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This chapter is an interpretive essay that seeks to establish continuities in Russian and Soviet international behavior. However, it does not extrapolate Tsarist foreign policy goals (e.g., the search for warm-water ports) to explain Soviet international behavior. Instead, it focuses on patterns of cooperative and conflictual behavior at the systemic level. Three chronological periods are discerned. The first lasts from Russia's emergence as a European power through the destruction of Tsarist rule by world and civil wars.
The second period covers the roughly two decades between the two world wars of th[e twentieth] century. This relatively brief interwar period is the crucible in which the historical Russian experience was assimilated to the Marxist-Leninist worldview. The historical memory of other international actors with whom the Bolsheviks were obliged to deal, plus geopolitical interests inherited from the Russian Empire, provide the continuity between interwar Soviet foreign policy and Russia's international experience before the October Revolution. Soviet diplomacy adapted Realpolitik lessons from the Imperial Russian experience to the new conditions in which the Soviet Union was born. A complex of motives resulted—making single-factor explanations futile—in which a traditional balance-of-power policy was combined with the desire for international guarantees of state interests. In the years between the two wars, therefore, Soviet foreign policy came to be animated by a combination of conflictual and cooperative tendencies.
The third period comprises the two score years [after] the end of the Second World War, a war from which issued a world radically different from that which existed either between the two wars or before the first of
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them. Soviet actions and attitudes concerning international conflict and cooperation have evolved under these new conditions, yet they were shaped originally by the Bolshevik experience between the two wars. This analysis aims to discern the continuities in patterns of Soviet international behavior between the early Soviet period and [the date of publication, 1987], as well as contrasts for which the evolution of Soviet power and of the international system since 1917 accounts.
After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the religious wars in Europe, establishing the territorial state as the unit of action in international affairs along with the principle of its sovereignty, the "balance of power" came to signify the wish to avoid the hegemony of a single power. This absence of unipolarity was guaranteed by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), and during the eighteenth century the "balance of power" came to denote "expediency and egotism in a collectivity of roughly equal and intensely acquisitive states which were bound and regulated by nothing but expediency and egotism."[1] Still more important from the standpoint of Russian policy, the Treaty of Utrecht marked the foundation of a pan-European state system. The seventeenth-century wars among Sweden, Poland, Denmark, and Russia "were fought and terminated almost without reference to the relations between the western European States[, but after Utrecht] …, the European State System became an indissoluble unity and all States, east and west, were involved in every contest between any of its members."[2]
Throughout most of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, Russia prosecuted five wars against Turkey. Under Catherine the Great, the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774) marked Turkey's cession to Russia of the latter's claim as protector of the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, giving her the right to interfere in internal Turkish affairs. Russia acquired a common border with the central European states of Prussia and Austria-Hungary in the mid-eighteenth century, thanks to the complicity of the latter two in the destruction of Poland, which like Caesar's Gaul was divided into three parts. By the time Napoleon rose to command France's revolutionary armies in the mid-1790s, these three empires had devoured Poland, which would not reappear on the map until it was recreated as an independent state at Versailles, after the First World War had been fought and won and lost.
In the struggle of the crowned European sovereigns against Napoleon, the "balance of power" reacquired the connotation of avoiding a single Power's hegemony. After his military demise the sovereigns, convinced
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of the desirability of avoiding such hegemony, sought some further alternative other than the eighteenth-century version of the balance of power, which had in practice resulted only in the war of all against all. This desire led to the innovation of the Congress of Vienna, which was intended to arrive at a settlement reestablishing some sort of order following Napoleon's final defeat. The leading principles of the international settlement it established were "legitimacy," meaning the reestablishment of Europe's crowned sovereigns as imperial monarchs, and "compensations," meaning reallocations of territory to accommodate Britain's seizure of French and Dutch colonies during the Napoleonic Era.
For roughly a decade after the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna, international relations in Europe were managed principally by the Austrian chancellor and foreign minister Metternich. His international policies were characterized by support for political absolutism, the suppression of nationalistic ambitions, and the forcible preservation of the status quo as established at the Congress of Vienna. "Metternichism" was opposed by a different current of thought called "liberalism," of which Britain was perhaps the most energetic exponent.[3] In domestic policy liberalism meant free trade, a limitation on the role of the state, a belief that conflicts were naturally occurring in society, and a belief that parties to such conflicts had a natural right to express these and rationally to resolve them. These tenets led liberalism to incline toward an antiimperial foreign policy, because it meant favoring the expression of both national sentiment and nationalist ambitions.[4]
Until the convocation of the Congress of Vienna, which led directly to the Concert of Europe,[5] Russia pursued her interests in Europe in the egoistic manner that marks perhaps the most inefficient and dangerous aspect of the traditional European balance of power. She considered herself a full partner in the Concert of Europe and felt betrayed in the Crimean War. The Concert of Europe owed its success in large part to the elaboration of a code of conduct for international behavior that transcended the ideological division between Metternichism and liberalism, i.e., between the three conservative Eastern powers (Prussia, Austria, and Russia) on the one hand, and the more liberal Western states on the other. The disintegration of the Concert was due in important part to the recrudescence of this ideological opposition.
The Congress of Vienna appears as the overture to the Concert of Europe, which until its demise in 1854 successfully compelled or induced the sovereign states to refrain from aggressive foreign policies. In that the Concert of Europe involved a series of summits, though not on a regular basis, it was a continuation of the Congress of Vienna by other means. The Congress's two essential features were to retain the idea of a coalition of states founded on public law, and to reinforce that public
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law through precedents that would establish the basis of the future practice of diplomacy.[6] By establishing agreement on a set of common values, it enabled the Powers to cooperate. The Concert of Europe, building on these values, sought, as an international system, not to eradicate but instead to manage international disagreements.[7] It accomplished this by motivating the independent states to limit the ends toward which they would seek to assert their sovereign power.
The Concert system was predicated upon the Powers' fear (i.e., respect) of one another and upon the value of stability, which the experience of the Napoleonic Wars had impressed upon their ministers. When Russia and Turkey went to war in the Crimea, the other European Powers, in order to maintain the existing balance in Asia Minor and the Balkans, intervened against Russia on the side of the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War was not in itself any different from previous conflicts that the Concert had resolved, but the British portayed it as an antimonarchist crusade against the Tsar on behalf of liberal values.[8] It thus became evident that the Concert's founders, who had begun to pass from the scene, had not adequately socialized their "successor generation." The underlying contradiction between the principles of Metternichism and those of liberalism was exacerbated, and the Concert of Europe foundered on the rocks of this reemergent ideological divide.
