The aim of this book is to make sense of reluctance in world politics and to explain its causes. In order to assess the explanatory power of my theorization of reluctance, I chose to focus on particularly ‘hard’ cases, in which we would generally not expect to see a reluctant behaviour in foreign policy: on states that are particularly powerful in their regions, and, more specifically, on how they address and manage regional crises. The underlying idea is that we would expect such countries to have an inherent interest in the stabilization of their respective regions, and therefore to engage in regional crisis management in a coherent and decisive manner. However, we actually observe variation: while Brazil was not reluctant in regional crisis management during the years of the first presidency of Lula da Silva, both India and Germany were reluctant regional crisis managers, even in periods of domestic political stability. The analyses in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 reveal that the explanations for the emergence of reluctance developed in Chapter 3 go a long way towards explaining the regional crisis management policies adopted by powerful states: in the cases analysed, reluctance emerged because of a combination of difficulties in preference formation (mostly driven by internal struggles and lack of coordination among different agencies and/or normative disagreements) and competing expectations by external actors.

But can the theory of reluctance developed in this book also be applied to other cases, actors or issue areas? In other words, does it have an explanatory power beyond the cases analysed in this book? This chapter addresses these questions by focusing on (1) different types of crisis; (2) different countries such as small states and great powers, with reluctance being particularly puzzling for the latter; and (3) different types of actors beyond the nationstate. Given space constraints, the following sections will necessarily be less detailed and rely more on secondary sources as compared to the in-depth case studies of the previous chapters. Overall, as we will see, the explanations for reluctance developed in this book are also helpful to make sense of reluctant policies in a broad range of different contexts.

This chapter explores the origins of technology and the war–state relationship. Although I recognize that each of these domains has a long history, the starting point of this chapter focuses on the transition from the late medieval world into the early modern period of European history and then extends into the late 18th century. The selection of this timeframe is dictated, in part, by the existing literature on this subject, which sees this as a definitive period in the relationship between these three domains. Thus, there is a consensus that war played an instrumental role in the creation of all forms of states throughout history, both within and outside of Europe (Tilly, 1992, 10–14; Tin-Bor Hui, 2005; Fukuyama, 2011, 86–112). However, this resulted in the creation of a range of types of states. As Tilly observed, the term state is frequently applied to various polities, including city states, empires and even theocracies. Thus, he defines states in general as ‘a distinct organization that controls the principal concentrated means of coercion within a well-defined territory, and in some respects exercises priority over all other organizations operating within the same territory’ (1992, 2). However, as I have explained, the principal interest of this study is in what he defines as national states. This is different from its predecessors because ‘a national state or modern state then extends the territory in question to multiple continuous regions, and maintains a relatively centralized, differentiated, and autonomous structure of its own’ (1992, 131). This conforms closely with Max Weber's definition of the state: ‘is a human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Gerth and Mills, 1946, 77).

In the case of the modern state, the connection between war and the state was complicated by the intervention of a new variable in the form of technology. In broad terms, it is claimed that technological and organizational innovation in early modern European warfare, both on land and at sea, precipitated a military revolution which, in turn, created a political revolution represented by the emergence of the modern state (McNeill, 1982; Downing, 1992; Roberts, 1995; Knox and Murray, 2001). This has been the dominant narrative in discussions about early modern war and state formation in Europe.

The case of Brazil is analysed in this chapter as a case of non-reluctance in regional crisis management. The analysis will focus on Brazil's approach to the two most severe crises in the country's extended regional neighbourhood: on Brazil's leadership of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and on Brazil's approach to the Colombian civil war between the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army) and the Colombian government. As for the other cases analysed in this book, I will address crisis management in a period of political stability. In the case of Brazil, the years of the first presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (often just called ‘Lula’) were indeed a period of stability, and one in which Brazil clearly wanted to become engaged in international affairs. President Lula of the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party), a former labour leader who had already run for the presidency of Brazil three times without success, was elected president in the general election of 2002 defeating his rival of the centre-right Brazilian Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Social Democracy Party) in a landslide in the second round. In the 2006 general election, Lula was re-elected, again after failing to prevail in the first round, but winning a landslide in the second round.

The eight years of Lula's first presidency (2003–10) were a period of great stability for Brazil for several reasons. Lula's leftist government promoted a series of social schemes such as the famous Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) and the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programme, which contributed to a remarkable drop in poverty levels in the country. Economic growth rose steadily in the early 2000s, reaching 7.5 per cent in 2010 (Kaufman and García-Escribano, 2013). Correspondingly, and most importantly, Lula's government was extremely popular, with approval ratings of 80 per cent of respondents in December 2010, and a remarkable personal approval rate of 87 per cent for the president (Reuters, 2010).

