Alliances Versus Federations: An Analysis with Military and Economic Capabilities Distinguished

This essay explores the distinction between federations and alliances and asks the question: When will states choose to federate rather than ally? William Riker (1964) argues that a necessary condition for a federal state's formation is that those offering the federal bargain must seek to "expand their territorial control, usually either to meet an external military or diplomatic threat or to prepare for military or diplomatic aggression and aggrandizement." This argument, though, fails to ask why states sometimes respond to threats by forming federations and at other times by forming alliances. Here, after assuming that states have initial endowments of military and economic resources, where economic resources enter utility functions directly and a.re what states maximize and where military capability influences preference only insofar as it determines a state's ability to counter threats, we offer a. multi-stage game-theoretic model in which states may be compelled to divert economic resources to military spending. Alliances, in turn, are self-enforcing coalitions designed to augment a state's offensive or defensive capabilities. Federations, which serve the same ends as alliances, a.re coalitions that need to be enforced by the "higher authority" established when the federation is formed. Our operating assumption is that states seek to form a. federation in lieu of an alliance if and only if (1) a stable alliance partition does not exist or, if one exists, it is dominated by an unstable partition and (2) if the cost of the loss of sovereignty to each state in the federation is offset by the gains from joining it, relative to what that state secures as its security value

Conflict and Stability in Anarchic International Systems

A considerable part of theory in international relations concerns the issue of whether cooperation and stability can emerge from the competition and self-interest of sovereign powers existing in a state of anarchy. Does anarchy, if ever, imply stability in the form of a balance-of-power, or does stability require restraints which arise from the complex nexus of interdependencies characterizing the contemporary world economy and its associated institutions? The analysis in this essay supposes that nation-states are each endowed with some infinitely divisible resource, which those states maximize and which also measures their ability to overcome adversaries in the event of conflict. In this context we reexamine and reformulate the realist view, by offering a noncooperative, extensive-form model of international conflict without exogenous mechanisms for the enforcement of agreements in order to uncover the conditions under which a balance-of-power as construed by our model ensures the sovereignty of all states in anarchic systems. Our primary conclusion is simple: there exists at least one world, albeit abstract and reminiscent of the frictionless planes with which we introduce the perspectives of physics, in which a balance-of-power ensures sovereignty

The Geographical Imperatives of the Balance of Power in 3-Country Systems

This essay extends a cooperative game-theoretic model of balance of power in anarchic international systems to include considerations of the asymmetry which geography occasions in the offensive and defensive capabilities of countries. The two substantive ideas which concern us are a formalization of the notion of a "balancer" and that of a "central power." What we show is that in stable systems, only specific countries (such as Britain in the 18th and the 19th centuries) can play the role of balancer, and that the strategic imperatives of a central country (e.g., Germany in the period 1871-1945) differ in important ways from those of "peripheral" countries

Return of the Luddites

Stephen Walt’s critique of the application of formal analysis to international security studies, we take strong issue with a number of Walt’s arguments and assertions, and we try to clarify what we believe are his misconceptions about the nature and mechanisms of progress in scientific research. We begin, however, by identifying some of the issues we do not dispute with Walt. First, it is true that formal analysis, especially in the area of security studies, is only infrequently motivated by the attempt to explain some well-documented empirical regularity or universally recognized empirical anomaly. If there is room for disagreement here, it is the extent to which regularities or anomalies can be found in the security studies literature that are sufficiently precise to allow careful analysis. Second, there is little disagreement that some formalism exists for its own sake, although we need to be cautious here because much of this rigor seeks to understand the very definition of rationality in complex strategic environments. Third, despite the proliferation of competing models of deterrence, bargaining, coalitions, threats, and so on, those models are rarely set against each other for competitive empirical assessment. Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that very little of what researchers label “theory” is theory in any true sense, but instead is often best described as a demonstration of one’s ability to cobble together assumptions and derive something that can be labeled “lemma” or “theorem.

