¹ Gaddis, John Lewis, ‘International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War’, International Security, 17 (1992/1993), 5–58, at p. 10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Gaddis, , ‘International Relations Theory,’ p. 18Google Scholar. Gaddis's sharpest criticisms are directed at North Americans pursuing a social scientific research agenda; we therefore respond primarily by reference to that literature.

³ Lapid, Yosef, ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era’, International Studies Quarterly, 33 (1989), 235–54, at p. 236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ Ashley, Richard K. and Walker, R. B. J., eds, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissidence in International Studies’, Special Issue of International Studies Quarterly, 34 (1990), 259–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Puchala, Donald J., ‘Woe to the Orphans of the Scientific Revolution’, in Rothstein, Robert, ed, The Evolution of Theory in International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 79Google Scholar (emphasis added). Puchala here, like Gaddis, condemns not just contemporary theories in the field of international politics, but also, as the title clearly implies, ‘scientific’ approaches to that subject matter.

⁶ Easton, David, ‘The New Revolution in Political Science’, American Political Science Review, 63 (1969), 1051–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Gaddis, , ‘International Relations Theory’, p. 6.Google Scholar

⁸ Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1948), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

⁹ Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 9Google Scholar. Gaddis, , ‘International Relations Theory’Google Scholar, cites both Hawking and Morgenthau in support of this view.

¹⁰ Keohane, Robert O., ‘Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond’, in Finifter, Ada, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983).Google Scholar

¹¹ Singer, J. David, ‘The Level-of-Analysis Problem in International Relations’, World Politics, 14 (1961), 77–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Hollis, Martin and Smith, Steve, Explaining and Understanding International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 54–6Google Scholar (emphasis added). Hollis and Smith here are reporting the view of Quine, W. V., ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in Quine, W. V., ed., From a Logical Point of View (New York: Random House, 1961).Google Scholar

¹³ Rosenau, Pauline Marie, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 212.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Vasquez, John, ‘The Promises and Pitfalls of Post-Modernist Approaches to International Politics’ (paper given at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, DC, 30 03 1994)Google Scholar. Some of the works cited by Vasquez are: Berger, Peter L. and Luckman, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar; Foucault, Michael, The Archaelogy of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972)Google Scholar; Lyotard, Jean-Françoise, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Vasquez, , ‘The Promises and Pitfalls’, p. 4.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ashley, Richard K., ‘Living on Borderlines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War’, in Der Derian, James and Shapiro, Michael, eds, International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings in World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 280.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Organski, A. F. K. and Eldersveld, Samuel, ‘Modelling the EC: Conclusion’, in de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Stokman, Frans, eds, European Community Decision Making: Models, Applications and Comparisons (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Such a view has been expressed recently, for example, by Singer, J. David, ‘Prediction Versus Explanation as Standards of Scientific Progress’ (paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York City, 09 1994)Google Scholar; Rosenau, James N., ‘Signals, Signposts and Symptoms: Anticipating and Explaining Major Historical Breakpoints’ (paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 09 1994).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Hempel, Carl, ‘The Function of General Laws of History’, in Hempel, Carl, ed., Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), p. 234.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Dessler, David, ‘What International Relations Theorists Can Learn from the Natural Sciences’ (paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York, 09 1994)Google Scholar. ‘World War III will begin at 2 p.m. on 11 October 1997’ would be an example of a prophecy as opposed to a prediction.

²⁰ Singer, , ‘The Level of Analysis Problem’, pp. 79–80.Google Scholar

²¹ Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Lakatos, Imre, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in Lakatos, Imre and Musgrave, Alan, eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Ian Shapiro and Alexander Wendt, for example, cite an article by Philip Kitcher as an authoritative source on ‘the incoherence of explanatory-predictive symmetry’. See Shapiro, Ian and Wendt, Alexander, ‘The Difference that Realism Makes’, Politics and Society, 20 (1992), 197–223, at p. 222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kitcher, Philip, ‘Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World’, in Kitcher, Philip and Salmon, Wesley, eds, Scientific Explanation: Volume XIII, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)Google Scholar. But in that same volume Merrilee Salmon (‘Explanation in the Social Sciences’, p. 408Google Scholar) having reviewed the controversy regarding Hempel's views on ‘nomological’ explanations (and predictions of the same structure) concludes: ‘Despite protests of the critics of causal and nomological explanation in the social sciences, the best approximations to a satisfactory philosophical theory of explanation seem to embrace successful explanations in the social sciences as well as successful explanations in the physical sciences. None of the critics, I believe, has demonstrated that the admitted differences between our social environment and our physical environment compel us to seek entirely different methods of understanding each.’ On this controversy, see also Keat, Russell and Urry, John, Social Theory as Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982)Google Scholar; Wendt, Alexander, ‘The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory’, International Organization, 41 (1987), 335–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bhaskar, Roy, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).Google Scholar

