1st Quarter 2017 Volume 8, No. 1

Editorial

The European Union, the Birth of American Airpower, Possibility and Peace Building, Measuring Security, and Economic Coercion

Rémy M. Mauduit

Articles

The European Union as a Model for its Neighbors

From Dream to Nightmare?

Geoffrey Harris, PhD

The Birth of American Airpower in World War I

Bert Frandsen, PhD

Possibility and Peacebuilding for Precarious Lives

The Impact of Art, Culture, and Community

Ruthann K. Johansen, PhD

Measuring Security

Understanding State Capacity in Oil-Producing States

Joseph L. Derdzinski, PhD

Jackson Porreca

Economic Coercion and Power Redistribution during Wartime

Rosella Cappella Zielinski, PhD

The European Union, the Birth of American Airpower, Possibility and Peace Building, Measuring Security, and Economic Coercion

In “The European Union (EU) as a Model for its Neighbors: from Dream to Nightmare?” Professor Geoffrey Harris postulates that the EU is facing serious challenges to its legitimacy, attractiveness and normative power, just as instability and threats to its stability and security are growing in its neighborhood. The problems of the eurozone have created tensions between the member states. Dr. Harris argues that Russian revisionism has not met with a durable collective response. Revolution and war in the Middle East and North Africa have left Europe apparently unable to influence events or handle the consequent humanitarian crisis with any conviction. The ideal of European integration has in fact faced increasing internal challenges since the time of the Maastricht Treaty, and in the decade since the last EU enlargement the attempt to establish a peaceful neighborhood has failed. How far do the deepening problems reflect a failure of leadership, or should the EU now abandon its image as a model for others and concentrate on its internal security and avoid trying to resolve the problems of others? In the decades after 1989 the European idea was attractive, waves of enlargement followed, and a neighborhood policy based on values and common interests was tried and failed. Dr. Harris ponders if the EU should now choose consolidation and self-defence over deepening and widening of the integration process.

Although the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, a complacent United States fell far behind the warring European nations in military aviation, Dr. Bert Frandsen posits in “The Birth of American Airpower in World War I.” When Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, the American air force consisted of only a handful of aviators in the Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps, equipped with a meager number of unarmed, and by European standards, obsolete planes. An American combat aviation arm did not exist. In contrast, the belligerents in Europe had achieved tremendous advances in military aviation, including the development of specialized aircraft for the missions of observation, bombardment, and pursuit. How did the United States create airpower upon the Great War? Professor Frandsen asserts that an important part can be told through the contributions of three key architects of American airpower: Raynal Bolling, Benjamin Foulois, and Billy Mitchell. These fathers of American airpower helped create a combat aviation arm on a par with the other branches of the Army. They harnessed public enthusiasm for airpower, developed the mobilization plans that turned recruits into aviation units, procured the airplanes, learned the operational art from the Airman’s perspective, and provided a vision that inspired the future emergence of an independent air force and an airpower second to none.

The pervasiveness of deadly force in twenty-first-century forms of warfare, terrorist attacks, and the displacement of millions of people fleeing violence makes peacebuilding essential for civilians and military personnel alike. Philosophical aesthetics can analyze the conditions that contribute to violence and perpetuate its acceptance as a reliable arbiter of conflict, hypothesizes Professor Ruthann Johansen in “Possibility and Peacebuilding for Precarious Lives — The Impact of Art, Culture, and Community.”

Philosophical aesthetics can also enlarge the concept of possibility from limited alternative options or choices toward a philosophical and ethical reorientation to the world and others, thereby offering promising prospects for building peace in precarious times. The interdisciplinary fields of peace studies and peace research provide resources to assess the effects of extended violence on human beings and communities. The critical methods of literary and historical criticism investigate cultural values and ethics and encourage reconsideration of the conditions of our common life and increasingly global culture. Close examination of events in Iraq from 2003 to the present shows that the failures in Iraq following the ousting of Saddam Hussein, and perhaps in all conflicts, arise from the inability to enlarge the concept of possibility and to develop those capacities necessary to engage it: imagination, memory, the capacity to mourn, a commitment to beauty, and a shift in intellection from critique and political contest to collaborative investigation of shared concerns. The exercise of these capacities opens transformative space lying adjacent to or within the conflicts that render life precarious and presents peacemaking possibilities that political scientists and military experts do not entertain.

Dr. Joseph Derdzinski and Mr. Jackson Porreca are seeking to test state capacity as an indicator of resilience to external pressures in “Measuring Security: Understanding State Capacity in Oil-Producing States.” As interest in Africa — more specifically African natural resources — has increased in recent years, state capacity might be the crucial factor in resisting or succumbing to exogenous threats. This contemporary interest in Africa by foreign actors, mainly China and the United States, is part of a strategic engagement to ensure long-term access to the region. China specifically has more opportunity to influence weak states to fuel its growth. Energy resources within states may be desirable targets for groups seeking to disrupt state governance as well as international markets, potentially facilitating conflict within the state. Using the single critical measure of state security capacity — homicide rates — this study’s cases explore how this variable indicates the everyday experiences of policing in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire. Among its conclusions, this paper analyzes the relationship between oil production and state capacity in this twenty-first-century “Great Game.”

War redistributes power among states. While most attention is placed on the changes in relative power of the loser in a hegemonic war, overlooked are some of the most important changes happening within victorious alliances. Professor Rosella Cappella argues that this power redistribution does not take the form of the destruction of an ally’s military forces but instead via the use of economic coercion, in “Economic Coercion and Power Redistribution during Wartime.” When a belligerent is unable to purchase necessary imports for the war effort, the state will have to engage in a loan from an ally. The creditor ally can use that loan to extract concessions resulting in the redistribution of power among states. Economic coercion has its limits. It only occurs when it does not damage the war fighting capability of the ally. Zielinski tests her argument by extreme and similar case selection. She compares the United States as the creditor to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union during World War II. The findings suggest an unexplored element of power transition theory. Opportunities for states to shift the status quo may arise without forewarning. Moreover, shifts in the status quo can occur by exploiting conflict settings versus engaging in conflict itself.

Rémy M. Mauduit, Editor

Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

The European Union as a Model for its Neighbors

From Dream to Nightmare?

Geoffrey Harris, PhD*

Europe’s Mission: A Force for Peace?

The European Union (EU) quite rightly presents itself and is perceived in many ways the world’s greatest and most successful peacebuilding project. Its early development coincided with the aftermath of years of war and genocide, the common experience which inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. The UDHR was adopted during the same year the Congress of Europe took place in The Hague.

At this Congress a “Message to Europeans” was adopted stating:

Europe’s mission is clear. It is to unite her peoples in accordance with their genius of diversity and with the conditions of modern community life, and so open the way towards organised freedom for which the world is seeking. It is to revive her inventive powers for the greater protection and respect of the rights and duties of the individual of which, in spite of all her mistakes, Europe is still the greatest exponent. Human dignity is Europe’s finest achievement, freedom her true strength. Both are at stake in our struggle.

The union of our continent is now needed not only for the salvation of the liberties we have won, but also for the extension of their benefits to all mankind. Upon this union depend Europe’s destiny and the world’s peace.1

Almost 70 years later, the EU clearly faces internal challenges—ongoing economic and financial crises in several member states, threats to its unity and falling popular support challenge its effectiveness and legitimacy at a time in which it also finds itself surrounded by zones of extreme violence and conflict. The basic values of freedom, justice and the rule of law, which characterise any liberal democracy and are at the core of the EU foreign policy, are not only challenged by revisionist Russia but even by some of the 28 national leaders.

European countries also face the constant threat of terrorist attacks from those who explicitly reject the basic Judeo-Christian values which underpin universal conceptions of human rights. These attacks also originate from inside the EU with inspiration from a terrorist group, the Islamic State, whose strength has only grown since the Arab Spring began in 2011.

Time to Soft-pedal on European Values?

Recognising the enormity of the challenges the president of the European Commission seemed to suggest that the EU should reassess the place of values in its basic mission. At a press conference held on 14 January 2016, The Guardian reported that Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission (EC) president, struck

. . . a pessimistic note about the multiple crises facing the EU, ranging from terrorism to the future of Ukraine and the continent’s ability to deal with refugees fleeing chaos and war in the Middle East and Africa. Europe was “running the risk of major reputational damage worldwide” because of its failure to tackle the refugee crisis, he said. “We are the richest continent in the world. . . now we appear as the weakest part.

Juncker said this record meant the EU had to be more modest when it talked to other countries about good governance. “Less arrogance and more performance —I think that has got to be our watchword for the future.”2 Such a statement appears to confirm a crisis of confidence at the heart of the EU leadership. In the weeks following this statement events in Syria led to the arrival inside the EU of thousands of more refugees. These events have highlighted the connections between the Syrian tragedy and the strategic weakening of Europe and, some now argue, the West in general. Russia not only paid close attention to but also, in effect, fueled this course of events. The spread of instability fits perfectly with Russia’s goal of seeking dominance by exploiting the hesitations and contradictions of those it identifies as adversaries.

The events in Syria come at a time when the EU is in the process of reconsidering sanctions on Russia following its annexation of the Crimea and ongoing destabilization of Ukraine. Turkey, NATO member, and the largest and longest standing EU candidate country, has seemed close to war with Russia at a time when its record on democracy and human rights has been increasingly tarnished.

Europe Should Be More Realistic?

If the president of the EC is right, does this mean that that the EU should put less emphasis on values both in external relations and even within the Union itself? This seems to be the view adopted by Jan Techau of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who calls for a renovation of the European project and foresees that:

. . . the EU will be a lot more realpolitik-driven. . . . Realpolitik here means that the EU will be a union less of values and more of transactional politics. It will be less idealistic and more functional. . . . Europeans will find out that ironically, by toning down their values rhetoric among themselves and by accepting a larger variety of approaches within their integrated club, they will be more effective at preserving the core of their values in the age of political globalization. So I predict a Europe in which values will be handled closer to the lowest common denominator than to the great ideals that Europe wants to stand for. This will be a source of never-ending tension, but it will prove less costly than becoming divided over maximalist morals only to lose out in the harsh world of political globalization.3

At the beginning of 2016, this seems to be a widely-held point of view and comes at a time when one EU prime minister, Viktor Orban of Hungary, accuses another, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, of “moral imperialism.” 4This was not only a rejection of criticism over his authoritarian tendencies and antiimmigration policies but a neat way of reversing the arguments and somehow blaming the German leader for her commitment to open borders and a humane response to the deepening refugee crisis.

Putin’s Alternative Vision

Vladimir Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, seems to be immune from such nagging self-doubt apparent in the remarks of President Juncker. Despite the economic crisis at home and uncertain results from military adventures abroad, he insists not only that America should abandon its exceptionalist pretensions, but also that, along with Europe, it should drop the illusion that its values and model of society have anything to offer to others. In fact, he sees things quite differently and has done so for some time. Addressing the UN General Assembly on 28 September 2015, he launched what is clearly a direct ideological challenge.5

Taking the 1940s as his starting point and emphasising the stability provided by the Yalta system, he argued that:

We all know that after the end of the Cold War the world was left with one center of dominance, and those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that, since they are so powerful and exceptional, they know best what needs to be done and thus they don’t need to reckon with the UN, which, instead of rubber-stamping the decisions they need, often stands in their way. . . we consider any attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. They may result in the collapse of the entire architecture of international relations, and then indeed there will be no rules left except for the rule of force. The world will be dominated by selfishness rather than collective effort, by dictate rather than equality and liberty, and instead of truly independent states we will have protectorates controlled from outside. . . . Nations shouldn’t be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one.

We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.

It seems, however, that instead of learning from other people’s mistakes, some prefer to repeat them and continue to export revolutions, only now these are “democratic” revolutions. Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa already mentioned by the previous speaker. Of course, political and social problems have been piling up for a long time in this region, and people there wanted change. But what was the actual outcome? Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention rashly destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.

I’m urged to ask those who created this situation: do you at least realize now what you’ve done? But I’m afraid that this question will remain unanswered because they have never abandoned their policy, which is based on arrogance, exceptionalism, and impunity.

It is interesting to note that President Juncker seemed, albeit implicitly, to accept the charge of arrogance by the West which President Putin denounced. Like his Chinese ally, President Putin likes to insist upon national sovereignty as the basis of international order and stability but his willingness to violate international law and national sovereignty is contradicted by his efforts to counter what he sees as Western interference in his neighborhood. Military action in Georgia in 2008 was an early example of his ability to seize the initiative as he did again in Ukraine in 2013.

It is clear that EU leaders did not take the measure of the challenge they face, and even now there are those who prefer dialogue to confrontation. In the past decade, there was a collective failure of European leaders to anticipate the possible reaction of Russia to an effort to establish a closer relationship with its neighbors. Descriptions of such a misjudgment range from inexplicable to catastrophic. Apart from public statements of concern about the EU Eastern Partnership by Russian leaders, the events in 2008 should have provided a warning. In the spring of that year, a NATO summit in Bucharest held out the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In August 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia. In fact, at the time Western relations with Russia were good enough for President Putin to address the NATO summit. In doing so, he explained that NATO membership for these countries was inconsistent with his country’s interests. Earlier, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, he deliberately avoided politeness, making clear the links between economic relations, political stability and the provocative nature of NATO enlargement. His rejection of the unipolar world at the end of the US President George W. Bush years could not have been clearer.6

In Riga in May 2015, the EU and the countries of the Eastern Partnership restated their view that democracy is essential for a closer political and economic association. The fact, however, is that if there is now a ring of fire in place of the ring of friends originally foreseen by the EU Neighborhood Policy (ENP), part of the explanation is that Russia chose to perceive the very nature of the ENP as a threat to its interests and even to the Putin regime. It is the Russian response, rather than the European efforts to advance democracy, which explain the current nightmare which Ukraine is living through. If the EU can be faulted, it is in having shown a complete inability to anticipate such a tragic course of events even if the warning signs were evident. European ambitions cannot advance through mere wishful thinking but to abandon them at the first challenge is unlikely to appease its challengers. As Nicholas Bouchet of the GMF put it:7

. . . countering Russia’s anti-democratic agenda requires a better understanding of why and how it has been successful in containing and rolling back Western democracy promotion efforts. Three points need to be made in this regard. First, the anti-democratic and illiberal political developments in Russia since the 1990s have gradually amounted to a coherent set of norms. They are not far from forming an ideology, even if one has not been formalized or expressed as such. Second, the argument that Russia’s actions are purely geopolitical—rather than ideological —is also flawed. Moscow’s domestic norms are closely linked to its policy toward the post-Soviet states and to President Vladimir Putin’s vision for Eurasia. Russia’s leadership supports and encourages these norms abroad because it sees this as essential to its survival at home, as well as for driving back general Western influence in the region and rebuilding a Russian geopolitical sphere. Third, the sum total of Russia’s actions abroad—however reactive, improvised, or tactical each may be on its own—indicates an embryonic strategy to support and promote non-democratic norms.

European Neighborhood Policy from Naivety to Failure?

Events since the Arab Spring confirm that it would be quite wrong to see Russian revisionism as the only explanation of the fires raging around the EU´s neighborhood. In fact, when dealing with its southern neighbors, the EU had until 2011 faced constant criticism for its failure to coherently or systematically treat human rights as a central element of its relations with the countries concerned. The southern neighbors of Europe did not entertain any serious aspirations for EU membership, and yet the Union adopted a set of policy instruments based on its enlargement strategy as developed since the early 1990s. In Article 8(1) of the Treaty on the European Union, the member states pledged that:

The Union shall develop a special relationship with neighbouring countries, aiming to establish an area of prosperity and good neighbourliness, founded on the values of the Union and characterised by close and peaceful relations based on cooperation.

In November 2015, the EU presented a review of progress achieved which recognised the limitations of a policy designed in similar terms for very dissimilar countries.8 It was interpreted as a step towards a more “realistic” approach with more emphasis on interests than values, but this brought the risk of leaving the ENP in a state of “suspended animation” or little more than a fig leaf to cover up a strategic retreat in the direction of greater realism as to what can be achieved. Steven Blockmans of the Centre for European Policy Studies put it this way:

Economically strong and confident about the process that was intended to put the EU on a firm constitutional basis and serve the reunited halves of the continent, the EU set out a policy to “prevent the emergence of new dividing lines between the enlarged EU and its neighbours.” Yet, in the absence of a clear membership prospect for ENP countries, the EU’s demands and prescriptive methods of harmonising legal frameworks and reforming institutions and economies have largely failed to inspire the neighbours, especially those who do not share the Union’s values.9

The ENP had not managed to tackle the root causes of the protracted conflicts in the region: poverty, lack of education, and unemployment or, as events in Georgia (2008), the Arab uprisings of 2011, the war in Syria and the consequent refugee crisis made painfully had it offered any real value in terms of conflict prevention or crisis management.

Indeed, the former Commission Director General for Enlargement, Sir Michael Leigh, commented on the recent commission review of ENP in stark terms:

The review effectively acknowledges that the ENP has failed in its goal of building a ring of well governed states around the EU. Most countries covered by the ENP are more unstable today than they were a decade ago. Violence and instability have, tragically, spilled over into the EU itself, the very risk the ENP was intended to avert. What’s more, the ENP was the pretext, if not the cause, of the tense standoff with Russia over Ukraine.  It has brought the EU little or no increased influence while complicating efforts to achieve a new strategic balance in Europe.

Today’s review recognizes that the ENP’s attempt to export the EU’s model of society to the Middle East and Eastern Europe has foundered.10

It is hard to disagree, but is it convincing or meaningful to argue that the attempt was doomed from the start? As Blockmans argues:

. . . the Association Agreements (AAs) and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs) with the EU, the highest form of contractual relations under the ENP, even ended up inciting violence, as was shown in Ukraine in 2013 after President Yanukovych pulled the plug on the conclusion of the country’s AA/DCFTA. In spite of a remarkable pro-EU revolutionary wave that swept out the ancient regime and managed to keep most of the country united in its determination to sign the agreement, the ENP—and in particular the Eastern Partnership—suffered a serious blow as a result of the EU’s collective lack of strategic foresight about Russia’s belligerence in Crimea and the Donbas.11

Certainly, by failing to treat Russia as a genuine partner of both the EU and NATO, the EU and the US failed to anticipate Russia’s reaction. Any optimism as to the rapid stabilization of Europe’s neighbourhood is hard to justify in the current situation, but to somehow blame the EU for events in any of the countries concerned seems to go beyond analysis and enter the realm of surrender. Strategic failure has certainly resulted from a failure of anticipation, yet the vision at the origin of the ENP cannot be simply abandoned. The basic idea that people should choose their governments, respect human rights, seek economic development and live in peace and security with neighbours is an idea which Europe has no reason to give up on even in the face of the overt challenge from Russia and the tragic counterrevolutions in many of the countries of the Arab Spring. Being realistic does not mean abandoning basic values, and as Leigh summarises, Europe does need new policies (plural) for its neighbourhood as:

. . . there will never be a common foreign and security policy worthy of the name unless the EU manages to act effectively in the part of the world where its potential influence is greatest. Well-designed neighborhood policies would also help to check the growing radicalization of young people within the EU itself…Europe cannot afford inertia when facing challenges of the magnitude of those unleashed by the Arab uprisings and by failed or partial transitions to the East. The EU should move away from high sounding strategies towards well-targeted initiatives with real impact and effectiveness.12

In fact, the confirmation of the need for well-targeted initiatives can be seen by the relative success of the EU strategy towards the Balkans. The situation in 2016 in the region is quite different from 20 years ago, and there is no reason to assume in advance that such progress in the right direction cannot be achieved, at least in the Eastern neighborhood. Standing up to pressure from Russia was necessary in Serbia and other countries of the region just as it will have to be about Ukraine, for example. The EU Balkan strategy does, in fact, replicate some of the elements of the original coal and steel community with elements of financial assistance and regional cooperation. Europe’s basic message that there is an alternative to war is confirmed by developments in the region where the “pull of Europe’s soft power” has proved effective. Ivan Vejvoda of the German Marshall Fund has made this point convincingly.13

It is the very success of the EU enlargement strategy that led to many of the problems the Union faces today. Twenty-eight countries with different histories and even geography all signed to the same treaties, but that is clearly an inadequate cement for a political union with explicit aspirations for a common security policy. The success of a peaceful enlargement could not be simply repeated via a neighborhood policy establishing a basis for relations with countries which do not have an EU accession perspective. Anyone who believed in that possibility a decade ago has been bitterly disappointed. This is not a reason to abandon Europe’s basic message. To do so in a vain attempt to define a single global foreign policy strategy would be particularly inappropriate.

Looking East

As S. Neil McFarlane and Anand Menon see it:14

The EU overestimated the significance of its attractive power in the eastern neighbourhood. It ignored the fact that its political and economic prescriptions cut across established interests of key members of the political elite in Ukraine and Armenia. It also denied itself its major leverage… the firm prospect of accession.

A neighbourhood policy for countries without an EU membership goal or perspective was not necessarily doomed from the start, as real success depended on decisions by the leadership and the peoples of the countries concerned. After 1989, the countries of central and eastern Europe, like Spain, Greece, and Portugal some years earlier, made apparently irreversible changes to establish democracy and the rule of law. Even now the disturbing developments in Hungary and Poland do not presage a return to the era of gulags and mass murder.

Clearly, EU policymakers underestimated the capacity and the will of Russia to contest the space between the Russian Federation and Europe. The region is diverse and densely populated, and EU preferences did not necessarily coincide with those of local leaders. Corruption, old Soviet-era networks, and ethnic issues could be used to counter the overwhelming power of attraction which the new EU members had, at least initially, bought into. Russia could certainly claim deep historical ties to many Eastern Partnership countries. In fact, it had a considerably greater material capacity to influence the policy choices of these states than the EU, which had even discounted or ignored the possibility that its approach would ever be contested, even after President Putin made his views clear. It is, however, unconvincing to somehow blame the EU for ignoring the signs and therefore being somehow responsible for the violent backlash from 2013 onwards. In the opinion of the former German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, the EU’s fundamental mistake was its association policy which meant that Brussels “ignored” Ukraine’s deep cultural division between traditionally pro-European western regions and Russia-leaning regions in the east.15

That Russia would use soft power and overwhelming military force never seemed to have occurred to the EU, or indeed the United States. It is worth recalling the context of the US-Russia reset announced so optimistically by the Obama administration. If Brussels misread the signs, especially during the Medvedev presidency, it took its cue from Washington, the global superpower which also saw Europe-wide stability as being in its national security interest.

The Arab Spring

For some, the unfolding events in the Arab world since the rebellion broke out in 2011 could be seen as similar to 1989 in Eastern Europe and the USSR, another triumph for human rights and democracy and a string of defeats for dictatorial regimes. Europe’s history of revolution and counterrevolution was ignored. The fact that most of the countries (Syria being a notable exception) had an association with the EU did not seem to make a difference as European institutions welcomed the overthrow of leaders with whom they had been doing all kinds of business for some years. Coming so soon after the evident failure of the invasion of Iraq to advance democracy in the region this seemed like a breakthrough. The idea of the EU being surrounded by a ring of friends seemed within Europe’s grasp. In this case, cultural differences combined with differences of geography and history were underestimated. As early as 2011, however, Viilup and Soler had succinctly described the ENP as “a weak response to fast changing realities.”16

In Eastern Europe, the European model was attractive and based on common history and values with the countries concerned. Mostly the peoples concerned were Christians. Western culture, and the idea of individual freedom was widely admired and not perceived as a threat except to those with a monopoly of power. Indeed, many of the Arab dictators presented themselves as westernized modernizers ready to contribute to stability in their region. In fact, the historical context of the Arab Spring was quite different, and the explosive elements in the opened Pandora’s box were as invisible to outsiders, as were the forces leading to the unexpected uprisings in the first place.

Visiting Cairo in March 2011, Jerzy Buzek, the president of the European Parliament, was naturally deeply impressed. A leading member of the Polish Solidarnoscz revolutionary movement, Buzek seemed to feel at home in the atmosphere in Cairo at the time. After meeting the new Egyptian leadership, he said:

The road to full democracy is long and difficult. I know it from my own experience in Poland, which overthrew its autocratic regime 22 years ago. Egyptians had a first free choice in yesterday’s referendum, but the process of constitutional change cannot stop there. People aspire for more. Democracy depends on strong political parties, independent media, and active civil society. It requires a solid legal basis, respect for minorities and a constant fight against corruption. Europe wishes to be a partner in democratic transition. The European Parliament stands ready to provide expertise. It will put pressure on other institutions to offer further steps in assistance and concrete projects.17

A few weeks earlier, he expressed the same sincere optimism when he received nongovernmental organizations’ representatives from both Tunisia and Egypt.

When moving away from the old regime, the fight against impunity is a crucial one. Things done in the past and in transition cannot be forgotten. Justice cannot be neglected. Today, we are at the beginning of what might become a renewed partnership between the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean, a partnership that will be based on truly shared values: justice and peace, democracy and freedom. This will be a partnership of the people, by the people and for the people.18

Mr. Buzek’s words reflected the optimism of the time but even as events evolved rapidly, contradictions emerged, most notably over the possibility of military action in Libya. Even before hostilities ended in that country, France and Italy were struggling to come to terms with an outflow of refugees and were fearing, rightly as it turned out, that a bigger exodus was coming up. In April 2011, the shape of things to come could already be seen. A Franco-Italian initiative, as reported in The Guardian, “called for accords between the EU and north African countries on repatriating immigrants, a policy certain to spark outrage among human rights groups, the refugee lobby, and more liberal EU governments.”

