Suchergebnisse

The military superiority thesis contends that the key to the ascendancy of western
Europe as the world's predominant region was its edge in military technology. Thanks
to intensive regional warfare and a series of military revolutions, military superiority
enabled Europeans to subordinate the rest of the world between 1500 and 1900. At
best, this interpretation gives too much explanatory weight to military technology.
Other factors that were equally if not more important were the variable vulnerabilities
of Afro-Eurasian and American targets of expansion, the need for and availability of
allies, and the evolution of a global political economy in ways that favored increasing
European predominance. As explored in five cases, ranging from Mexico and Peru to
southeast Asia in the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, none of these factors
worked entirely independently of the others. Rather, they interacted to promote the
ascendancy of some Europeans for a period of time. Military superiority, and especially
naval superiority, may have been most important for facilitating first the arrival and
then the survival of Portuguese, Dutch, and English forces along the maritime fringe of
Afro-Eurasia.

To explain the strong finding that democracies rarely fight other democracies, analysts typically focus on some attribute of regime type. This linkage may be spurious, at least in part. The emergence and persistence of the first wave of liberal republics and democracies were greatly facilitated by the prior resolution of regional primacy questions. Because early democracies did not engage fully in competitions for regional primacy and territorial expansion, they were less likely to attack other states, democracies or otherwise, in their home regions. Nonexpansionist foreign policies also discouraged the domestic concentration of economic and political power, which in turn facilitated democratization processes. Four historical cases illustrate how regional primacy issues preceded the development of democracy and either undermined or facilitated democratization processes in major powers that have been especially important to the annals of war participation. Further research on whether peace antecedes democracy or the other way around appears warranted.

Der Zusammenhang, daß demokratische Staaten in geringerem Maße geneigt sind militärische Konflikte mit anderen Staaten zu führen, wurde in den letzten Jahres häufiger untersucht und großteils für richtig befunden. Dabei richtete sich das Augenmerk jedoch fast ausschließlich auf die Herrschaftsform der sich im Konflikt befindlichen Staaten. Anhand von vier historischen Beispielen - Skandinavien, das revolutionäre Frankreich, Nordamerika des 19. Jahrhunderts und Japan zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts - wird gezeigt, daß vor allem auch der Umstand entscheidend ist, inwieweit regionale Vormacht ein expanives Streben beeinflußt und wiederum Rückwirkungen auf die politische und wirtschaftliche Machtballung eines Staates hat. (SWP-Krh)

Argues that the creation of zones of peace is related to geopolitics rather than to type of political regime.

The largely unanticipated end of the cold war and the consequent difficulties in explaining its demise underline the need to understand better the phenomenon of rivalries in world politics. There is, however, much more at stake than the history of the Soviet-American relationship because a respectable proportion of international conflict is embedded within the contexts of specific dyadic feuds with specific pasts and futures. To ignore these contexts may seriously distort the entire analytic undertaking of international relations. This article makes a case for identifying rivalries in terms of decision maker perceptions as opposed to the number of disputes over some period of time in which states engage. A second argument is that predominately positional and predominately spatial rivalries should be differentiated as two basic types. Finally, a third argument is advanced for categorizing positional rivalries with respect to their geopolitical milieu: dyadic, regional, global, and global-regional.