some more points on Chase Dunn/Boswell and a future research agenda

Dear colleagues,

here at last a good debate and thanks to all who participated. I think I
should clarify my approach and understanding of the hypotheses and theories
of quantitative peace researchers like Bruce Russett and Joshua Goldstein
first.

My early 1968-influenced college and university years are not that far to
recall the eschatological and often moral power of theories in the tradition
of Marxism, including Trotzky, whose predictions on inner-imperialist
rivalries were perhaps the most cogent of all (not to forget Rosa Luxemburg
and Rudolph Hilferding, that great Austro-German political economist,
murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camp, and still often overlooked
in the Anglo-American debate). My later years as a political scientist and
also as a diplomat taught me though also the respect of quantifyable and
hard-core empirical knowledge, and also the respect for the systematic
analysis of news (what was called in Eastern Europe before the year 1989 as
'white espionage')

Joshua Goldstein 

http://www.american.edu/academic.depts/sis/goldtext/jginfo.htm

and Bruce Russett

http://www.yale.edu/unsy/brussett/russettcv.htm


are among the leading quantitative prophets of future and past wars, and
whatever our fears and believes (actually, I as an Austrian often often
share your instinctive fear of a repetition of history in Europe, but in
contrast to most of you I live here in Europe, and my three children go to
school here, and once they will be confronted by a world that might be
patterned around the Chase Dunn Boswell scenario) we have to have the
intellectual discipline to look at their models and try to improve, refute
or learn from them, whether their authors share in our version of world
system theory or not (actually, Joshua Goldstein in his great work is very
near to many of the theories of world system analysis). 

And not just to build models, but also to run serious quantitative content
analysis to determine the war-proneness of given leaderships around the
world and the changes of these proneness over time.

One of the main predictions is that inner-democratic warfare is far less
unlikely than warfare between democracies and semi-democracies or
authoritarian structures. This is certainly true, whether we dismiss it or
not. It even fits to the cycle of war since 1450 so aptly described and
analysed by Joshua Goldstein, for all the contenders in major wars in the
past, France/Napoleon and Germany - were by all standards of the past much
more authoritarian than their contenders for world hegemony. Indeed, the
lack of agricultural reform and democracy in Germany were one of the main
resons for German imperialism and expansionism and a host of many many other
societal problems in pre-war Europe. Both Russett and Goldstein seem to
imply at least, that a future war constellation between the US and their
economic developed rivals in Europe and Japan is highly unlikely.

The late Karl Deutsch from Harvard - who in his Prague years before 1938
shared Austro-Marxism-, was the practical creator of the school of
quantitative international relations, and both Chris Chase Dunn and Tery
Boswell are great scholars in that quantitative tradition. So - we have to
look as scientists, but also as people caring for the globe and the future
of all its inhabitants - for the major conflict lines in the international
system in the years to come, and quite frankly, I do see the real dangers
somewhere else. In learning from the analysis of imperialism in the
tradition of Luxemburg, Hilferding, and if you like, Trotzky, we have see
where the economic interests clash hardest (today the 150 billions of crude
oil in the Caspian Sea), and we also have to analyse such questions, why
there was no major war between say, France and Britain in 1914, or between
the Dutch and the British from 1789 onwards. Good dissertations and masters
theses at your departments could be written on these questions; good
scholary and peace work could also conent-analyse major newspapers around
the world for such themeses as mentioning of war as a possible strategy to
gain economic or political benefits.

I have often thought about our ugly European, German and Austrian past - and
the intellectual product of this journey and at the same time the answer,
was among others, my quantitative re-discovery of Polanyi and Austro-Marxism
in my 1993 English language book. Equitable development is peace, and
equitable development above all is social reform, that starts from the
structures of agriculture and urban poverty. In that sense I am much nearer
to Gunnar Myrdal, William Arthur Lewis, or Ernst Wigfors (another European
thinker, unjustly almost completely forgotten). 

Societies, that overlook these reforms by internal or external pressures,
tend to be very conflict prone, both internally and externally. I'd say,
that a serious re-reading of Samir Amin and many others would tend to
analyse us to look in depth at the social catastrophe in many countries of
the Mid-East for example, and to better understand the dynamics of
Fundamentalism and crisis there (the same applies to Pakistan and
Indonesia). Whatever our fears, peace and development research would compel
us today, I think, to look also at India in detail - another crisis point in
the future international system. Still not to overlook the China
industrializatuion/ozon layer/and sea level connection (China relies heavily
on FCKW) - and their structure of economic reform and political repression,
which, you permit me to say, is far more important than bitter academic
debates about re-orientation (however valuable these debates might be - but
in a larger context - in a larger context !!! - I never dismissed and always
admired Andre Gunder Frank - but from a a practical viewpoint. It makes no
sense to read his works theoretically - you have to catch the enormous
practical importance!). Another issue would be the severe weather changes
taking place today and their effects on the international system (just look
at the fantastic internet resources available today from the US Commerce
Department on El Nino and La Nina).

Another major research agenda would be to look at the Kosovo war as
precisely a strategy to keep NATO intact and to keep it from falling apart -
a hypothesis forwarded amongst others, by Le Monde Diplomatique, and a
strategy to project NATO towards the southeastern space including the
Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus. The rehearsal, so to speak for a future
intervention in the Caspian Sea (not a bad theory!). Read Zbigniew
Brzezinski!

A most challenging and intellectually rewaring work on the Chase Dunn
Boswell theses would be to link this question  with these fascinating tables
of unequal exchange that our friend and colleague Gernot Köhler began to
work on. What about the theory, that countries, sharing about equally -
without major downs or ups - in world unequal exchange and exploitation do
not got to war with each other, while the conflict dyads evolve winning or
losing in the time series ratios of gains from unequal exchange per GNP
(Köhlers T ratio). I.e. to re-run the Russett Goldstein and all the other
dyadic literature with an improved Köhler time series, say, from 1960
onwards (if you include migration time series, the better - we in our
ministry here are terribly interested in all kind of migration-oriented
research). The hypothesis would be that conflict increases, say, between
Germany and the US, when their T-ratios move in different directions.

A price winning article for the Journal of Conflict Resolution or the
International Studies Quarterly, and an important contribution to world
peace research... Three four years of hard work, three or four years of
going through the major power war versus renewed cold war literature... a
fascinating intellectual enteprise ...


Good luck, good morning and kind regards. I hastily should add that all this
are my private opinions, just as in the past my postings reflected my
scholary opinions only...

Arno Tausch