specific factions within America find it attractive to behave as if the US rules a hegemony.
You are misrepresenting the sequence of events here. It was Australia who initiated the AUKUS deal due to its severe displeasure with the way France was mismanaging the Attack class contract, America did not reach out to Australia. The first contact was when Australia – not America – reached out to Britain – also not America – to see if they could do a bilateral deal, after the first few talks it became clear that the Americans would be required to make the sale a reality and so Washington was brought in on the deal.
If you look at the deal it is the UK, not the US, who wins big relative to the Attack class buy. While Australia is leasing American Virginia class SSNs the Australian built AUKUS boats are going to be British designed SSN(R) boats. These British boats represent the majority of the money being spent, including Australian R&D money for integration of new weapon systems into what will become RN standard SSNs. With Pacific basing of RN subs, a larger more efficient production run of SSN(R), better weapons fit, and prestige the British are massive winners of the sale, which is why they sought American assistance in making it happen.
Once Australia and the UK approached the US with the outlines of the deal the USA was given a choice; prioritize the relationship with the French or prioritize the relationships with Australia and the UK. At that point disregarding the French was the obvious correct answer.
The endless coups and wars and proxy wars instigated by the US completely destroy the myth the state of affairs is natural in any form. The reality is if the US withdrew all its troops from abroad and stopped meddling/bullying other countries it would be a completely different scenario.
That’s certainly an impressive label for absence of a product.
Unfortunately, there is a pre-existing term expressing the same in but one word: sovereignty.
The classic litmus test for which is always the same and can be expressed in three (but shorter) words, no doubt familiar to someone so versed in history: jus ad bellum.
Since the sovereigns by definition are end points where the proverbial buck must stop, and no one can give them orders, they can only be restrained by their own good sense and consequences of their actions.
If there is an entity which can give or withhold permission for a “sovereign” to do this or that, obviously the sovereignty was subsumed by said entity. Which generally comes in two flavours:
1. Client states of some larger empire, or
Which was the case with «the nations and kingdoms which the Romans rendered subject to their empire; the generality even of those whom they honoured with the name of friends and allies no longer formed real states. Within themselves, they were governed by their own laws and magistrates; but without, they were in every thing obliged to follow the orders of Rome; they dared not of themselves either to make war or contract alliances.» (Emer de Vattel, “The law of nations”, at the end of Chapter 1).
2. Being beholden to some supranational actor via something other than plain old coercive state power.
Which was what Vatican used to do, when it could.
Of course, a strong theocratic state (perhaps under some sort of caesaropapist doctrine) could try to do both at once… and a theocracy would be unlikely to allow even «within themselves, they were governed by their own laws» part beyond a very superficial level. This would be an unusual thing to happen, of course. And perhaps quite improbable to independently happen in more than one place at the same time.
After the end of the Cold War? Huh. So, how the rules of international relations were during (and immediately before) the Cold War — already rewritten or not yet?
Was it the world of relations between the truly independent sovereigns and classical international law as understood by Vattel?
If it was, on which examples can we plainly see that a puppet show run by a pair of clowns is so different from a puppet show run by one clown that it’s not even a puppet show any more?
If not, the change to one-puppeteer show from two-puppeteers show is not the only one relevant, and perhaps not even the most important: the structure of factions in the puppeteer community changed, but puppetry itself did not. We ought to ask when and how (and at whose hands) did the era of classical international law really end?
You say that Europe emerges as the “dog that didn’t bark”. I would like to argue that Europe is instead a “dog that cannot bark”. Firstly because Europe still lives under a US security guarantee regime where it is protected from outside powers (read Russia), but also, because it lives under a US security guarantee regime where it is protected from *civil war* by the presence of the US military. Europe cannot challenge the US as a global power because the EU lacks the level of internal unity to act on the world stage. Where is the EU army, or the EU foreign policy? It doesn’t exist. Europe is a collection of warring tribes held in temporary bureaucratic stasis.
Where Europe can act with unity against the US, it has, e.g. in certain minor economic realms like privacy.
