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Reality Check: Revising Theories of International Politics in Response to the End of the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

William C. Wohlforth
William C. Wohlforth
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

The end of the cold war has produced a sustained debate on international relations theory. Some scholars argue that the unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful demise of the post-World War II international order undermines the entire research agenda of the subfield; others maintain that it warrants an adjustment of the balance between theories or theoretical traditions; and still others hold that it has little or no relevance to theory. This essay reviews the debate in light of the new evidence that has accumulated over the past five years. It finds that because scholars rarely make the empirical implications of their arguments explicit, the cascade of new information concerning the event cannot advance the debate. However, the natural focus provided by a sudden and unexpected event of seminal importance and the outpouring of new data suggest the possibility of empirically driven progress in one's understanding of change in world politics. The article concludes with guidelines designed to increase the likelihood of such progress by clarifying the debate in advance of new releases of primary data.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , July 1998 , pp. 650 - 680
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1998

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References

1 Fox, , “Interwar International Relations Research: The American Experience,” World Politics 2 (October 1949), 67–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A second generation of scholarship on international relations theory and the end of the cold war is in the works: Thomas Bierstecker, Richard Herrmann, R. Ned Lebow, and Nina Tannenwald are editing a forthcoming volume, Understanding the End of the Cold War, as part of a multiyear project organized by the Mershon Center of Ohio State University and the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. The new and forthcoming literature on change in Soviet foreign policy promises to be particularly rich. Important examples include Checkel, Jeffrey T., Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Matthew Evangelista, Taming the Bear: Transnational Relations and the Demise of the Soviet Threat (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming); Robert D. English, Russia Views the West: The Intellectual and Political Origins of Soviet New Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming); and Mendelson, Sarah E., Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet With-drawal from Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other notable treatments from the first wave include Allen, Pierre and Goldmann, Kjell, eds., The End of the Cold War: Evaluating Theories of International Relations (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1992)Google Scholar; Hogan, Michael, ed., The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaddis, John Lewis, “International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 17 (Winter 1992–93)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herrmann, Richard, “Policy-Relevant Theory and the Challenge of Diagnosis: The End of the Cold War as a Case Study,” Political Psychology 15 (March 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fred Halliday, “The End of the Cold War and International Relations: Some Analytic and Theoretical Considerations,” in Booth, Ken and Smith, Steve, eds., International Relations Theory Today (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 Chapters by Richard Ned Lebow, Thomas Risse-Kappen, Rey Koslowski and Friedrich Kra-tochwil, and Janice Gross Stein were initially published in International Organization 48 (Spring 1994)Google Scholar.

4 Gaddis (fn. 2) offers the most comprehensive statement of this argument. It is especially appealing to scholars who advocate newer theories, less tainted by an association with the field's failure to anticipate the end of the cold war. For a recent example, see Katzenstein, Peter J., ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chap. 1Google Scholar.

5 For an example of this kind of response, see Stephen M. Walt's review of Lebow and Risse-Kappen, “The Gorbachev Interlude and International Relations Theory,” Diplomatic History 21 (Summer 1997)Google Scholar.

6 Most social scientists would expect social theory to fail to anticipate such complex outcomes. See Hechter, Michael, ed., “Symposium on Prediction in the Social Sciences,” American Sociological Review 100 (May 1995)Google Scholar. The only claim for predictive success (a “contingent forecast” emerging from the democratic peace literature) among theorists of international relations is Ray, James Lee and Russett, Bruce, “The Future as Arbiter of Theoretical Controversies: Predictions, Explanations and the End: of the Cold War,” British Journal of Political Science 26 (October 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For claims on the part of sociologists and Sovietologists, see Collins, Randall and Waller, David, “What Theories Predicted the State Breakdowns and the Revolutions in the Soviet Bloc?” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change 14 (1992)Google Scholar; Lipset, Seymour Martin and Bence, Gyorgy, “Anticipations of the Failure of Communism,” Theory and Society 23, no. 2 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A good critique of predictive claims is Rutland, Peter, “Sovietology: Notes for a Post-Mortem,” National Interest 31 (Spring 1993)Google Scholar.

7 See Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 7, Strategies of Inquiry (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975).

8 Walt (fn. 5), 476.

9 On process tracing in qualitative research, see George, Alexander L. and McKeown, Timothy J., “Case Studies and Theories of Organizational Decision Making,” in Coulam, Robert F. and Smith, Richard A., eds., Advances in Information Processing in Organizations, vol. 2 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAJ Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Roberts, Clayton, The Logic of Historical Explanation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Andrew Bennett and Alexander George, “Process Tracing in Case Study Research” (Paper presented at the Mac Arthur Foundation Workshop on Case Study Methods, Harvard University, October 1997; available at http://www.georgetown.edu/bennett). This paper is a preliminary discussion of material that will appear in Bennett and George, Case Studies and Theory Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming).