²³ Dessler, David, ‘Beyond Correlations: Toward a Causal Theory of War’, International Studies Quarterly, 35 (1991), 337–55, at p. 346CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shapiro, and Wendt, , ‘The Difference that Realism Makes’, p. 212Google Scholar, assert that ‘realists are not hostile to logical empiricists' reliance on predictions of empirical regularities as evidence for the validity of claims’, while Alexander Rosenberg observes in a similar vein that ‘among philosophers of science in recent years at any rate, the most central debate, between realism and antirealism, is about whether prediction of observations is merely necessary for knowledge, as realists hold, or all we need from science, as antirealists hold’. See Economics – Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 51Google Scholar. For a more extended and somewhat less conciliatory discussion of this issue, see Ray, James Lee, Democracy and International Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), chap. 4.Google Scholar

²⁴ Quine, W. V., Pursuit of Truth, rev. edn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 2Google Scholar. Quine also notes that ‘A sentence's claim to scientific status rests on what it contributes to a theory whose checkpoints are in prediction’ (p. 20).

²⁵ ‘It makes more and more sense, the farther in time we are from them, to view World Wars I and II as a single European civil war …’ See Gaddis, John Lewis, The United States and the End of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5.Google Scholar

²⁶ ‘Observation, however, is not determined by theory or discourse; unlike some ‘strong’ interpretivists, realists contend that well-established theories do refer to, and are constrained by, external reality’. (Shapiro, and Wendt, , ‘The Difference that Realism Makes’, p. 211.)Google Scholar

²⁷ Rosenberg, , Economics, p. 51.Google Scholar

²⁸ In their otherwise excellent review of many of the same epistemological issues that serve as our focus here, Hollis, and Smith, , Explaining and UnderstandingGoogle Scholar, also fail to cite most of the sources to which we are about to turn our attention.

²⁹ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

³⁰ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘The War Trap Revisited: A Revised Expected Utility Model’, American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 156–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³¹ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘The Game of Conflict Interactions: A Research Program’, in Berger, Joseph and Zelditch, Morris, eds, Theoretical Research Programs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

³² Described in de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Forecasting Political Decisions’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 17 (1984). 226–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, Newman, David and Rabushka, Alvin, Forecasting Political Events (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

³³ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Lalman, David, War and Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

³⁴ See in particular de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Political Forecasting: An Expected Utility Method’, in de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Stokman, Frans, eds, European Community Decision Making (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

³⁵ de Mesquita, Bueno, ‘The Game of Conflict Interactions’Google Scholar. Most of the forecasts have been produced by a corporation called Decision Insights, established by Bueno de Mesquita, Jacek Kugler and A. F. K. Organski in 1981 under the name of Policon.

³⁶ Feder, Stanley, ‘Factions and Policon: New Ways to Analyze Polities’, Studies in IntelligenceGoogle Scholar (recently declassified article in a classified publication; in Westerfield, H. Bradford, ed., Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955–1992 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995)).Google Scholar

³⁷ de Mesquita, Bueno, ‘Forecasting Political Decisions’.Google Scholar

³⁸ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Iusi-Scarborough, Grace, ‘Forecasting the Nature of Political Settlement in Nicaragua’ (paper for the Conference on Nicaragua: Prospects for a Democratic Outcome, sponsored by the Orkand Corporation, Washington, DC, 10 1988).Google Scholar

³⁹ de Mesquita, Bueno, ‘The Game of Conflict Interactions’.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Kim, Chae-Han, ‘Prospects for a New Regional Order in Northeast Asia’, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, 3 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article appeared after the vote in the United Nations, but the editor notes on the first page that it had been submitted and accepted before the vote.