In parallel to social and economic development, the years 2003–10 were also characterized by an entirely new intensity in Brazil's engagement in world politics.

In the previous chapter, I set out the principal limitations of technological determinism to explain the evolution of warfare in Europe from the early modern period onwards. This chapter aims to explain why technology became a critical variable within the war–state relationship and how it impacted the character of war. In addressing this question, it is also essential to explain why the military became increasingly enamoured with the allure of technology and how they sought to harness it. In constructing this audit, it is helpful to think of technology's direct and indirect effects and why and how it shaped the war–state relationship. Similarly, it is also essential to map out how these changes altered the character of conflict. The rise of modern war is significant because it allowed states to wage war on an unprecedented scale and duration, exemplified in the two world wars of the 20th century. To this end, this chapter is divided into three discrete sections. The first section addresses the question of why technology became fashionable in the military realm. The second looks at the drive for technology in war and how this affected the war–state relationship. The final section concentrates on how this increased focus on the technical means of waging war determined the character of modern war as explored via the impact of technology on strategy, operations and tactics.

I hope to demonstrate that technological innovation's importance had a profound impact on the war–state relationship during the period under scrutiny. However, its rise was facilitated by various factors, including the intensity of competition within Europe's regional security complex in the last third of the 19th century. In addition, internal organizational change within European armies in terms of their order of battle, modus operandi, and command and control, which preceded this revolution, also facilitated the incorporation of new technological enablers. Finally, I believe the principle of being able to mobilize the entire male population in a society to wage war was firmly established in the largely preindustrial era. The Napoleonic Wars demonstrate this point as first France, and then other nations rallied the population for war.

Consequently, this action cannot be credited to the industrial revolution, even if you extend the origins of this episode back to the 16th century as has been claimed (Toffler and Toffler, 1993).

This book started from the observation of contradictory, flip-flopping, muddling-though behaviour in international politics, and from the assessment that the existing theoretical repertoire in International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) does not really help us to make sense of these phenomena, which we nevertheless frequently observe. To address this gap, I proposed a conceptualization of reluctance that tries to move away from the often polemic and politically charged use of this notion. Building on different stages of concept reconstruction and concept building, in Chapter 2 I proposed an understanding of reluctance that focuses on two constitutive dimensions: hesitation and recalcitrance. Since both dimensions can be operationalized and observed empirically, my conceptualization of reluctance can be used for the classification of foreign policy, and can be usefully applied in empirical analyses.

Chapter 3 was devoted to developing a theory of reluctance in order to explain why this phenomenon originates and why it can be observed in different intensities across various cases. Building on a range of theoretical approaches from IR and FPA more broadly, I argued that a reluctant foreign policy will emerge if governments are faced with difficulties in devising clear preferences and, at the same time, a number of different and competing expectations by external actors. Such difficulties in preference formation can, in turn, emerge for a number of reasons.

For one, governments might be politically weak, which makes it difficult for them to devise a clear foreign policy course and to implement it. Second, states might have capacity problems of various kinds. They might have a weak bureaucratic apparatus and insufficient resources to implement a coherent foreign policy; or the state apparatus might be well equipped, but fundamentally divided. Forms of bureaucratic infighting such as struggles among different ministries can lead to problems in devising a clear foreign policy course and ultimately to flip-flopping or contradictory policies and statements on the part of various actors. A third possible driver of reluctance has to do with the individuals involved in decision making, and especially with their cognitive abilities. These can be seriously hampered in grave crisis situations that require swift decision making, and this can lead to a range of psychological mechanisms that ultimately result in ambiguous and hesitant policies.

This chapter explores how the nuclear revolution in war changed the character of conflict and challenged our traditional conception of what constituted an act of war. The related question of how this change impacted the war–state relationship is also explored. I explained in the previous chapter how the rise of modern war is intimately connected with the industrial revolution. Innovations in this period transformed warfare and contained several military revolutions on land and the sea. One of the most pronounced of these ‘revolutions’ was the emergence of airpower as a distinct but separate environment of modern war. The rise of electronic warfare was less well known but as important. However, in terms of impact, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 represented a true paradigm shift in the conduct of war. It is often pointed out that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was genuinely awful if measured in terms of deaths, but the USAAF firebombing of Tokyo in the preceding March was far worse; between 80,000–100,000 killed versus 66,000 at Hiroshima and 39,000 at Nagasaki. Viewed in this way, the explosive potential of the atomic bomb represented a critical enhancement in the firepower available to the US but, at the time, it was not necessarily seen as a game changer in the conduct of war. It is important to note that the significance of the atomic bomb in terms of its conduct on war is contested. In the view of Price and Tannenworld (1996), this weapon was viewed as just another weapon, albeit one that packed a lot more punch, to be employed on the battlefield. As such, its claimed impact has been much exaggerated. In their view, the most crucial change was the development of thermonuclear weapons. The detonation of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952 produced a ten-megaton explosion approximately 500 times more powerful than Hiroshima. What possible use could such a weapon have but to prevent war?