10 As of this writing, the books under review are among the most recent, comprehensive, and best documented with publicly available sources. Many other books should certainly be considered essential reading, including Garthoff, Raymond L., The Great Transition (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994)Google Scholar; Matlock, Jack F. Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995)Google Scholar; Oberdorfer, Don, The Turn (New York: Poseiden, 1991)Google Scholar; Besschloss, Michael R. and Talbott, Strobe, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little Brown, 1993)Google Scholar; and Hutchings, Robert L., American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider's Account of V, S. Policy in Europe, 1989–1992 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

11 The best-developed work in the literature on the end of the cold war is the scholarship on the role of these ideas in explaining change in Soviet policy. See, e.g., the works by Checkel, English, and Mendelson in fn. 2; and Robert G. Herman, “Identity, Norms, and National Security. The Soviet Foreign Policy Revolution and the End of the Cold War,” in Katzenstein (fn. 4).

12 Maier, Charles S., Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the Collapse of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 261Google Scholar.

13 Matlock ( fn. 10) is the single source that best captures this interaction. For a detailed review of German and American works on this period, see Risse, Thomas, “The Cold War's Endgame and German Unification,” International Security 21 (Spring 1997)Google Scholar.

14 Kuran, Timur, “Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989,” in Bcrmeo, Nancy, ed., Liberalization and Democratization: Change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University' Press, 1991)Google Scholar. This volume docs for theories ot comparative politics what Lebow and Risse Kappen do for international relations. The comparison is illuminating.

15 Cf. Ray and Russett (fn. 6), who agree that what matters in theory appraisal is not predicting an outcome (many different analysts predicted the Soviet collapse or the cold war's end—in a hot war) but rather predicting an outcome as a result of a specific causal process (in Ray and Russett's case, the cold war ending as a result of Soviet democratization). I lence any prediction, including theirs, requires causal evaluation.

16 Many students of these events reach this conclusion. See, for example, Maier (fn. 12): “I have tried to organize this book to show how long-term pressures, on the one hand, and conscious choices, on the other, interacted precisely because the events of 1989 established so compelling a case for the power of both” (p. xv).

17 Lebow discusses such an effort in “The Cold War in Comparative Perspective,” in Bierstccker et al. (fn. 2).

18 With due regard to numerous differences, the analogy to meteorology is appropriate. See Dessler, David, “Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War,” International Studies Quarterly 35 (September 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Atmospheric scientists take it for granted that the causal analysis of extreme weather events is necessary to evaluate competing models, generate new hypotheses, and determine the absolute limits of forecasting. See Cotton, William C., Storms (Ft. Collins, Colo.: ASTR Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Cotton acknowledges another motivation, which I ought to do as well: storms, both meteorological and geopolitical, are fascinating.

19 Here, I follow the example of Diesing, Paul, How Does Social Science Work? Reflections on Practice (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

20 See Dessler (fn. 18); Shapiro, Ian and Wendt, Alexander, “The Difference that Realism Makes,” Politics and Society 20 (June 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and J. Donald Moon, “The Logic of Political Inquiry: A Synthesis of Opposed Perspectives,” in Greenstein and Polsby (fn. 7), vol. 1, Political Science: Scope ami Theory. A useful assessment of the recent debate on this issue is James Lee Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), chap. 4.

21 A related and important issue is clarity and rigor in the use of countertactual thought experiments. For a useful discussion, see Tetlock, Phillip and Belkin, Aaron, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

22 See Ray and Russett (fn. 6) for this argument.

23 A statement or the causes of World War II may have nothing in common with a listing of the causes of war in general. Even if the explanatory problem is clearly defined, definitions of causal importance proliferate. See Roberts ( fn. 9), whose survey turns up ten meanings for “most important cause” (chap. 11).

24 A similar point is made by Ronald L. Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Norms, Identity and Culture in National Security,” in Katzenstein (fn. 4).

25 On within-case generalization (as well as causal importance and many other matters), I have found papers by David Dessler—now incorporated into his book manuscript “Positivism in World Politics”—to be particularly helpful. For a brilliant example of hypothesis testing by comparing generalizations within a single case, see Kaufman, Chaim, “Out of the Lab and into the Archives: A Method for Testing Psychological Explanations of Political Decision-Making,” International Studies Quarterly 38 (December 1994)Google Scholar.

26 Primary documents on the end ot the cold war from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are ‘translated and made available to scholars in the Bulletin of the Cold War History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.; and declassified U.S. and Soviet bloc documents are available at the National Security Archive, located at the George Washington University library. Both organizations envision major document releases in the upcoming years.

27 George and McKeown (fn. 9).