⁴¹ ‘Outcome of the Soviet Coup and its Political Aftermath’ (Decision Insights Incorporated Assessment, 19 08 1991).Google Scholar

⁴² This statement was made in a telephone conversation with the chairman of the consulting organization in question. In the preceding eighteen months. Decision Insights had provided political forecasting and strategic planning services to more than thirty-seven private-sector clients.

⁴³ Ray, James Lee, Global Politics, 6th edn (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 147.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ de Mesquita, Bueno, ‘The Game of Conflict Interactions’Google Scholar; ‘Forecasting Political Decisions’; ‘Political Forecasting’; de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Multilateral Negotiations: A Spatial Analysis of the Arab-Israeli Dispute’, International Organization, 44 (1990), 317–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Manuel Oroszco, currently a graduate student at the University of Texas, replicated the software that produced analyses reported in de Mesquita, Bueno, Rabushka, and Newman, , Forecasting Political EventsGoogle Scholar. Bueno de Mesquita offers his own exposition of the record of success achieved by his approach in ‘The Benefits of a Social Scientific Approach to Studying International Affairs’, in Woods, Ngaire, ed., Explaining International Affairs Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ For example, de Mesquita, Bueno, ‘Forecasting Political Decisions'Google Scholar; Multilateral Negotiations’; de Mesquita, Bueno and Iusi-Scarborough, , ‘Forecasting the Nature of Political Settlement’Google Scholar; de Mesquita, Bueno, Newman, and Rabushka, , Forecasting Political EventsGoogle Scholar; de Mesquita, Bueno and Kim, , ‘Prospects for a New Regional Order’Google Scholar; de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Organski, A. F. K., ‘A Mark in Time Saves Nein’ (Conference on European Integration, Groningen, The Netherlands, 05 1990)Google Scholar, later published in International Political Science Review, 13 (1992), 81–100Google Scholar; James, Patrick, ‘Rational Choice? Crisis Bargaining Over the Meech Lake Accord’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 06 1992)Google Scholar; Kugler, Jacek, ‘The Politics of Foreign Debt in Latin America: A Study of the Debtors' Cartel’, International Interactions, 13 (1987), 115–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morrow, James D., de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno and Wu, Samuel, ‘Forecasting the Risks of Nuclear Proliferation: Taiwan as an Illustration of Method’, Security Studies, 2 (1993), 311–31Google Scholar; Newman, David and Bridges, Brian, ‘North Korean Nuclear Weapons Policy: An Expected Utility Study’, Pacific Focus, 9 (Fall 1994), 61–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Organski, A. F. K. and de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Forecasting the 1992 French Referendum’, in Morgan, Roger, Lorentzen, J. and Leander, A., eds, New Diplomacy in the Post-Cold War World (New York: St Martin's Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Wu, Samuel and de Mesquita, Bruce Bueno, ‘Assessing the Dispute in the South China Sea: A Model of China's Security Decision Making’, International Studies Quarterly, 38 (1994), 379–403.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁶ See especially several chapters in de Mesquita, Bueno and Stokman, , European Community Decision MakingGoogle Scholar; Kugler, Jacek, Snider, Lewis W. and Longwell, William, ‘From Desert Shield to Desert Storm: Success, Strife, or Quagmire?’ Conflict Management and Peace Science, 13 (1994), 113–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁷ Green, Donald P. and Shapiro, Ian, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Rosenberg, , EconomicsGoogle Scholar. According to J. David Singer, ‘“Rational choice” explanations for the behavior of political elites in general, and statesmen in particular … [are] not only redolent of failed models that litter the landscape of modern economics, but dramatically at odds with the more solid findings in psychology.’ See ‘The Evolution of Anarchy vs. the Evolution of Cooperation’, Politics and Life Sciences, 13 (1994), 26–8 at p. 28.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ The discussion that follows owes much to the recent critiques of rational choice approaches by Green, and Shapiro, , Pathologies of Rational ChoiceGoogle Scholar, as well as that by Rosenberg, Economics, which, in general, we might add, have much to recommend them. It probably should be pointed out here that the focus of Pathologies of Rational Choice is on American Politics (so it does not address Bueno de Mesquita's rational choice approach explicitly), and that Rosenberg's volume is dedicated to (among others) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

⁵⁰ See de Mesquita, Bueno, The War TrapGoogle Scholar; ‘The War Trap Revisited’; de Mesquita, Bueno and Lalman, , War and Reason.Google Scholar

