The Partisan Origins of Great Power Politics?

Abstract

Realists have long held the grand strategies of the great powers are largely a function of the international distribution of power. Ascendant states tend to pur sue more ambitious grand strategies in both the core and the periphery, while declining states tend to retrench their strategic commitments. Leaders determine the national based upon assessments of the current balance-of-power and anticipated power trends. Especially in the case of the two dominant great powers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States and Great Britain, domestic politics stop at the water's edge. Kevin Narizny's The Political Economy of Grand Strategy joins a long list of recent books that challenge this realist orthodoxy by positing a central role for unit level variables (Snyder 1991; Rosecrance and Stein 1993; Kupchan 1995; Katzenstein 1996; Lobell 2003; and Haas 2005). Narizny poses three fundamental questions: Why do some great powers aggressively expand their international influence, while others refuse commitments that they could easily protect given their relative power? Why do some states seek control over peripheral territories, while others eschew imperialism? Why do some leaders support internationalist initiatives, while others pursue policies more consistent with Realpolitik? Drawing upon the international political economy (IPE) literature and liberal international relations (IR) theory, Narizny contends the leaders of rising and declining great powers are not neutral arbiters of the national interests, but instead act as agents of domestic coalitional interests. Different sectors?domes tic manufacturers, exporters and outward investors seeking markets in the core or the periphery, and military-colonial interests?have competing economic interests and consequently radically divergent views on international politics. Political parties aggregate those interests and then select candidates whose strate gic beliefs will likely benefit their constituents. As a result, the economic interests that back governing parties largely determine whether great powers pursue expansionist or status-quo policies in the core or the periphery. Narizny tests his coalitional theory of interest aggregation using case studies of US grand strategy from 1865 to 1941 and British grand strategy from 1868 to 1939. The competing economic interests that supported the Democratic and the Republican parties in the US after the Civil War and the Conservative, Liberal, and later Labour parties in Britain after the 1867 Reform Act, in effect, deter mined whether successive US presidents (Andrew Johnson to Franklin Roosevelt) and British prime ministers and cabinets (William Gladstone to Neville Chamber lain) seized or avoided opportunities to expand their respective countries' influence abroad. His analysis purports to shed light on long-standing debates about the revival of British imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s, the United States' shift from westward expansion in North America to the acquisition of ter ritories in the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean, and East Asia, the creation of the