But the EU simply cannot be classified as a world power like Russia or China. It has no ability to act in a way that a world power acts, not merely a disinclination to do so.
Meanwhile, we have seen significant strategic realignment in other parts of the world, notably Africa and south Asia.
This is rather bleak a picture of the EU. Your claim that EU is protected from internal war by the presence of US forces is quite incorrect: the US forces in the region were, until 2014, mainly theater-level support troops, and their combat capability was quite minor. In addition, they were located mainly in their old Cold War era bases that are far from the potential trouble spots. Despite this, no kind of low-level violence emerged in the areas where you might expect it, i.e. in Eastern Europe.
The EU is kept in peace very much by its own internal cohesion. We can discuss whether its military weakness is due to US influence, internal decoherence or the inherent pacifism of the German society, but these are not really issues with regard to its internal stability. There is no question that EU would have internal wars even if the US left.
“The difference between Russia and France is, to be blunt, that the French know something the Russians haven’t learned yet (but are apparently in the process of learning right now).”
Why do you think that is? Of all the countries that should’ve learned by 1945 that Modern War Is Bad, Actually, you’d think that Russia/the USSR would be near the top of the list.
WW2 saw the USSR entrench its occupation of the Baltic States, Karelia and Bessarabia (modern day Moldova). It also saw the vassalization of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and North Korea. It also saw the creation of a significant ally in China. WW2 saw the USSR’s international role transform from the role that Russia always had – that of an important, yet ultimately peripheral power – to becoming the second axis of international world affairs, almost rivaling the US.
I am pretty sure that Soviet military thinkers, at least until the 1970s, were under the opinion that a potential WW3 could lead to the ultimate destruction of the western capitalist order and the final victory of post-nuclear worldwide communism. After all, barring all the death and economic destruction, WW2 turned out great for the Soviets.
“barring all the death and economic destruction”
That’s a pretty damn big asterisk, though. By absolute numbers, the USSR lost more people than any other country in WW2. They lost more than 10 times the number of people that France did in WW1, a war in which it is commonly believed that nothing the victorious powers could’ve gained would’ve been worth the cost, and which left the next generation of French leaders very reluctant to start another war.
“By absolute numbers, the USSR lost more people than any other country in WW2. ”
if you break it down by individual nationalities, then I think that, after Jews and maybe the Roma, the Belarussians suffered the most of any national group from WWII.
Russia was from the late 18th century one of the key European powers – as amply demonstrated in 1812- 15. The Soviet Union was largely isolated – and suffered as a result. But the gains post 1945 were – in Soviet eyes – essentially defensive. After World War I, the interventions in the Civil War (9 million dead) and then World War II (27 million dead), the feeling was ‘never again’. Romania and Hungary had joined Germany in 1941, and Poland had fought a war over Ukraine in the 20s and been instrumental in blocking efforts to contain Germany in the late 30s.
So ‘barring all the death and destruction’ goes along with ‘apart from that, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln’.
For the average Soviet citizen, perhaps. I wonder how much that idea got adopted by the high Soviet leadership. I know that Kruschev essentially denounced Stalin, and Brezhnev was a political commissar on the front lines during WW2, but I don’t know if they truly internalized that much the idea that war should never be repeated. But fine, I’m willing to give on this argument.
To reply to Ben L again – maybe, after Kruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and, especially, Yeltsin, that lesson got forgotten by Putin and his regime? The ‘never again’ would now refer to the devastation of the economic crash of the 1990s rather than the Great Patriotic War of the 1940s, and thus the lessons of WW2 would be forgotten by Putin, who only gained prestige and popularity by invading Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and the Donbass?
“Khrushchev”: K and KH are totally different phonemes in Russian and many other languages.
Khrushchev was an advocate of “peaceful coexistence”, i.e. restricting competition between the Eastern and Western Blocs to the economic rather than political sphere, so yes, i think he was more on the “WWIII would be a disaster” side. (I think I remember reading that he wasn’t even super enthusiastic about supporting North Vietnam in its efforts to reunify the country, and wanted the North to stick with the partitioned borders). He might have held various different views at various points though.