⁵¹ For example, Mesquita, Bueno de, Newman, and Rabushka, , Forecasting Political EventsGoogle Scholar; Feder, , ‘Factions and Policon’Google Scholar; Mesquita, Bueno de and Iusi-Scarborough, , ‘Forecasting the Nature of Political Settlement’.Google Scholar

⁵² Mesquita, Bueno de, ‘Political Forecasting,’Google Scholar and Kim, Woosang and Mesquita, Bueno de, ‘How Perceptions Influence the Risk of War’, International Studies Quarterly, 39 (1995), 51–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵³ Waldrop, Mitchell, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)Google Scholar; Horgan, John, ‘From Complexity to Perplexity’, Scientific American, 272 (1995), 104–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suplee, Curt, ‘Computer Program May Give Insight to How Societies Evolve’, Washington Post, 05 1995Google Scholar (reprinted in the Tampa Tribune, 5 05 1995).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ ‘A theory of politics has no payoff if its hypotheses do not survive empirical scrutiny. In this light, it is surprising that both defenders and critics of rational choice theory have paid so little attention to empirical testing’ (Green, and Shapiro, , Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, p. 32Google Scholar). ‘Over a ten year period the proportion of papers in the American Economic Review that elaborated mathematical models without bringing the models into contact with data exceeded 50 percent and … a further 22 percent involved indirect statistical inference from data previously published’ (Rosenberg, , Economics, p. 66Google Scholar). Another 15 per cent of articles in the American Economic Review during this period, according to Rosenberg, involved neither mathematical formulation nor data.

⁵⁵ Laitin, David, ‘The Return of the Son of the Bride of the Future of Comparative Politics’Google Scholar (APSA-CP, Newsletter of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section in Comparative Politics, 5 (1994), p. 4Google Scholar). Laitin goes on to observe that ‘having a specialist for every piece of international real estate may soon seem as arcane as having a specialist for every planet in the astronomy department’ (p. 4).

⁵⁶ Johnson, Chalmers and Keehn, E. B., ‘A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies’, The National Interest, No. 36 (1994), 14–22, at p. 18.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ ‘Through the judicious use of modelling and area expertise, it is possible to derive issue-specific analyses that are more reliable and more informative than can be achieved through modelling alone or through area expertise by itself.’ (Mesquita, Bueno de, ‘Multilateral Negotiations’, p. 340.)Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Feder, , ‘Factions and Policon’.Google Scholar Policon is the name of the original corporation founded by Bueno de Mesquita and his associates (see fn. 34).

⁵⁹ Gaddis, , ‘International Relations Theory’, p. 18Google Scholar; Puchala, , ‘Woe to the Orphans’, p. 79.Google Scholar Even John Lewis Gaddis might now agree with our statement. Gaddis and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita have discussed in some detail what amounts to a simulation of the history of the Cold War based on Bueno de Mesquita's model, in a paper with a working title of ‘The End of the Cold War as an Emergent Property: Complexity in International Affairs’. These conversations have led Gaddis to conclude (in an e-mail message to Bueno de Mesquita on 8 February 1995) that ‘as I understand it, what you've done is to confirm Axelrod's “evolution of cooperation” model in iterated prisoners’ dilemma games, and then extend it beyond where he went to show how what looks like a robust system over time (a ‘long peace’?) can suddenly break down. You've shown that this can happen not through war or mutual convergence, which always seemed to be the only choices while the Cold War was going on, but by one side's suddenly shifting to the other's point of view. That strikes me as an important advance over earlier approaches to predictive modelling because it takes into account the emergent properties of complex adaptive systems. It's getting closer to how historians think.' This is from a copy of this e-mail correspondence (sent via e-mail) to James Ray by John Gaddis, in which Gaddis also acknowledges that ‘there has been a sort of BdM-JLG convergence’ (8 02 1995).Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Decision Insights, however, did produce forecasts of the break-up of the Soviet Union shortly after the coup attempt of August 1991. John Mueller also asserted in 1986 that ‘we may be coming to the end of the world as we know it. The predominant characteristic of international affairs over the last 40 years has been competition and confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and there is a great deal in the present situation to suggest that this condition could be on the verge of terminal improvement; the incentives for the Soviet Union to reduce its commitment to worldwide revolution are considerable. This could eventually result in the end of the cold war’ (‘Containment and the Decline of the Soviet Empire’, paper presented to the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Anaheim, California, March 1986, p. 1). This paper is informed by international relations theory to some extent, particularly in its conclusion about the low probability of an international war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It might be fair to say, however, that its impressive prescience regarding the demise of the Cold War is based more on wisdom, intuition and a pragmatic logic of cost-benefit analysis than a well-developed explicit theory of international politics.

