My second major project is a Data-set on Militarized Interstate Disputes in the 1715-1815 period of the history of international relations, starting from the European system.
Introduction
and goal of the project
The
goal of this project is to compile a dataset of Militarized Interstate Disputes
(MIDs) from 1715 to 1815. Militarized Interstate Disputes, the use of military
force between two states to manage an issue and from which most wars originate
are still prevalent in the modern international system. Yet this is a system
that is seen as increasingly pacific as interstate warfare has become a rarity.
Why are MIDs not becoming wars as often as they did in the past? My argument is
that this is due to the transformation of international politics from
war-inducing, creating the conditions that increase the chance of war, to
peace-inducing, creating conditions that decrease the chance of war. This is an
old argument in the history of international relations but one whose
exploration has been hampered by the lack of data on militarized interstate
disputes in the period before 1816. This
creates a problem because one of the most important thesis about the
transformation of international politics, that of Paul Schroeder as detailed in
the book “The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848" cannot be evaluated without data on the system before 1816, the transformation point (1994). While there is data to evaluate the conflict behavior of states in the
transformed system, there is no such data for before the transformation. As a
result one cannot evaluate the transformation thesis on its entirety and
adjudicate between the competing explanations for our relatively speaking more
pacific world.
My
dataset seeks to rectify this problem. Not only does it promise to help in the
exploration of the question of the pacific evolution of the international
system, but it has the potential of bringing about a reassessment of our extant
understanding of conflict processes, the evolution of international politics,
and the history of the international system. It will also lead to the discovery
of novel facts about the 18th century international political
system. This is the first data project that seeks to compile information about
all the militarized interstate disputes, as opposed to just wars for the
pre-1816 period. It also is one of the few efforts to contain information on
the military disputes of minor powers, as well as major powers. Essentially the
goal is to produce something similar to the Correlates of War Dataset for the
1715-1815 period.
How
does this project fit with my long-term research interests?
The 1715-1815
MID data project is part of my broader research interest on the role of the
major powers in the ongoing transformation of international politics from a
system of relations once dominated by military force, to one were military
force has been relegated to a secondary role. Taking my cue from Schroeder’s
argument, I start from the change brought about by the Napoleonic Wars on the
major powers governmental elite’s attitudes towards war. In my dissertation I
provide a way to measure how collective major power behavior varies in the
intensity of the antagonism or managerial coordination pursued by them in the
form of the Scale of Major Power Coordination Intensity. I argue that
managerial coordination, the engagement of major powers in policies of
consultation, multilateralism and avoidance of antagonistic alliances, was a
result of that transformation of attitudes and in turn has had a pacific effect
on international relations. This
permitted me to capture an element of the transformation thesis in a form
amenable to quantitative use.
The dissertation
focused on the association between increasingly managerial coordination between
the major powers and international phenomena tied to interstate conflict or the
pacification of the international system. The findings in the 1816-2001 period
supported the expectation of a positive association between major power
managerial coordination and peace. However without some kind of exploration of
the dynamics of peace and war and major power behavior in the period before
1816, these findings could not be considered supportive of the transformation
thesis. From this necessity began this
1715-1815 MID data project.
Previous Work
and its inadequacies
Past political
science research into military conflict for the 1715-1816 focused on using the
era as part of large scale broad treatments of trends in interstate warfare.
Such is the work of Kalevi Holsti (1991), Jack S. Levy (1983), Evan Luard
(1986), and Manus Mildarksi (1988). What is common to these works is a focus on
primarily major power conflicts, and exclusively wars. Indeed they many times
share listings of wars and information upon them. Even when these studies venture beyond major
power wars their coverage was uneven. For example, Holsti working of Luard’s
lists does not list Spain as
a combatant in the War of Austrian Succession, even though Spain was a major member of the conflict
(1991:85).
Many times there are no clear criteria for the
conflict included or excluded. One of the few compilations of military conflict
that covers the 18th century is Gaston Bouthoul’s and Rene Carrere’s
1740-1976 list (1978). The list contains both European and non-European wars.
