Do States Ally Against the Leading Global Power?

The latest issue of International Security came yesterday. It's a beauty. I was impressed since a few long-established scholars have articles, and I'm looking forward to reading Helen Milner et al., "The Center Still Holds: Liberal Internationalism Survives." The rest of the selections look great as well, and the timing's perfect since I'm starting up my Fall 2010 World Politics class next week.

Best of all, the lead article from Jack Levy and William Thompson is an instant classic: "Balancing on Land and at Sea: Do States Ally against the Leading Global Power?" I finished reading it Sunday afternoon. My specialty, back in the day, was international theory on balancing and alliances. My 1999 dissertation focused on "under-balancing" in interwar Europe. It's a topic that still gets a good amount of attention in the literature, but I've fallen far behind by this point (and I have no aspirations to jump back into that scholarship for publication). Mostly teaching this stuff nowadays, which I obviously enjoy.

In any case, Levy and Thompson have the most comprehensive review of the research on balancing and alliances that's available. All up to date of course, but going way back as well. (It was amazing to see Inis L. Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations, 1962. One of my undergraduate professors used to joke that he thought it was Claude Inis, and I used the book in my research. Funny how those memories come back.) The central problem for balance of power theory today is its failure to explain why no great power coalition of states has formed to balance the dominant position of the United States in the international system. I always get a kick out of reading the theoretical literature, since its abstracts away from current debates. For example, we keep hearing repeated announcements that the U.S. is declining as the globe's "hegemonic" power --- Glenn Greenwald cheered that possibility the other day --- but there is no new hegemon on the horizon, not even close, so even as the U.S. "declines" the demand for the American provision of international public goods will remain as high as ever. As Levy and Thompson indicate, not only has international theory failed to explain why no balancing formation against the U.S. has emerged, but that the dominant "land-based" explanations in the literature can't explain unrivaled American preponderance in an age of global mastery of the international commons. More specifically, the U.S. is the preeminent ocean-going power in world history, and where previous theories focused on continental land-based great power competition, with the history of European international relations as the central database, America's profile as the preeminent naval power providing security for trade and markets means that traditional causes of balancing behavior may not be applicable to the U.S. case. (There's reduced threat perception among potential adversaris, since the U.S. seeks no territorial conquests at the periphery).

With that, let's hear it from the authors:

Our basic argument is that alliance behavior and other forms of strategic interaction are different in the global system than in continental systems. States’ highest priorities are to provide for their territorial and constitutional integrity. The greatest threats to those interests come from large armies that can cross territorial frontiers, seize and occupy territory, take or destroy resources, depose political leaders, and impose new political structures and social systems. Dominant continental powers devote their resources to building armies that facilitate the defense of their frontiers and the expansion of regional territorial empires. They pose threats to other great powers as well as to less powerful states, and other great powers often respond by forming defensive alliances, building up their own military capabilities, or both.

Maritime powers have smaller armies, fewer capabilities for invading and occupying, and fewer incentives to do so. They pose significantly weaker threats to the territorial integrity of other states, particularly to other great powers, but greater threats to each other than to leading land-based powers. All of this reduces the incentives of land-based powers to balance against the leading global maritime power, even if the maritime leader is considerably stronger than all the rest. Thus, in 1915 Norman Angell addressed the issue of “why the world does not fear British ‘marinism’ and does fear German militarism” by arguing that “‘marinism’ does not encroach on social and political freedom and militarism does.”

Maritime power is not based on navies alone, but also, as Alfred Thayer
Mahan recognized, on economic strength, and the leading sea power is usually the leading economic power in the global system. This is as true of the United States today as it was of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the principal reason maritime powers develop their navies is to protect and expand trade, just as the principal reason land powers develop their armies is to protect and possibly expand territory. Leading sea powers also create international regimes to protect their positions of economic and naval dominance. They have evolved into leading air and space powers since the twentieth century, thereby technologically updating the means by which they control “the commons” so critical to predominance in the global system. Thus the distinction is not just between land-based military power and seabased naval power and the different threats imposed by armies and navies, but even more important, the larger distinction between the threats posed by territorial hegemony over land and people and by economic hegemony over markets. Economic dominance does not necessarily require political control, certainly not over other great powers, as Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher recognized in their concept of the “imperialism of free trade.” Political leaders and their peoples may resent both the lack of fair access to distant resources and markets and poor terms of trade, but these resentments pale in comparison to the threat of physical invasion and imperial dominance posed by land-based hegemons.

Unlike land-based empires, dominance in markets and on the seas does not generally involve infringements on the territorial sovereignty of other leading powers in more developed areas, and sea powers have historically shown little interest in getting involved in territorial disputes on the continent. The classic illustration is Britain. As balance of power theorists have long recognized, Britain’s primary interests lay in expanding its markets and investment opportunities overseas. Its primary interests on the European continent lay not in increasing its power and influence, but only in preventing any single state or combination of states from gaining control of a disproportionate amount of the resources on the continent, which could then provide a basis for challenging Britain’s maritime dominance. This is the classic role of the offshore balancer, which many attribute to the United States with respect to both Europe and Asia in the contemporary system.

Given these differences between the perceived threats associated with naval and economic dominance, on the one hand, and regional territorial hegemony, on the other, we expect high concentrations of land-based military power to generate counterbalancing coalitions of other regional great powers, but we do not expect high concentrations of sea power to have a comparable effect in generating counterbalancing coalitions against the leading global power. In fact, given the public goods often provided by leading economic states, we argue that high concentrations of sea power are likely to be associated with a lower likelihood of balancing by continental great powers, and that great powers are more likely to ally with predominant sea powers than to ally against them. Great powers ally with predominant sea powers to secure military or diplomatic support against threats posed by the dominant land power or another traditional rival, gain economic benefits by associating with the leading economic power and the global system it has helped create, or reap a share of the spoils from being on the winning side of an anticipated war.

Readers can just plug in the United States as the hypothesized model case and you'll get the picture.

The authors take balancing theory to a new level, but simplify it as well (since there's been so many emendations to the main propositions over the years it's kinda ridiculous). Sea power is essentially a whole different class of capabilities, and when a state is both preponderant and benign, counterbalancing alliances are unlikely to form. The empirical tests of this research is innovative and rigorous (including regression analysis.) And I got a kick out the concluding discussion, since Levy and Thompson save a good deal of firepower for Stephen Walt, who is perhaps the most important "realist" scholar working in this literature today, and I respect him much less nowadays, since he's become one of the biggest academic Israel-bashers on the scene.

The article's free to download in PDF, so knock yourself out on some top-flight political science research.