Volatile States in International Politics by Eleonora Mattiacci

Author:Eleonora Mattiacci
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Alternative Explanations

As Chapter 2 makes clear, it is possible to think of several alternative explanations of volatility in states’ behaviors. This section explores why such alternative explanations are not able to capture variation in volatility as well as my argument does.

For example, it could be that the presence of specific issues between France and the US explains the increase in French volatility toward the US. More issues could have developed or issues could have become more salient post-1962 . The presence of issues might increase the opportunities to interact and thus increase the probability of volatile behavior. Similarly, salient issues might attract greater attention and thus spur both more cooperation and conflict.

Statistically, a series of tests of proportion comparing the issues present pre- and post-1962 shows that there is no significant difference between the two periods in terms of the number of issues that were present. Moreover, similar tests show that the incidence of traditionally salient issues such as military and economic issues does not seem to differ much between the two time periods.168 Similarly, a close examination of the historical record does not provide sufficient evidence for this issue-based explanation. As the discussion above illustrates, declassified and contemporaneous sources suggest that issues that were present and salient in 1954, such as what to do with communist countries, Europe’s integration, the German question, nuclear weapons, NATO, and the transition of French colonialism, do not disappear in the years after 1962, when volatility decreases.

Not only do these similar issues appear to be recurrent throughout the time period 1954–1962, but also the previous discussion suggests that France and the US often created issues dynamically, coupling and decoupling bigger issues to serve their political purposes.

In particular, France did see relations between France and the US as comprising very many topics or issues: “Berlin, NATO, the UN, Franco-American nuclear relations, the Far East, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, economic relations between the US and Europe and the dollar.”169 Yet what constituted an “issue” often morphed as a function of political calculus. Examples abound. French decision makers, at different points in time and to serve their domestic agenda, alternated between connecting France’s policies in Africa with the larger struggle against communism taking place both in Africa and in Europe (e.g., in the case of Suez) and arguing that those policies in Africa were the domain of domestic politics and had little to do with foreign policy.170 At different times, French officials presented the issue of what to do with the Soviet Union and what to do about the German question as linked or as disjoint.171

The political determination of what constituted an “issue” for consideration was politically motivated and dependent on the (previous) decision to cooperate or not. Refusing to cooperate or proliferate and thus rejecting invitations to participate in the Limited Test Ban Treaty, France argued that disarmament and proliferation were linked and should have been treated as two faces of the same coin, though Americans disagreed with the linking of these two concepts.172

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