“maybe, after Kruschev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev, and, especially, Yeltsin, that lesson got forgotten by Putin and his regime?”
That may well be the case, but has some disturbing implications. If such lessons have to be re-learned every few generations, that doesn’t exactly bode well for humanity.
I am pretty sure that Soviet military thinkers, at least until the 1970s, were under the opinion that a potential WW3 could lead to the ultimate destruction of the western capitalist order and the final victory of post-nuclear worldwide communism
I was actually reading about that the other day, and I’ll have to check the reference. But, I think the essence of it was that while Stalin believed more or less what you say (and expected another World War by the early 1960s), that was by no means universally held among the post-Stalin political elites. Khrushchev’s inner circle was divided on the question of whether WWII would lead to the ultimate victory of socialism or whether there would be no winners at all (at least in the industrialized world), and I can’t remember which side Khrushchev himself came down on, although I can check that.
Some communists in the developing world absolutely did believe that, though, including both Mao and Che Guevara (who said after the fact that if he had been in charge of the nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis he would have fired them). Of course, as non-industrialized countries, Cuba and China probably had less to lose from a world war than the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe did.
The fact that Khrushchev didn’t start WW3 suggests that he came down on the “no winners” side.
The source I found indicates that Khrushchev was not the *most* peace-oriented member of the Politburo: Malenkov was the one who explicitly said “a nuclear war will have no winners”, and Khrushchev thought that socialism would probably come out the winner. That said, though, I’m sure he also thought that even if socialism might ultimately “win”, it would be a horrific price to pay and it was better to win through economic and political competition instead.
I don’t know if Khrushchev advocated trying to place nuclear missiles in Cuba but at the least it happened on his watch. And if he thought the Americans would accept it as a fait accompli, that was a terrible miscalculation.
I don’t know if Khrushchev advocated trying to place nuclear missiles in Cuba but at the least it happened on his watch. And if he thought the Americans would accept it as a fait accompli, that was a terrible miscalculation.
I think America was on the wrong side of the Cuban missile issue.
Cuba had every right to want nuclear weapons, for its own protection. They had been the subject of a (botched) invasion by US backed rebels the year before, and America had the overthrow of its government as a declared national interest. Why shouldn’t they want a nuclear deterrent to invasion? (For similar reasons, I think Ukraine, or for that matter Belarus, should have kept its nuclear weapons after the Soviet Union ended, rather than handing them over to Russia). One of the conditions for the Cuban missile crisis to end was a promise by the United States not to invade Cuba in future, which, surprisingly, they actually ended up keeping.
From the Soviet perspective, they were doing nothing in Cuba that the US hadn’t previously done by stationing nuclear weapons in Turkey.
Americans are honestly pretty bad at seeing how the world looks from their opponents’ perspectives. Although I think the Russians and Chinese are, historically and today, probably even worse, and if India ever becomes a major world power I suspect they’re going to have the same problem.
It probably was never feasible for breakaway former Soviet republics to keep the nuclear weapons stationed there. Nuclear weapons (and their delivery systems) aren’t something that can sit on a shelf indefinitely; they’re a weapons system that needs maintenance including ultimately reprocessing the fissile cores at a level that amounts virtually to recreating them. Unless Belarus and Ukraine were going to have an independent nuclear weapons infrastructure, the actual nukes were a wasting asset. Persuading the republics to give them up ensured that the fissile material wouldn’t eventually end up in the hands of third parties that could process them into working nukes.
“Unless Belarus and Ukraine were going to have an independent nuclear weapons infrastructure, the actual nukes were a wasting asset”
Why would Belarus and Ukraine be any less capable of caring for nuclear weapons than Russia? Or for that matter India or Pakistan?
In having the complete nuclear and bomber/missile industry infrastructure necessary within their own borders to be independent nuclear powers. While possibly caring for a stockpile of fissile material isn’t as demanding as being able to produce it from scratch, it nonetheless would have required both the commitment to become nuclear powers (politically fraught given non-proliferation sentiment elsewhere) and the substantial expense necessary to do so.
