Mobilization Follies in International Relations by Konstantinos Travlos
Over the last academic year, I had two publications come out. Due to life events I was not able to sit down and write a short blog post summarizing them. Now I have a chance. Today I will talk for my contribution to a special issue by the All Azimuth journal.
The goal of the issue was to provide a series of teaching tools in the form of articles for graduate student methodology and dissertation design courses. My contribution “Mobilization Follies in International Relations: A MultimethodExploration of Why Some Decision Makers Fail to Avoid War When PublicMobilization as a Bargaining Tool Fails”, sought to help students by presenting a full research article, but combining it with commentary on the decisions made throughout the process.
For my topic I decided to focus on sub-category of the questions on the role of intentions in international politics and how to credibly signal them (which covers issues like deterrence), which was the use of mobilization as bargaining chip. Ever since I was a child and remember the partial mobilization of Greece during the Imia/Kardak Crisis in 1996 , mobilization as a state behavior has always interested me.
Imia Crisis 1996
It is the most expensive military action a state can take short of war. As I pointed out, there a Militarized Disputes that are cheaper than mobilization for a state. And it is rare and has become rarer. In my article I began from a broader discussion of mobilization as a bargaining tool, building on the limited existing literature (mainly the works of Slantchev, Tarar, and MacKey, all working in the rational choice tradition of scholarship). My interest in Balkan diplomatic history and in general the behavior of minor powers, led me to focus on public mobilization as a tool of indirect coercion. Essentially I asked what happens when as state tries to use public mobilization as a tool to trigger intervention by third party against an opponent that is stronger than the mobilizer. I call this compellence by proxy This is a behavior you read a lot about in post-1816 Balkan History. For example the 1885 Greek Mobilization, whose goal was to trigger a crisis that would lead the major powers to push the Ottomans to give territorial compensation to Greece for the Bulgarian acquisition of Eastern Rumelia.
Greek cartoon on the Eastern Rumelia Crisis
But like deterrence studies, the intention behind mobilization is never completely clear. Even in the case of “public” mobilizations. I thus considered proxies for intention by focusing on the character of the mobilization, and especially the period between the onset of mobilization and the onset of war. My argument is that mobilization periods that last an above-average time until the onset of war, are probably indicative of the use of mobilization in order to gain a diplomatic advantage. The specific question though I decided to try and answer was about what happens when that period does not bring about third party intervention? Is there something to differentiate those states that avoid war when this “compellence by proxy” fails compared to those who do not?
My hypothesis was that it depends on the ability of the failing government to overhaul its winning coalition (A concept I picked up from Braumoeller). I assumed that mobilization creates or strengthens hardliners within society and decision making, which would make it harder for a government to back down if compellence by proxy fails, and the target retaliates with war threats. However, if the government can overhaul its winning coalition, by getting rid of hardliners, then it can back down and avoid a disadvantageous war.
Thus I compared mobilizations that could be considered as attempts at compellence by proxy that led to war with those that did not. My temporal domain was the 1816-2008 period. To my dismay I found that there is no dataset on mobilization events in international relations. One can glean information from Correlates of War and the Interstate Crisis Behavior dataset, which is what I did. But a good dataset of these events could be useful, as they involve some of the same dynamics as deterrence, but are more common. Anyhow, I was able to locate 54 cases of mobilization that could had been done for compellence by proxy motivation and did not become associated with war onset, and 16 were there was war onset.
To get some kind of handle on ability of government to overhaul their winning coalition, I had to rely on Bueno De Mesquita’s Winning Coalition Size dataset. This is not a perfect representation of the concept I am going for, though size is one element. But it would do, or so I thought.
Example of the data
Because of the small number of observations (n), I decided to also conduct a small number of quick comparative studies of six Serbian and Greek mobilizations in the 1879-1908 period. The Balkan international system, as formed by the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, was an excellent international context for attempts at compllence by proxy, due to major power interest. The statistical evaluation was done by cross-tabulations using chi square tests of statistical significance, since the n was so small.
None of these models of evaluation are very sophisticated by themselves, but my hope was that using both would somewhat alleviate their individual weakness. My findings did not support a strong statistically significant relationship between size of the winning coalition and war onset in cases of mobilizations most likely to be attempts at compellence by proxy. The analysis of the Balkan cases also corroborated these results. That said there were some secondary indicators of possible interest
- Mobilization is rare in international relations. Rarer than war.
- Mid-sized winning coalitions (usually indicative of competitive authoritarianism, or logrolling coalition regimes) do seem to have some, statistically insignificant, association with increased war onset. If my tools for capturing ease of overhauling winning coalition are the culprits for the lack of statistical significance (due to lack of sophistication), then a better measurement instrument might reveal a statistically significant association.
- The case studies do show that domestic politics plays a role in explaining failure an success in avoiding war after a failed attempt at compellence by proxy. Rule autonomy, and the presence of non-governmental hardliner groups, might play a role worth exploring.
So why look at this article of null findings
- I lay forth my thinking behind my decisions. There is running commentary useful for questions of theoretical development and research design.
- For the data on mobilizations
- For the data, and short narratives, of the six Balkan case studies
- Because it is an addition to the rather small body of work on the role of mobilization in international politics
- Because it does raise questions for future research
- Because if you study deterrence, mobilization intentions suffer some of the same issues. How I went about overcoming them in this paper might be interesting to you.