Promising strong support for the democratic revolutions sweeping the Maghreb and the Middle East, Sarkozy and Berlusconi added: “In exchange, we have the right to expect from our partner countries a commitment to a rapid and efficacious cooperation with the European Union and its member states in fighting illegal immigration.”19

Five years later the drift from dream to nightmare (as the former Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi described the situation) is all too evident. At the time the threat of terrorism in Europe, in the context of a much larger than imagined migration into Europe, was not a major concern. Currently, the EU is still having great difficulty in coming to terms with a tide of humanity largely flowing towards Europe from the countries of the Arab Spring. The Islamic State, which was unknown in 2011, now controls almost 300 kilometers of the coast of Libya. Hundreds of thousands of refugees are escaping a horrific situation in Syria, and the EU is providing 3 billion euros in aid to Turkey in the hope that it will help slow down the surge into Europe. In fact, Turkey itself is increasingly unstable, its president seems to be moving in an authoritarian direction, and it is not keen on opening its border to more refugees. This is a human tragedy as well as a political nightmare and is all unfolding at a time EU countries are looking at ways to slow the tide of refugees.

In the second part of 2011, Poland held the rotating presidency of the EU, and as a country whose own peaceful revolution in the 1980s had been profoundly influenced by outsiders explicitly promoting democracy, it responded with understandable emotion to the events of the Arab Spring which unfolded in the months leading up to the beginning of its presidency. Even if the historical analogy may well turn out to be overstated, the reaction to the Polish approach seemed logical and understandable. Poland’s underground “Solidarnosc” movement had benefitted from under the radar “democracy promotion” assistance, in particular from the US foundations. This was the context for the establishment in 2013 of the European Endowment for Democracy.

In its 2014 Annual Report the EED described its objectives, not just in terms of promoting democracy as such but explained that:

In the face of closing spaces for democracy and freedom, the democracy support agenda has been brought back into the geopolitical game. EED focuses on local and grassroots needs, the young fledgling and unsupported, who struggle to fight for democracy and reopen these free spaces.

Initially its focus was precisely on the neighbourhood countries, but in 2015 its activities were extended to Russia,20 it also operates in Central Asia.

Pragmatism, Differentiation Do Not Mean Surrender

It is certainly the case that at moments of dramatic change huge hopes are raised, and false comparisons are adopted which overlook profound differences of history, culture, and geography. To put it simply, Egypt in 2011 was not Poland in 1989. That was the kind of thinking which led from the dream of irreversible change in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 to the evident nightmare of 2016. Now that this harsh reality is so evident, should the EU simply reduce its ambitions? This seems to be the implicit message from the review of the European Neighborhood Policy launched in Brussels in November 2015.

In the years after 2011, the EU maintained its aspiration of contributing to democracy, the rule of law and good governance. These could be described as the raison d´etre of the ENP, but recent indications are that the level of ambition of the ENP is being reduced and that EU leaders seem unaware of the intimate link between achieving these ambitions and having a meaningful security and defence policy. In June 2015, Federica Mogherini announced a yearlong review of a Global Strategy to steer EU external action stating that:

. . . it will be essential to work even more closely together at European level and with partners around the globe: “The European Union has all the means to be an influential global player in future—if it acts together. In a world of incalculable risk and opportunity, crafting effective responses will hinge on the Union’s ability to adjust, react and innovate in partnership with others. We need a common, comprehensive and consistent EU global strategy.21

By advancing with the ENP review, Brussels may have missed an opportunity to develop a strategy taking into consideration both the issues of regional and global security. By the time the global strategy review is completed in June 2016, it will be clearer than ever that the main threats to European security are on the EU doorstep.

The End of Ambition?

As Tobias Schumacher put it in January 2016:

. . . the EU’s aspiration to contribute to democratic development, good governance, the rule of law, and the strengthening of human rights in its Southern neighbourhood became more salient. In fact, it provided EU policies towards Europe’s Southern periphery with their normative raison d’être.

The ‘new’ ENP, presented by EU High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini and EU Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Johannes Hahn in the European Parliament after one year of discussions and four months of unprecedented public consultations, puts an abrupt end to this. While many Arab regimes, after years of either suspicion towards or outright rejection of EU democracy promotion efforts, are overwhelmingly rejoicing at this development, it is a blow for reform actors in the Southern neighbourhood and for anyone who was hoping that the EU was serious with its normative approach. Strictly speaking, the ‘new’ ENP is a step back when compared to its two predecessors, the revised ENP of 2011 and the original ENP of 2003/2004, as it invariably leads to the substantiation of and thus support for autocratic rule in the EU’s Southern neighbourhood.22

This abandonment of ambitions risks depriving the EU of its power of attraction and dropping the fundamental purpose of the ENP. By dashing any of the remaining hopes for reform in its region, the inevitable consequence is indeed mass migration by people who have every reason to abandon hope of a better life in their country.

As one former EU official observed:

The gravity of the situation should encourage Member States to go beyond bland references to “differentiation” and “local ownership” in the ENP review and to commit themselves to policies better adjusted to current realities.23

As Michael Leigh added, many others—Russia, Iran Turkey, China and the Gulf States—are active influences in the EU’s neighbourhood. Originally, the EU had reason to believe that after its peaceful enlargement its success in expanding the space of democracy and stability in Europe would flow outwards without any counter movement or backlash. In fact, the whole of Europe’s neighbourhood is now the theatre for hard and soft power conflict of global significance. Again, Russian leaders are clear enough. The same Mr. Medvedev with whom the reset took place recently accused the west of moving towards a new cold war.24

Russia has certainly understood the new situation, and this has not gone unnoticed in Washington. As US Sen John McCain argued, Moscow is using its bombing campaign to add to the flow of people from the Middle East and thus feed divisions in Europe. McCain said Russia’s strategy in Syria was to “exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the transatlantic alliance and undermine the European project.”25

The European Council on Foreign Relations also concluded that:

The failure to face the facts sooner—deluding ourselves that conflicts as complex as Syria and Libya would somehow burn themselves out without the need for sufficient diplomatic energy from Europe’s countries—may mean that EU governments now have to function on the terms of leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin who have taken a more realistic approach to (and in no small way been complicit in) the regional trend towards instability.26

In 2003 the EU adopted a security strategy which saw the Balkans rather than the wider neighborhood to the South and East. Just before a major enlargement, it seemed that the ambitious objectives of the 1948 declaration quoted above had been achieved. The document noted that:

Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free. The violence of the first half of the twentieth-century has given way to a period of peace and stability unprecedented in European history. The creation of the European Union has been central to this development. It has transformed the relations between our states, and the lives of our citizens. European countries are committed to dealing peacefully with disputes and to cooperating through common institutions. Over this period, the progressive spread of the rule of law and democracy has seen authoritarian regimes change into secure, stable and dynamic democracies. Successive enlargements are making a reality of the vision of a united and peaceful continent.”

The strategy also recognized that:

It is in the European interest that countries on our borders are well-governed. Neighbors who are engaged in violent conflict, weak states where organised crime flourishes, dysfunctional societies or exploding population growth on its borders all pose problems for Europe. The integration of acceding states increases our security but also brings the EU closer to troubled areas. Our task is to promote a ring of well governed countries to the East of the European Union and on the borders of the Mediterranean with whom we can enjoy close and cooperative relations.27

Referring also to the threats of terrorism, coming particularly from the territory of failed states, the document identified the main risks. The enormity of these risks—their immediacy and proximity so evident in 2016—could barely have been imagined in such an optimistic scenario just 15 years after the end of the Cold War. For this reason, the strategy was short on concrete steps and vague about the nature of future relations with the countries concerned. The ENP similarly has turned out to be good on procedure but weak on substance. The migration crisis which was developing before 2011 is partly the result of this ambiguous low-key approach.

External Sources of an Internal Crisis

Apart from the ideal of spreading its values in its region, there is little doubt that the expectation was that stable modernizing neighbors would reduce the pressures of illegal and legal immigration which have concerned policymakers since the beginning of the century. The current situation is one in which none of these objectives are being achieved, and the consequences for the very existence of the EU are coming into focus.

As Roger Cohen put it in The New York Times in February 2016:

The European idea has not been this weak since the march to unity began in the 1950s. Germany is awash in so-called Putinversteher—broadly Putin sympathizers like Schröder—who admire him for his strong assertion of Russian national interests. Michael Naumann, a former minister of culture, told me: “The United States has left us, we are the orphaned kids in the playground, and there’s one tough guy, Putin. It’s really that simple.28

What has been described as a nightmare is not going to end soon, and the threat to the unity of the Union is evident. Basic questions as to the identity of Europe and its boundaries have always been avoided precisely because addressing them was bound to prove divisive. The fact that in the same month EU leaders were obliged to postpone discussions on the refugee crisis to spend days and nights on a fruitless search for cosmetic arrangement with the UK is just a sign of the times.

In the Cold War era, basic existential questions could be overlooked. In the years immediately after 1989, the answer seemed easier: the EU would define itself in response to efforts by outsiders to join. In the years since 2000, Putin began to plan a response and to provide serious competition to the EUs vision of itself and of its role in its region. Brussels did not seem to notice. It does now. The Russian president openly mocks European pretensions to spread its values in its region even as Russia discreetly deploys soft power to assist the political forces encouraging the weakening or breakup of the EU. BREXIT would just be a bonus, and even if it does not happen, the UK vote to leave the EU threat represents a further example of the Union’s internal instability.

The refugee crisis has clearly put a huge strain on the whole EU structure but, in fact, whilst the lack of foresight of Europe’s leaders can be faulted, the crisis affecting Europe results to a substantial extent from the actions of others, not just Assad, other dictators or even the huge pressures for emigration resulting from instability in the whole region. Russia and the United States are still competing in the Middle East just as they are in the eastern neighborhood. America decided, with European acquiescence, to forego the use of hard power to influence the course of events in Syria whilst Russia took an opposite course directly assisting the Assad regime in a way which is likely to increase further the migratory pressures on the EU. That these events create pressures on EU-Turkey relations is a bonus for Russia which is using every opportunity to divide Europeans. The fact that former US president Barack Obama chose not to exercise leadership as a reflex against the interventionism of his predecessor facilitates Putin’s grand strategy at a time when the United States and Europe do not have any strategy at all.

Developments in Libya confirm that security challenges in the South are becoming a more significant consideration for NATO. As a German Marshall Fund expert puts it:

NATO is already moving in this direction at the political and military levels. Minds on both sides of the Atlantic are concentrated on the need for closer cooperation between NATO and the EU. There is now a critical mass of political will for this, and rapid progress might be made if key diplomatic obstacles, including the Cyprus dispute, can be resolved. The diverse nature of challenges in the south, from territorial defense to issues of development, reform, and human security where the EU’s instruments are most relevant, means that closer cooperation between these two leading institutions will be felt first and foremost in the Mediterranean. A division of labor along these lines may well be emerging. If so, the NATO naval mission in the Aegean may be an early test case, with more to come.29

The current albeit relative sense of urgency may prove difficult to maintain at a time of extremely sensitive relations with Turkey, both an EU candidate country and a NATO member on the front line of the refugee crisis and close to military conflict with Russia.

Regional Stability Is the Key to European Security

Anand Menon and S. Neil McFarlane have succinctly summarized the harsh reality of the EU today:

The EU design has turned out to be an ill-adapted institution for the pursuit of interests in the face of geopolitical competition. Coupled with internal divisions and interests the result has been an evident inability to aggregate differing perceptions into a common policy.30

In such a large and diverse union, different countries have different priorities whilst all signed up to common texts, treaties and policy declarations. All subscribe to the noble goals of the Lisbon Treaty whereby they are committed to work together for peace prosperity and human rights as well as to developing close relations with the neighboring countries. As stated in Article 7a:

The Union shall develop a special relationship with neighboring countries, aiming to establish an area of prosperity and good neighborliness, founded on the values of the Union and characterized by close and peaceful relations based on cooperation.

With regional instability as the main threat to national security, the response of member states to the rapidly developing but unexpected events on its borders have been demonstrably quite different. Even when decisions have been made, they are not implemented. France and Germany follow different priorities whilst Britain sets an example of introversion on refugee issues whilst like others, it is involved in the military action underway against ISIS. Not all interpret their responsibilities to asylum seekers in the same way. Not all show sensitivity in selling arms to dictatorships. Not all are influenced by religious issues in defining their policies towards migrants and refugees. Not all seem to be as resistant to Putinist ideas of illiberal democracy. This was not always the case, as even during the Cold War the European Economic Community, as it was then called, could actively promote human rights as a key element of the Helsinki process.

In 2003, Europe’s internal divisions had already been on global display as Britain, Spain and the soon to be new EU member states of central and eastern Europe failed to line up behind Franco-German leadership in challenging the decision of the United States and its coalition of allies to invade Iraq without a UN mandate. The invasion provided part of the backdrop to the Arab Spring which produced the destabilizing flow of refugees into Europe. In the same year, the EU could still adopt, however, a new security strategy with an emphasis on soft power as Europe’s primary contribution to the promotion of democracy which the United States was ready to advance with hard power.

This difference of perspective underlay attitudes to Russia even before its military adventures in Georgia and Ukraine. As Desmond Dinan noted:

. . . the new countries generally adopted a harsher approach towards Russia and a friendlier approach towards the United States.31

In fact, the Union’s unity in implementing sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea has proved quite an achievement. Failure to maintain this unity could provide a further weakening of Europe’s ability to influence events in its neighborhood. Even Dinan’s description is outdated as Russia has succeeded in splitting the Central Europeans with Hungary developing friendly relations even as the Baltic countries fear that they could be a target of destabilization. Poland shares such concerns even as its leadership adopts elements of the Putin playbook such as limiting media freedom or reinterpreting major historical events. The Baltic countries feel immediately threatened.

Divisions over geopolitical priorities had always been particularly marked in EU policy to Belarus. The decision in early 2016 to re-engage with the Minsk regime will clearly be a test for the new, realistic, approach. This will enable, for example, the European Parliament to restart official contacts with the Belarusian Parliament and to set out EU expectations for democratic parliamentary elections in Belarus later this year. In this way, dialogue can signal to Belarus that a democratic election process is a crucial opportunity for engagement with the EU. In the spirit of the European Neighbourhood Policy Review, the EU has stressed the importance of assessing country by country the reality of the situation and demonstrating flexibility. This could enable the EU to become more influential.

Normative Power Europe: Game Over?

At the beginning of this century, while the EU was developing its security strategy and preparing for enlargement, the institutions, civil society, and academia reflected an optimistic view of the Union’s potential as a civilian, normative power. As the Iraq invasion failed dramatically in its goal of promoting democracy or spreading stability, Europe was encouraged to see itself as a new kind of global power. At a very minimum, the EU should be a model for others, particularly in its region. What the EU was could, somehow, be more important than its external actions.

This approach was mirrored in the structures and strategy put in place under the leadership of the first EU High Representative, Baroness Catherine Ashton. As the various crises have unfolded, this approach has seemed to be pursued with less conviction. I have written elsewhere that in its current policies on human rights and democracy promotion the EU is now tending to blow an uncertain trumpet.32 The implications of this may be profound.

No Longer the City on the Hill

Throughout the decades after 1989, the United States supported enlargement and the concept of regional partnership as these processes embodied American hopes that the EU would take the lead in stabilising the former Soviet space. Similarly, after 2011, Washington chose to explicitly lead from behind in the Middle East.

With the question of EU membership in at least one country on the table, the existence of the EU is being openly questioned. Leading figures no longer hide their sense of anxiety, and in Washington, the danger of even greater instability is a source of evident anxiety. Sen Benjamin Cardin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote recently that:

As the European Union confronts unprecedented challenges which collectively threaten the future of the European project, the US has an obligation to stand with our friends there in support of the principles that we all share: democracy and the rule of law, respect for human rights, economic prosperity and peace and security. The pressures on the union are considerable, but there are measures that the US can take to help. . . . Another alarming trend that has emerged in several countries across the EU is a rising nationalism exacerbated by the migrant crisis. In some countries, governments have embraced a brand of “illiberal democracy” which calls into question the very democratic values of the EU. It is worrying that we have seen an erosion of these principles in some corners of the union. We should make clear our support for the EU’s democratic principles and our opposition to the chorus of illiberal voices in Europe. . . . Russia has also sought to erode support for EU institutions by funding anti-EU political parties, think tanks, NGOs and media voices, using the very strengths of Europe’s democratic societies — free press, civil society and open debate — against it. The EU and US should work together on affirmative messaging that clearly and unequivocally states our shared values.33

In 2004 Jeremy Rifkin, an American, was so impressed with the EU that he could describe it a bit like a new USA regarding the attractiveness of its model for the rest of the world.

Europe is the new “city upon a hill.” The world is looking to this grand new experiment in transnational governance, hoping it might provide some needed guidance on where might be heading in a globalizing world. The European Dream, with its emphasis on inclusivity, diversity, quality of life, deep play, universal human rights and the rights of nature, and peace is increasingly attractive to a generation anxious to be globally connected and at the same time locally embedded.34

Rifkin wondered whether Europeans were capable of the kind of hope and optimism which inspired and inspires the American dream. He noted a

. . . deep pessimistic edge ingrained in the European persona…. after so many misbegotten experiments and so much carnage over so many centuries of history. Failures can dash hopes. . . . no dream, regardless of how attractive it might be can succeed in an atmosphere clouded by pessimism and cynicism.35

Weeks ahead of a referendum in the UK on EU membership with no sign that the refugee crisis is abating or becoming manageable, the divisions and uncertainty are all too evident. Those, inside and outside the EU who dislike or feel threatened by its very existence, see a historic chance to destroy decades of progress. The lessons of history which have underpinned the process of European integration are being forgotten in these new and unexpected circumstances.

The excessive optimism of the 1990s is being replaced by a fashionable so-called declinism. As Martin Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament, put it, “Europe’s current political generation (is) in danger of squandering the achievements of the EU’s founding fathers.”36

Current circumstances may well lead to a lowering of expectations and a priority for crisis management. The divisive atmosphere in which such crises are to be managed is not one in which any new meaningful global strategy will be easy to develop and implement. The urgent priority is the stabilization in the face of a maelstrom of clearly momentous and dangerous developments. The refugee crisis merely confirms that basic somewhat dramatic reality. To close the gates, return to introversion, and abandon basic values would be to abandon the identity of the EU and possibly the very reason for its existence.

Notes

1. “Message to Europeans: The Hague, Digital European Integration Studies, accessed 8 March 2016, “http://www.cvce.eu/en/obj/message_to_europeans_the_hague_10_may_1948-en-b14649e7-c8 b1-46a9-a9a1-cdad800bccc8.html, (site discontinued).

2. “Juncker ‘Quite Sure’ of February Deal on Britain’s EU Membership,” The Guardian, 15 January 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/15/juncker-quite-sure-february-deal-britain-eu

-membership-referendum.

3. “Four Predictions on the Future of Europe,” Carnegie Europe, 12 January 2016, http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=62445.

4. “Hungary’s Orban Criticizes Merkel’s ‘Moral Imperialism,’ Deutsche Welle, 23 September 2015, http://www.dw.com/en/hungarys-orban-criticizes-merkels-moral-imperialism/a-18736240.

5. “70th Session of the General Assembly,” President of Russia, 28 September 2015, http://en

.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50385.

6. “Putin’s Prepared Remarks at 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy,” The Washington Post, 12 February 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/AR2007021 200555.html.

7. “How to Counter Russia’s Anti-Democratic Strategy,” The German Marshall Fund of the United States, 26 May 2015, http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2015/05/26/how-counter-russia%E2%80%99s-anti

-demo cratic-strategy.

8. Joint Communication to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, “Review of the European Neighbourhood Policy,” JOIN(2015) 50 final, Brussels, 18 November 2015.

9. “The 2015 ENP Review: A Policy in Suspended Animation,” CEPS Commentary, 1 December 2015, https://www.ceps.eu/system/files/SB%20ENP%20Review%20CEPS%20Commentary.pdf.

10. “EU Urgently Needs New Neighbourhood Policies,” EurActiv Network, 18 November 2015, http://www.euractiv.com/sections/global-europe/eu-urgently-needs-new-neighbourhood

-policies-319568.

11. “The 2015 ENP Review: A Policy in Suspended Animation,” CEPS Commentary, 1 December 2015, https://www.ceps.eu/system/files/SB%20ENP%20Review%20CEPS%20Commentary.pdf.

12. “EU Urgently Needs New Neighbourhood Policies,” EurActiv Network, 18 November 2015, http://www.euractiv.com/sections/global-europe/eu-urgently-needs-new-neighbourhood

-policies-319568.

13. “Europe’s Soft-Power Pull is Still Working, If Unevenly, in the Western Balkans,” The German Marshall Fund of the United States, 3 September 2015, http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2015/09/03

/europe%E2% 80%99s-soft-power-pull-still-working-if-unevenly-western-balkans.

14. S. Neil McFarlane and Anand Menon, “Of Wealth and Weakness,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 56, June–July 2014, 95–101.

15. “EU Policy to Blame For Ukraine Crash–Ex-Chancellor Schroeder,” RT News, 12 May 2015, https://www.rt.com/news/158432-schroeder-russia-sanctions-eu/.

16. “Reviewing the European Neighborhood Policy: A Weak Response to Fast Changing Realities,” CIDOB, June 2011, http://www.cidob.org/en/publications/publication_series/notes_internacionals/n1_36/reviewing_the_european_neighbourhood_policy_a_weak_response_to_fast_changing

_realities.

17. “Buzek on His Talks in Cairo,” The President of the European Parliament, 20 March 2011, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/former_ep_presidents/president-buzek/en/press/press

_release/2011/2011-March/press_release-2011-March-29.html.

18. “Meeting with Human Rights Groups on Tunisia and Egypt,” The President of the European Parliament, 10 February 2011, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/former_ep_presidents/president-buzek

/en/press/press_release/2011/2011-February/press_release-2011-February-12.html.

19. “France and Italy in Call to Close EU Borders in Wake of Arab Protests,” The Guardian, 26 April 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/26/eu-borders-arab-protests.

20. “The European Endowment for Democracy Goes Russian,” Carnegie Europe, 16 March 2015, http://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/?fa=59377.

21. “Global Strategy to Steer EU External Action in an Increasingly Connected, Contested, and Complex World,” European Union, 30 June 2015, http://www.eeas.europa.eu/top_stories/2015/150627

_eu_global_strategy_en.htm.

22. Tobias Schumacher, The European Neighborhood Policy, College of Europe, Natolin, “Back to the Future: The ‘New’ ENP Towards the Southern Neighbourhood and the End of Ambition,” College of Europe Policy Brief 1, no. 16 (January 2016).

23. Sir Michael Leigh, “Rethinking the European Union´s Neighbourhood Policy,” chap. 6, 110 of “Challenges to Democracy in the European Union and its Neighbours,” Noi and Toperich, Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, March 2016.

24. Dmitry Medvedev, “Speech by Dmitry Medvedev at MSC 2016,” (address, Munich Security Conference, Munich, Germany, 13 February 2016.)

25. “Russian Jets Pound Syria as Obama Urges Putin to Stop Violence,” The Guardian, 14 February 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/14/vladimir-putin-could-end-syrian-war-one

-phone-call-philip-hammond?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.

26. “Inward Looking EU ‘in Hock’ to Authoritarians,” Democracy Digest, 29 January 2016, http://www.demdigest.org/inward-looking-eu-in-hock-to-authoritarians/?utm_source=Democracy+Digest+RSS+Mailer&utm_campaign=907462dc9b-Democracy+Digest+Newsletter+E-mail&utm

_medium=email&utm_term=0_513d53b18e-907462dc9b-88694217.

27. “A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy,” European Council, 12 December 2003, http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/78367.pdf.

28. “Will Merkel Pay for Doing the Right Thing?,” The New York Times, 14 February 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/15/opinion/will-merkel-pay-for-doing-the-right-thing.html.

29. “NATO Looks South,” The German Marshall Fund of the United States, 17 February 2016, http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2016/02/16/natos-aegean-deployment-shape-things-come#sthash

.WCDNN9qV.dpuf.

30. McFarlane and Menon, op.cit

31. Desmond Dinan: Europe Recast: A History of European Union (Boulder, CO: Lynne Riener Publishers, 2014), 318.

32. Aylin Ünver Noi and Sasha Toperich, ed., Challenges of Democracy in the European Union and its Neighbors (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, 2016) 183-205.

33. “The United States Must Support the EU in These Trying Times,” The Guardian, 3 February 2016.

34. Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: TarcherPerigree Publishers, 2004), 358.

35. Rifkin, The American Dream, 384–85.

36. “European Parliament Chief Calls for Flexibility on Migrant Quotas, Financial Times, 4 March 2016.

*The author recently ended a 40-year career at the European Parliament. His final posting (2012–16) was as the deputy head of the European Parliament’s Liaison Office with the US Congress, based in Washington DC. Until July 2012, he was the head of the Human Rights Unit within the Secretariat General of the European Parliament (Directorate General for external policies).

Before this position, Harris was in charge of interparliamentary relations with countries in Europe from 1992–2004. From 1989–1992, he was the diplomatic adviser to the president of Parliament. From 1976–89, he was an official of the centre-left Socialist Group, where he worked on institutional and budgetary affairs, regional policy and issues relating to racism and xenophobia. He is also the author of The Dark Side Of Europe (1993) on the subject of right-wing extremism in contemporary Europe.

Harris graduated from the University of Manchester before he earned a master’s degree at the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.

**The views expressed in this paper are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Parliament.

The Birth of American Airpower in World War I

Bert Frandsen, PhD*

Although the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, the birth of American airpower did not take place until the United States entered the First World War. When Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, the American air arm was nothing more than a small branch of the Signal Corps, and it was far behind the air forces of the warring European nations. The “Great War,” then in its third year, had prompted the development of large air services with specialized aircraft for the missions of observation, bombardment, and pursuit. On the battlefield, machine guns kept infantry on each side pinned down. They sought safety in trenches but were still vulnerable to indirect fire from artillery that caused even more casualties through concussion, shrapnel, and poison gas. Consequently, each side came to realize the importance of gaining command of the air. Air superiority provided the means for observing the enemy and directing accurate artillery fire on enemy trench lines and the depth of his formations. Thus, many believed that a “decision in the air” was required before a decision on the ground could be won.