Less Filling, Tastes Great: The Realist-Neoliberal Debate

This essay examines and reformulates the realist-neoliberal debate. Focusing initially on the issue of the attribution of goals to states, we argue that not only are goals merely the epiphenomena of other things but also that their specification constitutes but a re-description of strategic environments. That is, although an attribution of goals may contribute to our characterization of outcomes, a discussion of them is not central to the development of a theory that explains and predicts the outbreak of conflict and the patterns of cooperation. Instead we argue that the realist-neoliberal debate should be recast so that our central research agenda is the development of substantively specific models that allow us to ascertain how the equilibrium to a game in which states structure international affairs influences the types of issue-specific subgames states play, how countries coordinate to equilibria of different types, how we can characterize the coordination problems associated with different equilibria, how states can enhance the attractiveness of an equilibrium, and how states can signal commitments to the strategies that are part of that equilibrium

Alliances in Anarchic International Systems

Alliances play a central role in international relations theory. However, aside from applications of traditional cooperative game theory that ignore the issue of enforcement in anarchic systems, or interpretations of the repeated Prisoners' Dilemma in the attempt to understand the source of cooperation in such systems, we have little theory on which to base predictions about alliance formation. This essay, then, builds on an n-country, non-cooperative, game-theoretic model of conflict in anarchic systems in order to furnish a theoretical basis for such predictions. Defining an alliance as a collection of countries that jointly abide by "collective security strategies" with respect to each other but not with respect to members outside of the alliance, we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for an alliance system to be stable. In addition, we show that not all winning or minimal winning coalitions can form alliances, that alliances among smaller states can be stable, that bipolar alliance structures do not exhaust the set of stable structures, and that only specific countries can play the role of balancer

Notes on Constitutional Change in the ROC: Presidential versus Parliamentary Government

The debate over constitutional reform has moved to center stage in Taiwan, with a focus on two issues: the choice of presidential versus parliamentary government and a determination of the ultimate role of the National Assembly. These two issues, in turn, are linked by a third -- whether the president ought to be elected indirectly by the National Assembly or directly in a mass popular vote. Of these issues, though, the choice between a presidential and a parliamentary system is central, because it requires that we consider the methods whereby chief executives and legislators are elected and, correspondingly, the role of the National Assembly. Beginning, then, with the issue of presidential versus parliamentary government, this essay argues that the most commonly cited arguments over the advisability of choosing one or the other of these two forms are, for the most part, theoretically meaningless and are largely rhetorical devices for rationalizing prejudices about preferred governmental structures and the state's role. Consequently, we attempt here to provide a more useful set of criteria with which to evaluate reform in general and the choice between presidential and parliamentary government in particular. We conclude that although the choice between presidential and parliamentary forms is important, equal attention should be given to the methods whereby a president and the legislature are elected. It is these institutional parameters that determine the character of political parties in Taiwan, their ability to accommodate any mainlander-native Taiwanese conflict, and the likelihood that executive and legislative branches will formulate coherent domestic and international policy

Realism Versus Neoliberalism: A Formulation

Although the debate between realism and neoliberalism offers deep insights and raises fundamental questions into the nature of international systems, it also offers the confusion that accompanies imprecisely formulated concepts and an imperfect application of subsidiary ideas. Using a noncooperative extensive-form game to model anarchic international systems, this essay seeks to resolve that debate by restating it in a more explicit and deductive context. Arguing that collective security corresponds to the system envisioned by neoliberals, we begin by differentiating between balance of power and collective security in terms of the strategies that characterize the foreign policies of countries. Next, we establish that both balance of power and collective security can correspond to equilibria in our game. Arguments about goals and institutions are then recast in terms of the different properties of these equilibria. In particular, a balance of power equilibrium does not guarantee every country's security, so in it countries must be vigilant about their relative share of resources. A collective security equilibrium, on the other hand, ensures everyone's sovereignty, and thereby allows absolute resource maximization. Unlike a balance of power equilibrium, however, a collective security equilibrium is not strong and it is not necessarily perfect, so the institutional structures facilitating the realization of mutual gains from the variety of cooperative "subgames" characterizing the world economy play a critical role in establishing the stability of that equilibrium