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East European military expenditures in the 1970s: collective good or bargaining offer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

William M. Reisinger
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In late November 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu, general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, returned to Bucharest from a Moscow meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO). In a series of speeches from 25 November through 1 December, he began to denounce efforts by the Soviet Union to integrate more fully the armies of the WTO members and to get the East European members to increase their defense expenditures. Ceausescu was making a dramatic (and apparently successful) appeal for domestic support for his resistance to Soviet pressure. Other WTO member-states, although less publicly, have also resisted this Soviet pressure. Romania is not the only East European state ignoring Soviet calls for higher defense spending. Poland, for example, has also shown a significant decline during the 1970s in the amount of its gross national product (GNP) spent on defense (D/GNP). East Germany, on the other hand, increased its expenditures dramatically over the same decade.

Type
Research Note
Information
International Organization , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Winter 1983 , pp. 143 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1983

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References

1. Farlow, Robert L., “Romania,” in Staar, Richard F., ed., 1979 Yearbook on International Communist Affairs (Stanford, Cal.: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), pp. 68–69Google Scholar. See also Moore, Patrick, “The Ceausescu Saga,” RAD Background Report/275 (Romania), Radio Free Europe Research, 20 December 1978.Google Scholar

2. The Research Project on National Income in East Central Europe, based in New York City, has been researching this problem for a number of years. For a discussion of the difficulties involved, see Alton, Thad P., “Comparative Structure and Growth of Economic Activity in Eastern Europe,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, East-European Economies Post-Helsinki (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1977), pp. 199–266.Google Scholar

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8. Because his figures in Military Expenditures are based on East European data, Alton does not vouch for the accuracy of his estimates, apart from the component of personnel and pensions costs.

9. See Alton, Thad P. et al., “Defense Expenditures in Eastern Europe, 1965–1976,” in East-European Economies Post-Helsinki, pp. 267–88, esp. pp. 268–69.Google Scholar

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14. Starr, Harvey, “A Collective Goods Analysis of the Warsaw Pact after Czechoslovakia,” International Organization 28, 3 (Summer 1974), pp. 521–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Starr used data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies' The Military Balance. I do not use those data because they are not derived from a common methodology. Had I used Military Balance figures in Table 2, the tau statistics (without the Soviet Union) from 1970 to 1979 would have been:.6.6.47.33.33.33.47.33.33.29.

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19. Regression assumes that the data are interval-scaled—that the relation between data points corresponds to their number value (e.g., 5.2 represents twice as big a D/GNP as 2.6). Because of this, regression is more risky (given the problems of estimating defense spending accurately) than computing the tau statistic, which merely requires that the data be ordered correctly. Still, the r2 derived from such regression is useful because it shows the degree to which variations in GNP among the East European states account for variations in D/GNP.

20. Remington, Robin, The Warsaw Pact: Case Studies in Communist Conflict Resolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), p. 93Google Scholar. For more recent evidence of this, see Zimmerman, William, “Soviet-East European Relations in the 1980's and the Changing International System,” in Bornstein, Morris, Gitelman, Zvi, and Zimmerman, , eds., East-West Relations and the Future of Eastern Europe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), pp. 87–104.Google Scholar

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23. The Olson-Zeckhauser hypothesis is a special case of this assumption, one that treats only a pure collective good.

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26. Exactly what constitutes an acceptable contribution at a given time will depend on which issues become politicized over the course of negotiations. On top of D/GNP, the East Europeans are expected to make a variety of contributions, including bloc diplomatic solidarity, support for national liberation movements, and the backing of Soviet policy initiatives. Another contribution that has been growing in importance is investment in joint projects within the Soviet Union. See Bornstein, Morris, “Soviet Economic Growth and Foreign Policy,” p. 247Google Scholar, and Marer, Paul, “The Economies of Eastern Europe and Soviet Foreign Policy,” pp. 299–300Google Scholar, both in Bialer, Seweryn, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Col: Westview, 1981).Google Scholar

27. Marer, Paul, “Has Eastern Europe Become a Liability to the Soviet Union? The Economic Aspect,” in Gati, Charles, ed., The International Politics of Eastern Europe (New York: Praeger, 1976), p. 61.Google Scholar

28. Ibid.

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30. Marrese, Michael and Vanous, Jan, “Implicit Subsidies and Non-Market Benefits in Soviet Trade with Eastern Europe,” Dept. of Economics, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill., 12 1981)Google Scholar. Some of the difficulties with this type of analysis are discussed in Marer, Paul, “East European Economies: Achievements, Problems, Prospects,” in Rakowska-Harmstone, Teresa and Gyorgy, Andrew, eds., Communism in Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), pp. 267–69.Google Scholar

31. Marrese, and Vanous, , “Implicit Subsidies,” p. 128.Google Scholar

32. Bornstein, , “Soviet Economic Growth,” p. 247.Google Scholar

33. Marer mentions that an East European state's indebtedness to the West can increase its dependence on the Soviet Union (“Economies of Eastern Europe,” p. 305).

34. Multiple regression provides a way of estimating the impact of one variable on another while a third is held constant. In this case, it shows the effect of the subsidy variable on D/GNP when the index is controlled for. In 1978, for example, there is only a.01 probability that the true, rather than the statistical, relationship between the subsidy variable and D/GNP is actually negative.

35. The GDR's military role in Africa, for instance, may be partly a means of increasing its international prestige and visibility after being diplomatically dormant throughout the 1950s and 1960s. See Robinson, William F., “Eastern Europe's Presence in Black Africa,” RAD Background Report/142 (Eastern Europe), Radio Free Europe Research, 21 06 1979.Google Scholar

36. Schelling, Thomas argues that weakness can translate into strength: The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).Google Scholar