The subsequent introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles, heralded by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, gave this weapon an almost invincible aura.

However, as Freedman explains, the significance of this technology lay in the fact that a single bomber armed with a single bomb was able to destroy a city (Freedman, 2003, 17).

India

• I1: Indian expert, New Delhi, 18 October 2013.

• I2: Retired Nepalese diplomat, New Delhi, 29 October 2013.

• I3: Afghan academic, New Delhi, 31 October 2013.

• I4: Indian scholar, New Delhi, 12 November 2013.

• I5: Retired Indian diplomat, New Delhi, 14 November 2013.

• I6: Former high-ranking government official, New Delhi, 14 November 2013.

• I7: Former high-ranking government official, New Delhi, 22 November 2013.

• I8: Indian scholar, New Delhi, 26 November 2013.

• I9: Indian scholar, online, 8 November 2022.

• I10: Indian scholar, online, 15 November 2022.

• I11: Afghan scholar, online, 16 November 2022.

• I12: Indian scholar, online, 18 November 2022.

• I13: Nepalese scholar, online, 20 November 2022.

Germany

• G1: Senior German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, 20 April 2015.

• G2: Expert, German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, 21 April 2015.

• G3: Expert, German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, 21 April 2015.

• G4: Expert, Federal Academy for Security Policy, Berlin 22 April 2015.

• G5: German government official, Federal Chancellery, Berlin, 23 April 2015.

• G6: Senior German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin, 23 April 2015.

• G7: German diplomat, Federal Foreign Office, Berlin 23 April 2015.

• G8: German expert, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G9: German government official, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G10: German government official, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Berlin, 24 April 2015.

• G11: German academic, Hamburg, 27 April 2015.

• G12: German academic, Hamburg, 27 April 2015.

• G13: German expert, telephone interview, 29 April 2015.

• G14: German academic, telephone interview, 12 May 2015.

Brazil

• B1: Expert on Brazilian foreign and defence policy, online, 5 July 2022.

• B2: Scholar based in Chile, online, 14 July 2022.

• B3: Brazilian scholar, online, 23 August 2022.

• B4: Brazilian academic and former government adviser, online, 8 September 2022.

• B5: Colombian scholar, online, 16 September 2022.

• B6: Brazilian scholar, online, 19 September 2022.

• B7: High-ranking officer in the Brazilian Armed Forces, online, 26 September 2022.

• B8: Scholar based in Brazil, online, 27 September 2022.

Before we move on to developing explanations for the varying occurrence of reluctance in world politics, we need to develop a sound conceptualization of reluctance. So far, this term has been used in a rather casual manner, and such unspecific usage has made the term not particularly useful beyond mere description. By contrast, if appropriately conceptualized, ‘reluctance’ can yield analytical benefits by helping us to make sense of the widespread indecisiveness and muddling through that can frequently be observed in contemporary international politics. Conceptual clarity is indispensable if we want to make sense of this phenomenon and to adequately operationalize it for empirical analysis.

The conceptualization of reluctance builds on and combines different approaches to concept reconstruction and concept building, which are briefly discussed in the next section. The actual conceptualization exercise proceeds as follows. First, based on a qualitative content analysis of selected International Relations (IR) literature that explicitly uses the notion of reluctance, I inductively identify the key issues usually associated with this term. This helps as a first approach to delineating the broader semantic field of reluctance, and thereby contributes to concept reconstruction, as suggested by Sartori (1984: 41–50). Based on this broader semantic field, in a second step I move on to discussing the related but distinct notions of exceptionalism, isolationism, under-aggression, under-balancing, buckpassing and free-riding – and I highlight why we need reluctance as an additional concept to make sense of a distinct set of phenomena. Based on the insights gained from situating the concept of reluctance in the existing IR literature, I proceed with the actual concept-building exercise, which follows the guidelines outlined by Goertz (2006) in his work on social science concepts. I therefore discuss the negative poles of reluctance – that is, what reluctance is not; I develop two core ‘secondary’, constitutive dimensions of reluctance; and I operationalize these two dimensions, developing indicators for empirical analysis. In a nutshell, I conceive of reluctance as a specific way of doing foreign policy that involves a hesitant attitude and a certain recalcitrance about conforming to the expectations articulated by others.

