Randall L. Schweller is a John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellow in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. In August 1994 he will join the faculty of the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University.
The author is grateful to Richard Betts, Marc Busch, Thomas Christensen, Dale Copeland, Michael Desch, Richard Herrmann, Robert Jervis, Ethan Kapstein, James McAllister, Gideon Rose, David Schweller, Jack Snyder, Kimberly Marten Zisk, and the members of the Olin National Security Group at Harvard's CFIA for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. A leading proponent of the "balancing predominates" view, Kenneth N. Waltz, remarks: "In international politics, success leads to failure. The excessive accumulation of power by one state or coalition of states elicits the opposition of others." Waltz, "The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory," in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 49.
2. The bandwagoning image of international politics pictures the global order as a complex machine of wheels within wheels. In this highly interconnected world, small local disruptions quickly grow into large disturbances as their effects cascade and reverberate throughout the system. In contrast, the balancing image sees a world composed of many discrete, self-regulating balance-of-power systems. Because balancing is the prevailing tendency among states, prudent powers should limit their commitments to places where their core interests are at stake.
3. Jack Snyder, "Introduction," to Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3.
4. Quoted in Deborah Welch Larson, "Bandwagoning Images in American Foreign Policy: Myth or Reality?" in ibid., p. 95.
5. Quoted in J.H. Elliott, "Managing Decline: Olivares and the Grand Strategy of Imperial Spain," in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 97.
6. Quoted in Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 133. Napoleon often spoke in terms of bandwagoning dynamics. In 1794, he said: "It is necessary to overwhelm Germany; that done, Spain and Italy fall of themselves"; in 1797: "Let us concentrate all our activity on the side of the navy, and destroy England; this done, Europe is at our feet"; and in 1811, "In five years, I shall be the master of the world; there only remains Russia, but I shall crush it." Quoted in R.B. Mowat, The Diplomacy of Napoleon (New York: Russell & Russell, [1924] 1971), pp. 22, 53, 243. Not all French strategists of the period viewed the world in these terms, however. After his remarkable victory over the First Coalition in 1794, Carnot feared that France might become drunk with victory: "The rapidity of our military successes . . . do not permit us to doubt that we could . . . reunite to France all the ancient territory of the Gauls. But however seductive this system may be, it will be found perhaps that it is wise to renounce it, and that France would only enfeeble herself and prepare an interminable war by aggrandizement of this kind." Quoted in ibid., p. 11.
7. Adolf Hitler in a speech to Gauleiters on May 8, 1943. Quoted in J. Noakes and G. Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919-1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, Vol. II: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), p. 857.
8. For his most comprehensive statement on the subject, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).
9. See Robert G. Kaufman, "To Balance or to Bandwagon? Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe," Security Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 417-447; and Paul W. Schroeder, "Neo-Realist Theory and International History: An Historian's View," paper presented at the War and Peace Institute, Columbia University, June 11, 1993.
10. The domestic-sources school of alliance formation includes Deborah Welch Larson, Stephen R. David, and Jack S. Levy and Michael M. Barnett...