⁶¹ Gaddis, , ‘International Relations Theory’, p. 18 (emphasis in the original).Google Scholar

⁶² Lebow, Richard Ned, ‘The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism’, in Lebow, and Risse-Kappen, Thomas, eds, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 23–56, at p. 24.Google Scholar In the same volume, Kenneth Oye (‘Explaining the End of the Cold War: Morphological and Behavioral Adaptations to the Nuclear Peace?’ pp. 57–84, at p. 58Google Scholar) states, ‘Because realism is underidentified, it cannot be tested with reference to the end of the Cold War or any other sequence of events’.

⁶³ In defence of the idea that this account is consistent with realism it might be pointed out that David Sanders provides an account based on realism of the withdrawal of Great Britain from its colonies in the late 1940s and the 1950s with some similarities to Wohlforth's realistic account of the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe (see Losing an Empire, Finding a Role (London: Macmillan, 1990), esp. pp. 265–9Google Scholar). However, unlike Wohlforth, Sanders emphasizes that realism calls for ensuring that the evacuated areas are left in the hands of the ‘firmest and most trustworthy ally’ (p. 267), something the Soviets did not accomplish. And like Wohlforth, Sanders provides this realistic account of a withdrawal from imperial holdings only well after the fact.

⁶⁴ Wohlforth, William, ‘Realism and the End of the Cold War’, International Security, 19 (1994/1995), 91–129, at p. 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It is only fair to point out that Wohlforth goes on to argue that the strength of realist theories is only evident ‘when they are compared to the alternatives, which suffer from similar or worse indeterminacy but do not possess comparable explanatory power’ (p. 93). We intend to compare realism not only to some ideal standard, but also to a specific alternative.

⁶⁵ Koslowski, Rey and Kratochwil, Friedrich V., ‘Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire's Demise and the International System’Google Scholar, in Lebow, and Risse-Kappen, , eds, International Relations Theory, pp. 127–65, at pp. 129 and 131–2.Google Scholar Similarly, Gaddis asserts that ‘the second most “powerful” state on the face of the earth did voluntarily give up power, despite the insistence of international relations theory that this could never happen’. See Gaddis, John Lewis, ‘How the Cold War's end dramatizes the failure of political theory’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 38 (22 07 1992), A44.Google Scholar And Lebow, ‘The Long Peace’ (p. 41), argues that ‘the most fundamental tenet of realism is that states act to preserve their territorial integrity. Gorbachev's decision to abandon Eastern Europe's communist regimes wittingly called the integrity of the Soviet empire into question. It triggered demands for independence from the Baltics to Central Asia that led to the demise of the Soviet state’. Thinking about whether Gorbachev's behaviour was both pivotal and not to be expected from other possible Soviet leaders constitutes a useful counterfactual exercise to help sort out the role of systemic forces in constraining leaders. On such exercises, see Tetlock, Philip and Belkin, Aaron, eds, Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Lebow, , ‘The Long Peace’, p. 39.Google Scholar Also Chemoff, Fred, ‘Ending the Cold War: The Soviet Retreat and the US Military Buildup’, International Affairs, 67 (1991), 111–26.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ John Mueller of the University of Rochester expressed the following in a September 1994 personal communication to us: ‘Insofar as anyone can figure out what realism in its various forms (neo, structural, quasi, crypto, semi, defensive, last-ditch, kinky, etc.) actually was, therefore, it seems to me it was (I like the past tense here) not only flawed in that it was incapable of predicting the end of the Cold War, but that it had a negative, e en blinding or at least blinkering, effect in that it caused people for decades to focus on the wrong dynamic and to be incapable of seeing what was going on. It ignored domestic issues willfully and to its ultimate peril’.

