References to “Weimar” have played an increasingly important role in trying to make sense of the present, and also to mobilize various constituencies. Related to the diagnosis of contemporary political movements as fascist or neo-fascist, there is the question of whether some of the lessons drawn in the postwar period from the failures of Weimar – especially the ones that inspired the creation of the legal toolkit generally known as “militant democracy” – should be central to attempts to defend democracy today. This chapter engages both issues and argues that the toolkit of militant democracy remains valuable in many ways – but that its instruments are often not well suited to dealing with today’s challenges to democracy.

The concluding chapter briefly summarizes the main findings and discusses the broader implications for the study of international relations. This book has argued that the trade-off between good information and political security helps to explain why leaders often charge headfirst into conflict that they lose. Whereas much of the existing literature posits that bureaucratic participation in a foreign policy decision-making process tends to degrade the information available to leaders as they choose between war and peace, this book has instead argued that institutions and leaders benefit from the information that the bureaucracy provides, especially when leaders pit bureaucracies against one another in competitive dialogue. Yet leaders often forgo these institutions precisely to avoid the costs that a powerful bureaucracy can impose on their prospects for political survival. As such, miscalculation on the road to war is often the byproduct of how leaders resolve the trade-off between a more accurate vision of the world and protection from bureaucratic punishment.

This chapter addresses in detail those rare occasions in which the Court and the Commission have adopted differing positions on the legal questions before them. In exploring both the potential for such disagreements and how they have been handled, the chapter shows that these instances attest to the strength of the inter-institutional relationship rather than undermine it. It also points out, however, that harmony comes at a cost.

This chapter extends the analysis in Chapter 6 by examining the origins and consequences of national security institutions in Pakistan from 1947 to 2015. Unlike India, the persistent threat of bureaucratic punishment prevented the emergence of integrated institutions, despite the salient international threats faced by its political leaders. Instead, Pakistan has cycled between siloed and fragmented institutions, with civilian leaders tending to adopt the former and military rulers tending to choose the latter. The chapter argues that the reason for this pattern stems from differences in political agenda. Military leaders have historically pursued ambitious programs to transform Pakistan’s society and economy, which would allow the military to return to the barracks. A medium-n analysis of Pakistan’s institutional performance suggests that siloed and fragmented institutions tended to perform poorly relative to India’s integrated institutions. Process tracing of the 1999 Kargil War illustrates that this poor performance can be attributed to low-quality bureaucratic information upon which Pakistan’s leaders based their choice for conflict.

Chapter Three explores the views of former officials regarding compliance by states with international law. Almost all former officials believed that international law constrains state behavior, at least to some extent, and that states comply with international law much of the time. The top positive factors favoring compliance, as revealed by frequency counts, were reputational concerns; state interest in a stable legal and institutional system; reciprocity, or the prospect of retaliation; ethical considerations, including ethical values underlying international law rules and respect for the rule of law; idiosyncratic factors, including the history and culture of states; and benefits flowing from participation in specific regimes. The significant role of ethical factors gives a boost to normative theories about compliance. The role of systemic interests illustrates the benefits of a multilateral, institutional, and rule-based system. Among the factors militating against compliance, the dominant factor was state interest. Many former officials suggested that decisions about compliance involve a cost–benefit assessment, a consideration of many factors including international law. The chapter concludes by considering the former officials’ perceptions about the reasons that states outside of the United States take into consideration regarding compliance with international law.

In this introductory chapter, Lebow and Norman identify the Weimar Republic and its collapse as the paradigmatic historical example shaping political thinking about fragility and robustness in the postwar world. It spells out the volume’s analytical focus on Weimar lessons in comparative perspective and identifies its theoretical starting points in a broader scholarly field concerned with the role of historical analogies in politics.

The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

Breiner emphasizes Weimar’s role as an exemplar in political thought and focuses specifically on the highly influential political scientist Otto Kirchheimer. His chapter highlights how Kirchheimer viewed the Weimar Constitution as a struggle over conflicting and irreconcilable notions of democracy and society and further ties it to his postwar theory of political opposition and its decline. Breiner uses these discussions to highlight how mainstream American political science have misunderstood these ideas and how they relate to core aspects of the Weimar problematique.