The Alliance Politics of Concerted Accommodation: Entente Bargaining and Italian and Ottoman Interventions in the First World War

Abstract

This article examines the challenges allies face in coordinating diplomatic efforts to accommodate and peel off their main enemy's potential allies. It elucidates the key dimensions, and the underlying coordination dynamics, of this problem of “concerted accommodation,” and it develops propositions about the conditions that shape the efficacy of such efforts. The argument links allies’ strength to their divergent or convergent assessments of the target state's ability to tip the war toward victory or defeat. Divergent assessments foster weak allied efforts that are likely to fail, but when allies agree that the target is a potential “war-tipper,” they will support their concerted accommodation policy with more robust cooperation that is more likely to work. The causal arguments and mechanisms are examined in a paired comparison analysis of two First World War cases: the Entente's efforts to induce (1) Ottoman neutrality and (2) Italian intervention.