⁶⁸ Various examples are reviewed by contributors to Allan, Pierre and Goldmann, Kjell, eds, The End of the Cold War: Evaluating Theories of International Relations (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1992).Google Scholar In his chapter, ‘The Events in Eastern Europe and the Crisis in the Discipline of International Relations’, Philip Evarts does a particularly devastating job of compiling forecasts that turned out very wrong.

⁶⁹ This is the characterization by Goldman, Kjell, ‘Bargaining, Power, Domestic Politics, and Security Dilemmas: Soviet “New Thinking” as Evidence’Google Scholar, and Grunberg, Isabelle and Risse-Kappen, Thomas, ‘A Time of Reckoning? Theories of International Relations and the End of the Cold War’Google Scholar, in Allan, and Goldman, , eds, The End of the Cold War.Google Scholar This is certainly not to imply that such a forecast should, by contrast, have taken the form of a point prediction.

⁷⁰ Rummel, R. J., The Dynamic Psychological Field: Vol. I, Understanding Conflict and War (New York: Sage Publications, 1975).Google Scholar

⁷¹ Doyle, Michael, ‘Liberalism and World Polities’, American Political Science Review, 80 (1986), 1151–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷² Weart, Spencer R., ‘Peace Among Democracies and Oligarchic Republics’, Journal of Peace Research, 31 (1994), 229–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ray, James Lee, ‘Wars Between Democracies: Rare, or Non-Existent?’ International Interactions, 18 (1993), 251–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Owen, John, ‘How Liberalism Produces Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19 (1994), 87–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷³ Mintz, Alex and Geva, Nehemia, ‘Why Don't Democracies Fight Each Other?’ Journal of Conflict Resolution, 37 (1993), 484–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁴ Ember, Carol R., Ember, Melvin and Russett, Bruce M., ‘Peace Between Participatory Polities: A Cross-Cultural Test of the “Democracies Rarely Fight Each Other” Hypothesis’, World Politics, 44 (1992), 573–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crawford, Neta, ‘A Security Regime among Democracies: Cooperation Among Iroquois Nations’, International Organization, 48 (1994), 345–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁵ Bremer, Stuart, ‘Dangerous Dyads: Conditions Affecting the Likelihood of Interstate War, 1816–1965’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36 (1992), 309–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maoz, Zeev and Russett, Bruce, ‘Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986’, American Political Science Review, 87 (1993), 624–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar These and additional sources in each of these categories are reviewed in Russett, Bruce, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, and Ray, , Democracy and International Conflict.Google Scholar Also see Oneal, John, Oneal, Frances, Maoz, Zeev and Russett, Bruce, ‘The Liberal Peace: Interdependence, Democracy, and International Conflict, 1950–1986’, Journal of Peace Research, 32 (1996).Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Cohen, Raymond, ‘Pacific Unions: A Reappraisal of the Theory that “Democracies Do Not Go to War With Each Other”’, Review of International Studies, 20 (1994), 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ne, Christopher Lay, ‘Kant or Cant: The Myth of Democratic Peace’, International Security, 19 (1994), 5–49Google Scholar and Spiro, David, ‘The Insignificance of the Liberal Peace’, International Security, 19 (1994), 50–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; argue that the democratic peace proposition fails on conceptual, historical, or statistical grounds. We believe we refute these arguments in Russett, and Ray, ‘Why the Democratic-Peace Proposition Lives’, Review of International Studies, 21 (1995), 319–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Russett, , ‘The Democratic Peace: And Yet It Moves’, International Security, 19 (1995), 164–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In his reply in the same issue of International Security, Layne (pp. 175–7)Google Scholar makes the novel charge that Russett is guilty of practising postmodernism.