I gather that review of internal Soviet nuclear war planning documents after the end of the Cold War seemed to suggest that the Soviets were not at all enthusiastic about the idea of starting World War Three, and certainly weren’t planning on doing it, even as they continued to prepare for such a conflict.
They definitely weren’t planning their doctrine around a surprise nuclear first strike without provocation, the way a lot of very fearful Americans had perhaps understandably anticipated.
And in turn, they were a lot more worried about an American unprovoked nuclear first strike than most of us Americans would expect.
It turns out most people most of the time, even in the halls of high power, aren’t actually genocidal madmen unless someone starts systematically purging the system and promoting only genocidal madmen.
Before WW2 The USSR was almost a pariah state. In August 1939 Stalin begged for an alliance with the UK and France and they rejected him.
After WW2 the USSR was a true superpower. Never before it had a garrison in Berlin. In the 1950’s the USSR managed to kick the UK out of the Middle East and take its place. Stalin was willing to trade millions of Soviet civilians and soldiers for a superpower status.
The Soviet Union was not “begging” for a military alliance with the Entente. Stalin was offering a bargain that would allow Soviet Union to occupy and control Finland, the Baltic Countries and Poland. These countries were not willing to join such an alliance, and Great Britain and France had the decency not to sacrifice the independence of these nations simply for short-term political gain.
Then, Stalin went with Hitler and got the same price from him.
Stalin proposed a joint demarche that would mutually guarantee existing borders (so aimed at Germany). France would take it up unless Britain did – and Britain would not unless Poland agreed. Stalin had a non-aggression pact as his second string, and played that when Britain and France showed no interest.
The “demarche” included the right of passage for Soviet troops through Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian soils. The Polish government was – justly- concerned that the Soviets would misuse this right to foment internal political changes in Poland. The justification of such doubt is the fact that the Soviets had tried, during 1920’s, several times to foment revolutions or coups in the neighbouring countries. A year later, in 1940, when the Soviets had obtained basing rights in the Baltic countries, their troops were used to underwrite coups in these countries.
Soviet Union was, in 1939, a revanchist imperialist nation, and a true danger to its neighbours.
“Soviet Union was, in 1939, a revanchist imperialist nation, and a true danger to its neighbours.”
True.
Issue is, Poland did better under Soviet occupation than under German occupation. And sometimes the smart thing to do is to choose the lesser of two evils.
Hitler could have passed himself off as the savior of eastern Europe. Instead, he managed the nearly impossible: to make Stalin look like the lesser of two evils to the Ukrainians and Belarusians.
Is this meant to be a reply to me? Anyway, I’m not terribly surprised that the lesson Stalin took from WW2 was that immense amounts of human death and suffering was worth it if it led to some political benefit (given that he was, you know, Stalin). What does surprise me is that the next generation of Russian/Soviet leaders seem to have taken similar lessons.
By contrast , the lessons that those in charge of fighting WW1 learned seem rather different than the ones that the next generation of political leaders took away from the conflict.
>What does surprise me is that the
>next generation of Russian/Soviet
>leaders seem to have taken similar
>lessons.
Did they, though? The next generation after Stalin was men like Khrushchev and Brezhnev, not men like Putin.
And Khrushchev and Brezhnev didn’t go around systematically engineering things so that they would end up fighting World War Three with the Americans. They were willing to use their own nuclear deterrent to cover for a lot of sparring and positioning and general ‘cold warring,’ but there wasn’t some massive effort on their part to build up for an all-out clash of the superpowers that they wanted and were planning to bring about.
On the other hand the Soviets strongly believed that the best defense was a strong offense. Post-1992, it turned out that American strategic planners had been presuming that a stepped nuclear escalation was feasible, whereas the Soviets had planned to launch a massive strategic attack the moment any nuclear weapon detonated on Warsaw Pact territory.
