Polarity and War: The Changing Structure of International Conflict by Alan Ned Sabrosky

Author:Alan Ned Sabrosky [Sabrosky, Alan Ned]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781000306026
Google: 4gaiDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 4204611
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1985-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

Polarization and War

The early theorists' hopes of finding a simple relationship between polarization and war have been disappointed by the studies undertaken to date. Although there are disagreements amongst them, there is a general consensus that the relationship is neither linear nor constant over time. Bueno de Mesquita found that changes in polarization "tightness" was a good predictor to war proneness, but that the slope of the regression equation varied with time.20 I found a curvilinear relationship between polarization and war, with both very high and very low scores associated with a greater amount of war in the subsequent five-year period. However, while this relationship was very strong for the 20th century, it was quite weak for the 19th.21 Singer and Small found a similar intercentury difference using their polarization index.22

This intercentury difference has manifested itself in other sorts of studies employing alliance data, even those in which polarization was not a concern per se. In a soon-to-be-completed study by the author, it was discovered that, after 1903, great power alliances which had another great power as their "target" always produced a sharp increase in the rate of growth of the target's armed forces, and that this in turn always produced a measurable increase in the allies armed forces growth as well (▵̅ P1 x ≈ .36, p̅ ≤ 10-5, calculated by a moving Chow's F-test). On the other hand, prior to 1903, alliance targetings had no significant impact whatever.23

This suggests at least one plausible explanation for our persistent observation of an intercentury difference. In the 19th century, alliances were, in the classic balane-of-powe fashion, equilibrating mechanisms. Thus, as alliances were formed or broken, the system polarized and depolarized without generating an immediate or urgent security threat to any power. Rather, security threats leading to war occurred only when alliances did not shift quickly enough, or moved in the wrong direction. Under such conditions one might expect little or no relationship between polarization on the one hand, and arms races and war on the other.

Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, however, the situation changed dramatically. Alliances seemed to be formed, not to attentuate threats, but to build a winning coalition in case of war. Understandably, this sort of alliance is likely to trigger an arms race, which in turn dramatically increases the probability that conflicts will escalate into war. Of course, this explanation is incomplete; why is it that the function of alliances changes so suddenly? The origins of the major structural transformation that appears to occur in the international systems sometime between 1890 and 1905 remains, at this writing, a matter of speculation.

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