In contrast to the European air forces, an American combat aviation arm did not exist. The Army possessed only 26 qualified aviators in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps.1 Their assignment to the Signal Corps can be traced back to the Civil War when the Union linked observation balloons, the telegraph, and signal flags to provide intelligence on Confederate activity.2 As America entered World War I, the Aviation Section was equipped with a meager number of unarmed and obsolete airplanes. Some of the pilots had seen active service as pilots during the Mexican Punitive Expedition in 1916. The single squadron that accompanied this expedition, commanded by Maj Benjamin Foulois, consisted of eight aircraft—unarmed, underpowered, and unreliable. Consequently, the squadron proved useless for its observation mission and wound up serving as a courier service—a mission that reflected the Signal Corps’ ownership of the Aviation Section.3

How did the United States create airpower upon the Great War? The complete story is beyond the scope of this article, but an important part of the story can be told through the contributions of three key architects of American airpower: Raynal Bolling, Benjamin Foulois, and Billy Mitchell. These fathers of American airpower mobilized a combat aviation arm on a par with the other branches of the Army. They harnessed public enthusiasm for airpower, developed the mobilization plans that turned recruits into aviation units, procured the airplanes, learned the operational art from the Airman’s perspective, and provided a vision that inspired the future emergence of an independent air force and an airpower second to none.

Air-mindedness

The paucity of American military aviation in 1916 stands in stark contrast to the country’s enthusiasm for airpower. Within months of America’s declaration of war, Congress passed an appropriation of $640 million, the largest appropriation in its history, to build a mighty air force. Headlines such as “GREATEST OF AERIAL FLEETS TO CRUSH THE TEUTONS” appeared in American newspapers.4 This unprecedented commitment of national treasure and enthusiasm for airpower is clear evidence that air-mindedness existed in America even at this early date.

Air-mindedness was stronger in civilian society than in the military. Just a few years before even Billy Mitchell, America’s future prophet and martyr for an independent air force, had testified in Congress against aviation’s independence from the Signal Corps.5 More to the point, resistance within the upper echelons of the Army to such a large appropriation for aviation was so strong that the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, bypassed the Army general staff when he took the proposed legislation to Congress.6 The public’s enthusiasm for airpower manifested itself in a Congress that exhibited an almost messianic faith in the airplane’s ability to deliver victory as reflected in newspaper headlines.7

Air-mindedness owed much to civic organizations, especially the Aero Club of America, which drew its leadership from the captains of industry.8 The Aero Club was a federation of aviation clubs from across America that sponsored flying exhibitions, issued pilots’ licenses, and promoted a nascent aviation industry.9 Promoters of aviation envisioned growth of an aircraft industry as revolutionary as the automobile industry, which was then transforming American society. The efficiencies achieved by Henry Ford’s assembly line had only recently brought automobile prices within reach of the average American, and sales were skyrocketing. In contrast, aircraft production was so small that airplanes were made in shops instead of factories, but hopes for the future were high. The Aero Club was a powerful lobby and had been largely responsible for legislation establishing the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps in 1914. The Club also lobbied for the establishment of aviation units in the National Guard. Bolling organized one of these units in New York.10

Raynal Bolling

A Harvard-educated lawyer and aviation enthusiast, Bolling served on several of the Aero Club’s executive committees, including those dealing with law, government affairs, and military aviation. He would become one of the key architects of American airpower. Many readers will recognize Bolling as the name of the USAF base near the Pentagon in Washington, DC. He merited this honor for his role in creating American airpower during the “Great War.” He was also the senior US Airman killed in action during the war. Bolling’s part in the birth of American airpower exemplifies how the National Guard and Reserve played an important role in the formation of an American air force—a prologue to today’s total force.

Bolling initially rose to fame as the chief lawyer for US Steel. At that time, US Steel was the largest corporation in America and vitally important to any war effort. He helped defend the nation’s largest steel company from being broken up by President Theodore Roosevelt—“Teddy the Trust Buster.”11 He was also a member of the New York National Guard. “The Guard was a hotbed of early interest in aviation, and there were many efforts to form Guard aero units in various states. The most prominent was in New York.”12 Bolling’s interest in aviation, combined with financial support from the Aero Club of America, led to his founding of the 1st Aero Company (1st AC) of the New York National Guard in 1915.13

Bolling’s command expanded to become the 1st Reserve Aero Squadron after the passage of the National Defense Act of 1916, which originated the nation’s air reserve.14 Bolling’s squadron was among the first aviation units sent to France in the summer of 1917. It was the core organization that built and expanded into a huge American aviation training center at Issoudun, France. His second in command, Capt James Miller, took charge of the squadron after Bolling left and became the first commander at Issoudun. Another member of this squadron was Quentin Roosevelt, President Roosevelt’s youngest son. Miller and Roosevelt later became pilots in the 1st Pursuit Group, an ancestor of today’s 1st Fighter Wing. Both men were killed in air-to-air combat with the Germans.15

Bolling did not accompany his squadron to France because he was called to Washington to help plan the creation of a wartime air force. His aviation expertise, contacts with industry, and knowledge of the law made him an especially valuable asset in crafting legislation to create American airpower. He and Major Foulois drafted the bill that would become the $640 million appropriation.16 Foulois had also only recently come to Washington. He was the most experienced of the 26 qualified aviators in the regular Army.

After the passage of the historic aviation bill, Foulois and Bolling focused on the next major problem: how to translate the huge appropriation into a practical plan to man, train, organize, and equip an American air force. The United States was unprepared for war and a strict policy of neutrality had minimized contact with the European allies. An air force needed modern combat aircraft, well-trained pilots, mechanics and support personnel, and a host of other items to create combat-ready squadrons. Bolling was sent to Europe to figure out what types of airplanes America should build. Foulois concentrated on the establishment of mobilization and training centers across the country, where recruits were transformed into aero squadrons. The largest was at Kelly Field near San Antonio, Texas.

Benjamin Foulois, Father of the Air Force

If a single person can be called the father of the American air force, Foulois deserves that title. He flew with Orville Wright in 1909 on the Army’s acceptance tests for its first airplane. He took Army No. 1 to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and amazingly, taught himself to fly it, just as he had been ordered. One could argue that he learned to fly through distance learning because Wright provided him advice through an exchange of letters. Later, Foulois helped organize the Army’s 1st Provisional Aero Company, and he commanded the 1st AS (not to be confused with Bolling’s 1st Reserve Aero Squadron) during the Mexican Punitive Expedition.

Foulois’s command on the expedition represented America’s first employment of airpower on a major expedition. Although his squadron was incapable of adequately accomplishing its reconnaissance mission due to the inferiority of its airplanes, valuable lessons were learned that he put to use in developing the mobilization plan that gave birth to American airpower.17 One of his most important insights from the Mexican Punitive Expedition concerned the ideal organization for an aero squadron. His design became the basic fighting unit upon which American airpower was built. He returned to Signal Corps headquarters in Washington after the expedition and put his plan into effect.

The major designed a squadron consisting of 150 men, not counting pilots. In most cases, pilots were not assigned to the squadron until after they had completed basic training and deployed to France. By organizing a standard service aero squadron, Foulois incorporated the idea of interchangeability regarding organizational structure. This system of standardization simplified mobilization because only one type of airplane squadron, the 150-man squadron, needed to be initially organized. After squadrons had been organized and received basic training at Kelly Field, they deployed to Europe as soon as transportation was available. The concept of a standard service aero squadron was an elegant but simple solution to the problem of building an Air Service in which the initial stages of organization took place in the United States, and the final stages were completed in Europe.

Gen John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), decided to conduct the final organization, training and equipping of the Air Service in France. This was necessary because the Americans were so far behind the Europeans in military aviation. It was a key strategic decision perfectly suited to the strategy of the French and British, who needed to build American partnership capacity to help win the war. The AEF assembled in France in the rear of the French Army, which had been at war for more than three years by the time US fighting units began arriving. French advisors helped train and equip all types of American combat units for frontline duty. In the case of aviation, most of the advanced pilot training for the Americans took place under French Air Service instructors, who usually could not speak English.

To facilitate interoperability, Pershing decided to copy French Army organizational structures. This influence persists, most obviously reflected in today’s numerical designation for staff organizations (A-1 for personnel, A-2 for intelligence, A-3 for operations, etc.). It is also why the USAF’s organizational hierarchy goes from squadron to group to wing, unlike the British system, which goes from squadron to wing to group.

Another of the commanding general’s decisions was even more significant for the birth of American airpower. He decided that the AEF needed an Air Service separate from the Signal Corps. The American air force took its first step towards independence in 1917 in France when it became the AEF Air Service. As one historian noted, “In making aviation a service branch, like the infantry or cavalry, Pershing had duplicated the existing Royal Flying Corps organization.”18 It would take another year before the Air Service won independence from the Signal Corps in the United States. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the War Department to establish the US Army Air Service on 20 May 1918.19

The final manning, training, and equipping of squadrons took place in France at organization and training centers. Pilots, aircraft, vehicles, tools, and a host of other equipment were joined at these centers to form combat-ready squadrons. Depending on the type of aircraft and trained pilots assigned, the standard service aero squadron would be transformed into an observation, pursuit, or bombardment squadron. Once the disparate parts came together in the center, the squadron and group commanders would establish standard operating procedures and conduct collective training. This included formation flying and familiarization flights to just short of the frontlines, usually defined by the friendly balloon line. When final preparations had been completed, and the squadron was combat-ready, it deployed to a frontline airfield to begin operations.20 The aircraft sent to the squadrons at these organization and training centers were results of the work of Raynal Bolling.

Bolling Mission

Bolling led a group of officers, technicians, and other experts (more than 100 personnel) on what became known as the “Bolling Mission” to Europe to determine what types of airplanes America should manufacture. They met with aviation officials in Britain, France, and Italy. Because of these meetings, Bolling realized that US aviation technology was so far behind that it would be necessary, at least initially, to rely upon the European allies for airplanes. At this point in aviation history the airplane reflected an immature technology, and unlike today, improvements were inexpensive and rapid. Also, the proximity of European aircraft designers and their factories to the battle area gave them a distinct advantage in turning out improved models based on combat experience.

As it turned out, American industry had so much difficulty producing acceptable warplanes that most of the AEF’s airplanes came from foreign sources. It was a scandalous failure for the nascent American aircraft industry, especially given the huge aviation bill passed by Congress. This disgrace resulted in a series of Congressional investigations after the war. Accordingly, it is no surprise that France, which had the largest aviation industry in the world, supplied 80 percent of the AEF’s airplanes.21

Bolling’s aircraft purchases were of great consequence. As one historian noted, “The Bolling Commission actually played one of the most important roles in the war.”22 This is because the numbers and types of aircraft that he recommended for production in the United States as well as those purchased from the Allies would shape the air strategy regarding the weight of effort for air superiority, observation, and bombardment.23 The contract he negotiated with the French, known as the 30 August Agreement in 1917, called for 875 training planes and 5,000 service-type aircraft. Since the war would be over in a little more than 14 months, these early decisions had a significant impact. In the event, however, French manufacturers were unable to deliver on time, resulting in aircraft purchases from the Britain and Italy. The following table illustrates the sources of frontline Air Service aircraft:

Source

Number of Aircraft

Representative Types

France

4,791

Nieuport 28, SPAD XIII,

Breguet 14, Salmson 2A2

Britain

261

Sopwith Camel, SE-5

Italy

19

Caproni Bomber

US

1,216

DH-4

Table 1. Sources of aircraft for the American Expeditionary Force Air Service in France. 24

General Pershing was so impressed with Bolling that he retained him in France, promoted him to colonel, and appointed him as chief of the Air Service’s line of communications. In addition to aircraft procurement, Bolling was responsible for logistics, reception of aviation units, and pilot training. The other main part of the Air Service was called the Zone Advance, where the training and organization centers were located. Colonel Mitchell was in charge of it. 25

Billy Mitchell

When Mitchell arrived in France, he was one of the senior officers in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, but not yet a qualified aviator.26 He was one of the rising stars of the Signal Corps, having been the youngest officer appointed to the Army’s new general staff. One of his responsibilities before the United States entered the conflict was briefing the president and members of Congress on the developments in the European war. He became the deputy officer in charge of the Aviation Section to help “instill old fashioned discipline” in the section after a scandal occurred at the Signal Corps Aviation School in San Diego, California. During this period, he developed a rocky relationship with Foulois, who eventually replaced Mitchell when he left Washington for France shortly before the declaration of war. Mitchell’s job was to observe how airpower was being in employed in the war. He was one of the first members of the Aviation Section to arrive in France, just four days after the United States declared war on Germany.27 Timing is everything, and Mitchell’s was perfect.

Mitchell was well-suited for the job as an official observer because he spoke French, and the assignment provided an ideal stepping-stone to air command. He toured the front, took detailed notes, and learned about air strategy, tactics, and organization through repetitive visits with the French and British air commanders and their units.28 Most important, Mitchell’s job required him to systematically record, reflect on, and analyze what he had seen. “I was a different breed of cat from any of the others they had seen,” he wrote in his hotel room at Chalons after visiting a French pursuit group headquarters. “Deep into the night they could hear my typewriter clicking as I wrote up my notes.”29

Mitchell would become the AEF Air Service’s senior operational commander, and he mastered the operational art from the Airman’s perspective, most famously demonstrated in his orchestration of airpower for the Saint-Mihiel offensive, the largest coalition air operation of the war. His success provides a case study in learning and adapting.30 Being an official observer required him to reflect on what he saw and clarify his thoughts through the process of writing reports. He continued this practice even when he was no longer an official observer, keeping a journal throughout the war. Daily writing supercharged his learning and disciplined his reflection. His systematic and disciplined approach to learning helps explain why a relative newcomer to aviation like Mitchell surpassed the more experienced Army aviators like Foulois to become the senior operational air commander. Foulois taught himself to fly; Mitchell taught himself the operational art from the airman’s perspective.

During his period as air commander of the Zone of Advance, Mitchell did not command much of anything because squadrons had yet to arrive at the organization and training centers. Instead, he served mainly as a senior planner. Significantly, he developed the tables of organization for pursuit, observation, and bombardment squadrons using the 150-man aero squadron as his basic building block. He modified the French model discussed earlier, however, by following the British example of an 18-plane, three-flight squadron. This demonstrates how the AEF Air Service borrowed ideas from both the British and French. A similar synthesis would take place in the development air tactics.

Pershing had originally requested that Foulois accompany him to France to command the AEF’s Air Service. The challenges of mobilizing an American air force, however, kept him stateside. By November 1917 mobilization was well underway, enabling Foulois to leave Washington. He arrived in France wearing the rank of brigadier general to assume command of the AEF’s Air Service.

Foulois brought his staff and reassigned both Bolling and Mitchell to new jobs, removing them from key positions in the headquarters and replacing them with handpicked officers who had accompanied him across the Atlantic. Mitchell was greatly embittered with this treatment: “A more incompetent lot of air warriors had never arrived in the zone of active military operations since the war began. . . The competent men, who had learned their duties in the face of the enemy, were displaced and their positions taken by these carpetbaggers.”31

Foulois’s dismissal of Bolling and Mitchell was a colossal error. It further poisoned the poor relationship that had developed between them. More to the point, the veteran from the Mexican Punitive Expedition failed to transition from tactical to senior leadership, where building consensus with other senior leaders and peers is so important. In effect, his reassignment of Mitchell and Bolling decapitated the Air Service at a critical time when recently acquired institutional knowledge was more important than ever. The mobilization assembly line that began at Kelly Field was just then beginning to surge aero squadrons into France.

Foulois appointed Bolling as liaison officer to the Royal Air Force. Bolling became the senior Airman killed in the war when his car was ambushed by a German patrol while he was attempting to visit elements of two American aero squadrons that were attached to the British. The Germans had just launched their long anticipated spring offensive, and the front line had dissolved in that sector. Bolling was the most knowledgeable officer on aircraft procurement. His loss contributed to the unhinging of the Foulois regime.

Foulois assigned Mitchell to be the chief of Air Service, I Corps.32 Though a personal setback, this “demotion” removed Mitchell just as a tsunami of administrative and logistical issues arrived at the doorstep of his successor. American aero squadrons were beginning to arrive in the Zone of Advance at various organization and training centers (pursuit, bombardment, observation), where they received their aircraft and equipment and were made combat ready before being assigned to the front.33 In contrast, when Mitchell arrived at the recently created I Corps headquarters, it did not yet have operational control of any American combat units. He joined a headquarters whose staff was itself undergoing organization and training. As before, he did not command much of anything but was perfectly situated to continue learning.

Like the other members of the staff, Mitchell conducted a study of his area of responsibility undistracted by the daily grind of command. This time he focused on the enemy: the organization, aircraft, and operations of the German air force.34 Thus, by the spring of 1918, Mitchell had spent a year in France, developed plans for the tactical organization of the Air Service, and conducted in-depth studies of both the friendly and opposing air forces. He knew more about these subjects than any other senior American officer.

Mitchell also polished his flying skills. He arrived in France without the wings of an aviator, but the limited responsibilities of successive jobs enabled him to build on the flying lessons he began in the states. By then he had become an accomplished pilot, even learning to fly America’s first fighter, the French-made Nieuport 28, which was a difficult plane to handle because of the gyroscopic effect created by its rotary engine. In May 1918 he led a six-plane exhibition flight of 94th Aero Squadron’s Nieuport 28s during an awards ceremony in which the commanding general of the French Eighth Army presented the Croix de Guerre to several officers of the 94th, including Eddie Rickenbacker, in recognition of their first victories against the Germans.35

In contrast, many of the experienced prewar Army aviators, such as Foulois and Col Robert Van Horn, who had replaced Mitchell as commander of the Zone of Advance, were so overwhelmed with the workload of building the Air Service that they simply could not devote time to learning to fly the latest combat aircraft. They could never lead by example as Mitchell did.

While at Toul, Mitchell anticipated the establishment of an Army headquarters that would be needed to control multiple corps as American doughboys poured into France. He established a provisional air headquarters for First Army. As happened before to Mitchell in the Zone of Advance, however, he was removed from this position just as the First Army was nearing activation.

The deteriorating state of affairs in the Air Service, exacerbated by the earlier decapitation of its senior leadership, resulted in Pershing dismissing Foulois. His replacement, engineer officer Maj Gen Mason Patrick, remembered Pershing describing the Foulois regime as “good men running around in circles.”36 As the dominoes fell, Foulois arrived at the provisional air headquarters for the First Army and told Mitchell, “There’s no use beating around the bush, Billy, I’m here to take over your office, your files, and your job. You are relieved as of this moment.”37

First Battles

Yet again this setback would ironically provide Mitchell the opportunity to further his study of air warfare, gain experience in a major coalition air operation, and surpass Foulois as the most important American air leader to emerge from World War I. By the end of May, Germany’s last great offensive, launched in March, had reached Château-Thierry only 40 miles from Paris. The resulting panic led to the piecemeal commitment of Soldiers and Marines to reinforce Sixth French Army, which was reeling back from the German onslaught. Marines fought one of their most famous battles at Belleau Wood, and the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division won the moniker “Rock of the Marne” for its stalwart defense along that river.

After observing these initial battles, one of Pershing’s colonels observing the action sent a strongly worded report back to AEF headquarters: “I recommend that an observation and a pursuit squadron of aero planes be sent here to work with this division at [the] first opportunity. The Germans have control of the air and embarrass our movements and dispositions.”38 Consequently, Pershing ordered American aviation to the Marne sector along with the 1st Corps headquarters, which provided the overall command for additional American units reinforcing the French.

Despite their previous falling out (but also getting Mitchell away from the First Army sector), Foulois put Mitchell in command of 1st Air Brigade, a new organization created to accompany US reinforcements to the beleaguered Sixth French Army. Mitchell’s command consisted of 1st Pursuit Group (1st PG) and 1st Observation Group. The lines of authority were unclear. The 1st PG received its operations orders from the chief of the Air Service of Sixth Army, which was in overall command of the sector. That was logical because the American pursuit group replaced Sixth Army’s former pursuit group, which had been practically shot out of the sky. The 1st Observation Group (1st OG), which directly supported 1st Corps with reconnaissance and artillery adjustment, took its orders from the corps.39

These unclear command relationships created a difficult conundrum for Mitchell’s subordinates, who sometimes received orders from multiple headquarters. The 1st PG operations officer, Philip Roosevelt, explained, “I had to spend a lot of time seeming to obey their orders while really making my own dispositions. . . . All our orders really came from the French—which [Mitchell] approved.”40 To be sure, the Army was still working out the nuances of command relationships between the pursuit and observation groups and the armies and corps they supported. This was made more difficult while fighting under French command. Today, we would call Mitchell a COMAFFOR (commander of Air Force forces) who had OPCON (operational control) of the US 1st PG and OG. He was supporting a French CFACC (combined force air component commander) who had TACON (tactical control) of the 1st PG, while the 1st (US) Corps had TACON of the 1st OG. But these sorts of command relationships had yet to be created.41

Nevertheless, Mitchell’s presence enabled him to organize a tactical headquarters, which he located adjacent to the air headquarters of Sixth French Army just as it was preparing to conduct the largest combined air operation of the war up to that time. The Marne campaign served as his postgraduate education in aerial warfare.

Major Air Operations

Anticipating a renewal of the German offensive, Allied Commander in Chief Gen Ferdinand Foch assembled a large air force as a strategic reserve. It consisted of the French Air Division, the Royal Air Force 9th Brigade, and US 1st PG. The French Air Division was the largest single aviation unit of the war. Its two brigades represented some 370 fighters and 230 bombers. The RAF’s 9th Brigade provided an additional nine squadrons of offensive airpower. Added to that were the four squadrons of the US 1st PG.

With his brigade headquarters collocated with the French Sixth Army air headquarters, Mitchell learned how to integrate multinational airpower in a large operation. Once the battle began on July 15, 1918, the combined forces established air superiority and attacked German crossing sites along the Marne. Air operations helped defeat the German army in the most decisive battle of the war, known as the Second Battle of the Marne. Afterwards, the Allies seized the initiative and never lost it. Germany would be defeated a few months later.

Meanwhile, Pershing finally activated the First Army and was preparing for the Saint-Mihiel offensive. The stakes were high because the United States had yet to demonstrate the ability to campaign on the European battlefield. Realizing that Mitchell was his best and most experienced air commander, Pershing returned him to the position of chief of Air Service of First Army, replacing Foulois, who, to his credit, supported the decision and took a new job that focused on training and logistics.

First Army’s mission was to reduce the Saint-Mihiel salient, a large bulge in Allied lines that had existed since the early days of the war. Foch was eager for Pershing to finish this attack quickly because he wanted the Americans to concentrate their main effort in the Meuse-Argonne sector, joining the French and British for the final offensives. Accordingly, he reinforced Pershing with troops and enablers, especially artillery and aviation.

The French, British, and even Italians provided air units to reinforce the American Air Service’s 28 squadrons. The total force numbered 701 pursuit planes, 366 observation planes, 323 day bombers, and 91 night bombers adding up to 1,481 aircraft for the largest air operation of the war.42 In contrast to the Allied defensive battle on the Marne, Mitchell’s plan supported an offensive operation and therefore took an entirely different approach. While American combat aviation operated within 3 miles of the front, Mitchell ordered the French Air Division to attack 12 to 20 miles behind enemy lines. By pressing the attack, he kept his enemy off balance and on the defensive, unable to interfere with the First Army offensive.43

Saint-Mihiel occupies a special place in airpower history, not only because it was the largest single air operation of the war. The concentration of coalition air forces did its part in helping Pershing to wipe out the salient and achieve a successful inauguration of American arms in continental warfare. Mitchell’s example provided a vision for unity of command that would inspire airmen long after he passed from the scene. His continued command for the upcoming Meuse-Argonne offensive was a foregone conclusion. Just before the end of the war, Pershing made Mitchell chief of the Air Service for an Army group that would command First and Second US Armies.

By the end of the war, the US air arm had grown from a handful of men with obsolete airplanes to a combat arm of the line. The AEF Air Service consisted of 14 groups—seven observation, five pursuit, and two bombardment.44 Yet, the AEF Air Service represented only 40 percent of the total American air arm. Including what had been created in the United States, the Air Service had grown to more than 190,000 men and 11,000 aircraft.45

Though a separate service would not be created until 1947, America began embracing airpower long before the birth of the United States Air Force. As we have seen, the foundations for a total force—consisting of National Guard, Reserve, and Active air forces—had been established from the beginning. Although the US airplane production failed shamefully, the war helped launch an aviation industry that would grow to be second to none. The experiences gained by American Airmen stimulated a variety of visions about how airpower would change the character of future war, and Billy Mitchell emerged as the leading American theorist and foremost advocate for a separate Air Force and Department of Defense. Moreover, an era of air-mindedness unfolded because the advances in aviation technology stimulated by the war further inflamed the imagination and enthusiasm of the public. The birth of US airpower in the Great War would transform the American way of war.

Notes

1. Juliette A. Hennessy, The United States Army Air Arm: April 1861 to April 1917 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1985), 196; Roger G. Miller, A Preliminary to War: The 1st Aero Squadron and the Mexican Punitive Expedition of 1916 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 2003), 53.

2. Hennessy, Army Air Arm, 5.

3. Herbert Malloy Mason, Jr., The Great Pursuit: Pershing’s Expedition to Destroy Pancho Villa (New York: Smithmark Publishers, Inc., 1995), 103–109; John S. D. Eisenhower, Intervention: The United States and the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1917 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 254–257, 276.

4. Benjamin Foulois, From the Wright Brothers to the Astronauts: The Memoirs of Major General Benjamin D. Foulois (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), 150.

5. Alfred Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power (Indiana University Press, 1964), 17.

6. Foulois, From the Wright Brothers, 146.

7. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), vii–viii.

