Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions: Designing Reliable International Agreements

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

This project brings together two of the central questions facing scholars and policymakers in international relations- how can we form successful cooperative agreements under anarchy, and how can we enhance prospects for peace through security cooperation? The investigator contends that understanding the causes and effects of international agreements requires an appreciation for the variance in their content. All military alliances are not equal; they vary in the breadth of their applicability, the strength of their obligations, and the intensity and formality of their collaborative links. This project collects information about this variance and uses it to advance understanding of the causes of war and peace. The investigation answers the following three questions: Are military alliance commitments reliable? Under what conditions are leaders likely to violate past alliance commitments? Do alliances influence the initiation of war? All three studies share a common genesis in an argument regarding the efficacy of leaders in designing reliable agreements. In the process of negotiating treaties, national representatives specify particular conditions under which cooperation will occur and design means to encourage compliance with treaty provisions. Through the process of designing their contracts, leaders manage to make credible promises. This argument leads to the following expectations: (1) Once we take into account the specific conditions to which they apply and the actions required when they are invoked, we will discover, contrary to previously reported empirical evidence, that most alliance commitments are fulfilled. (2) While most alliance agreements are reliable when they are formed, major changes in conditions (for instance in power status or in domestic political organization) after an alliance is formed may result in a state abandoning prior commitments. Alliances featuring more highly institutionalized military collaboration, however, are less likely to be abandoned when changes in conditions occur than those that do not. (3) All else equal, aggressive leaders are less likely to attack countries with allies who have promised to intervene, especially if the potential aggressors judge the alliance commitments to be reliable. This argument emphasizes the importance of the design of cooperative agreements, and to evaluate this argument, the researcher collects information about the obligations and provisions included in alliance treaties. With support from her home institution, the investigator has developed a coding scheme and collected data covering the period 1816-1944. She has conducted some preliminary studies based on early data collection, and they have produced evidence commensurate with her expectations. The current investigation extends the data to cover the Cold War years, 1945-1988. While this period is much shorter than that covered in phase one of the data collection, the proliferation of countries in the post WWII era means that there are as many alliance treaties signed between 1945 and 1988 as in the entire period from 1816 through 1944. Extending the data collection will make it possible complete the proposed studies and to continue this research program after the grant period ends. The results of this research will enhance our understanding both of the causes of war and of the effects of international institutions on behavior. This research probes motives to commit to international agreements and institutions, to comply with past promises, and to react to deterrent threats. Means of designing effective cooperation and effective deterrent threats are of central interest to both theorists and policymakers in international relations today. This research promises to provide guidance on both of these issues and produces a dataset that will be used widely by other scholars interested in the topic.