However, it does not contain any information about specific participants for
multilateral wars. It also does not disaggregate war systems into their
component wars. As an example the war of Austrian Succession saw two Austro-Prussian
wars within it. Without disaggregating war systems it is hard to see how
conflicts linkages work. Finally even though the authors include some domestic
and intestate conflicts that fall below the casualty threshold of war they
leave others out. Thus the Revolt of the Belgian Netherlands in 1788 is
included, which only indirectly had an interstate element, while the Patriot’s
Revolt in the Netherlands ,
that led to a direct Prussian military intervention is excluded. No
justification for this choice can be found in the criteria for the lists
(Bouthoul & Carrere, 1978:83). The problems of such works pass on to later
works that used them as part of their bibliography, an example of which is the
Conflict Catalog (Brecke, 1999)
The above
discussion should not be seen as dismissive of the work and findings of the
scholars mentioned. The lists and evaluations they conducted based on these
lists had important findings to offer political science, especially on the
relation of war to major power status, alliances, and the evolution of the
issues over which states fight. That said, the findings are limited because of
the focus on war and major powers. There
is precious little we can learn from the extant literature on the dynamics of
conflict escalation to war, the relationship between alliances, issues and
conflict propensity in the 18th century, or the paths to war for the
states of the era.
One can
understand why these limits existed. Most of the lists and compilations were
conducted in the 1970-1990 era, when many political scientists were interested
in grand theory and long-range change of the international system. Indeed
Levy’s and Midlarski’s work were part of projects conducting such long-term
evaluations. Sources for military conflicts that were not wars were hard to
find for the 19th century, let alone the 18th century
before the rise of the internet. Most of the lists relied on dictionaries of
war like those of Dupay and Dupay (1986), or annals of history like that of
Langer (1972), that tended to exclude or miss military conflicts below the
level of war. Also most of these
projects pre-date Bremer’s revolutionary study that led to the focus on dyadic
military interaction, and the focus on militarized interstate disputes as
opposed to just wars, lacking thus a theoretical reason for valuing information
about conflicts beyond wars (Bremer, 1992; Jones, Bremer & Singer, 1996).
We now know that
it is important to evaluate not just wars, but the military conflicts that
precede and sometimes give birth to them.
This is key for understanding how states avoid war, and in turn of how
states avoid military conflict in total. The past literature sought to tell a
long-term story of who fights wars, and under what conditions. Now for the
post-1815 era we tell a story of who uses military force against whom, when
does it reach the level of war, and under what conditions states not only avoid
war, but any level of military conflict. It is time to extend these inquiries
to the birth of the modern interstate system.
The interest of political scientists in the connections between the 18th
century and our modern era has not been abated as evidenced by a large slew of
work over the last ten years that includes it in its temporal domain (Thompson
and Dreyer, 2012;; Ringmar, 2012; Cederman, Warren & Sornette, 2011; Levy
and Thompson, 2010; Young and Levy, 2010; Colaresi, 2001; Thompson (ed), 1999).
Consequently a dataset with militarized interstate disputes for the 1715-1815
period will be of interest to scholars currently engaged in research. In the next part I explain why such a project
is feasible now.
What will the dataset include?
a) A dataset of militarized interstate disputes in the 1715-1815 period with
versions at the dyad-year and dispute levels of analysis
b) A dataset on national military capabilities in the 1715-1815 period.
c) A dataset on
1715-1815 alliances based on the work of Douglas Gibler (2010)
The dataset will
contain information on participants of each dispute dyad, duration, hostility
level of the most intense military action taken by each participant, range of
casualties caused by the activity, whether the dispute was a war, whether the
disputants were initiators or joiners to a previously initiated dispute,
whether each disputant was a major power, information on the issues that are associated with the dispute,
information about the rivalry status of the disputants, information about the
way the dispute was resolved ,and a measure of relative military capabilities.
The dataset will be merged with Douglas Gibler’s list of alliances for the 1648-1815 period
(2010), permitting us to also have information about the alliance portfolio of
the disputants.
Accompanying the
dataset will be a narratives document that will contain a brief description of
the disputes, their historical context, and justification for any coding
decisions for that dispute. This is similar to the incident narratives for the
Correlates of War MID dataset. They provide sources for possible future
incidents project, increase reliability and permit scholars to corroborate our
sources. Each description will also list the specific sources used to code the
dispute, with information on the exact page umbers from the source that refer
to the dispute. It will list sources for the general narrative, as well as
specific sources for information on casualties and military capabilities.
