The Strategic Logic of Multilateral Pacification

• In Event: Interventions and Conflict Resolution

Abstract

It is a familiar observation that the possibility of war permeates relations among states under anarchy. At certain times, however, some states have chosen to cooperatively limit the risks of war, rather than unilaterally exploit its advantages, by selectively restricting the ability of other states to engage in coercive bargaining. Indeed, across the past two centuries, states have concluded 92 treaties containing 115 distinct provisions prohibiting the use of military power in various regions of the world. Examples of such enforced pacification of the international system include neutralization of states, such as Belgium in 1839, and demilitarization of territories, such as the Rhineland in 1919, as well as renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy in the mutual relations of signatory states, accomplished, for example, under the Litvinov Protocol (1928) in Eurasia or the Rio Pact (1947) in North and South Americas.

The practice of pacification is doubly puzzling. First, the sovereignty and autonomy costs of multilateral pacification are substantial. Why do some states agree to pay these costs at least some of the time? Second, there is considerable variation in the timing and institutional design of pacification commitments. What explains that variation? There are no comprehensive answers to these questions in the scholarly literature, because no historian or political scientist has yet identified multilateral pacification as a coherent state practice. For example, although renunciation of war through global agreements, such as the Covenant of the League of Nations (1920), Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), and Charter of the United Nations (1945), has attracted enormous attention from political scientists and historians alike, few scholars have investigated renunciation of war through local or regional, rather than global, agreements. Fewer still have systematically investigated neutralization or demilitarization. Certainly, no general explanation for states’ use of multilateral pacification has yet been articulated.

This paper advances our understanding of multilateral pacification conceptually, empirically, and theoretically. Conceptually, it introduces the idea of multilateral pacification and develops a typology of institutional designs of pacification commitments. Empirically, it provides an original dataset of pacification agreements concluded between at least three states during the past two centuries. Theoretically, the paper develops the argument that, at least across the past two centuries, the primary rationale for states’ use of multilateral pacification has been fundamentally strategic. Specifically, it shows that states incorporate precise pacification commitments in treaties to prevent the militarization of those disputes which, in the view of the architects of those treaties, can only lead to mutually ruinous escalation – that is, escalation in intensity and scope beyond the point of profit for all belligerents. Thus, variation in the timing and institutional design of pacification commitments is largely explained by shifts in the perceived distribution of the risk of such mutually ruinous escalation.

This argument is validated using case studies composed with original archival research. The case studies explore the origins of two of the most ambitious pacification agreements: the Covenant of the League of Nations and Charter of the United Nations. The case studies are centered on the institutional imaginations of five policymakers and statesmen in who played pivotal roles in the creation of these world organizations: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson; Lord Robert Cecil, who led the British delegation to the League of Nations Commission at the Paris Peace Conference; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt; Lord Gladwyn Jebb, a Counsellor at the British Foreign Office who remained at the forefront of British planning on the United Nations throughout the Second World War; and Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who spearheaded the Soviet Union’s entry into the League of Nations in 1934, positioned himself as a champion for collective security in Geneva, and, during the Second World War, chaired a postwar planning commission which Joseph Stalin charged with crafting Soviet proposals for the Charter of the United Nations. It is one of the more intriguing findings of my research that these five policymakers and statesmen all understood multilateral pacification as a strategic instrument for the limitation of mutually ruinous confrontations – despite vast differences in their upbringing and worldviews.

Author

• Anatoly Levshin, Harvard University