The late 1860s saw the unification of Germany under Bismarck, who after the Franco–Prussian war in 1870–1871 became the first Imperial Chancellor of now-Kaiser Wilhelm I and ruled Germany at the center of a series of parliamentary coalitions for the next two decades. Germany's unification confirmed the dominance of its influence in central Europe, and this rendered the delicate Concert system irretrievable. The 1870s were transitional to a unipolarity marked by Bismarck's management of nearly the whole of Europe's international affairs, a system that had its height in the 1880s. Russia was not displeased at Germany's unification, which created opportunities for changing the status quo that the Concert had arranged in central Europe.
In the years between the Crimean War and the height of Bismarck's power, Russia's foreign activity had three foci. The first was Poland, where the Tsar repressed a popular revolt in 1863, and where the humiliation of the diplomacy of France and Britain—neither of which "was at any time prepared to go to war, [whereas] only the threat of force could have held Russia back"[9]—did much to restore the prestige that Russia had lost in the Crimean War. The second focus of Russian policy was Asia, particularly the Pacific coast and what is now called south and southwest Asia (the region towards Persia and Afghanistan). The third area of interest to Russian policy during these years lay in the Balkans. Yet it was not until two decades after the Peace of Paris, which
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had resolved the Crimean affair of the mid-1850s, that she became again actively involved in the "Eastern question."
Bismarck had instigated the Dreikaiserbund or Three Emperors' League, founded in 1873 and uniting Wilhelm I of Germany, Alexander II of Russia, and Franz Josef of Austria. However, it was unclear whether this coalition was an actual alliance or merely an entente. The Balkan Crisis of 1875–1878 tested the Three Emperors' League and found it wanting. Disillusioned with the Serbs, to whom Panslavist sentiment had drawn them, the Russians turned away from the south Slav territories toward Bulgaria, a Turkish province more distant from and less threatening to Austria. Bismarck's strategy of dividing Turkey's European possessions between Russia and Austria-Hungary was revealed at the Congress of Berlin (1878). By 1879 the Three Emperors' League had been reduced to an alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary;[10] it was nevertheless reinstituted by the early 1880s, only to fall apart again later in the decade because of continuing conflict in the Balkans between Austria-Hungary and Russia.
With the secret Reinsurance Treaty (1887) between Russia and Germany, Bismarck sold out Austria-Hungary's interests in the Balkans in return for Russia's promise not to aid France in a Franco–German war. However, after Bismarck's fall from power in 1890, Germany abrogated the Reinsurance Treaty and drew closer again to Austria-Hungary, supporting the latter's claims in the Balkans and projecting her own interests into Asia Minor, south of the Black Sea. With Italy, these two countries founded the Triple Alliance in 1891, motivating a diplomatic rapprochement of Russia with France, which turned into a political alliance in 1892, supplemented by a public military alliance in 1894. With the establishment of the Dual Alliance of France and Russia in opposition to the Triple Alliance, the division of continental Europe into two hostile camps was complete. England's "splendid isolation" was ended by its Entente Cordiale with France (1904), through which it allowed France to have Morocco in return for recognition of her own conquest of Egypt.
The Entente Cordiale was not an alliance but was still a great blow to the Triple Alliance. And although it did not itself improve relations between Russia and England, the entry into office by new governments in both these countries in 1905 did lead to the Anglo–Russian Convention (1907), which delimited the signatories' spheres of influence in southern Asia. Russian expansion in East Asia was checked, however, when Japan destroyed the Russian naval fleet in the war of 1904–1905. The last decade before the outbreak of the First World War then witnessed in Europe a succession of international crises, including a series of Balkan wars.
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By the end of the nineteenth century it was clear that the unrestrained nature of foreign-policy claims typically advanced by sovereign states was incompatible with systemwide security needs. Yet centralized conflict management was not feasible. The problems of an international system based exclusively on state sovereignty and alliance systems were illuminated most clearly when the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo launched a war that involved all Powers in conflicts of unexpected—indeed, until then unimagined—duration and intensity. Russia, in the decade before the Great War inaugurated by this murder, continued to assert foreign policy goals—in the Balkans, in Asia Minor and south central Asia, in central Europe—that were of a scope that the empire's domestic resource base, including human resources, could not sustain. As a result, when war came the Tsar's command of his armies at the front slipped away, just as the armies themselves slipped away, deserting to defend not their Tsar against the invading Germans but rather their native fields and factories against the domestic turmoil into which Russian social and economic life had tumbled in his absence from his court, a turmoil so turbulent that no one could prove the Bolsheviks wrong when, occupying his Winter Palace, they declared him deposed and themselves a Government.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in October 1917, they believed that the world war would be a vehicle for international proletarian revolution. They were wrong. The Western powers' main concern with the Bolsheviks was to keep them in the war, and when the working-class uprisings expected by the latter in Europe did not occur, Lenin's régime signed a separate peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk (1918). This treaty was invalidated by the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which was intended to eliminate Germany as a viable actor in the European system. The Bolsheviks were at the time concerned with more vital matters: their own power was not incontrovertibly established until 1921, following a protracted civil war in which Tsarist and Western troops participated; and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not founded until 1922.[11]
The year 1922 also saw the summit of European states including the two pariahs of Europe—Germany, which had committed the unpardonable sin of losing the last war, and the Soviet Union, which had forgiven itself its ancien régime's financial debts to the West—at Genoa.
It was initially envisaged that the two main subjects of discussion at Genoa would be the inclusion of Russia in the process of European
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reconstruction and the problem of German reparations and war debts. But [the new French Premier] Poincaré … resolutely refused to permit the question of reparations to be placed on the agenda. … This left nothing for the conference to talk about but the problem of Russia.[12]
The only agreement issuing from Genoa was named not for this city but for the Italian seaside resort of Rapallo. Its signatories were Germany and Soviet Russia; they had agreed on the practical value of an alliance of convenience. Both sides had been attending the Genoa Conference, and each felt keenly the need both to break out of its diplomatic isolation and to obtain the other's renunciation of financial claims (for war reparations in the one case, for reimbursement of Tsarist debts in the other). The treaty itself produced sensation and scandal among the victorious allies who had established the League of Nations, from which Russia had been excluded and in which Germany was powerless. Though it was not mentioned in the treaty text, Rapallo meant that the Germans could produce armaments in Russia, since the Treaty of Versailles prohibited them only from doing this in Germany. The Bolsheviks desperately needed that and other foreign investment for their own economic reconstruction; as further quid pro quo, the Germans trained Soviet soldiers and officers on Soviet territory.
