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The Transformation of Alliance Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Herbert S. Dinerstein
Herbert S. Dinerstein
Affiliation:
The RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California
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Extract

The pattern of international relations has always been in flux. The further we are removed from a period, the easier it is to discern its most salient features. So the fifteenth century now emerges as the time of the birth of the nation-state which was to become the key factor in international relations. Yet the supra-national church was not successfully challenged until the next century. Today it is clear that the French revolution completed the conversion of dynastic states into national states. In retrospect the 18th and particularly the 19th centuries are seen as the high point of the world expansion of Europe and the extension of its system of international relations. Now we realize that the Japanese victory over Russia in 1904–1905 marked the beginning of the counter-offensive against Europe. But what emerges sharply now was obscured then by a welter of incident.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , September 1965 , pp. 589 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1965

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References

1 von Clausewitz, Karl, On War (Modern Library, New York, 1943), p 332Google Scholar.

2 Chamberlain, particularly, and even Churchill, expected that aerial bombing would produce far more casualties than it actually did. However, 50,000 British civilians died in German air raids, a figure that would have seemed horrible enough to the statesmen of 1938.

3 The following is a partial list:

a. Franco-Prussian War, 1870.

b. Serbo-Montenegrin War against Turkey, 1876.

c. Russo-Turkish War, 1877–1888.

d. British-Afghan War, 1878.

e. The Zulu War, 1879.

f. War of the Pacific, 1879–1883.

g. British-Egyptian hostilities, 1882.

h. Serbo-Bulgarian War, 1885.

i. Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895.

j. Italo-Ethiopian War, 1896.

k. Greco-Turkish War, 1897.

1. Spanish-American War, 1898.

m. The Boer War, 1899–1902.

n. The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905.

o. Tripolitan War between Italy and Turkey, 1911–1912.

p. The First Balkan War, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece against Turkey, 1912–1913.

q. Second Balkan War, Bulgaria against Serbia, Greece, Rumania, and Turkey, 1913.

4 It is not generally appreciated that the Japanese, despite their naval victories, were staggered by the extent of their losses and probably would have soon taken the initiative in suing for peace, had not Russia done so because of the revolutionary situation in the latter country. I am indebted to Paul Langer for this realization.

5 The Soviet Union was revisionist when Germany was weak, a defender of the status quo after Hitler came to power, and revisionist again in 1939 when it seized the opportunity to gain territory and remain neutral in a war between its foes. The status quo position of the Soviet Union at various times must be distinguished from that of Great Britain and France, for unlike them it had great expectations of radical favorable chances in the future. The Soviet Union favored the status quo when its relative weakness permitted no other course, but was prepared to shift when opportunities for aggrandizement offered themselves. Professor Vernon V. Aspaturion suggested this and other formulations.

6 These lines, like the rest of the paper, were written in March 1965. No changes have been made in the text to accommodate subsequent events like the Dominican crisis.

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