⁷⁷ Siverson, Randolph and Emmons, Juliann, ‘Birds of a Feather: Democratic Political Systems and Alliance Choices’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 35 (1991), 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burley, Anne-Marie (Slaughter), ‘Law among Liberal States: Liberal Internationalism and the Act of State Doctrine’, Columbia Law Review, 92 (1992), 1907–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bercovitch, Jacob, ‘International Mediation and Dispute Settlement: Evaluating the Conditions for Successful Mediation,’ Negotiation Journal, 7 (1991), 17–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brecher, Michael, Crises in World Politics: Theory and Reality (Oxford: Pergamon, 1993)Google Scholar; Dixon, William, ‘Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 14–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raymond, Gregory A., ‘Democracies, Disputes, and Third-Party Intermediaries’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 38 (1994), 24–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Garfinkel, Michele, ‘Domestic Politics and International Conflict’, American Economic Review, 84 (1994), 1294–1309Google Scholar; Maoz, Zeev, Domestic Sources of Global Change (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁸ Lake, David, ‘Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War’, American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), 24–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schultz, Kenneth and Weingast, Barry, ‘The Democratic Advantage: The Institutional Sources of State Powers in International Competition’ (paper given at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 09 1994)Google Scholar; Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de, Siverson, Randolph M. and Woller, Gary, ‘War and the Fate of Regimes: A Comparative Analysis’, American Political Science Review, 86 (1992), 638–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mesquita, Bruce Bueno de and Siverson, Randolph M., ‘War and the Survival of Political Leaders: A Comparative Study of Regime Types and Political Accountability’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 841–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fearon, James D., ‘Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 577–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar One implication of these works considered together is that democratic states might avoid war against each other because they are formidable opponents in war, and because democratic states are particularly vulnerable to a loss of power in the wake of a lost war. See Ray, , Democracy and International Conflict, chap. 1.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Mesquita, Bueno de and Lalman, , War and Reason, pp. 156–7.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ In Polity III, the Soviet Union received a score of 0 on the institutionalized democracy index (on a scale from 0 to 10) in 1986, a score of 5 in 1989, and 7 in 1991. On the institutionalized autocracy index (also a 0 to 10 scale), it had a score of 7 in 1986, 1 in 1989, and 0 in 1991. On the Freedom House indicators, the Soviet Union received the worst (least democratic) possible scores on political rights and on civil liberties (that is, 7s) in 1986, and moved to scores of 6 and 5 by 1988; at the end of 1990 it was coded as 3 on both scales. Jaggers, Keith and Gurr, Ted, ‘Transitions to Democracy: Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data’, Journal of Peace Research, 32 (1995), 469–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gastil, Raymond D., Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1988–1989 (New York: Freedom House, 1989)Google Scholar; McColm, R. Bruce, Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties, 1991–1992 (New York: Freedom House, 1992).Google Scholar

⁸¹ Brzezinsky, Zbigniew, ed., Dilemmas of Change in Soviet Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).Google Scholar Summary characterizations of each contributor's position appear on p. 157.

⁸² d'Encausse, Helen, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).Google Scholar Collins's paper is cited in Collins, Randall and Waller, David, ‘What Theories Predicted the State Breakdowns and the Revolutions of the Soviet Bloc?’ Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change, 14 (1992), 31–47, at p. 34.Google Scholar

⁸³ Collins, and Waller, , ‘What Theories?’ p. 33.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Wohlforth, , ‘Realism and the End of the Cold War’, pp. 102–3.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Deutsch, Karl et al. , Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Adler, Emanual and Barnet, Michael, Pluralistic Security Communities: Past, Present and Future (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Global Studies Research Program, 1994)Google Scholar; Wendt, Alexander, ‘Collective Identity Formation and the International State’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 384–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁶ Starr, Harvey, ‘Democracy and War: Choice, Learning and Security Communities’, Journal of Peace Research, 29 (1992), 207–14, at p. 211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸⁷ Mesquita, Bueno de and Lalman, , War and Reason, pp. 248–9.Google Scholar

⁸⁸ Ray, James Lee, ‘Promise or Peril? Neorealism, Neoliberalism, and the Future of International Politics’, in Kegley, Charles Jr, ed., Controversies in International Relations Theory (New York: St Martin's Press, 1995), p. 350.Google Scholar Interesting testimony regarding the logic of such a derivation from democratic peace theory can be found in a passage (first published in a 1987 article) by John Lewis Gaddis: ‘Michael Doyle has recently pointed out [that] there is a historical basis for arguing that liberal democracies tend not to go to war with one another. This raises the question: could the extension of democracy – especially within the superpower that has not, until now, had much of it – bring an end to the Cold War? Stranger things have happened’. (See Gaddis, , The United States and the End of the Cold War, p. 140.)Google Scholar