During the years from 1924 to 1933 that the Bolsheviks faced up to the task of conducting international relations within the established international system. This period is characterized as one of "dual policy," because on the one hand the Bolsheviks created the Communist International in order to undermine from within the other states composing the international system, but on the other hand they did conduct state-to-state diplomacy. During these years the main focus of Soviet foreign policy became security and survival; world revolution was not eliminated as an organizing goal of policy, but rather it was placed on a back burner.[13]
Partially in response to Rapallo, the western European powers signed with Germany in 1925 the Treaty of Locarno, establishing the status quo of international boundaries in the West. This opened to Germany the possibility of playing off the Western powers against the Soviets, who had moreover not been invited to join the League of Nations, although they did participate in various conferences that it called.[14] Against this background, which largely excluded the USSR from the European diplomatic network, Soviet policy sought in two ways to mitigate its isolation. First, it attempted further rapprochement with other states dissatisfied by the status quo—not only Germany and Italy but also Japan, which sought to revise established territorial boundaries on the Chinese mainland in particular. Second, the Soviet Union worked outside the League of Nations to establish its own security
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system. The latter effort was only partly successful; nevertheless, the Soviets had by the mid-1920s signed conciliation treaties, which included neutrality and nonaggression, with Lithuania, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Persia.
These Soviet moves, which sought revision of the status quo, were paradoxically yet indissolubly linked with other initiatives through which Soviet diplomacy sought to maintain the status quo in the attempt to create a predictable international environment. In particular, the Kellogg–Briand Pact (1928), which to sign meant to renounce the sovereign right of waging war, complemented the evolving Soviet security preference for predictability of the environment. Many of the capitalist powers that signed this treaty dragged their heels on ratifying it. Yet the Soviets, at the time still weak and dependent, noted that its ratification would be very much in their own interests. Litvinov therefore developed his famous protocols to the treaty, according to which its provisions would enter immediately into force between the Soviet Union and the other signatory of the bilateral protocol, without waiting for the requisite number of states to sign and ratify the multilateral treaty itself. The Litvinov protocols are significant for having "caught up and integrated into the treaty structure of the U.S.S.R. a nexus of ideas originating independently of that treaty system but consciously calculated to stabilize [an] existing political relationship." By the early 1930s, "the dual impact of Japanese aggression in the Orient and the recrudescence, in Nazi form, of the historically polymorphous Drang nach Osten" had led to the conclusion of further bilateral pacts of neutrality and nonaggression with Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, France, and Italy.[15] The clear aim of these treaties was the protect the status quo in eastern European against the potential fallout from Locarno.
How did collective security fit into Soviet diplomacy? We must first be clear on its meaning. Collective security is a specific arrangement that attempted to respond to the frustrations over the difficulties created by unbridled state sovereignty. Articulated in opposition to the balance-of-power system, collective security arrangements do not name potential aggressors; whereas potential aggressors are named in traditional balance-of-power defensive treaties. Denoting a particular system for organizing conflict management in the international arena, collective security refers to a scheme (never implemented with complete success) according to which any state violating a predetermined status quo is held to account by all other states in the system. The central notion behind collective security is that aggression anywhere is of interest to everyone, and everyone will unite against the aggressor. The Soviet practice of collective security was influenced by ideas prevalent in
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western Europe, where (save for North America) its staunchest proponents could be found.
Between the two wars in Britain there were fierce divisions between the "traditionalists," who believed that the proper point of departure in international politics was the unilaterally determined national interest, and the "collectivists," whose belief in multilateral collective security had led them to create the League of Nations for its implementation. France's motivation for aiding in the League's creation, on the other hand, were less altruistic. France wanted most of all to avoid another German invasion, and felt that she would be already half-lost should Germany gain mastery over central and eastern Europe. France was moved thereby to advocate that if any country (i.e., Germany) should attack any other country (i.e., in east central Europe), then all remaining states should band together against the aggressor. France's policy, cloaked in the language of collective security, was thus directed against Germany and not against any aggressor in the abstract.[16]
The Soviets' ideas about collective security in the 1930s owed much to British theories, but their practice of collective security was much closer to the French. The Treaty of Locarno had left Germany's eastern boundaries unsettled and open to discussion—indeed open to pressure for change—to the detriment of the small central European states occupying those territories. These countries in central and eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania) found rapprochement with the Soviet Union necessary, and they too signed treaties of neutrality and nonaggression with the USSR. The Soviets tried to involve the western European powers in the defense of these states, through which Germany would have to march were she to reach Soviet borders. In 1935 the Soviets signed a mutual assistance treaty with the French and then one with Czechoslovakia, in which they pledged to come to the latter's aid in the event of German attack, provided that the French first executed their treaty obligation to the military defense of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Soviet diplomats worked to prevent any kind of rapprochement between France and Germany.
Two recent, equally respectable monographs draw on the same basic source material from this period to reach opposite conclusions. Haslam concludes that the Soviets, seriously committed to collective security, were compromised by Anglo–French appeasement.[17] Hochman, by contrast, concludes that the Soviets, operating within a balance-of-power framework, consistently preferred to arrange a deal with Germany.[18] In fact, both strands were present in Soviet policy at the time. These two interwar Soviet policies derive in particular from the two alliance patterns that dominated Russia's diplomacy from the 1870s, when the Balkan conflicts fully restored to her the prestige she had lost through the Crimean War, up to the First World War.
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Alliance patterns inherited from Tsarist Russia thus provide an important explanation why the Soviets were able during the interwar years concurrently and creatively to pursue both collective-security and balance-of-power policies. The first pattern was entente or alliance with the central European empires, as in the Dreikaiserbund; indeed, this pattern harks back to the partitions of Poland. The second traditional pattern was entente or alliance with the western European republics, as in the Dual Alliance and Anglo–Russian Convention, with the goal of containing Germany. With the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, the first pattern was reduced to Russo–German mutual assistance, expressed through the simple codeword "Rapallo." After the Treaty of Versailles, the second pattern became known as "collective security." Enduring the upheaval of the Russian revolutions and Civil War, these alliance patterns bequeathed to Soviet Russia an inheritance that permitted her a remarkable flexibility in interwar diplomacy. They provide a continuity between late Imperial and early Bolshevik foreign policy.