With the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2009, Germany came back centre stage in European politics, and continued to play a central role in the 2010s, for example through its initially leading role in the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16. Overall, therefore, the 2010s clearly saw the increased political weight of Berlin in Europe, sparking debates about what kind of power Germany had become. Several of those debates were explicitly framed around the notion of ‘reluctance’: for example, Paterson (2011) famously argued that Germany was a ‘reluctant hegemon’ in Europe, and The Economist took over this notion on one of its covers in 2013, calling for a more active engagement of Germany in Europe, arguing that ‘Germany's current footdragging poses larger dangers’ (The Economist, 2013).

The notion of reluctance was often used with reference to Germany's unwillingness to engage militarily (Maull, 2000a: 57; Breuer, 2006: 211; Dyson, 2011: 244). Moreover, several authors depicted the German government as indecisive and erratic in its foreign policy, highlighting that, particularly during the Eurozone crisis, ‘Leadership from Berlin has been hesitant’ and plagued by a ‘capacity-expectations gap’ (Bulmer, 2014: 1245). Quite the opposite of these assessments, a range of other observers maintained that Germany was not ‘reluctant’ at all. The more apologetic ones argued that German policies actually reflected a careful approach to policy making (Münkler, 2015: 162), and that Germany had a long tradition of quiet, lowkey leadership and engagement in European affairs and global governance (see, for example, Mützenich, 2015: 276–7). Critical observers argued instead that Germany was only ostensibly hesitant since it consistently pursued its policy of austerity throughout the Eurozone crisis, imposing its will on the rest of Europe (Beck, 2012). This assessment reflected a more general criticism of German policies coming from Anglo-Saxon economists and Southern European publics and politicians (Spiegel Online International, 2015), and a widespread uneasiness about a revival of German power and assertiveness related to fears of a re-emergence of the ‘German question’ in geo-economic and geo-political terms (Kundnani, 2014; Hellmann, 2016; Fix, 2018).

Similar discussions about indecisiveness and muddling through in German foreign policy characterized the months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Dempsey, 2022a; The Economist, 2022).

These were the warning words of the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, in a radio interview on 13 February 2022 (Deutschlandfunk, 2022), a few days ahead of Russia's attack against Ukraine. This would not be the last time that a representative of the Ukrainian government asked Germany to do more to support Ukraine. In the following weeks and months, as the unthinkable – a fully-fledged war of aggression in Europe – was unfolding, Germany adopted a series of policies that disconcerted its international partners with their lack of coherence, frequent delays and lack of responsiveness. In the weeks immediately preceding the Russian attack of 24 February 2022, the German government was debating the delivery of 5,000 helmets to the Ukrainian army (FAZ, 2022), much to the bewilderment of its international partners (Dempsey, 2022b), which were providing substantial military aid. Germany, by contrast, long refused the delivery of weapons or other equipment, citing political and legal constraints on the provision of military equipment to conflict zones (BMWK, nd). Moreover, the German government was extremely slow in agreeing to the extension of sanctions. For example, when it came to the exclusion of Russia from the Swift payment system, the German government reacted late to mounting international pressure, being the last country in the European Union (EU) to agree to such a step (Zeit Online, 2022). Similarly, it only agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project a few days before the start of the Russian invasion (Ischinger, 2022). An observer described Germany's approach as follows:

The debate

This book explores the relationship between technology, war and the state from the early modern period to the present and seeks to understand how technological change will impact the war–state relationship in the future. The idea for the book began when I was asked to deliver a course on the relationship between new technologies and their impact on strategy and operations at the UK's Defence Academy. This renewed interest in technology reflected the UK military's concern that a spectrum of emerging capabilities was starting to impact defence, and they were keen to understand how best to address the challenge of what they thought might be a potential military revolution. My initial position was one of profound scepticism, and I believed that technology would do no more than result in a superficial change in how the UK might engage in a future war. Indeed, the course I devised was essentially a warning from history about what happens when political leaders and their military organizations become seduced by the promises made regarding technology in war. To this end, a range of case studies, from Hitler's insane pursuit of wonder weapons in the Second World War to the emasculation of the United States’ conceived revolution in military affairs in Afghanistan and Iraq, demonstrated why technology is no substitute for an understanding of the geographical and political context of war (Kaplan, 2012). However, my research on the subject challenged the assumptions that shaped this course. More importantly, it also seemed to test the conventional view that prevails in broader academic debates on the relative importance of technology as a driver of change in the domain of war. The fundamental purpose of this book is to ask if we have arrived at a point where current patterns of technological change require a reassessment of the relationship between technology, war and politics, expressed here in the form of the state.

A cursory examination of the literature on this subject of war and technology reveals what can be described as an orthodox school and a revisionist school. The traditional view of technology asserts it has played a positive role in human history, and its impact on the conduct of war resulted in the emergence of a modern military system which fits into the broader aspiration of contemporary society. This school consists of three subsets.