8. Charles J. Gross, The Air National Guard and the American Military Tradition (Washington, DC: Historical Services Division, National Guard Bureau, 1995), 28.

9. Today known as the National Aeronautic Association. The Aero Club of America helped bring the Wright Brothers invention to the attention of President Roosevelt. See Foulois, 53.

10. Gross, The Air National Guard, 28.

11. “Bolling Won Fame as a Young Lawyer,” New York Times, 16 April 1916, 1.

12. Gross, The Air National Guard, 26.

13. James J. Hudson, Hostile Skies: A Combat History of the American Air Service in World War I (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 13; Gross, The Air National Guard, 30.

14. Gerald T. Cantwell, Citizen Airmen: A History of the Air Force Reserve, 1946–1994 (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 1997), 5.

15. Bert Frandsen, Hat in the Ring: The Birth of American Air Power in the Great War (Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003) 22–24; 31.

16. Henry Greenleaf Pearson, A Businessman in Uniform: Raynal Cawthorne Bolling (New York: Duffield and Company, 1923), 109; Foulois, From the Wright Brothers, 143–147.

17. Pearson, Businessman in Uniform, 60–65, 70, 87; Hennessy, Army Air Arm, 175.

18. Alfred F. Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power (Indiana University Press, 1964), 30.

19. Walter J. Boyne, ed., Air Warfare: An International Encyclopedia 2:” United States Air Force: Organizational History,” by George M. Watson, Jr., 643.

20. Herbert Frandsen, “The First Pursuit Group in the Great War: Leadership, Technology, and the Birth of American Combat Aviation (PhD diss., Auburn University, 2001), 49–52.

21. For production in the US the Bolling mission selected the British DH-4 for observation and day bombing; British Bristol and French SPAD as fighters, and the Italian Caproni as a long-range night-bomber. Irving B. Holley, Ideas and Weapons: Exploitation of the Aerial Weapons by the United States during World War I; A Study in the Relationship of Technological Advance, Military Doctrine, and the Development of Weapons (Yale University Press, 1953; reprint Washington DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 59–60;

22. Hudson, Hostile Skies, 14.

23. Major R. C. Bolling to Chief Signal Officer of the Army, Washington, DC., Subject: Report of Aeronautical Commission, 15 August 1917, 7–8, Gorrell, series A, 16; “Agreement of French Government dated Aug. 30, 1917,” 3, Gorrell, Series I, 28. Also see Pearson, A Businessman in Uniform, 146; Hudson, Hostile Skies, 22.

24. Holley, Ideas, and Weapons, 131; John Morrow, The Great War in the Air Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 338.

25. Hurley, Billy Mitchell, 32.

26. The section on Mitchell borrows from the author’s article, “Adapting and Learning: Billy Mitchell in World War I,” Joint Force Quarterly 72, 1st Quarter 2014, 96–101.

27. Hurley, Billy Mitchell, 22.

28. James J. Cooke, Billy Mitchell (Boulder, Colorado: Lynn Rienner, 2002), 51.

29. William Mitchell, Memoirs of World War I: From Start to Finish of Our Greatest War (New York: Random House, 1928), 26.

30. Mitchell’s published memoir probably represents his diary to a remarkable degree with little editing. Ibid, vi.

31. Mitchell, Memoirs of World War I, 165–166.

32. Ibid, 178.

33. Frandsen, Hat in the Ring, 8.

34. Mitchell, Memoirs of World War I, 179.

35. Ninety-Fourth Aero Squadron Alert Log, National Air and Space Museum Archives, file 1247, 216.

36. Mason Patrick, The United States in the Air (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1928), 16.

37. Foulois, From the Wright Brothers to the Astronauts, 172.

38. Col. Walter S. Grant to [Col. Fox] Connor, June 15, 1918, in United States Army in the World War (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1988), IV–490.

39. Frandsen, Hat in the Ring, 150.

40. Roosevelt to Father, July 8, 1918, Philip J. Roosevelt papers, family collection of Philip J. Roosevelt II, Chappaqua, New York.

41. Thanks to Lt Col Jim Burlingame, USAF (Ret.), LeMay Center Doctrine Division, Maxwell AFB for clarification on contemporary command and control relationships.

42. Patrick, United States in the Air, 27.

43. First Army Air Service, Operations Order 1, September 11, 1918, in United States Army in the World War, VIII (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1918), 216.

44. “Air Force History,” Military.com, accessed 25 October 2017, http://www.military.com/air

-force-birthday/air-force-history.html.

45. Lt Col Peter R. Faber, “Interwar US Army Aviation and the Air Corps Tactical School: Incubators of American Airpower,” 186, in Col. Phillip S Meilinger, ed., Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Air University Press, 1997).

*Dr. Bert Frandsen (PhD, Auburn University) is a professor and the deputy director of the Department of Leadership and Warfighting at Air War College, where he teaches “Future Conflict and Air Warfare” and “Theater Strategy and Campaigning.” He is also the exercise director for Global Challenge, a one-week wargame conducted at the end of the academic year that involves all faculty and students. His publications include the book, Hat in the Ring: The Birth of American Air Power in the Great War, which was selected in 2013 for the Chief of Staff of the Air Force Reading List. Dr. Frandsen previously served on the faculties of the Air Command and Staff College and Auburn University and retired from the US Army after 20 years of service.

Possibility and Peacebuilding for Precarious Lives

The Impact of Art, Culture, and Community

Ruthann K. Johansen, PhD*

After Saddam Hussein was removed from power in 2003, opportunity existed to address intergovernmental and international conflicts and cultural and religious divisions within Iraq which might have produced a society more sensitive to human dignity and protective of human rights. Instead, all actors in these events—the Shias, the Sunnis, the George W. Bush administration and later the Obama administration, the military, political advisors on all sides, and the embedded media—missed the opportunity that now has led to a decade of continuing violence and the generation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). What contributed to this failure, the effects of which deepen in the Middle East and send millions of war refugees into neighboring countries and Europe?

This question and the shadows of Iraq moving across the world lead us to wonder how contemporary civilization, particularly in the Western liberal capitalist form, has come to a blind alley economically, spiritually, and ecologically from which it can extricate itself only by radically altered attitudes and aptitudes. American philosopher, literary, and cultural critic Judith Butler poses similar questions in her concept of precarious life for which evidence abounds: in geopolitical contests in Syria, Israel, Palestine, and the Ukraine; religiously rationalized kidnappings and rapes by Boka Haram in Nigeria; bombings by rebel and international forces; suicide attacks and beheadings by ISIS; the unprecedented flight of war refugees and migrants for economic survival; and intransigent political positions of those with power on all sides of such conflicts, buttressed by vituperative public discourse and inimical modes of critique that mirror political conflicts. The complexities and intransigence of such conflicts make any appeal to shared humane values appear useless.

Disappearing centers of stability and disorienting distortions render life precarious for the earth and all human beings, not merely those besieged by violent conflicts. Butler analyzes the sources of precariousness: limited public debate about terrorism, which collapses the space between reflection and revenge; the separation of condemnation for and interrogation of violence; the conflation of critique of foreign policy with lack of patriotism or anti-Semitism; and the exclusion and inclusion of people from our calculus of human value; making state power, buttressed by military protocols, irreducible to law. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s conceptions of ethics^1 to engage such conditions of precarious life, Butler asserts the role of the humanities “to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. . . to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique. . . , to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded, or dismissed, but valued. . . .2

How necessary ethical transformations occur interests civilian and military peacebuilders. This paper argues that the failures in Iraq following the ousting of Saddam Hussein, and in all conflicts, arise from the inability to enlarge the concept of possibility and to develop those capacities necessary to engage it, which opens transformational space lying adjacent to or within the conditions that render life precarious. The paper first describes possibility as an “adjacent” space and identifies characteristics of such space. Second, using Iraq as an example throughout, I discuss the five capacities useful for accessing the invisible resources of possibility. Third, I examine the utility and applicability (teachability) of these five capacities by illustrating their operations in Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief assessment of living on the thresholds of possibility, for peace-builders and citizens alike.

Defining the Space of Possibility

Irish philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel scholar, and poet—the late John O’Donohue—describes possibility as a world or space adjacent to the visible world to which we are attached and by which we are generally blinded to an invisible world which makes possible, nourishes, and sustains the visible. In his The Poetics of Possibility, O’Donohue interprets possibility through the thought of philosophers such as Plato, who did not regard knowledge as a static possession but emphasized the dialogical struggle to know; Aristotle for whom thinking was a kinetic philosophy of becoming; Hegel who considered the dialectic to be “the inner rhythm of experience. . . [which is] a constant unfolding and thematising of possibility. . . where extremity and opposition become transfigured and unexpected new possibilities emerge to call the journey into deeper creativity,”3 as well as Immanuel Kant, who by evoking a middle ground [between subject and the world], the transcendent and the actual, places possibility at the heart of the philosophy of knowing.4

The invisible space of possibility becomes most apparent in life’s threshold experiences, in philosophical reflection, or in questions that decenter us and disclose the human desire for something New, as an unformed longing of consciousness. Of such longing, French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in 1943:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.5

This longing of consciousness, arising from the invisible, suggests that possibility calls forth and engages all the faculties of thought, feeling, and imagination. By disclosing an interplay of the visible and invisible—a creative view of duality rather than duality as divided, static categories—possibility encourages an inner conversation with life and thereby invites human wholeness. Without awareness of the invisible world of possibility which lies adjacent to or within the visible world of facts, human connections among individual consciousnesses, the Other, and history are weakened. O’Donohue concludes that “the divided mind separates each from the other and can never participate in the challenge and journey of their conversation, conflict, and creativity.”6

In a world of sharply divided, intractable political conflicts, brutalities and violence perpetrated by individuals and military forces against those regarded as enemies, millions of people displaced from their homes by war, and vitriolic political rhetoric, all human beings live uneasily on thresholds between life and death. Theoretically, the threshold is a fecund place of possibility for peacebuilding initiatives. However, opening conversation between the visible world, by which many circumscribe reality, and the invisible world of possibility contains enormous challenges. To access and engage the world of possibility requires (1) an imaginative capacity to acknowledge a matrix of possibility (that which is “not yet”) lying beneath the surface of that which already exists and seems fixed; (2) memory capable of exploring what happens to unselected possibilities and for reconciliation, not merely recollection or vengeful repetitions; (3) the capacity to mourn the Other which makes clearer seeing and growth possible; (4) a commitment to beauty as the harmony of chance (possibility) and the good necessary for participation in the creation, recreation, or restoration of the world; and (5) a shift in intellection from critique and political contest to collaborative investigation of shared concerns.

Developing Capacity for Possibility

Examining the characteristics of each of these capacities and their interplay enlarges our understanding of the invisible world of possibility, permitting us to see it as more than a collection of alternatives offered for choice in the contingent or abbreviated world of facts. These capacities provide resources for drawing upon possibility not simply in conditions of relative stability and cooperation but even in chaotic and destructive circumstances.

The capacity to imagine, to bring to consciousness that which is not present or does not yet exist in the midst of particular time and location reveals the dialectical nature of imagination. Within individual consciousness itself there is a dialectic evident in dreaming, as the unconscious ushers forth images for the waking mind to engage. The imagination becomes a bridge between the unconscious and the conscious as well as between the individual self and the world. John Paul Lederach, a life-long peace builder, concludes that imagination (1) moves from “isolation and attitudes about ‘dominating or being dominated’ toward a capacity to envision and act on the basis of a web of interdependent relationships;” (2) avoids “the trap of narrowly defined dualisms. . . , [and seeks] ways to nurture an inquisitive capacity that explores and interacts constructively with the complexity of the relationships and realities that face our communities;” (3) trusts “that creativity, divinely embedded in the human spirit, is always within reach;” (4) accepts “vulnerability [and risks] the step into unknown and unpredictable lands [to seek] constructive engagement with those people and things we least understand and most fear.”7

For O’Donohue, “the imagination is always more loyal to the deeper unity of everything. It has patience with contradiction because there it glimpses new possibilities.”8 Imagination “illuminate[s] the inner landscapes of our lives,”9 permitting us to see beyond what appears fixed and unchangeable in the outer. Drawn to freedom and impatient with repetition, imagination offers revelation. Imagination appreciates irony, which grants it a degree of humility for acknowledging that what is given might be otherwise. In sum, the imagination integrates the mind and the heart, the spiritual and the material, inviting wonder and reverence. However, when the imagination is wounded, asserts Stephen Levine, sickness and suffering result, and the injured capacity for imagining turns to fantasizing.10

If we apply the characteristics of imagination to the conditions in Iraq after the removal of Hussein, failures of imagination stand out. Realistic fear of terrorism by the United States, fear of domination isolated all parties in Iraq from each other and from considering their situation in nondualistic and more dynamic ways. Neither Shias nor Sunnis, both followers of Islam, were able to see an inner landscape of their religious lives which could offer a deeper possibility of Muslim unity. Mistrust contributed to repetitive violence from all sides, not to reverence or wonder. The Iraq war from the outset was rationalized by wounded imaginations consumed by fear of terrorists fantasizing the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that left behind a wide swath of civilian and military casualties, suffering, and a political vacuum in which long-standing religious and political animosities continued.

Although an analysis of the distinctions between fantasizing and imagining lies beyond the scope of this essay, Levine’s assertion that fantasizing replaces imagination when the imagination is wounded leads to a consideration of memory’s role in navigating traumatic events in personal or group life and in recognizing latent possibilities which exist in life-serving as well as life-denying circumstances. Miraslov Volf, a theologian and public intellectual who has written extensively on memory and its role in reconciliation processes, points out the ambiguity of memory, for “while memories give us identity and can promote justice, they can also become roots of bitterness and obstacles to reconciliation.”11 Demonstrating from history that “memory is, always and necessarily, an interaction between effacement [forgetfulness or erasure] and conservation,” Tzvetan Todorov argues that memory is essentially a selection, distinguishing between “recovery of the past and its subsequent use.”12

Both Todorov and Volf believe that how we use memory is the decisive question. Todorov describes two ways human beings use memory. The first is what he considers literalization of memory which risks trapping one in the remembered event, unable to go beyond it. In contrast, what he calls the exemplary use of memory “allows one to use the past in light of the present, to make use of lessons of injustice undergone in the past to fight injustices taking their course today. . . .”13 Perhaps the terms exclusive and inclusive might be more helpful to describe memory. Exclusive remembering focuses on the uniqueness of one’s own suffering thereby keeping a particular grievance or injurious event or group alive, whereas inclusive memory generalizes from a particular past event to other situations in the present. For memory to serve reconciliation rather than bitter resentment or repetition, Volf recommends four rules for remembering: (1) remember truthfully; (2) remember in a way that heals identity; (3) remember so as to learn from the past, and (4) remember in a redeeming way.

Much trauma literature depends on identity-healing remembering. Because identity healing is concerned principally with the injured individual or group, it contains some of the risks of exclusive memory. To learn from the past or to respond in a redemptive way to injustice requires an inclusive memory that does not fan the flames of an original conflict but instead opens pathways to possibility. An individual or group makes such movement from identity-healing or exclusive memory to exemplary or inclusive remembering by marginalizing the personal grievance and generalizing it or opening it to other possibilities, including the restoration of wounded imagination.

The precariousness of life is increased or ameliorated by the ways human beings collectively use memory. Both erasure of memory—whether enforced by totalitarian political authority, by revisionist histories, or by the superabundance of information in the digital age—and utilizing memory only for identity healing threaten human community by crippling the capacity to empathize with others. In contrast, memory that engages injustices, bears witness, applies learning from past injuries to current injustices, transmutes fear, and may call upon invisible resources available in spiritual traditions diminishes the precariousness of life by opening people to the vulnerable Other.

In Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein makes visible the power of memory to increase the precariousness of life. Earlier US interventions supportive of Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, then with United Nations support against Hussein’s effort to annex Kuwait in 1990 surely lingered unresolved in the memories of some political leaders. Recollections of President Ronald Reagan’s association of Hussein with an axis of evil combined with the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks provided justification for the vengeful toppling of a ruthless dictator. Without a postconflict plan in place following Hussein’s removal, a failure of memory and understanding of the centuries-old conflicts between Shia and Sunni Muslims over religious practices left a vacuum into which adversarial hostilities erupted. Isolated in their perceptions of each other—Iraqi and US actors, Shias and Sunnis—and protective of their own righteousness, few remembered truthfully. Identity-healing memory was also difficult because of projected blame. Given such obstacles, learning from the past and moving toward reconciliation continue to elude us.

Butler’s purpose to “[reimagine] the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” in “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” explicates the complicated intersections of politics, injustice, abuses of memory, violence, and the lost capacity to mourn.

Her analysis applies exemplary or inclusive memory to look beneath the surfaces of political conflicts, distortions of memory, and justifications for repetitive violence that make life precarious. Her analysis also implies an invisible world of possibility where addressing a question such as what makes for a grievable life suggests why the capacity to mourn is essential to peacebuilding and community.

Vulnerability and grieving, characteristics shared by all human beings, potentially expand our conceptions of the human, making it possible to see that injured and injurer, oppressor and oppressed, I and the Other, are forever bound to one another. Vulnerability, loss, and mourning, which lie beneath or adjacent to security, abundance, and joy, offer fertile space for transformation and creativity. Embracing the experiences of vulnerability and developing the capacity to mourn subvert both oppressive controls of political power and military force as well as rigidly fixed categories rooted in prejudice. The capacity to mourn personal losses and to see the Other as part of oneself strengthens interpersonal connections, opens space for productive reassessments of who is worthy of living and mourning in death, and realigns human loyalties. In short, the capacity to mourn encourages the possibility of reimagined community.

The numbers of Iraqi lives lost during the Iraq war—estimates as high as a million—and 50,000 more from continuing violence since 2011 staggers the imagination. US casualties add another approximately 4,500 soldiers in Iraq and 2,345 in Afghanistan. For American citizens, distance from the war’s daily devastations and the numbing size of casualties, both supported by righteous hatred of the enemy, make mourning others’ losses impossible. Even grieving the lost and severely injured lives is difficult when US military forces are comprised of volunteers from lower economic and social classes. The personal stories and the extent of the connections of the dead remain largely untold. Their memories and those of the ones who loved the dead are buried with them. Fear, anger, and hatred kill the capacity to grieve. And without the capacity to mourn, distorted facts justify questionable policies such as prisoner torture or legitimate the use of drones against suspected terrorists. The inability or refusal to mourn lives not considered grievable prevents the growth of understanding of the inescapable connections among human beings, thereby closing off the possibility of reimagined community.

All the foregoing capacities useful for perceiving possibility as an invisible world resting next to or within the visible world of facts, conflicts, and violations rest on the ground of beauty. Although diminished or banished as being purely subjective (in the eye of the beholder), naïve, romantic, or sentimental, beauty as the perfection of things, O’Donohue asserts, dwells at the heart of life. It beckons us to enter and live in the world in a new way, aligned more closely with transcendent categories more familiar to the medieval than the postmodern mind: Being, Oneness, Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. In the medieval vision, “Every act of thinking, mostly without our realizing it, is secretly grounded in these presences. If the One, the True, Being, the Good, and the Beautiful were to vanish, the thought in the mind would have no pathway out to the world. . . these presences guarantee our sense of meaning and sustain the sense of order, truth, presence, goodness, and beauty in our world.” 14

Given the deconstruction of essential categories such as those associated with the medieval mind combined with gigantic neuroscientific leaps in understanding the human brain and consciousness, evoking beauty in the service of possibility seems intellectually questionable. Yet, without markings for order, coherence, and unity on a path to possibility, human beings are left in solipsistic isolation; political actors exert power solely and endlessly to defend self-interests; and global crises of war, terrorism, starvation, disease, displacement, environmental toxicity increase precarious life for all. However, if beauty were understood “as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal [the visible and invisible] in connection and conversation with each other;”1 if beauty were recognized as possibility veiled behind the representations of war, then beauty combined with imagination, memory, mourning—all necessary for accessing possibility—could bring into view what is occluded by the visual aesthetics of war and its consequences. Openness to beauty brings into view the incomparability of our own lives through which we can perceive the incomparability of the Other and our shared unicity. “. . . ultimately beauty is a profound illumination of presence, a stirring of the invisible in visible form and in order to receive this, we need to cultivate a new style of approaching the world.”16

Destruction of beauty is commonplace in war and terrorist rampage. Truth, order, coherence and a sense of unity capable of crossing lines between enemies are the first casualties of war. From the beginning of the Iraq war, the cultural heritage of Iraq has been destroyed by shellings, bombing, burning, and looting. In the rubble of the Iraq War lay the National Library and the National Museum, which housed thousands-of-years old testaments of law and beauty. On its website, Global Policy Forum chronicles the history of the destruction of cultural heritage from 2003–2015. Under a National Geographic photo of a 4,000-year-old ziggurat bearing shrapnel holes in the Iraq city of Ur, GPF states:

The United States and its allies ignored the warnings of organizations and scholars concerning the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage, including museums, libraries, archaeological sites and other precious repositories. Arsonists badly burned the National Library, and looters pillaged the National Museum. Looters also damaged or destroyed many historic buildings and artifacts. The US constructed a military base on the site of ancient Babylon. Coalition forces destroyed or badly damaged many historic urban areas and buildings, while thieves have ruined thousands of incomparable, unprotected archeological sites.17

To reclaim an invisible world of possibility, to recognize possibilities as more than contingent options or competing alternatives to secure narrow political interests, and to refine capacities necessary to bring the invisible to bear on the visible world of actuality and fact require major shifts in intellection, media and public discourse, political rhetoric, narrative conventions, and academic methods of critique. Observing the ubiquity of critique in the social sciences and humanities that engages in reciprocal debunking of facts, Bruno Latour challenges our intellection and methods of critique by asking “Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm?”18 Latour answers his own question by advocating a form of critique that is “associated with more, not less, with multiplication, not subtraction.” 19

Sandra Gustafson builds on Latour by seeking convergences between the study of language and literature and the work of strategic peacebuilding. Gustafson proposes to “develop a style of literary analysis that takes familiar components of humanistic study and redirects them toward a form of critique anchored in a sense of more.” This includes “an interest in the creative possibilities emerging from the space of gathering (the Ding or Thing, related to civil society and the public sphere); and a shift from matters of fact to matters of concern, which in this instance involves a shift from the reality of war and militarist styles of thought to the building of a culture of peace.”20

Latour’s and Gustafson’s commitment to matters of concern and critical practice guided by more, not less, and multiplication, not subtraction, offers a direction for the intellection shifts necessary to engage the space of possibility. Both Latour’s criticism of deconstructionist distortions of fact and Gustafson’s desire to move from militarist styles of thought toward forms of critique focused on concerns that lead toward a culture of peace require close attention to the role selective attention plays in choosing either concerns or facts and how both concerns and facts can be used to support ideological interests. Intellection informed and transformed by all the foregoing capacities necessary for engaging possibility will give attention to objective factors in any conflict, distinguish personal interests from shared collective values, discern ideological positions posing as facts or concerns, consider a multiplicity of subjectivities, and foreground questions such as “how else might particular concerns be addressed” or “what that is not yet could we consider?” Practiced from the space of possibility, critique becomes a form of poiesis, a means for making sense and making meaning.

The decision for the war in Iraq illustrates the problems caused by failing to give discriminating attention to both concerns and facts. The argument that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq fit the ideological predilections of President Bush, served to coalesce the concerns about terrorism, and addressed a felt need for vengeance following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The United Nations weapons inspectors were still investigating the presence of weapons of mass destruction at the time the president with the support of Congress made the decision for preventive war, a justification that ignored international laws prohibiting such military actions.21 When US citizens learned that they had been misled about weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the war shifted to depose a ruthless dictator and establish democracy. Had government officials waited to secure more factual evidence about the presence of weapons in Iraq, had both elected officials, political analysts, and the public entertained the longer-term possibilities that could emerge from a preventive action on ambiguous evidence, the choice for war might have been different.

Opening Space for Possibility

Creative cultural critique and peacebuilding, both of which “return us to the human. . . in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense,” draw us to the threshold space of possibility and the capacities described above necessary for navigating there. The humanities and works of literature in particular—poetry, fiction, drama—make highly visible the relevance and collaborative operation of these capacities in spaces of possibility. Also, such works disclose the lingering and haunting effects of violence and war on individual consciousness and conscience, history, and culture. Pat Barker’s first novel Regeneration in her trilogy of the First World War and Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War about the American war in Vietnam both perform cultural critique in fictional threshold worlds of possibility.

As an imaginative artist, Barker creates a fictional blending of history and fiction. The novel is set in the Craiglockhart War Hospital for Officers, a facility located on the edges of Edinburgh, Scotland, established in 1916 for the treatment of shell-shocked officers. The hospital itself represents a threshold space between the battlefield and society, between creation and destruction, between madness and sanity. Psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers presides in the hospital, assigned to rehabilitate traumatized soldiers so they can return to their military field assignments. The patients in the novel include fictitious characters broken with various physical and mental injuries and the well-known poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. A well-decorated combat officer and brilliant poet, Sassoon has avoided imprisonment for sending a letter disavowing the war by being considered mentally unsound and sent to Craiglockhart.

Amidst beautifully interwoven narratives of psychological crisis between conscience and duty; friendships between the inmates; the parental qualities expressed at the front by officers toward soldiers; conversations between Sassoon and Owens about Christ, pacifism, and war; the therapeutic intimacy of friendship with subtle prohibitions against homosexuality; nerve regeneration experiments; and the psychological and moral evolution of Dr. Rivers called a “male mother” by a former patient, Barker brings into unsettling dialogue the visible world of war and an invisible world of possibility, which becomes increasingly visible through the challenges of memory. As a therapist, Rivers’ role is to assist the officers in healing their splintered memories. His and his patients’ success in healing their personal memories, however, presents the further dilemma, both for them and for him as physician, of returning them to the arena that produced the initial shell-shock and memory disturbances.