When the Soviets pursued a balance-of-power policy in the interwar years, this occurred chiefly through rapprochement or alliance with Germany, as at Rapallo. But Soviet rapprochement with an Anglo–French entente in the 1930s replicated Russia's pattern of foreign relations 30 years earlier when threatened by Germany. Indeed, Soviet participation in collective security arrangements during the interwar period, including finally her admission to the League, recalls her having been accepted as an equal by the major European powers a century earlier, through membership of the Concert of Europe.[19] After the Munich agreement finally killed the illusion of collective security in 1938, the Soviets had no choice but to return to the balance-of-power pattern. For Russia, the balance-of-power tradition had signified alliance with Germany; earlier in the Soviet period, it had animated Rapallo; and the year after Munich, the Hitler–Stalin Pact was struck, which Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union annulled.
During the period before the First World War, indeed for several decades thereafter, heads of state and their ministers were the nearly exclusive actors in international affairs; however, the very recent explosion of communication and travel—and of disposable income permitting access to these by vast sectors of various national publics—has created a very different world, in which the interconnection between foreign and domestic politics (never having been nonexistent) is clearer, more impressive, and of higher profile than ever before. In the world that
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emerged from the Second World War, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the Soviets had their own security system—a framework of international arrangements—in Eastern Europe, a security system that was indeed potentially the core of a universal communist international system. The boundaries of that protosystem were well defined and in large measure prevented extrasystemic communication from penetrating the system, while means for intrasystemic communication were also present.
When the Soviets first sought to convene an all-European conference on cooperation and security in 1954, the boundaries of the communist international system were relatively impermeable. However, experience had taught that territorial claims were a proximate cause of armed conflict. So long as there was no peace treaty or surrogate for it, the boundaries of states in Europe would remain formally undelineated. At the time the Soviets sought not only to affirm their postwar borders but also to have their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe recognized, to prevent West German rearmament, and to legitimate the status of the German Democratic Republic. The West did not respond in the 1950s, and Soviet diplomacy did not repeat its the call for a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) until 1966.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the boundaries that kept extrasystemic communication generally outside the nascent communist international system began to break down.[20] This development enhanced communication also between the two European blocs. The Sino–Soviet split meant that smaller communist states could preserve a certain independence by playing the Soviets and the Chinese against one another. The smaller states in both NATO and the WTO began to exercise a certain independence: France and Romania in particular began to diverge in their foreign conduct from that of their alliance leaders. A certain degree of East European multilateralism to the exclusion of the Soviet Union became evident, and a trend was also manifest toward political liberalization in the region, most clearly in Czechoslovakia in 1968 but less markedly in other countries of the bloc as well.[21] The smaller East European countries began, in the 1960s, to extend to Western Europe independent economic ties that eventually had the adaptative effect of altering their own national mechanisms of economic planning and administration to such an extent that intra-CMEA coordination was significantly hampered. A side effect of the invasion of Czechoslovakia was to halt this incipient political and economic disintegration of the bloc, reinstituting a solidarity in the East that facilitated subsequent Soviet moves toward convening CSCE.
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The reconsolidation of the East bloc enabled Brezhnev, who consolidated his political primacy in the early 1970s, to put forward a vast foreign policy initiative called the Peace Program, which extended European détente to include the United States. However, as Flanagan notes, "by [the end of 1971], many of Moscow's initial goals for the security conference had been realized through bilateral diplomacy,"[22] the same method to which the Soviets had turned after their exclusion from the Versailles security system that emerged from the First World War. Yet the idea of such a conference caught hold in Western Europe, and this, combined with the investment of prestige in such a conference by Soviet diplomacy and by Brezhnev personally, created an irreversible momentum. The Soviets consequently altered their approach. In a world changing ever more rapidly, they ceased seeking a security system that froze the status quo and instead pursued security through seeking to establish rules preventing the unexpected from occurring. Change was permissible, but uncertainty and risk should be minimized.
The Soviets sought a security conference as a substitute for the peace treaty that had never been written to end the Second World War. They wished also formally to legitimize their role as a European power, just as they had been included in the security arrangement called the Concert of Europe after the defeat of another potential hegemon of the Continent, Napoleon. The Soviets' other purpose—as in the period between the two world wars—was to render the international environment predictable. The negotiations on Mutual Balanced Force Reduction and the SALT accords have provided security in this sense,[23] and Soviet proposals for a collective security arrangement in Asia were likewise intended.[24]
The Soviet acquisition of a strategic capability of a certain dimension had led to the coinage of the phrase "balance of terror," by analogy with the balance of power.[25] Yet between the world of the balance of terror and that of the balance of power there are differences other than the qualitative nature of the weapons, which themselves seem not to have transformed as radically as necessary the conduct of international relations. These differences clarify the nature of the world today [i.e., 1987] in which, and through which the Soviet Union seeks an order that provides its security.
The principal difference explains why international security arrangements were easier to arrive at in earlier days than they are today [i.e., 1987]: until very recently the overriding concern in international affairs was territory. (Prestige might be added, although it was not always sufficiently distinct from the latter; indeed, nowadays it is increasingly distinct.) Today [i.e., 1987] the items on the political agenda are much more numerous than this. Among them appear economic development, arms limitation, and human rights—to name just a few additional items giving rise to great differences among countries. This pro-
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liferation of issues and issue areas necessarily complicates not only foreign affairs in general but also international negotiations in particular. Also, a significant difference between the world today [i.e., 1987] and any other of recent memory (with the possible exception of the Holy Roman Empire) is that until only a few years ago the number of sovereign states demanding a voice in such matters was far fewer than it is today [i.e., 1987]. Indeed, the relatively recent multiplication of independent states has contributed to augmenting the political agenda.
In the years following the end of the Second World War, the Soviets favored the foundation of an International Trading Organization (ITO) as provided for in the negotiations that created the Bretton Woods system. In the place of this stillborn ITO, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was created, of which the Soviet Union is not a member although several of its smaller allies are. Yet the Soviets favored the establishment of structures within which and procedures through which they could define the rules according to which their interests could be affected by the actions of other states. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s the Soviets proposed convoking a conference under the auspices of the United Nations in order to establish such an ITO. The Soviets wanted to break the West's stranglehold on existing international institutions concerned with commerce. An ITO would give them the opportunity to define their interests in the process of the creation of an international régime. Other international actors might thereby be normatively compelled to behave in accord with Soviet interests (the EEC, for excample, by lowering its tariff barriers to imports from the CMEA countries). The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was established in 1964 as a result of the Third World's adoption and transformation of this Soviet initiative.
