The Description for this book, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939: The Path to Ruin, will be forthcoming.

Scholars of security affairs can stop their dreary quarrels over military doctrine and balance assessments, and turn their attention to finding ways to prevent global warming and preserve the ozone layer. European leaders can contemplate how to spend peace dividends. This chapter assesses this optimistic view by exploring in detail the consequences for Europe of an end to the Cold War. It examines the effects of a scenario under which the Cold War comes to a complete end. The chapter argues that bipolarity, an equal military balance, and nuclear weapons have fostered peace in Europe. It offers an explanation for the peacefulness of the post-World War II order. The chapter examines the theories underlying claims that a multipolar Europe is likely to be as peaceful, if not more peaceful, than Cold War Europe. The peace-loving democracies theory holds that domestic political factors, not calculations about military power or the international economic system, are the principal determinant of peace.

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The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939: The Path to Ruin

Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War

Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.

Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?

Nations have two methods of increasing their security: building arms and forming alliances. Both methods present different political costs that must be incurred to raise security. Building arms requires shifting economic resources to the military. Forming alliances requires abandoning interests that conflict with those of the ally. Each of these strategies produces domestic opposition. A nation's response to a threat to its security must weigh the relative attractiveness of arms versus allies, both in terms of their effects on internal politics and on their external benefits. Three cases are examined in the light of this argument. The response of Austria and France to the unification of Germany in the 1860s is the central case. Theories of alliance formation based on neorealism and the offense-defense balance predict that Austria and France should have allied against the mutual threat of Prussia. This article argues that they did not form an alliance because arming separately presented lower political costs. World Wars I and II likewise are analyzed from the perspective of the argument above.

Arms versus allies: trade-offs in the search for security

I would like to thank Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Benjamin Frankel, Jay P. Greene, Barry R. Rosen, and Stephen Van Evera for their constructive comments and criticisms of this paper. All lapses in analysis and fact are strictly my own.

Do Weak States Bandwagon

: Military historian Williamson Murray has prepared this selected bibliography as a guide to the vast body of military histories and as a reading program that could extend our understanding and comprehension of that terrible, yet intriguing, human phenomenon that is war. JAWP) is making it available to those individuals in DoD and the Services who feel that history can shed light on the problems they confront today. The bibliography is derived from the substantial literature on European and American military history The works were chosen for a variety of reasons: quality of scholarship, point of view subject matter, and readability. They are categorized by period and subject matter, and given a rating by the author. The first chapter contains an annotated list of twenty-five books that Dr. Murray considers essential to the library of a warfighter, scholar, or student of military history.

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The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938-1939: The Path to Ruin

Citations

Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War

Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?

Arms versus allies: trade-offs in the search for security

Do Weak States Bandwagon

Military History: A Selected Bibliography

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