the realist road to war

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The Realist Road to War The War Puzzle by John A. Vasquez Review by: William J. Dixon Mershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Oct., 1994), pp. 329-331 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/222737 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 00:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley and The International Studies Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Mershon International Studies Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Fri, 9 May 2014 00:07:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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The Realist Road to WarThe War Puzzle by John A. VasquezReview by: William J. DixonMershon International Studies Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Oct., 1994), pp. 329-331Published by: Wiley on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/222737 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 00:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley and The International Studies Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Mershon International Studies Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Fri, 9 May 2014 00:07:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Mershon International Studies Review (1994) 38, 329-331

The Realist Road to War Review by WILLIAM J. DIXON

Department of Political Science, The University of Arizona

The War Puzzle. By John A. Vasquez. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 368 pp., $64.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

The quest to explain the origins of war surely constitutes one of the oldest continuing research traditions in the history of social inquiry. Tracing the roots of this tradition leads us at least as far back as Thucydides, through the classic works of Rousseau, Kant, Clausewitz, and the like, to the two main branches of contemporary scholarship consisting, on one side, of historically idiographic studies of particular wars, and, on the other, of the nomothetic or scientific school. It is the latter branch that concerns us here because John Vasquez's new book, The War Puzzle is clearly a product of the scientific program pioneered by Lewis F. Richardson (1960) and Quincy Wright (1942) and exemplified more recently by J. David Singer (1979) and his Correlates of War associates (Leng, 1993; Small and Singer, 1982).

Despite the predictability its lineage would imply, The War Puzzle occupies an atypical place in the scientific genre. It is not a report on original empirical research, at least not in the usual sense of a work whose pages are liberally peppered with statistics, tables, and charts that bring historical data to bear on putative propositions about war and peace. Neither is it a purely theoretical exercise deductively teasing out innovative or counterintuitive implications from a few well-chosen initial premises. It certainly does not fulfill the need for a comprehensive, state-of-the-art text that reviews and integrates the disparate scientific literature on the causes of war. Yet this book does offer original theoretical insights illuminating important empirical patterns, and it does so by drawing almost entirely and quite selectively on evidence from the existing literature. Vasquez likens his enterprise to that of a detective searching for clues, and where better to conduct the search than in the mass of empirical findings accumulated over the past two decades of scientific research.

Clues are empirical observations, but even the amateur sleuth knows that not all empirical observations are clues. Observations become clues only in relation to a crime, so Vasquez begins his detective work by sifting through various forms of interpersonal violence, force, hostility, and conflict to narrow his investigation to a particularly pernicious form of human activity characterized by Hedley Bull (1977:184) as "organized violence carried on by political units against one an- other." Although this preliminary conceptual analysis draws together important insights about war from such varied figures as Hugo Grotius, Karl von Clausew- itz, Quincy Wright, and Margaret Mead, it serves only to delineate the broad contours of the inquiry. Vasquez argues that war in general is too amorphous and diverse a phenomenon to follow any single causal path and that only by disentangling this phenomenon can the clues to its multiple origins be recog- nized. Accordingly, he offers a three dimensional typology of war. The first and

? 1994 The Mershon Center at the Ohio State University. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK.

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Book Reviews

most important dimension differentiates between equal and unequal distribu- tions of capabilities, with the former designated as "wars of rivalry." The second employs the common distinction between limited and total war, while the third divides purely dyadic wars from "complex" wars involving more than two com- batants. Vasquez limits the domain of his inquiry to the general category he terms "wars of rivalry," with special emphasis on those that are also total and complex wars, that is, world wars.

The most valuable clue for solving a mystery is often the one most conspic- uously evident. The trick is not to observe the clue itself but to comprehend its significance. Such is the case with wars of rivalry, for the essential clue is the all too obvious fact that an overwhelming proportion of such wars are fought between neighboring states. Vasquez not only cites several studies demonstrating the importance of territorial contiguity, he also draws from Holsti's (1991) categorization to examine the issues over which wars were actually fought. Although some readers might quibble with the broader of his two definitions of territorial issues (e.g., national liberation, succession), the evidence is neverthe- less rather impressive. But the role of territory is only a clue, not an explanation. Here Vasquez wisely becomes a bit more speculative in basing his explanation on a genetically inherited and now deeply ingrained collective human tendency to claim and defend territory. To avoid misunderstanding about this potentially controversial position, it must be noted that Vasquez treats territoriality "as a proclivity that humans have and not as a drive or instinct that makes war inevitable" (p. 152).