⁸⁹ ‘The prospects for liberalization in the Soviet Union are complicated, because it is not just the matter of political control by the current leaders that is at issue – or even just the maintenance of Socialism vs. some restoration of capitalist institutions. The very unity of the USSR itself is at stake. A major barrier to liberalization of the Soviet government is the suppressed desire of ethnic groups or “nationalities” for self-determination. Liberalization could revive these potential separatist movements, bringing the potential fissioning of the world's last great colonial empire’. Both this passage and the one above are from Russett, Bruce, ‘Causes of Peace’, in Stephenson, Caroline M., ed., Alternative Methods for International Security (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), p. 191.Google Scholar Both repeat verbatim material that appeared in the more widely available book by Russett, Bruce and Starr, Harvey, World Politics: The Menu for Choice (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981), p. 442.Google Scholar Writing in mid-1988, he treated the key contingency as more plausible: ‘As Soviet ideology and practice begins to shift, the distinction between ruling elites and their people loses some of its force. If both sides see each other as in some sense truly reflecting the consent of the governed, the transformation of international relations begins’. (Russett, Bruce, ‘Democracy and Peace’, in Russett, , Starr, Harvey and Stoll, Richard, eds, Choices in World Politics (New York: Freeman, 1989), p. 259.)Google Scholar

⁹⁰ We believe this accurately characterizes many scholars cited here as ultimately contributing to the theory and evidence for the democratic peace, including Bremer, Bueno de Mesquita, Dixon, Maoz and Ray himself. Policy makers also were appropriately cautious both in taking up the democratic peace proposition and in applying it to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, by April 1989 US Secretary of State James Baker was saying, ‘And a kind of democratization – something, I think that's far from democracy, but, nevertheless, a kind of democratization, has begun’, and GIST, an unauthored State Department publication which generally follows the tone and observations of high-ranking officials, said a month later that should moves towards internal democratization ‘continue and become irreversible fact, the basic nature of the US-Soviet relationship could be altered profoundly, but we are not there yet’ (US Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, SI. 128: Un 5/2/1989) Both quotations are from Ann Mason, ‘The End of Cold War Thinking: A Study of Change and Learning in Foreign Policy Belief Systems’ (forthcoming doctoral dissertation for Yale University). By early 1992 Baker had thoroughly bought into the idea of a democratic peace with Russia (see Russett, , Grasping the Democratic Peace, pp. 128–9Google Scholar). The late Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs recently observed: ‘One of the most powerful [propositions] to come out of international relations research in decades is the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other. This proposition has had a substantial impact on public policy … There are very few propositions in international relations that can be articulated this cleanly and simply, but when you have one, you can really cut through the clutter of the bureaucratic process and make an impact’ (Kruzel, Joseph, ‘More a Chasm Than a Gap, But Do Scholars Want to Bridge It?’ Merslum International Studies Review, 38 (1994), 179–81, at p. 180).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹¹ Puchala, , ‘Woe to the Orphans’, p. 57.Google Scholar

⁹² One anonymous reviewer of this article argues that ‘Wohlforth's realist account – that if a state perceives its power is radically declining it may retrench without resorting to conflict – the authors reject. Their own claim they call “conditional prediction”. Wohlforth's assertion they call “ex post facto” explanation. What's the difference?’ We feel there are three important differences. The first is that the predominant thrust of realism, as Wohlforth admits, leads to an expectation that the Cold War would end violently, even if, or perhaps especially if, the power or capability of one of the protagonists should change dramatically. The second is that Wohlforth's realist account depends on a change in the distribution of power between the United States and the Soviet Union which arguably occurred only after the end of the Cold War. It seems to us that political changes within the Soviet Union more clearly preceded a change in the Cold War relationship than did the change in the military-industrial capabilities of the Soviet Union. The final difference is that Wohlforth's explanation was offered after the end of the Cold War, while Russett's admittedly contingent assertion occurred well before the events of 1989 to 1991. That is a distinction of some importance. It might also be prudent to acknowledge here that the democratic peace proposition implies that political changes in Russia in the autocratic direction, which some current accounts suggest are already under way, would have negative effects on its relationship with the United States. (See Stanley, Alessandra, ‘Russia's new rulers govern, and live, in neo-Soviet style’, New York Times, 23 05 1995, Section 1, pp. 1, 4.)Google Scholar

⁹³ The formula on which these estimates are based can be found in Mesquita, Bueno de, ‘Political Forecasting: An Expected Utility Method,’ p. 86.Google Scholar

⁹⁴ Black, Duncan, The Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).Google Scholar