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From Balance to Concert: A Study of International Security Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Robert Jervis
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Abstract

International anarchy and the security dilemma make cooperation among sovereign states difficult. Transformations of balance-of-power systems into concerts tend to occur after large antihegemonic wars. Such wars undermine the assumptions supporting a balance-ofpower system and alter the actors' payoffs in ways that encourage cooperation. The logic developed in “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma” holds: largely because of the increased costs that will be incurred if the grand coalition breaks up, states have greater incentives to cooperate with each other, fewer reasons to fear the consequences of others' defections, and fewer reasons to defect themselves. Cooperation is further facilitated by mechanisms that increase each state's ability to see what others are doing, and to gain “timely warning” of the possibility that the others will defect.

Type
Part II: Applications to Security Affairs
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1985

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References

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19 Factors beyond our structural model have to be taken into account for a complete explanation of the difference between the British and French positions. On this topic, one of the earliest discussions still remains unsurpassed: Wolfers, Arnold, Britain and France Between Two Wars (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940Google Scholar). For a discussion of the extent to which France was a revisionist state after 1815, see Roger Bullen, “France and Europe, 1815–48: The Problem of Defeat and Recovery,” in Sked (fn. 3), 112–44.

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24 This is not to deny Hinsley's argument that the British realized that their Continental partners' habit of demanding too extensive collaboration would make the concert impractical. Only a somewhat looser arrangement, the British felt, would allow the concert to succeed. See Hinsley (fn. 13), 202–12.

25 Quoted in Albrecht-Carrie (fn. 20), 109.

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29 For instances of deception, especially on Metternich's part, see Schroeder (fn. 3), 46, 82–83, 207, 212, 219.

30 Van Evera (fn. 8).

31 See Downs and others, “Arms Races and Cooperation,” pp. 118–46 of this collection; Jervis, Robert, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 67Google Scholar–83, 354–55.

32 Bullen (fn. 11), 81, 93; also see Craig (fn. 11), 257.

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