State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation [NOOK Book]

Of all the states on the map of the world in 1816, nearly half no longer exist today. The fate of these states is the subject of this book. Both as the primary form of organization in international politics and as specific actors on the global stage, states have come to be the central pillar of international relations theory and politics. And while scholars and practitioners alike have questioned whether the state as an institution will survive, the survival of particular states is typically assumed and, further, assumed to be desirable. The conventional wisdom appears to be that states do not-and should not-die.

This perception is belied by both recent and distant history. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a defining moment of the late twentieth century, cementing an end to the Cold War. Less than fifty years earlier, World War II witnessed numerous attempts to "kill" other states and ended with the dismemberment of Germany. As any series of historical maps will reveal, international relations is in many ways captured by the emergence and disappearance of states in the international system.

This book addresses three main questions: (1) What is the historical record of state death? (2) Why do some states die while others survive? and(3) What explains the decline of violent state death after 1945? By "state death," I mean the formal loss of control over foreign policy making to another state. This definition distinguishes state death from cases of extreme regime change, internal state collapse, or minor territorial exchanges. Typically, state death occurs when one state takes over another, or when a state breaks up into multiple, new states. For example, the partitioning of Germany after World War II constitutes a state death, but the Cuban Revolution of 1959 does not. The British conquest of Punjab in 1846 led to the death of the Punjabi state, but even though internal collapse left the state of Somalia without clear internal authority structures, Somalia continued to exist as a member of the international system in the 1990s. Although the argument advanced here has important implications for domestic political changes, the focus is on the survival of states in the international system.

The argument of this book is that geography is a key determinant of state death and survival-it endangers some states while securing others. Buffer states-states that lie between two other states engaged in rivalry-are particularly likely to die. Indeed, buffer states account for over 40 percent of state deaths. Each rival fears that its opponent will take over the buffer state between them and gain a strategic advantage. While both rivals might prefer to maintain the sovereignty of the buffer state so as to decrease the risk of war, the fear of losing strategic ground, coupled with the rivals' inability to trust each other not to encroach on the buffer, generally signal the demise of buffer states.

Under certain conditions, however, the dynamics of rivalry can be mitigated such that a buffer state survives. If the rivals' hands can be metaphorically "tied"-because their resources face serious and simultaneous constraints, because they must jointly meet another threat in a separate theater, or because buffer state sovereignty is guaranteed by even more powerful actors-buffer states can escape the fate of their fellows. But these conditions are likely to be (and historically have been) rare. They may occur with the coming of world wars, with revolution, or with the creation of new world orders. And even when buffers are protected by more powerful actors, the incentives to take them over do not disappear; the form of conquest merely changes. The post-1945 era provides an example of a superpower-the United States-sponsoring a rule against conquest that prevented rivals from taking over the buffers between them. The norm against conquest is an intervening variable that reshapes the way in which states seek to control other states. Thus, the bright-line prohibition against taking over other states has led to a proliferation of interventions to achieve ends formerly sought through conquest.

Relevance

The issue of state survival lies at the heart of international relations theory and practice. International relations scholars typically take state survival to be a minimum, and primary, goal of states, statesmen, and citizens. But international relations (IR) scholarship lacks systematic, rigorous analyses of variation in state death and survival.

The survival assumption is empirically verifiable. States and their citizens do seek survival. From Haile Selassie's impassioned plea to the League of Nations in 1936 to the French resistance to German occupation during the Second World War, loyalty to state and homeland appears to be an extremely strong motivator, one to which people have often sacrificed their lives.

This push for survival is justified; state death is more frequent than scholars have believed. Since 1816, 66 of 207 states have died. Fifty of these cases (over 75 percent) are instances of violent state death, which constitutes the narrower focus of this book. Violent state death occurs when one state uses military force to deprive another of its formal control over foreign policy making. Typically, violent state death occurs in the form of conquest or occupation. It is not unusual for state death to be a cause or a consequence of war. For example, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was the trigger for the Persian Gulf War, just as the takeover of Poland led Britain and France to join the Second World War. Following World War II, Germany was dismembered for almost five decades.

Recent events have highlighted the import of thinking seriously about state death. While the lack of scholarship on this topic may be attributed to the relative absence of state death-or, at least, violent state death-since 1945, the recent US occupation of Iraq may reverse this trend. Understanding the dynamics that may endanger some states while bolstering others has reemerged as a central problem for policy makers.

The Literature

State death is a touchstone issue for international relations theorists. I test my argument alongside three major hypotheses drawn from the international relations literature: a balancing argument drawn from realism; a social constructivist claim about the relationship between international legitimacy and state survival; and a set of arguments that suggest that states whose populations are likely to resist conquerors are most likely to survive.

State death plays a fundamental, yet underappreciated, role in neorealism. A basic premise of realist arguments is that states will balance against power; when faced with external threats, states should build up their militaries and seek alliances. Kenneth Waltz, in his famous explication of neorealism, works from the assumptions that states seek survival and that anarchy is the governing principle of the international system. The assumption of rationality is also frequently ascribed to Waltz's work, but the rationality of states or state actors is not a neorealist assumption. Instead, neorealists avoid making a strict rationality assumption by making a selection argument: states that "do not help themselves, or who do so less effectively than others, will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to danger, will suffer." At the same time, neorealists assert that the death rate of states is low. If irrational behavior is punished by death, and the death rate of states is low, neorealists claim, then states must behave as if they were rational. Even if we take the assumptions as empirically correct, the logic behind the deduction is shaky at best. Not all states face equal threats and, further, power and alliances-which are the preferred form of balancing for neorealists-may attract (or indicate) rather than deter threats to survival.

