Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics - Brossura

Renshon, Jonathan

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0691174504 ISBN 13: 9780691174501

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2017

Riassunto

There is widespread agreement that status or standing in the international system is a critical element in world politics. The desire for status is recognized as a key factor in nuclear proliferation, the rise of China, and other contemporary foreign policy issues, and has long been implicated in foundational theories of international relations and foreign policy. Despite the consensus that status matters, we lack a basic understanding of status dynamics in international politics. The first book to comprehensively examine this subject, Fighting for Status presents a theory of status dissatisfaction that delves into the nature of prestige in international conflicts and specifies why states want status and how they get it.

What actions do status concerns trigger, and what strategies do states use to maximize or salvage their standing? When does status matter, and under what circumstances do concerns over relative position overshadow the myriad other concerns that leaders face? In examining these questions, Jonathan Renshon moves beyond a focus on major powers and shows how different states construct status communities of peer competitors that shift over time as states move up or down, or out, of various groups.

Combining innovative network-based statistical analysis, historical case studies, and a lab experiment that uses a sample of real-world political and military leaders, Fighting for Status provides a compelling look at the causes and consequences of status on the global stage.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Jonathan Renshon is an assistant professor and Trice Faculty Scholar in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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"People think that countries go to war over resources, but all too often nations are, as Shakespeare put it, ‘jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth.' With insight and data, Renshon explains how nebulous concerns with status, prestige, and respect can drive the course of war and peace."--Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

"Renshon provides powerful proof of what scholars and practitioners have long believed but could never demonstrate concretely: that the people who govern states sometimes want status enough to fight for it. A major advance in the study of the causes of war, Fighting for Status is a theoretically rich and methodologically sophisticated tour de force that takes our understanding of the international political implications of a core human trait to a new level."--William C. Wohlforth, coauthor of America Abroad

"Fighting for Status is a theoretically innovative and methodologically rigorous study, with a sophisticated multimethod design that will reshape the analysis of status in international politics. The role of status is an enormously important but difficult question in many fields, and Renshon makes a pathbreaking contribution that will now be required reading."--Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University

"This book argues that status has been a concept often used to explain foreign policy choices and international conflict but it is not well defined or carefully studied. Fighting for Status is the best comprehensive treatment I have seen that advances a theory of when and how status matters."--Richard K. Herrmann, Ohio State University

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Fighting for Status

Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics

By Jonathan Renshon

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17450-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix, 
List of Tables, xi, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
1 Introduction, 1, 
2 Status Dissatisfaction, 32, 
3 Losing Face and Sinking Costs, 75, 
4 A Network Approach to Status, 116, 
5 Status Deficits and War, 150, 
6 "Petty Prestige Victories" and Weltpolitik in Germany, 1897–1911, 182, 
7 Salvaging Status: Doubling Down in Russia, Egypt, and Great Britain, 221, 
8 Conclusion, 254, 
References, 273, 
Index, 301, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Of all the misperceptions in international politics, perhaps the most grievous is embodied in the Charter of the United Nations, which declares that the organization "is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members." A laudatory notion, but one belied by hundreds of years of international politics and human nature itself. The fundamental ordering principle of international politics is hierarchy, not equality. And while guns and tanks are easy to count, far more can be explained by things that we cannot see, hear, or hold. It is ultimately on status, not bullets, that "the success or failure of all international policies" rests. But status is more even than the "everyday currency of international relations," because status is also the end goal for political leaders, many of whom are plainly obsessed with investing in, seizing, and defending it.

Smoking gun quotes and tales abound. In a 1952 cabinet memo that foreshadowed the war decades later, British officials argued that the Falklands must be retained, since "public admission of our inability to maintain these traditional possessions would cause a loss of prestige wholly out of proportion to the saving in money obtained." Friedrich von Holstein, a German diplomat during the 1911 Agadir Crisis, asserted that Germany must escalate the Moroccan crisis "not for material reasons alone, but even more for the sake of prestige." Later, on the eve of World War I, Russian leaders seemed wholly preoccupied with the threat to the regime's status if they should fail to meet the challenge issued by Germany. Russia refused to back down, despite the near certainty that its odds would be far better if it delayed the conflict for one or two years. Czar Nicholas explained this otherwise-puzzling decision to the Russian people by referring to the need to "protect the honor, dignity and safety of Russia and its position among the Great Powers." This is exactly what Germany wanted, since it had manipulated the situation precisely to play on the czar's concern for status: a 1913 memo from German prime minister Bethmann Hollweg stated that it would be "almost impossible for Russia, without an enormous loss of prestige ... to look on without acting during a military advance against Serbia by Austria-Hungary."

Not all tales of status in world politics involve war and peace; some cast world leaders in an almost-petty light. At his coronation in 1804, Napoléon arranged an informal meeting with the pope, who was in attendance. While both were competing for political and economic dominance over Europe, Napoléon got the upper hand by arranging his horse carriage in such a way that the pope was forced to dirty his shoes. At the Potsdam conference in 1945, the leaders of the three great powers of the day — Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — could not agree on the order they'd enter into the conference room. It was eventually decided that all three should enter simultaneously through separate doors. Vladimir Putin reportedly declined the invitation to a G8 summit at Camp David in 2012 so that he could avoid the humiliation of leaving when the leaders of other nations went to Chicago for a NATO summit to which he was not invited.

