States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s a...

Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics

(1976). Society and the Stalinist state in the period of the five year plans. Social History: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 139-175.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03071027608567373

Society and the Stalinist state in the period of the five year plans

Seven factors that may have contributed to the national integration of the working classes in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia 1871–1914 are explored: the national process of capital accumulation, the international prestige of the nation, the coming of interregional connections, compulsory education, suffrage, the role of the army, and the introduction of social insurance systems. The (provisional) results of this exploration show a clustering of integration-promoting factors in Britain, Germany and France, which is to a certain extent lacking in Italy and Russia.

The National Integration of European Working Classes (1871–1914)

We must finally understand that of all precious capital in the world, the most precious capital, the most decisive capital is human beings, cadres. We must understand that in our present condition cadres decide everything. If we have good and plentiful cadres in industry, in agriculture, in transport, in the Army, our country will be invincible. If we have no such cadres we will limp with both legs. Joseph Stalin Descartes argued that the initial operation in the solution of any complex problem must be its subdivision into a series of smaller, less intricate, and therefore, hopefully, more tractable problems. Following that strategy, this study will examine one particular aspect of the purges—the destruction of the Soviet diplomatic corps—in an attempt to shed more light on the general nature of the purges and to assess the relationship, if any, between the purges and the evolution of Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s. The central tasks, then, are to describe the impact of the "Great Terror" on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and its embassies, and to evaluate the significance of these developments for both domestic politics and foreign relations of the USSR.

The Impact of the Great Purges on the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs

In the history of Soviet studies in Britain, Marxist ideas and influences have always been an undercurrent. This undercurrent has sometimes acted as a positive force; sometimes it has been merely argumentative and factitious. But it has never escaped its subordinacy. Individual Marxists have worked in isolation, reliant upon the research, the formulations and the good will of non-Marxist colleagues. For the most part the influence of Marxism has been deflected, absorbed or contained. Thus, in examining the British field today, among the most important questions are the health and strength of bourgeois scholarship, and the prospects for developing a creative Marxist tendency capable of transcending its past “moral and intellectual” encirclement. Here one clarification is necessary. I have referred to the position in Britain, but the links between English and American scholarship are many and obvious. Is there, in fact, a specifically “British” Soviet studies? The internationalisation of Soviet studies has proceeded a long way, but it is far from complete. While language barriers, which separate British from Italian, French or German work, do not inhibit the emergence of an “Anglo-American” enterprise, the very different political conjunctures continue to distinguish the balance of tendencies in Britain and North America. And I must make it clear that for me Britain is “here” and North America is “over there”. I can only write about this relationship from my own experience and knowledge, and inevitably my perception of the influences emanating from “over there” will be incomplete. Finally, I shall seek to examine a number of positive developments in the study of the inter-war Soviet economy and its socialist transformation, and I shall cover the decade which began in 1966. This decade has a special significance. It began with the publication of the last, sixth edition of Maurice Dobb’s Soviet Economic Development since 1917, and finished with his death. If, as I shall argue, the last decade has been one of transition, Dobb was a central figure in that process.

Beryl J. Williams

Papers

Essays in honour of E. H. Carr

Essays in Honour of E.H. Carr