The postwar evolution of the USSR's approach to such international arrangements—its willingness to pursue "milieu" goals rather than "possession" goals[26]—is reflected in the transformation of the Soviet approach to international law occuring in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the 1972 meeting of the Soviet Association of International Law, its leading publicist Professor Tunkin criticized Soviet specialists in international law for their attitude toward the work of their Western colleagues. In a radical departure from the then-reigning concept of "socialist international law," he affirmed the existence of a general system of international law that embraced both Soviet and Western scholarship.[27] The Soviets had come to understand that their interests could be served through this common framework of international law. Since the construction of this framework is not complete, the Soviets now participate in building it, confident that by doing so their architectural preferences will be to some degree realized. We
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may call this transformation of the Soviet approach the "socialist offensive in international law."
Combined with the substitution of the United States for Germany in the role of the principal enemy, the socialist offensive in international law explains contemporary [i.e., 1987] Soviet strategy in international politics as a present-day structural analogue of the interwar Soviet collective-security strategy. In particular: the United States is the analogue of Germany; the Third World is the analogue of the western members of the League of Nations; the general system of international law is the analogue of the League's collective-security mechanism; and the doctrine that the socialist countries are the "natural allies" of the developing countries against international imperialism is the analogue of the USSR's entente with England and France, a counterweight against Germany organized under the aegis of collective security. During the interwar period the Soviets attempted both to deal bilaterally with their principal enemy (Germany) and simultaneously to restrain Germany through multilateral arrangements, collective security in particular. Today [i.e., 1987] the Soviets attempt to deal bilaterally with their new principal enemy (the United States), and simultaneously to restrain the United States through multilateral arrangements in international law that also include the developing countries.
The "natural allies" doctrine is most clearly of a piece with the socialist offensive in international law, finding expression through it, in multilateral negotiations over global economic issues. Yet the Soviets chose the Nonaligned Movement as the forum for propagating this doctrine, because its membership is more restrictive than the "Group of 77" at UNCTAD, which actually includes over 120 developing countries. (Many Latin American countries, for instance, are members of the Group of 77 but not of the Nonaligned Movement.) In fact, the farther-reaching interpretation of the "natural allies" doctrine articulated by Cuba and other Soviet clients in the Nonaligned Movement fell by the wayside when the presidency of the Movement rotated from Cuba to India in 1982. The reason was that the full and unadulterated "natural allies" doctrine robbed the Nonaligned Movement of the foreign-policy autonomy from both East and West that was its original purpose.[28] Two examples from UNCTAD illustrate how the Soviets continue still to seek to motivate the developing countries against the West in multilateral global economic negotiations, while seeking at the same time to safeguard their own interests.
The UNCTAD negotiations over an Integrated Program for Commodities sought to establish international buffer stocks to regulate commodity prices, along with an international agency that would control available supply. A stable world market price was necessary to allow the producing countries to proceed with economic development in an
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orderly fashion, not subject to uncertainty over foreign-trade earnings from their principal commodity exports. In the late 1960s the Soviets felt that they could support the idea of such buffer stocks only as a temporary measure. When the developing countries then threatened to take their complaints to GATT, of which the Soviet Union is not a member, the USSR acceded to the use of UNCTAD as a forum. Finally, in 1976, the Soviets and their bloc came out in favor of creating these buffer stocks in order to stabilize commodity prices, but only in the framework of a particular form of international agreement, the terms of which, it was further asserted, would not apply to intra-CMEA trade.
Another example involves the negotiations at UNCTAD over the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). When the Soviet and East European countries agreed to lower their tariff barriers against exports by developing countries, the latter quite rightly objected to the meaninglessness of the move: East-bloc imports of these commodities depend not upon putatively higher consumer demand resulting from lower tariff barriers, but rather upon the provisions for imports that are built into the respective CMEA member-countries' annual economic plans. To this objection, the Soviets and East Europeans replied by volunteering to organize seminars bringing together personnel from their own economic planning and foreign trade ministries with their counterparts from the developing countries, so as to facilitate the incorporation of the latter's exports into the former's plans. The response from the developing countries has been favorable, and any export contracts that are agreed fall into the framework of overarching longterm intergovernmental agreements for bilateral economic ties, a device that the Soviets have long preferred in organizing their foreign trade planning. Such bilateral intergovernmental agreements also govern transfer of technology from the CMEA countries to the developing countries. Therefore the East bloc does not feel affected by developing countries' demands for international controls upon technology between from a parent transnational corporation and its subsidiary based in a developing country. Here, indeed, interests of CMEA and developing countries coincide: the former may benefit from international regulation because they too import Western technologies.
Multilateral global economic negotiations have become the principal forum in which the USSR pushes the socialist offensive in international law in general and the natural allies doctrine in particular. The USSR uses not just UNCTAD but also other forums, such as the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and UNESCO's work on a New World Information and Communications Order, to erect international régimes that take into account their state interests.[29] They use such institutions as the International Law Commission to shape
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the overarching framework of international law that regulates the rights and duties of states and of nonstate actors. The East bloc as a whole works through the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law to transform the existing system of international commerce. Treaty law among socialist states also influences the elaboration of international norms in this area.[30]
This survey of Imperial Russian and Soviet history suggests various patterns in the organization of international affairs that may consciously or unconsciously underlie current Soviet policies. In the prerevolutionary era, two patterns are evident. First is the unilateralist and egoistic diplomacy practiced during the eighteenth century, and particularly in the last half of the nineteenth century after Bismarck's departure from the European scene, of which the First World War illustrated the ultimate disaster, so far as Russia's place in Europe was concerned. Second is the Concert of Europe, a multilaterally guaranteed security régime in which Russia was a full partner and in the framework of which she was also a member of the Holy Alliance. The Concert addressed economic issues only insofar as these were directly linked to territory; and after the breakdown of the Concert, Russia's drive toward the Caucasus and the Black Sea had in part the economic motive to exploit the natural resources there.
During the interwar years two patterns of international behavior also dominated the policy of the Russian state, each a continuation of one of those just identified. The tradition of egoistic unilateral diplomacy was transformed into entente with the main enemy, Germany. By re-enacting the most favorable pattern of diplomacy that emerged from Tsarist practice—alliance with Germany—the Bolsheviks concluded that bilateral arrangements even with a hostile power (as Germany was after 1933) could satisfy their national interests. The alliance with Germany followed in the geographic footsteps of the Three Emperors' League, itself the Bismarckian and most successful Imperial Russian formulation of egoistic diplomacy during the period between the Crimean War and Brest-Litovsk.