By taking readers to the heart of madness in the hospital threshold space of possibility, Barker questions what constitutes madness and sanity for individuals and a culture. Also, through the lives and voices of the maimed, mourning what they have seen and done on the battlefield, Barker reveals a darker side of British history exposing how the erasure of people with questions and conscience from public view, collective memory yields a collective amnesia present in much history making. Cut off from the mystery and beauty of possibility, unable to learn from the past and to use memory for reconciliation, incapable of appreciating vulnerability and grieving the Other, histories sustained by erasures and amnesia more likely are repeated than transformed.

Bao Ninh’s novel of North Vietnam titled The Sorrow of War enters the space of possibility challenging ideologically shaped history by chronicling war’s devastations and questioning the Northern soldiers’ heroism as revolutionary liberators. The novel confronts the official histories of French and American readers as well, taking them to the space of possibility governed by a Hanoi soldier’s memory, memories of the land and rivers, and invisible but palpably present spirits of the dead. With his soul no longer intact and now working with the Missing in Action (MIA) Body Collecting Team, soldier-narrator-author Kien reflects, “. . . war was a world with no home, no roof, no comforts. A miserable journey of endless drifting. War was a world without real men, without real women, without feeling.”22

Bao Ninh’s convention-shattering novel was on the proscribed list in Vietnam for many years, handed around in mimeographed form as Bao Ninh’s final project for graduation from the Nguyen Du Writing School in Hanoi until its publication in 1990. In his novel, Ninh masterfully integrates the capacities of possibility. Writing an imaginative aesthetic work of excavation, Ninh unearths the tragedies of war, the sorrows of love, the struggles of human consciousness, and the political rape of family, cultural traditions, and land regarded reverently. Moving from North Vietnamese Army soldier Kien to author Kien, with frequent, disorienting time shifts, soldier-author Kien gathers missing dead bodies following the war. In this role, Kien also collects his missing lover Phuong, the alluring Hanh whom everyone desired, and the mute girl who saves the disorganized pages of Kien’s manuscript.

As Kien writes he begins to see life through his father’s paintings and returns to them recalling, “In the paintings, the characters wandered aimlessly across unreal landscapes, withered puppets joined to each other like cutout figures. The tail-ender in these processions was the aged artist himself, who cast himself as a tragic figure.” Kien’s father’s last words to Kien before he died were: “Our era is over. From now on you have to be grown up, fight the battle alone. New times are coming, splendid and magnificent and trouble-free times. No more sadness. . . Sorrow is inconsolable. There will still be great sorrow; sorrow passed down to you. I leave you nothing but that sorrow. . . .”23

Built on memory, The Sorrow of War is presented in the ways memory works in the human mind, particularly in minds consumed by trauma, alcohol, despair, and ghosts. Just as human memory is nonlinear, so time in the novel is nonlinear, as the storyline depends on flashbacks and then jumps forward into the present. Memory here is truth-telling as only the traumatized mind can be. “Kien recalled it all. Everything. Not a single detail was missing. His fighting life was being revived in flashbacks, or in slowly unfolding scenes as heartrending as a funeral march.”24 Through soldier-writer Kien, Bao Ninh writes to heal his personal and collective wounded identity.

Working with the MIA missions becomes the staging place for mourning and the transmutation of memory. During this time Kien comes to believe “at the bottom of his heart [that] he exists on this earth to perform some unnamed heavenly duty. A task that is sacred and noble but secret.” 25 His writing was to save the souls of the dead who were not properly buried or prayed over in Vietnamese tradition. In reflections, linking soldier and author, that conclude the novel, author Kien discloses the importance of mourning that transcends and transmutes violence. “But we [writer and soldier] also shared a common sorrow, the immense sorrow of war. It was a sublime sorrow, more sublime than happiness, and beyond suffering. It was thanks to our sorrow that we were able to escape the war, escape the continual killing and fighting, the terrible conditions of battle and the unhappiness of men in fierce and violent theaters of war.”26

The beauty to which this novel bears witness rests in the poetic prose which gives voice to the muteness of vulnerability not mourned, to souls lonely forever. Paradoxically, in the palpable absence of coherence, unity, truth, and reverence for the landscape and sacred tradition, beauty haunts the novel. The mystical presence of lost souls, the soul of landscape, and vulnerable people brutalized by Japanese, French, and American violence are compressed midway through the novel in Kien’s father’s cremation of his paintings. It is as if from those ashes, Kien accepts the force within him to write of sorrow bereft of beauty that with the writing reclaims beauty.

Bao Ninh’s unconventional novel offers provocative ways to rethink intellection and intellectual critique. Here the author completely disorients the linear mind and expectations for narrative structure. He establishes a restless dialogue between the past and present; the dead and the living; love, political ideals, soldier loyalty, and war’s costs. Through a mute girl who saves the author from burning his manuscript and finds herself with disorganized pages, Ninh maneuvers muteness and the silence and sorrow of war into creative expression. By foregrounding memory and mourning, Ninh complicates assumptions about intellection and intellectual critique. To think truthfully, to see clearly, to accept and protect vulnerability takes us to the threshold space of possibility, a space not simply reserved for novelists or poets.

Embodying the Ethics of Possibility

Through finely developed capacities of imagination, memory, mourning, beauty, and amplified processes of intellectual critique, literary works make the visible and invisible worlds present to our imaginations and demonstrate the utility of these intersecting capacities. I have argued that the threshold space of possibility offers the potential for ethical transformation. The ways in which we use imagination and memory, experience vulnerability and mourn loss, appreciate beauty and direct our critical faculties constitute aptitudes that contribute to an ethos or habits of being necessary for living in the space of possibility. Individual and collective moral character derives from the development of the aptitudes, which, by embracing and safeguarding the freedom, dignity, and rights of each person—the self and the Other—give rise to communities of possibility that protect precarious lives.

Peace-builders in conflict arenas live themselves in the threshold space of possibility working for the transformation of conflict. Into their peacebuilding assignments, they carry their own experiences and perceptions of the visible and invisible influences within the conflicts themselves and in those affected by them. Also, they likely encounter traditions, experiences, and perceptions of those enmeshed in the conflict which may differ from their own. Drawing upon the concept and capacities of possibility, peace-builders must discern as clearly as possible the presenting and hidden issues of the conflict. This requires willingness, both the peace-builders and those parties to the conflict, to investigate beneath the conflict surfaces and hackneyed interpretations or justifications by applying the capacities associated with possibility. By calling forth and mentoring the capacities of possibility in the victims of conflict, peace-builders and victims together can perform the ethical task of excavation, rejuvenation, and transformation of community. At their best, peace-builders understand and extend the invitation to live life poetically by engaging the space of possibility.

All humanists committed to justice, peacebuilding, peace research, policy making, teaching, and ethical public discourse can apply the aptitudes and their enlarged critical faculties to economic, political, religious, scientific, and social matters of both concern and fact. The critical equipment needed to assess the extent to which political goals and means for building an inclusive human community deserves at least as much scrutiny as the Pentagon budget, Latour observes.27 In addition to scrutiny of what is offered in the visible world of political affairs, contested interests, and violence, peacebuilding requires a pedagogy for possibility. A pedagogy for possibility teaches and refines the capacities of imagination, memory, mourning, beauty, and creative intellection. It is a pedagogy requiring both reflective interiority and continuous, active engagement with the capacities of possibility present or latent in the Other and in precarious life itself. By presenting possibility as a threshold space for new learning and radical reorientation of values and peacebuilding approaches, I am advocating as an arbiter of political, religious, cultural conflicts abilities more integrated, demanding, life-serving, and reliable than violent force, which renders all lives precarious.

Notes

1. See for example Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 187–203. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

2. Judith Butler, “Precarious Life,” in Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004), 151.

3. John O’Donohue, The Poetics of Possibility (Dublin: Dublin Centre for the Study of Platonic Tradition, 2007), 20.

4. O’Donohue, Poetics of Possibility, 12.

5. Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” Selected Essays 1934–1943, Richard Rees, ed. and trans. (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 10.

6. O’Donohue, Poetics of Possibility, 23.

7. John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 173.

8. John O’Donohue, Beauty (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 138–39.

9. O’Donohue, Beauty, 145.

10. Stephen K. Levine, Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1997), 41.

11. Miraslov Volf, “Love’s Memory: Redemptive Remembering,” http://www.ptsem.edu/lectures/?, 2002, 1.

12. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Abuses of Memory,” trans. Mei Lin Chang, Common Knowledge 5 (1996), 8.

13. Todorov, 14.

14. O’Donohue, Beauty, 45.

15. O’Donohue, Beauty, 9.

16. O’Donohue, Beauty, 23.

17. “Consequences of the War and Occupation of Iraq,” Global Policy Forum, accessed 21 January 2017, www.globalpolicy.org/humanitarian-issues-in-iraq/consequences-of-the-war-and-occupation-of-iraq.

18. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2004, 225.

19. Latour, 248.

20. Sandra Gustafson, “Literature and Peace Studies,” University of Notre Dame, unpublished paper, 2013, 4.

21. United Nations Charter, Article 2 (4).

22. Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 31.

23. Ninh, 125–126.

24. Ninh, 121.

25. Ninh, 50.

26. Ninh, 232.

27. Latour, 231.

*Ruthann Knechel Johansen is a professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She taught in the Program of Liberal Studies and was a faculty fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where she taught courses on the literary imagination and peacemaking and on the role of narratives in understanding cultures and identity and mediating conflicts. She is also a president emerita of Bethany Theological Seminary. Continuing to write and publish, Johansen is the author of Listening in the Silence, Seeing in the Dark: Reconstructing Life After Brain Injury; The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster As Interpreter; and numerous articles and papers.

Measuring Security

Understanding State Capacity in Oil-Producing States

Joseph L. Derdzinski, PhD*

Jackson Porreca

How do you measure security? Clearly, security is experiential, subject to perceptions and experience. However, this hardly lends itself to large-N comparisons between states. This paper seeks to model how people experience the state. More precisely, how people interact with the organs of the state that most people see and often deal with daily—state security actors.

Predicated on the notion that measuring security and safety is both a straightforward concept (e.g., number of crimes, budgets, staffing) but concurrently notoriously difficult to measure at the interpersonal level, this paper seeks to explore that space between numerical indices of security and personal anecdotes, ultimately seeking a more nuanced model for states subject to resource competition, particularly the oil-producing states of West Africa.

Though this paper was conceived without knowledge of the stir created by Francis Fukuyama’s 2013 “What is Governance?,” his overall conceptual framework animates this paper’s general direction: how does one measure governance? More specifically, how can security and public safety institutions be measured to capture how citizens perceive their security vis-à-vis official actors? The usual determinants of state security, such as budgets, staffing and personnel, criminal cases opened and closed, and other tangible metrics may give a glance into the everyday reality, but clearly cannot capture the essence of the interpersonal experiences of many in the developing world, most acutely interactions with security actors. In its characteristic pithiness, The Economist’s Baobab blog describes one such encounter with traffic police in Freetown, Sierra Leone:

Motorbike-riding in the capital results in almost daily conflict with the notoriously corrupt traffic police, who attempt to solicit “fines” for a bizarre range of offenses. On one recent such occasion, two policemen on a motorbike forced Baobab to the side of the road. “You are plying the streets in your underwear,” announced one, gravely. “You will have to come with us to the station; there will be a fine.” Baobab considered this an unfair description of his attire —jeans, a sleeveless shirt, shoes, and a helmet—and told him as much; the men duly went on their way.1

With this not-altogether uncommon experience—in fact, the reality for most of the developing world—in mind, this paper extracts homicides—one universally-employed variable from the existing large-N studies—to study it (a bit) more closely, using Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire to test its validity. Moreover, resource competition is clearly linked to conflict, presented not just an existential threat to the state, to citizens as well, connecting individuals and the state.2 Through a study of the state’s performance in public safety and security, and governance writ large, this paper seeks to distill the main contributors to state capacity as they relate to energy.

Setting the Stage: Intrastate Conflicts^3

The literature focusing on explanations for intrastate conflict spans the range of theoretical understandings. Stephen D. Krasner, for example, from a political economy perspective, argues the price volatility of key commodities could be a mechanism of social and political destabilization. He notes, “Economic dislocations caused by abrupt price increases can generate local or even national political discontent. . . The dissatisfaction caused by a decline of utility is usually greater than the satisfaction resulting from an unexpected improvement.”4 Rising food prices, due in large part to widespread drought in Russia, coupled with soaring energy costs at the time, likely catalyzed to become one of the drivers of the Arab Spring.5 It appears likely growing economic inequalities, most tangibly popular inability to afford staples, coupled with repressive (albeit weak) governments, spurred the latent social forces to compel rebellion against the state.

Arguments supporting a state-weakness hypothesis where (relative) deprivation combines with an already-anemic state offer motive and opportunity for political-oriented violence, supported by evidence from numerous case studies.6 Prompted by a relatively rich sample, the earliest studies looked at the most extreme example of collapsed states, This, however, reflecting the “stalled” transition that typifies the great majority of countries, has morphed into the contemporary focus on weak or fragile states, including those that exercise some powers associated with the state, but lack legitimacy.7 The puzzle then seems to be why some states suffer from domestic tumult and violence, while others enjoy a modicum of internal peace.

There seems to be strong evidence that among the factors that promote societal peace, principal factors are the state’s ability to resolve conflicts with a combination of good governance and the ability to provide public security. While all states face multiple pressures stemming from internal social dynamics and globalized economic and security factors, nonetheless a principal concern is the provision of public goods and infrastructure. Tying this into the provision of energy, states in the developing world are—theoretically—subject to energy shocks to a greater degree than states with more durable political systems. The fundamental argument, then, is that state capacity correlates directly with the ability for states to adapt to changing economic conditions. The stronger state then can withstand a related intrastate conflict. Therefore, as Figure 1 seeks to illustrate, does state capacity intervene to mitigate or increase the influence of energy resource on intrastate conflict?

Figure. Oil, conflict, and state security

Energy and Conflict. Akin to other globalized issues, increasingly energy and access to energy have become political and economic matters. Francis McGowan describes this arc:

Energy rose from being a rather technical issue handled largely by the energy industries themselves and specialist civil servants to being one with serious diplomatic and geopolitical consequences which involved political leaders in debates about the strategic implications of how energy is produced, supplied and consumed. . . Given the centrality of energy to everyday life it is scarcely surprising that governments have been concerned to ensure that energy supplies are secure. . . It is clear that there is an important strategic dimension . . . giving rise to an understanding of energy as fundamentally a “securitized” issue.8

However, despite the varied research on political transitions, democratization and governance,9 there is little extant literature on the relationship between energy shocks to governance in the developing world, and on state security capacity more specifically. The connection between insecurity and the liberalizing state are well established, though deeper, more refined understandings continue. James D. Fearon and David Laitin established many of the current intellectual foundations of the sources and effects of insecurity and the state. Arguing the principal factors that contribute to internal conflict are neither ethnic nor religious differences, nor even broader grievances, “but, rather, conditions that favor insurgency.”10 These are typically found in states with “financially, organizationally, and politically weak central governments” that increase the feasibility and attractiveness of insurgency due to weak police capabilities.

More specifically, the state’s security capacity is directly linked to income; low per capita income is strongly correlated with state policing capacity. Fearon and Laitin find a “U-shaped relationship between oil dependence and civil war onset, while high resource wealth per capita tends to be associated with less violence.”11 To supplement and enhance their qualitative assessment, Matthias Basedau and Jann Lay’s qualitative comparisons of a smaller sample of oil-dependent exporters find oil-wealthy countries succeed in political stability through redistribution, a well-funded and presumably, effective security apparatus, external security guarantees, and capable state institutions.12 Among the difficulties of gaining an understanding of the validity of state capacity, however, is understanding which variables provide the most energetic indicators.

State Capacity: Defining and Measuring

Ever seeking a binary conception of the world, practitioners and academics perceive state capacity essentially falling into two categories of public management. As Nick Manning notes, The first group is those who think that state capacity should be measured by what the state produces (its outputs and outcomes, like in health and education). Robert Rotberg and Craig Boardman fall here. The second group, where Fukuyama falls, argues that these measures are too difficult for a variety of reasons, and instead state capacity can best be measured by looking at how governments function, specifically bureaucratic procedures, capacity (in the sense of the ability to get things done) and autonomy (in the sense of protection from political micromanagement).13 Fukuyama’s general argument rests on the idea there is an intrinsic relationship between procedures and outcomes, but that procedures ultimately trump outcomes as a measure of governance. For example, “outcome measures cannot be so easily divorced from procedural and normative measures.”14 By his reasoning, an authoritarian state may minimize everyday criminal activities, but at the cost of liberal governance. Most people “would accept a higher degree of crime in exchange for procedural protections of individual rights.”15

In Jordan Holt and Manning’s response to Fukuyama, they contend that in Fukuyma’s estimation, while output and outcome measures seemingly cut through the conceptual uncertainty and simply ask what got done, in practice, they are likely to be very problematic for three reasons: (1) they can be affected by exogenous factors, making it difficult to isolate the contribution of public action; (2) measuring quality aspects is difficult; and (3) normative and procedural concerns (i.e., how the output or outcome was achieved) still matter, particularly in policy areas involving human and individual rights.16

The conclusion is outputs do not enjoy validity as a measurement of state capacity. Where, ultimately, does that leave one who desires to measure state capacity vis-à-vis state security? In practice, it is difficult to disaggregate procedures and outcomes, as security is inherently a personally-derived concept.

Measuring State Security

Though not specifically addressing national security and public safety writ large, Cullen S. Hendrix’s work on civil conflict provides insight into the nexus between state capacity and security. He contends that in the literature on civil conflict and war, a rise in interest in state capacity coincides with a turn from the debate on motive (e.g., economic or societal factors) but toward the “political opportunity structure that affects potential rebels’ decisions to fight,” including Charles Tilly’s work that “places state capacity at the center.”17

In the national security context, which is most concerned with deterring existential threats to the state, both internal and external, Hendrix’s discussion of the Weberian notion of the state enjoying the legitimate use of force, adds that, at least in terms of military capacity, “State capacity can be defined according to the state’s ability to deter or repel challenges to its authority with force.”18 Moreover, as Douglas M. Gibler and Steven V. Miller contend, “the agents of the state build the capacity of the state and centralize power by creating military institutions, introducing instruments for controlling social activity…these are all supported by state-erected tax structures.”19

As Peter Alexander Albrecht and Lars Buur note, “security provision and access to justice are widely considered to be essential services, fundamental building blocks in promoting good governance, and critical for the creation of a secure environment at both the local and national level.”20 With pressures placed on the state from resource competition, or more precisely, the pressure placed from the desire to gain access to resources, security organs might be among the best potential bellwethers to state capacity and state security. However, measuring the notion of security can be vexingly difficult. A recent Dutch conference introduced this challenge:

Measuring security in fragile contexts is both politically laden and operationally challenging. At the core. . . is the reality that the measurement of security, just like its definition, its provision, and its oversight, is innately political. That is, it can be configured to serve particular interests and ambitions. So when discussing how to measure security, we begin with the question: To what end? Who is demanding this “evidence” of progress, and for what purpose do they intend to use the information gathered.21

Hendrix argues many in the field emphasize a state’s repressive capacity, i.e., the military and the police, as the decisive factor in intrastate conflict. Larger security apparatuses (especially the military) are associated with a lower likelihood of conflict onset, increased likelihood of conflict termination, and shorter duration.22 In the context of the state security—national security and public safety—the latter receives scant attention as a measure of the state’s capacity to deal with intrastate conflicts. Perhaps a function of international efforts to promote military capacity over “low” policing activities in the wake of the globally-connected terrorism, the military has taken on the role of combatting internal violence, a role inconsistent with the theoretical best practices for the role of military and police forces. However, public safety remains a potent indicator of both security capacity as well as popular attitudes toward state legitimacy.

Public Safety/Rule of Law

The terms surrounding personal safety and security—public safety, rule-of-law, public order, personal security—all center on the central concept that providing for safety is a public good that may trump all others, both as a personal matter (of course) but as a prime goal of the state as well. Citizens demand an everyday existence where the threat of personal theft and injury or death is minimized, so much so that safety becomes a major indicator of state capacity. As Robert I. Rotberg and Rachel M. Gisselquist contend, “Countries with lower crime rates are supplying greater quantities and qualities of the safety segment of the political good of safety and security than those states where crime is rampant.”23 The animating concept is that public safety, as a distinct subset of a state’s security, has a real relationship with the ability resist internal and external pressures. The question, then, surrounds the data and approaches for measuring public safety. Among the range of variables, homicide rates stand out as best indicating a state’s ability to provide public safety.24

Tapio Lappi-Seppälä and Martti Lehti argue, “Homicides have been a primary target for comparative and historical criminological studies since the beginnings of modern criminal statistics. . . in the nineteenth century. . . almost all homicides were recorded by the authorities, making them a suitable object of studies of crime, and especially of trends. . . the founders of modern criminology. . . had great interest in homicides.”25 Rotberg and Gisselquist base their public safety assessments on the level of violent crime, specifically the national homicide rate, derived from EIU for the Global Peace Index and United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operation of Criminal Justice Systems.26 In perhaps the most influential of recent policy reports on the subject, the UN Office on Crime and Drugs notes the transcendent nature of homicide:

Beyond resulting in the deaths of nearly half a million people in 2012, this form of violent crime has a broad impact on security—and the perception of security—across all societies. . . homicide and violence in countries emerging from conflict can become concurrent contributors to instability and insecurity. . . interventions must address not only the conflict itself but also surges in homicide resulting from organized crime and interpersonal violence, which can flourish in settings with weak rule of law.27

However imperfect a measure, homicides are at least accepted by practitioners and scholars as an indicator of state capacity. The true measure comes with homicide rates applied to context. Africa, with its range of states, allows for a deeper exploration within each national context.

Africa

African states, with shorter histories of independent governance, are clearly subject to all forms of pressures, including energy pressures. Not to lose this study’s state-centered focus, it is relevant to note that Africa is arguably caught up in a modern version “Great Game,” this time between China and the United States. Evidenced by US military interest in Africa (such as United States Africa Command), though the Obama administration—continuing policies from the Bush administration is primarily interested in reducing politically-motivated violence, there is, of course, a keen desire to maintain a stable flow of energy resources out of the region. As part of its strategy for the region, the Obama administration is keenly interested in promoting African states’ intrinsic ability to resolve domestic issues. The Chinese note this US interest, increasingly devoting China’s own considerable resources to the region.28

Africa might be described as typifying energy resource “honey pots,” which might be a contributing element of intrastate aggression. Most contemporarily, the so-called Islamic State, demonstrates how resource capture can turn into revenue flows for insurgent groups. Locally, politically-oriented actors may attack energy infrastructure for a variety of reasons (typical of Michael Watts’s “petro violence”). But African states are susceptible to violence to varying degrees. A tentative understanding is that oil does increase the risk for conflict, but that this relationship is “context dependent. . . African oil-producing countries face different levels of risks” depending on social and political factors.29 Understanding how and why states are more or less resilient to pressure and coercion is central to this study. The African continent, including the Maghreb and Sahel in addition to the sub-Saharan countries, varies greatly in its experiences with developing liberal, accountable governance, as well as in wide country-to-country variations in exploitable energy resources. What is common among all African states, however, is that they have attracted international attention for both market potential and extractable wealth. Jonathan Holslag contends, “Despite changing interests, perceptions, and means, China is and will remain dependent on the good will and collaboration of other players to help safeguard its economic interests in Africa. . . In fact, it will be the main stakeholder in terms of maintaining peace, social stability, good governance, and equitable development in its partner countries.”30 Among the milieu of international and state-level factors that influence which states are more susceptible to pressure, disaggregating how and when certain factors privilege others can best be explained by case studies.

Case Selection and Study

Despite the range of African states that have or are increasingly their energy capacity, this study seeks to choose cases selected on the basis of displaying the particular set of characteristics deemed most important for an analysis of the impact of energy on political stability, with state capacity as the intervening variable. The cases are chosen based on those that display the following dynamic:

1) States that have significant energy resources and significant internal conflict; or

2) States that have an emerging or established energy resources and a degree of internal conflict in the past or present.

The guiding principle is that the oil extraction creates both a potential benefit and a risk to state capacity, with both resources to promote state institutions as well as the potential for threats to the state. Ideally, the cases would be able to address the more specific question of the impact, if any, oil has on state security institutions, and on the police more specifically.

Data challenges are obvious, doubly so because of the relatively closed dimension inherent in policing activities and the difficulties of a conflict or postconflict setting. One institution argues that “The unpredictable collection environment typical of most postconflict contexts requires practitioners to employ an element of creativity and comprehensive context awareness in designing ways to measure security progress.”31 Moreover, as Lappi-Seppälä and Lehti argue, “data for the African countries are limited. For most countries, figures are available for only one year (2008)” while noting further that, “All African countries report huge differences and generally very high rates, with a partial exception of northern (Islamic) Africa. The highest rates are in the 40–50 range (Zambia, Ivory Coast, and Swaziland). A majority of African countries have rates between 15 and 30.”32

Following best practices of structured, focused comparison, after a brief introduction, each case first describes the current state of oil production, including contextual factors surrounding its extraction and institutional impact. Next, homicides and homicide rates establish a baseline for the subsequent study of national policing, including its structure and practice. An initial assessment completes each case. Based on the selection criteria described above, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire hold promise to describe the nexus between oil, conflict, and state capacity.

Nigeria Police Force: A Performance Assessment

As Africa’s most populous country and a critical contributor to global oil markets, increasing instability in Nigeria is cause for great concern. While the security challenges confronting the state in recent years are diverse, there is little doubt that Nigeria’s security forces have struggled to respond effectively and arguably have further alienated themselves from the Nigerian public, inviting greater chaos and erosion of the rule of law. This section examines the performance of Nigeria’s National Police Force in confronting multifaceted threats: from piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, continuing unrest in the oil-rich Niger Delta, and, perhaps most devastatingly, growing tensions between the nation’s Christian and Muslim populations that have been exacerbated by an ongoing, violent campaign to fight the Islamist group Boko Haram in the country’s restive north.