I think this is way premature. First of all, it has been just over 30 years since American world hegemony even started, much less ended. No other country really compares, in finance, the internet, science or the military. China has just now overtook it by some measures in economic output, and it is quickly arming itself, and it can certainly command -some- obedience among client states in Africa, but it is not a peer yet. (I also think that both China’s premature international thuggery and its odious political system harm it more than help it, but that’s another matter).
Now, obviously that won’t last forever. The USA will almost certainly be one of the three greatest powers by 2100, but likely not number 1. (I’m looking at China and India. Russia is simply not nearly on the same level, although it thought it was). But it is a slow process that has only just begun. It’s too early to look at the world in 2023 and say the realignment is not happening.
The main question of the article, to my understanding, was to ask the following:
Why not Europe? The EU has enough economic capacity such that, if it increased military spending, it could become a diplomatic center of gravity all on its own. It doesn’t need U.S. hegemony for its own security, and thus, in any previous century besides the 20th, would have done all it can to separate itself from its American overlord. Yet, it doesn’t. Why? Previously, individual nations within Europe were willing to go to war to establish their geopolitical supremacy. Now, the entire alliance of all of them (sans Russia) refuse to do so. Why?
Why not Europe? The EU has enough economic capacity such that, if it increased military spending, it could become a diplomatic center of gravity all on its own.
The EU is an alliance of 27 different countries, whereas the US is just one country. Hence getting the EU as a whole to commit to any particular military or diplomatic policy is going to be at least 27 times more difficult than getting the US to do the same.
And if you’re wondering why the EU doesn’t just unify into a single country so it can be a proper superpower, the answer is that it doesn’t have enough asabiyyah to make this feasible.
In part the answer is similar to what you gave re the US- its still too early. The Treaty of Maastricht was a few years after the USSR fell; the EU, politically, is about as young as US hegemony.
After WWII Europe had neither the capacity, the will, or the men to fight the USSR. Without the USA the Soviet Union would have pushed a LOT further than they did. Further, having Europe as a buffer was useful to the USA. We needed each other. During the Cold War no one wanted to shake things up too much, for fear of wiping out our species.
Since the Cold War, Europe hasn’t had a reason to take over. Being the face of the Status Quo Coalition isn’t a popular role. Part of it (how much depends on who you ask) is that the USA does vile things from time to time, and deserves some of the blame. But part of it is that ANYONE in this position is going to have to do those things, and will take the blame. Europe right now has the best of both worlds: the USA’s military support, but also the ability to grandstand (see cluster bombs and mines) and condemn US activities.
Basically, there’s no margin for Europe in moving to take over the USA’s position. They’d end up spending a LOT more on their militaries (though with Ukraine that’s likely to happen anyway to some extent), and would need to give up some of their moral high ground. And what they’d get in exchange isn’t worth it–they’re already a major player in US policy decision-making, meaning that they’ve got a significant amount of influence on the current Status Quo already.
A quote from my boss is apt here: “The best way to deal with risk is to make someone else take it on.” That’s where Europe is now.
It’s doubtful that the Soviet Union wanted to push further after 1945. So far, no evidence has emerged from the archives (largely open in the 90s) to support this. Stalin was very wary of bringing parties he could not control into his orbit, and the USSR was in terrible shape.
On the EU – yes it has little international military clout. One of Brett’s points is that this is an increasingly irrelevant dimension of power, given the limited returns and high costs of war. In the diplomatic and economic fields the EU is on a par with the US, in eg setting and enforcing standards, in anti-trust action and so on.
No European country has the size, power or wealth to have any hope of achieving geopolitical supremacy, and that’s been the case since the early 1960s. A stubborn insistence on trying to go it alone would achieve nothing but insignificance. Even Brexit took place in the context of the U.K. remaining a key NATO member and continuing extensive trade with the rest of the “quoalition”.
China is now ahead in many fields of science as well (at least in terms of quantity: quality is harder to judge, especially as much of their published science seems to be Chinese-language and therefore hard for the rest of us to read).