In addition, if selection pressures are as acute as neorealism suggests, the rate of state death should be high, not low. The fact that the rate of state death is higher than previous scholars have assumed does not, however, necessarily support the neorealist balancing argument. I show that the strong relationship between power, alliances, and state survival suggested by this argument does not exist. This finding does not necessarily lead to a conclusive rejection of the balancing argument. Death in the international system could take many forms, from a decline in power to a regime change to state death-I test the application of this argument only to punishment by state death. But my findings do illustrate that balancing behavior does not govern state death and survival.

Unlike realists, constructivists do not assume or conclude that states behave rationally. According to constructivists, states and state actors socially construct their world such that certain actions are permissible and others are forbidden. For example, David Strang and Alexander Wendt have argued that states confer degrees of international legitimacy on other (aspiring) state actors. Some of these actors are designated as being in the "in-group" while others are in the "out-group." This distinction among actors is accompanied by different rules of behavior. To conquer and occupy an illegitimate state is permissible, while conquest of a "legitimate" state is taboo and will be punished. Using a new measure of international legitimacy, and by adding previously ignored states to standard data sets, I find considerable support for this argument. Indeed, the claim that more legitimate states are more likely to survive could be consistent with the argument that a norm against conquest has prevented violent state death after 1945. Particularly if the standards for international recognition of states have been more liberal in the post-1945 era, the general norm against conquest and the specific norm against conquest of legitimate states may have become congruent.

The issue of state death is also relevant for a third set of arguments from comparative politics and international relations theory-what I will call the "nationalist resistance" argument. Proponents of this argument have suggested that nationalistic societies will generate particularly high costs for states that conquer them. The resistance to conquest inspired in these particularly nationalistic states would make conquest untenable. Would-be conquerors, behaving strategically, thus avoid taking over states whose populations would generate high levels of resistance. The logic of this argument, as Peter Liberman suggests, may be incomplete because nationalism often coexists with industrialization. The infrastructure that characterizes industrialized states may actually make conquest and resource extraction easier, and resistance more difficult, than nationalist resistance theorists would suggest. Furthermore, signs of nationalism may generate a reaction opposite from what one would hope for, angering would-be conquerors and accelerating the process of state death.

Method

The primary focus of this book is variation in the incidence of violent state death. Violent state death is the most common form of state death; one could argue that it is also the most pernicious form. Typically, violent state death occurs via conquest or annexation. Nonviolent state deaths, on the other hand, are usually attached to voluntary state unifications or dissolutions. While there is some overlap among these categories-Bavaria and Württemberg, for example, voluntarily acceded to the Prussian Confederation, but only after observing the conquest of nearby states like Hanover and Saxony-by and large, the processes of violent and nonviolent state death appear quite distinct. It would be surprising, for example, if the same causal explanation could account for the British takeover of the Indian princely states and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Because these types of events are so different, I have chosen to focus on the group of outcomes that is most common among state deaths.

I employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to test hypotheses derived from my argument as well as alternative hypotheses. Statistical analysis permits the uncovering of patterns, or correlations; it allows us to verify or disconfirm initial hunches. It also lends the benefit of systematic testing. At the same time, statistical analysis suffers from at least two weaknesses: first, not all variables are easily quantified and, thus, not all hypotheses can be tested using quantitative analysis; and second, while statistical results can show correlation, they typically do not uncover the causal processes that most intrigue political scientists. Even if I am able to show that buffer states are more likely to die than nonbuffer states, I also need to show that my argument explains these outcomes in particular cases. Mixing methods combines the best of both worlds: rigorous, systematic statistical analysis allows generalization, while case studies permit illustration of causal mechanisms.

Plan of the Book

The remainder of this book is divided into three main sections: "Patterns and Causes," "Buffer State Death and Survival," and "The Norm against Conquest and State Death after 1945." Chapter 2, "Definitions and Patterns," has two tasks. First, I describe in detail the coding criteria and decisions for variables used in this analysis that have not been used frequently in the international relations literature. I explain how and why I generated a new list of states. I also discuss the definition and coding of "state death," going so far as to explain why certain borderline cases were excluded. Second, I present an overview of state death, taking on the questions of who, what, where, when, and how.

The "why" of state death is addressed in chapter 3, which is devoted primarily to presenting and explaining the argument that the dynamics of rivalry and geography determine state death and survival. I argue that geography, by which I mean location, is a prime predictor of state death-buffer states are particularly likely to die because rivals face strategic imperatives to take over the buffers that lie between them and are typically unable to make credible commitments to preserve buffers. At times, however, unusual circumstances may intervene that decrease the probability that rivals will take over buffer states. I lay out three such conditions: "tiring hands," when rivals' resources are simultaneously constrained such that they cannot take over the buffer; "diverted rivalry," when the rivals must become temporary allies against a threat in another theater, creating incentives to cease fighting over the buffer so that necessary resources are not sapped; and when a particularly powerful state intervenes to guarantee the sovereignty of the buffer state, creating a situation whereby buffers are secure from conquest because rivals fear the costs of violating dictates issued by more powerful actors in the system. This third condition has characterized much of the post-1945 period. The United States in particular has supported a norm against conquest, altering other states' incentives to take over their neighbors. I trace the evolution of the norm against conquest both in the United States and abroad, in part to understand to what degree it has been internalized and, further, to what degree it may be reversible. Chapter 3 concludes with a review of additional explanations for state death, particularly the balancing argument, the international legitimacy argument, and the nationalist resistance argument.

The heart of the book's quantitative analysis is presented in chapter 4, which begins the section on buffer state death and survival. This chapter focuses on general explanations for state death, using duration analysis to test hypotheses about the role of buffer states, balancing behavior, international recognition, and nationalism with respect to state death. Analyses of variation in buffer state survival are also included.

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Excerpted from State Death by Tanisha M. Fazal
Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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