Nigeria’s constitution explicitly calls for the provision of national security as the centerpiece of state responsibility, stating that, “the security and welfare of the people (of Nigeria) shall be the primary purpose of government.”33 To examine the degree to which Nigeria’s security apparatus is meeting this constitutional expectation, this case examines the level of threat Nigeria faces and the relationship between oil production and human insecurity. Finally, it will consider the structure of the nation’s police force and its effectiveness in maintaining the rule of law in the face of multiple threats, with particular attention afforded to its relationship with the Nigerian public and their perception of security forces.

Oil Production

As global oil prices fluctuate wildly (mostly recently steadily downward), and instability grows in many of the world’s critical regions of production, examinations of the relationship between human security and the presence of hydrocarbon resources are perhaps more pertinent than ever. Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa, yet its ability to maintain production has been hampered in recent years by increasing security threats in its primary zone of production—the Niger Delta. Local forces in the region seeking a greater share of wealth from oil rents frequently attack oil infrastructure with devastating effects on aggregate production and Nigeria’s relationship with the international oil companies it partners with for extraction. Nonetheless, oil remains the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, and its relationship with national security could become an even more pressing issue considering the recent massive drop in global oil prices.34

Despite these challenges, Nigeria continues to produce a great deal of oil. In 2013 (the most recent year with available data), Nigeria produced 2,371,510 barrels per day, a commanding portion of Africa’s total of 9,958,000 barrels/day. The vast majority of this oil is refined and exported to global markets, as Nigerians only consumed 302,000 barrels/day in 2013. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund estimated that 96 percent of Nigeria’s total export revenue was derived from oil and natural gas resources.35 Hydrocarbon exports had a value of US $95,118,000 in 2014, clearly a massive revenue stream for a government struggling to provide material security to its population.36 With this in mind, it is concerning to consider how the precipitous drop in global oil prices will affect the Nigerian state’s ability to maintain the rule of law, especially since much internal conflict in the country’s South is driven by local populations feeling they are not getting a fair share of wealth generated from oil revenues.

Social unrest driven by oil resources has been a major problem for Nigeria even when global oil markets favored producing nations, and these tensions will only be further strained as the value of the resources themselves declines, and populations become more desperate. As one recent report states: “unrest in the Niger Delta arises from the well-grounded conviction among the region’s minority tribes that oil companies colluded with greedy Nigerian politicians over the decades to extract billions of dollars of oil for their own benefit at the expense of local habitat and the livelihoods it supported.”37 Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea has also exploded since 2000, leading the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 2018 in October 2011, which urges states in the Gulf of Guinea to take effective action against piracy. Nigeria has responded to these challenges by direct, coercive action against militant and criminal groups involved in the disruption of the country’s oil industry, in conjunction with a program aimed at “buying off” insurgent groups. This project has been largely unsuccessful as it has failed to address the underlying causes of militancy in the Niger Delta and Gulf of Guinea, and as the state’s financial and military resources have been increasingly redeployed to the country’s North where the state is engaged in a bitter battle with Boko Haram.38

Homicides

Although the security concerns confronting Nigeria range from property crimes to an outright insurgency, an accurate picture of the daily threat to Nigerians’ lives is perhaps most easily obtained through observation of the nation’s homicide rate. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Nigeria’s homicide rate in 2010-2014 was 20 homicides per 100,000 people.39 This rate is significantly higher than that of the African continent as a whole, where the homicide rate was 12.5 deaths per 100,000 in population. Considering that this number is almost precisely double the global homicide rate of 6.2 deaths per 100,000 people, it is clear that the prospect of falling victim to a homicide in Nigeria is particularly high compared to global norms—nearly four times.40

While these deaths are attributable to a large number of conflicts and crimes, it is clear that Nigeria’s security services are failing to provide even a modicum of security to the nation’s people. A closer examination of the structure and performance of the country’s police force sheds further light on this issue.

Police

Although Nigeria is an extremely diverse state whose unity is predicated on the sharing of power between the largely Muslim North and the largely Christian South, the structure of law enforcement in the country does not reflect this diverse reality. Though Nigeria’s federal government devolved substantial power to regional governments following independence from Britain in 1960, police services in the country remain centralized into a unitary force known as the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) following the integration of local forces in 1972. A direct holdover from the colonial police force tasked with protecting colonial interests via subjugation of indigenous communities; corruption, repression, and the excessive use of force have long been defining characteristics of the organization.41

Indeed, the NPF has been a direct contributor to Nigeria’s soaring homicide rate, committing extrajudicial killings and using lethal and excessive force to apprehend suspects and control crowds of protestors. During the fight against Boko Haram, the NPF has acted in conjunction with the military to commit numerous summary executions, assaults, torture, and other abuses. The situation had deteriorated to such a degree that the joint task force assigned with degrading and destroying Boko Haram had to be disbanded in August 2013 in the face of excessive reports of abuse and violence at the hands of authorities.42

While these direct abuses have provided concrete evidence of the pernicious nature present in much of Nigerian policing, outright violence is not the only factor negatively affecting Nigerians’ perception of their police force. As one recent report summarized harshly, “It is not an overstatement to say that corruption has destroyed the image and integrity of the Nigeria police in the eyes of the Nigerian people. In general, the behavior of the Nigerian police is far from good, and law enforcement in Nigeria can hardly be said to be positive because of the corruption embedded within the system.”43 The impression that police are not acting to protect and serve all of Nigeria’s people is potent in such an ethnically and religiously divided society. Even when security personnel have the resources to effectively combat criminals—a notion that is far from given—they often use these resources to promote their personal interests or those of their ethnic kin, undermining the government’s efforts to provide security to the population at large.44

Should Nigeria wish to benefit from its extensive material wealth, it must increase its capacity to promote human security and national cohesion. If the structural problems confronting the NPF—such as underfunding, poor training, and low morale —are not addressed, the security situation in the country is likely to continue to deteriorate. So long as the Nigerian public continues to distrust the authorities and perceive them as personally-interested actors rather than guarantors of societal well-being, ethnic strife, and the competition for national resources will continue to be the dominant narrative in Nigerian politics.

Côte d’Ivoire: The Potent Postauthoritarian/Postconflict Brew

This small West Africa coastal state, once among the most economically well-off country in the region, is only now—arguably—emerging from the conflict surrounding the 2010 elections, which were meant to seal the transition from the ancient regime and heal an otherwise fissiparous society. Côte d’Ivoire had built its economic foundation on the monoculture crop cocoa; through massive state intervention created the world’s leading producer. That said, despite the obvious and well-founded concerns about overreliance on one commodity, other concerns, mainly societal, came to the fore. As Matthew I. Mitchell notes, undoubtedly state-led efforts to promote cocoa and coffee cultivation through promoting liberal immigration policies “helped to create a world-class agricultural export market.”45 But while this immigration strategy’s economic success is clear, this success “came at a tremendous political cost as the Ivoirian state failed to ground these sectors in a peaceful and sustainable socio-political environment.”46 It was within this tumultuous context that Côte d’Ivoire’s dissolution developed.

Not to repeat existing excellent narratives of the conflict,47 suffice to note that the 1999 coup against the successor to the one-party state of Félix Houphouët-Boigny and 2002’s (failed) coup and rebellion revealed the contemporary fragility of the once-powerful regime. Emblematic of personal rule, the decades bordering the twentieth and twenty-first centuries left Côte d’Ivoire little recognizable legal-rational institutional structures. The 2010 presidential elections, meant to promote stability and reconciliation, conversely led to open combat between loyalists of Laurent Gbagbo (president since 2000) and President-elect Alasance Ouattara, recognized internationally as the legitimate-elected chief executive. Within this context and the concomitant security issues of a postconflict environment—demobilization and reintegration of combatants; security sector reform; reconciliation, among others—the Ivorian police have emerged as what most optimistically can be characterized as “developing.”

Oil

Côte d’Ivoire is famously known worldwide for its success in cultivating crops for global consumption, oil, and gas reserves which place it firmly in the medium-capacity countries, though its production clearly has been affected by internal strife. The latest assessments from the US Energy Information Administration assesses total oil production in 2014 to be 37,650 barrels per day, down slightly from 38,560 barrels/day in 2013, placing Côte d’Ivoire 65th in global oil production. In fact, petroleum extraction had been decreasing since 2010, when it declined 21 percent from the previous year.48 However, exploration and discoveries hold promise to raise Côte d’Ivoire capacity seven-fold in the coming years.

Côte d’Ivoire aspires to increase its share of public revenue dramatically, building on the international firms’ increasing interest in Africa’s west coast after Ghana’s 2007 discovery of oil. Recent discoveries by French, American and British firms are raising the possibility of increasing domestic oil output to around 200,000 barrels per day in five years due in part to these recent discoveries and exploratory drilling. Moreover, Côte d’Ivoire has signed 14 new contracts since the end of the conflict.49

Oil production in Côte d’Ivoire remains inconsistent with international best practices for transparency. The UN’s assessment is: management of oil industry revenues is still opaque. . . For example, the conclusion of the 2008 report of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative revealed important inconsistencies, demonstrating how payments made by the Ivorian oil company Société Nationale d’Opérations Pétrolières de la Côte d’Ivoire (PETROCI) to the State had not been declared by the General Directorate of the Treasury and Public Accounts, an agency of the Ministry of Economy and Finance.50 Moreover, the UN noted, “the Group confirmed from multiple credible sources that the contract and bidding process at PETROCI continues to be opaque and hence generates a high risk of diversion.”51

Oil production, therefore, remains a relatively small portion of the Ivorian economy, though this is likely to change, even with oil trading at under $50/barrel in early 2015. Based on the ethnic violence sparked by cocoa cultivation, it is possible, and even likely, that as oil becomes increasingly lucrative, the odds of violence increasing are high.

Côte d’Ivoire Homicides

Côte d’Ivoire could reasonably be characterized as an unsettling personal safety environment for the average citizen. Short of the more globalized violence of just a few years past, a more profit-oriented (versus politicized) form of violence permeates much of the state, from the rural areas to the capital. Nonstate actors, however, are not the sole perpetrators as many official actors create the sense of universal threat to self. The State Department, in fact, characterizes Côte d’Ivoire as “critical” for crime, which includes “violent crime, carjackings, armed break-ins to private residences, hold-ups in the street, and theft from cars;” US Embassy personnel have not been immune.52 Within this environment, homicides stand as interesting proxy for overall crime rates, though notoriously problem-rife to pin down.

Table 1. Homicide rates—Côte d’Ivoire

Source

(Reporting Period)

Rate

WHO (2012)

13.6/100,000

Lappi-Seppälä and Lehti (2008)

56.9/100,000

Reported homicides vary widely, depending on the source (table 1). The World Health Organization, in conjunction with its public health reporting mandates, lists in 2012 homicides at 13.6 per 100,000 citizens, with a total reported homicides of 2,691. This figure is notable in that this is the only year—since 2001—reported in their dataset.53 Interestingly, Lappi-Seppälä and

Lehti, the UN Office on Crime and Drugs as well as the State Department, cite 56.9 homicides/100,000 in their most recent reports, based on WHO data, those this figure seems to be lacking in WHO’s reporting. In short, there is little evidence that homicide reporting enjoys universal acceptance.

Côte d’Ivoire Police

Superficially, Côte d’Ivoire security structure follows a standard template from international (arguably Western) models of force structure: a military, with land and sea forces, as well as a national police force tasked with civilian law enforcement and public safety. However, despite the overall “modern” structure of the Ivorian security apparatus, akin to many postconflict states organization belies the reality. Despite an absence of civil war, the country still struggles with developing an accountable and universally professionalized civilian police force.

The Limited Pace of Reforms

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration are challenging even in the most propitious environments, which Côte d’Ivoire clearly has not been in recent years. Wracked by corruption, internal criminal violence and societal discord, the Ivorian government and international actors have struggled to bring about substantive reforms.

One recent Human Rights Watch assessment notes the slow pace of security sector reform (SSR) as well as the disarming the estimated 74,000 former combatants from the recent conflicts.54 Citing the UN, by June 2013, the Ivorian government disarmed and demobilized approximately 6,000 former combatants, though many former combatants remained as violent criminal actors or were protesting the slow progress of reintegration programs.55 The former have presented a particular challenge for policing, particularly in rural areas. According to subsequent human rights reporting, “armed criminals operate in the north in virtual impunity, seemingly unafraid of security force intervention, arrest, or prosecution. As noted by a cocoa farmer who was robbed in an attack. . . ‘They spent an hour doing the robbery—they took their time.’ I heard one say, ‘Today we are ready! Your forces should just come now!’”

Some of these concerns are as much a function of lack of access to resources as it is a reflection of the developing professionalism. The police lack the variety of materials associated with modern policing: communication equipment, weapons, and vehicles, which, all combined, severely constraint police ability to respond to criminal acts. Gendarme (modeled on the French paramilitary force of the same name) and civilian police stations outside of the capital have just one vehicle for all the stationed personnel. Some are forced to receive emergency duty calls on cell phones.56

Reflective of much of the current character of Ivorian policing (and, to be fair, much policing around the country) corruption is endemic. Security forces reportedly carry out arbitrary arrests and detentions, followed by cruel and inhumane detainee treatment.57 Checkpoints established to combat criminals are sometimes used instead to extort money from travelers, with the government occasionally acting to reduce this particular form of extortion, including some arrests of responsible actors, though this tactic is still widespread.58

Côte d’Ivoire’s current environment faces both the headwinds of postauthoritarianism and postconflict development while facing the potential to re-emerge as a model of governance and growth in West Africa. Without serious introspection coupled with a commitment to good governance—most centrally policing—Côte d’Ivoire’s success can hardly be assured.

Analysis and Conclusions

As these two cases demonstrate, homicide rates can give some insights into policing capability as a proxy for state capacity. In both cases, above-average homicide rates correlated with perceived policing dysfunction, though their lack of well-founded data (telling in itself) sheds doubt on the efficacy of homicide data for more than the broadest of indicators. More specific conclusions indicate:

Weak Security Apparatus. Analyzing specifically for Nigeria, Robert-Okah and Wali’s recent observations hold true not just for Nigeria, but Côte d’Ivoire as well. They hold that a weak security system “arises from inadequate equipment for the security arm. . . in addition to poor attitudinal disposition of security personnel. . . some personnel get influenced by ethnic, religious or communal sentiment.” This results in citizens sabotaging government efforts by supporting and fueling insecurity, allowing criminals” to escape the long arm of the law.”59 The lack of materiel goes beyond weapons, encompassing a dearth of vehicles, fuel, information management, and communications equipment, among others.

Oil. There seems to be little connection, at this point, at least, between oil and state capacity. This study intended to isolate oil-producing countries based on their production levels—or their expected midterm production capacity. Côte d’Ivoire, as a low-to-medium producer of oil (though with great potential for growth) and Nigeria as Africa’s largest producer, are chronically unable to connect their respective oil wealth to enhance internal security. The evidence does not support in either case oil as a nationwide variable that enhances the potential for violence, but in neither case does oil wealth lead to enhanced state capacity to deal with everyday violence or the more regional-specific internal identity-related violence.

Homicide as an indicator of institutional capacity. Neither case is universally what one might consider a failed state (recognizing that this term has seen a reduction in practice), but there is a clear and apparent weak institutional capability. In both cases the national homicide rates—well above the global average—indicated a gap in the institutional capacity of the police, which in turn is a barometer of nationwide institutional capacity. However, the problems with the data (most pronounced in Côte d’Ivoire) make drawing more specific inferences doubtful. In the case of Nigeria, “The foundations. . . are very shaky and have resulted in the deterioration of state governance and democratic accountability, thereby paralyzing existing set of constraints including the formal and legitimate rules. . . the state of insecurity in Nigeria is a function of government failure.60 This “paradox of plenty,” where in a very rich country has very poor people leads to the insecurity of lives and properties.61

Murphy’s analysis on the interplay between oil production and state incapacity outside of those institutions that matter most to oil production plays out to a reasonable degree in both cases:

The current international system that makes international recognition—not internal legitimacy or functionality—the key to state authority works to the benefit of dysfunctional oil producers in the developing world. Enclaves that are valuable to oil consumers—and to the domestic elites who facilitate and benefit from international legitimization—function well enough. They include oil and gas fields, export terminals, oil-related shipping, and offshore infrastructure around which defensive perimeters can be drawn.62

Significance for Regional Instability. The ultimate question surrounds a state’s capacity to withstand internal pressures when combined with resource competition. In these two cases, both states experienced internal instability, though this instability was not a direct consequence of oil production, but rather was a symptom of greater social, political and economic dysfunctions. Police reforms may assist in mitigating some of the greater concerns surrounding crime and its prevention, but until macro-level issues, including economic growth and governance, these reforms will likely serve only as a temporary salve. Until these issues are ultimately addressed, perhaps with the commodity-derived incomes, regional instability emanating from and affected by Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire will likely continue.

Notes

1. “Corruption in Sierra Leone: Dodging the Traffic Police,” Economist, 19 July 2013, http://www

.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2013/07/corruption-sierra-leone.

2. As noted in Douglas M. Gibler and Steven V. Miller. “External Territorial Threat, State Capacity, and Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 5, (September 2014): 634.

3. This and subsequent paragraphs in this section are revised and condensed from Andrew Price-Smith, Robin Dorff, and Joseph Derdzinski, “Energy and State Capacity: Implications for Instability and Conflict in East Asia and Africa,” (working paper, 2015).

4. Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 40.

5. Sara Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo, “Global Warming and the Arab Spring,” Survival 53, no. 2 (April–May 2011): 11-17.

6. For example, see Fredrik Kahl, 2008, and Homer Dixon, 1999.

7. Though the direct comparison is rather crude, Freedom House’s 2015 report that 54 percent of the world’s 195 states are “partly free” or “not free,” correlating with a lack of legitimacy founded in liberal order and, to a lesser degree, a weakly functioning state. See Robert H. Dorff, “Responding to the Failed State: The Need for Strategy,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 10, no. 3, Winter 1999, 62–81.

8. Francis McGowan, “Putting Energy Insecurity into Historical Context: European Responses to the Energy Crises of the 1970s and 2000s,” Geopolitics 16, no. 3 (5 August 2011): 487.

9. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 75–76.

10. Ibid., 75.

11. Matthias Basedau and Jann Lay, “Resource Curse or Rentier Peace? The Ambiguous Effects of Oil Wealth and Oil Dependence on Violent Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 46, no. 6 (November 2009): 757.

12. A majority of this paragraph originated from Price-Smith, Dorff, and Derdzinski, 8–9.

13. Nick Manning, “How Can We Measure State Capacity? Do You Start Upstream or Downstream?,” The World Bank (blog), 23 June 2014, http://blogs.worldbank.org/governance.

14. Francis Fukuyama, “What Is Governance?” Governance 26, no. 3 (July 2013): 356.

15. Ibid.

16. Jordan Holt and Nick Manning, “Fukuyama Is Right about Measuring State Quality: Now What?” Governance 27, no. 4 (October 2014): 718.

17. Cullen S. Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity: Theoretical and Empirical Implications for the Study of Civil Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 47, no. 3 (18 May 2010): 273.

18. Ibid., 274.

19. Gibler and Miller, “External Territorial Threat,” 635.

20. Peter Albrecht and Lars Buur, “An Uneasy Marriage: Non-state Actors and Police Reform,” Policing and Society 19, no. 4 (9 December 2009): 396–97.

21. From the 14 November 2014, “Measuring Security Progress: Politics, Challenges and Solutions” conference site, available at http://www.kpsrl.org/calendar/calendar-event/t/measuring-security-progr ess-politics-challenges-and solutions.

22. Hendrix, “Measuring State Capacity,” 274.

23. Robert I. Rotberg and Rachel M. Gisselquist, Strengthening African Governance: The Index of African Governance (Cambridge, MA: World Peace Foundation, 2009), 45.

24. As an indicator of more far-reaching approaches, the Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG) takes a wider approach to public safety, including variables such political terror, social unrest, violent crime, and police services. Available at http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/interact/.

25. Tapio Lappi-Seppälä and Martti Lehti, “Cross-Comparative Perspectives on Global Homicide Trends” Crime and Justice (December 2014): np.

26. Rotberg and Gisselquist, “Strengthening African Governance,” 46.

27. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Regional Homicide Profile: Africa,” UNODC Homicide Statistics 2013, 2 February 2015, 5, http://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014

_GLOBAL_HOMI CIDE_BOOK_web.pdf.

28. For a broad discussion of Chinese security policies toward Africa, see, for example, Jonathan Holslag, “China’s New Security Strategy for Africa,” Parameters, Summer 2009, 23–37.

29. See Philippe Le Billon, “Oil and Armed Conflicts in Africa,” African Geographical Review 29, no. 1, (June 2010): 63–90.

30. Holslag, “China’s New Security,” 36.

31. Clingendael, Netherlands Institute of International Relations, “Measuring Security Progress: Politics, Challenges and Solutions,” 20 November 2014, https://www.clingendael.nl/publication

/measuring-security-progress-politics-challenges-and-solutions.

32. Lappi-Seppälä and Lehti, “Cross-Comparative Perspectives,” np.

33. I. Robert-Okah and W. Wali, Insecurity in Nigeria: Implications for Sustainable National Development in Nigeria, International Journal of Academic Research Part B 6, no. 4 (July 2014): 242–250.

34. US Energy Information Administration, “Independent Statistics and Analysis, “Nigeria-Country Analysis,” 30 May 2013, np.

35. US Energy Information Administration, “Nigeria-Country Analysis,” np.

36. Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries, “Nigeria,” 1 February 2015, http://www

.opec.org/opec_web/en/.

37. Martin N. Murphy, “Africa’s Leaking Wound,” US Naval Institute Proceedings 139, no. 4 (March 2013): 36–41.

38. Ibid.

39. World Bank/United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Intentional Homicides (per 100,000 people),” World Bank Data Sets, accessed 17 January 2017, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC

.IHR.PSRC.P5.

40. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Intentional Homicides.”

41. Nigeria Police Watch, “About the Nigeria Police,” 17 April 2011, http://www.nigeriapolice watch.com/resources/about-the-nigeria-police/.

42. US Department of State, “Nigeria 2013 Human Rights Report,” 2 February 2015, https://www

.state.gov/documents/organization/220358.pdf.

43. Matthias Olufemi Dada Ojo, “The Nigeria Police and the Search for Integrity in the Midst of Diverse Challenges: An Effective Police Management Approach,” International Journal of Political Science and Management 16, no. 2 (June 2014): 87–100.

44. Okah and Wali, “Insecurity in Nigeria,” 242-50.

45. Matthew I. Mitchell, “Migration, Citizenship and Autochthony: Strategies and Challenges for State-building in Côte d’Ivoire,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30, no. 2 (April 2012): 274.

46. Ibid.

47. See, for example, Mike McGovern’s 2011 narrative Making War in Côte d’Ivoire (University of Chicago Press).

48. Available at http://www.eia.gov/countries/country-data.cfm?fips=iv. The UN noted that, “Production continued to decline in 2013, reaching 32,000 barrels per day.” UN Security Council letter, 14 April 2014.

49. “Ivory Coast Aims to Boost Oil Output After Discoveries,” Reuters, 3 January 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/oil-ivorycoast-idUSL5E9C33CZ20130103. More recent reporting demonstrates the rapid signing of multiple exploration contracts with many of the major international oil firms, including ExxonMobil in December 2014.

50. United Nations Security, letter, 14 April 2014.

51. Ibid.

52. US Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) “Cote D’Ivoire 2014 Crime and Safety Report,” accessed 17 January 2017, https://www.osac

.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=17008.

53. UNODC, “Intentional Homicide Count and Rate per 100,000 population, by Country/Territory (2000-2012),” accessed 17 January 2017, https://www.unodc.org/gsh/en/data.html. The UNODC defines “intentional homicide” as the “unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person.”

54. UN General Assembly, Resolution 2162, “Renewing Mandate of United Nations Operations in Cote d’Ivoire,” 30 June 2014.

55. Human Rights Watch, World Report 2014: Cote d’Ivoire, accessed 17 January 2017, https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/cote-divoire.

56. Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), US Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, “Cote D’Ivoire 2014 Crime and Safety Report,” accessed 17 January 2017, https://www.osac

.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=15611.

57. Human Rights Watch World Report 2014: Cote d’Ivoire, np.

58. Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), Human Rights Watch, np.

59. Robert-Okah and Wali, “Insecurity in Nigeria,” 242–50.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Murphy, “Africa’s Leaking Wound,” 36–41.

*Dr. Joseph L. Derdzinski is an associate professor of political science and a senior international development and governance adviser. His research and consulting interests center on the study of the political processes of postauthoritarian states and how political institutions can be employed to reduce violence. He served on observation missions for the highly-fraught 2014 elections in Egypt and Afghanistan and conducted and published research to help the Ukrainian government develop an accountable national guard. He teaches courses on international politics, the politics of Africa, US foreign policy, and comparative politics. Dr. Derdzinski was an officer in the US Air Force, where he worked extensively with security service colleagues throughout northern Europe. He also led the first US military security detachment in Bosnia during NATO’s implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, when he worked with Bosnia’s security services in their postconflict transition.

Jackson Porreca graduated from Colorado College in 2014 with a degree in Political Science and a minor in Italian. Following graduation, he went to work for the Department of Political Science and conducted research on issues of International Security and focusing on state capacity and issues of global health. He has coauthored a peer-reviewed article published in Global Health Governance and assisted with other research projects. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is employed as a creative writer for a major bicycle company.

