Alliances: Why Write Them Down?

Reviews 카테고리에서는 주로 내가 읽었던 논문 혹은 단행본의 내용을 간단히 요약하고 학계의 쟁점 사항이나 저자의 주장 가운데 흥미로운 부분, 혹은 내가 제기하는 비판 등을 담은 포스팅을 써볼까 한다.

첫 번째 논문은 James D. Morrow의 동맹은 왜 공식 조약으로 체결되며, 공식 조약이 동맹의 영향력에 미치는 변화는 무엇인가를 다루는 논문이다.

Alliances: Why Write Them Down?

A Short Review 

Kyung Won, Suh

James D. Morrow, "Alliances: Why Write Them Down," Annual Review of Political Science 3 (2000), pp. 63-83.

Summary

  In this review article, James D. Morrow, a leading IR scholar on military alliance and formal theory, reviews the existing literature on formal alliance and presents several arguments about why states formalize some relations but not others. He succinctly offers a formula on the driving factors of a state’s decision to intervene in a war, and explores the two ways in which states make their alliance more credible: signaling and commitment. Furthermore, he cast doubts on the validity of neorealist theory of balance of power by formalizing the relevant hypotheses of neorealist theory. Lastly, He covers a variety of issues regarding alliance politics, such as the trade-off between arming and allying, burden sharing within alliances, management and duration of alliances, asymmetric alliances, as well as domestic politics and alliances.

 

Why Choose It?

  One of my research topics is to examine the deterrence-enhancing effects of formal alliances by using qualitative methods. There have been several quantitative studies on alliance politics testing the deterrent power of formal military alliance. Although some findings are contradictory to each other, in overall, all of these findings suggest that formal alliances enhance deterrence. Like the literature on audience costs and democratic peace theory, however, little attention has been paid to investigate the causal mechanism of the theory through in-depth case studies; indeed, some seminal papers already conducted process tracing to test the causal mechanisms of audience costs and democratic peace theory, which found that there is little supporting evidence. Following these efforts, I plan to write a research paper on investigating whether or not the causal chains work as posited by game-theoretic approaches to military alliances. As a preliminary research, therefore, I choose this article to fully understand the reasoning of formal models of military alliances.

Interesting Argument and Its Critics

 

Signaling and Formality

  Morrow argues that an alliance matters only under two conditions: (a) if the alliance impacts the calculation of the allies to come to the aid of one another during a war, and (b) if it leads adversaries to determine that the allies will fight to support one another. The first condition changes allies’ calculations; the second changes adversaries’ calculations (p. 67). Signaling information involves with the second condition; making commitment has to do with the first condition.

  If signaling can convey information sufficient for adversaries to infer a sender’s intentions (thus affecting their calculation to challenge), it must be costly: signaling behavior should impose some kind of costs on an actor. Morrow provides two sources of these costs: coordinating its own foreign policy reducing autonomy, and pre-war military coordination. Because states outside an alliance think that if allies coordinate their foreign policies, then they bear a sort of costs to build this similarity, such coordination makes the alliance more credible and thus enhance its deterrent effect.

  Second, military coordination can also impose costs: extensive coordination of military forces during peacetime might decrease one’s ability to fight alone because the structure or military procurement of its military force might be adjusted to maximize the fighting power of allied forces, not its own. In this case, peacetime coordination makes costs and the alliance more credible.

  However, several questions arise. For starters, do formal military alliances always lead extensive military coordination? Morrow’s second logic implicitly assumes that states forming a formal alliance should coordinate their military force extensively and frequently. However, it is a testable hypothesis, not an axiomatic empirical law. It is also possible that states do not fulfill their commitment to perform peaceful coordination.

  Furthermore, are these costs imposed by coordinating foreign policies and military force really bigger than the costs of intervening in an undesirable war? If shared interests which lie behind formal alliance vanish, then the costs of fulfilling alliance commitment may sharply increase. Even under this circumstance, formal alliance may remain intact because breaking formal agreement is costly, especially when no several conflicts occur. Therefore, assuming that the costs made by forming formal alliance are always bigger than the costs of being entrapped into a war is not compelling.

  Lastly, even we assume that these costs are enough to force states to honor their commitments, it might be the case that these case have nothing to do with “formality” of military alliance. Coordination of foreign policies and military force is involved with states behavior. Therefore, even states which forge informal alignment or alliance without formal agreement can extensively coordinate their foreign policies and military force – consider U.S.-Israel relations. Although coordination does impose severe costs and it can change adversaries’ calculation, it might be not directly related to the formal nature of military alliance. In this case, Morrow’s theory may not be convincing even there is ample statistical evidence to support his theory.

            

The Void Costs of Breaking Commitment

  Morrow’s commitment mechanism is an important way of imposing costs on allies. Specifically, his argument on audience costs deserves attention. Formulated by James Fearon, another leading IR scholar on formal theories, audience costs is one of the most compelling theories of international relations. Its central logic is that states (and leaders) should pay the costs if they fail to fulfill its commitment because actors outside the government could impose political costs on leaders by punishment. Therefore, the costs of fighting a war with allies reduce as the costs of breaking commitments increase.

  However, one can raise a critique of this theory. Especially, leaders who choose not to intervene might be punished only if opposing parties or citizens believe that breaking commitment is likely to damage national interest; namely, its reputation or prestige, status. However, when they judge that intervention will not serve national interest, then why we believe leaders would still be punished by domestic actors?

  There are several cases that breaking alliance commitment does not always damage a state’s national interests. For example, the costs of fighting a powerful aggressor seem too high, even for domestic actors outside the government. The majority of constituents may have dovish preferences; in this case, even opposing parties try to punish leaders in office by criticizing non-fulfillment of commitment, it is likely to be a void attempt.  Furthermore, domestic balance of power is an important factor of creating audience costs. If domestic political structure allows leaders to maintain a solid political position, then the costs of being punished are relatively low. Therefore, there are several reasons for believing that domestic audience costs may vary across cases, and thus the credibility of formal military agreement also varies.