The tradition of the Concert of Europe was transformed during the interwar years into the policy of collective security, a universal defensive alliance against the main enemy, Germany. The eventual bankruptcy of this pattern led the Soviets to rely increasingly upon alliance with the main enemy, even as the activity of the Communist International (and its Popular Front strategy in particular) was subordinated after 1933 to the struggle against the main enemy, complementing the collective
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security strategy. That the two patterns of behavior were thus simultaneously pursued is no contradiction.
Following World War II the creation of the Soviet bloc—a throwback to the waning age of conventional weapons and the Eurocentric balance of power—realized Russia's succession, blocked first by Bismarck and then by Hitler, to Austria-Hungary as the dominant power in east central Europe and to the Ottoman Empire as the hegemon of the Balkan provinces.[31] During these years the principal enemy had become the United States, no longer Germany. Paradoxically, the nuclear weapons that kept the Cold War cold created conditions for replicating the Soviet pattern of entente with the main enemy: for in the early postwar years, relations between the two blocs (or the absence of these) seemed governed by an unwritten entente—the tacit mutual acknowledgment of spheres of influence—between the superpowers: an entente enforced by America's unwillingness to unleash its nuclear superiority. Indeed, in the 1960s this entente took the form of a Soviet–American condominium in which the Soviets accepted the role of junior partner.[32]
Both the capabilities and the attributes of the Russian and Soviet state, including geography among the attributes, necessitated a collective-security policy between the two world wars against the main enemy. Not only are such attributes at the origin of security problems that provide a continuity between Soviet and Tsarist foreign policy; they also constrain the policies that the leadership of any Russian power would be able to justify to itself. These security problems constrain the possibilities for change in Soviet international behavior.
In pursuit of its offensive in international law, the USSR continues the strategy of its interwar collective security policy, substituting the Third World for the western League powers and the United States for Germany. But Soviet participation in UNCTAD and other international economic negotiations is neither a ruse nor merely a stick with which to beat the capitalists. Soviet perspectives on the international environment are informed by what Krasner calls a "Grotian" approach, according to which international régimes are pervasive. At the same time, and without contradiction, the Soviets' own behavior is motivated by what Krasner labels a "modified structural" approach to régimes, which posits the primacy of states.[33] Through participation in the process of defining what international law will permit, the USSR asserts its interests not just by defending categorically state sovereignty in general (and its own in particular), but moreover by constraining the terms into which an implicit international régime becomes explicitly codified. Indeed, the formalization and institutionalization of a régime provide opportunities for its transformation. Thus the Soviet Union encourages change, and by doing so channels it in
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directions that tend less to threaten Soviet interests than might otherwise be the case.
Other than the Grotian and modified structural perspectives, there is one more influential approach to international régimes: the "conventional structural" view, according to which "the regime concept [is] useless, if not misleading."[34] Kenneth Waltz is a noted contemporary [i.e., 1987] exponent of the conventional structural approach. He defines international structure in a manner that, he asserts, "solves the problem of separating changes at the level of the units from changes at the level of the system"; but his application of the term "structure" is inconsistent. Criticizing Kaplan, for example, he constructively asserts the necessity of keeping "interactions of the system's units out of the definition of its structure." Yet later Waltz writes that states "may alter their behavior because of the structure they form through interaction with other states."[35]
Reasoning by analogy from domestic politics, Waltz proposes three elements in his definition of structure: (1) "the principle [either of anarchy or of hierarchy,] by which a system is ordered," being the indicator—when one principle replaces the other—that the system has been "transformed"; (2) "the specification of functions of differentiated units," which does not apply to anarchic systems "since [such a] system is composed of like units"; and (3) "the distribution of capabilities across units," changes in which "are changes of system whether the system be an anarchic or a hierarchic one."[36] Asserting that the international system has no acknowledged authority and is therefore anarchic, Waltz excludes the second element from his definition of an international structure.
It therefore becomes crucial that the distinction between "order" in the first element of the definition and "distribution of capabilities" in the third should not be tautological. Yet to ascertain the distribution of capabilities according to Waltz, we must map each country into one of a set of categories that constitute a hierarchical order:
The distribution of capabilities is not a unit attribute, but rather a system-wide concept. … We abstract from every attribute of states except their capabilities. … What emerges is a positional picture, a general description of the ordered overall arrangement of a society written in terms of the placement of units rather than in terms of their qualities [i.e., attributes].[37]
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The distinction among Superpowers, Great Powers, Middle Powers, and Minor Powers is an example of such an ordering. This mapping analytically imposes hierarchy upon the anarchic international system. The "distribution of capabilities" characterizing the system is determined by the number of states at each level in the hierarchy of categories.
In fact, it is more reasonable to suppose that the structure of the international system is "partially ordered." This term refers in mathematics to a structure in which some members of a set stand in a "fully ordered" relation to other members of the same set, but not all members stand in such a relation to all other members. It may be possible to speak of a complete ordering of states in the international system in some delimited issue area, and indeed, Waltz's assertion of empirical bipolarity in world politics is most appropriate to the security realm.[38] Yet his definition of international structure does not take into account the geopolitical attributes that are at the source of problems idiosyncratic to any given state's national security.
By contrast, Liska's ambitious analysis of structure in international politics refuses to separate so cleanly a state's attributes from its capabilities. Liska argues that the capabilities of states differ in part because their geographic situations influence not just the alliance strategies but moreover the military capabilities that they seek to develop. Liska's idea of structure in world politics is grounded precisely in the very notion that Waltz rejects, viz., patterns of interaction among states. Liska's concept of structure in international relations comports everchanging triangles—spanning the centuries—among land and sea powers whose strategies are determined as much by geography as by anything else.[39] These same patterns he sees repeated over time, with changing dramatis personae (i.e., dramatis patriae).