Economic Coercion and Power Redistribution during Wartime

Rosella Cappella Zielinski, PhD*

War is an opportunity to revise the distribution of power among states in a short amount of time. While most attention is placed on the changes in the relative power of the loser in a hegemonic war, arguably some of the most important changes happen within victorious alliances. Power redistribution does not take the form of the destruction of an ally’s military forces but through economic coercion. The primary mechanism by which an ally can engage in this coercion is via exploiting its role as a creditor.

Creditor allies are increasingly present during wartime. The author finds that, since 1950, external sources of war finance have far exceeded domestic sources.1 Before 1950, 52 percent of belligerents engaged in foreign debt, whereas 72 percent have in the post-World War II era. The figures are more dramatic when one considers all forms of foreign war finance. Before 1950, 25 percent of states used resources from abroad to cover 25 percent or more of the costs of war; after 1950, 80 percent of states relied on resources from abroad to cover 25 percent or more of the costs of war. As credit becomes central to war-fighting ability, states with poor credit are more likely to form alliances with states that maintain favorable access to international capital markets.2

Given this increasing potential for economic coercion, under what conditions can a state use economic coercion against an ally? The various literatures on sovereign debt, economic statecraft, and alliances overlook economic coercion during wartime. Works that examine lending emphasize debt repayment ability. The literature does not account for the prerogative of lending states and the desire to extract concessions beyond repayment with interest. The economic statecraft literature, emphasizing peacetime conditions or wartime denial, does consider how states can exploit their allied relationships for gain beyond advancing the war effort. The alliance literature overlooks power redistribution amongst allies, focusing on power redistribution between alliances or the effect of power shifts on alliance formation and cohesion.

To fill the gap in the literature, I argue economic coercion occurs due to war finance. When a belligerent is unable to purchase necessary imports for the war effort, the state will need to engage in a loan from an ally. The extent of dependency varies with domestic arms production, the structure of the nation’s currency reserves, and the intensity of the war effort. Wartime dependency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic coercion. Coercion occurs when the costs of coercion are low, particularly when it does not damage the war-fighting capability of the dependent state.

To explore the extent to which power can be transferred amongst allies via economic coercion, I engage in extreme and similar case selection—the United States as a creditor to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union during World War II. Both states needed to purchase goods from the United States to effectively fight the war. The United Kingdom engaged in various attempts at self-sufficiency, but the war effort made it impossible. Through the extension of the Lend-Lease loan, the United States endeavored to move the world’s economic center from London to New York without damaging the war effort. In the Soviet Union, the overarching goals remained to use Lend-Lease aid to extract concessions to promote an international environment favorable to American interests. Despite the urging of some within his administration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt perceived it too costly to engage in economic coercion against the Soviets, as the Red Army was key to defeating the Nazi war machine.

The case study findings suggest an unexplored element of power transition theory. Power transition theory argues that when a dissatisfied challenger state rises to parity and desires to change the status quo, it often seeks to do so by engaging in conflict.3 War outcome redistributes power in favor of either the challenger or dominant power. The underlying assumptions of the power transition theory suggest dissatisfaction of and desire to change the status quo as the impetus of conflict outbreak. The findings of this article suggest opportunities for states to shift the status quo may arise without forewarning. Moreover, shifts in the status quo can occur by exploiting conflict settings versus engaging in conflict itself.

The article proceeds as follows. I discuss the various sovereign debt, economic statecraft, and alliance literatures. I then present my argument. I develop the necessary conditions for wartime dependency and then discuss under what circumstances states exploit that dependency. Subsequently, I discuss my case selection and test my argument. I first present the conditions that led to British dependency on US Lend-Lease aid and the American decision and ability to exploit that dependency. Following the same format as the American case, I discuss the degree of Soviet dependency and the US decision to not exploit that dependency. I conclude with a brief discussion of other extreme cases and implications for our understanding of power transition amongst allies.

Sovereign Debt, Economic Statecraft, and Alliance Literatures

The ability to garner resources is a necessary component to any war effort. While some states finance their wars domestically, others turn to sources outside their borders. Scholars have examined the relationship between wartime creditor and debtor states through (a) postwar state decline, (b) postwar debt repayment, (c) war outcome, and (d) the ability to finance a war.4 These works suggest wartime lending is contingent upon, and the terms of the agreement vary with, the ability of the debtor state to pay the creditor state back.5 Belligerents whose economic foundations are weak, whose leaders do not commit to debt repayment, or whose ability to win the war is questionable are subject to high-interest rates. This literature does not account for concessions by the debtor that extend beyond direct monetary compensation.

Also, when the motivations of the debtor to engage in foreign war finance have been examined, the underlying assumption is a domestic choice—that it is either economically or politically cheaper than raising taxes.6 These scholars often treat all debt as the same regardless of the source—domestic or foreign. Thus, they overlook the motivations for a state to turn abroad for resources, especially when they risk being beholden to the terms and conditions of another state.

The wartime debt literature does not account for the creation of potential creditor–debtor relationships and the economic statecraft literature under-theorizes the conditions that allow for wartime economic coercion. First, when economic statecraft is discussed during wartime, the focus is on wartime denial. The goal of these works is to understand how states can use their economic resources to undermine the enemy’s war effort.7 These works concern themselves with attempts by national strategists to deny the enemy access to their own strategic resources and manufacturers through export embargoes and depriving the enemy of imports from important neutral states by using diplomatic and military means to dissuade neutrals from exporting to the enemy, as well as preemptive buying to divert supplies from the enemy or denying financing.8 These works do not account for how allies can exploit their own relationships for gain beyond advancing the war effort.

Second, the economic statecraft literature emphasizes exploiting existing dependencies: reliance on another state for a specific good is exogenous. For example, Albert O. Hirschman^9 discussed how asymmetric trade relations can create dependencies exploitable in the future, especially during wartime when states most need foreign trade.10 These works do not address how dependencies are created quickly due to the war effort.

Third, the literature does not adequately address the difference between wartime and peacetime coercion. During peacetime, the ability to find substitutes is lower relative to wartime. For example, sanctioned states “escaped this vulnerability interdependence” by “engaging in smuggling, establishing resource conservation programs, developing new markets for their products, and creating substitutes for embargoed goods.”11 Wartime creates unique constraints on a state’s economy—trade embargos, potential trade partners hurt by the war, an inability to divert internal resources as they are needed for the war effort, capital flight, and decreased credit ratings—that make finding substitutes much more difficult. In addition, the time horizon for state and leadership survival may not allow for the creation of such long-term substitutes. To match the adversary, the state needs inputs for the war immediately. Leadership survival literature suggests the penalty for leaders who either lose a war or for war efforts that are going poorly range from the population voting the leader out of office to death. The result of this wartime cost–benefit analysis is higher rates of compliance to the pressures of economic statecraft.

The alliance literature does not address why and how power gets redistributed amongst allies, instead emphasizing power distribution and redistribution between allies and target states, particularly the effect of alliance duration^12 or the ability of an alliance partner to influence the alliance.13 These studies overlook the transfer of power from one ally to another via exploiting alliance dependency. Similar to the economic statecraft literature, those that study alliance dependency emphasize peacetime conditions, exploring how dependency affects fears of entrapment or abandonment^14 or bargaining power within the alliance.15 As Patricia A. Weitsman noted,16 alliances formed during peacetime often dissolve once war begins. This suggests that peacetime alliances serve different purposes than their wartime counterparts and the insights we generate regarding peacetime alliances do not necessarily apply to their operation during wartime.17

By exploring the ability of a state to garner resources for war, this article builds upon the sovereign debt, economic statecraft, and alliance literatures. The following section theorizes the economic and military conditions under which an ally can revise the distribution of power in its favor. It hypothesizes the necessary conditions for wartime economic coercion to take place and engages in a cost-benefit analysis of when leaders will seize the opportunity.

Wartime Economic Coercion—Wartime Dependency

The ability to exercise economic coercion—the threat or act by a sender government(s) to disrupt economic exchange with the target state—is conditional on dependency.18 Wartime dependency occurs when a state needs inputs to fight its war effort from an ally and does not have the means to purchase them. Dependency is contingent upon the degree of control over the supply of something a state values, an intense need for this supply, and the cost of compliance is less than the costs of doing without the supply.19 During wartime, control over the supply of both war inputs and credit to purchase them is concentrated in the hands of specific states, thus decreasing the availability of substitutes. There is also an intense need for this supply. Wartime creates conditions in which internal mobilization of resources becomes limited. Additionally, as wars threaten state and leadership survival, the costs of noncompliance to leaders are high.

Leaders have three ways of acquiring inputs for war: they can seize them, make them, or buy them.20 Inputs for war include manpower, equipment (typically reflected via a defense industry or a civilian industry that is convertible to purchase inputs for war coupled with raw materials), foodstuffs, and transportation assets.21 When a state can supply its entire war effort via domestic inputs, it negates the need to purchase inputs from abroad and, thus, the need to obtain a currency loan to do so.22

When a state is unable to supply its war effort domestically, it needs to look outside its borders, creating the potential for reliance on an ally as creditor.23 While all war inputs may need procurement from abroad, military equipment, primarily finished goods such as airplanes or battleships versus subcomponents, is the most expensive and difficult to obtain. In an era of capital-intensive complex weapons systems, finished goods are particularly costly, as supply is limited to countries possessing the most highly developed technology.24 As the need for military equipment increases, especially expensive finished goods so does the cost of purchasing those goods. Dependency arises when the currency of belligerent state diminishes to critical levels, preventing the purchase of needed war inputs.

It should be noted that while the belligerent state may be dependent on the military goods of the ally, financial dependencies are more exploitable. If the belligerent state needs to purchase goods from abroad, it is profitable for a supplier state to sell its goods to any buyer. As Hirschman noted, “It will generally be much easier to switch imports than exports, all countries being ready to sell and not ready to buy.”25 Extending credit, however, is inherently risky. During wartime, there is no guarantee that the state will repay its debt. Furthermore, there are fewer credit substitutes. While multiple states may be able to sell inputs for war, currency loans are in short supply, as the borrowing states need a loan in the currency of the supplier state.

During peacetime, states can adjust their economy to increase their currency levels. A state may encourage exports, prompting the flow of currency into the country, or reduce imports, keeping needed currency from flowing out of the country, to redress the imbalance. Wartime negates this self-sufficiency. During wartime, exports often become severely limited through decreased trade. Trading partners are hurt by the war, states enact blockades or sanctions, or states need industries that normally are export oriented for the war effort.26 Simultaneously, the need to import goods increases, as the state needs to supplement goods that the state is no longer able to produce to supply the armed forces. The decrease in exports results in a decrease of reserve currency, while the increase in imports increases the need for it. The need for currency further increases when a state is maintaining forward operating bases or fighting abroad and purchasing goods in theatre.27

Debtor dependency varies with the structure of the debtor state’s economy. States with high levels of existing currency reserves and those with assets abroad, i.e., holdings of foreign direct or portfolio investment, which can be liquidated in exchange for the supplier state’s currency can prolong the need to engage in a currency loan, as they have more existing resources from which to draw. Also, reserve currency states are in a unique position to avoid these financial difficulties because they can run a balance of payments deficit.28 The demand for a state’s reserve currency provides the state with a unique ability to accrue other national currencies through voluntary accumulations of liabilities abroad rather than through losses of gold or gold-exchange.29

Finally, the extent of debtor dependency varies with the intensity of the war effort. As the intensity of the war increases so does the state’s limit of production capacity as well as leadership and state survivability: “In the long run. . . despite substitution, some limit to the inputs either of raw materials or labour will be reached, the curve of production will flatten out, and the economy may then be said to have achieved its war potential.”30 As the war expands, the state needs more goods to confront the enemy. Simultaneously, domestic production reaches its limit, and the state will need to purchase increased amounts of goods from abroad.

Additionally, as the war becomes more intense, leaders will feel more pressure to win the war to avoid losing power. There is a considerable amount of scholarship linking war outcome and the extent to which the state suffers war casualties with leadership survival.31 As Susan Strange wrote, “The greater the perceived threat to security, the higher price will be willingly paid and the greater risk accepted.”32

In sum, wartime creates dependencies that do not exist during peacetime. When a state needs to procure inputs for the war from abroad and does not have the currency to pay for it, it will need to engage in a currency loan, resulting in a reliance on the creditor state. This reliance on a state creates the potential for coercion. The potential for coercion increases with the size of the loan, when the goods needed are critical to the war effort, and war intensity increases—either by expanding scope and intensity or the war shifts from a limited war of choice to a total or existential war.

Wartime Economic Coercion—Exploiting Dependency

States want power and wartime debtor dependence provides the necessary conditions for states to attain it. Yet wartime economic coercion is an uncommon event. Under what conditions do creditor states take advantage of this debtor dependency? Creditor states engage in a cost-benefit analysis. They want to obtain concessions and increase their power when the costs of coercion are low: “If the benefits do not outweigh the risks, they sit tight and wait for a more propitious moment.”33 During wartime, the cost-benefit analysis is centered on the war effort. These creditor states are in a delicate position: They want to extract concessions from the belligerent state(s) yet avoid undermining the war effort, especially when fighting for a common cause. Thus, they will only seek concessions that affect nonwar fighting capabilities and do not negatively affect war outcome.

Case Selection

I test my argument with case study analysis to explore the necessary and sufficient conditions of economic coercion.34 To highlight the variables of interest and provide insight into power transition theory, I engage in most similar and extreme case selection.35 The universe of cases is creditor–debtor dyads during wartime. Wartime creditor–debtor dyads consist of two states in which the debtor is a belligerent in a conflict, and the other is the creditor.36 Excluded is sovereign debt extended by foreign private creditors independent of their state of residence. Interstate loans may be serviced by a private creditor but are made either at the request of or in conjunction with the state.

To maximize the variance on the variables that create dependency,37 I explore World War II debtor states. The size and scope of the war meant self-sufficiency was difficult for those states that needed to purchase war inputs from abroad as trading partners were hurt, the ability to increase exports was diminished as war production increased, and war imports increased. Furthermore, it was a total war for various states; leaders were fighting for state survival. Within the World War II population of cases, I compare most similar cases—the experiences of the United Kingdom and Soviet Union as debtors to the United States (US). Both states were subject to the US Cash and Carry policy, and both eventually became reliant on American goods for the war effort, funded by American Lend-Lease loans. Yet the United States only waged economic coercion vis-à-vis the United Kingdom. It made no attempt to garner concessions from the Soviet Union.

Quid Pro Quo: The United States and the United Kingdom

To effectively fight the Germans during World War II, the British needed expensive finished inputs for the war effort from the United States, and they did not have the gold or currency to purchase them. While the government made various attempts to increase their dollar holdings, war intensity prevented attempts at self-sufficiency. By the summer of 1940, the British were debtor dependent. The American government capitalized on this dependency, attempting to shift the world financial center from London to New York.

Dependency on the US

To fight the Axis powers, Britain had to supply itself and the war effort of the Empire. In the first 15 months of the war, the United Kingdom supplied 90.7 percent of the Empire’s munitions and 69.5 percent of munitions throughout the course of the war.38 Germany, however, out-produced Britain in almost every aspect of war supply until 1941.39 The British were also in need of raw materials. The defeat in Norway in April 1940 deprived Britain of its main source of timber, papermaking material, and iron ore. In the summer of 1940, with North African contracts broken due to the war, Britain was deprived of a large proportion of its imported steel-making materials, phosphates, flax, hemp, and other essential commodities. Finally, with the closing of the Mediterranean route, the Axis disrupted trade with the Balkans, removing another source of timber and materials.40 The primary external source for war input was the United States.

From the start of World War II to May 1940, the British bought war supplies from the United States with British currency reserves under the US policy of “cash-and-carry,” purchasing American goods in cash. Britain was responsible for transporting those goods across the Atlantic. Even prewar contracts had to be paid in full before the goods could leave American ports.41 This period of self-reliance was short-lived due to short dollar supply, a worsening balance of payments position and the inability to float debt on the US market.42

To purchase needed goods, the British began an internal campaign to promote the flow of dollars into the country and keep any they had from flowing out through a series of import controls and export promotion. On 1 September 1939, the House of Commons passed the Import and Exports Customs Powers (Defense) Act, limiting the “imports of luxuries and of goods of which there are sufficient home supplies in order to conserve exchange for the additional purchases of other products required in war time.”43 The British also sought to promote exports to the United States, encouraging exports of jute, rubber, tin, whisky, and furs.44 The government forced exporters to bill clients at the official sterling–dollar exchange rate, higher than the free market rate traditionally used. Finally, the British also enforced “dollar-invoices” versus the often-used sterling invoices. The goal was to bring in as much hard currency from the bulk of certain exports with as little administrative interference as possible.

The demands of war proved too high and the British system of controls inadequate. The British needed the more expensive furnished munitions.45 Furthermore, in order to fight the war, Britain had to focus all of its manufacturing on the war effort, forcing it to abolish its export drive.46 In March 1940, the British reported that at the current rate of purchases, within two years, the United Kingdom would have given the United States all of its dollar assets.47 British prime minister Winston Churchill told US president Franklin D. Roosevelt that, “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same.”48

The events of late spring 1940 further exacerbated the British financial position. The fall of France and evacuation of Dunkirk forced the British to increase expenditures. When the British evacuated the continent, they left all their newly produced war supplies^49 and had to assume all of France’s contracts with the United States.50 The war was increasing in intensity, and the British needed as many inputs as they could procure. Instead of rationing currency and conservative purchases, the British threw all the dollars they had into the war in the hope that the United States would continue providing supplies once they ran out.

Exploiting British Dependency

To help its ally, the Roosevelt administration introduced the Lend-Lease Bill to Congress in January 1941, and by the end of the war, extended $27,023 million in aid to Britain.51 In exchange for the extension of credit and aid, the administration wanted to shape the postwar world in favor of US interests, to continue its open-door policy that began during World War I, and reconstruct the world economy on the basis of a free marketplace to relieve their agricultural, industrial, and capital surpluses.52 To do that, the United States wanted countries linked together by a worldwide gold standard, not grouped into blocks by ties to specific reserve currencies.53 The United States attempted to impose said changes throughout the 1930s. However, it was unable to end the British Imperial preference and sterling controls.54 The United States took advantage of its coercive power as a creditor to achieve the goals that it was unable to during the inter-war years:

Although American leaders grasped the potential leverage created by British dependence upon the United States, they did not consistently use that leverage between 1937 and March 1941. Before the actual outbreak of war, the American government could not resort to obvious coercion, fearing the Chamberlain ministry would seek a modus Vivendi with Germany. . . .Once the Lend-Lease Act became law, the temptation to use it as a means of obtaining economic concessions from Britain—concessions which would promote economic multilateralism as well as directly and indirectly benefit American economic expansion—became too great to resist.55

Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau led the charge.56 He began by placing severe restrictions on the level of British gold and dollar reserves.57 When the British signed Lend-Lease, the allies agreed that the UK balance continue to be above the desired minimum of $600 million but below $1 billion and the British open discussion on dismantling imperial preferences.58 The British resented Morgenthau’s requests yet had to acquiesce to his demands.59 To shift American policy, Prime Minister Churchill messaged President Roosevelt:

While we will do our utmost and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the exchange, I believe that you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if, at the height of this struggle, Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets so that after victory was won with our blood, civilization saved and time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.60

Throughout the war, the United States tied the postwar order—the Atlantic Charter and Bretton Woods—to the extension of American aid.61 The financing of World War II cemented the sterling’s decline. The British need to procure inputs for the war from the United States and its inability to run a balance of payments deficit during World War II drastically hurt the sterling’s status once the war ended.

The dependency created during wartime continued into the postwar era. To begin to repair its economy, the British government approached the President Harry S. Truman administration for financial assistance. It was met with further coercive power by the United States in a “string of political conditions including early convertibility of sterling-sponsoring an international trade conference, and ending discrimination of dollar imports.”62 In response, Otto Clarke, civil servant in the Treasury, stated, “Our right to be bilateral, to exploit our buying power and debtor position to expand our exports, would have been well sold for $5 billion grant in cash. But not for $4 billion at 2 percent interest.”63 While Britain despised the terms, their dependent financial position forced their acceptance.

US policy undermined British autonomy, increased American gold holdings and solidified the decline of the sterling. There is no doubt that the war effort hampered British power vis-à-vis other states in the international system. However, it was US creditor policy, the demanding of all gold reserves, and transfer of value assets that ensured decline. A 1945 British report estimated that the country lost roughly 25 percent (£7,300 million) of its estimated prewar wealth (£30,000 million). Within this overall figure, more than half of prewar wealth (£4,200 million) was lost due to external disinvestment in the form of selling British overseas investments to pay for war imports. Internal disinvestment in nonessential industries amounted to £885 million and the destruction of buildings, capital goods, and shipping due to war damage £2,200 million.64

The United States and the Soviet Union

The Germans attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Like the British, the Soviets needed to import goods for the war effort from the United States. During the early months of the eastern front, the Soviet Union purchased goods via Cash and Carry followed by the Lend-Lease loan. Unlike the British case, the United States never attempted to engage in economic coercion. Not only did the United States not exploit the Soviets, it gave them special Lend-Lease treatment. President Roosevelt overrode suggestions that the United States should both be wary of Soviet intention and use Lend-Lease dependency to shape the postwar order in favor of US interests.65

Soviet Dependency

Akin to the UK, the Soviet Union needed to purchase goods from the United States to confront the German army. While its rearmament scheme prior to the war was similar to the Allies, it was initially more difficult for the Soviets to match the defense production results of the United States and United Kingdom, given “the low productivity, capital scarce Soviet industrial base” and the blow the blitzkrieg campaign delivered to the Soviet military industrial machine.66 In September 1941, Stalin made clear to the United States that the Germans had considerable superiority over the Soviets in numbers of tanks and airplanes, obtained possession of two million tons of grain in the Ukraine and had the huge capacity to produce armaments in comparison with the more limited Soviet capacity. He also stated that German dictator Adolph Hitler and the Nazis would not be defeated by a blockade, starvation or bombing but only on the field of battle, and tanks and airplanes would be the ultimate deciding factor.67

Lend-Lease played a consistent role in the Soviet war effort, despite the massive expansion of Soviet industry and their industrial recovery. Overseas sources contributed up to one quarter of Soviet aircraft supplies and up to one-fifth of tank supplies in 1942.68 While the Soviets were able to meet their own armament and shell needs, American shipments of trucks, tractors, and tinned food provided the Red Army with decisive mobility in its westward pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Thus, at their respective peaks, Britain and Soviet received comparable amounts of Lend-Lease aid.69

While reliance on external supplies was similar, overall Soviet dependency on US assistance regarding war outcome is nuanced. The Soviet’s industrial might plus reliance on winter conditions resulted in a different attitude vis-à-vis Lend-Lease aid than the British. The British consistently carried a tone of desperation. In contrast, while the Soviets acknowledged their need and weaknesses, they felt more secure in their war capabilities. In the words of Former British Director of Military Intelligence and Head of the British Military Mission in Moscow, Lt Gen Sir Noel Mason-MacFarlane, the Russians seem to be “confident of their strength but fully aware that they have a bitter struggle ahead of them.” 70

Prospective Economic Coercion to Special Treatment

Before Operation Barbarossa, US–Soviet relations were sour. After Munich, where the Russians felt betrayed by Britain and France, and after the August 1939 Nazi–Soviet pact, where the allies felt betrayed by Russia, suspicion on both sides sharpened.71 American policy reflected such suspicion. In August 1939, export licenses for production equipment and raw materials ordered in the United States by Amtorg Trading Corporation, the purchasing agency for the Soviet government in the United States, were refused, two Soviet air attaches were declared persona non grata, and various Soviet personnel in the United States were under restricted movement.72 Even days before the invasion, which the Allies knew was imminent, Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled London and the US ambassador in the Soviet Union with the current American policy towards the Soviet Union:

1. To make no approaches to the Soviet government;

2. To treat any approaches to which the Soviet government makes toward us with reserve until such time as the Soviet government may satisfy us that it is not engaging merely in maneuvers for the purpose of obtaining unilateral concessions and advantages for itself;

3. To reject any Soviet suggestions that we make concessions for the sake of “improving the atmosphere of American-Soviet relations” and to extract a strict quid pro quo for anything which we are willing to give the Soviet Union.73

The US ambassador overwhelmingly concurred with the policy stating that, in his experience, it is not possible to create “international good will” with the Soviets.74 Once the war began, American policy towards the Soviet Union did an about-face. The notion of quid pro quo was discarded, and the Soviets received special Lend-Lease treatment. Soviet funds were unfrozen, and an immediate loan was extended. Through October 1941, when Russia was eligible for Lend-Lease aid, Russia had to pay cash for purchased goods. Unlike the British, the Soviet government, regardless of its ability to purchase goods, was advanced $50,000,000 by the Defense Supplies Corporation to procure raw materials in the United States.75

Once Lend-Lease aid began, the Soviets were subject to special treatment.76 Requests from Britain had to be accompanied by ample documentation proving need and ability to use and evidence indicating financial inability to otherwise obtain such assistance, including the disclosure of gold and dollar assets.77 In contrast, Soviet supply programs were formulated in separate protocols, which were subject to the control of the Munitions Assignment Board only in matters of minor detail, and the president agreed to cutbacks in these schedules of commitments only when transportation problems were insurmountable or when fulfillment of commitments interfered with a major American operation.78 W. Averell Harriman, US ambassador to the Soviet Union, advised the American delegates to the Moscow Conference that the policy of the United States would be to “give and give and give, with no expectation of any return, with no thought of a quid pro quo.”79

Costly Coercion

Soviet support was paramount to ending the war and economic coercion would impede on that mission. After the German invasion, President Roosevelt’s advisors Harry Hopkins and Harriman, along with British supply minister William Maxwell Aitken, believed that the USSR, irrespective of whether it ultimately prevailed against the Wehrmacht, stood a chance to reduce German power by margins substantial enough to ensure British survival and, by extension, that of the North Atlantic community on whose integrity US wellbeing depended.80 Soviet involvement in the war effort as a key component to victory increased throughout the war. A top-level US strategic survey in the summer of 1943 observed, “Russia occupies a dominant position and is the decisive factor looking toward the defeat of the Axis in Europe.”81 Also, President Roosevelt feared the USSR would make a separate peace with Germany akin to the 1918 Brest-Litovsk treaty.82 He wanted to ensure that the Soviets did not just reclaim their Western boundaries but, in concert with the Allies, deliver a decisive blow against the Germans.

