Historical research since the opening of the British archives in the late 1960s has brought about a substantial revision of the image of appeasement that had generally been accepted after World War II. Yet the traditional image has scarcely been questioned in contemporary writing on international relations. This article examines some of the central themes in recent studies relating to appeasement: the “structural” approach, which offers a new overall interpretation; the economic, military, and intelligence “dimensions” of British foreign policy in the 1930s; and the breaking down of traditional stereotypes of the roles of Chamberlain and Churchill. This reappraisal has important implications for the discipline of international relations, its view of the origins of World War II, and theories of international structural change.

Realist approaches to international politics raise the possibility that external policies based on expanding military power may undermine the economic bases of that power. The links between external strategy and economic performance can be classified as fiscal (macroeconomic effects), structural (microeconomic and structural effects), and protectionist (effects on foreign economic policy). The case of prewar Japan suggests that, for countries at an intermediate position in the international power hierarchy and in the international division of labor, the positive effects of external ambition on economic performance may dominate. Other cases—National Socialist Germany, contemporary developing countries, and the postwar superpowers—seem to confirm that international position is a principal determinant of these effects.

Despite their limited accomplishments in promoting economic development, the authoritarian regimes brought to power through social-revolutionary transformations—from the French Revolution of the 18th century to the Iranian Revolution of the present—have excelled at conducting humanly costly wars with a special fusion of popular zeal, meritocratic professionalism, and central coordination. Revolutionary elites, whether communist or not, have been able to build the strongest states in those countries whose geopolitical circumstances allowed the emerging new regimes to become engaged in protracted and labor-intensive international warfare.

The authors present a theory of the general enabling conditions for war which predicts that war is possible, though not inevitable, when the conditions of the theory are satisfied. Whether a war will actually occur depends upon the idiosyncratic situational factors that are outside the scope of the theory. Three conditions make war possible: (i) Aspirations do not match achievements: governments only initiate wars when their achieved share of global capabilities differs from their aspired share of capabilities. (2) Salience: governments only initiate wars against other governments when there is a history of substantial interaction. (3) Power: governments never initiate wars against other governments that have a substantially greater military capacity. These conditions may be viewed as a series of three filters that identify pairs of countries between which war is possible. The theory predicts that wars will not occur in any dyad that does not pass through all the filters. In testing this theory for all nations between 1816 and 1980, the authors allowed for the fact that governments may preemptively initiate wars against other governments that meet these conditions.

The argument of this paper is that the emergence of military dictatorships, such as the Brazilian regime of 1964, is not caused by an economic crisis of dependent capitalist development. Rather, it results from a polarization and radicalization of the democratic regime by which it is preceded. Democracies handed down from above, like that in Brazil and other South American democracies, lend themselves to polarization and radicalization. They therefore favor the emergence of modern forms of autocracy.

Specialists in the study of Soviet foreign policy increasingly feel torn between the positivist culture of political science departments and the holistic traditions of the Soviet area-studies programs. In fact, these approaches are largely complementary. Examples taken from literature on Soviet security policy and on the domestic sources of Soviet expansionism show how positivist theories and methods can be used to clarify holist (or traditionalist) arguments, to sharpen debates, to suggest more telling tests, and to invigorate the field's research agenda.

The notion that the attitudes of the American public vis-a-vis the Soviet Union are driven essentially by emotion, and that they are more extreme and volatile than those of the government itself, is widely believed but may not be valid. While the public typically desires a combination of tough and conciliatory policies, it also tends to express, at any given moment, particular concern about whichever of the two it feels is most slighted in U.S. policy. Thus, the public will tend to seek conciliatory behavior from hawkish administrations while preferring a tough stance from administrations it deems dovish. By so doing, the public is likely to have a moderating effect on official behavior toward Moscow. The proposition is tested with reference to shifts in public approval of presidential Soviet policy, and certain implications are suggested for the manner in which political leadership perceives of its mandate.

Recent work has focused on the problem of how states cooperate in the environment of anarchy. Linked to the ideas of the Prisoners' Dilemma and public goods, that work has provided important insights and lines of research. But it also has problems and limitations, which are explored in the paper. The anarchy approach stresses individual actors' choices and slights questions of how issues are posed and constrained. It takes preferences as given without exploring either the frequency of PD situations or the ways in which preferences are formed and can change. Many of the concepts the framework uses—e.g., cooperation and defection, the distinction between offense and defense, and the nature of power—are problematical. Issues of beliefs, perceptions, norms, and values also lead to a different perspective on cooperation.

Soviet military decision making is characterized by a division of labor between the party, which issues broad policy guidance, and the professional military, which oversees the development of the armed forces based on that guidance. There is to date no civilian institution whose functions parallel those of the General Staff. The party is now, and has historically been, dependent on the professional military for the formation of options on strategy, organization, and force composition. The Soviets have never equated civilian control and authority with civilian management. Absolute party authority over defense policy has been maintained through control of personnel and resource allocation.

Many scholars expected U.S. trade policy in the 1970s and beyond to look like that of the 1920s and 1930s—i.e., to be marked by widespread and high levels of protectionism. The American market, however, remained relatively open. One central reason was the growth of antiprotectionist sentiment among American firms. Firms now opposed protection because they had developed extensive ties to the international economy through exports, multinational production, and global intrafirm trade. The development of these international ties by the 1970s reduced protectionist pressure by American firms even when they were faced with serious import competition: protection had become too costly. The preferences of these firms also seemed to affect trade policy outcomes, turning them away from protection.

