POL214Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Chain Gang, Security Dilemma
Document Summary
Chain gangs and passed bucks (shifting responsibility): predicting alliance patterns in multipolarity. Kenneth waltz"s rigorous recasting of traditional balance-of-power theory has provided the intellectual foundation for much of the most fruitful recent work in the fields of international politics and national security. Prob: those who apply it use to predict for strategic choices. He deduces logically that multipolarity is structurally prone to instabilities. In a nutshell, we argue that given europe"s multipolar checkerboard geography, the perception of offensive military advantages gave rise to alliance chain-ganging before 1914, whereas the perception of defensive advantages gave rise to buck-passing before 1939. This structure comprises a constant element, anarchy, and a variable element, polarity. In multipolarity, two equal and opposite alliance dilemmas impede efficient balancing. In the face of a rising threat, balancing alignments fail to form in a timely fashion because some states try to ride free on other states" balancing efforts.