To guarantee continued Soviet involvement in the war required cooperation between the two countries. If Lend-Lease aid was not perceived as sincere, the Soviets would be satisfied at securing its western boundaries and convincing Hitler not to engage in a spring offensive.83 Hopkins wrote to Brig Gen Philip R. Faymonville, the ranking Lend-Lease officer in Moscow, “Our willingness not to pry out economic information, because of its sharp contrast with British methods, established the integrity of our motives and built up a good will which should not be dissipated by inquiry into matters not germane to the purposes of supply conference.”84 Thus, “Give without stint became the mantra, in Hull’s phrase ‘all aid to the hilt.’”85

The inability of the United States to directly assist the Soviets on the battlefield compounded the belief that economic coercion would hurt the joint war effort and American war aims. Due to limits in US armaments production (producing for the US war effort and sending goods to other Lend-Lease recipients) and involvement in the other campaigns including the Pacific theatre, the Americans were unable to provide what the Soviets were requesting, the opening of a second front to relive the Red Army from the German onslaught.86 US policymakers feared that if a second front did not materialize quickly and on a large scale, the Soviets “will be so deluded in their belief in our sincerity of purpose and will for concerted action that inestimable harm will be done to the cause of the United Nations”87 Unable to open a second front, in order to mollify the Soviets, President Roosevelt promised to continue sending Lend-Lease aid.88

After the Tehran conference and plans for a second front had been agreed upon, Ambassador Harriman made the case to President Roosevelt to use Lend-Lease aid to shape the postwar order.89 He argued that the United States should, at a minimum, demand the same information from the Soviets as it did from Britain.90 After D-Day, cooperation with the Soviets decreased, and the ambassador continued to call for coercion, suggesting the only way to induce Soviet cooperation was to “make them feel their negative attitude will affect our willingness to cooperate with them on matters that have no immediate effect on the war.”91

President Roosevelt and his advisors rebuffed Ambassador Harriman’s suggestions. While the military crisis had passed and a second front was now open, it was too risky to interrupt or change the conditions of Lend-Lease aid. Hopkins responded to the ambassador, “Since no one can now determine when the war will be over, it seems preferable that there should be no interruption in the procurement of supplies for the USSR war program in the event that hostilities should continue beyond normal expectations.”92 President Roosevelt also made it clear to Secretary of State Hull that Russia “continues to be a major factor in achieving the defeat of Germany.” Thus, maximum US aid and supplies should continue.93

While the Soviets relied on American Lend-Lease aid to execute their war effort, President Roosevelt perceived it too costly to engage in economic coercion. Economic coercion would threaten the ability of the two states to share a common war aim of defeating Hitler, versus Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin stopping at the state’s western boundaries. The inability of the United States to open a second front until the summer of 1944 further strained US–Soviet relations. The only way to appease Stalin was to continue uninterrupted, Lend-Lease aid.

Conclusion

War provides an opportunity to revise the distribution of power among states. While scholars place attention on the redistribution of power between the victors and defeated, this article demonstrates that the transfer of power can also occur within alliances. A creditor ally can exploit the dependency of a debtor ally to extract concessions. Dependency occurs when a belligerent state needs to procure goods from abroad for the war effort and does not have the currency to pay for them. The extent of dependency varies with the volume and character of goods needed, particularly expensive finished goods, and the scope of the war, particularly existential or total wars. Dependency is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic coercion amongst allies. Fighting for a common cause, leaders do not want to imperil the war effort. Thus, we can expect to see coercion take place when the costs to the war effort are low.

This article explored this relationship by comparing extreme and similar cases, British and Soviet dependency on American Lend-Lease loans. While both states relied on the United States, only the British were coerced. The United States attempted to shift the financial center away from London to New York. In contrast, President Roosevelt perceived the costs of coercing the Soviets as too high. Exploiting Lend-Lease dependency would lower the Soviet war aims at defending its western borders versus the preferred American total defeat of Hitler’s Germany.

While further hypothesis testing here is not feasible, events during World War I suggest that economic coercion is associated with hegemonic wars. During the first years of World War I, Russia and France were unable to continue to supply their respective war efforts.94 As a result, they turned to Britain to purchase goods for the war.95 Unable to pay for the goods in sterling, they engaged in currency loans from Britain. Capitalizing on Russian and French dependency, Britain exercised economic coercion, procuring Russian and French gold to preserve London as the world financial center.96 While Britain could exercise economic coercion vis-à-vis France and Russia, it was unable to defend itself from newfound US coercive power. If Britain were to effectively fight the expanding war, it would need to purchase goods from the United States,97 without enough dollars and gold to purchase American goods outright, Britain needed a dollar loan.98 President Woodrow Wilson exploited this newfound debtor dependency in an attempt to decrease British domination of the world’s international financial system.99

These findings suggest an additional agenda for power transition theory; national power can be manipulated by exploiting alliances during wartime. The US–UK case during World War II and the brief discussion of US–UK during World War I suggest that when costs are low, rising powers can benefit most when a declining power becomes financially dependent during a war.

Notes

1. Rosella Cappella Zielinski, How States Pay for Wars (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016), 109.

2. Michael Allen and Matthew DiGiuseppe, “Tightening the Belt: Sovereign Debt and Alliance Formation,” International Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2013): 647–59.

3. Abramo Fimo Kenneth Organski, World Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); A. F. K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Randall L. Schweller, “Tripolarity and the Second World War,” International Studies Quarterly 37, no.1 (1993): 73–103.

4. Karen A. Rasler and William R. Thompson, “Global Wars, Public Debts, and the Long Cycle,” World Politics 35, no. 4 (1983): 489–516; Kenneth A. Schultz and Barry R. Weingast, “The Democratic Advantage: Institutional Foundations of Financial Power in International Competition,” International Organization 57, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 3–42; R. Cappella Zielinski, How States Pay for Wars (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016), 10–28; and Paul Poast and Patrick Shea, War and Default, (unpublished manuscript), 2013.

5. Robert J. Barro, “Government Spending, Interest Rates, Prices, and Budget Deficits in the United Kingdom, 1701–1918,” Journal of Monetary Economics 20 (1987): 221–47; Ed Miller, “Japan’s Other Victory: Overseas Financing of the War,” in The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero 2, ed. by John W. Steinberg, Bruce W. Menning, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David Wolff, and Yokote Shinji, 465–84 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005); Schultz and Weingast, “The Democratic Advantage,” Cambridge University Press 57, no. 1, January 2003, 11–14.

6. See Robert J. Barro, “On the Determination of Public Debt,” Journal of Political Economy 87 (1979): 940-71; Michael N. Barnett, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Robert E. Lucas and Nancy Stokey, “Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy in an Economy Without Capital,” Journal of Monetary Economics 12 (1983): 55-93; The American Economic Review 87, no. 1 (1997): 23-40; Lee E. Ohanian, The Macroeconomic Effects of War Finance in the United States: Taxes, Inflation, and Deficit Finance (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998); Gustavo Flores-Macias and Sarah Kreps, “Political Parties at War: A Study of American War Finance, 1789-2010,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 4 (2013): 833-48.

7. David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 55; Donald G. Boudreau, “Economic Sanctions and Military Force in the 21st Century,” European Security 6, no. 2 (1997): 28–46; Y.-L. Wu, Economic Warfare (New York: Prentice Hall, 1952).

8. Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 39–52; Edward S. Miller, Bankrupting the Enemy: The Financial Siege of Japan before Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2007); Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society (Berkley: University of California Press, 1977); Norrin M. Ripsman, “The Political Economy of Security: A Research and Teaching Agenda,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 3, no. 1 (2000): 1–14.

9. Albert O. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945).

10. Rawi E. Abdelal and Jonathan Kirshner, “Strategy, Economic Relations, and the Definition of National Interests,” in Power and the Purse: Economic Statecraft, Interdependence, and National Security, ed. by Jean-Mark F. Blanchard, Edward D. Mansfield, and Norrin M. Ripsman, 119–56 (New York, NY: Frank Cass and Co., 2000); Stephen D. Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics 23, no. 30 (1976): 317–47.

11. Jean-Mark F. Blanchard and Norrin Ripsman, “Asking the Right Question: When Economic Sanctions Work Best?” In Power and the Purse: Economic Statecraft, Interdependence, and National Security, ed. by Blanchard, Mansfield, and Ripsman (New York, NY: Frank Cass and Co., 2000), 223. In the words of Klaus Knorr, when State A’s coercive economic power over State B tends to be stronger, the greater is his control over supply, and hence his ability to damage State B by means of denial. Below a very high threshold, however, his control is of little or no coercive worth. This is because a position of a high degree of control is extremely rare because foreign markets, sources of commodity supply, and aid are usually dispersed internationally. There are virtually always other suppliers than State A available (Klaus Knorr, “International Econoimc Leverae and its Uses,” in Economic Issues and National Security, ed. by Knorr and Frank N. Trager (Lawerence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1977), 103). Blanchard and Ripsman (“Asking the Right Question”) found that economic coercion worked primarily because domestic and international political conditions existed that magnified the political costs of noncompliance for the target state, 222.

12. James D. Morrow, “Alliances and Asymmetry: An Alternative to the Capability Aggregation Model of Alliances,” American Journal of Political Science 35, no. 4 (1991): 904–33.

13. Ole R. Holsti, P. Teekence Hopmann, and John D. Sullivan, Unity and Disintegration in International Alliances: Comparative Studies (New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1973); George Liska, Nations in Alliance: The Limits of Interdependence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962); Hans J. Morganthau, “Alliances in Theory and Practice,” in Alliance Policy in the Cold War, ed. by Arnold Wolfers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959); Jeremy Pressman, Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

14. Glenn H. Snyder, “The Security Dilemma in Alliance Politics,” World Politics 36, no. 04 (1984): 461–95.

15. Snyder, Alliance Politics, 461–95.

16. Patricia A. Weitsman, “Alliance Cohesion and Coalition Warfare,” Security Studies 12, no. 3 (2003): 79–113.

17. Ibid., 81.

18. David A. Baldwin, “Power and International Relations,” in Handbook of International Relations, ed. by Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse, and Beth A. Simmons, 273-97 (London: SAGE, 2013); Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Daniel Drezner, “The Hidden Hand of Economic Coercion,” International Organization 57 (2003): 643-59.

19. Klaus Knorr, International Economic Leverage and Its Uses (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas Press, 1977), 103.

20. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 84.

21. Klaus Knorr, The Power of Nations: The Political Economy of International Relations (New York: Basic Books, 1975), chap. 3.

22. Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere and Germany’s Grossrauwirtschaft and its rearmament program throughout the 1930s are attempts at autarkic defense production (Hirshman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, 34–39; Milward War, Economy, and Society: chap. 1).

23. Snyder, Alliance Politics, 472.

24. Klaus Knorr argued, “The production, maintenance, and use of armed forces requires a variety of goods and services. Some of these—food, clothing, shelter—are a type that can be produced by societies at a relatively low level of economic and technological development. Products more technologically extracting—trucks, gasoline, ships, drugs, guns, ammunition—are those produced by industrial societies. Most demanding are very complex weapons systems—intercontinental ballistic missiles, modern communications systems, high-performance aircraft and ships—that are only within the reach of countries possessing the most highly developed technology” (The Power of Nations, 50–53).

25. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, 32.

26. It should be noted that even if the state devotes the majority of its industrial capacity to manufacturing weapons systems for the war effort, it might not be enough to match the war inputs of the adversary. As Alan Milward noted, “The trend towards capital-intensiveness in warfare means that in the armaments industry there is often less scope than in other industrial sectors for suiting the nature of the technology to the nature of the economy. . . There is certainly room for manoeuvre and for all marginal adjustments, and it is not necessary to have all the best available armaments technology, but there are many strategic situations where no amount of labour will compensate for certain kinds of technological deficiencies” (Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 171).

27. Knorr, The Power of Nations, 61. The extent that a state relies on the local economy to support its forward operating bases may vary. A state may bring into theater all its supplies, including subsistence, textiles, individual equipment, petroleum, construction material, energy, water, and labor, rather than source anything locally. Under this scenario, there is no need to purchase goods in theater. Conversely, a state that chooses to source locally will need local currency, raising the need for a currency loan.

28. See Benjamin J. Cohen, “The Macrofoundations of Monetary Power,” in International Monetary Power, ed. by David M. Andrews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

29. Benjamin J. Cohen, The Future of Sterling as an International Currency (London: Macmillian Press, 1971), 35.

30. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 20. The realization that states have an inherit limit on production can be reflected in the war strategy chosen, the most discussed example being the German Blitzkrieg strategy of WWII (see Mark Harrison, “Resource Mobilization for War: The U.S.A., U.K., U.S.S.R., and Germany,” The Economic History Review 41, no. 2 (1988): 171-92). It can also be seen in the larger war strategy, “Economic strategy must certainly take into account the ultimate potential of the economy to defeat the enemy by out-producing him in the weapons of combat” (Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 19).

31. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Randolph M. Siverson, “War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Giacoma Chiozza and Hein E. Goemans, “Peace Through Insecurity: Tensure and International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 4 (2003): 443-67; Michael Colaresi, “Aftershocks: Postwar Leadership, Survival, Rivalry, and Regime Dynamics,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2004): 713–27; Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver, and Jason Reifler, Paying the Human Costs of War: American Public Opinion and Casualties in Military Conflicts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), Hein E. Goemans, War and Punishment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

32. Susan Strange, States and Markets (London: Pinter Publishers, 1988), 29.

33. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Policies (New York: Norton, 2001), 37. For a discussion of the opportunity costs to A to influence B’s behavior, see John C. Harsanyi (“Measurement of Social Power, Opportunity Costs, and the Theory of Two-Person Bargaining Games,”) Behavioral Science 7 [1962]: 67-80), Nagel (1968) and Baldwin (Paradoxes of Power, 82–99). The literature on the costs of economic statecraft for the sender is limited. The majority of works emphasize sanctions and the various economic costs—i.e., decrease in trade, hurt domestic industries—to the sender (see Farmer, Richard D. “Costs of Economic Sanctions to the Sender,” The World Economy 23, no. 1 [2000]: 93–117) or credibility costs via “involuntary defection” (see Robert D. Putnum, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two Level Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 [1998]: 427–60).

34. John Gerring, “What is a Case Study and What is it Good For?” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004), 341–54.

35. John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 101–105.

36. It should be noted that the creditor may or may not be a belligerent. The effects of the creditor as a warring party are explored in this article. However, within-case variation (i.e., the United States as a creditor both prior to entry into WWII and after) suggests no change in the ability to engage in economic statecraft for the United States.

37. Jason Seawright and John Gerring, “Case Selection Techniques in Case Study Research: A Menu of Qualitative and Quantitative Options,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2008): 302.

38. William Keith Hancock and Margaret M. Gowing, British War Economy (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949), 373.

39. Mark Harrison, “The Economics of World War II: An Overview,” in The Economies of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison, ed. by Harrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15–16.

40. M. M. Postan, British War Production (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), 155.

41. H. Duncan Hall, North American Supply (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1955), 102.

42. The Department of State to the British Embassy, memorandum, 21 February 1940, in Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1940, III: 97–8.

43. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, memorandum, 3 September 1939, in FRUS, 1939, VII: 214.

44. R. S. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1956), 241.

45. Hall, North American Supply, 111–112.

46. Aide-Memoire, the British Embassy, to the Department of State, memorandum, 3 July 1940, in FRUS, 1940, III: 43.

47. British Ambassador (Lothian) to Secretary of State Hull, memorandum, 1 March 1940, in FRUS, 1940, III: 106–7.

48. Hall, North American Supply, 243.

49. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–1945, 133.

50. Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1944), 30.

51. Sir Roy George Douglas Allen, “Mutual Aid Between the U.S. and the British Empire,” in History of the Second World War, ed. by R. S. Sayers (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery, 1946), 533. Repayment of Lend-Lease aid was negotiated after the loan was over. Britain agreed to pay 2 percent interest over 50 annual payments.

52. Frank C. Costigliola, “Anglo-American Financial Rivalry in the 1920s,” The Journal of Economic History 37, no. 4 (1977), 915. In President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s report to Congress on the first year of Lend-Lease operations, he wrote that “the third direct benefit received in return for our aid [in addition to aiding the fight against the Axis and receiving reciprocal aid from recipients] is an understating with Britain (and prospectively with others of our allies) as to the shape of future commercial and financial policy” (Leon Martel, Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 61). Others, particularly in Congress, wished to extract concessions beyond the economic realm. In January 1943, Vice President Henry A. Wallace told FDR of strong Congressional sentiment for obtaining postwar use of air bases in exchange for the renewal of Lend-Lease. For example, Rep. Robert Chiperfield (R-IL) wanted control of naval bases, air bases, and trade routes, while Senator Allen J. Ellender (D-LA) wanted bauxite and tin mines owned by the British and the Dutch (Martel, Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War, 61–62).

53. Costigliola, “Anglo-American Financial Rivalry in the 1920s,” 919–920.

54. Alan P. Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain, 1940–1946 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 4–6; Arthur A. Stein, “The Hegemon’s Dilemma: Great Britain, the United States, and the International Economic Order,” International Organization 38, no. 2 (1984): 377–378.

55. Warren F. Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door: The Temptation of British Opulence, 1937–1942,” Political Science Quarterly 86, no. 2 (1971): 258, 241.

56. Morgenthau also exerted pressure on London to begin liquidating British-owed direct investments located in America, ship South African gold to the United States, and have French gold held to Canada turned over the United States (Kimball, 1969: 159; Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–1945, 370–371, 383–384; John M. Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 220–223). He suggested that a “liquidator” be sent from London to the United States with the power to make sales (Hall, North American Supply, 273) and the British should provide a further $2,000 million in cash before arms began to be supplied under Lend-Lease Memorandum of Conversation, by the Secretary of State, 11 January 1941, FRUS, 1941, III: 5.

57. Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain, 1940–1946, 7.

58. FRUS, 1943, Report of Interdepartmental Committee to President Roosevelt on Policy Decisions Relating to Dollar Position of Lend-Lease Countries, (Washington, DC, 1 January 1943), III: 49.

59. Kimball, “Lend-Lease,” 772

60. The British Prime Minister (Churchill) to President Roosevelt, memorandum, 20 December 1940, in FRUS, 1940, III: 25.

61. Leon D. Epstein, Britain: Uneasy Ally (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 60.

62. Till Geiger, Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War—The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1945–1955 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 65.

63. Ibid., 65.

64. Ibid., 219.

65. For a succinct discussion of the various ambassadors in Moscow—Steinhardt, Standley, and Harriman —the evolution of their perceptions of the Stalin regime, the Soviet war effort, and their recommendations to President Roosevelt, see David Mayers, “The Great Patriotic War, FDR’s Embassy Moscow, and Soviet-US Relations,” The International History Review 33, no. 2 (2011): 299–33.

66. Harrison, “The Economics of World War II,” 176; George G. Herring, Jr., Aid to Russia 1941–1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 32. For a discussion of early losses see Memorandum, The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State, 23 August 1941, FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 642–644 and Memorandum, The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State, 9 November 1941, FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 656–657. For a discussion of initial Soviet industrial recovery, see The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Standley) to the Secretary of State, 9 April 1942, FRUS, 1942, Europe: 434–35.

67. The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Laurence A. Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 4 September 1941, in FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 646.

68. Harrison, “The Economics of World War II,” 189.

69. Ibid.,189; Munting, Roger. “Lend Lease and the Soviet War Effort,” Journal of Contemporary History 19, no. 3 (1984): 495-510.

70. The Second Secretary of Embassy in the Soviet Union (Thompson) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 20 March 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 420.

71. Herring Jr., Aid to Russia 1941–1946, 27; Stettinius, Lend-Lease, 119.

72. Stettinius, Lend-Lease, 121–122.

73. The Secretary of State to Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt), memorandum, 14 June 1941, in FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 757. See also Herring Jr., Aid to Russia, 28.

74. The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 17 June 1941, in FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 764–766.

75. Stettinius, Lend-Lease, 128.

76. The Acting Secretary of State (Wells) to the Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt), memorandum, 16 July 1941, in FRUS, 1941, II, Europe: 794.

77. Leon C. Martel, Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 34.

78. Herring, Aid to Russia, 233–234; Martel, Lend-Lease, Loans, 34.

79. Herring, Aid to Russia, 1941–1946, 38.

80. Mayers, “The Great Patriotic War,” 309.

81. Ibid., 300.

82. See Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006], 165–168) for a discussion of the likelihood of a German-Soviet separate peace from a Soviet perspective.

83. The Charge in the Soviet Union (Thurston) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 3 February 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 688–689.

84. The Second Secretary of Embassy in the Soviet Union (Thompson) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 16 March 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 697.

85. Mayers, “The Great Patriotic War,” 309. Harry Hopkins to General Faymonville, “The United States remains firm in the belief that material aid to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is of the highest strategic importance.” The Acting Secretary of State to the Second Secretary of Embassy in the Soviet Union (Thompson), at Moscow, memorandum, 13 March 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 697. President Roosevelt to Secretary of State Hull, “I understand both the Army and Navy are definitely of the opinion that Russian continuance as a major factor in the war is of cardinal importance, and therefore it must be a basic factor in our strategy to provide her with the maximum amount of supplies that can be delivered to her ports. I fully indorse this concept.” Memorandum by President Roosevelt to the Secretary of State 6 January 1943, FRUS, 1943, Europe: 737.

86. Stalin was calling for a second front as early as the fall of 1941. The ambassador in the Soviet Union (Steinhardt) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 15 August 1941, in FRUS, 1941, Europe: 821.

87. US Ambassador Stanley quoted in David Mayers (The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997], 143). See also The President of the Council of People Commissars of the Soviet Union (Stalin) to Prime Minister Churchill and Mr. Averell Harriman, memorandum, 13 August 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 621; Mr. Joseph E. Davis, Special Representative of President Roosevelt, to the President, memorandum, 29 May 1943, in FRUS, 1943, Europe: 657.

88. President Roosevelt to Stalin, “I well realize on the other hand that the real enemy of both our countries is Germany and that at the earliest possible moment it will be necessary for both our countries to bring our power and forces to bear against Hitler. Just as soon as it is humanly possible to assemble the transportation you may be sure that this will be done. In the interim there will leave the United States for the Soviet Union during the month of August over 1,000 tanks and at the same time other strategic materials are going forward, including aircraft.” The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Standley) to the People’s Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union (Molotov), memorandum, 19 August 1942, in FRUS, 1942, Europe: 626.

89. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 15 January 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe: 1039–1040.

90. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman) to Chairman of the President’s Soviet Protocol Committee (Hopkins), memorandum, 13 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe: 1053.

91. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 3 September 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe: 1129.

92. Chairman of the President’s Soviet Protocol Committee (Hopkins) to the Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman), memorandum, 4 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe: 1043–1046.

93. President Roosevelt to the Secretary of State, memorandum, 14 February 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe:1053. In March 1944, Acting Secretary of State Stettinius and the Foreign Economic Advisor, Crowley, wrote to President Roosevelt, “At this stage of the war, we cannot assume the war will stop at any fixed time. We believe, therefore, that we must act and plan as if the war were going on indefinitely, so as to assure the uninterrupted flow of supplies needed for the war.” Acting Secretary of State and the Foreign Economic Administrator (Crawley) to President Roosevelt, memorandum, 6 March 1944, in FRUS, 1944, Europe: 1059.

94. Peter Gatrell, “Poor Russia, Poor Show: Mobilizing a Backward Economy for War, 1914–1917,” in The Economic of World War I, ed. by S. Broadberry and M. Harrison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–250; P.-C. Hautcoeur, “Was the War a Great Watershed? The Economics of World War I in France,” in The Economic of World War I, ed. by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

95. Edward V. Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy, 1914–1925 (London: Macmillian and Co. LTD., 1952), 312.

96. Martin Horn, Britain, France, and Financing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 28-56. Gold outflow at the beginning of the war resulted in inconvertibility of the currency and was a challenge to Britain’s goal to preserve London as the world’s financial center. To maintain the gold standard, Britain needed to import gold into the country. However, given that other states were hoarding their own gold stocks, Britain was unable to procure any on a voluntary basis. A few sources that discuss the importance of maintaining the gold standard to the British are Burk (Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 [Boston; London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1985], 62) and Brown (The International Gold Standard Reinterpreted, 1914–1934 [Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1940]).

97. William A. Brown, The International Gold Standard Reinterpreted, 1914–1934; Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918, 62–67; Edward V. Morgan, Studies in British Financial Policy, 1914–1925, 309.

98. Kathleen Burk, “J. M. Keynes and the Exchange Rate Crisis of July 1917,” The Economic History Review 32, no. 3 (1979), 409.

99. For a discussion of McAdoo’s desire to exploit British newfound weakness, see Kathleen Burk, “Great Britain in the United States, 1917–1918: The Turning Point,” The International History Review 1, no. 2 (1979): 228–45; and Burk, “The Diplomacy of Finance: British Financial Missions to the United States 1914–1918,” The Historical Journal 22, no. 2 (1979): 351–72.

*Rosella Cappella Zielinski is an assistant professor of Political Science at Boston University who specializes in the study of the political economy of national security. Her book How States Pay for Wars (2016 with Cornell University Press) provides the first cross-national study of war finance. Her other works explore the relationships between war finance, public opinion, and military effectiveness.

Table of Contents

00Contents-E

01Editorial-E

02Harris-E

03Frandsen-E

04Johansen-E

05Derdzinski-E

06Cappella-E