Since the 1960s, new left-socialist or ecology parties have appeared in approximately half of the advanced Western democracies. These parties have a common set of egalitarian and libertarian tenets and appeal to younger, educated voters. The author uses macropolitical and economic data to explain the electoral success of these left-libertarian parties. While high levels of economic development are favorable preconditions for their emergence, they are best explained in terms of domestic political opportunity structures. There is little evidence that these parties are a reaction to economic and social crises in advanced democracies. The findings suggest that the rise of left-libertarian parties is the result of a new cleavage mobilized in democratic party systems rather than of transient protest.

The preventive motivation for war arises from political leaders' perceptions that their states' military power and potential are declining relative to those of a rising adversary, and from their fear of the consequences of that decline. It is conceptualized as an intervening variable between changing power differentials and the outbreak of war, and is distinguished from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic. The strength of the preventive motivation is hypothesized to be a function of a state's expectations regarding its rate of military decline, the margin of its inferiority in the future, the probability of a future war, and the probability of a victorious war now with acceptable costs. It is also affected by the risk orientation of decision makers; the influence of the military in the political process; and domestic political factors that undermine the political security of decision makers as well as the military power and potential of the state.

Analysis of transitions to democracy is marked empirically by democracy's own resurgent vigor, and theoretically by shifts away from focus on global political economy to concern with such political variables as organization or leadership, and study of their expression within national arenas. Contributors to Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy (edited by Guillermo O'Donnell, Phillippe Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead) explore these issues with special emphasis on how regime transitions begin and on possibilities for social, cultural, and economic democratization. The collection focuses more on the transitions than on democracy itself, and fails to place transitions in the context of democracy's social and cultural bases. Insufficient attention is given to civil society and to its organized links with politics. This theoretical and empirical position obscures the appeal of liberal democracy to elites and masses, and hinders understanding of why popular groups accept pacts and back the leaders who make them.

Theories of development are derived from readings of history. Modern historical research challenges many of the basic beliefs about how economies develop. More specifically, recent research suggests that the lessons drawn from the history of industrialization in England are highly misleading. The article thus challenges the empirical foundations for much of classical and Marxian development theory.

The classic dialectic between Realist and Liberal theories of international politics, as expressed by Robert O. Keohane, ed., in Neorealism and Its Critics and Richard Rosecrance The Rise of the Trading State, can be transcended. Neither paradigm singularly explains international behavior: Realism is the dominant approach, but liberal theories of transnationalism and interdependence help to illuminate how national interests are learned and changed. Keohane and fellow critics argue that Neorealism—articulated definitively in Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979)—elegantly systematizes Realism, but concentrates on international system structure at the expense of system process. Focused tightly on the concept of bipolarity, Waltz's theory tends toward stasis; the unit (state) level unproductively becomes an analytical “dumping ground.” As a Neoliberal counterpoint, Rosecrance's argument does not go far enough. In the tradition of commercial liberalism, he argues that an open trading system offers states maneuverability through economic growth rather than through military conquest. He tempers his argument with Realist considerations of prudence, but fails to clarify Realist-Liberal links in his theory, or to explore fully the connections between power and non-power incentives influencing states' behavior. A synthesis of Neorealism and Neoliberalism is warranted: a systemic theory using the former to analyze at the level of structure, the latter more often at the level of process.

The signal performances of Southeast Asian countries in attaining economic growth and political stability are frequently explained by cultural and policy factors. Recent research suggests, however, that the role of the state is extensive and central to economic and political goals. The present approach to the comparative evaluation of state capacities attempts to account for the variations and nuances of the performance of Southeast Asian states. The structure of political support and available means of social control provide relatively greater capacity to state elites in Singapore and Malaysia, and less capacity to state elites in the Philippines and Indonesia; Thailand is an intermediate case.

Major changes in the postwar global environment have transformed “the” German question into many German questions that continue to complicate the foreign and domestic policy-making processes in the Federal Republic. Inconsistencies between official policy pronouncements and the accepted political modus operandi are explainable in terms of four “paradoxes”: (1) the nation/state identity paradox; (2) the reunification/integration paradox; (3) the stability/security paradox; and (4) the lessons-of-history/normalcy paradox. West German commitment to the Atlantic Alliance remains unshaken, but the FRG should not be forced to choose between the U.S. and Europe, between integration with the West and further improvement in relations with the GDR. Normalization of those relations will be best served by a mutual adherence to the principles of balance, territorial integrity, confidence building and greater transparency in matters of inter-German decision making.

The concept of the “reactive state” is useful in understanding the foreign economic policy behavior of Japan and certain other middle-range powers deeply integrated in the global political economy, particularly during periods of economic turbulence when international regimes do not fully safeguard their economic interests. The essential characteristics of the reactive state are two-fold: (1) it fails to undertake major independent foreign-policy initiatives although it has the power and national incentives to do so; (2) it responds to outside pressure for change, albeit erratically, unsystematically, and often incompletely.

In the Japanese case, reactive state behavior flows from domestic institutional characteristics as well as from the structure of the international system. Domestic features such as bureaucratic fragmentation, political factionalism, powerful mass media, and the lack of a strong central executive have played an especially important part in Japanese financial, energy, trade, and technology policy formation since 1971.

Since its inception, the Correlates of War project has been in the forefront of the quantitative analysis of war. This review seeks to integrate some of the major findings of the project into an explanation that identifies the steps that regularly occur before war. The explanation must be seen as an artificial construct, based on inductive generalizations from existing evidence and clues, whose primary utility at this stage of inquiry is to see what patterns precede wars, what conditions are associated with peace, and what factors may be of causal significance. The findings and the explanation derived from them are relevant to assessing some common realist practices and policies of states such as alliance making, military build-ups, hard-line bargaining, balancing of power, peace-through-strength, and deterrence. It is argued that among equals, power-politics behavior does not avoid war, but leads political actors to take steps that bring them closer to war.