Regarding Guyana, Bahamas, and Panama: They’re not nearly as rich as they seem. All 3 just made your $40,000 PPP cutoff this year, for the first time ever. In 2010, Bahamas was under $30,000, Panama under $16,000, and Guyana under $10,000! In that context, they’re just too new to have established their roles in the Status Quo Coalition. If they stay prosperous, though, I would expect them to start building up their diplomatic capacity in the coming years.
I would also perhaps, as you imply in your conclusion, list US withdrawal as a potential existential threat to the coalition. For one, such a withdrawal would not be clean, as the coalition is significantly interlocked with US hegemony and a anti-Coalition American government is liable to mistake coalition members for vassals with messy results. Once all that shakes out the coalition has lost its muscle (though it could certainly attain great-power muscle if it tried) and a lot of economic heft, at which point alignment begins to look more promising, perhaps with the addition of a European bloc.
Why would nominal GDP be in any way considered an accurate way to gauge a country’s military power, and not it’s GDP per PPP? GDP per PPP maps much more nicely onto a countrys’ production capabilities.
Because overall wealth and size matters more: “God is on the side of the big battalions”
San Marino is a very nice place with a high GDP per PPP, but the total population is only around 33000 and the total GDP per annum about 1.5 billion. San Marino would need to spend four years of their entire GDP to buy one Nimitz class aircraft carrier, and 18% of their entire population would be needed as the crew.
I’m personally not quite sure whether GDP PPP is actually a good measure of military power.
Take a look of this article here: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/debating-defence-budgets-why-military-purchasing-power-parity-matters
It adjusts the military budgets of countries based on unit prices, like the wages of soldiers and prices of equipment and operations.
At the bottom is a table wherein the military expenditure of many countries was adjusted by ‘military purchasing power parity’; it concludes that Russian military spending was worth 28,2% of that of the USA, a number which does not even bother to take into account all the equipment Russia inherited from the Soviet Union.
A few months after the article was published, Russian paratroopers were dropped on Kyv; nearly everybody predicted Ukraine would fall in months or even weeks.
Instead it turned out that all those rumours about Russian officers selling fuel on the black-market and using their conscripts to build dachas instead of training them, and that most of the money allocated to medical equipment instead was put in somebodies pockets, were accurate. So, presumably Russian military spending was worth much less than 28,2% of that of the USA.
As to what to use instead of GDP PPP? Maybe GDP multiplied by GDP per capita?
I had once read a paper which claimed that total GDP is a poor way to estimate the power of a country because it ignores costs, like the need to feed its many inhabitants, production costs, security costs, and so on.
https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/43/2/7/12211/The-Power-of-Nations-Measuring-What-Matters
It theorised instead that GDP multiplied by GDP per capita might be a better indicator as countries with a larger GDP per capita tend to, in general, make more efficient use of their resources.
It thus claimed (in an argument with a table of war and dispute outcomes, and case studies of great power rivalries) that in conflicts between countries, where one side had a higher total GDP and the other a higher GDP multiplied by GDP per capita the latter tended to win. Some examples include 19th century China against Japan or Great Britain, and the Arab-Israeli Wars. (Germany against Russia and the USA against the USSR are also included in the case studies despite the Russians only having a larger army instead of a greater GDP) However, there were plenty of exceptions, so it is still a far from perfect measure.
Nominal or exchange rate GDP/capita also matters for anything you have to import: fuel, electronics, rare metals, weapons you don’t make, etc.
The most important Arab-Israeli War was in 1948. GNP-per-Capita is not the explanation. See
https://www.timesofisrael.com/hold-for-wed-5-pm-the-growth-of-israels-economy-a-timeline/
“Israel had a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of some $5,000 when the state was established in May 1948.”
My explanation is that the important factor is not GNP-per-Capita but corruption. Corruption destroyed the Russian army, not GNP-per-Capita. Ditto for the 1948 Egyptian army. There is some correlation between GNP-per-Capita and corruption, but Israel in 1948 was an outlier.