Indeed, war is not inevitable according to Vasquez. For as obvious as the territorial connection may be, it is equally obvious that most neighboring states are not at war most of the time. Territoriality is thus an underlying cause of war that remains distinct from a set of more proximate causes found in the learned foreign policy practices for dealing with rival states. These proximate causes actually form a process unfolding as a series of steps to war, steps that Vasquez traces to centuries of realist thought. The villain in this account turns out to be realism (a.k.a. realpolitik, power politics) and the prescriptive practices and tactics it entails, such as alliance formation, military buildups, and crisis bargaining. Thus, for Vasquez, "realism and power politics are not so much explanations of war and peace as they are part of the behavior comprising the road to war that must be explained" (p. 197).

Although the main emphasis of his account is on realist interactions of rival states over territorial (or possibly other equally intractable) grievances, Vasquez readily acknowledges the relevance of both domestic politics and global condi- tions. The former plays out in the shifting domestic balance between "hard- liners" and "accommodationists," a distinction based on personal predispositions regarding the efficacy of compromise and the legitimacy of force. (Recognizing the potential tautology, Vasquez takes pains to differentiate hard-liners and realists.) For a variety of reasons, the domestic balance usually favors accom- modationists, which in turn acts as a constraint on war and helps to account for the fact that war is a relatively rare occurrence. Although Vasquez's careful discussion renders this a plausible claim, it also stands in stark contrast to his previous emphasis on power politics.

Wars of rivalry begin with grievances, most commonly over territorial issues. Realist practices designed to communicate resolve and increase power are in- terpreted by the opponent as escalatory moves that augment the domestic position of hardliners and lead to further steps eventually resulting in war. Such wars have all too often expanded beyond their limited goals and original com- batants to become world wars. They do so, Vasquez contends, through a process of diffusion that relies on a particular conjunction of global conditions: a mul-

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WILLIAM J. DIXON

tipolar distribution of capabilities, an alliance system that bifurcates this multi- polar structure into two hostile blocs, and a relative parity of power between the blocs. Moreover, in one of the book's boldest assertions, each of these is deemed a necessary condition for expansion to world war. Vasquez thus treats world wars as a special class of wars of rivalry, subject to the same causal influences but unfolding under a unique confluence of global conditions. Although this account is offered as an alternative to theories emphasizing hegemonic transi- tions (e.g., Gilpin, 1981; Thompson, 1988), it may not be so contradictory an alternative as Vasquez would have us believe. While we are left to wonder about the circumstances under which these global conditions converge, it is at least imaginable that the answer might have something to do with hegemonic transitions.

It should be fairly evident by now that Vasquez's agenda is not merely to advance our scientific understanding of wars of rivalry, but also to provide some guidance on how we might short-circuit the process by which they originate. While it seems unlikely that territorial grievances can soon be eliminated from human political contention, the realist road is not the only way to deal with them. Alternative political practices stressing multilateralism and compromise can provide an exit from the road to war. The War Puzzle issues a powerful indictment against political realism, both in theory and in practice, and the evidence it adduces makes at least a plausible case. Whether or not the evidence is sufficient to convict is a matter to be adjudicated by the book's intended audience of professional social scientists and graduate students seeking a sci- entific understanding of the origins of war.

References

BULL, HEDLEY. (1977) The Anarchical Society. New York: Columbia University Press. GILPIN, ROBERT. (1981) War and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. HOLSTI, KALEVIJ. (1991) Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order 1684-1989. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press. LENG, RUSSELL J. (1993) Interstate Crisis Behavior, 1816-1980: Realism versus Reciprocity. New York:

Cambridge University Press. RICHARDSON, LEWIS FRY. (1960) Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Pacific Grove, Calif.: Boxwood Press. SINGER., J. DAVID. (1979) The Correlates of War: Research Origins and Rationale. New York: Free Press. SMALL, MELVIN, AND J. DAVID SINGER. (1982) Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars,1816-1980.

Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage. THOMPSON, WILLIAM R. (1988) On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to World Politics. Co-

lumbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. WRIGHT, QUINCY. (1942) A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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