While it can be difficult to escape the image of world leaders stuck in a door frame, Three Stooges style, these anecdotes touch on concerns far more serious than they might first appear. Status is valuable, not least because it "confers tangible benefits in the form of decision-making autonomy and deference." Certainly, efforts to gain prestige may sometimes be both costly and risky, but "if they succeed, they can bring rewards all out of proportion to [those] costs by influencing the psychological environment and policies of other decision-makers." Even if status was useless as a currency (and it is not), it would still be sought after for the psychological benefits it confers on its holders. Thus, for leaders, a combination of intrinsic motivation — evolution has ensured that increased status makes us feel good — and instrumental benefits — higher status brings tangible benefits in security, wealth, and influence — makes status one of the most sought-after qualities in world politics.

So far, we are on uncontroversial, even staid ground; scholars from every corner of political science, along with their real-world counterparts in the White House (and Kremlin) agree on the critical importance of status. Yet the broad agreement that "status matters" has left us in a peculiar situation. While there is considerable agreement within the political science discipline and foreign policy community that status matters in world affairs, the depth of our understanding has lagged far behind our confidence. For all the bombastic declarations, there is too little in the way of focused research on how and when status matters. Qualitative work on this subject has been illuminating, but unable to establish patterns across time and space. Similarly, cross-national quantitative research on status and conflict has established an excellent foundation for future inquiries, but has yet to generate concrete, replicable findings on the subject.

Thus, our understanding of status in international politics has been guided by intuition, not evidence, and this has left us with a significant gap. There is still much we do not know about how status affects foreign policy behavior and international outcomes, and what we do "know" is often based on surprisingly little evidence. What we need — and what this book provides — is a systematic investigation into the ways that status concerns affect the behavior of states and leaders, especially as these concerns relate to the propensity for military conflict.

This book begins that process by proposing a theory of status dissatisfaction designed to address the following questions. When does status matter: under what circumstances do concerns over relative status overshadow the myriad other concerns that decision makers face in complex international environments? How does status matter: what specific outcomes do status concerns trigger, and what strategies do states and leaders use to improve their rank? Finally, which types of status are most important? If status is standing in a hierarchy, then leaders may construct a virtually unlimited number of hierarchies based on different attributes (for example, wealth or power) and composed of different groups of competitors. Put more plainly, who forms the relevant comparison group for different types of states? This book addresses these questions while also shedding light on perennial dilemmas of foreign policy such as how status quo actors can accommodate dissatisfied powers (for example, modern-day China or pre–World War I Wilhelmine Germany) using status-based incentives.

The Case for Status

Status in international politics is standing, or rank, in a status community. It has three critical attributes — it is positional, perceptual, and social — that combine to make any actor's status position a function of the higher-order, collective beliefs of a given community of actors. There are two ways in which the term is commonly used. The first refers to status in its most purely positional sense: standing, an actor's rank or position in a hierarchy. "Status community" is defined as a hierarchy composed of the group of actors that a state perceives itself as being in competition with. "Rank" is one's ordinal position and is determined by the collective beliefs of members of that community. Since status is based on higher-order beliefs, there is no objective, time-invariant formula for what qualities or attributes confer status. The second meaning of status is as an identity or membership in a group, such as "status as a major power." Status can thus be "about" belonging to a given group or ranking in a hierarchy, but in either case, positionality is critical.

Status refers to the actual position or identity of a state. While either position or identity might have some explanatory power on its own, my focus is on status concerns. Status concerns denote the level of focus on status-related issues, and the likelihood of acting in order to advance or salvage one's status. A concern for status might be sparked by a perceived threat to one's status position or rank, but this is not a necessary condition. In this manner, status concerns are a larger conceptual category that includes "status threats" as one precipitating cause among several. Put slightly differently, status concerns may lead to status seeking — behavior or actions undertaken in order to gain status — but may also lead to actions designed to preserve one's current position or slow one's decline (neither of which is accurately captured by the term "status seeking"). Status concerns are orthogonal to status itself, since both high- and low-ranked actors may evince powerful status concerns.

Why focus on status? In justifying or explaining a research program, scholars have several rationales from which to choose. Sometimes the case is made that something is important conceptually or theoretically, while at other times the case is made empirically — it helps explain something — or based on intuition or common understanding ("we all agree this is important"). It is rare that the case can be made on all these levels and more, but such is the case for status.

A Broad Consensus

The "case for status" rests on three pillars, the first of which is the broad agreement that status matters in world politics. This wide-ranging consensus crosses disciplinary and epistemological boundaries, and might truly be said to be one of the few facts on which world leaders and political scientists agree.

