Abstract
This chapter reviews various hypotheses about the relation between economic change and governments’ readiness to participate in international conflict. It develops a theoretical model with hypothesised linkages from economic difficulty, to governments’ efforts to contain domestic political discontent stemming from that difficulty, through militarisation to participation in militarised international disputes. It also develops a hypothesis that democratic governments may respond to economic difficulty in a way that is systematically different from that of non-democratic governments. It then tests these hypotheses on two large bodies of cross-temporal and cross-national political and economic data. The results suggest some tendency for democratic governments to engage in international conflict more often after economic downturn, and for non-democratic governments to do so after economic expansion.
Work on this topic was begun when I was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 1984, and has been supported by the World Society Foundation in Switzerland. It owes much to conversations with Marc Blaug, Paul Kennedy, and J. David Singer. John Bailey, James Lindsay, Celeste Wallander and Yagil Weinberg provided valuable research assistance.
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Notes and References
Kondratieff, N., ‘Die Langen Wellen der Konjunktur’, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 56:1926, pp. 573–600.
van Duijn, J. J., The Long Wave in Economic Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983).
See also the articles by Glismann, Rodemer and Wolter, and by Cleary and Hobbs, in Freeman, Christopher (ed.) Long Waves in the World Economy (London: Butterworth, 1983).
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and Goldstein, Joshua S., ‘Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles’, International Studies Quarterly, 29, 4: 1985, pp. 375–402.
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Thompson, William R., ‘Phases of the Business Cycle and the Outbreak of War’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, June 1982, pp. 301–11.
For a vigorous dissent see Strange, Susan, ‘Protectionism and World Politics’, International Organization, 39, 2; 1985, pp. 233–59.
Baran, Paul, and Sweezy, P. M., Monopoly Capital, (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).
For the general point, see Most, Benjamin, and Starr, Harvey, ‘International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Substitutability, and “Nice” Laws’, World Politics, 363, 1984, pp. 383–406.
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See Tufte, Edward, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);
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and Thompson, William R. and Zuk, Gary, ‘American Elections and the International Economic Cycle’, American Journal of Political Science, 27, 3, 1983, pp. 464–84 for critiques of Tufte;
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and Krell, Gert, ‘Capitalism and Armaments: Business Cycles and Defense Spending in the United States 1945–79’, Journal of Peace Research, 18, 3, 1981, pp. 221–40, for a critique of Nincic and Cusack.
A vigorous if controversial assertion of this proposition as applicable to various phases of modern European history is Meyer, Arno, ‘Interval Crisis and War Since 1870’, in Bertrand, C. L. (ed.), Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1977).
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The systematic empirical literature of these relationships individually (that is, in bivariate form) is both voluminous and largely inconclusive. Despite some dissent — for example, Rummel, R. J., ‘Libertarianism and International Violence’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27, 1983, pp. 27–72 — I believe the predominant evidence is that neither a democratic nor an authoritarian regime, as such, is significantly more likely than the other to engage in conflict.
See, for example, Singer, J. David and Small, Melvin, ‘The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes’, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 1, 1, 1976, pp. 50–69;
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and Erich Weede, ‘Democracy and War Involvement’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28, 4, 1984, pp. 649–64. On the relation — or, more correctly, the lack of it —between domestic conflict and foreign conflict
see Rummel, R. J., ‘Dimensions of Foreign and Domestic Conflict Behavior: A Review of the Empirical Findings’, in Pruitt, Dean and Synder, Richard (eds), Theory and Research on the Causes of War, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969);
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Singer, J. David, ‘Accounting for International War: The State of the Discipline’, Journal of Peace Research, 18, 1, 1981, pp. 1–18;
and Ward, Michael, and Widmaier, Ulrich, ‘The Domestic-International Conflict Nexus: New Evidence and Old Hypothesis’, International Interactions, 9, 1, 1982, pp. 75–101.
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supplemented by Mitchell, B. R., European Historical Statistics, 1750–1975 (New York: Facts on File, 1979, 2nd edn).
For the relevant dates see Russett, Bruce, Singer, J. David, and Small, Melvin, ‘A Standardized List of National Political Entities in the Twentieth Century’, American Political Science Review, 62, 3, 1968, pp. 932–51.
Singer, J. David, and Small, Melvin, ‘The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes’, Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, 1, 1, 1976, pp. 50–69 (esp. p. 55). These codings are virtually identical to those used by Chan (see note 17). I am grateful to Professor Chan for providing me with them in correspondence.
The coding procedures, rationale, and resulting patterns are found in Gochman, Charles and Maoz, Zeev, ‘Militarised Interstate Disputes, 1816–1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28, 4, 1984, pp. 585–616.
Summers, Robert, and Heston, Alan, ‘Improved International Comparisons of Real Product and Its Composition’, The Review of Income and Wealth, 30, June 1984, pp. 207–62;
United Nations, Projections and Perspective Studies Branch, Handbook of World Development Statistics, 1982 (New York: UN Department of International Economic and Social Affairs, 1982).
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© 1987 International Economic Association
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Russett, B. (1987). Economic Change as a Cause of International Conflict. In: Schmidt, C., Blackaby, F. (eds) Peace, Defence and Economic Analysis. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18898-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18898-7_9
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