It is worth noting that although Liska and Waltz differ radically over the definition of international structure, which is key to each of them, nevertheless both their attempts conclude on the normative desirability of a Soviet–American condominium. But Waltz asserts such bipolarity as a present-day empirical fact, and by his definition this must mean that the international system is not anarchic, as he originally asserted, but instead hierarchic. Indeed, toward the end of his argument Waltz covertly reintroduces the previously excluded second element of his definition of structure—the differentiation of functions among units—when he states that the "extraordinary positions [of the United States and the Soviet Union] in the system lead them to undertake tasks that other states have neither the incentive nor the ability to perform."[40] By superposing what he calls the principle of hierarchy upon the principle of anarchy, Waltz introduces an inconsistency into his analysis: such a superposition constitutes, by his
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own definition of structure (in its first element), a different systemic structure.[41]
The contemporary [i.e., 1987] relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States—respectively the present-day land and sea powers—is in Liska's view already being transformed by China, whose emergent status as a superpower is establishing it as the third vertex of a new triangle.[42] Liska argues for establishing a Soviet–American condominium to avoid conflict over the Third World. He is correct that the autonomous developments in and demands of Third World are most likely reveal conflicting American and Soviet interests.[43] Indeed, events in the Third World were the principal source of Soviet–American misunderstandings over détente, leading to its downfall.[44] Yet the most such a Soviet–American condominium with respect to the Third World could realistically do—like the Concert of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century—would not be to eradicate conflict but only to manage it. Leading social scientists in the Soviet Union, including members of the Central Committee, have recently ceased to polemicize uncritically against "bourgeois futurology" and begun to explore Western notions of world order, with a view to applying these to the global management of international conflict.[45] It is possible to interpret the recently established and continuing regular contacts between middle-echelon officials in the U.S. State Department and the Soviet Foreign Ministry, concerning regional conflicts in the Third World, as moves toward mutual understanding in a pre-régime era.
This chapter's analysis of contemporary [i.e., 1987] Soviet behavior has suggested that the USSR in effect plays the Third World and the West (particularly the United States) against one another whenever possible, taking one or the other side depending on the issue. If the issue is one on which its interests agree with those of the United States, then it will generally allow the West to refute the Third World's objections. (The Soviets share Western reluctance at UNCTAD, for example, to establish an authoritative international institution to regulate transnational technology transfer.) But if otherwise, then the Soviet Union will seek to mobilize the Third World against the United States. The situation is analogous to that in the mid-1930s, when two broad groups of states could be distinguished in world politics: the status quo powers (England, France, and the United States; today [i.e., 1987], "the West") and the revisionist powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan; today [i.e., 1987], the Third World). In the 1930s the Soviet Union remained largely outside the framework of the traditional international system; and yet it played a certain role in balancing this system, though it did not determine the balance in the balance of power.
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For the Soviets today [i.e., 1987], as was the case in both the interwar and immediate post–World War II periods, indeed as was the case too for the Russian Empire throughout the nineteenth century, the preferred scheme is inclusion in a general security system. In the absence of this, the second-best approach—itself quite effective—is the combination of status quo and revisionist components into a single line that is applied differentially according to the particular policy arena. Through such a strategy the USSR seeks not only to have its interests taken into account within the existing international system, but also to demonstrate to world opinion (an audience subsuming other states as well as mass publics) that the existing system is really not satisfactory as it stands. The growth in Soviet power and prestige since the Second World War has given the USSR more room for maneuver in pursuit of its interests, in a world that the multiplication of issues in international politics, since the decolonization of the European empires, has made more Grotian.
Participation in régime-formation is a way for a state such as the Soviet Union to get its foot in the door in policy arenas where it has no traditional place. In international economic negotiations, for instance, the extremely low level of Soviet foreign trade and the nonconvertibility of the ruble make the USSR a peripheral actor: the West and the Third World are the principals. Precisely in such nontraditional (i.e., nonterritorial) issues of the postcolonial era, the socialist offensive in international law acquires its significance as the analogue of the Soviet strategy of interwar collective security, implemented both against the West in general and against the main Soviet enemy of the present era, the United States.
The author wishes to express deep gratititude to Zachary T. Irwin and Monica Johansson-Irwin for their detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier draft of this chapter.
[Note 1]. F.H. Hinsley, "The Development of the European States System since the Eighteenth Century," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 11 (1961): 73.
[Note 2]. Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics: The Western State System in Transition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941), p. 59.
[Note 3]. For details, see Henry W. Littlefield, History of Europe since 1815 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), chs. 2–3.
[Note 4]. This point is brought out in Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, translated by R.G. Collingwood (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 407–16.
[Note 5]. See Robert Jervis, "From Balance to Concert: A Study in International Security Cooperation," World Politics 38, no. 1 (October 1985): 58–79.
[ page 97 ]
[Note 6]. Hinsley, "Development of the European States System," 69–80.
[Note 7]. See Richard B. Elrod, "The Concert of Europe: A Fresh Look at an International System," World Politics 28, no. 2 (January 1976): 159–74.
[Note 8]. The only comprehensive account of the affair from Russia's perspective is John Shelton Curtiss, Russia's Crimean War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1979).
[Note 9]. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russiia, 1855–1914 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, [1952]), pp. 78–79.
[Note 10]. For an interesting empirical study of this period, see Brian Healy and Arthur Stein, "The Balance of Power in International History: Theory and Reality," Journal of Conflict Resolution 17, no. 1 (March 1973): 33–62.
[Note 11]. For a survey of federalist Bolshevik ideas for the international organization of the outcome of world revolution, see Elliot R. Goodman, The Soviet Design for World State, with a Foreword by Philip E. Mosely (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), ch. 7.
[Note 12]. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), p. 212.
[Note 13]. The "dual policy"—or at least the duality of party and state instruments in Soviet foreign policy—continued after 1933, but with the difference that the Soviets then directed their fraternal parties to pursue tactics that complemented rather than contradicted (as was the case until 1933) Soviet state-to-state diplomacy.
[Note 14]. See Kathryn W. Davis, The Soviets at Geneva: The U.S.S.R. and the League of Nations, 1919–1933 (Geneva: Librairie Kundig, 1934; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1977).
[Note 15]. Malbone W. Graham, "The Peace Policy of the Soviet Union," in Samuel N. Harper (ed.), The Soviet Union and World-Problems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935), pp. 150, 152.
[Note 16]. Arnold Wolfers, "Polices of Peace and Security after World War I," in Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), ch. 16. Further on the British, see Esko Antola, "Theories of Peaceful Change: An Excursion to the Study of Change in International Relations in the 1930s," Cooperation and Conflict 19, no. 4 (December 1984): 235–50.
[Note 17]. Jonatham Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–1939 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).
[Note 18]. Jiri Hochman, The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
[Note 19]. Of course there was no twentieth-century analogue of the Holy Alliance (which included Prussia and Austria); but the Concert's real guarantor was the Quadruple Alliance, which augmented the members of the Holy Alliance with England.