>Israel 54,997 77 Complicated Complicated
Israel’s position as one of the few post-colonial states with active border disputes and a fractious neighborhood to rate as both rich and free makes the “complicated” part inevitable. It also has had a pretty long list of unpleasant experiences at the hands of the status quo coalition (arms embargoes, trade sanctions, proxy wars, genocide, etc. by France, Britain, Germany, and the US). It also has not experienced the same sort of solidarity from the bloc or durable benefits of the status quo that other states have: bloc members have frequently supported attempts to violently revise Israel’s borders and existence and Israel has had to fight existential wars much more recently than any other bloc member.
For a good portion of postwar history, the NATO powers rated reliable access to Arab oil well above any principles enshrined in the status quo and Israel tended to bear the brunt of that hypocrisy.
When did a bloc member support an attempt to violently (not through peaceful negotiations) revise Israel’s borders?
The closest I can think of is France in ’67, but that was more of a hostile neutrality than actual support.
Britain’s support for the Arab invasion in ’48 and 49 is well-documented. The Jordanian Army was literally commanded by serving British officers. The RAF conducted air reconnaissance for the Egyptian military and supplied arms to both as well. And that is without even getting into its covert attacks on Jewish Shoah survivors trying to reach Israel.
There is also a substantial history of covert western support for the PLO’s terror campaign pressure Israel into territorial concessions, notably by deliberately exposing their own Jewish citizens to attack. Former Italian PM and President Francesco Cossiga admitted to such an arrangement years ago (https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-documents-show-italy-ignored-warnings-of-1982-terror-attack-on-rome-synagogue/). I recall hearing stories of a similar arrangement in France.
“the coalition is often regarded (wrongly) by Americans and Russian propagandists alike as simply a tool of American Imperialism – a collection of smaller states huddled around Columbia‘s skirts. That reading is a mistake and it leads to misjudging how the coalition will act, because the coalition isn’t bound together by American power but by common interests and so behaves differently.
For the United States leading the coalition, the mistake is to assume that the members of the coalition are bound by American power (hard or soft),”
Just wanted to say, I’ve noticed a number of factions & political dissidents who describe the “status quo coalition” as a de facto American Empire. This view, which the author disagrees with here, is more common than you might assume.
For all the theorising (and a lot of over-theorising) balance of power is so simple a notion that it has been observed in chimpanzees and baboons. At the state level, the striking fact is that it does not succeed very often. As the historian John Darwin noted, for most of history empires have been the norm. And, where it does succeed, this is less due to adroit diplomacy than to constraints on the reach of power. Greek attempts at hegemony ran aground on the ideal of the polis, Hellenistic ones on the limited military base of the successor kingdoms. In China, north India and the Middle East, disunity was followed by conquest and unity.
In post-Carolingian western Europe, elite identity was deeply territorial and ‘national’ (not in the same sense as later, but attached to the institutions, laws, customs and dynasties of the country). This made extensive conquest almost impossible – one could not integrate another major state, and instead ended up with major coordination issues (like poor Charles V, head bowed under his many hats). So they ended either grabbing very small chunks off each other or going overseas.
One might also note that the collapse of hegemonial power came as often from internal causes as from external opposition. The Hapsburgs fell on religious divisions, the Ottomans, Russians and Austro-Hungarians on nationalism.
What is the main thing wrong with the way Marxists characterize Medieval systems?
How would you say Marxists characterize medieval systems? The first question cannot be answered without the second.
It’s always confused me that Marxists lump all pre-industrial societies together as “feudal” when most historians reserve the term for classic feudalism categorized by a weak or non-existent central state and payment-in-kind obligations rather than a market economy.
“Feudal’ is like the 18th century ‘Gothic’ (meaning then archaic, with tones of crude and barbarous). The Marxist usage is a short-hand for a socio-economic base where rights over land are paramount, hence rule by landowners, and a social pyramid based essentially on extraction from peasant farmers. As distinct from pre-agricultural societies and later industrial ones. It’s a distinction which is useful – and still used in overview works (see eg Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Book and Sword, or Patricia Crone’s Pre-Industrial Societies – neither Marxists).
Which rather glosses over the times and places in which significant numbers of yeoman farmers existed; unless one counts republics where the yeoman were represented in legislatures and the extraction was taxes by the state. Does Marx ever address this or does he dismiss non-tenancy farming as historically insignificant?
What you call “yeoman” the Marxists in the USSR called “Kulak”. The Kulaks who worked 8 acres of land, for their own benefit, were considered “enemies of the people”. And Stalin gave them the choice of slavery or death. And plenty of them chose death.
At this big picture level, the actual agricultural labour can be done by ‘yeomen’, serfs, gang-slaves or whatever – there is a lot of variation in detail. Marx is interested in how a social hierarchy emerges and how it is supported. It’s a theory of political economy – with the emphasis on ‘political’. As always, to be read in the context of its time – which is one of transition from land rent to return on capital. But note that Adam Smith just assumes that the distribution of the product will arise naturally, and modern economics mostly shies away from questions of power.
A common supposition is that landowners are ‘stationary bandits’. But that would make their role purely extractive, which is clearly not the case. It is also clearly not the case they they (or CEOs) are rewarded in proportion to their contribution to marginal return. It’s a debate of current relevance.
This is laughable and sounds like a 5 year old’s understanding of America. The reality is the US has taken countless actions to preserve hegemony including multiple wars and proxy wars. That does not sound like a country that believes its role as leader will automatically be accepted. There have been multiple bombs and coups and failing that, endless sanctions to try to brutally crush anyone who tries to go against the empire. The US incited the ukraine proxy war and is currently trying to encircle China with military bases. Definitely not a country interested in peace. If the US withdrew all its troops from abroad and stopped all the CIA coups you’d be surprised at how equally things would turn ugly for America.
So you seriously believe that coalition governments are part of the coalition because of coups and proxy wars? Which ones? The U.K.? France? Australia? Finland? I do not deny that the U.S have carried out coups, but those have mostly happened in countries that are not part of the coalition (like Iran) and have mostly as a bitter fruit created great hostility (again, well, Iran as an example). But the effect of the unilateral withdrawal of U.S troops from a coalition country were they have bases would be an outr outraged feeling of betrayal, and a demand that they stay and do their part.
“incited the ukraine proxy war” marks as you as utterly dismissable.
No one made Putin invade Ukraine. Try not apologizing for imperialism and war crimes.
The US incited the ukraine proxy war
Yes, the CIA was responsible for the Maidan Revolution in 2014. There is not one shred of evidence for that; however, that is perfectly normal as the CIA is hyper-competent, just look at how successful they were in assassinating Castro and supporting coups against Saddam.
Moreover Putin’s idea that ‘Ukraine is a fake nation created by Lenin’ was also planted into his mind by the CIA. /s
and is currently trying to encircle China with military bases.
Why do so many of China’s neighbours want US military bases in them? Why do India and Vietnam (countries who have condemned in the UN the USA’s embargo of Cuba but not Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for some mysterious reason) want to have joint military exercises with the USA? Is it related with the CCP’s behaviour?
https://thediplomat.com/2022/11/india-us-armies-hold-exercises-close-to-disputed-china-border/
Devereaux argues that under the hegemony model, current allies of the US ought to be re-aligning themselves to create a multi-polar world. Thus, the lack of this re-alignment is taken as evidence that the hegemony model no longer explains the current world order.
But the assumption there is that the US hegemony is weak enough to be challenged. I think Occam’s Razor would caution you to re-examine that assumption. It could be that the US is still overwhelmingly dominant as a hegemon, and the smaller states don’t feel it is the right time to re-align yet.
What evidence do you need to distinguish the “hegemon hypothesis” from the “status-quo coalition hypothesis”? It seems to me that it is only distinguishable if you assume that the US is sufficiently weak.
Under any successful hegemony, a sympathetic viewer could always make subjective arguments about why their allies/satraps/clients are aligning themselves “voluntarily” because it is in their best interest. A lot of it could come down to subjective judgment calls.
Sorry to be so late: “one it becomes clear that” -> “once it becomes clear that”.