The first element of this consensus is the strong belief among scholars that status (in some shape or form) affects outcomes of importance across international relations, including behavior related to international organizations, nuclear proliferation and testing, humanitarian interventions, and international political economy. A recent study summarized its findings by noting that "status seeking and dominating behavior may be as important as raw aggression in affecting the likelihood of international conflict." A related belief follows that status concerns have been particularly important to certain countries, such as Russia, Norway, India, China, or France. A hyperbolic, but by no means unusual, statement in this vein is that "[China] may very well be the most status-conscious country in the world."

Policy makers and leaders are, for once, in agreement with political scientists. In government circles, the desire for status is cited as a key factor in nuclear proliferation, the rise of China and Russia, conflict in Syria, and a multitude of other issues. There is also a long history of policy-oriented political scientists encouraging government programs devoted to leveraging what is often seen as a universal desire for status. Political scientists will likely be aware of the work of Larson and colleagues, who urge the United States to provide status incentives to Russia and China. They might be unaware, however, that Hans Morgenthau himself made similar pleas over a half century ago (he referred to them as "status bribes").

The case for status is often substantiated via leaders' public and private statements. For example, General Matthew Ridgway wrote to his superiors concerning strategy in Korea that the official US policy was "particularly debilitating to our prestige." David Lloyd George described Britain's position during the 1911 Agadir Crisis in his famous Mansion House speech by forcefully arguing that "Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and prestige among the Great Powers of the world," and that "if a situation were to be forced" on it that required it surrendering "the great and beneficent position Britain has won," then "peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable" for a "great country" like Britain to endure.

The rationale for giving a place of prominence to status holds no matter which level or actor one places the focus on. For example, a renewed emphasis on leader-specific factors in international relations suggests we should take seriously those factors that affect individual-level decision making. Notably, there is a strong consensus that status is a critically important human motivation and "universal feature of social groups." High-status individuals benefit in real economic terms from the deference (i.e., preferential treatment) shown to them by lower-ranked individuals. High-status individuals also enjoy significant physical and mental health benefits as well as greater access to younger and healthier mates. High-status individuals are even perceived as possessing different "intrinsic" qualities than low-status individuals, who are in turn likely to adopt unfavorable beliefs about themselves to explain their lower ranks. Status positions even affect how we see the world. For example, high-status individuals hear louder applause for themselves and use different language when they speak. In short, the tremendous benefits that status confers on individuals who possess it help explain why status seeking is such a fundamental motive for leaders.

The justification still holds, however, if we abstract away from the role of the individual political leader — that is, if we "black box" the state and focus our attention on the international system as a whole. Though the system is anarchic, in the sense of lacking a recognized authority with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, it is not unordered or "flat." It is in fact ordered, or ranked, on many dimensions, leading Lake to describe international hierarchies as "pervasive." Of course, the most obvious set of status hierarchies in international relations are those based on material capabilities or power. But hierarchies based on moral authority, norms, and international law compliance are prevalent as well. Put simply, even if the system as a whole is anarchic, nearly all relationships and interactions within that system are characterized by hierarchy and permeated with patterns of dominance and subordination.

Empirical Benefits

The second pillar on which the case for status rests is its empirical usefulness. Here is where one begins to sense a divergence. On the one hand, scholars have been confident in attributing status-seeking motives to states and leaders. For example, Mastanduno, describing the Cold War dynamic, writes that "U.S. officials worried greatly, some would say obsessively, about the costs to U.S. credibility and prestige." The confidence with which status is pronounced to be driving behavior and outcomes, though, belies the amount of evidence we have in favor of such explanations.

There is far less evidence concerning the impact of status than one would expect, and certainly too little to match our confident declarations. As an example, despite the recent turn toward causal inference in political science, there is no evidence for a causal effect of status on anything related to international politics. Even if we relax the high standards typically required to discuss causal explanations, there is surprisingly little empirical work on the subject (though that has certainly begun to change over the last few years). To be sure, there is good research out there (and more every year), but it is typically bound by strict criteria, such as a small group of states or narrow time period. Evidence of status' impact on world affairs is thus not causally identified, but nor is it particularly comprehensive or far-reaching.

A second aspect of the empirical justification for status is its potential ability to solve puzzles that would otherwise be mystifying. Why were leaders in Wilhelmine Germany so fixated on status concerns? What is the link between status and war? Why don't more states offer the "status bribes" suggested by Morgenthau, and why do some states not accept them when they are offered? Just as important, what are the methods states can use to gain status, and have those changed over time? No single book can answer all the questions it poses, but this book aims to begin the systematic empirical investigation of the nature and consequences of status concerns.

Synthesis

The third pillar on which my case for status rests is the concept's utility in bringing together myriad approaches to international relations (IR). For constructivists, the perceptual and social nature of status make it a natural focus. Lebow provides one of the strongest arguments in this vein, stating that for several hundred years, "honor and prestige were even more important than security and wealth," and in a later work declared prestige to have been the driving motive in 62 percent of the wars fought since 1648. A related literature on status has drawn extensively from Social Identity Theory to examine how rising powers such as Russia and China have attempted to maintain and increase their status.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Fighting for Status by Jonathan Renshon. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2017
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691174504
• ISBN 13: 9780691174501
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 304
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile