By C2011 Cristian Cantir

COALITION OF THE LEAVING: WHAT CAUSED THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE IN IRAQ (2003-2009) By C2011 Cristian Cantir Submitted to the graduate degree program in Political Science and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________ Chairperson Juliet Kaarbo ________________________________ Brent Steele ________________________________ Erik Herron ________________________________ Philip Schrodt ________________________________ Afshin Marashi Date defended: April 13, 2011 ii The Dissertation Committee for Cristian Cantir certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: COALITION OF THE LEAVING: WHAT CAUSED THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE MULTI-NATIONAL FORCE IN IRAQ (2003-2009) ____________________________ Chairperson Juliet Kaarbo Date approved: April 13, 2011 iii Abstract This mixed-methods dissertation investigates the countries of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq (2003-2009) to identify the determinants of defection and of fluctuation in troop numbers. It makes theoretical contributions to the literature on alliance and coalition defection and speaks broadly to the question of international cooperation in the field of security. The major conclusion in this study is that the long-term reliability of military commitments of countries, particularly ones made within ad hoc coalitions, is fragile because it depends considerably on the domestic political process. iv Acknowledgments I'd like to thank the members of my committee for all of their help and assistance. Julie Kaarbo, my chair, has been patient, encouraging, and kind throughout this entire process. I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends, who tolerated my disappearing into the library for days and still talked to me afterwards. Most of all, I'd like to thank my family, who were always supportive and loving. v Table of contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1-13 Chapter 2: Literature review 14-55 Chapter 3: Description of dataset and quantitative analysis of defection and troop reduction patterns 56-108 Chapter 4: Italy in the Coalition of the Willing 109-139 Chapter 5: Denmark in the Coalition of the Willing 140-170 Chapter 6: Bulgaria in the Coalition of the Willing 171-184 Chapter 7: Conclusion 185-190 References 191 1 Chapter 1 On March 11, 2004, the Madrid commuter train system fell victim to a number of explosions that were later tied to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. At the time, more than one thousand Spanish troops were in Iraq as part of the “Coalition of the Willing.” The domestic unpopularity of Madrid's involvement, as well as the terrorist attack, contributed to the defeat of the ruling conservative People's Party shortly thereafter. The troops soon left after the newly- anointed Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero fulfilled his campaign promise of withdrawing from the coalition. Just a few months prior, Nicaragua had withdrawn its small contingent from Iraq as well, claiming financial problems. This slow trickle of withdrawals continued as Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, and other countries lifted their troops out of the coalition, much to the dismay of the United States and the United Kingdom. Even staunch supporters of the United States left; although Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Manuel Barroso suggested that Prime Minister Zapatero's decision to withdraw troops meant giving in to terrorist threats,1 his country soon left Iraq as well. Many others stayed, but reduced the number of troops on the ground, sometimes to a symbolic number; toward the middle of 2008, the Czech Republic had about 20 soldiers left in Iraq after its initial contribution of 300. The unexpectedly quick breakdown of the coalition and the unceremonious withdrawals of close United States allies like Spain and Italy have received considerable coverage in the mass media. Editorialists and news agencies gave a significant amount of space to describing the problems of the Coalition of the Willing and the withdrawal of the various allies. In contrast, the topic has been understudied in the academic community. Most of the 1 Portugal and Spain Vow to Boost Ties Despite Differences in Iraq, AFP, May 4 2004. 2 research about the “Coalition of the Willing” (CW) since 2003 has focused on why certain countries joined while others did not. For example, Bugajski and Teleki (2005) suggested economic reasons like debt recovery, since many CW countries like Romania had loaned large sums of money to Iraq before of the fall of the Iron Curtain. Newnham (2008, 192) suggested the presence of certain incentives provided by the United States to potential allies, like the status of “market-based economies.” Schuster and Maier (2006, 239) focused in on desires of CW members to appease the United States as the only superpower, while Mouritzen (2006, 153) averred that various countries engaged in behaviors like “proximate balancing” against their regional rivals by developing closer ties to the United States. This focus on coalition entry is unsurprising for two reasons. First, IR scholarship on alliances has been dominated by studies on alliance and coalition formation; with a few exceptions, the focus has been almost exclusively on why a country would join an alliance in an anarchic international system. As a result, students of coalition dissolution have been hard-put to find any previous theoretical work on the matter. The breakdown of the “Coalition of the Willing” has cast light on the fact that the alliance literature was ill-prepared to offer any cogent theoretical explanations for this empirical problem. Second, the alliance literature has typically overlooked the impact of domestic politics on decisions to join and defect, hence the numerous articles on the CW members “balancing” or “bandwagoning” in the coalition. The suggestion in these articles is that the bulk of motivations for a country's alliance behavior is driven by factors external to the country's internal politics, like an alteration in the balance of power. The current dissertation does not follow in the footsteps of previous writing on the topic 3 and attempts to fill three theoretical gaps and one empirical gap. The research question is what factors led to changes in the behavior of CW members, particularly defection and changes in troop numbers. First, the study incorporates variables suggested by the previous alliance literature, but also adds previously unstudied or under-studied domestic-level factors into the analysis of state behavior in the Coalition of the Willing. The dissertation identifies four clusters of variables (informed by four different theoretical perspectives) and compares their relative worth in explaining alliance behavior in the Coalition of the Willing. Such an approach is very rare in the study of alliances because most proponents of a particular cluster of variables (and, therefore, of a theoretical approach to studying this topic) only investigate their effect without looking at the others (Bennett 1997). Moreover, if such a comparison does exist (e.g. Bennett 1997; Kimball 2010), the variables informed by the domestic variable approach are rudimentary and involve nearly no engagement with the rich foreign policy analysis literature. These four clusters are security, autonomy, costs and benefits, and domestic politics. Each of the concepts is operationalized with a number of variables that will be described in greater detail in Chapter 2 and 3. Second, the dissertation focuses on alliance defection, an understudied subject in the alliance literature. It therefore pits competing theoretical arguments against each other and then contrasts their empirical utility in the case of the Coalition of the Willing. Finally, this study extends Putnam's (1988) two-level games framework, designed initially for the study of international treaty ratification, to a security setting and seeks to cast light on the process by which executives in CW members kept their commitment to the United States while ensuring domestic cooperation to continue this commitment. 4 Since cabinet heads in many countries were the ones who were the primary negotiators with the U.S. regarding coalition troop commitments, and since national legislatures had to approve these pledges (usually once a year), this portion of the study will analyze the interaction between governments and parliaments in foreign policy making, a topic that remains severely understudied (Kesgin and Kaarbo 2010) and has significant implications for both the study of domestic institutions and foreign policy, as well as security studies. The empirical gap filled in the study is the analysis of an ad hoc coalition, a type of multilateral institution which has become more prominent after the Cold War and whose functioning we do not yet understand as well as that of alliances. A short note on definitions Although theoretical work on alliances and coalitions dates back to the 1960s (see, for example, Liska 1968 and Small and Singer 1966), we do not yet have a single definition of the term (Bergsmass 2001, 26). Authors often use “alliance” and “coalition” interchangeably, generating even more confusion (Bensahel 1999, 6). Generally speaking, a number of major differences emerge in the literature between the two terms (Bensahel 1999, 9). First, an alliance is usually defined as a more formal and more institutionalized type of inter-state cooperation (Kober 2002, 2; Leeds

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