[Note 20]. George Modelski, The Communist International System, Research Monograph 9 (Princeton: Princeton University, Center of International Studies, 1960).
[Note 21]. Andrzej Korbonski, "Détente, East–West Trade, and the Future of Economic Integration in Eastern Europe," World Politics 28, no. 4 (July 1976): 568–89.
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[Note 22]. Stephen J. Flanagan, "The CSCE and the Development of Détente," in Derek Leebaert (ed.), European Security: Prospects for the 1980s (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), p. 193. See also Mojmir Povolny, "The Soviet Union and the European Security Conference," Orbis 18, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 215–24.
[Note 23]. Robert Legvold, "The Problem of European Security," Problems of Communism 23, no. 1 (January–February 1974): 13–33.
[Note 24]. Soviet moves to establish regional collective security arrangements in the present day are similar to interwar collective security only in name. It is argued below that interwar Soviet attempts to mobilize the Western powers against Germany through collective security find their structural continuation in contemporary [i.e., 1987] Soviet attempts to mobilize the Third World against "international imperialism" through the Nonaligned Movement.
[Note 25]. Albert Wohlstetter, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," Foreign Affairs 37, no. 2 (January 1959): 211–34. For discussions of similarities and differences between the two balances, see A.F.K. Organski, World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1968), ch. 16; and Glenn H. Snyder, "The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror," in Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis (eds.), International Politics: Anarchy, Force, Political Economy, and Decision-Making, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), pp. 217–27.
[Note 26]. The distinction was first made by Arnold Wolfers; see his "The Goals of Foreign Policy," in Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration, pp. 73–77.
[Note 27]. Kazimierz Grzybowski, "La théorie soviétique du droit international au cours des années soixante-dix," Revue d'Études comparatives Est–Ouest 14, no. 4 (December 1983): 83–96.
[Note 28]. See Zachary T. Irwin, "Yugoslav Nonalignment in the 1980s," in Pedro Ramet (ed.), Yugoslavia in the 1980s (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 249–75.
[Note 29]. For analyses of Soviet conduct in these negotiations that illustrate this argument, see, respectively, Paul Roth, "The Soviet Union and the New World Information Order," paper presented to the IIIrd World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Washington, D.C., November 1985; and Elmar Rauch, Politische Konsequenzen und Möglichkeiten der Seerechtsentwicklung aus der Sicht der UdSSR (Abschlussbericht), Bericht 24/1982 (Cologne: Bundesinstitut für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien, 1982). For analysis of a noneconomic issue area that also supports this interpretation, see William C. Potter, "The Soviet Union and Nuclear Proliferation," Slavic Review 44, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 468–88.
[Note 30]. One example is the influence of the CMEA General Conditions of Delivery of Goods (1968) on the UNCTAD negotiations concerning multimodal transport. For a more extensive statement of this argument, including an extended analysis of Soviet conduct in UNCTAD from which the discussion in the text in drawn, see Robert M. Cutler, "East–South Relations at UNCTAD: Global Political Economy and the CMEA," International Organization 37, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 121–42.
[Note 31]. Grzybowski, "La théorie soviétique du droit international," 93 and n. 39, compares contemporary [i.e., 1987] Soviet power and influence in Eastern Europe
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with those exerted in the region by the Holy Alliance within the overall framework of the Concert of Europe, observing that the Alliance's power and influence "were based on a particular conception of legitimacy, combined with the right to intervene in the affairs of any European country in order to defend the principles animating the Alliance." The right to such military intervention had been established as a principle of international law by the Treaty of Paris (1815).
[Note 32]. Vernon V. Aspaturian, "Soviet Foreign Policy Perspectives in the Sixties," in Aspaturian, Process and Power in Soviet Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 771–99; for the argument that a tacit entente of this nature preceded even the 1960s, see "The Enemy Partners," ch. 18 of Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations, translated from the French by Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
[Note 33]. Stephen D. Krasner, "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables," International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 189–94.
[Note 34]. Ibid., 190. For an interesting discussion of the balance of power, including Grotius's implicitly critical evaluation of the concept, see Alfred Vagts and Detlev F. Vagts, "The Balance of Power in International Law: A History of an Idea," American Journal of International Law 73, no. 4 (October 1979): 555–80, esp. 559–60.
[Note 35]. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 57, 93.
[Note 36]. Ibid., pp. 100–1. Ruggie points out that Waltz's definition of structuralism (1) does not capture the vast changes between the international politics of the medieval world and those of the present day, (2) leads to underestimation of the potential for change in the global polity, and (3) allows only for reproductive and not for transformative logics. See John Gerard Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis," World Politics 35, no. 2 (January 1983): 261–85. Another critical review of Waltz's controversial work is Richard Rosecrance, "International Theory Revisited," International Organization 35, no. 4 (Autumn 1981): 691–713.
[Note 37]. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 98–99.
[Note 38]. Robert Jervis, "Security Regimes," International Organization 36, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 357–79.
[Note 39]. For another treatment of this subject, see Aron, Peace and War, ch. 7.
[Note 40]. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 199. Indeed, Waltz's argument is an extension and elaboration of a case he made a decade and a half earlier: cf. Kenneth N. Waltz, "The Stability of a Bipolar World," Daedalus 93, no. 3 (Summer 1964): 881–909.
[Note 41]. This alteration is moreover not sufficiently distinct from the notion of "system change" upon which the third element of Waltz's definition relies.
[Note 42]. George Liska, Russia and World Order: Strategic Choices and the Laws of Power in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); idem, Russia and the Road to Appeasement: Cycles of East–West Conflict in War and Peace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
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[Note 43]. However, Liska's prescription that the United States seek to liberalize the Soviet Union by encouraging the latter's Westernizing tendencies, seems to ignore the historical pattern according to which domestic reform in Russia has been instituted only following foreign policy failures: the serfs were freed after the loss of the Crimean War; constitutional reforms were introduced after the disaster of the Russo–Japanese War; the Tsar abdicated in favor of the multiparty Provisional Government after German military defeats during World War I.
[Note 44]. Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American–Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), chs. 15–19.
[Note 45]. This trend dates principally from the 1979 World Congress of the International Political Science Association, which was held in Moscow. (The sources for this assertion, as well as those in the text above, are the author's personal interviews with the individuals concerned.)
DR. ROBERT M. CUTLER was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia for twenty years. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
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